Secondhand Smarts - community works!

I haven't posted a Secondhand Smarts update for a while, but rest assured I get so many bargains from secondhand shops, TradeMe, etc, that I can hardly keep up.

An extra special nod must go to the bargains I got at last year's school fair. OK, I put in a lot of hours at the White Elephant sale where I got the goodies, but it was a great community event and raised much needed funds for the kids' school. And hundreds of people went away happy with their bargain finds!

Community and charity work can seem thankless at times, but as well as the reality of the help you're providing, you are also making connections that can sometimes reap more tangible rewards. Sometimes you need something and someone else already has exactly what you need. Like these...

Stepping out...

The boy needed some shoes. Look what I found!


Tevas. Good as new. In the right size. For a couple of dollars!

Frozen

Yeah, this attachment!

I love making frozen banana ice cream. It is pretty hard work for the S-blade on the food processor though, and we've heard that juicers and mincers do an even better job on the frozen bananas. I don't want another whole gizmo in my kitchen, but I have idly considered buying the mincer attachment for our mixer.


I almost let this amazing coincidence at the White Elephant Sale pass me by. I'd even shelved this box and moved it around a couple of times. But it wasn't until a customer said "there are bits missing from this" that we both realised it was an attachment, not a standalone machine. Just exactly what I needed for the machine we have at home, and luckily the customer didn't! $5, for an attachment retailing new for £38.


I can confirm that the banana ice cream product from the mincer is far superior - it can take the totally frozen banana chunks without strain and produce a really really cold treat instead of one that melts almost as served.

The icing on the cake

And cookies, and vegan cupcakes for the Vegan Society stall, and...

My sister's a decorating ace with all the equipment, but sometimes there's no chance to go borrowing. There were a couple of icing sets in the sale, and I knew I wanted to go home with one.

This one was pretty and compact, so it won the toss, and at $4 was quite the bargain. Especially when later at home, I found this was a collector tin retailing for $70.

Yes, there were even more bargains we got at the fair, but enough already! Secondhand is totally smart shopping.

Vegan Minecraft cake - mine own crafting

Our son's Minecraft birthday cake was the sincerest form of flattery - idea stolen from a recent Facebook post from a mother friend.

Usually, my talented sister artistically bakes and decorates all our vegan birthday creations, but this time life got in the way. But she let me use all her gear, for which much thanks.

Inspiration

I searched for a model - one problem is that Minecraft itself has a cake object (mines, cakes, I'm sure you see the link at least as well as I do), and that cubical cake was the most common example.  But I wanted to make a piece of the Minecraft block world for my little Minecraft addict.

Sadly, most of the pictures of Minecraft world cakes were messy-looking and not very inspiring. I naturally feared that I was about to add another such example to the Minecraft mixup, but I pressed on.

My son picked the right birthday to love Minecraft - I imagined I could design a 7 into the blocks of the cake. I wouldn't have aimed for any other digit. Except 1, and even in our house, the 1-year-olds aren't hooked on computer games.

Planning

I designed the blocks, discussed my plan in a special session with another friend (recently graduated from a short decorating course), then redesigned the blocks.

You could use this basic stepped design for any year. Grass on the ground, 1 level of rock blocks, and one level of grass blocks. My aim was for big blocks and a simple structure. 

And the bit I cut out from the first layer could be the second layer! What could be simpler?

Chocolate!

I made a chocolate cake, because:

• Chocolate is the only cake worth making
• Chocolate was the dirt for the grass blocks.

And of course, I used the Vegan 101 Easy Vegan Chocolate Cake recipe (good for cake or cupcakes).

I used a professional "snow creme" icing product, and thinned and tinted it (pale gray and grass-green). I knew that you get a better look from pre-formed layered icings, but I wanted it to taste good.

For this big a cake, I used my own medium sized roasting pan (the only one left in my decluttered kitchen because our oven is so petite).

I baked a full day in advance of the party, since I knew that for cake sculpture, cool cake (or even cold cake) is a must.  I mixed up loads of chocolate batter and several cups of icing (just in case.




Luckily, each step went pretty well to plan.
 

Lesson #1 - lots of batter gangs up on you and escapes.

Baking
 
 
Whew, successfully out of the pan in one piece!

Marking

Cutting
 
 

Constructing and Decorating

I didn't take any pictures of these stages, because my hands were covered in icing the whole time.  And because I was too busy thinking "Oh sh*t!" and "this looks awful."

Moving the cutout bottom layer onto the presentation platter was a two-person job and was still nerve-wracking.  

Lesson #2: The cutout was geometrically simple, but because of the 7, it was structurally very weak (one long skinny arm of cake hangs on by just one cake square). But it survived.

I iced the whole rock level first.

Lesson #3: in shaped cakes, allow for the thick layer of icing that will wreck the measurements of your precision design.

Then I placed the second cake level (the cutout) on top. Scattering chocolate crumbs all over the icing on the first level. I iced the second level and the ground level with green, plus more green from a grass nozzle.
The rest was damage control, adding more and more icing to the rock layer until it looked respectable.

Lesson #4: large spaces of plain pale icing are like white clothes; every spot shows.

The steadier hand got the detail work done.

I had not planned the green grass line around the base of the rock layer, but it was crucial.  As well as completing the illusion of the ground grass level beneath the rock, it also drew the eye to the deep colour and away from the many imperfections in the pale rock level. Rock's meant to be a lumpy and spotty, right?

 
Lessons Learned

While I got compliments on the cake, and it was delicious, I was totally stressed during the process about how many things had to go right for it to work.

I'm definitely hoping big sis is back on the job next year! Or I might just have to ask Sue Shopland to make me one of her new vegan cake plaques to make my homemade cake look super professional.

Eco-friendly packaging - an investment in our future

The winner!

Last year I was lucky enough to win a beautiful set of eco-friendly bamboo party ware from Friendlypak in New Zealand.  

This substantial set arrived packed in their own compostable product - popstarch.  By the faint fragrance, this is made of potato starch like their compostable trays and bowls.  I've been happily reusing this packaging in my own boxes.  

FriendlyPak specialises in compostable containers - stores and food providers can use these instead of plastic (which often goes unrecycled due to food contamination).  They even have shopping and dog waste bags!  And how cool is it that they link to The Story of Stuff on their website?

Basic scary facts on packaging waste:

• US Waste Facts  - "Every year, Americans throw away enough paper and plastic cups, forks, and spoons to circle the equator 300 times."
• European Packaging Waste  "On average every citizen in the 27 Member States EU-27 generated 164 kg of packaging waste in 2008."
• NZ Packaging Waste  "Each New Zealander throws away 83 kilograms of used packaging every year."

If we continue to ignore packaging waste, we're going to be up to our necks in it.

Packaging choices under pressure

I don't run a store.  But I could use reusable packaging like the lunch wraps from 4MyEarth.  I have already chosen waxed paper (which can even be reused for a few days) over plastic wrap for the kids' sandwiches.   I need to do some more research on reusable vs compostable. 

One New Zealand survey shows that consumers are concerned about too much packaging but feel ill-informed to act on that concern.

Another study takes a hard look at the eco-friendly claims for various types of packaging - there's lots to learn here even for those of us who might think we're already savvy.
Counting the cost

This packaging discussion finds that cost is still the biggest factor when people choose disposable packaging over more eco-friendly choices.  They also point out that as waste pressures rise, the real cost of waste disposal will motivate more consumers to choose better packaging. 

In Auckland, the Waste Management and Minimisation Plan includes charging us each time our bin is emptied instead of (as present) a flat cost each year. As a pretty good waste minimiser already, I'm a fan!

And, of course, the more we support these eco-friendly industries, the cheaper their products will be. 

Thanks!

So here is my public thank you to FriendlyPak for this prize, and also my heartfelt message to FriendlyPak, 4MyEarth and companies like them:

Thank you for providing us with genuine green consumer choices.  Thank you for developing products to support the vision of a thriving green economy.  Thank you for helping us put our money where our mouth is instead of into the same old poisonous products.

Minimalist dilemma

As a minimalist, I still had a serious decision to make. These bowls and trays are beautiful, but I already have a set of functional and attractive party bowls.  The prize bowls also needed a home.  In the rush of the holiday season, they simply sat in a stack on the downstairs sofa.

So was their home in my home or someone else's?

Stay tuned to hear all about Workout #4 in Productive New Year's Workouts, and how it all eventually worked out.

Everyone's doing it - what's your best tip to reduce your waste footprint?

• Reduce
• Avoid creating trash
• A year without spending makes less trash

5 Productive New Year's Workouts

Resolved to have a fitter New Year?  Here are some free holiday workouts that leave you with more than just an endorphine rush.

Caution:  Don't try all of these workouts in one day without medical advice.

1.  Try on all the clothes you own - a foolproof way to get rid of a few things and step down from holiday eating. 

Hey, the workout's not done until you've folded and put away everything!

2.  Empty your worst storage closet, declutter, and replace.

3.  Get in the garden - check out container gardening if you have no garden space (those big pots are great for for weightlifting).

4.  Clean the fridge and pantry.

5.  Play tag with the kids (or other fun-lover of your choice).

Happy New Year, everyone!

Coffee, tea, or mess?

My next decluttering area volunteered itself during my recent Use It Up challenge - our tea/coffee shelves.  Too many Use It Up candidates equals a decluttering challenge!

These shelves have an awkward location.  I have to lean sideways over the kitchen bench to reach them, so only the lower shelf is really easy for me to reach.  And the minivac installation makes it worse.  What can I say?  It seemed like a good idea at the time...

Result?  Everything ended up piled on the lower shelf.  When I saw that the bags of tea I actually use had been tossed up to the top shelf as clutter, I knew there was no time to lose.

Strateagy

Accessibility is key for this type of project.  This is the high-use kitchen; these are hospitality items you want to gather at a moment's notice with one hand while preparing kids' nibbles and carrying on a conversation with the other visiting mothers.

So I want all the regularly used items on the bottom shelf or the front of the middle shelf. We don't have that many kinds of tea and coffee we like!  So what is all that stuff on that shelf?

Declutter 

This was all clutter!

We had:

• two half full containers of decaf instant coffee
• two nearly empty tea boxes and one small opened bag (I don't need breastfeeding tea anymore!)
• two half full tea boxes
• a jar of old mint

Teabags in plastic bags will keep longer and take up less room the more are used up.  Cut the labels from the boxes to keep inside the bags. 

During the declutter, I also enjoyed the very last of the Wildberry teabags (blue and purple box) with some of my stevia leaves from the last Use It Up challenge.

Reorganise

I found a canister for all the teas, including one plastic bag with the stray anonymous teas.  This is on top so I will use them up first.

I rehomed the salt and pepper.  I moved unopened tea and coffee to higher shelves.  I also moved the opened coffee packets up because my husband is the coffee drinker and he's taller.

And for my last trick, I removed the minivac installation.  I can think of at least two better places for it than in this tight corner.

Enjoy!

Before

After!

More Vegan Waffling - Sticking to it

Our waffle maker had made its last wholewheat vegan waffle, but I got lucky with Freecycle with another waffle maker in great condition.  Guess who was pleased with herself?

Try...

But then I tried to use it.  This waffle maker was a different shape and a smaller area, so I set the timer a bit shorter.  

Not short enough.

Have you ever cleaned a waffle iron with burned on batter on both sides?  Ugh.

Twenty or so minutes later, I set the waffle iron outside to dry properly.  I have a sneaking (and mostly illogical) fear I might have shorted out our other waffle maker by trying to clean it, and I didn't want any water at all in the electrical areas for the next try.

Try...
 
Our vegetarian au pair, Filip, was keen to do the next waffle.  He made lots of waffles back in Germany, and I hoped he could work some magic.

Sadly, he also faced a long cleanup job.  But he reported crucial data - the waffle was already getting too brown on the outside while still drippy in the middle.

Did I get just what I paid for?  Was this a defective waffle maker?  Maybe it could only cook non-vegan waffles?

We'd both had enough experimenting for one day, and the (again painstakingly clean) waffle maker went to hide in the cupboard.  I was tempted to give up and buy a new waffle maker that understood me.

Learn...
Before giving up, I did some research, starting from the brand on this sturdy old waffle maker - Ralta.  From there, I learned a lot about waffles.  
Our other waffle maker was Scandinavian style (heart-shaped with diamond spacers).  













Our new one is Belgian style (square with squares). (pic) 

 




You can also have American waffles (circle with squares).




 

Belgian waffles need a doughier batter with extra rising ingredients, not the drippy one I used before to cover and fill the large heart-shaped area of the Scandinavian style.  There's no time for that water to cook out.

The Belgian recipes looked more involved and I feared I might be choosing between no waffles or complicated nonvegan waffles.  But I found my dream recipe for 100% Wholewheat Vegan Belgian Waffles.  Instead of yeast and eggs, I can use baking powder and vinegar to make the waffle rise in the 3-4 minute cooking time the Belgian waffle needs.
 
For true Belgian waffles, you can't cheat like this because it changes the taste, but luckily I don't care.  I just want vegan waffles from my free waffle maker!

Then, and only then, Try Again
 
Just like magic, in about 3 minutes the thick batter slid gently off the waffle maker onto the serving plate as golden brown waffles.








My next challenge is to learn to make perfect pancakes on my cast-iron skillet so I don't need a waffle iron.

Decluttering, meet reorganising

I set my decluttering sights on this (the shelf with the ugly paper piles of pretty kid artwork).  This is highly visible clutter - seen all the way from the dining room through the kitchen.

I have been reducing toys so my big plastic box of "surprise" toys is nearly empty.  We have enough hidden nooks full of great toys. I moved the best art into that box, kept a few for artistic wrapping paper, and the rest generated some heat and entertainment in the fire last night. 

I really enjoyed looking through all that art and will enjoy the memories for years to come. But I'm happy for them to be in a closet instead of in full view.

Much better!  I'm now thinking hard about what objects deserve to be stored so visibly.  Might we be heading toward a shelf disappearance a la the infamous cube shelves?

Success inspires success

I love my son's student desk, but it doesn't get used much due to regular snowfalls of paper clutter.  I already learned not to store things in the tempting empty spot underneath because it is hard to get to.  After failing to enlist some shorter people to help me retrieve crayons from underneath, I finally took some time to plan.  Clutter is always going to fall off the desk, but the desk can be somewhere easier.

Another after shot is reborn as a before:

 

 And after quite a bit of grunt work...

Both Alex and I can get to his desk, Nadia has her own space, and when things fall into the corner by the window, I can easily reach them.

Best of all...

Build it, and they will come....

Leftovers - minimise waste!

 I'm proud to say my refrigerator rarely surprises me with a Nobel-prize-winning science experiment.   
I'd like it to look like this fridge too, but it doesn't quite :-)

More like

And here's some more harsh reality:  the average American family throws away 14 percent of their food (according to a USDA funded study in 2004). That's almost US$600 every year!  Can you think of something nice to do with $600?  Me neither.  Good thing.  (Apparently in total 25 to 50 percent of the country's food is thrown away, so commercial food producers are at least as guilty and you can't solve the problem by leaving the leftovers to them.)
 
Dinners
There are so many reasons to have a meal plan for your dinners, and leftover usage is just one.  Design your meal plan around tasty leftovers and you are so far ahead of the game, you might as well be brushing that winners' tape off your midsection already.  As an example from our meal plan, a simple (vegan) Italian tomato pasta sauce over your kid-friendly spirals or macaroni also makes a wonderful dish reheated with big chunks of steamed potato stirred in.  Or the original could be a thick pizza sauce, modified to be pourable for another meal.   
When I make lots of sauce at a time, I have to guess how many containers to refrigerate for use this week and how many to freeze.  As a rule, twice in one week is the limit - after that it doesn't matter what shape the pasta is underneath, I will get complaints!  Also see Cooking and freezing.

Extra rice refreshes pretty well, and any other fine restaurant would also agree that Chinese veggie stirfry over rice (with cashews) is a different meal from Rice with Lentil Curry Sauce and fresh green salad.  

Plan your produce purchases based on your known favourite meals, and keep it simple!  We vary (if you can call it that) between hot vegies: broccoli, cauliflower, courgettes, mushrooms and salad: lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, gherkins and olives.  Perhaps not exciting, but relatively cheap and I know my family will, between us, eat all those and we won't have green slime from more adventurous vegetables puddling in the crisper.  More on keeping it simple:  Minimalist guide to eating.

Don't cook a full and separate meal every night of the week - that is the surefire way to join the queue (holding their noses and losing their money) from the fridge to the compost bin.
 
Leftovers for lunch

How can I be sure to have a nutritious homecooked lunch every day?  Eat yesterday's dinner leftovers.  If possible, feed them to the kids and husband as well.  Let me know your secret, if you succeed with that.  In any case, this solves your lunch menu problem while clearing your fridge too. 

Lunch leftovers and  scrapping it up
Now that I have two children in various levels of outside care, I regularly face the dreaded rattling lunchbox. It's a true potluck - at what point has DS lost interest in the available options except to mix them together?  We also have a snack bag habit for car trips.  In most cases, I'm more generous with loading than our appetites require.  For that investment in peace and contentment, I must pay the price of seeing sedimentary layers of stale biscuit and pretzel crumbs mixed with cashew bits and squashed raisins.

And like everyone, my family is prone to having more on their plates than they can handle at a sitting.  Food is love, after all.  While the compost bin is always an option, it's still a shame to waste food just because it is now unsightly.  

So savoury scraps get scooped into the "everything soup" freezer container and sweet scraps generally add a few extra spoonfuls of sugar to help my morning porridge go down.   

Knowing this food has a future purpose curbs my habit of eating the last leftovers off a plate just because they are there.  Some of you will understand this one already, and the rest of you might never understand.  But we can all understand that it isn't a good habit.

Over the top
Being too particular is the enemy!  Tonight's dinner was a surprisingly pleasing melange of pasta sauce and stirfry sauce.  That and some quick-cooking rice vermicelli saved us from dropping $20 at the takeaways (and adding cold to our colds at the same time).

• Not all my leftover experiments are as successful.  OK, DH?  I am sorry...and no doubt will be again.

I save  the salt from bulk bags of cashews and pretzels for cooking rice or soup, and I win popularity contests with iceblocks from juice poured from tinned fruit. 
Here's some extra help for Your refrigerator


Now please share your cleverest leftovers secret!

More (I mean less) housework

The best kitchen tip I ever adopted is this - zone your kitchen!  All the pros do it!
(I'm sorry I can't credit this idea due to my wide-ranging browsing style, but I thank whomever from the bottom of my heart.)

Kitchen zones
This means:  designate particular areas of the kitchen for particular tasks, and stick to it.

I only needed to designate two zones to make a huge difference!  (I also tidied for visitors and took the photo opportunity :-)

I'm giving you one rather difficult angled picture rather than several better ones, and I hope it works.

I chose the far left of sink surface to be food prep and the right to be cleanup in waiting.  (The size of each area is roughly equal in real life, unlike in the photo.)  Note that I had to choose the best compromise in my sadly imperfect kitchen....so you can too.

The bulk of my food prep is for the microwave.  (And the oven is across from the sink next to the fridge, with so little prep surface around it that it is unworthy of a photograph, phooey!)  I also have my cluster of kettle, food processor, and toaster, all ready to go.  And the pantry cupboard is just a turn around away.  But the dishwasher is under the food prep side and the cutlery and cookware drawers under cleanup.   OK, so with those problems, why even bother? I hear you ask.  Control freak, you mutter under your breath, but I hear that too.  No really, this is cool!

With these zones, I can start food prep at any time without having to clear away a stack of dirty dishes.  Any waiting dirty dishes not in the dishwasher are either soaking in the sink or stacked to the right.  Purists might argue that I should clean up before I start anyway, or not leave dirty dishes around in the first place, but I've failed for years to adhere to that, whereas this works pretty well.  Plus, with something prepped and cooking in microwave or wherever, that is the perfect time to multitask for a few minutes and load the dishwasher - whereas any time you must spend clearing beforehand is spent and gone.

• Having the dishwasher on the opposite side isn't so bad - the dishes travel via the sink for a rinse and then to the dishwasher anyway

But wait, there's more!  Food preparation mess is also contained in the one area.  Obviously, dirty dishes have their own stickiness, but this can't compare with food prep.  I like having a natural containment site for porridge glops, scatterings of broccoli floretettelets (you know, the little round tips of the broccoli that go everywhere when chopped) and cauliflower powder.  Before, I used to pick out wherever was clean and make it messy too :-)

A few microrules help even further.  Soaking is an important part of my routine - it saves water and effort.  I even reuse soaking water when I can, even if it gets gungy.  But I try to soak the breakfast bowls and other small items that collect during the day in the small sink only.  That leaves the big sink free so the tap can be used (filling the kettle, during food prep, etc) and in extremis, for the days when I am so rushed I don't get around to the breakfast dishes until after dinner, the dinner plates still have a place for their own quick soak and rinse right after dinner instead of balancing dangerously and ineffectively on bowl and saucer towers or having to wait until even later.

And don't forget the rinse and reuse.  Act now, and some dishes rinse off so clean it would be a crime not to reuse them.  I don't care, and the kids don't notice.  I have a small special stack for those, and DH knows he's to front up with his breakfast bowl.  Don't put these gems into the sink, for soon they will be swimming in gungy water and they will be dishwasher fodder.

You remember I said my stove and fridge area wasn't worth photographing?  Well, that's true.  But have a look at the shelves over that side of the kitchen... before...

and after....

Hooray for me!

So now share your best kitchen tips and tricks....

Living the life you have...

I would claim not to be a collector or hoarder, but I've just discovered I have a very large collection indeed.  Of marbles.  How can this be?

My mother was quite the marble champeen in her day.  This is not hereditary, so I'm not pointing fingers.  But there was a collection of marbles (in a blue metal tin) from my parents when I was growing up .  I like marbles (what's not to like?) so when I had my own home, I put them into pretty glass jars by color and displayed them on windowsills as suncatchers.  Pretty.

Pausing for true confessions - I admit that for all my air of puzzlement and wonder, I do have a magpie sparkly acquisitive streak a mile wide.  Despite having such severe shortsightedness that the New Zealand taxpayer funds my contact lenses in the infrequent intervals they need replacing, I have in a tiny little bag one tiny little cubic zirconia and one great hurking 1 carat plus CZ.  Both of these I spotted on the street and my little beady eye somehow processed them as not just random glass cracklings.  You explain it, I can't.  I also always find coins on the road.  In one moment too unlikely to invent, my husband once gleefully pounced on a nearby coin, only to have me stroll over and pick up the $2 one not far away.

Fast forward to our current house, which has wooden Venetian blinds everywhere.  Bye bye windowsill displays.  With nowhere to put my precious pretties, I naturally... put them back into a box for years.  I took out one jar because my son likes marbles, but I doled them out super carefully (I'm sure I had a great reason for this that escapes me now.)

With the large collection stored out of mind, and with both children enjoying the feel of marbles and other smooth glass objects during their preschool activities, I started buying bags of marbles when they appeared at my favourite secondhand shop.  $2 for a big bag of marbles and glass treasures, hooray!  Tuck that away for next birthday... oh, the cleverness of me.

In my grand decluttering effort, I have rediscovered my marble display jars, much the worse for wear from storage.  Still nowhere to put them even if I wanted to display icky jars.  But with my new mindset, of course I decanted them all into the current marble collection.   And thus I have an embarrassment of marbles.

At two litres or so, I have exceeded any possible normal fondness for marbles.  I admit enjoying plunging my hand into the bucket and rolling them around, but you can only do that so many times.  The kids look a bit confused, play with a few of the cool ones, and eventually dump them all over the floor.

This chronicle is the longhand history of only one lot of unnecessary stuff that's innocently taken over my life, simply because I didn't bother to acknowledge that certain things I owned no longer had a home in our new home.

We have kitchen things committing the same crime - our new house has an insanely small oven which can't even take a standard cookie tray.  Yet we still have large expensive roasting pans from the days of yesteryore when our oven was from the good old days and could roast the Christmas turkey.   The only way we can use these pans is with a kitchen remodel.  Yet they are only now appearing on the "begone" list.

And hands up anyone else who has stacks of clothes for the size they want to be again?  I admit I'm still not giving up on this one!

How much of your clutter is from places you used to live, or for the home you wish you were in, or for the  person you wish you were?

I assure you, I will be working very hard to lose my marbles.  And what would you make of two wildly mismatched cubic zirconias?