Re-Branding

I'm considering re-branding the soap biz. I want a stream lined look, something memorable, something people will pick up and say "wow! I must have this" (OK, that last bit is what I always want). I'm thinking a Victorian meets steam punk look. Very feminine, but with teeth, as it were.
I am going to have to clean out all the soaps that are currently packaged with the old label/style. Last year I cleaned out the inventory with a huge ass sale on Etsy which was very successful! I'm thinking maybe 3 for $10 rather than $5 each. Stay posted! Fear ye not, I will come to some sort of decision!

I lack creativity when it comes to naming the soaps though. A thesaurus is my best friend.

Here is the current style:

(sorry about the blurry photo)

I really love the tree. It's just so...plain? boring? nondescript?

I need a new name. And new graphics. And new images. And new descriptions. Oh my! I'm open to the universe (or any humans) providing me with inspiration.

Skits off to play with fonts and inspiration

Vegan Mac and Cheese

We have been eating a lot of more vegan food over the last couple of days and I wanted to share an absolutely fantastic dish we had for dinner last night (and lunch today)

The low down...
Vegan Dad's Creamy Mac & Cheeze (As directed. We didn't have any sunflower seeds, so I subbed more raw cashews)
1 Tbs Green Chile Powder
1 Tbs soy sauce
1 bag Morning Star Crumbles (I have a weakness for these)

-Mix everything together.
-Pour into a greased 13x9 pan.
-Top with homemade bread crumbs (ours are, of course, spiked with some green chile powder)
-Bake in a 400* preheated oven for about half an hour.

So. Tasty! Even tasty as left overs!

Rather Lazy

I've been rather lazy about updating this blog. Oh my. Hopefully I will have some exciting adventures over the weekend to share.

Current Fermentation Stash:
1/2 gallon organic wine
1 gallon wild fermentation apple cider
1 1/2 gallons wilder fermentation mead
1 pints kimchi
9 bottles wild fermentation ginger beer
1 very large bowl of some scary looking stuff The Boy is wild fermenting
2 gallons kombucha (our last batch was perfect! they keep getting better and better!)

We bought a little space heater to help the fermentation group since we are refusing to heat our house with the furnace this year :)

Fermentation Madness

The Boy is reading Wild Fermentation and seems to want to make every single thing in it. Since we are short of flat surfaces to store our jars of bubbling goodness we will be putting in shelves this weekend.

Currently bubbling away-
Kombucha
Ginger Beer
Hard Apple Cider

On the short list of things to get started this week-
Kimchi
Mead
Sourdough (this is a maybe for me, but The Boy loves sourdough)

We are in desperate need of more glass jugs though. Sunburst Bottles has a great selection of large capacity glass bottles, if we can't source them locally that is where we will get them for future projects.
Oh the excitement of wild fermentation! I love to sit and watch the jars start to spontaneously bubble with no aid from us other than a piece of muslin to keep the flies out. (photos coming soon)

Omnivore's Hundred

It's been ages since I was an omni...
Bolding=something I've eaten

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos Rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom Yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Woo-hoo! 44% I love food!

Wild Fermentaion and New Fur Kid

I've been a bit MIA lately :) We got a new furbug! His name is Ziggy and he is such a little terrorist! He is a doll, but rather a handful. Here is a photo of him while still at our local Animal Services Shelter (he is an ex-stray)

(Can you see his little goatee? So cute!)

After reading several stellar reviews of the book Wild Fermentation, I just had to get it. It's a brilliant book! I read it in one day and we now have two (not including our kombucha) wild fermentation projects going! One is a hard apple cider and the other is ginger beer, both are starting to bubble and do their fermentation dance. I'm so excited about this project! I've been taking lots of photos, so hopefully a how-to/step-by-step post for ginger beer will be in Herb-Cat's future...

"Meat"balls.

These are the best "meat"balls ever. All measurements are approximate, I usually don't measure things.

-4 eggs
-1/4 cup dried minced onion
-3Tbs vegetable broth powder
-1/4tsp onion powder
-1/4tsp dried parsley
-1/8tsp black pepper
-1 tsp minced garlic
-2 cups grated cheddar cheese
-1 cup homemade bread crumbs (recipe to come)
-1 cup finely chopped walnuts (we use the food processor)

1. Mix all ingredients together.
2. Lightly oil a baking sheet and preheat oven to 400*f.
3. Roll mixture into meatball sized balls (or what ever other shape strikes your fancy at the moment).
4. Bake for about 20 minutes until they are nice and crispy (don't get them too crispy, they are rather nasty when they get too dried out).
5. Nom. Or you can freeze them (on a baking sheet in a single layer then put in a container) and nom them at a later date. They freeze very well!

Homegrown Evolution has a nice post about HomeGrown.org today, and I thought I would join the r/evolution! I even started my own group to discuss gardening here in the crazy SW. Please join us! Let us embrace the urban gardening r/evolution!

Visit HOMEGROWN.ORG

"Beans, Bullets, and Band-Aids"

Hard times have some flirting with survivalism. Interesting article. I want to stock up on our beans and rice supply in the very near future. Not because we are extremists. Rather, just to be prepared for any "uh ohs" in the near future. Beans and rice make a myriad of delicious dishes, they are cheap, and they have a very long shelf life. Once we get the garden producing more that just jalapenos, I will feel more confident in the availability of our food at home.
The article mentions SurvivalBlog. I think I will spend my day reading that. Information is power....and all

Weekend Update

Another relaxing weekend has come and gone.
We did more garden planning and research...two raspberries to go in the front courtyard area. The blueberry bush to go in the front yard. The blackberry to go behind one of the sheds. This coming weekend we are going to get a shovel (the last one died a very dead death), a wheel barrel, and some more steer manure to make the beds ready for their new berry friends.
We rearranged the living room (again), I think we have finally got the set up down. We desperately need more bookshelves! One day one of us may be crushed in a book avalanche!
Charlie got her teeth stuck on her collar during an attempt to link the thing off. The Boy gallantly saved her; he has the scabs to prove it. Her next collar is going to be leather (with a little skull and cross bones on it) since she trashes everything else!

AUTUMN BLISS RASPBERRY

Some of my favorite posts from this weekend in no particular order:
- I want a hypertufa grot! Like I need a new project ;) Thanks Little House in the Suburbs!
- Whole grain crackers would go great with creamy pinto soup!
- With a little help from my friends. Working dogs and a Beatles nod? You can't go wrong!
- Make your own apple cider vinegar, how cool is that? It seems to be a lot like making kombucha.

The Shins

I love The Shins. Truly. Deeply.
For your viewing pleasure "Pink Bullets"...

Catching Babies

I just finished a lovely book called Baby Catcher by Peggy Vincent. Brilliant book! I am considering going into the field of midwifery and this book was great for me. In it she share beautiful birth stories and birth stories that are sad and tragic. The novel chronicles her journey from a nursing student to a privately practicing midwife.

I believe this book helped nudge me more toward a job in midwifery. Who knows how many other nudges I will need to take that first step though.

"From Publishers Weekly
It was in nursing school at Duke in the 1960s that Vincent found her calling: delivering or "catching" babies. She moved to California and became a midwife, specializing in home births; over the course of 40 years, she brought some 2,000 babies into the world. There's a predictable plot structure to most of the stories she recounts: the initial meetings with the pregnant woman, the last-minute phone call once labor speeds up, the coping with contractions, the appearance of the baby's head, the wet newborn, the oven-warmed blankets, the celebratory meal afterwards. Despite the repetition, Vincent's account is a page-turner. It's not just the risk that something might go wrong (meaning a nail-biting trip to the hospital for an emergency cesarean), and not just the quirkiness of home birth settings (which can involve jealously raging house pets or leaky houseboats), but something inherent in the magic of birth itself. What sustains Vincent and her readers is this sense of standing ringside at the greatest miracle on earth. A solid writer, Vincent doesn't preach the virtues of unmedicated birthing; she just lays consistent stories of women doing it Christian Science moms, Muslim moms, spiritualist moms, lesbian moms, teen moms and just plain ordinary moms. With the midwife's axiom "birth is normal till proven otherwise" as a guiding principle, all these women have a chance to make childbirth a crowning moment in their own lives. Male readers may find this female-centered narrative off-putting, and mainstream readers might raise eyebrows at the inclusion of children in the birthing process, but Vincent addresses these issues fairly directly herself. Agent, Felicia Eth. (Apr.)Forecast: With appendices guiding readers to more technical resources, Vincent's latest baby is bound to be popular with women's health and alternative medicine readers. A cover blurb by Anne Lamott could break it out further."

Vacation

We are back from vacation! It was a wonderful escape from the day to day, full of good people and fantastic food! I hope to post some photos over the weekend.

I've decided to bring my etsy back. I remember how much fun it was to connect with buyers and doing the happy dance when I had repeat customers. Plus, this will hopefully help with my goal of organizing the soap lab!

The holidays are coming up (quickly!) and I urge everyone to buy handmade items (or make gifts!) for loved ones. I took the handmade pledge. Will you?

Slide Show

Off topic, but I'm proud of myself...check out the new slide show on the right side of the blog! These are pictures from our wee urbanhomestead! Yeah!

Thinking Not Doing

1. Plan a garden:
I did more work on the tentative plan (Had to make room for the luffa, after all)
I put all the chicken compost that The Boy got via freecylce

2. Take a formal herbwifery calss:
Nope. I did do a lot of reading though.

3. Choose a major:
Eh. Not yet. The Boy and I did do a lot of talking about it last night though. So that is a start I guess...

4. Learn to tie-dye:
Gr. No. All the stuff is still sitting in the box by the backdoor though.

5. Organize soap lab:
I did a bit of work in there. Only to make room for the new and fun things I bought. I must stop buying things! On a positive note I did craft a wonderful hair mask :)

6-8.
Nope.

9. Exercise:
No :( The work I did in the yard has made my arms sore though. So that should count a little.

10. Getting into craft shows:
No. Maybe I'll look into that today.

Note to self: Have fewer irons in the fire.