FS: 93 Legacy Sport Sedan plus extras - Cheap!

[evolutionmovement]

I was kidding about taking the racing bike out in the snow—there's really no extra clearance around anything and I love the bike too much to beat it up like that (though I do take it down dirt bike ways a lot, I haven't had to touch the thing for maintenance since I bought it in 2000. Good components are worth the money). I'm thinking I'll get those tires for the mountain bike, though.

Canning is pretty easy, but it takes a little longer than I thought as far as how long you're supposed to leave it at pressure and I kind of have to keep an eye on it with a gas stove to keep the pressure setting from climbing or falling. The pressure canner I bought came with a book that covered most things from different vegetables to seafood (not that you can't get that anywhere else). I plan on doing this for chili, soups, and chowders, too. I never make the stuff because I have to make a ton of it and then I get sick of eating the same thing for the next 4 days. I'm going to do some sauerkraut, too. My friend makes his own sausages (which is too much bother for me) and I never liked sauerkraut until I had some homemade stuff with those sausages. Now I know what it's supposed to taste like, so I'm going to try to copy that. I don't really like cabbage much otherwise anyway.

The canning should eliminate what waste we have from the CSA farm, though my sister's rabbits won't like it. Also, I love fruit, but I'm a huge snob when it comes to eating it and there's very little I'll accept from a grocery store (like mangoes, because local grown isn't an option—damn, I wonder how amazing they are fresh), so canning it as preserves will at least give me a winter option, like you were saying.

I find it amusing how much I've domesticated myself. What a prize I am for the ladies!

[vrg3]

Yeah, good bikes do seem to require a lot less upkeep. I'm constantly amazed by how cheap linear-pull brakes seem to go out of adjustment every time you ride.

Hm. I'll have to look into getting a pressure canner. Do you just have a gajillion mason jars?

Cabbage is one of the best things in the world to pickle. Whether it's sauerkraut or kimchi, it really comes out awesome and is really good for your body too.

Oh, man, fresh mangoes. When I was a kid in India we'd sometimes pull them off a tree and then massage them in our hands until the inside was all pulpy, and just bite a hole in the skin and drink it.

It's not just domestication -- when the shit finally hits the fan and society finishes crumbling, your homesteading skills are gonna be what keep you alive.

[evolutionmovement]

That's the excuse I use—I'll still need a balanced diet when I'm eating the neighbors and farming becomes impractical.

Mangoes are at the top of my fruit list and I've never even had a fresh one. I just had currants recently and they're near the top now as well and, even better, they can grow up here. I'm supposed to get a permit to plant them in MA due to a blight they had that would spread to pine trees, but they sell them now that don't have the blight and I don't have pine trees, so we'll see. I can imagine even finding out who I'd get the permit from anyway would be a big PITA. Supposedly figs are borderline to grow up here, too, but I'd feel bad if I planted a fig tree and it died because the climate isn't quite right, so I'll stick to more traditional New England fruits.

I got two dozen wide mouth 32 oz. mason jars as a start. 32 oz. is bigger than I thought it was. I made a pretty good batch of kimchi and it only used 3 of them. It actually filled them perfectly as if I knew what I was doing. We've got a closet in the basement we're going to use to store the full ones as we do them.

The pressure canner I got fits 7 32 oz. jars at a time or something like 24 pint jars, but I'm not doing pints so I don't remember. For a lot of things, the FDA only recommends the pressure canning method as safe (except, of course, the fermented stuff).

[vrg3]

Heh. Right after reading the sentence where you mention mangoes, I was about to write back about figs. Oh, man, fresh figs are amazing. My friend's got a fig tree growing in his backyard that always yields delicious fruit through the summer and then a huge crop at the end of the summer. Check out the size of this one she picked two weeks ago:


So many people never experience fresh figs, instead only ever having them dried. It's a completely different experience. Fresh figs, a sharp local cheddar cheese, and some homebrew are like the world's best summer afternoon snack.

I say try growing figs. If they grow so well in Cleveland I bet you could make it work over by Boston. Maybe start with a young one and keep it indoors in the winter at first.

I'll have to read up on canning and maybe invest in a pressure canner. Thanks for the tips!

[evolutionmovement]

You know, after I posted that I looked up portable green houses and found a bunch of them which could keep a bigger tree happier during winter. It seems the dwarf ones can be kept at 6-8 feet. Yeah, I love fresh figs, but man are they expensive! My food tastes are much closer to the Middle East through Southeast Asia regions than European or American.

Home brewing is another thing I'd like to get into, but there's only so much damn time! At least there are plenty of good local breweries around here, so it's not a burden.

[vrg3]

Ah, homebrewing is easy! When you start getting fancy it can be harder, but even the most preprocessed of cheater's homebrew kits makes pretty good beer. http://www.makebeer.net sells kits that have pretty much everything already processed into a syrup that makes it super easy:

You just dump the syrup in the fermenter (you can use a food-safe paint bucket), add enough water at the right temperature to about 5.5 lukewarm gallons, stir in the yeast, seal it (but put in a check valve bought from the homebrew supply store -- they call it an airlock) and leave it at room temperature for a few days. Then you stick a sugar lozenge in each bottle (the lozenges come with the ingredient kit), fill each bottle almost full, and cap 'em (caps are in the kit too, but you need to buy a capper). A week later, it's drinkable. Three weeks later, it's pretty good. From then on it gets better as it ages in the bottle.

Really; it's a total of maybe 3 hours of work.

[bry]

amazing how much stuff you can fit in a '93 legacy...

[evolutionmovement]

I'll have to find some room for it. Maybe this calls for a dedicated shed.