Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Whole foods cooking

The Creative Life: Buy less, create more, and transform your life

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When you type the phrase “American consumers” into Google, you get 976,000 results. That two-word phrase is mentioned 1,494 times in Google News stories just today. I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of hearing about American consumers. I’m all for supporting farmers, booksellers, manufacturers, craftsmen, bakers, and artisans with my dollars – especially those doing business in a fair, sustainable way. I’m just convinced that this meme that Americans are essentially consumers is destructive, not just to the environment, but to our psyches.

Consumption is passive, bland, and boring. Consumption requires little of us. We humans are creative and innovative creatures. Our minds churn with thoughts, impressions, and opinions. We erupt with ideas. We produce symphonies, skyscrapers, bridges, frescoes, novels, poems, quilts, ocean liners, and airplanes. We’re not mindless buyers, purchasers, or consumers. We are producers, inventors … creators.

How can we buck this oppressive notion that our most important role in life is consuming? Easy. We can buy less and get creative. I’m all for art. Draw, paint, sew, knit, crochet, sing, and dance! But what I’m talking about is more accessible. It doesn’t require a paint brush, knitting needles, a sewing machine … or talent. All you have to do is bring imagination to the day-to-day.

Look at your shopping list; think outside the box, bottle, or container; and ask yourself, Can I make this? Sometimes the answer will be no … or the learning curve, labor, or time you’d spend make it a bad candidate for your efforts. But often you can make things.

It may be hard to shift your consciousness from buying to creating at first. Most of us have watched and listened to literally years of commercials selling everything from boxed rice, to jarred baby food, to taco seasoning, to deodorant. Corporations have convinced us we need loads of products. And the government and media have even conflated consuming with civic responsibility. So it may seem strange that a lot of the products and packaged food we buy are unnecessary. Some don’t even save us time; many are inferior to what we can make ourselves; and worse, many (and their packages) are destructive to our health and to the planet.

When you start thinking about what you can make and start practicing that first (and most ignored) part of the recycling mantra – reduce, reuse, recycle, your grocery bills will inevitably shrink. You’ll probably experience an incomparable glow of satisfaction when your creations taste fabulous or nail the job they’re intended for. You might also notice positive changes in your health. But the best part is you’ll begin to see yourself as the imaginative, resourceful, amazing creator that you are.

Four easy ways to start buying less and getting creative:

1. Grow food
Turn your lawn into an edible landscape, put a few containers of tomatoes on your balcony, plant a fruit tree, or just grow some herbs in your kitchen window. When you garden, you and nature become co-creators in a grand project. And fruit, veggies, and herbs are never again something you mindlessly buy at the supermarket year-round.

2. Cook from scratch
You can easily afford some good cookbooks with all the money you’ll save by ditching expensive, nutritionally-deficient, processed food. Cooking is easy. If you’re a newby, just follow the recipes closely. Of course, cooking with whole foods takes more time than heating up processed food or spinning through the drive through. But you’ll save buckets of cash, eat healthier, and the taste difference is nothing short of astounding. Some of my favorite cookbooks: Cooking for the Whole Family by Cynthia Lair, Laurel’s Kitchen by Laurel Robertson, and America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook.

3. Make bread

The authors of Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book insist there are “subtle, far-reaching, and distinctly positive changes that can take place when you begin to bake (bread) regularly.” They claim the process is therapeutic, creative, calming, and can transform a house into a home. I agree. I’ve been making my family’s bread for much of the past year, and I’m amazed by how much I look forward to bread-making day, not just because the house smells delectable and I get to eat slices of steaming hot bread fresh from the oven. There’s also something about the process. It leaves a lot of room for learning and growing. Bread-making undeniably takes time, but you can use a bread machine, stand-up mixer, or food processor to help with the kneading, and for most of the rest of the process, the dough simply rests and rises on the counter, leaving you free to kick back or attend to some other chore. Start with a basic loaf, and you might find yourself moving onto more complicated recipes, like desem or sourdough, before you know it.

4. Mix up green cleaners
Years ago my friend Beth told me she started looking forward to cleaning when she started making her own cleaners, but it took me years to heed her advice. It seemed complicated. It’s not. Trust me, you do not need to be a chemist for this. All you need is distilled white vinegar, baking soda, and liquid castile soap (Think: Dr. Bronner’s). And Beth’s right – homemade cleaners make housework more fun. You can mix up an all-purpose bathroom cleaner with 50/50 vinegar and water. Find more recipes for everything from furniture polish to mildew remover in The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen or Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck.

You don’t have to stop there. You can make herbal teas, tonics, tinctures, cosmetics, lotions, salves, yogurt, butter, ice cream, beer, wine, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, pickles, jams, and so much more. And for the more crafty – of course, you can sew clothes; crochet blankets; knit sweaters; create art for your walls; or build furniture. You may find that the more you create, the more creative you become.

Are you already buying less and getting creative? I’d love to hear what you’re doing!

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bread machine

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I have an uncomfortable relationship with technology. I’m conflicted about most of it – the car, the TV, the electric razor, even the “labor-saving” devices that populate our home. Oh, I use them. Sometimes I even have my washer, dryer, dishwasher, bread machine, and vacuum cleaner all going at the same time. But I have this annoying feeling that won’t seem to go away – like a mockingbird chirping under a bedroom window night after night – that maybe all of this technology isn’t making most of us happier.

Take the bread machine. This handy invention has its roots back at the turn of the twentieth century. Joseph Lee, an African American proprietor of an inn and catering business in Massachusetts, invented and patented the first dough-kneading machine for commercial bakeries. The large machine reportedly did the work of six men, and created better tasting, “more hygienic” loaves. Nearly all commercial bakeries automated their bread-making production by the 1950s. Then in 1986 a Japanese company produced a bread machine small enough to sit on the kitchen counter. In the three decades since, bread machines have become inexpensive and commonplace, transforming many households across Japan, Europe, and the U.S. – including mine.

I use my bread machine twice a week. I set it to the dough cycle, then transfer the dough to a loaf pan for its final rise and baking. I love it for so many reasons.

  • It creates perfect loaves every time. A person (not to mention anyone in particular) might not always produce a perfect loaf. She might knead the dough, let it rest, knead it again, let it rest, put it in the oven, bake it for thirty minutes, then excitedly open the oven door to find a loaf that – how shall we say this? – is the consistency of a block of concrete. But the bread machine? It never fails. It is a straight A student.
  • It makes what would be a laborious process nearly effortless.
  • It makes my house smell good all day.
  • I use organic, whole-grain ingredients, so the bread is nutritious and lacks any nasty preservatives.
  • I never buy the $5.00 loaves at the health food store anymore.

The bread machine is a magnificent invention. It deserves my undying devotion. I should celebrate its existence every day.

But instead, I sort of resent it. I just don’t get that swell of pride, that sense of accomplishment, that giddiness that I get when I use my own two hands to turn flour, water, and yeast into bread. And when I take a loaf to a potluck or give one away as a gift, and someone asks if I made it, I hesitate, I stammer, I feel like a cheater – like the kid caught red-faced copying off my neighbor’s paper. Like a total fraud.

Wasn’t life more satisfying when we made everything with our hands?

Okay, I admit, I’ve been known to fantasize about halcyon days past – times when people had face-to-face friends rather than Facebook friends, when folks exercised outdoors rather than in front of their wiis, when people spent time interacting with other people instead of zoning out in front of Lost or CSI. So I guess it’s in that same vein that I imagine that when keeping up a household was more handiwork and less switching on different machines, housework was surely more laborious, but didn’t it feel more, well, authentic?

Maybe you also find yourself waxing poetic about a mythical technology-free past. Maybe you glare at your bread machine or your Cuisinart; or you wince at the buzz of the dryer; or you heave a sigh as you drag the vaccuum out of the closet? Well, I think I might’ve found a cure. Pick up The Forgotten Arts and Crafts by John Seymour, and turn to the section on the housewives of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain.

Seymour sets out to celebrate the difficult and creative work women have done in homes throughout time, work that he asserts could not have been done as well, if at all, by men. If you read the chapter, you will undoubtedly agree with Seymour that the housewives of yesteryear were a noble bunch. You may also mourn with him for the Americans who live in “bleak and cheerless” shells of houses “glued to that flickering screen.” However, if you’re prone to dreaming about a utopian past, you might also feel a bit less ambivalent about your washer, dryer, stove top, vacuum cleaner … and yes, your bread machine. Take these three common Victorian-era chores:

1. Cooking without electricity or gas

Until the mid-nineteenth century, women cooked everything on an open hearth in an iron cauldron, spit, or griddle over the fire, and they baked bread in dutch ovens hidden in the ashes. It was a messy affair. Dollops of soot flopped down the chimney and burst into the room, and pots were hopelessly blackened with soot.

The first cast-iron kitchen range was invented in 1780, but they didn’t become readily available until the 1840s. Around then coal also gradually took over from wood as the most popular domestic fuel. Ranges, especially closed ranges, transformed the kitchen, but cooking was still a laborious task. The cook had to sweep the chimney and clean the flues and dampers that channeled heat around the range. And every morning, she had to clean, black-lead, polish, and re-light the range.

The cast iron stove of days past is not as mysterious to me as it may be to some, as I grew up with a wood-burning one in my kitchen. We used it mainly to keep the kitchen warm during the winter months, but we also cooked stews in the oven and toasted tortillas on the top. It certainly made our kitchen a more beautiful, cozy place. But relying on it for one’s entire sustenance is a different matter. Cooking as we know it – with handy oven dials set to exact temperatures and relatively predictable cooking times – is a strikingly modern invention – one that I plan not to take for granted from now on.

2. Doing dishes without a faucet

Housewives rubbed ashes on greasy dishes to make soap, and for more stubborn dirt, they used sand or brick dust. Of course, sinks didn’t have faucets until recently. So where did water come from? Rainwater collectors, ponds, and wells. A housewife heated the water in boilers over the fire or hobs that sat by the side of the fire. As long as she kept her water pots full, she had a constant supply of hot water that she could carry to the sink when she needed it.

By the mid-nineteenth century, water was piped to many towns in England, but an entire street usually shared one common faucet. It wasn’t until after World War II that poorer homes were outfitted with indoor water faucets.

3. Washing laundry without the spin cycle

In most households, Monday was set aside for the wash, because the housewife cooked meat on Sunday, leaving plenty leftover for Monday’s meal. Saved the task of cooking, she could devote Monday to laundry. She drew water, carried it to the house, and made soap. Then she spent the whole of the day “soaking, pounding, rubbing, boiling, starching, rinsing, and drying” the family’s clothing. She had a number of tools at her disposal – tubs, boards, dollies, paddles, bats, and tongues. She used human urine or pig manure to bleach linens, and she starched shirts with wheat, potatoes, or rice. Drying linen was no easy task until the invention of the upright wringer in the nineteenth century. Virtually all clothing needed to be ironed with flat irons heated on the range top. Poorer housewives had to start the wash at night, just before retiring to bed, because their family members only possessed one pair of clothes.

Making peace with the Magic Chef©

John Seymour convinced me. The housewives of days past were super heroes. And I recommend picking up The Forgotten Arts and Crafts, because we can undoubtedly learn a lot from them. They managed without many of the things a lot of us are striving to use less of – oil, processed food, and plastic to name a few. Their work was relentless, back-breaking, and filthy, and they seemed to do it with grace. Seymour recounts a conversation he had with an old woman in Herefordshire many years ago. She gave him an account of the weeks’s work when she was a child, and he replied, “‘Wasn’t it all a lot of work?’ ‘Yes, she said. ‘But nobody had ever told us there was anything wrong with work.’.” We’d probably all do well to remember that wisdom. But if I had a time machine, I think I’d stay right where I am, with the Magic Chef© churning away on the kitchen counter.

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Business is Booming: 5 Rays of Recession-Era Hope

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These are just a few of the headlines that blared off Google’s News feed last week:

  • “World economy to shrink by 1-2 percent in 2009”
  • “Unemployment rises in 99.7 percent of metro areas”
  • “Rescuing the Economy Just Got Harder”.

Pass the St. John’s wort, please.

It’s hard not to despair about the state of the world these days – and not just when you turn on the news. We all know someone – if not many – affected by the “worst recession since the Great Depression.” Depleted retirement accounts, foreclosed homes, lost jobs – personal calamities and real human anguish. And the downturn isn’t just touching those corrupt day-traders, bankers, and mortgage brokers, or hitting the realtors, developers, and fresh faces on Flip This House, who were getting drunk off the housing bubble a couple years ago. It’s taking out teachers, bureaucrats, factory workers, and seemingly half the state of California too. So, we can probably all use some good news about now.

For those of us who weren’t quite so inebriated on the manic consumerism of the last few decades, it’s not hard to find silver linings. So, here goes – five reasons you might want to celebrate a little.

1.  Seed companies can hardly keep up with their orders.

Philadelphia-based Burpee Seed Company estimates that $10 in seeds can produce vegetables that would cost $650 in a grocery store. When the economy started its collapse, they marketed the “money garden” – six easy-to-grow seed packs for ten dollars. Not surprisingly, Burpee’s business is up twenty percent from last year.

Burpee’s not alone. Washington-based Irish Eyes Garden Seeds is getting a hundred calls a day – a 20 to 30 percent increase over last year. At Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, a small company in the Ozarks, sales are up two and a half times. They’re having trouble keeping their catalogs stocked, and their most popular seed varieties are sold out for the season. Oregon’s Territorial Seeds is experiencing the same phenomenon. It’s official – the backyard garden is the hottest thing growing this spring. Even the Obamas are doing it.

2.  Americans are rediscovering their kitchens.

Epicurious.com predicted that one of the hallmarks of 2009 would be “a return to families cooking together and eating at home more than they have in decades,” and they seem to be right so far. Sales of cookbooks, cookware, and cooking magazines are up. Websites devoted to helping newbies navigate the kitchen are thriving. And people aren’t just tossing jars of pasta on noodles or popping boxes in the microwave; they’re cooking from scratch. Staples like white flour, dried beans and legumes, and eggs are flying off grocery store shelves. And according to market researcher Nielsen Co., canning and freezing supplies were the supermarket sales category with the highest annual growth rate (as of last November) – a trend they haven’t seen since the 1930s.

3.  Libraries have become hip.

Libraries across the nation are reporting more visits and higher circulation. Lawrence Public Library director Bruce Flanders says his numbers are in a “rapidly ascending trajectory.” Library card requests rose 27% in San Francisco in the last months of 2008. And CBS Evening News reported that nationwide more people applied for library cards last year than anytime since libraries started keeping records in 1990.

At New Urban Habitat, we’ve been sweet on public libraries for a long time, not just for all the money individuals save by borrowing books, DVDs, and computers rather than buying their own, or the resources we keep out of the landfills when we share. Libraries are also refuges for the lonely-types of the world – punk teens, new parents, retired grandfathers, and information seekers of all kind. And librarians are downright edgy. They read banned books, thumb their noses at the Patriot Act, and they’ll answer just about any question in the stratosphere, no matter how bizarre. Plus, as Dale Carnegie knew, there’s no better place to retool your resume than a public library. (Now if only library budgets were also in that rapidly ascending trajectory.)

4.  Craftiness is chic

According to Entrepeneur.com, “tough times tend to spur creativity”. And sure enough, crafting is cool right now. Craft and Hobby Association reported that in 2007, craft sales reached nearly $32 billion, and almost 57 percent of U.S. households engaged in crafting. Crafts – especially sewing, scrapbooking, and knitting – are just getting more popular as the economy sours. Etsy.com, a site where small crafters sell the wares, reported a more than three-fold increase in sales in 2008. And despite the general gloomy reports coming out of the publishing industry, craft books are making big profits. It’s not just craftiness – the recession is inspiring people to hunker down and enjoy other old-fashioned activities, like board games and playing music together.

5.  Bike service shops are booming

Car lots might be vacant these days, but some bike shops are teeming with customers. Bike industry news is mixed. Sales for higher-end models and mountain bikes are down. But shops offering utility city cycles – entry-level, commuting, hybrid, and cargo models – are faring much better. And service-oriented shops in bike-friendly locales are rolling right along. The $4 a gallon gas last spring inspired quite a few people to dust the cobwebs off their old bikes and teeter them in for tune-ups. And recession-era frugality has kept that trend alive. People may feel uneasy laying down the cash for a new bike right now, but even with plunging gas prices, folks are discovering it’s cheaper to tune up that old cruiser than to keep the station wagon on the road.

So, let’s raise our glasses (of homebrew) to the resurgence of bikes, crafts, cooking, gardens, and libraries. As we’ve all known for awhile, they are nourishing to people’s bodies, minds, and souls, not to mention their pocket books. The more people who love them, the better.

The Art of Meal Planning : Save Money, Eat Healthier, and Enjoy Cooking Again

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I used to buy a pocket calendar each year – the kind people used to jot appointments and reminders in before Smartphones. I excitedly wrote everyone’s birthdays in it, marked out vacations and holidays … then ditched it somewhere around January 4.

I never seemed to have a problem remembering where I was to be or whom I was to meet. Likewise, I avoided bouncing checks or overdrawing my bank account through most of my twenties without writing any purchases down or actually ever balancing my checkbook. (My mother, who reconciles her account to the penny on the same day of each month, is palpitating and sputtering for air about now.)

I also somehow excelled in college without writing half of my assignments down. So yeah, I might have became a tad cocky in my disregard for organizational tools.

Then I had a baby.

Without actually recounting the disasters that resulted from my lack of organization in the last several months, let’s just say, I’m more forgetful these days. It could be sleep deprivation, or just the sheer number of items on my to-do list. As it turns out, a three-person household is ten times harder to keep up than a two-person household, even with both spouses sharing the load nearly equally. Perhaps it’s because the additional person is hellbent on electrocuting himself, drowning, or licking the cat unless he’s under constant supervision; goes through a load of laundry every six minutes; and has more appointments and play dates than I had all through my twenties? In any case, organizational tools are my new allies. If they can’t save my family from the mountain range of laundry in the guest room, the cavernous refrigerator, or the Leaning Tower of bills on the junk table – nothing can.

The Art of Meal Planning

Of all the organizational tools my family’s adopted in the last few months, meal planning has been the most life-changing. It’s second only to a budget in must-dos to get your finances under control. (My mom will be relieved to hear that we’ve adhered to a budget for a few years now.) For most of us, shaving the grocery bill is the best way to cut back on spending – and let’s face it, most of us are pinching our pennies these days.

A good meal-planning system can cut your grocery bill by hundreds of dollars a month. And it can also help you eat healthier, incorporate more whole foods into your diet, enjoy cooking again, stop those last-minute “let’s just get a pizza” nights, and even help you get along better with your spouse. Are you sold yet?

Meal planning is simple

You can make fancy Excel spreadsheets or Word tables, or you can just draw a grid on a piece of paper. Plan your meals as often as you wish. Most people do it once-a-week or once-a-month. Right now, my husband and I are transitioning from weekly to monthly planning, so we can buy more things in bulk from a local natural foods mail-order supplier – something only made possible with our meal-planning system. But whichever you choose, the idea is to decide what you will make for dinner each night then write the ingredients you’ll need for each meal on your grocery list.

You’ll want to have a few things handy:

  • the circulars from your grocery store (probably available online)
  • coupons (if you clip them – we don’t)
  • favorite cookbooks or recipes
  • in the summer, a list of which veggies are ready to pick from the garden, or abundant at the farmer’s market.

One way to make the planning easier is to institute a “soup and bread night” or “a baked potato night”. I divide my grocery list into sections resembling where things are located in the store, but my husband (who actually does the shopping), assures me it’s unnecessary.

Eat healthier and cook with more whole foods

Meal-planning has enabled me to make more whole-grain, whole-foods meals from scratch almost effortlessly. If I know I’ll be making chili or black-bean tostados the next day, I put dried beans out to soak the night before. So I never buy canned beans anymore. If I know I’ll need bread for a meal, I make a loaf in the morning. Sure it’s a bit harder to soak and simmer beans or make a loaf of bread than it is to open a can of pintos or a bag of Oroweat, but we’re eating healthier for cheaper than ever. Plus, that desperate frustration I used to feel around five p.m., staring into the vacuous refrigerator with a fussy baby in my arms, has entirely evaporated – so it’s a good trade off. I never end up rushing to the store to grab convenience foods for dinner, or ordering take-out at the last minute – things that used to happen frequently.

Plan for domestic harmony

You get how a meal plan can help your finances and your health, but your marriage? Well, my husband and I don’t have exactly the same taste in food. He prefers tater-tots to quinoa, sloppy joes to salads, and bratwurst to rice and beans – and I am, well, the opposite. My husband likes the same predictable meals week after week, whereas I like to mix it up, find recipes in new cookbooks, sample a new whole grain or vegetable each week, and experiment with different herbs and spices. I hate cooking meat and am allergic to dairy, so my dishes are almost always vegan. My husband makes a mean pork roast.

So, we each plan and cook three meals a week, and order take-out the seventh night – and we’re both happy. We try to please each other’s palates to some degree. He hates lentils no matter how they’re seasoned, so I keep those off the menu, and in return, he’s nixed the sloppy joes and often makes me salmon or pasta, which I love.

So, what are you waiting for? Get out that paper and pen. Let’s meal-plan our way to world peace.