Making your own sauerkraut is easy and fun
06.10.11
In my mostly German family, sauerkraut was the meal, not a side dish. Served with pork, for flavoring, some type of sausage, and mounds of mashed potatoes, it was a feast most of the family eagerly looked forward to while it roasted slowly in the oven most of the day.
My mother, who had a dash of Welsh diluting her heavily German blood, would prepare the food, but not partake. She would sit at her end of the dinner table with two boiled eggs in front of her and a pained expression on her face. For days after she would grouse about the smell, and the fact that no matter when in the year you made the dish, it seemed to revive more than a few flies, which then buzzed around the house lethargically. In my household, sauerkraut was not served during warm-weather months for just this reason.
Three years ago, I started dating a man with a strong German heritage. What else could he be, with a name like Vogelsberger? His mother, Freda, a cooking dynamo who raised five sons, still made her own kraut. Since I never have lost my love for the dish, I wondered, would it really be worth the trouble to make?
Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Seven Ways to Green Homes on the Cheap
07.10.11
Shedding crocodile tears (though a few drops of sweat may be necessary).
1. Replace all the light bulbs in your ceiling fixtures with compact fluorescent light bulbs, or CFLs. You know you want to, and the government says you have to – 100-watt bulbs after 2012, 75-watt bulbs after 2013 and 40 to 60-watt bulbs after 2014. You may feel even better if you buy slightly more expensive light-emitting diode, or LED bulbs, which contain no mercury.
Cost per 3-light fixture, $9. Cost for one LED, $13, with remote.
2. The average toilet requires 5 gallons of water to flush. Low-flow toilets still use about 2 gallons. There considered to be in harmony with green homes. Assuming your house was built more than a decade ago, and contains two bathrooms, you could be flushing up to 40 gallons of water daily. Curb that by filling a milk jug (or a large, plastic mayonnaise jar) with water and drop it in the toilet tank at the back. You can cut that water-waste figure by up to 16 gallons daily. Put your dishwashing machine on another water diet; wash only one load of dishes per day, typically after dinner. Cost to you, almost nothing.
Source: Housing Predictor