Looking for inspiration

After a few meltdown moments (well I have been doing this motherhood thing pretty constantly night and day for over a year now... pause for gasps and applause ;-) C has been putting in overtime at home to give me a few extra breaks. Strangely, I've found myself scratching my head with what to do with them as I have now morphed so solidly into mothermode I have forgotten what else I do!

I decided to give this sustainability urge a bit more attention and combined my favorite relaxes in one - book shopping, coffee drinking and reading. I hunted down the book The Mud House by Richard Glover. It's his memoir of the dream holiday house he and his mate built with almost no money and no skills... just the thing to inspire C and me.

Great, fun book. But as for mud brick house building, that dream will have to stay in the pipe line a while longer as we don't just have almost no money, we have no money (could it be all the book buying and coffee drinking?!).

Another way to look at that though, is more time for skill developing, plotting and planning. So, still on the quest for inspiration, I did a bit of a google (much cheaper than books and coffee; I am more sustainable already!). Here are a few great blogs I came across which have really got me thinking...
www.greenrenters.org : lots of great creative ideas for green living
http://myyearwithoutspending.blogspot.com : introduced me to "The Compact"
http://sfcompact.blog "The Compact" site.

Hmmm..committing to a year without buying anything new! Awesome idea... for now I am contemplating... could I do it? just what would it mean giving up?

Stuffed sqash not so stuffy

Well, I tried S.A's stuffed squash recipe. Turned out ok. Just as well I had loads of MEGA squash though because I had to stuff three of them to use up the stuffing the recipe made. We ate one the first night and were a bit disappointed, not too tasty. But seems a stuffed squash ages well, cos the next nights' was deelish. It was also a white squash, whilst the first had been yellow. Not sure if that was the key, or if we had more of the yummy yoghurt sauce with the second. Verdict - I'd cook them again, but not as a regular thing.

101 ways to squash

Well, I knew it, this is going to turn into a food project blog! Ah well, I promised dabbling, and this is the hobby of the moment.
SO, due to the bounty of mega squash from our garden I am now on a crusade to find as many different ways of serving up squash as possible. So far we have had an odd tasting pasta sauce consisting of grated squash, parsnip, ricotta cheese and something else I can't remember. Then we had squash frittata. Next I'm going to try a Stephanie Alexander stuffed squash recipe - I'll post the verdict.

Bounty

Well I thought I ought to start this blogging caper with something to inspire me. If my dream is to be self-sufficient then this harvest from our community garden plot (admittedly largely the work of two more organised friends!) is the closest I've come yet. We got almost a whole meal out of it which was lots of fun - so much healthier and enjoyable eating your own produce (at least while the novelty is still there). I am not under many illusions, I know to be truly self sufficient takes so much time, money and commitment if I get there it will likely be in retirement! But I don't want to let a little idealism get completely lost in the day to day realities, so I plan to celebrate my meagre efforts here and see what comes of it. I've never been one for diaries or consistent hobbies, so you can be sure the blogging will be random and intermittent, but hopefully fun...here I go!