First, buy a whole chicken.

I know, I said it was free, but as any physicist can tell you, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Free always has a price, even if it’s sometimes hidden.

Anyway, soup.

So buy a whole chicken. If you buy it from a nearby small farmer, you will be helping your local economy, your local ecology, your health, your taste buds, and your soul.

Oven roast the chicken, and serve it for dinner with your choice of sides. If you don’t have a good recipe, see if your local library has a cookbook called “Best Recipe” or one of its kin. Be amazed at how good a home cooked meal can be.

I know, soup. We’re getting there.

Put away the leftovers. Pick the remnants of good meat off the carcass. Set them aside. You can leave plenty on the bones – fat, gristle, meat that’s tough to remove, etc.

If possible, cut the bones in half, either with kitchen shears or a large knife. It’s not absolutely necessary, but it will release marrow, which will really give some life to your soup.

Put the remnants of the carcass in a big stock pot, and add a bunch of water. At least a gallon, maybe more if your stock pot is big. Add some salt — maybe tablespoon or so, and another tablespoon of vinegar. (Don’t worry if your soup smells like vinegar for a while. It’ll go away. The vinegar is supposed to help draw out some extra nutrients.) You can throw in a bay leaf if you have it. Turn on the heat. You want to keep it just shy of boiling – A few bubbles every now and then, but not a full boil.

Now, get out a stalk of celery, a carrot or two, a couple cloves of garlic, an onion, and a potato. Substitute other veggies as you see fit. In mine, I left our celery because we didn’t have any. I included a little corn, because we had some left from the roasted chicken dinner. Soup is great for using up leftovers.

Peel the papery skin off the onion and put the skin in the pot. (This will give some color to your broth.) Wash and peel the carrot(s) and potato and put their skins in the pot too. Pull off some celery leaves and put them in the pot.

Cut up all the vegetables and mince the garlic. Heat some oil in a large pan. Wait for it to shimmer. Then add the garlic and all the veg to the pan, along with a good healthy sprinkling of thyme and some salt and black pepper. You can add other seasonings if you like.

When everything in the pan starts getting tender, take it off the heat. Put it in a bowl with the meat you set aside earlier. You want your broth to cook for a good hour before you go any further, so you may want to put these veggies and meat in the fridge for a bit, depending on how your timing is going to work out.

Once the stock pot with the bones, peelings, etc. has been heating for an hour or more (more is fine), get out a big bowl and a strainer or colander. Pour the broth through the strainer into the bowl. Skim off the top of the bowl if necessary, to catch any bits that came through the strainer. Discard the bones and scraps.

Put the broth back in the stock pot, along with your sauteed vegetables and meat bits. Simmer for another 30 minutes or so. Toss in a couple handfuls of egg noodles. Then toss in another handful, because it’s hard to have too many noodles in your soup, as far as I’m concerned. Cook until the noodles are appropriately soft. Add salt or seasonings to taste, but taste it first. Depending on how you roasted that chicken back at the beginning of this process, it may be plenty salty. Or it may need a good bit of salt.

Congratulations – you just made some excellent soup. And it didn’t cost you anything. Let’s look at the ingredients: Chicken bones and meat scraps – You were going to throw them out, right? Vegetables – You had them in your kitchen already. You just used the ones that would have gone bad waiting to be used. Herbs and/or spices – That much less going stale in the bottom of the jars. Tap water. Noodles.

So maybe not COMPLETELY free, but pretty effin’ close. For a few pennies worth of ingredients, and stuff that most people would throw away, you have the equivalent of about a dozen cans of some damn fine soup.

Besides, “Free Soup” does sound a lot better than “Chicken Carcass Soup.”

–

What if you could keep your house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside, in the height of summer, without air conditioning, fans, or any other power? How often would you even need A/C at that point? If you have a pair of scissors, an afternoon, and a couple hundred dollars or less to make it happen, read on.

There’s a material out there called shade screen. It’s like window screen, but it’s designed to block more light. Apparently it’s used most often in hot climates as a replacement for standard window screen, to cut down on sunlight. Similar products are used to keep greenhouses cool.

The window screen version doesn’t show up much in cooler, more seasonal climates. I’m not sure why. It could be because while blocking out the sun is good when it’s hot, it’s not really desirable when it gets cold. Lack of sunlight in winter can be depressing enough without any help from your window screens.

But still… commercially available shade screen can prevent 80-90% of the sun’s hot rays from entering your house. With summer temperatures here regularly over 90F, and plenty of humidity, I thought there must be a way to take advantage of this stuff without it being a giant pain, and without losing the winter sunshine.

My first thought was two sets of screens – one for summer, and one for winter. But that didn’t come close to passing the “pain-in-the-butt” test. My next thought was to attach the shade screen to the existing screen frames with velcro. That proved to be somewhat ineffective, as the sticky backing of the velcro heats up and becomes less sticky. The adhesion between the screen and the velcro wasn’t very good anyway.

Finally, I realized that most of our windows slide down from the top as well as up from the bottom. If I put the shade screen between the window and the original screen, and then pin the top of the shade screen by closing the window on it, I’d be all set. No muss, no fuss.

I removed one of our window screens and used the frame as a template to cut the shade screen. I put the original screen back in place, opened the window from the top, slid the shade screen down between the glass and the screen, arranged it to the best fit, and then closed the top part of the window.

It worked like a charm. On a hot July day, with the sun beating down, I compared the surface temperature of the window with the shade screen to another nearby window.

After ten minutes, there was a 21F degree difference!

Lucky for me, all but a few of our windows are the same size. I took a screen back out and used it as a template to cut shade screen for all the other windows. I cut it maybe an inch wider and a few inches longer than the frame. It couldn’t have taken an hour to cut enough for the whole house.

– –

You may be wondering if it would be easier to just draw the curtains or hang shades in your windows. This shade screen approach has two major advantages: 1. You can still see out, and more importantly 2. The sunlight is blocked before it goes through the glass. Halting the sun’s rays after they’re already inside isn’t nearly as effective.

I’ve found that there are a number of other advantages to this approach, along with a couple minor drawbacks.

Advantages:

• Easy to implement for summer. I’d estimate 30-45 minutes to put them in all the windows in our house.
• Even easier to take down for cooler seasons. It took me less than 15 minutes to pull them all down, roll them up, and put them away.
• If the window is open and there’s any wind at all, the bottom of the shade screen is free to blow in the breeze and let the air flow in.
• If you want the shade screen out of the way – to let a breeze in, or to accomodate house plants – you can just roll it up as far as you need and tuck it behind the window pane.
  
• You get a privacy effect. From the inside, you can see out just fine. From the outside looking in, it just looks black…
• It cost me under $200 for a 100-foot roll of 36-inch screen, and I only used half of it for the whole house – a dozen double-hung windows, plus the sliding door.

Disadvantages:

• If it’s raining and windy and you leave your window open, the shade screen will catch the water, and then fling it around the room as the wind blows the free-hanging bottom part of the screen
• You get a “wavy” appearance because the shade screen is not pulled perfectly flat. (This photo makes it look worse than it is, but you get the idea.)

Of course, my approach won’t work in every house. Your windows may not be the same as mine, so you may have to come up with a different method if you’re going to try this.

I can tell you that getting it to stick directly to glass is challenging. We have a sliding glass door that gets a lot of afternoon sun. I first tried attaching the screen to the glass door with long strips of velcro. It quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to work because of the heat. The adhesive just wasn’t holding up. I tried sewing the velcro strips to the screen, which worked a little better, but the then the velcro adhesive failed on the glass surface – again because of the hot sun. My next attempt was with some suction cups. It worked “sort of,” so I bought more of them to see if there was strength in numbers. I haven’t had the chance to try it yet, but I give it a 50-50 shot. It’s a pretty big piece of shade screen, so it’s got a bit of weight to it – especially when it’s wet and windy. If anybody has suggestions, let me know.

At any rate, with the windows open at dusk, the whole house fan pulling in the cool night air, and the shade screen keeping the sun out during the day, we can consistently keep the house at least 12F degrees cooler than the outside temperatures on a hot summer day. If I can work out a way to keep it on the big west-facing sliding door, we might even get a few more degrees out of it.

For reference, I bought Phifer SunTex 80 from Wholesale Screens and Glass. (They also sell SunTex 90, which blocks even more sun.) I’m sure other vendors and similar products would do just as well.

Slate has an interesting article about whether you’re better off buying certain items at the store or making them yourself. Their primary focus is cost, though the author does address quality to some extent. They leave out plenty of other factors that might come into play – supporting local growers, sustainable farming practices, or various other ethical considerations. But let’s face it: money is on a lot of people’s minds right now.

The article runs into some accounting problems, like apparently including the cost of canning jars in the cost of making preserves. If you’re doing that, what about the canning kettle? Or the stove for that matter? Canning lids I could see, but canning jars are a buy once, use forever item. The author also talks about buying organic strawberries. Were they in season? Were they shipped in from another time zone? Strawberries can vary a lot in cost and quality based on these factors.

Still, the article’s definitely worth a read. It also ties into our current lead article pretty well, and we thought it could make for an interesting discussion topic in The Barnyard. What do you make from scratch? What did you think would be hard but turned out to be easy? What did you try and give up on? What are you thinking about trying? Let us know!

Dr. Kathy McMahon of Peak Oil Blues fame (and occasional H&H contributor) will be offering an online course for people who are interested in keeping chickens at home.

The course is ninety-minutes long and takes place at:
9am PST / noon EST
Saturday June 13th, 2009.

It is an online course, so you will need an Internet connection

Full details here

A must-watch video:

Wildlife film maker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family’s farm in Devon into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature holds the key. With her father close to retirement, Rebecca returns to her family’s wildlife-friendly farm in Devon, to become the next generation to farm the land. But last year’s high fuel prices were a wake-up call for Rebecca. Realising that all food production in the UK is completely dependent on abundant cheap fossil fuel, particularly oil, she sets out to discover just how secure this oil supply is. Alarmed by the answers, she explores ways of farming without using fossil fuel. With the help of pioneering farmers and growers, Rebecca learns that it is actually nature that holds the key to farming in a low-energy future.”

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=4152340418943461860&hl=en&fs=true

In what many see as a powerfully symbolic action, The White House will break ground on a kitchen garden on the South Lawn on Friday, with help from local elementary school students. We can’t always agree on  Obama’s policy decisions, but I think this is one we can all get behind.

More details here.

There’s a wonderful series of videos on YouTube showing some Depression Era meals along with anecdotes about living through it. All of the recipes and stories are by Clara, a great-grandmother in her 90’s. She recalls what life was like, and how they scraped together tasty meals from the cheapest ingredients.

http://www.youtube.com/v/DuMkW35BwK8

The complete set of videos can be found here.

–

At last, we’re on the downhill side of winter. Or is it the uphill side? Anyway… it’s finally warming up a bit, but over the course of this somewhat grueling winter, we’ve had plenty of opportunity to experiment with heating our house with cherry pits.

It’s really interesting to see the differences in the various fuels. Well, okay, maybe not to everybody. But just in case others are in a similar position, I’ll share what our experience has been….

Cherry pits don’t produce the same grainy ash that corn does, nor the light fluffy ash of the wood pellets. They’re somewhere in between. You don’t get very much ash falling down into the ash pan, but you get quite a bit floating around and sticking to the walls of the burn chamber, and the exhaust vent. It varies from a grayish tan to a sooty black. A poor burn (i.e. not enough airflow) gets you something akin to creosote coating everything.

While mixing corn and wood pellets gets you the best of both worlds, mixing cherry pits and wood pellets gets you the worst of both worlds. (I didn’t have a chance to try mixing cherry pits and corn.) The pellets plus cherry pits initially looked good, since there was almost no ash in the ash pan. I thought we were getting a more complete burn, amounting to higher efficiency. What was actually happening was that there wasn’t less ash, it was just more airborne ash. More ash collected on the heat exchanges, in the air intake and exhaust ducts – basically in a lot of nooks and crannies, which meant the airflow was poor, which meant the efficiency was getting worse and worse over time.

It got bad enough that the air intake fan wouldn’t turn any more (though I’m sure some of it was from the previous two winters). I had a service tech out to help troubleshoot. He showed me some new tricks for cleaning & maintaining the stove. But even with good airflow, I have to knock ash out of the exhaust duct about once every couple days to keep it from building up again. And it still builds up in hard to reach spots that are more suited for a spring cleaning project than a weekly maintenance task.

The other problem is that – contrary to what I’d heard – the cherry pits burn a little more slowly than pellets or corn, which, without getting into too much detail, means that we can’t set our stove to it’s highest setting. We can run wood pellets on 5 (the highest setting). We can run corn on 4 and get more heat than pellets on 5. If we run cherry pits on anything higher than 3, it will work for a while, but get worse over time. By the time 8 hours is up, the burn pot has filled up, the fire is partially smothered, the heat output is down, and there’s smoke coming out of the exhaust vent – something that never, ever happens with corn, and rarely with pellets.

I wanted to like the cherry pits. And they were usable. Our heat stove just doesn’t cope with them all that well. They don’t produce noticeably more heat than wood pellets (unlike corn, which does produce noticeably more heat). They do produce noticeably more ash in the least convenient places.

Our first winter with this heat stove, we burned primarily corn. Last year we used about a 3:1 mixture of corn & pellets, but then straight pellets at the end of winter when the corn ran out. This year, we didn’t use any corn. After bad experiments mixing corn & cherry pits, we went back to either/or. Next year, I’m going to say it’s back to the corn/pellet mix. Each fuel has it’s good and bad points, but the corn/pellet mix seems to result in the cleanest, hottest burn while staying on the low end in terms of cost and hassles.

Patti Moreno shows you how to make three simple medicinal herbal teas….

Chris Martenson recently did a very condensed presentation of his amazing Crash Course for WGBY in Springfield MA. If you don’t have the time to watch the entire Crash Course, you can see this 40-minute “cliff notes” version in either Windows streaming media format, or a downloadable Quicktime format.