Week 5, cont.
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At the beginning of my summer off, I planned to spend a week visiting my parents in Eatonville, Washington to have a girls’ week with Mom and do all the things we always wish we had time to do. So, in the midst of the media whirlwind we experienced, I was having a great time with Mom and still trying to check things off our lengthy to-do list. On the list: lots of canning, sewing, cheese-making, and soap-making. It worked out rather well that many of the items on the list relate to the Green Garbage Project and help me reduce garbage in my everyday life.
Several readers have suggested that I post tutorials about the canning process as well as how-to’s for making cheese and soap. I’ll definitely consider this suggestion but do want to note that:
1) This was my first time making soap
2) Soap-making is a tricky process that requires a bit of research, reading, and lots of safety precautions. Working with lye is a bit nerve-wracking at first and before anyone tries soap-making on their own, I caution you to read up on the process, particularly safety precautions.
3) Many excellent books and online tutorials have already been written about these processes. Mom and I purchased books on both subjects, and that’s how I learned.
So, perhaps tutorials will be forthcoming, but in the meantime I can certainly post pictures of the process.
I think I enjoyed making the soap the most since it was such a new experience. You start with two or three basic ingredients – tallow, oil, and lye if making traditional soap, or oil and lye if making vegetarian soap. Since Mom and I are vegetarians and buy only cruelty-free products, we went with a castille soap recipe which is amazingly simplistic – heated olive oil and lye mixed with water. We discovered just how important it is to measure precisely and double-check everything, because there are lots of places things can go wrong in soap-making. Eventually, the lye and oil are mixed together and then stirred for a long time. After that, the mixture is poured into a rectangular container to set up. It took more than a week for our soap to set up, and now our next step is to hand-mill the soap, adding fruit/vegetable ingredients and scents.
Mom's skull and crossbones - anything that touches lye should never be used for another purpose.
Stirring the oil, water, and lye mixture until it shows trailings, which are intial signs that the soap is setting up.
The soap after about a week.
As for canning, this is a process Mom and I are much more familiar with. We made blueberry syrup from berries I picked from a local farm here in Oregon, blueberry butter (like apple butter), pineapple jam, kiwi dacquiri jam, and salsa. Here are the finished products:
The results of our hard work - lots of canned foods.
The cheesemaking process was a bit of a disappointment, because we ended up with milk that wouldn’t separate into curds and whey. The cheesemaking process is a fascinating one, and making homemade soft cheeses is a simple matter as long as the proper milk is purchased. Milk for cheesemaking needs to be pasturized, not ultra-pasturized(heated to a lower temperature) for the correct chemical reaction to take place. The trouble is, nowadays, most milk is ultra-pasturized – it keeps longer and is probably perceived to be healthier by many people. We bought milk that said it was pasturized, but upon calling the company found out that is was heated too high for cheesemaking. If you’re interested in making your own cheese, I recommend checking out www.cheesemaking.com.
Finally, we went for an alpine hike in Mount Rainier National Park and had a wonderful time. The hike was a great reminder why we’re doing this project in the first place – the make the great outdoors a little cleaner.
One of many gorgeous views among the Mount Rainier wildflowers.
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are you able to just buy the soap you slice off yourself at the grocery store? we have a few stores up here in Seattle that let us do just that and you don’t end up with waste.