Monday, November 3, 2014

it's our birthday month! a lot of fish, food and some prepping tips when you don't have a lot of space!

it's been incredibly mild for the month of october and november looks good too!



it's our birthday month - mine is on the 9th and jam's is on the 17th. 7 days apart. years ago we stopped buying each other gifts, and instead, bought stuff for our old house in the city, and now, we save up to buy a big purchase item and it is our birthday gift to each other. here is our gift to each other:


woohoo baby! a red kitchen aid pro mixer for the kitchen! we have always made all of our bread, rolls and pizza dough by hand so we know how to do it. but this little baby makes bread making a breeze. i love it! so does jam! we also got 2 old Penn 716Z reels from ebay as back-ups for trout fishing. and jam also got a big-*ssed surf-casting rod and real from cabelas. this rod is for catching bass and mackeral in the ocean. we now have everything we need in order to fish for the rest of our lives in any body of water.

here's some delicious zuchhini and pattypan squash puree that we made during season and then canned. i added some small bits of cauliflower, a tiny bit of cream, some broccoli leaves, cayenne, cumin and turmeric. we love home-made soup on a grey day.


these nachos were supposed to be a snack for watching a movie, but there was no way we could hold them on our laps, eat them and watch the movie! because we made them out of baked potatoes straight from the ground! so you understand that we would have made a mess! so we scarfed those plates down at the kitchen table - yummeh!


here's a beautiful sunset:


just so that you don't think we're too fancy - rice and beans baby!


spiced with garlic, cayenne, cumin, turmeric, chili powder and salt and pepper. throw on some mozzarella and a fresh tomatoe taken right off the vine. the greenhouse is working out amazingly as we still have tomatoes coming in - woohoo! in november???? can you even believe that???

here's my hunk going to the halloween dance which we had a blast at!


no pic of me because my pic came out horribly. i was a woodland faery dressed in a green dress with wings. i gathered moss from the yard and put it all throughout my hair. i wish the pic had have turned out as it was a cute outfit.

remember when all of our pepper plants became aphid infested and we almost killed them spraying them with soapy water 5 times a day and fried them? live and learn eh? well jamie sprayed the aphids off every day with the hose and because the greenhouse extends our season, we actually got some hungarian hot wax peppers off of a few sad little plants.


there aren't a ton, next year we'll do a lot better but i am glad that we got as many as we did. jamie loves hot pickled peppers and i was able to at least make one jar for him. it's pretty good considering we thought the plants wouldn't produce anything at all!


i will also be harvesting my thai chili peppers, monets and alma paprikas this week to make a bunch of hot sauce for him!

here's a delicious everything in the fridge salad with nasturtium and borage flowers. i make an antibiotic dressing using EVOO, apple cider vinegar (with the mother), garlic, ginger, lemon and honey. it's super good for you!


you know what else is super good for you? a man that goes down to the beach to get seaweed, rocks and gravel and comes home with this:



that's a striped bass from the north atlantic ocean! jam is also really good at filleting fish!


oh ya baby - bass fried in butter with a bean and pepper salad with some local apples. man it was good!

and ya know what else he got me?


a big giant plate of mussels fresh out of the ocean. he likes mussels but i LOOOOOOOVE them. he dips his in butter but i am a purest when it comes to shellfish - plain!!!!

we took the rest of that striped bass the next day and made fish and chips baby!


anyway - on to storing your preps when you don't have a big house and trust me, this house is tiny!!! you have to think up some nifty ways to store your preps. i've already shown you the hidey-hole that jambaloney found behind some sheetrock in our water heater closet. i removed the majority of our 5 gallon buckets in order to show you how he used the studs to make shelves on the left, and on the right is a coffee table that we brought here that took up our whole living room. so this was a great place to put it. you can see how many 5 gallon buckets can be stacked up here! and it's room we didn't know we even had!



this is my end table on my side of the couch.



remove the lamp and tray and the box it sits on opens. it's a great place to store spices. (i took a bunch of spices out just for the pic.) it is normally stuffed right to the top.


this is an ottoman with 2 little end table thingys. the ottoman top comes off.


and inside you can store all kinds of goodies! (again i took a bunch of stuff out just so that you could get an idea.



we keep long term food in the hidey-hole and take food from the hidey- hole and put it here. that's how we rotate out our preps.

i just wanted to share some ideas for anyone who doesn't have much storage space for preps. when choosing new furniture, or as jam does, when building new furniture, always look for something that can be of use to store preps. we have several other pieces of furniture that hide some of our preps and jam will keep building additional stuff and finaggling more places to keep adding to our preps.


it's another mild day temperature-wise but it is windy as oh heck!!! good day for inside jobs. oh ya - we're having more fish and chips for supper - woohoo!

23 comments:

  1. Oh the fish looks lovely~! We had our basement flood, so I am now devising ways of storage that are off the ground. It was a fluke thing that should never happen again (haha) but I wont let everything be ruined the next time. I so want a small green house, but handsome and I may be downsizing in the next couple years, so I may hold off until then. Love the pics

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    1. lw - the fish really was lovely - so fresh and right out of the ocean!!! i am sorry to hear about this flood and your losing some stuff - it sucks - and i know because our basement flooded the first year we were here. as for the greenhouse, if you are downsizing, maybe wait to get it but trust me - they really extend the season - it's amazing!!! xox

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  2. Sweet Kymber,

    Happy Birthday to You and Jambaloney!!!!! Woooohooooo.................I love the birthday gift you both gave each other.

    Fish...........love me some fish........Great catch Jambaloney, and you filleted those babies really nicely.

    Love to you both.
    Your Friend,
    Sandy

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    1. Sweet Sandy - we both thank you very much for the sweet birthday wishes. hon - you will love this: we checked our email this morning after cards and tea....and i realized the date from looking at email. i said "hey babe - it's my birthday"....and jam said "happy birthday babe" - both of us had forgotten because we never know what day of the week it is, never know what time it is and certainly don't know what month it is - bahahahahah! and ya, you and me both love us some good fish! much love to you and yours always, hon! xoxoxo

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  3. Well Happy Birfday you two. Food looks great as always and so does the fish. Not sure I would be a fan of the muscles though, maybe if you fried em like clams.

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    1. well thankee buddy...and because you are so sweet in your comment i'm going to hold back from calling you a wiener in this comment - i can be so sweet eh? bahahahahah!

      do you like steamed clams or steamed oysters? if you do, you would like steamed mussels. but if you only like clams deep-fried, then you would enjoy deep-fried mussels...they are very similar. much love buddy! xoxox

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  4. As is always the case, the food you made looks very delicious indeed. Even more so since all of it is fresh.

    Storage room is always at a premium,and every little nook and cranny does have it's place in the overall scheme.

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    1. thanks so much buddy - that is a sweet thing to say! and you are soo right about storage space! we find that we really need to learn to be creative. and i loved your recent post about how you store stuff and where you store it - it's always great to learn from like-minded people! much love to you and yours, always, Harry! xoxoxo

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  5. Happy Birthday you two, enjoy!

    Mixer
    You will like that mixer! I bake bread every week and machine kneading makes it very easy, even Jam could do it now:-) They do make some nice attachments for it also, I have several myself.

    Meals
    As always your meals look great!

    Fish
    Hey Jam slow down on taking the fish out of the ocean so I can catch some down here. As soon as I can finish up some projects and free up some time I'll be surf fishing three days a week here. Hope I have your luck!!

    Weather
    Honestly I thought you'd be having some snow by now.

    Storage space
    If your like me you keep adding to your stocks and never seen to have enough room for it all.

    Greenhouse
    I assume a green house is a must for you so you can extend the growing time and like now still get some goodies from the plants.

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    1. hey Mike buddy - you'll be glad to know that we took your post about various mixers into consideration before purchasing ours. you'll also like to know that the mixer we purchased is normally $600 but we got it on sale for $350!!! still a ton of money but it will pay for itself soon!

      thanks for the compliment about the meals, i do try and make the food look good as well as be good for you.

      jam says he hears you loud and clear and will be sure to send some fish your way. i can't wait to hear about what you fish for and with what....jam can't either!

      we had a little tiny bit of flurries yesterday, it's all gone now and that was totally out of the ordinary for this time of year here. we'll normally have a few flurries in december...but don't get real, actual staying snow until january.

      yep - we are like you and constantly adding to our preps and have completely run out of room for it all. we're now going vertical with some extra storage until we can build our new addition.

      Mike - the greenhouse was the best investment we have ever made while spending very little money on it. i still have tomatoes and peppers out in the greenhouse - can you believe that???

      much love to you and yours buddy! xoxoxox

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  6. "Rice and beans, baby!" I hear that almost every day. lol How did I not know your birthday is the day before mine, Kymber? And Jam's just a week after! Scorpios rock! :-)

    Dang it, I really wanted to see that fairy costume. Maybe someone at the party took pictures...

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    1. Sue, sweetie - you just can't go wrong with the rice and beans eh??? bhahahahahahahah! holy moly - how come i didn't know your birthday was yesterday??? happy belated birthday sweetpea!!! i don't feel any different than i felt yesterday - do you???

      the costume was really cute. i had wings and a cute little dress and then all the moss in my hair. i also collected some branches from our scotch broom and made a headpiece that kept knocking other people in the face - bahahahah! i'll see if one of my friends has a pic and sen d it to you! much love to you and the RenoMan! xoxoxo

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  7. We bought a kitchenaid mixer about ten years ago and love the thing. I don't know if the modern ones are different but the one we have has all metal gear except for one nylon bevel gear in the middle of the drive train. Kneading bread is hard on it and it occasionally strips. I think are manual says not to knead bread for longer than two minutes which never gets the job done. So I have learned to buy that gear in bulk online and about every three or four years when it shucks it out, I replace it, repack the grease and it is good as new. Ours doesn't have the lift mechanism which we would like along with glass bowls but all that will have to wait awhile until I run out of my stash of bevel gears.

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  8. Happy Birthday fellow Novemberians! I am the 24th! I have always said 'cool' people are born in November....Winston Churchill was the 30th, actress Hedy Lamar was a November 9th baby and Gordon Lightfoot was born on November 17th! Wonderful post and so chock full of ideas and great food and I so enjoyed it!

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  9. Happy birthdays- I'm the 28th, Mary's the 29th and little Oscar is the 23rd!

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  10. We too have Nov B days Oldest son on the 4th my dad on the 4th, Sammy on the 25th and my mom was on the 18th. Stay safe you two.

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  11. Food looks good and so does that new mixer!
    We live in a fairly small house as well so I'm always on the lookout for new ways of storing food. I'm working on a project now that will make you smile but it won't be finished for a week or so yet so you'll have to wait.
    You've made me want fish for tea now!

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  12. wow you sure do put on a good spread of food. and what really is interesting to me is that you make it all look so pretty. even rice and beans. I am going to have to up my game for the mr's dinners or as we call it Tea.

    Am loving that you found that area of space for your food storage. that is really excellent.

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  13. Happy Birthday to you Gurlie and to Jam. ...isnt being 29 wonderful????

    All the food and pics look wonderful. Was Jam a hippy? I would have LOVED to see you in your faery costume, I am sure it looked awesome. Our two boys were a werewolf and ghost with chains. I had brown face paint on the werewolf, and my nutty mother actually thought I turned him brown permanantly...

    Anyways, much love to you and Jam. I hope you both have a fabulous Birthday.

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  14. Definitely a hunk, a wonderful mutual gift, and a very clever girl to find spots to store preps. You never cease to inspire and surprise me with your ingenuity.

    Now, where's my bass and mussrls?????

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  15. Happy birthday to you both! I think you are going to love having that Kitchen aid mixer. A great multi-tasker and I love multi-taskers.

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  16. Happiest of Birthdays to you both! Seems you turn most days into a celebration, so I'm guessing the birthday month must be outta this world fun. Enjoy!

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  17. Beautifully clever ideas for small house storage! In some ways our house seems big (almost 1500 square feet) but with our lifestyle it's hard to find places for things. Ideas for space are always welcome! And a very happy birthday to you both. Great idea about birthday gifting. :)

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