The end of PLUMPY and Merry Christmas

I suddenly woke up in the middle of the night and remembered I had a blog. Whoops. Diligence is no longer my forte it seems. But now I'm sitting down in a post Christmas bloated trance I thought it would be time for an update...

So PLUMPY came to an end with more of a fizzle than a bang, perhaps especially for me as I escape 5 days early on a plane to England on the 17th Dec. Now there's a story in itself. One notable event is that I finally remembered to put my own chopsticks in my bag one week before the end and then didn't go and use them anywhere. Still they are there now, which isn't particularly useful in England. I made some unpackaged edible Christmas presents - perusing recipes on the internet until I found one that I had all the ingredients for so I didn't have to leave the house. After a happy couple of hours rooting through Value Village I had collected several cute jars (well I thought so anyway) and then in a handy thirty minute window when everybody had left the house I whipped up some buttermilk fudge. Apart from a nervous moment when I thought I'd melted Kala's thermometer (Merry Christmas!) it all went quite smoothly and after a few hours chilling in the fridge it tasted sufficiently like fudge and was in danger of putting you in a diabetic coma after two mouthfuls. Perfect.

So what have been the most important discoveries from Project PLUMPY? Avalon Buttermilk is certainly one (if you have got bored of making lumpy yoghurt), you can get yummy bulk chocolate from Save On and peppermint and yoghurt covered pretzels (not as disgusting as they sound) and yes it is possible to largely live off toast during the day if you're lazy. Nut butters are easy to make and anything other than peanut is tastier. And now I can make bread without looking at a recipe (almost anyway). I'm sure we will incorporate mostly unpackaged domestic behaviour in the new year.

So back to the other story - the flight to England. Earlier in the year I had the joy of being caught up in the Volcano experience so I thought my flight delay quota had been used up. Apparently not. I had already booked a fairly mammouth journey, coach to Seattle, flight to Minneapolis then a flight to Heathrow... It all went smoothly (apart from the guy next to me being terrified of flying), until about a km from Heathrow, where we had been circling for a little while the pilot announced we were off to Dublin as we'd run out of fuel and Heathrow was shut for at least 90 minutes (ha ha). So we landed in Dublin and there we sat. And they said yes just waiting for Heathrow to reopen (again ha ha) and no we can't let you off. 3 hours later (3 hours!! I'd already been travelling for nearly 24) they announced the flight was cancelled and we'd be getting off. Then we did the obligatory lining up in various places in the airport following people with fluorescent vests and clipboards and then got put on a few buses where we eventually ended up in a hotel in Liffey Valley. Which apparently isn't the greatest bit of Dublin but is right next to an enormous shopping centre. We got fed (nice actually) and after a slight debacle about whether we were going to pay for the wine or not got sent back to our rooms. They called at midnight and said 'Be ready at 5am'! Then they called again at 1 am (at which point I think I broke a toe jumping out of bed and kicking the desk) and this time they said 'Be ready at 7am!'. 7am came and they said, 'No no actually it's been cancelled, Heathrow is closed'. At this point after realising it was probably a bit too far to get to Limerick and back in a day to visit Noelle I headed to the shopping centre for change and then on the bus into town for the day. Apart from being bitterly cold I had a very nice day shopping and going to the art gallery and having a beer with Denis (thanks Denis!). Anyway back at the hotel and after similarly choreographed nightly phone calls we all ended up back at breakfast at 6.30 waiting for 'news'. American Airlines managed to come and pick up their guests but no sign of Delta and still no 'news'. The internet connection at the hotel had decided to stop working, slightly unfortunately. I gave up and went back to my (really quite nice) hotel room and started watching Harry Potter. I mean why not. I couldn't work, there was no internet :o) Eventually they called us and came and took us to the airport where we found out 1. we were flying to Manchester and 2. the flight had been delayed because they hadn't been able to find a coach to come and get us from the hotel. Oh the irony. We made it to Manchester and then they put us on another coach to Heathrow, through the snowy snow snow. Amazingly most other people were wisely not on the roads so it was probably one of the quickest journeys from Manchester to Heathrow, ever. Total journey time, Vancouver to Heathrow: 80 hours. Wicked. Luckily I'm here for 3 weeks...

We're not dead...

... it's just not all that hard to live package free. Well apart from me with my various bad habit cravings. Although there are lots of snacks you can buy in bulk. I've probably said that before and I'll probably say it again.

So what have we been up to? Well there are lots of things in jars on top of our kitchen cupboards. Here is some sweet and sour vegetable pickling evidence, recipe courtesy of Meaghan's mum, I was given the job of sterilising the jars, but it was too scary so I retreated to the safety of the washing up and left Meg to it:



Before... and.... After...







There's a regular routine of butter, yoghurt, bread and granola making. All going fairly well except most of the yoghurt has been either slimy or lumpy or somewhere in between but the last batch seemed spot on. Hoorah. I think the temperature is key. Well there's not much else to get wrong.

What else could you possibly need? Well maybe some soup.



Mmmmm. Brown.
It tasted good though.

And some hard won, self-packaged cheese. It was an extremely exciting moment when Kala came home with this golden nugget...


Another discovery way up there on the excitement scale was that you can take your own pot to the gelato store and they will fill it for you. No photos of that, we ate it too quickly.

And last but not least there is a new member of the PLUMPY household. And he's pretty plump.



And hard to photograph because he's always asleep. But meet our new hamster, somehow he's got the name Bobbin. It just seems right. When I adopted him off a craigslist ad the girl said, 'You're not going to feed him to a reptile are you?'. No, we're going to eat him ourselves because it's difficult to get unpackaged meat. Unlikely actually. He's mostly fluff and his chewy noises keep me company working from home.

I'll leave you with an update on our new and old boxes. You'll notice quite a few beer bottles, maybe that's why we're not finding it very difficult.

Plumpy hikers

Just to mix it up a bit I decided to go on a 3 day hike and was thoroughly looking forward to it before I remembered I wasn't allowed any packaged food. My heart and my back starting sagging simultaneously. Sweaty heavy bread and watery granola it would be then. And what about protein? My meat eating body constantly worries about this. Way to much actually. It's become a bit of a thing.

Luckily we found a proteinous friend out on the trail. I stabbed him with my plastic fork and ate him whole.

Not really.

The first successful packageless camping food was some homemade granola, recipe courtesy of Kala's dad.


Due to the honey and other yumminess it's actually way to tasty and I find my hand inside the jar quite often. Luckily I abstained enough that there were sufficient amounts to take hiking. But what about milk powder? Crucial for granola and tea I find. You can get it in bulk but we didn't have any and obviously it was 11pm the night before I was planning to go. So instead I took milk in a thermal mug, perfect. And heavy. The theme of the packageless camping food.

Thanks (again) to Kala who went and found some basil late at night (it's possible), I made some cashew and basil pesto. Pesto is so quick and easy to make, who knew? Well, lots of people I guess. But not me. So along with some bulk pasta there's a meal. And with some cous cous and a slightly cheating foil packet of veggie curry there's another one - well we're allowed to eat up what's in the house and it was in the house. So there. And some bread, which was heavy and did go slightly sweaty but not too bad. And the never ending supply of peanut butter. Which I have made 3 times and has turned out completely (and progressively) disappointingly different each time. And of course jam, lashings of jam. Yoghurt covered raisins and pretzels are dangerously easily available in bulk. Mmmmm. And I happened to trip across a hip flask full of rum. Shame.

So off we went to Lake Ann, near Mount Baker in Washington State. I kept my mouth shut about my banana and pesto whilst crossing the border and all was good. Apart from a slightly horrifying moment when I thought we had about half as much food as we needed it all went well. And it was quite pretty too...


and Krista was so happy about joining in with the packageless adventure she was jumping for joy.


or perhaps it was all the yoghurt covered raisins. Actually I think I ate most of those.

Learning to love our plumpy lives

So it's been pointed out to me that most people would have found going travelling for 9 months as a good impetus for writing a blog. Somehow that didn't occur to me and now I'm excitedly writing about saving plastic bags. I'm probably just lazy. Or contrary. Or both.

The first package free week is drawing to a close and I had my second disappointing moment when I was repeatedly offered donuts out of a cardboard box. No really I don't want one thanks, I don't like them, actually I'm allergic - I'll vomit all over you, it's not worth it.

In fact we've been cooking up such a storm that we're
probably eating better than usual. Busy weeks in our household can sometimes involve a toast marathon. Meaghan came home one night literally bursting to the seams with vegetables. I was worried the PLUMPY prophesy had already come to pass. Or that we were producing a litter of plumplets.

Luckily it was a false alarm. We named the new arrival "Remember more shopping bags next time". Snappy isn't it?

Meaghan busied herself with making soup while Kala did recipe research on the couch

and I helped with chopping the vegetables

I seem to be having an unusually long period of adolescence.

The kitchen robot ingratiated itself further and with a little help from some mystery hands produced a happily guzzled down cauliflower and leek soup.


All Kala's couch research yielded great things. Firstly, a yummy nectarine loaf. And secondly some butter! Very exciting. This involved culturing the cream overnight with a small amount of yoghurt and then whisking, making sure you spray the kitchen with an even coat of buttermilk, pouring off the buttermilk, rinsing with iced water and slapping it around a bit. And out comes BUTTER. Just like that.













The weekend's excitements will include a trip around Famous Foods to investigate the bulk section. Don't you wish you had our lives?

Welcome to Project P.L.U.M.P.Y.

Finally I have beaten inertia and started a blog. Well everyone else seems to have one so shouldn't I? What should I write about? Unsurprisingly this burst of momentum coincides with a household project to live for 3 months food packaging free. Now that would be something to blog about... especially as the biggest diet coke, chocolate, chewing gum addicted member of the household I'm terrified about having to make all my food for 3 months. I might starve. Maybe I can lick the inside of the fridge door for supplemental nutrients?



...on second thoughts maybe not.

It seemed to me that the most important thing for our project was a name. I mean rules are useful too but a name just solidifies the whole concept. Meaghan was plum jamming like a mad thing (as my Irish friends have taught me to say) on Sunday...




...and this lead (somehow) to project P.L.U.M.P.Y. People like ummm meals packaging-free YES! (Thanks Kala for the words, did I remember them right? It probably doesn't matter). For some reason we stopped there, even though Meaghan had said 'but I don't want to be PLUMPY'. In fact it's probably going to have the opposite effect. But there you go it stuck. In my head at least.

So the rules. It's like fightclub. Except with less fighting. So far. There are two boxes in our kitchen - one is called Old and one New. We left off with the inspiration after the project naming.



...in case you're not sure what two cardboard boxes look like.

Any new food we buy must not come with any new packaging, we can use what we have already to go and collect new food items - there are a couple of exceptions: milk bottles are reusable, cardboard egg cartons can be taken back to the farmer's market and reused, the occasional beer bottle is ok as bottles are reused for domestic beers and we might allow ourselves to buy butter if we fail to make it very well. We can use up any food we have in the house (condiments etc.) but if we finish it we have to try and replace it in an unpackaged way. So back to Old and New, Old contains any packaging from items in the house we finish up, New contains any new packaging we use (it should be just milk bottle tops and egg cartons but we'll see!). We can only go out to eat once a week so we're not just eating out every night when we can't be bothered to cook. And those are the rules. Simple eh?

When can we make some wine?
Sigh.

Day 1 went fairly hitch free except we hadn't yet made any bread but there was some food in the house. We made a random contents of the fridge dinner: roasted turnip, omlette, soda bread courtesy of Kala and salad. It was a bit brown-centric but filled our holes. Then we headed off into town to watch a gig... excitingly discussing how we were going to have a beer when we got there (kegs are ok, reusable yay!) Extreme disappointment ensued when we realised they only had plastic glasses. No beer for us. I tentatively mentioned we could pop into the pub next door to have a quick pint to energise us for the evening ahead. I think we had all been thinking the same thing. The pub next door happened to be the Savoy hotel on Main and Hastings, not one of Vancouver's most salubrious neighbourhoods. $3 a pint for unnamed draft lager. Bargain. And it came in a glass of the old fashioned kind. We were definitely the only people in there that weren't alcoholics and we felt for the kind of pub it was they had gone a bit overboard on the lighting, I mean who wants to see what's in those dingy corners? During the course of our 40 min stay we got asked to buy someone a drink, did we want to buy a dreamcatcher and most randomly some guy came and showed us a packet of mozzarella cheese under his jacket. Sorry we don't eat packaged foods.

After witnessing a near fight (the bottle bounced) and an ejection we decided it was time to get back to the gig. If it wasn't for project plumpy I would never have been into the Savoy. Random experiences ahoy. If I only I could think of something to say about Soy. Sauce. Oh dear.

So feel free to check in and follow our exciting journey... along with our sourdour friends Duncan and Hamish:


... hi there.

and our newest and probably fondest addition to the household, the kitchen robot.


The robot made me peanut butter. For that I have declared undying love.