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.