Why are we wasting our time keeping track of our expenses you ask?  Well, it’s old fashioned but it only took 1 hour to review 2 weeks worth of expenses thanks to our handy dandy system.

Step #1: Always carry around a small notebook (Bank of Shamerica offers them for free as Check Debit Card Registers) and record every single expense using the accounting technique called “double entry.”  Double entry just means that every time you record what goes in and what goes out for each transaction. For example I bought groceries for Mat and I looks like this:

The credits are on the left and the debits are on the right.

I have a code for each type of expense (6001 always means groceries) so that I can search threw them easily.  If you’d like a copy of my template I’d be happy to share it with you.  A very nice young accountant shared it with me and it’s been a huge help.

Step #2 Post your journal (the notebook with all your entries) to the ledger (the spread sheet on your computer) every two weeks.

Step #3 Set realistic goals for saving money every week. I told Mathew my goal was to only spend $800 this month and he’ll laugh at me if I don’t meet my goal, so that’s my social obligation to meet.

In the name of open source budgeting, I give you my numbers for the second half of the year.  I was traveling for all of July, August and most of December which means I wasn’t paying rent. And I didn’t pay rent for most of the fall in Brooklyn thanks to good good friends.

Happy Budgeting and I’ll let you know how next Monday’s budget night goes in mid-February.

The best part about my new home is that the growing season is 71 days longer than in my home state of Michigan! 71 days! That’s so much time time!  The last frost date for Portland is April 3rd and the first frost is November 7th.  The number one reason my dad should leave Sweden to come farm near me:  the last day of frost in his neck of the woods is late May or June.  I’ll have harvested my first crop by then.

The extended growing season here in Portland means that plants that were annuals or house plants back in Michigan are perennials out here.  Yesterday was a rainy Sunday here in Portland, so while homeowners were curled up indoors I roamed the streets with sharp scissors slicing off plants I want for my garden. That’s right, I like to combine the thrill of stealing with the joy of propagating plants from cuttings.  I simply cut three to four inch pieces of new growth from various hardy plants like rosemary, sage and thyme.  Back at my sublet I stripped all but 2 or 3 leaves and put them in little pots of dirt.  I’m not sure if they’ll take, but there’s a pretty good chance that in a month they’ll send out roots and be ready for planting in the spring.

I also discovered that succulents can reproduce from a leaf. I have always lusted over the exotic and beautiful hens and chicks, and yesterday I gave in to my desires and snatched three little hens and chicks from an over crowded garden bed in NE Portland. Please don’t tell the neighbors of my sins.  I like to think I was helping thin out the patch.

The succulent leaves are laying out in the sun for the next three days in order to callus over. The calluses prevent direct contact with fungus or disease in the same way that scabs prevent open bloody wounds from directly mixing with bacteria and viruses in our environment.  After three days each leaf will start to send out little roots in an attempt to keep living.  I will then set the leaves on top of pots of sandy soil so that their roots can take hold.  The tricky thing with propagating succulents from cuttings is that they are apt to rot if they are buried in dirt of given to much moisture.

With a little bit of luck the hens and chicks I snagged will turn in to 30 hens and chicks!

What? How do you make fermented veggies?  Check out Sandor Katz’s book on Wild Fermentation. We cut veggies, salted them, pounded them to release their water, then packed them in to food grade plastic containers.  After the sliced veggies were submerged in their own salty brine we weighted them down with containers of water (plastic bags of plastic pails).

The kraut will be stored in my friend’s basement since I’m currently subletting and my housemates didn’t seem like the “kraut in the basement” type of people.  Lucky for us this beautiful pink smelly batch will be ready just in time for the most sickening modern holiday of all: Valentines Day.

I’m getting a lot better at cooking for some reason, I’d like to think it happened naturally but my boyfriend will remind me that 1 out of 2 dishes I made in 2008 was absolutely lousy.

Thanks to Michael Ruhlman‘s new book called Ratio I’ve been introduced to the idea of cooking not from recipes but from simple ratios to construct healthy meals based on ingredients on hand.   I initially intended to buy the book as a Christmas gift for someone, but there was only one copy left at the Strand (used book store) . . .  so it turned into a gift for myself.

Some call ratios “a secret decoder ring that frees you from the tyranny of recipes”, and I’m not sure it’s that easy, but a careful study of the ratios and the similarities and differences between them has certainly helped me out.  As a nomad I have to provide food for myself in all sorts of strange situations and it’s much easier to carry around a one page chart of ratios when I’m out shopping or standing in front of the fridge than anything else.  Apparently for $5 I can buy the Ratios iphone app. I don’t have an iphone and I think my brain needs a little arithmetic every now and then, but it’s pretty cool.

The most useful part of the book is the ratio charts: Doughs and Batters, Stocks and Sauces, Meat-Related Ratios, and the Custard Continuum, which take up one page of the book. His writing is quick and to the point. Muffin batter differs from popover batter only because there’s twice as much flour and a hint of baking powder.

How I’ve used the ratios:

The other night my friends got a fantastic donation of eggs from a local farmer so I whipped out the Custard Continuum and we started a very classic Creme Caramel and a quiche based on ingredients found in the fridge.

The creme caramel was incredibly easy to whip together. Just 2 cups milk, 4 eggs, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract and 1/4 tsp salt.  I would double the vanilla next time, and we made it richer by using half and half stolen from the school’s cafeteria.

The trick to the whole show was the caramel sauce.  Now I hadn’t read the caramel sauce chapter when I tried this recipe and I didn’t realize that all I had to do was put 1/2 cup sugar in a pan on medium heat and wait (and wait and wait 15 minutes at least) for the sugar to get so hot that it turned into a liquid (sure Puhlman said it, but we doubted that sugar would liquify on it’s own and after 20 minutes of stirring . . . there was a lot of doubt).  My friend Franny was the only one patient enough to keep pushing the sugar around till it finally browned with 2 tbsp butter and a tbsp of cream. I later read that stirring it isn’t actually important, just watch it to make sure it doesn’t burn. We poured the beautiful caramel into the bottom of 6 ramekins, waited for the caramel to cool and then poured the custard in.  After 30 minutes in a water bath at 325 degrees Fahrenheit our little custards were caramel heaven. I’ve never had something so simple and yet so elegant from a home oven.  We flipped them upside down and the caramel sauce ran down the custard. The pictures really don’t do it justice.  Many thanks to Willie, Iris, and our hostess of the evening Franny.

My last trip to Oberlin, Ohio was via Greyhound in mid October.  The drive from Cleveland to New York is approximately 8 hours if driven at 70 mph. Riding Greyhound buses in the Midwest steals all the wind (and hope) from my Midwest Loving sails.  It’s always another Erin Cometbus adventure, only I don’t have the wit to weave the terrible mishaps into a best selling zine.  The ride took 14 hours with a 4 hour stop for a replacement bus because the “windshield wiper broke” on our bus (well after the rain had stopped) and cost $69.70.  I’m not including the bizarre story of how I found myself entwined with the passenger next to me when I woke up in Cleveland.

My thoughts on Greyhound are that they do not care about me, when I get to my destination, or if I get to my destination.  Of course, the Chinatown bus staff did not care about me but it cost $70 (up from $45 in 2007) and they cared that I got to my destination as fast as possible.  Despite a severe snow storm for 2 hours followed by steady rain and several stops to deliver passengers to 9 different locations along the route it only took 9 and half hours.  Freaking amazing!

We also noticed there are several more Chinatown bus lines running to more Midwestern locations.

I should also mention that we were the only gringos aboard.  While waiting a man asked me if I knew about the shuttle to Cleveland because as he said some people find it surprising. I bubbled up about how much fun I had last time on the shuttle, we were packed like sardines.  It turns out that was our driver just checking to make sure we were prepared for being dropped off at a Youngstown, Ohio gas station at 1:30 in the morning and scrambling into an unmarked white van to end up at a deserted Chinese strip mall at 2:30 am.  His concern that our fear of the unknown might slow down his ability to deliver us to Cleveland in a timely way is the sort of customer service that makes Chinatown buses fast.

Molly Jean on Traveling Efficiently:
I think a lot of people think living nomadically is very stressful because of all the packing, re-packing and the logistics of trying to find a place to crash each night. It certainly is stressful, but so is life. Traveling involves most of the same chores as keeping a clean house, like making the bed, only it adds the dimension of unknown, “where is the bed I am going make?”

Total time to pack: 2 hours. We each have a hiking backpack filled with about 80 lbs of winter cloths, summer cloths, rain gear, yoga mat, art supplies, laptops, kefir grains, 12′ diameter hot air balloon and film equipment. We’ve been traveling with this arrangement since June.

Total cleaning time: It took me probably 3 hours on and off to clean the bedroom and bathroom where we’d been staying in Brooklyn at a friend’s place (note: Mathew cleaned up the last three times we moved).

Selling time: 1 hour. I posted my bike on craigslist and broke even on what I paid for it on craigslist back in September.  Blessed is the internet. Mat got rid of his bike in a scant 3 minutes our last night thanks to a bike thief in Williamsburg.

Time spent on Travel Logistics:  2-4 hours total.

Spread the word, slow cooking is back and a really quick way to make amazing meals.

Imagine the scene: It’s 10:30pm on a Wednesday night, my hot boyfriend and I just got home and we’re hungry as cus and want to get fed and go up to bed A.S.A.P.  We’ve got a lentil soup in the fridge from our Monday night cook out and some radishes but we really don’t want to eat lentils for lunch the next day.

The solution to this hairy predicament: barbecue brisket while you sleep! (for tomorrow’s lunch and dinner)

That’s right, Mathew heated up the lentils, made some rice, pickled the radishes and set the table while I threw together some barbecued brisket.  We finished our work at the exact same time and sat down to a good meal.  Total Prep Time: 20 minutes.

Ingredients:

beef brisket (I used 1.5 lbs, but you can do what you wanna do)

1 onion

4 potatoes (I used sweet potatoes and baby red potatoes, any root vegetables would do, or skip the veggies, but you’ve got to use and onion for flavor)

a cup or two of beef broth

paprika

barbecue sauce (soy sauce, brown sugar, ketchup, stewed tomatoes, apple cider vinegar, paprika,  worcestershire sauce)

Preheat oven to 180 degrees F

Step #1 I should of sauteed the onions to give them some of that delicious carmelized flavor, but there just wasn’t time.  Instead I chopped them and threw them in a sturdy pot with a good lid.

Step #2 I dried the brisket with a paper towel and sprinkled it with salt and paprika.

Step #3 I lightly seared the brisket on both sides in a frying pan on high heat.  The brisket cooks in the oven at 180 degrees F for eight or more hours, so there’s no reason to over do it with the searing.  Sear it just enough to get a good brown color. Put the brisket on top of the onions in the cooking pot.

Step #4 Deglaze the pan.  Turn down the heat on the frying pan and pour in a half cup or more of apple cider vinegar or apple juice or in my case just plain old vinegar (I forgot to buy any when we moved in and we’re moving out in two weeks so it seems pointless to buy a whole bottle of apple cider vinegar). Pour the delicious deglazing liquid in to the cooking pot over the brisket and onion.

Step #5 Pour a cup or two of barbecue sauce (or some other delicious seasoning mix that you concoct) over the brisket.

Step #6 The brisket should be completely submerged in liquid while it cooks so that the meat doesn’t dry out.  Pour beef broth over the brisket until it’s completely submerged in delicious liquids.

Step #7 If you still have room in your pot chop up some potatoes or other vegetables into  chunks (2″ by 2″).  I cut my sweet potatoes really big ( 4″ by 3″) and they weren’t completely cooked. Don’t be a fool like me, chop ‘em small.

Step #8 Put the lid on your pot of soon to be brisket, say a prayer and pop it in the oven at 180 degrees F.

Step #9 Go to bed with your favorite honey, get a good night sleep, wake up and check the oven to find a tender brisket waiting for you.  I cooked my brisket at this temperature for 9 and half hours and it was perfectly tender and delicious.

After cooking I like to slice my brisket into paper thin slices and serve it like a soup with all the delicious sweet spicy broth and potatoes.

Mathew and I unleashed a personal opaque projection device at the Perfect Wave Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn last weekend for the show Devil’s Trumpet.

It’s almost impossible to photograph the beauty of this little device.  It’s basically an opaque projector mounted 4 feet above a semi transparent paper screen resting a foot above the viewer. The projector works so simply that it often boggles viewers like myself who are more accustomed to the mystery of digital or film projection. The projector was built for Fernando Renes‘ mutoscope which will be shown in Spain, Paris and Miami Basel next year.

Inside the projection box there are too bright lights that shine on the object to be projected (in this case Mathew and I dangled feathers, prisms, and shells), the light bouncing off the object is bounced off two perfect metallic hemi-spheres and directed down to the paper screen using a small lens.  One viewer proclaimed “Wait . . . the light just takes the image from here . . . to their with out any technology?” I would say that the geometry that guided the placement of the lens and metallic hemispheres in this neat little wooden box is technology. I think Euclid would be proud of us.

Our projection device was whipped up Saturday afternoon for the specific purpose of  providing a personal light show to people listening to binaural beats.  The binaural beats were created by our friends Phil, Tyler and AJ via earmuffs, funnels, tubing and a lot of didgeridoos.