RIP Frankencar

My car was towed away to the great junkyard in the sky last night. Herr Austin Frankencar (Austin for short) had character. I should have known that it was a harbinger of doom when I named the car after the six million dollar man. As much as the car was nothing but trouble for its short 18 month time with me, I'm still kind of sorry to see it go.

Austin is a 2000 VW Jetta TDI. I purposely bought a diesel car because I wanted to use biodiesel. My main reason was because I want to reduce dependence on foreign oil, but the mad science aspect of the chemistry of home-produced biodiesel appealed to me, too. (I never did get around to making my own, though.) The environmental benefits of reduced emissions were icing on the cake.

The car spent three weeks in the shop right off the bat and then was in and out of the shop for the first few months of ownership. The previous owner had severely mismaintained the car (including jamming spark plugs in the radiator hoses and reinstalling the engine backward). I had to replace the transmission right after I bought it. I had a few months of good use and then it was back to in and out of the shop. My mechanic, only half jokingly, offered to blow the car up for me. Back in February, the front bumper fell off and has been held on by duct tape ever since. I decided I didn't want to pay to fix it.

Book Review - Make the Bread, Buy the Butter

I recently read the book Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese. It's half cookbook, half memoir. Reese chronicles her efforts to make tons of food items from scratch after losing her job. She documented the cost of the homemade version, the cost of the store bought version, and how difficult or annoying it was to make the item herself. She chronicled both her successes and her failures.

I found the book to be both funny and useful. I especially liked her empirical approach to the issue. Since I'm saving up to buy a house, I don't want to waste money on things that are more trouble than they're worth. Plus, I'm not someone who finds great joy in cooking. I like to take on a big project now and then, and there are some things I find fun to do, but mostly I see cooking as a chore - something that I do simply because it needs to be done. I do, however, have a bit of a mad scientist streak, and this book appealed to that part of me.

Reese enjoys cooking way more than I do, so her calculation falls a little more to the "make" side of the equation than mine does. However, I was surprised by some of the things she said fell in the "buy" category. Burritos and jam both fell under "buy" for her. While I love a good taqueria burrito, they're not that hard to make at home. And homemade jam is far superior to anything at the store and costs about the same.

Several times throughout the book, I found myself surprised that anyone would think to make certain items homemade. There's a recipe for pop tarts, for example. I was pleasantly surprised to see how easy it is to make ricotta cheese. I'm going to have to give it a try sometime. She has a marshmallow recipe that I want to try as soon as I can figure out what to use in place of the gelatin to vegetarianize it. (I'm thinking either pectin or agar-agar.)

I skipped most of the meat chapters, but I did start reading the one on chickens with the hope that I could find some egg recipes. But halfway through a rather graphic description of killing a rooster, I decided to skip the rest of that chapter, too.

In all, I recommend the book. There's something for the urban homesteader, the person who loves to cook, and the mad scientist.