Living Large In Our Little House

Half a Baking Sheet, Teeny Tiny Tongs and a Measuring Shot Glass

When we moved to Our Little House, we had all kinds of kitchen gad­gets and tools. Some of them we never took out of boxes when we received them as wed­ding presents.

The truth is, unless you’re a gourmet cook – which I am not – like most things in our homes, we can get by with a few necessities.

I had already learned this when Our Little House was set up as a weekend/vacation lake home. I had very few things, but every­thing I needed to cook a good meal while we were here.

Since mov­ing, I’ve found there are some gad­gets and tools that are great for small spaces and for cook­ing for one or two people.

Here’s my list of 7 must-haves for the small kitchen:

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Our roma tomato plant was as big as this cherry tomato plant

Mother’s Day did not start out well for me.

When I got up, Dale said, “Something got one of the tomato plants last night.”

I went out to the party deck and sure enough, two of the three roma tomato stalks had been sheared off almost at the base.

When I wrote about toma­toes and rats a cou­ple of weeks ago, I was writ­ing a gen­eral update on what was hap­pen­ing on the deck, I didn’t nec­es­sar­ily think the rat would eat at the tomato plants, but now I’m not so sure.

We’ve been won­der­ing what has been attract­ing rats up on our deck since we don’t keep dog food or any­thing else out there.

One night last week, I took Molly and Dakota out for their before bed potty excur­sion and Molly imme­di­ately started chas­ing a rat on the deck.

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One of the pieces I didn't want to part with

Stuff.

We buy it, we find room for it in our homes, we clean it, pack it, move it, store it and sell it.

For most of us, stuff becomes an obses­sion until we no longer own it, but it owns us.

When we moved to Our Little House from a 1,100 square foot house packed with stuff, we real­ized just how lit­tle room we needed once we got down to it.

We were acci­den­tal in the Small House Movement, find­ing out through liv­ing it how free­ing liv­ing with­out our stuff could be.

The prob­lem became what to get rid of, as I not only had our stuff we had accu­mu­lated through 21 years of mar­riage, but we had my mother’s stuff, some of it sen­ti­men­tally priceless.

Here’s the process by which we elim­i­nated (and con­tinue to elim­i­nate) stuff from our lives:

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The view out­side of Gulf Shore Plantation Condominiums in Gulf Shores, AL

If you’ve read Living Large for any length of time, you know we’ve done a lot to adjust our lifestyle to help the envi­ron­ment and with food, our own health. We eat at home much more often than we did in the city and when I can get it, I’ve been buy­ing organic meat, pro­duce, eggs and milk for years now.

Some weeks before I left for a trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama last week, a story came out from Al Jazeera about defor­mi­ties being found in some Gulf of Mexico seafood. Although unknown, the impli­ca­tion being that it is caused by the 2010 oil spill. Of course, the story was alarming.

I did some research into the issue and found a lot of infor­ma­tion, none of it able to dis­prove the con­tention by sci­en­tists the gov­ern­ment has hired that the seafood is safe. The con­tention is between some envi­ron­men­tal­ists and sci­en­tists say­ing the Gulf Coast, like Alaska after the Exxon Valdez spill, will need years of study to deter­mine the full impact.

The FDA allows things into our food that we would find repul­sive. Pink slime, for exam­ple, that ground up mix­ture of beef trim­mings and ammo­nia in some ground meat prod­ucts. The FDA also allows for a cer­tain amount of insect parts in any processed food.

What they don't allow are sick ani­mals of any kind and espe­cially not seafood.

Once one wades through the hype of the arti­cle by Al Jazeera, while rais­ing ques­tions about the full envi­ron­men­tal impact of the spill, it doesn’t prove a thing but mak­ing the seafood unap­pe­tiz­ing. What the arti­cle fails to men­tion is that any seafood found with ill­ness today, just as it was prior to 2010, can­not enter our food sys­tem and even the arti­cle admits that the fish and shell­fish found with prob­lems make up a very small por­tion of the seafood caught.

It’s also true that the seafood com­ing from the Gulf is the most tested in the system.

I looked back at an arti­cle I did sev­eral years ago on how seafood is ulti­mately affected by any­thing any­one puts into the water, from pes­ti­cides in the Heartland that run down the Mississippi to the trash taken out to sea and dumped.

There are chem­i­cals in all of our food, from fac­tory farmed meats to the processed food we eat at restau­rants. Our own bod­ies con­tain a huge amount of chem­i­cals already that is nat­u­rally fil­tered. There’s no escap­ing it unless we do not eat anything.

So, here’s how I approached seafood on my trip: I ate lots of it.

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