Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (10 page)

Store the
harissa
in a jar. Smooth the surface down and cover the surface with a layer of olive oil to help keep it fresh. Restore this layer after each use. It will keep for a few weeks.

Makes about 1½ cups

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Old-Fashioned Vinegar-Based Drinks

If you’re trying to avoid high-fructose corn syrup, you’ll know how hard it is to find a sweet beverage in the store that doesn’t contain it. Those you can find tend to be pricy. Homemade drinks make it easy to reduce your sugar consumption. They return sweet drinks from the realm of the mundane to their rightful place as special treat. You might drink a whole can of soda without even noticing, just because it’s in your hand, but you’ll drink a small glass of club soda and flavored syrup with more conscious pleasure.

Oxymel,
sekanjabin,
and switchel are three sweet vinegar-based drinks of ancient lineage. We don’t consume nearly as much vinegar as our ancestors did—particularly if our ancestors came from northern climes where citrus does not grow. Once upon a time, only rich folk could afford citrus, which meant that for most people vinegar was one of the only means of making food taste tangy and bright.

Vinegar also was widely used in pickling and often mixed with water to purify it. It makes sense that people would make sweet beverages with it as well. Keep in mind that they were using unpasteurized vinegar, such as you might buy in the health food store or make yourself (see Project 52). Raw vinegar not only has richer, more subtle flavors than distilled vinegar, but it is also a healthful, fermented food.

If your palate leans toward the adventurous, make up a few of the following recipes and keep them on hand for visitors or sudden soda cravings. They might taste odd at first, but they are genuinely addicting.

Oxymel

PREPARATION:
5 min

Oxymel
means “acid-honey.” It’s a blend of honey and vinegar. The ancient Greeks and Romans used this widely as a beverage and as a vehicle for medicine—they’d infuse the oxymel with different herbal concoctions. Its use carried forward well into medieval Europe and beyond. As a simple drink, it has long been considered a refreshing and restorative beverage.

YOU’LL NEED

• ½ cup honey
  
• ½ cup mild, tasty vinegar, like apple cider, white wine, or fruit vinegar
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

The classic proportions are 1 part honey to 1 part vinegar, but you can adjust this to taste. In a saucepan, warm the honey gently, then stir in the vinegar (they won’t mix cold). Pour the syrup into a clean bottle. It will keep indefinitely.

A spoonful of straight oxymel is good for a sore throat. Stir a couple of spoonfuls into hot water or tea for a soothing, expectorant drink. Or stir it into cold water to make a refreshing, lemonade-like beverage.

Makes 1 cup

Sekanjabin

PREPARATION:
15 min

This traditional Iranian vinegar beverage was once used as medicine—just like oxymel—but it is still drunk for pleasure to this day. You can find premade
sekanjabin
syrup for sale in Middle Eastern markets.
Sekanjabin
is an Arabic transcription of a Farsi term,
sirka-anjubin,
which means “honeyed vinegar.” Despite this, all the recipes we’ve found are made with sugar, though we’re sure it could also be made with honey. In general,
sekanjabin
is a type of beverage more than a specific recipe, so be inventive and alter it as you like. Here’s a basic
sekanjabin.

YOU’LL NEED

• 4 cups sugar
  
• 2 cups water
  
• 1 cup apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar (Fruit vinegar would be good, too.)
  
• 1 cup fresh mint leaves
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan and heat gently for about 5 minutes, until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to a simmer, add the vinegar, and continue to simmer, until the mixture thickens a little. Test it by raising your spoon and watching how fast the liquid runs off it. When it slows, the syrup is ready. Add the mint and infuse for 5 minutes. Keep the heat low so your syrup doesn’t caramelize. After 5 minutes, take it off the heat and let it cool.

Strain off the mint leaves and pour the syrup into a very clean bottle. Like the oxymel, this keeps indefinitely.

Mix with sparkling or still water at the ratio of 1 part syrup to about 4 to 8 parts water, depending on how strong you like it. On special occasions, serve
sekanjabin
with a little shaved cucumber on top.

DOCTORING YOUR
SEKANJABIN:
Try adding about ½ cup fresh lemon juice when you add the vinegar. Or, add 1 to 3 ounces of grated ginger and/or the peel of a lemon when you add the mint and let it infuse for about 20 minutes. Or, add crushed fresh fruit to the blend and let sit overnight, then strain off the fruit.

Switchel

PREPARATION: 20 min

Switchel, or haymaker’s punch, is
sekanjabin
by way of the prairie. This sweet water was served during the summer to hot and tired field workers as the prairie equivalent of a sports drink. Laura Ingalls Wilder mentions it in
The Long Winter:

Ma had sent them ginger-water. She had sweetened the cool well-water with sugar, flavored it with vinegar, and put in plenty of ginger to warm their stomachs so they could drink til they were not thirsty. Ginger-water would not make them sick, as plain cold water would when they were so hot.

Like
sekanjabin,
this drink is more like a concept than a specific recipe. Every farmwife made her own version. Play with the types of sugar and the amount of vinegar until you come up with something you like.

YOU’LL NEED

• 1 cup apple cider vinegar
  
• 1 cup molasses (If you don’t like molasses, substitute white sugar, brown sugar, or honey, or do a half-and-half blend. Also, you can up the quantity of sugar to tone down the vinegar bite.)
  
• 1 ounce grated or sliced ginger, to taste, or 1 teaspoon ground ginger
  

PUTTING IT TOGETHER

In a saucepan, heat the vinegar and molasses or sugar until they’re well blended. Add the fresh ginger and simmer a couple of minutes more to warm it, then take the pan off the heat and let the ginger infuse for about 15 minutes. Skip this step if you’re using powdered ginger—just stir it in and you’re done.

Strain off the ginger. The flavors mellow the longer they are left to sit, so making the syrup the day before you need it is a good thing, but not imperative. It will keep well.

When you’re ready to serve, add all of the syrup to about 1 quart of cold water and stir well, or portion it out glass by glass.

If you want to be authentic, add about ¼ to ½ cup ground oatmeal to the diluted switchel before serving. Most of the oatmeal will settle to the bottom of the pitcher, and this is fine. The idea is that the oats add body and smoothness to the switchel. Make ground oatmeal by chopping rolled oats in a blender.

Cleaning, Washing, and Mending

Doing the laundry and cleaning the house are weekly rituals of renewal. Preparing your own cleaning products and laundry soap makes the ritual more personal and intellectually engaging. It’s hard to imagine housecleaning as empowering, but the power is there when you decide which substances you and your family breathe, touch, and ingest on a daily basis. Commercial cleaning products and laundry detergents are some of the most toxic substances in the home. Take a look at the warnings on the back of their packaging. Ask yourself if you really want to wipe your counters, mop your floors, and coat your clothing with such aggressive chemicals. Rather than worry about potential chemical exposure, it’s easier to disengage and make your own cleaning products. Once you switch to homemade, you’ll walk down the cleaning aisle of the supermarket and marvel at all the brightly colored, highly specialized bottles of cleaners that you don’t need and don’t miss.

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Making Your Own Cleaning Products

Recipes for cleaning products are everywhere, and you should certainly experiment to find mixes that work well for you. Our philosophy is “Simple is better,” so most of our recipes and recommendations are based on a single ingredient used correctly, and we use the same ingredients for many different purposes.

As you convert to this way of cleaning, the space beneath your sink will become blissfully uncluttered. All you need are a couple of spray bottles, some rags, and a few key ingredients. It feels good to get rid of all those bottles of who-knows-what chemicals and lurking toxins. As you transition to nontoxic cleaning, you can use up what is already in your cupboards or take your half-empty bottles to a hazardous waste drop site. This is a safer way to dispose of chemicals than sending them to the landfill.

Get ready to go sleek and minimal. The following is all you need to clean your entire house and do the laundry:

FOR BASIC CLEANING:

• 1 gallon distilled white vinegar
  
• 1 large box or bag baking soda (sodium bicarbonate)
  
• 1 quart liquid castile soap, like Dr. Bronner’s
  

FOR ADVANCED CLEANING AND LAUNDRY:

• 1 box laundry borax (sodium borate, also called sodium tetraborate)
  
• 1 box washing soda (sodium carbonate)
  

We used to look askance at borax and washing soda, believing them to be unnecessarily harsh for day-to-day cleaning. Recently, we’ve started using them in homemade laundry powder and experimenting with them in housecleaning. While they need to be used with more caution than baking soda, soap, and vinegar and kept out of reach of children and pets—they’ve earned their place in our home as less-toxic cleaning alternatives for really tough jobs.

A few other items get called into play now and then, like lemons, cornstarch, and olive oil, but they’re things you’re likely to have in the kitchen. You’ll also want to gather up some rags and spray bottles. We’re big on cleaning with rags, which we make out of old kitchen towels and T-shirts. They’re sturdier than paper towels and more hygienic than sponges. Use a fresh rag for every job, gather them up into a “rag load,” and launder in hot water.

Any of the recipes that follow can be scented with essential oils to make cleaning more fun, but that step is entirely optional.

ALMOST UNIVERSAL SPRAY

Combine 1 part vinegar with 1 part water in a spray bottle.

This 50/50 blend of vinegar and water is the homemade mix you’ll reach for most often. Use it to wipe down counters, tile, tables, appliances, bathroom sinks, toilet seats, and mirrors and windows. It requires no rinsing. However, it doesn’t work well on heavy grease—it’s best for shining and gentle cleaning, disinfecting, and deodorizing. Yes, deodorizing! The smell of vinegar vanishes when it dries, taking other odors with it. The scent of vinegar might seem strange at first, but soon you’ll associate it with cleanliness and realize it’s a more wholesome scent than chemical fumes and artificial perfumes. Vinegar disinfects because it is a mild acid. Up the disinfectant strength by adding a few drops of tea tree oil to the spray bottle and shaking well before each use.

Here’s a tip for windows and mirrors: The secret to a streak-free shine is polishing until dry with an old, lint-free T-shirt or even newspaper. You don’t need much vinegar to clean windows—your bottle of 50/50 blend will be convenient for quick touch-ups, but if you’re doing a lot of windows, use about ¼ to ½ cup vinegar in a bucket of hot water. Wipe with a wet rag and polish dry. If you get bad streaking, you’re probably seeing remnants of wax leftover from commercial window cleaner. A squirt of dish soap in the vinegar mix will take care of that.

WARNING

Don’t use vinegar spray on marble or granite countertops. It might damage the stone.

SPRAY FOR GREASY SURFACES

Pour 1 to 2 tablespoons of liquid castile soap in a quart spray bottle and top off with water.

It’s a dilute mix because it doesn’t take much soap to do a lot of cleaning. Use soapy water on sticky refrigerator doors, grimy appliances, and stovetops. While this could be used as a general-purpose cleaner, like the vinegar spray above, we’ve found that surfaces wiped with the vinegar spray stay cleaner longer. Our theory about this is that traces of soap left behind attract dirt. So to work less, use soap only when it’s really needed, and use the vinegar spray the rest of the time.

Want to use your own homemade bar soap in your spray? You can improvise a watery liquid soap which is good for cleaning by pouring 1½ cups of boiling water over ½ cup of grated Coconut Laundry Soap (Project 42) and stirring until it dissolves. If you experiment with other types of bar soap, be aware that bar soaps dissolve in unpredictable ways, depending on their composition. A simple alternative is to let the soap dissolve gradually. Place a few pieces of soap, roughly 1 or 2 tablespoons, in the bottom of a spray bottle full of water. It won’t be particularly pretty, but the soap will dissolve over time and create soapy water strong enough for this purpose.

If you want to boost the cleaning power of this soap spray for extratough jobs, add a tablespoon of borax.

SUPER-NATURAL DISINFECTANT

Many common herbs are full of disinfectant powers and pleasant scents. Instead of reaching for disinfectant sprays, use a strong infusion of herbs in water to wipe down cooking surfaces, the inside of the refrigerator, cutting boards, doorknobs, and the like.

Pour 1 cup boiling water over 1 heaping tablespoon of dry herbs or over a handful of fresh herbs. Let it sit for 20 minutes, strain off the herbs, and transfer the liquid to a spray bottle. Make only 1 cup at a time, because it will not keep long.

The best-known disinfectant herbs are lavender, rosemary, thyme, and sage. Use any one of them or a few in combination. Be careful using them on porous, white surfaces, though, as they might stain. When cleaning white surfaces, use straight white distilled vinegar.

VINEGAR OF THE FOUR THIEVES

Instead of using boiling water, you can steep herbs in white vinegar to take advantage of the disinfectant power of both. There’s an old wives’ tale that a group of thieves survived the Black Death by cleaning themselves with (or in some versions, drinking) herbal vinegar. This recipe exists in many permutations. Follow the directions below, or switch up the ingredients any way you like:

Combine equal parts of lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage, and peppermint-fresh or dried. Put them in a jar and cover with distilled white vinegar (unheated). Steep the herbs for 4 to 6 weeks, strain off the herbs, and store in a spray bottle.

SCOURING POWDERS

Baking soda scours without scratching. It should be your first choice of abrasives. Keep it in a jar with holes punched in the lid or, if you want to get fancy, in a decorative sugar shaker. Baking soda dissolves in water, so don’t try to use it in standing water. It works best when applied to a damp surface or sprinkled on a damp rag or sponge.

Baking soda should take care of 90 percent of your scrubbing needs, but if you need more oomph, pull out the borax. Borax is coarse, but it will not harm fiberglass or porcelain. If faced with a situation that will not respond to baking soda or borax, like a casserole dish caked with burnt-on grease, try soaking and scrubbing with washing soda, but be sure to wear kitchen gloves when you do it. Don’t use washing soda on aluminum pans—it will discolor them. It will also scratch fiberglass surfaces.

Here’s some special help for the kitchen sink: If stains remain after cleaning with baking soda or borax, dry the sink with a towel, then scrub it with a lemon. You don’t need to waste a good lemon on this—set aside lemon rinds when you’re cooking. Squish the lemon pieces all over the base and sides of the sink, pressing hard to release every bit of juice and oil. Then walk away and don’t use your sink for at least a half hour. Leave it as long as you can, even overnight. When you come back and rinse, your sink will be sparkling.

SOFT SCRUB

Baking soda and liquid castile soap are a great team. Blend the baking soda with a small amount of the liquid castile to make a paste with the consistency of frosting, and use this to attack tough jobs. Try it on everything from bathtub rings to stained coffee cups.

FLOOR CLEANERS

One-half cup white vinegar mixed in a bucket of hot water will clean ordinary dirt from the kitchen or bathroom floor and requires no rinsing. Vinegar is safe to use on tile, vinyl flooring, and linoleum. A strong solution of vinegar might damage stone, so if you have stone floors, check with the product manufacturer. Damp mopping with water alone is usually sufficient to clean wood floors, but you can add a splash of vinegar to the water if they are particularly dirty.

When a kitchen floor is nearly black with grease and grime, special care is needed. Plain old soap and water—about 1/8 cup liquid castile soap in a bucket of hot water—will lift grease more effectively than vinegar and water. Add ¼ cup borax to make it work even better. Scrub tough spots with baking soda or the soft scrub mentioned above. Washing soda cleans grease like nobody’s business, but it’s so strong it might dull no-wax floors, so it’s not recommended for those. For tile floors, use ½ cup washing soda per bucket of water. Follow up with a plain-water mopping to rinse. (To give you an idea of the strength of washing soda, back in the days when floors were waxed, it was used as a wax stripper. If it can strip wax, it’s strong enough to strip all the oils from your skin, leaving your hands mummified, so wear kitchen gloves when using it.)

TOILET BOWL CLEANERS

Most of the time, white vinegar is all you need to clean your whole toilet. Use the 50/50 vinegar spray to wipe down the tank, seat, and lid. To clean the bowl, pour a bucket of water in the bowl to force the water level to drop, then pour a generous amount of vinegar all around the edges of the bowl, letting it collect at the bottom. Scrub with a toilet brush. If the area under the waterline is discolored and scrubbing doesn’t take off the stain, add more vinegar and let it sit for an hour or so. When you come back, the stain should come off easily. Orange rust stains under the rim can also be removed with vinegar: Soak paper towels or rags with vinegar and tuck them around the rim. Let them sit for an hour or so, then remove them and scrub the area clean.

If the bowl is so dirty that it needs more abrasive power, scrub with baking soda or borax. Baking soda will fizz when mixed with vinegar—this is no cause for alarm. However, baking soda neutralizes the acid in vinegar, making vinegar a less effective cleaner, so don’t add baking soda until you’ve done all the cleaning you can with vinegar alone.

DUSTING AIDS

All you need for dusting is a rag and a spray bottle of water. Scent the water with essential oils, if you want. Mist the rag so it will grab and hold dust; use the damp rag on all surfaces. Fold the rag over and over, remisting as you do, so that you are always wiping with a clean portion. Use as many rags as you need. Old, lint-free T-shirts or kitchen towels are fine for this, but the best dusting cloths are made of wool, because wool attracts dust. Cut rags from wool fabrics or, if you knit, use up leftover wool by knitting dusting squares.

WOOD CLEANERS

In most cases, you can dust wood with a damp rag, as above. If the wood is actually dirty, clean it with a mix of 5 parts vinegar or lemon juice to 1 part olive oil. You only need to make a few spoonfuls of this “salad dressing” at a time because it goes a long way. Combine the ingredients in a bottle and shake well. Rub on with a soft cloth to clean, then buff to a shine with a fresh cloth.

FURNITURE POLISH

Making furniture polish is like making a basic salve. Mix 4 parts linseed oil with 1 part beeswax. See Project 36 for instructions on how to cook it up. Add lemon essential oil for that classic furniture polish scent. Apply the paste with a soft cloth, rub it in thoroughly, then buff with a fresh cloth. Olive oil can be used in the place of linseed oil, but linseed oil dries faster, giving a cleaner finish.

STOVE AND OVEN CLEANERS

The stove is probably the most difficult item to clean in the house. The cooktop, range hood, oven, and broiler all collect grease, and most of that grease is baked on. A mildly dirty stove can be washed with soapy water and scrubbed with baking soda, but if the state of your stovetop and oven make you despair, it’s time for a deep cleaning with washing soda.

Put on your kitchen gloves and some old clothes. Wipe down the outer surface of the stove and the range hood with a mix of ½ cup washing soda in hot water. If the wells beneath the burners are filled with baked-on gunk, let them soak in this liquid, or make a paste of washing soda and water, apply to the wells, and let them sit. Meanwhile, wipe down a gas stove’s cooking rings. If they’re crusty, soak them in the same solution or, in extreme cases, put them in a big pot of washing soda water and bring to a low simmer. That should pry off even the worst baked-on grease. Scrub the inside of the oven with washing soda, or apply a paste and let that sit, if necessary. When cleaning a gas stove, don’t apply a paste to the gas burners themselves, as this can gum them up. When cleaning an electric stove, keep the paste off all heating elements. Rinse all surfaces with water when you’re done.

Never use washing soda on aluminum surfaces or aluminum cookware.

SOAP SCUM AND BATHTUB RING CLEANSERS