tips & tricks – shoutforjoy.us

My Home Apothecary

Friday, I spent most of the day making capsules at our kitchen table. I have two capsule machines: size 0 [~500mg] and size 00 [~600mg]. With either of these I can make 24 capsules at a time. It is a slow process, but not difficult. It has allowed us to reduce our use of pharmaceuticals and improve our health dramatically. Back in September 2013, I reported about talking to my doctors about ginger and turmeric. I make those capsules. Since I make them, I can add some black pepper into the turmeric capsules, which is an added bonus, not yet available off the rack at drug stores. Turmeric is much better activated when combined with black pepper. This way, I don’t have to remember to add black pepper to every meal when I am taking turmeric.

I have managed to stay off Lipitor due to turmeric. With the turmeric and ginger, I have not had to have a Synvisc or cortisone injection in either of my knees for three years now. They were at the point of talking about replacement. They seldom bother me anymore. The site where the infection had eaten into my spine is totally clean and restored, as if nothing had happened there, according to the last MRI. This is what powerful, natural anti-inflammatories can do for you.

I also made 600mg cinnamon capsules and 500mg green tea capsules, Friday. These serve similar purposes. They both help regulate / reduce blood sugar and are powerful antioxidants to prevent cancer and other degenerative diseases. These take some careful choosing and preparation, however.

There are basically two kinds of cinnamon. The most commonly available is Cassia Cinnamon. It is produced mainly in China, Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. The Chinese bark is darker brown. It does not curl up tightly in the drying process, and, most of the time, isn’t smooth. It takes some effort to break up the pieces. It is what is sold for baking spice as it is much less expensive than Ceylon Cinnamon, also known as “True” Cinnamon. Cassia Cinnamon has a sharper or hotter flavor than Ceylon Cinnamon. That may taste great on your rice or snickerdoodles, but it is not what we want. You don’t want to ingest large quantities of Cassia Cinnamon, because it contains large amounts of coumarin which can damage the liver.

The bark of Ceylon Cinnamon comes tightly rolled and smooth, with an orangey color. It has a relatively sweet flavor. It was originally produced in Ceylon, modern Sri Lanka. Now it is also produced in Mexico and India, as well. It is more favored in South American cuisine than Cassia Cinnamon. It has more health benefits than the Cassia, without the coumarin danger. Another word about cinnamon; if you have Type AB blood, you are most likely allergic to it. Cinnamon has many health benefits. I t is an antioxidant. It lowers so-called bad cholesterol and reduces the uptake of glucose in the blood when ingested 1/2 hour before meals by those with Type 2 Diabetes, among other things.

One would think it would be a simple matter of going to a food store and buying a box or tin of loose, green tea. Read the fine print! On my last trip to Assi Market, it took me over 20 minutes in the tea aisle before I found a box of simple green tea, nothing added, vacuum packed. It was from China by way of an Irish importer! Green tea has a range of benefits. It lowers cholesterol and blood pressure. It can lower blood sugar and improve the metabolism to digest and burn fat. This is especially important for those on a low carb diet. There is evidence that it is good for the brain to prevent Alzheimer’s disease. It can help prevent stroke and congestive heart failure. No wonder there are so many Chinese!

From time to time, I also make coriander, to help the kidneys; and garlic, to fight a cold or infection. I’m allergic to at least six classes of antibiotics, so I have to do my own homework and do my best to stay healthy. Using herbs and minerals, I have managed to avoid knee surgery, and those expensive injections for years, and reduce the number of prescription medications I regularly use from six to two, while improving my cholesterol, and more importantly, my inflammatory numbers. I now have put my Type 2 Diabetes into remission using nutrition. When they discharged me from the hospital in 2011, I had diabetes from the kidney failure and steroids they had put me on to fight the Stevens Johnsons Syndrome. So I think the time and effort are worth it.

I have set up two men my age down on the street with capsule making machines. One went to a walk-in clinic with bad arthritis in his knees. He was handed a prescription for a medication that would cost almost $400/month. He came to me. He said, “What are these people thinking? I am coming to a free, walk-in, clinic. How do they suppose I am going to afford this much for their drugs?” He paid me $15 for a capsule machine and a starter supply of ginger and turmeric from our good, bulk supplier in Amish country. This set up cost The King’s Jubilee about $30. He wanted to pay. I gave him a low ball number. He will stick to it and do it, if it cost him something. Although, he is a serious person. I started supplying another man, who used to be homeless, who then volunteered with us, with ginger and turmeric and green tea capsules. This started after he disappeared for a couple of weeks. He reappeared and told me the reason for his absence was he ate a chocolate bar and it put him in the hospital. I got tired of making his capsules, so I gave him a machine and bulk spices. The next week he said, “That’s really hard work! You must really love me!” His daughter was able to stop her insulin after she started faithfully using the green tea and turmeric. He passed on the love!

Coffee, Tea, Cardamom

I guess this is more like a couple of simple lifehacks than a recipe. We were at our daughter’s place visiting her and the granddaughters. I wanted to make Red Bush Tea for them as a taste of Botswana. It is called Rooibos in Afrikaans. We learned about it from reading The #1 Ladies Detective Agency books, and ordered it from Adagio tea company. Lydia didn’t have a little strainer to catch the loose tea while pouring. So, I decided to make it in her French press. It worked wonderfully! I don’t know if this is a common use for a French press, but I had never heard of it or thought of it before. Now I use my French press to make tea whenever I want more than one cup. It is so much easier and neater than using either a tea egg or a strainer.

I really do not want to use sugar in my coffee. I will not use chemical sweeteners. Some of the coffee we get from the food bank is bitter. I had seen coffee and tea with cardamom in stores. So we bought a small container of ground cardamom from Centerville Bulk Foods for about two dollars. I put a generous, three finger pinch in the three cup French press and stir it in with the coffee. It tones down the bitterness, without weakening the coffee at all. It does not have a strong flavor. It just adds an earthy note. It is a healthy way to avoid sugar. Cardamom is the third most costly spice by weight after vanilla and saffron. However, a little goes a long way. It is also reputed to have many health benefits.

40 Year Skillet Maintenance

When Bethann and I got married in 1975, we received Corning Ware Centura dishes with matching cookware that was supposed to be unbreakable, oven to freezer to microwave, last forever. We had four daughters, worked full time, rehabbed a couple of houses we were living in; exercised radical and exuberant hospitality and disproved that theory, or whatever it was. When those unbreakable pans hit the floor and broke, they shattered with panache! (Let it sink in. … OK … now ,,, both parts? groan? Thanks.)

So we replaced the dishes with cheap apple stoneware dishes for years. They take up too much room in our limited cupboards in our current old house, so we bought speckled enamel tinware in Amish country for our everyday plates. We can fit so many in our cupboards, we don’t need paper plates any more for parties. That’s right, the post is about skillets!

Back in 1975, we were given a set of three cast iron skillets. We have probably used at least one of them almost every day since. That set cost far less than a placesetting of our CenturaWare® or than one Corning® pan. Cast iron is superior to Teflon® for several reasons, the most significant of which is the production of it does not poison seals at the North Pole. If we had been given Teflon® pans, we wouldn’t be talking about them now. They would be long gone. Any bits we would have ingested would have been carcinogenic; whereas bits of cast iron pans are iron, which most people need in their diet.

Cast iron skillets take some basic maintenance. We wash them with hot water and steel wool. Then we put them on the stove with the flame on low to dry. Occasionally, if it looks too dry, we put a little olive oil in it while it is still hot and rub it around evenly with a clean rag or paper towel to re-season it.

After 40 years of use, your pan may look like this:

Medium Skillet with 40 year accretion of crud

It was time to take action to restore this skillet, so it could continue to serve for another 40 years. It was simple, I took a spent oscillating cutter tool blade and scraped the accumulated charred crud off the bottom and outsides of the pan. Then I scrubbed it with steel wool and rinsed and repeated. Then I finished by scouring the bottom and outsides with comet and hot water with steel wool and rinsing thoroughly.

Now it should take less energy to heat and cook. It will distribute heat more evenly, like when it was new. So mark your calendars to do your 40 year maintenance on all your cast iron skillets. It works the same way for Dutch Ovens, too. With them, you could probably get away with 50 years, as there isn’t so much stovetop use.

This was one of my “sidetracks” from home repairs. I get in the mode of fixing things, then that mode sort of generalizes in me. I get sidetracked onto these little projects as breaks from the bigger ones. Not to worry, I did manage to finish replacing the fan in the upstairs bathroom.

I work on these projects and write about them to combat my severe depressive disorder and cPTSD. Maybe you will find something helpful.

My 11 Step Program

It started with my wife and I deciding to change the color of the living room as our Christmas gift to each other. It is the gift that keeps on giving. The living room color determined the stairway color and upstairs hall, that is, since we changed the color of the woodwork. I had painted the steps before. I wanted them to hold up better this time. Bethann thought it would be nice to soften the noise a bit and make them easier on stocking feet.

Step painted & taped. 1 strip of paper to be removed yet.

Our house is old. Of course, this staircase is in the “new part” which was built in 1845 to be the hotel for the railroad when it came through Souderton.
It is narrow at 30″ at the bottom and less than 29″ at the top, in just 11 steps. We have 7′ ceilings. I had painted the first coat on the floor, before I decided the ceiling needed repainting. That white paint really drips! At any rate, I found a simple and economical solution in carpet pads at Home Depot. A pack of 13 sold for under $11. They came with no installation instructions. They were being sold near the large area rugs and window treatments, not near the stair runners. I found a pack. I wasn’t sure if they were dark olive or gray. The Home Depot is only a mile and a half away, so no big deal, if they ended up not looking right in the stairway. (It turns out, in context, they appeared to be dark olive.) Almost all of the tape at Home Depot or Lowe’s is in their paint departments, with certain exceptions. How consumers are supposed to keep track of all the ins and outs of capitalist, retailer, marketing manipulation, I don’t know. Half of the employees don’t know. They learn as they go, as training is minimal. So I went to the paint counter to ask where I could find a fairly agressive, double-sided tape. The man showed me to that expensive, thick 3M stuff, that never comes off, leaving a foam residue, or removing part of the substrate if ever removed. I told him that was too aggressive. I was taping down carpet pads. Gravity and regular foot pressure were on our side. He begrudgingly told me they sold carpet tape two aisles over, with the flooring, but that it was thin and not very aggressive. You could easily remove and reposition the carpet pads with that. He was disgusted as he said it. I said that sounds like just what I need!

While others were sleeping, I started at the top and worked my way down. I centered a pad and marked both ends’ location on the step with pencil. Then I painted up to those marks and roughly just within where the pad would go. Next, the tape was applied to the step. Then the pad was pressed into place. I did five steps one night and the remaining six a few days later.

My 11 Step Program was completed for a total cost of just under $20 plus the paint.

Re-use McCormick Pepper Grinders

We go through a lot of spices. I like to use fresh ground, black pepper. It is better for you and more tasty. We don’t have the budget or the space for those ornamental, high end pepper grinders, but to constantly be buying throwaways from McCormick isn’t that economical or ecological either. Here is a solution:

Easy way to refill a McCormick pepper grinder.
Warm the black plastic grinder top a little with a hair dryer.
This makes the plastic pliable enough that you can pull
the black plastic grinder top off the glass bottle with your
hands. To reattach push back on until it snaps over the
glass bottle lip.

This works for the salt grinders, as well, obviously.

Cranford vs. the Oil Burner

The first two houses we bought were obvious handyman specials. Our third (current) house is, too, but we just weren’t aware of it, since we were bamboozled by its charm. (Note to self: Never buy a charming house. Buy an ugly one and make it charming enough to bamboozle the next owner.) Our first house was a frame bungalow with gas, gravity flow heat. This means there was basically a slightly oversized stove burner inside a giant tin can in the basement with big, round duct arms stretching out to the perimeter of the house. One of these was right over the workbench. I bumped my head into it regularly. At least that spot was a little bit cushioned by the fiberglas patches the previous owner had placed there. The heat came up through a grate in the center of the house, the living room floor. It was not very effective for heating the house on -20° days, but we were newlyweds, so it hardly mattered.

Our second home had oil heat with hot water radiators. The summer-winter hook-up had been disconnected and we had a gas water heater. The first winter we lived there was fairly mild, and neither of us had grown up with oil, hot water heat, so we didn’t notice any major problems, other than it seemed pretty expensive. The second winter was a different story. It was cold and no matter how we set the thermostat, the house would never get above 52°. We invited friends over quite a bit. The added bodies would warm the house, or, at least, we would be distracted from how cold it was. Our friends would say to each other, “The Coulters invited us over. Time to visit the refrigerator.”

I had this theory about hiring professionals. I didn’t think it was worth it to hire somebody to do something who made more per hour than I did. Of course, I was making very little working in a poultry meat processing plant. I didn’t understand things like overhead, liability insurance and transportation costs. I also didn’t appreciate the efficiencies involved when someone truly knew what they were doing, as opposed to someone who was reading the totally misnamed Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual, such as myself.

The house was cold. I was ready to try anything. An old plumber had told me that one could clean the electrodes in the burner by pouring a tablespoon of salt over them as it was firing. I figured he was old. He must have done this any number of times and survived. I would give it a shot. He had failed to mention that one should not use an electrically conductive, metal spoon.

So I get a tablespoon out of the silverware drawer and fill it with table salt. I go down into the basement. I gingerly set the spoon on a shelf while I remove the shield above the burner gun. I pick up the spoon and carefully empty it, so that it falls through the arcing electricity between the electrodes or cathodes or whatever you call them. Oops! The spoon made contact with one of them. The electricity travelled up the spoon and threw it against the opposite wall of the basement, with my arm still firmly attached to it.

Bethann heard me crashing against the shelves and various tools falling. She hollered down to me, “Is everything OK?” I answered weakly, “It’ll be fine.” Then I put the cover back on the oil burner and went back upstairs.

That did not solve the problem. In fact, it got worse. I looked at the situation again on another evening. I noticed the boiler was hot and the basement seemed warm, but it wasn’t circulating to the radiators. I surmised that the circulating pump was shot. I drained the system and took off the pump assembly. Sure enough, the impeller was totally shot. I replaced the pump assembly and filled the system. I turned on the heat, expecting a toasty warm house. No such luck.

I was about to give up and call a plumber. Just then, my friend, Jim, stopped by and offered moral support. Bethann said, “Why don’t the two of you go down and take one last look? You know, another perspective and all that.” Jim thought to bring a flashlight. We look around. Everything looks normal. The thermostat is set properly. The fuses are good. Then he shines the light toward the ceiling joists where we see this big valve painted bright red. It had a lever on the side of it and words cast into it to mark three positions: “OPEN” “RUN” “CLOSED”. The lever was in the closed position. I moved it to “RUN” and voila, we had heat in the house. It was the valve to set it on summer or winter for the water heater that used to be attached to it. This explained the smashed impeller. It had been pushing against a closed circulation valve for two years.

So once again, my mom was right. Reading is the key that unlocks every door.

Thursday was reading night.

In our home, when I was growing up, Thursday night was reading night. This was never, ever announced or even mentioned. It was never enforced. None of us kids were even aware of it. However, it was intentional, consistent and disciplined. My mom, B.J., told me about it when I was in college. I asked her about it, because I had realized that I had never seen any of the TV shows that were on Thursday nights.

My folks wanted to make sure that all four of us kids would enjoy reading and make it a part of our lives. They determined that the best way to do this was by providing opportunity and example. So they chose Thursday. On Thursdays, the television did not get turned on. Mom and Dad would sit in the family room and read. There were built in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace and they were filled with books. Of the approximately forty lineal feet of shelves, half were taken up with reference books: an encyclopedia, dictionaries, thesaurus, legislative manuals and almanacs. The other half were filled mainly with history and biographies, with maybe three feet of philosophical fiction and two feet of family photo albums. My brother and sisters and I each had our personal collections of books in bookcases in our bedrooms.

On Thursdays, we could pretty much do what we wanted. There was a stereo, pool table and fireplace in the basement recreation room. There were games and books there, too. There was a table for puzzles and crafts in the family room. We could play organ in the living room. But we would find our folks quietly reading. I don’t remember being told that we couldn’t turn on the TV. They were reading in front of it. It just wouldn’t seem polite.

We all grew up to be readers.

Years ago, I heard a story on NPR about Iceland being a super-literate country. Thursday was family reading night. All broadcast television would go dark on Thursday evening. It was practically considered one’s civic duty to write at least one book in your lifetime. I haven’t been able to run down the source of this story or substantiate it. Perhaps the internet and cable have erased this distinction there, by now. I did think it was curious that they also chose Thursday. We know a man whose full name is Samuel Shakir Kamees Massad, which translates from the Arabic as: “asked of God to be thankful for Thursday.” To that I say Yes I am!