Making vinegar at home

There are a lot of apple peels left over after making sauce, pie fillings, and dried apples.  The last two years we just composted them, but this year we figured we'd make use of them by making vinegar.  We use vinegar for cleaning (including conditioning my hair), cooking, preserving, and I even found ideas of using it for making your skin soft.  It wouldn't cost us anything to make, and it was easy enough, so we went for it.  Using a 5-gallon bucket, we put all the peels in (no peels with black spots or rotten areas).  Put a plate over that to keep the peels down and then put another weight (we used a canning jar full of water) to keep the plate down.  You don't want anything floating around and get exposed to the air.  Cover it in water and put in a place where it can remain undisturbed.  We had our bucket in the cold storage room. After about 6 weeks or so we brought it back up and stored it in sterilized canning jars.  We had a successful first attempt and I'm certain we'll be doing this again next year.

We used a funnel with cheese cloth in it to filter, and just put it in a used gallon container, and then started filling up a few mason jars.  On the left, you can see the green 5-gallon bucket on full of vinegar.  On the right side, you can see that we were also making laundry detergent.

By the end of November, we had our own home made vinegar.

Greening up (or tie-dying) the kitchen

We go through a lot of paper towels.  Or we used to.  We used them for spills, as napkins, wiping little faces, and probably a bunch of other stuff.  I've wanted to get away from being so wasteful with paper products (but not so far as to give up toilet paper!), but it seemed like cloth napkins were so fancy.  We tired using Jaimie's flour sack towels but it always seemed like we'd use them once or twice and go back to the paper towels.  We needed something specifically for napkins.  But, if I had fancy kitchen stuff, then I'd have to worry about keeping it clean, and that would mean more time doing laundry.  In another blog (sorry, can't remember which), I read that a mom sends her daughter to school with tie-dye napkins because the stains don't really show and it's fun for the school-aged child.  Well, I just so happened to have tie-dyed handkerchiefs in a bag of tie-dyed shirts I made with my older sister several years before.  So, we've been using our new "napkins" and it has been a successful transition away from paper towels.  We keep them in a bread box on the counter, where we also keep the coloring books and crayons, so our toddler (who claims all contents of the box belong to her) decides who gets what color (she generally wants something with pink in it and Daddy gets something with blue).  It doesn't even seem like using cloth makes a difference in the amount of laundry.