Cheese making at home

A~ and I took an opportunity to attend a cheese making class the weekend before last and had a great time. If you're following me on Facebook you may remember me posting something about it. (If you're not, don't delay, I'm making an effort to get more regular posts up there in a timely manner.) Well we had a great time.

Demonstrating the process of making mozzarella

The class was being taught by a man that started one of our very favorite local cheese companies, Beehive Cheese, and was covering the obvious first timer cheese of choice, mozzarella. This was perfectly fine with us since, with summer knocking on the door, we wanted to get a few tricks as to how to make this family favorite so we could add it to our repertoire to enjoy with fresh garden tomatoes this year. The class covered the basics of course, but we did manage to learn a couple of good tricks too. For instance, did you know that even just a couple of drops of milk in normal tap water is enough to negate the effects of the chlorine in it? That's nice to know. Another good tip was to mix your citric acid into a 1/4 cup of water (with a drop of milk in it...) to dissolve it before adding it to the milk. You should also do the same thing for your rennet. The reason for this is to allow the ingredient to be introduced to the milk more gently so to speak. Rather than the shock of a direct hit of citric acid, you can ease it into the milk this way.

Prepping all ingredients. Milk & diluted citric acid and rennet.

Since we were newly educated and wanted to put our new info to use to really reinforce it into out minds we went ahead and made ourselves a batch of fresh mozzarella and ricotta this weekend. We learned a couple of things during this process. 1. If we're going to be making cheese, even just the basic mozzarella and ricotta, we need to get some specific equipment. Namely a large fine meshed strainer and some good quality cheese cloth. (The kind for actually making cheese with, not the flimsy crap from the mega-mart.) 2. The final step in making the mozzarella is to heat the curd and "knead" it until it turns to the silken texture and stiff dough-like consistency of good mozzarella.During this part of the process, there is a time to stop when the cheese has formed... I passed that point slightly and the dough was a little on the rubbery side but still very tasty. I'll chalk this error up to simple inexperience. Overall, I really enjoyed the class and the cheese that we made as a testament to having learned something at it. now I'm looking forward to the lasagna that we'll be having with our fresh cheese! Here's a few pictures of our home cheese making process in the works. Buon appetito!!

First, heat milk slowly to 55 deg... then add citric acid and stir...

Continue heating to 88 deg (F) then add rennet..stirring in.. then let sit while curd forms and increase temp to 98

strain off the whey leaving only curds...

heat curd, continue pouring off whey and knead till silken and dough like...

Separate into serving sizes if you'd like and store in fridge. (or eat right away)

We also made ricotta from another half gallon of milk. The steps are even easier:

Heat milk in a microwave safe bowl until it reaches between 190 - 200 Deg (F), then stir in 1/4 cup vinegar per qt of Milk. This will separate the curds off almost immediately.

After lettin the curd separate for 20-30 minutes, strain off whey and store the ricotta.. BAM! that easy.

The leftover whey from both processes is still a very high nutrient supplement. If you have chickens or livestock they will love it! Waste not want not.

Till Next Time.

Yeah, we got skills...

The wife and I that is. We make a heck of a team.

You see, she comes up with these great ideas for how we can make use of a particular area, and I build the solutions for her. Then, When I'm done, and there's this kinda OK looking piece of wood sitting in some room, she comes along with a gallon of paint and a truckload of creativity and **POOF** "Dang that looks good honey!!"

Case in point, She decided that the open area just under our railing in the front room needed a nice bench to sit on while we change shoes and that we could maybe store backpacks or blankets in.

A trip to the hardware store, some doodles on a scratch pad and a few weekend days later I built her a bench.... with storage of course.


In fact, she liked the idea so much she decided we needed a matching piece for the library that we finished almost exactly two years ago.


Yep, more storage, can a growing family ever have enough?


But what I built her in wood was only half the project. She went in, painted and "aged" it...


...and then sealed it with multiple coats of protective clear coats and we now have a great looking bench in the front room.


And an equally good looking mini bench/ottoman for our library.


And there you have it, if you can't find what you want, or if what you do find just costs too darn much, give building your own a try. The first few times they may be a little skewed or wobbly, but each time you'll get better and better. Pick up a good how to magazine like "home handyman" for example at the library and do your research. It can be done and let me tell you, there's no better feeling than showing off your own creations.

Now, I hoping the "if you build it they will come" rule will apply. Think the bench in the library will get the kids reading more?
We'll see.
Best
P~

seed starter is up...FINALLY!!

Well between an unplanned trip to California, Master Gardener courses and two kids doing science fair projects, I never had a chance to get around to finally finishing the seed starter that I got started with a ways back... sorry for taking so long to update you.

Tonight I finally got around to bringing it down into the basement where I'll have it set up until I'm done getting starts going; probably until mid May at least. I'm going to just put up a bunch of pictures (since that's really the best way to explain it don't you think?) and explaining myself as I go.
The main requirement for this project, outside of the obvious functionality of the starter, was that I could disassemble and store it with relative ease in a minimum amount of space. Above it the framework of the starter minus the lights. The trays are roughly two feet wide by 4 feet long, and the long boards that make up the legs are just shy of six feet long. They leg board are "L" shaped and nest inside each other.
Here they are all laid out just before A~ and I assembled it. The process is simple, attach the bottom shelf loosely to all four legs and then move your way up. It's a two person job, but in a pinch a single person could do it.
This is the set up that the whole shi-bang is held together with. It's a 2 1/2 inch long carriage bold with a washer, lock washer and wing nut for easy hand assembly.
This is a view from the top of one of the legs so that you can see how the legs and the shelves attach. Below is a picture of the shelf from the inside.
I lined the bottoms of the two shelves that will hold plants with plastic sheeting because I didn't want to accidentally spill water over the sides and have it drip out the bottom onto either the flooring or the fluorescent lamps. And speaking of which, these are the brand/s of lamps that I am using. One gives a high number of lumens but is heavy on the red spectrum of light (kitchen and bath) while the other will fill the gaps in the blue spectrum.
Mind you, they're not professional bulbs or anything, but hey...they do put out a good bit of light! I have two lamps per shelf for a total of four. Each shelf can hold 192 individual plants or 48 plastic four packs. Total I'll be able to have up to 384 plants started at one time. Woohoo!!
And last but by no means least...here it is, my starter. I only have one shelf loaded so far, but I'll be able to get my cabbages and broccoli started to supplement what I direct sow into the ground soon. The bottom shelf will have the later season stuff like tomatoes, peppers eggplants and such. then I'll spread them out amongst the two shelves as they get bigger.

Spring is here!! I don't care what the weather man tells me. When I start seeds and I can turn my soil like I did today...Springs here!! Time to get growing!

Hope all your seeds are sprouting well. till tomorrow.

P~

I've got bubbles!!!

Oh yeah I do! lots and lots O' bubblin goodness.

It's been two weeks since the bottling and for Superbowl Sunday I was treated to this most tasty brew!

I really mean it too. It was...is...really good. Over the period of the second week the beer had a chance to develop more carbonation and also managed to shed it's slightly yeasty taste to become quite tasty. I did notice a strange phenomenon that I thought I'd offer up for some comment on though.

When the beer was on top of the fridge, the remaining yeasts in the bottle seemed to form along one side of the bottle and form a slight fogginess around one half of the bottle. I can only assume that the yeast naturally gravitated toward the warmer side of the bottle and grew there.

After taking the bottles down on Saturday and putting them in the fridge they cleared out remarkably quickly. After only a couple of hours the bottles were basically clear (except for the small amount of sediment on the bottom.). Any thoughts? I know I have a couple of experienced beer makers out there.

A~ and I stopped into a local brew makers shop a couple weeks back and checked into what all is required to really start brewing some bigger and more unique beers. It will be an investment for sure and is something I will no doubt try in the future. But, with the fill plate I find myself staring at right now, this is one of those things that will be getting "back burnered". For now at least, I intend to try out some of the other MR beer products. This one was great!

Till tomorrow...
P~

Big plans and good news.

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I went out for dinner with my family and took a night off. I had some pretty great news yesterday and thought I deserved it. The news? Oh just a promotion at work that came kinda out of the blue! I'm now officially a software engineer. (I was already, but now I get to say so...) I do have to admit that with the economy in a pretty dismal state, and knowing that there are friends of mine that have had a fairly rough go of it lately, I felt more than a little reticent about posting the good news up here but at the end of the day it's not just a blog about gardening, homesteading or living a little more sustainably, it's a blog about me. So that's the good news.

Now, what's all this about big plans huh? Well they're plans that A~ and I have been kicking around for some time now and finally have decided on. You may remember the pergola that I built for A~ for mothers day a few years back. This isn't the best picture of it, but you get the idea. Anyway, We've decided that we don't use it nearly as much as we had hoped that we would so it's getting..."modified".

We decided that we need a greenhouse much more than we need a little used pergola. So the big plans are....drumroll please...A solar greenhouse for the backyard. When finished it will be 10' X 12', I'm designing it with good solar gain and shading principles (I hope anyway, I'm no architect.) so that in the winter I should be able to maximize the amount of sun that the greenhouse gets while the awnings and angles should allow some shading in the heat of summer.

I've got a couple of dwarf citrus trees that have been clinging to life in the house this winter, as well as a fig tree, that I want to be able to keep out there over winters. Two of the biggest reasons for wanting it, are to be able to start our spring veggies out there and then to prolong some of them over the winter months. Next year we're hoping for fresh tomatoes in January!!

So, if any of you have any suggestions based on my drawings, basic as they are, I'd love to hear them. I hope to only have to build this baby once. It may take a while, perhaps even more than one summer building a little at a time, but it'll be a great addition to the ole 'stead don'tcha think?

All the best till tomorrow.
P~

While the kids aren't here...

Dad's make beer!!

Or at least that's the way it worked out this weekend while the boys were down in Salt Lake for a couple of days. A~ and I took the opportunity to stop off at our local thrift store the D.I. and I found this baby brand new, complete and from this year.(The malted hops in the kit were still fresh and the product catalog for ordering new supplies was for 2009.)I'm guessing someone got it as a Christmas gift and just couldn't see making the effort to make it themselves. Their loss, my gain. These retail normally for about $35.00 so, although home brewing is something I've been wanting to try and I think this will be a easy way to test it out, I wasn't willing to shell out forty bucks to do it. But $12.00...that I can do!

Besides the ingredients that came in the kit, I had to muster up some basic tools to use in the kitchen, all of which were chemically sanitized before using. I never thought about it, but I guess beer yeast are a pretty particular bunch. The purpose of the sanitizing is to keep any "rogue" bacteria from fouling the beer.
After sanitizing and prepping everything, the next step was to mix the "wort". This basically consists of mixing the packaged ingredients which include a premixed and hopped malted-barley solution that was a lot like molasses. One of the ingredients was a package called "booster" that was basically corn syrup solids. Not my idea of top notch beer making ingredients, but I figured that it's a first batch and this was what I had.
After mixing the wort all that was needed was to pour it into the keg with a few gallons of cold water and place in a 68-76 degree spot to allow fermentation to take place. That was the biggest challenge of the whole process, finding a place in the house that was that temperature. During the winter months about the highest that our thermostat ever adjusts itself to is 66 deg (F) but is usually set to 62. I did manage to find that the top of our refrigerator was about 68 deg this afternoon, so there it sits. I'm guessing that the fermenting in beer is a lot like that of lacto-fermentation. It will still work, but may take a little longer in the cooler temps.

So, in about two-three weeks, I should be bottling this up and in another couple of weeks should be enjoying some fine home-brew. Well, that's the plan anyway. Wish me luck!
P~

Finally - homemade mozzarella

This last weekend A~ and I finally tried our hand at making our own mozzarella. It was fun, interesting and didn't taste half bad. Add to that the fact that we got enough cheese from one $2.80 gallon of milk that it would have equalled what we would normally have spent $6-$8 on. There are still some finessing things that we have to work out, like the exact amount of rennet to add, how long to knead it for, and the proper amount of salt to add, but we ate it, and I think the boys are looking forward to more of it.
It all started with a gallon of milk poured into a stainless steel pot. The milk was then heated slowly to 55 deg F.



When the milk gets up to 55 F we add some citric acid diluted in water and continued heating until the milk had risen to 88 deg F, stirring occasionally. At this point the milk has started to curdle slightly and looked almost like cottage cheese sitting in yogurt.




When the milk has risen to 88 deg F, we stirred in our rennet with an up and down motion. (Don't ask me what that's supposed to mean that's just what the recipe said to do). It's at this point that we lost our way a little. The recipe that we were following called for 1/4 tsp, and the package for the rennet called for a different measurement. We added the packages quantity and it didn't seem to be getting the curds and whey to split so we added a little bit more and continued heating. We were supposed to heat it until it reached near 105 deg, but ended up having to go to nearly 120 before we saw any real separation. I don't know if it had to do with our elevation or what, but this is the main area that we need to play around with to perfect it.



Now you can see the curd separating pretty well. You need to let it continue to separate until the whey is mostly yellowish/clear.



It's now that you ladle the curd out of the whey with a slotted spoon. After you've done that, and drained off as much whey as you can, the curd needs to be microwaved for 1 minute, knead and pour off excess whey (don't throw that whey away, you can make ricotta with it) Do this at least two more times for 35 seconds each times, lightly salting after the second time, and knead the cheese until it is stretchy and shiny then roll into balls and set in ice water bath if you are not going to eat it right away.

And there you go. approximately 3/4 to 1 pound of finished mozzarella. You can eat it right away, or let it cool and store in a lightly salted water in the fridge.
It was fun and tasty, although I think I needed to knead it a little longer. The finished product was still a bit "wet" for lack of a better description, and was breaking down slowly in the water bath.




We did enjoy it with a few homegrown tomatoes and basil and some olive topenade that A~ made, and the next day put slices on top of some eggplant Parmesan.


We'll be tweaking this recipe to make it work better for us, but I think we're onto something good! I'm consistently amazed with how possible it is to make some of the dairy products that seem to mysterious like this cheese or the yogurt that I love to make. Give it a try, it's not that hard, costs very little for the supplies and is a great skill to have in your quiver.

Enjoy.
P~

DIY for dogs

I like to try to take a little extra time to make things myself when I can. Every Christmas for instance, I make some kind of wooden toy for my kids. It's just something I do because I love them and it's become a tradition. I make things for my wife and our home too. The latest such thing was the bookcases that I finished last week. I do this, of course because I love my wife, but also because it allows us to have things that we may not otherwise be able to afford, and because it increases our self reliance. Why should our pets be any different?

Look at that face; he's been going crazy because it's warming up and he's getting spring fever too. We haven't been able to let him out much because his old collar broke and if he's not on a lead and we don't watch him all the time, well, let's just say he likes to wonder. So I decided to make him a new collar. I made the last one as a prototype, and he seemed to like it. He didn't scratch at it nearly as often, I think because it didn't have the big adjustable buckle that the store bought one's have. I used a nylon string that will stay cleaner, and should wear a little better than the cotton one that I made the last one out of.

If you've never tried macrame, try picking up a book at the library and giving it a shot. I taught myself this basic little knot set when I was in high school and have used it a few times for things. This was a perfect match.
After I got halfway through the collar, I made a loop and wrapped it with some finer nylon string, (actually it's cheap fly line backing material from the fishing section at the store.) this will act as the connection point for the lead, and again, will decrease annoyance because it's softer than metal. After the whole thing was done, I attached a button with the end pieces of the center portion of the string, and made a loop out of the other end. his I wrapped too, just for durability.

Now look, isn't that better? I made this last night, and he was outside today, very much happier. It doesn't matter what it is, when you make it yourself it always means so much more. You get a sense of accomplishment and pride, even from silly little things like a dog collar. Don't be afraid to try, what's the worst that could happen? Just start small until you gain confidence.

P~

Welcome & Weekend plans

Well I suppose at least a quick welcome message is in order. A comment of mine with regard to the 100 foot diet challenge over at path to freedom was posted today and I've noticed a bunch of new visitors, so welcome and I hope you'll take a few minutes to look around. I'm a bit eclectic I know, but hopefully that will mean there's a little something for everyone. If you don't find a lot of 100 ft diet posts right now, it's because this weekend is the first time since the beginning of December that I've seen my yard through the snow. But keep checking in, Seeds should be getting an early start soon.

In other news, (sounds like I'm an anchor man doesn't it.) it's shaping up to be quite an eventful weekend around here. I went to work early today so that I could get home early and get right to work in the garage. All the building of the bookcases is completed, and they are sanded and rough prepped for painting. Tomorrow, I will get an early start again so that I can do a final dusting in the garage, tarp off the "paint room" and situate the cases for painting. Later that afternoon when the sun has warmed the garage a bit, we'll do the painting. We bought an air powered spray gun that we'll be using to shoot our favorite paint; Olympic brand, zero VOC Satin. We're doing it this way to get a more even coat and better finish. I mean, no point trying to save a little money by building our own furniture if it's going to look homemade right? My dad will be up visiting again tomorrow, lending a hand where it's needed and spending a little time with us.

Sunday, our boys will be heading into town to spend the holiday with their grandmother so A~ and I will be having a rare day alone together. I suspect there will be some finish painting to do, but I think we'll still have a bit of free time to enjoy each others company.

Monday, I'm heading up to the mountains for a ski day at Snowbasin, home of the downhill runs from the 2002 Olympics. This is the only day I go skiing anymore. It's just too expensive to do more often than that. There are a couple of guys from work and I that started this tradition about 6 yrs ago and it's become just that, a tradition, one that I'll no doubt be paying more that just dollars for. (Hopefully the excersises I've been doing will keep me from paying for it too much!!)

Wednesday next week should be a big day around here too, but I'll leave you guessing about that one for a couple of days.

Hope you all have a great weekend. Watch for final pictures of the bookcases next week.
P~

The Library

Well since I was talking about it in yesterdays post, and since today I finished the rough assembly of the last of 7 bookcases that we'll be putting in the basement, I thought I'd share my progress so far with you.

It all began when my wife and I decided that we wanted to get some bookcases for our smallest basement room. We took a quick run down the street to our local furniture dealer. We looked around and got an idea of what it was that we (she) wanted and what they would cost. Once buying enough to fill the area that we wanted to fill was out of the question (It would have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $2100.00), we decided that I'd try to replicate as best I could the cases that we had decided on. That's them in the catalog picture that we modeled our cabinets after.

So I drew up some plans that I think should be pretty solid, yet not look it. (That's my biggest shortfall in carpentry; building too solid, to where they look utilitarian rather than like furniture you'd want to display.) I was pretty nervous when I got ready to start this project. I always feel like the more ambitious my projects become, I'll eventually overstep my abilities, but A~ has faith in me so I try my best. Anyway, I purchased the MDF board that I planned to build it with, and made the good decision to have the board ripped at the store. They have the proper equipment to do the job much more consistantly that I do and if you've ever tried to rip 4x8 sheets of plywood on a home-use sized table saw you know it's not fun. I spent the next week and a half or so a little at a time cutting and prepping boards for assembly. Basically I was getting the pieces for the cabinets trimmed, drilled for screws and all the small connecting pieces to a state similar to when you buy the furniture in a box that needs assembly.

Last weekend my Dad came out on Sunday to watch the Superbowl and helped me in the morning with assembling some of the bookcases. I was able to get another couple done through the week and today, as I said, I finished the rough assembly of the last two. Here's where I'm at so far. You can start to see how they mimic the style of the ones from the store. Today we also made it to the hardware store to pick up some moulding that we're going to place over the seams after the cases are in place to give them the effect of looking like one solid built in unit.

All told I think they'll end up looking pretty good. When you factor in the fact that we'll only be into them about $550 - $600.00 compared to the projected $2100.00 and they certainly start to look even better! I'll make sure to post a couple of pics of them when they're all finished and in place. Should be another couple of weeks since we're planning on prepping through this week, and painting next weekend. Then with some finish work, and moving them down the stairs and we should be able to be finished by the weekend of the 24th, just in time to start building my new chickens home. The work of the faithful do-it-yerselfer is never finished. These home projects are one of those things that I never necessarily look forward to, but always begin to enjoy while I'm in the middle of it, and am immensly proud of when I'm finished.
Doing this type of work and building things to meet our needs is sort of my equivilent to my wifes baking our bread, or cooking from scratch. It gives us the ability to live at a level that we otherwise may not be able to if we did things like everyone else and bought everything we needed premade. It's a big part of what makes us succesful on a single income, and something I hope we can pass on to our boys. I watched it in my father to a great degree, I remember him putting bookshelves up in their master bedroom, and fixing things until they just couldn't be fixed any more. It's not the easiest way, but I realy do believe that it is the best way for us. You never know what your capable of till you try.

P~

Well it's shaping up to be another eventful weekend. A~ and I just made a "sponge" out of our sourdough starter, so we can use it to make some no-yeast sourdough bread tomorrow. We've never tried this before so we'll see how it goes. It would be a really useful thing to know, how to bake bread without yeast that is, in case of who knows what. So we'll see how that goes, Ill let you know of course.

Another thing that'll be going on this weekend is me working feaverishly in the garage to catch up. You see over the years I've always made my boys something by hand. One year, I made shields out of plywood and carpet scraps, another I made them swords from leftover hardwood flooring and last year I made small tanto knives from some maple that I picked up in a scrap pile. See a pattern there? Wooden weapons. My boys are boys, what can I say. They've used all these things regularly and I'm proud to say they're still in one piece. Anyway, the point of the story is that I thought this year, they may be getting too old for my handmade cheapness, not to mention wooden toys. Well I was mistaken; it seems they were talking with A~ the other day about not being able to go over to my side of the garage because I might be making something for them. She said she didn't think I was and they were very unhappy with that. It seems I've started a tradition more valued than I had thought. I did it more for me, too see their surprise and to show them that I loved them. Little did I realize it would become something that they look forward too. I should have guessed it, they are suckers for tradition. So this year, with the abundant leftover hardwood flooring, and some maple or ash scraps from the cabinet makers, I will venture to make bows. They are after all getting older, and are responsible enough for them. (They won't be big powerful ones mind you.) We'll see how it goes.

Lastly, I may try to format and rebuild our computer. It's been acting up lately, and the last time I did it, I incorrectly partitioned the hard drive. So if If I'm out for a few days, don't give upon me I'll be back.

P~

Yogurt first try.

I finally tried my hand at making homemade yogurt. This has been something I've been wanting to try for a while and I finally just did it. I was going to try to make it with regular 2% milk, something that I could easily get at the store but the more I looked around and compared recipes, I noticed that there were a lot of references to making it with reconstituted milk, or even milk with dried milk added to increase the thickness. As I spoke about last week, I feel there's a need to not just store and prepare ourselves with food stores, but to learn how to effectively use them. So I decided to make the yogurt entirely from dried milk. This was, at it's core, an experiment after all.

I mixed a gallon of milk per instructions, 3/4 cup mix to 1 quart warm water. I added one more 1/4 cup to the final mix to help with thickness of the yogurt, then refrigerated it. I won't go into the specifics of the process, there's a lot better descriptions of it easily accessible online. Basically I heated the milk to kill off the bad bacteria, cooled it to an acceptable temp to allow new bacterial growth, and inoculated it with live cultures from some plain yogurt that I had frozen to use specifically for this. After allowing the inoculated milk to sit in a warm bath overnight, the milk had solidified into a beautiful gelatinous blob of yogurt.

Tonight I tried it out after I had left it to cool through the day. The jar of preserves that you see in the picture is one that I have been saving for a while. I was born in Sweden, and as a kid we called this stuff "Swedish Gold". It was so hard to get, and so expensive when we could, that the only time we ever really got to enjoy it was either when visiting family, or when Mormor (Swedish for grandma) sent some out to us. Anyway, I've been waiting for something worth trying it on, and this just seemed right. I added a little splenda to sweeten, and a dollop of Cloud berries and Mmmm Mmmm good! Since I had made two quarts of yogurt (I kept a half gallon of the milk in the fridge to test out on some other things.) I decided to try vanilla and some sweetener in the second one. I added the flavoring, and whipped with a blender and whisk attachment. What I had after was delicious, smooth, almost and a little thinner, almost like Keefer.

I'm really proud to say that it came out well on my first try. I don't know how many of you have tried this, but I have to say it was well worth it. I haven't figured out exactly what it ended up costing me to make the two quarts, but by using strictly the dried milk, I'm sure the cost was very minimal. I'll let you know if I ever figure it out, I probably will. Next try I'd like to learn how to flavor the yogurt while I'm making it, rather than after. I'd also like to find a better way to keep it warm than the water bath, you know I love a challenge!

Tuesday How-To

I thought I'd take a minute to share a little how-to with you. I mean after all, I've given you recipes for rhubarb pie, ratatouille and eggplant Parmesan; I figured it was time to reaffirm my identity as a man out there is a blogosphere that seems to be very feminine.
While I was working on my flooring over the last few weeks, I have been running over in my head how I was going to handle all of the spaces, nicks and nail holes that enevitably show up when doing any type of large woodworking project. I've tried both water based and oil based wood fillers, and have never really been able to find one that I was happy with. Either the texture is all wrong, or I use it once and then it's dryed out before I need it again. Or maybe in th color is the problem; with a wood like red oak, there's such a wide variety of colors that it's hard to get a good match. Either it's too dark or too light, the later being the worst of the two and can look like you spilt rice on the ground if your not careful. So what was my solution? Make my own of course!

Here's the "recipe":
• sawdust,

• Wood Glue,

• Water

That's it. I used wood dust from the catcher on my sander. It is very fine, almost the consistancy of flour. I put a bit in a plastic cup, addedenough glue to adhere it all together into a very thick paste. To this paste I added a little bit, (1/2 teaspoon maybe) of water, just enough to loosen the past into a consistancy that I could work with. I was very pleased with the results. I found that it worked in well, and could be sanded easily. I do think that the next time that I use it I would try wiping it with a damp sponge to clean the excess out of the grains. It did sand down completely but took a little while.

My Dad says I'm a craftsman, that's why I like to own every aspect of my projects. My kids would just tell you I'm just cheap. As for me, I'm afraid a day will soon come when so many of our skills and knowledge base will be lost if we don't take the time to practice and hand these skills down. I enjoy knowing that I made it, that whether or not a local hardware store has it or not, I can accomplish my goal. I encourage you to experiment with whatever your interests are. I can't think of many things out there that we couldn't simplify and do it ourselves at least to some degree. I think you'll find a huge amount of satisfaction in it.

P~