Sparked

In high school we had a certain number of community service hours we had to complete each year. I'm not exactly sure what happened if you didn't complete them but I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have been able to graduate or maybe not even have moved on to the next grade level. What I do know is that I had lots of fun completing my service hours and have fond memories volunteering with my friends.

After I left high school I always tried to keep volunteering in my life. I was part of a service club in college and volunteered whenever friends suggested an opportunity. Recently however I have fallen out of the habit. What with our move across the country, our house hunt and purchase, the impending packing and moving, I haven't quite gotten myself organized to volunteer here in Vermont. Thankfully I came across this website called Sparked. Maybe I'm late to the game or maybe, like me, you have never heard of Sparked before. Either way I wanted to write about it because I am really enjoying it.

Sparked is a microvolunteering website. In their words microvolunteering is "volunteering that you can do in small bits of time - from 5 minutes to 2 hours. It's high-impact, high-efficiency do-gooding." Basically you go to sparked.com, set up an account that includes your interests and your skills and then you have access to a list of challenges for which you can volunteer. You choose what you want to do, you choose how long you work on it and that's it! For example I just worked on challenge that was typing subtitles for a YouTube video on Suicide and the Media for an organization in New Zealand.

I think it's a really neat idea and it fits really well into my schedule. I can pick it up or put it down whenever I need to. Plus they have challenges for all sorts of skills and interests so I won't always be working on the same thing. Hopefully this will satisfy my need to volunteer until I can search out other opportunities in my neighborhood.

Local Food

One of the benefits of living in Vermont is our access to fresh local foods. My friend Irene recently shared an article with me that ranks Vermont at the top of the Local Food Index. According to the article the rank is based on the states "commitment to raising and eating locally grown food based on the number of farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms" (CSA). "Vermont has 99 farmers markets and 164 CSAs, with a [state] population of fewer than 622,000".

Marc and I have yet to sign up for a CSA share but we do frequently visit the Norwich Farmer's Market and the local food Co-Op. Plus, once we get into our house we are hoping to make the most of our land and gardens.

House Update - 29 days to go!

29 days to go until closing and our fingers are crossed that everything will go as smoothly as it has been going. This past week I finally realized that our stuff wasn't going to magically move itself into our new home. Hopefully with the month of July as an overlap month, where we'll have both the condo we are currently renting and our new home, the moving part won't feel too overwhelming. Although it would probably help to start packing some stuff up now.

Marc and I have also begun our conversations about what is going to happen during week one of house ownership. Hopefully by discussing it now we can get some prep work done ahead of time so come July 3rd we are go, go, go! Which means tomorrow I am meeting with multiple contractors at the house to start getting an idea of what we are going to be doing.

Speaking of working on the house, after our wedding Marc and I started talking to each other about what we wanted in a house. We discussed in depth all of the houses we had lived in and even drew out floor plans for those houses. We would talk about what things we liked about our apartment in San Diego and how we would improve it. We looked at building plans for homes and we searched the internet for examples of things we liked.

We also wrote this list which we then put away and forgot about. Last week while I was cleaning out I came across the list and enjoyed comparing it to what we have ended up with. If you ignore the fact that it's written on fruit and vegetable paper you will notice that our future home contains all but two items on the list - no enclosed yard and no central air/heat. But that doesn't mean that one day it won't have those things.

29 days and counting . . .

A Nice Little Saturday Planned...

We were lucky enough to enjoy a rainy and pretty cool (52 F / 11 C) Saturday in early June. How?

By making it awesome!

And what is more awesome than the local science museum and sausage?  Not at the same time mind you, but that's a good idea for next time. As Christina mentions below, we visited the Montshire Museum in Norwich, VT today. It was fun, they have live fish and bees and a space movie. What could be better?

Sausage.

Sausage could be better.

I have been mentioning to Christina that I want to make my own sausage for months.  In fact, we registered for the meat grinder and sausage-making attachments on the Kitchenaid for our wedding and one of our friends gave it to us!  (Thank you!).

So inspired/shamed by some very good store-bought chicken sausage (yes, "very good", "store-bought" and "chicken-sausage" all in the same sentence), and called out by my lovely wife, today was sausage making day.

First, we drove down to Claremont, NH and visited Liberal Beef, a butcher shop about a half hour away to get hog casings, pork shoulder and pork fat.  The rest of the ingredients we either had or picked up at the local Co-op in White River Junction.

I know I write more than Christina, so I'll just jump to the pictures and review in a minute:

The making part was a blast.  I also ran into three problems:

1. I think the fat wasn't cold enough the first time I put it into the grinder so it more "smooshed" through the holes as opposed to "ground" through.  That, or some of the tendon/sinew got stuck so I had to clean off the grinder before I could proceed.
2. Getting the hog casing onto the stuffer attachment.  I mean, this is salted pig intestine that I cleaned and rinsed and was still slimy and it was hard to hold it in the first place, never mind "sheathing the attachment" with it.
3. Not asking Christina to help.  So I did.  It got easier:

You are supposed to let the links sit and dry overnight in the fridge after you stuff them, but I am most certainly not patient.  We cooked a little (pre-stuffing) on a skillet and it tasted great.

A good amount of fennel, a little wine flavor, juicy, tasty, not too salty.  About an hour into it "drying" in the fridge we decided to grill up 3 links for a late dinner-ish snack.

Not that it was a letdown for my first sausage-making experiment, but it came out a little dry.  One of the sausage links split open on the grill and dried out. The other two were also a little dry, and I think I should add more pork fat.  I went a little light on that since the pork shoulder was already pretty fatty, but I think I should ramp up the fat to over 25%.

I'm also excited to see how they taste tomorrow morning after sitting overnight.  I read the flavors really meld this way, so tomorrow's sausage may trump the super-fresh links we had earlier.

We'll keep you posted.

Rainy Saturday

Today we received free admission to the Montshire Museum because Marc's company is a corporate donor. Since it's been on our list of things to check out and it was a rainy day we decided to head on over. For some reason it has always been a children's museum in my mind. I'm not sure why because even though it was crawling with children today it was definitely a science musuem.  If you've ever been to The Exploratorium in San Francisco it was more like that then Kidspace in Pasadena. We had lots of fun learning about space and local animals (bees, ants, fish, frogs, etc). Plus we challenged ourselves survivor-style with some puzzles. There was definitely lots to see which means we have to go back when our nieces and/or nephews visit.

Speaking of children, the best part of the visit was when we ran into one of Marc's coworkers. After introducing us to his child he looked around and asked us where ours was. Which left us to admit that no, we have no kids, we just wanted to play.

After the museum the ongoing search-for-the-perfect-sausage sent us to Liberal Meats in Claremont where we were able to buy hog casing, pork shoulder and pork fat. The store is a flashback to your neighborhood butcher. People were coming in to buy their cuts of meat for the week and I'm pretty sure that when we asked for pork fat the butcher walked into the meat freezer and literally sliced it off the pig. Tonight we'll find out if the secret to delicious sausage in Vermont is to just make it yourself from local ingredients.