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We have a lot of pets: Eugene, the cat; Dewayne the turtle; guinea pigs Baconator and Boudin; but we also have pets who also have ‘jobs’: our bantam hens and our worms. They take care of the kitchen scraps so there’s not so much waste going on. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, consider giving a listen to the 99PercentInvisible podcast: Best Enjoyed By

Doug Rauch:
We waste a staggering amount of food. The average American wastes somewhere between 20 and 25% of the food they acquire.

Roman Mars:
And it’s not just wasting the food, it’s wasting the water to grow it, the transportation to get it to the supermarket, everything that goes into getting food to your plate.

My family donates to a local food pantry and in my hometown, we’ll bring things to a Little Free Pantry, too.

We got started with being serious about this in 2013 when we got red wigglers

This is them straight in the bin before I’ve done the whole setup, but the worms still live in this same container — it’s a large sterilite bin inside a plastic laundry basket, set up in the garage (the laundry basket catches any moisture that might leak out).

There are holes in the Sterilite bin so it lets in plenty of air but keeps things nice and dark. This is a good website for some basics.

There’s definitely a sweet spot on how much to feed the worms, but basically the more we feed them, the more worms there seem to be; scale back on the volume of scraps, and fewer. Allllways just vegetables and newspaper — never any meat or dairy, tomatoes, potatoes, or citrus (but YMMV because some people do give some citrus). Our worms seem to really like banana peels and carrots, especially, not particularly excited about celery for some reason.

You can keep a spray bottle around to give the environment a spritz if things are looking a little dry, or add more newspaper if things are looking too wet. It’s actually fun trying to figure out how to make the perfect environment so your worms are living their best life.

The guinea pics DO love celery, though. And carrots and collards and that kind of thing. They get only fresh food like we would eat.

this is Boudin, and he is a celery man.

We started with a thousand worms, but you can really start small and just get a container or two of fishing worms from a lake store.

Now, the chickens are super, super fun. They get an almost daily treat of some kind — often carrots that have been through the Cuisinart, but also just about any other kind of fruit or vegetable scrap from the kitchen.

This is Zelda, a Polish chicken, and she’s eight years old, which is pretty old for a bantam hen (her sister Tallulah, a bantam Cochin, is the same age — we got them when they were two days old).  Neither of them lay eggs anymore, but they did up until the last 18 months or so, which is also pretty good.

We have some new bantam chicks which are just starting to lay now — we got them in August. Here you can see their pretty brown eggs (though we have an Easter Egger which lays pretty blue/green eggs — more about that next week) next to a large Eggland’s Best egg.

They are terrific fun and besides kitchen scraps and such, in the warmer weather, I grow allllll kinds of herbs to treat them. They eat a variety of those — just absolutely tons of herbs, really — plus weeds (they love weeds!) from around the yard too. More about chicky fun next week.

PS: look how cute Zelda was as a baby…already had her little top fluff going

DeKalb Parts Store
half a car special effects included
Ft Payne AL, 2010.

Center Evangelistic / Iglesia Centro Evangelistico
House of Fire Church  / Casa de Fuego
Gadsden AL, 2010.

We had the absolute best time over winter break — we ‘adopted’ a couple of the international boarders from Shug’s school, and took a couple of trips: one to Gulf Shores so they could have some beach time, and Av took the older boys to New Orleans while Shugie and I did things closer to home.

There was no problem finding places to eat outside, and of course since we were at a condo, I did a LOT of cooking for all of us there. Also, one of the kids is a vegetarian (I was a vegetarian some in high school, too), so we tried some of the plant-based meat substitutes. Some are much better than others, which probably goes without saying. I did make a lasagna, and I promise, if you didn’t know, you’d never know it wasn’t made with real ground beef.

We stayed at the Seaside Beach & Racquet Club on Orange Beach, Alabama; it wasn’t the nicest condo we’ve ever stayed at, but was certainly fine for this stay and had a really big balcony.

Christmas Day lunch — both our international students celebrate Christmas — was at the Flora-Bama (Av likes to do the New Year Day Polar Dip there), and it was fun because it was a covered-dish affair, where everyone brought something to share. There were ALL kinds of different people there, and we got a table outside, which was great.

When Av and the older boys went to New Orleans (we took two cars to the beach since there were so many of us), they stayed at the JW Marriott because we like their concierge lounge and knew the boys could use it a lot, and it’s right on Canal so easy walking everywhere.

They went everywhere, and of course I asked for gingerbread pics — here, from Windsor Court

and the Ritz-Carlton

They got back in time for New Year Day, and we had the traditional spread

We really never wanted the boys to go back to school! We’d had such a really terrific time — days going non-stop and a couple of just lazy, Netflix-filled days. We’re making plans to be with them to do things on the weekends altogether now, too. So nice and so grateful for the boys having these and such a terrific group of friends. We’ll remember this special winter break forever.

“Please Don’t Steal! G-d Is Watching You”
further down: Luke 11:2-4
and II Corinthians 5:17
Warning signs, Montgomery Curb Market
Montgomery AL, 2009.

The NYT just did a tiny piece on picture books for kids, A Cooks Tour: 3 Picture Books About Famous Foodies, and among those, Sweet Justice: Georgia Gilmore and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (here on Amazon, here at Bookshop).

There’s a historic marker outside Georgia Gilmore’s home:

It reads
Georgia Gilmore
February 5, 1920 – March 3, 1990
Georgia Gilmore, cited as a “solid, energetic boycott participant and supporter” lived in this house during the days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Once arrested on a bus, Gilmore was ardent in her efforts to raise funds for the Movement and organized “Club From Nowhere” whose members baked pies and cakes for sale to both black and white customers. Opening her home to all, she tirelessly cooked meals for participants including such leaders as Dr. Martin Luther King and Dr. Ralph Abernathy. Her culinary skills continued to aid the cause of justice as she actively worked to encourage civil rights for the remainder of her life.

and her home was not far at all from the parsonage where Martin Luther King Jr lived:

There are two other books for children about Georgia Gilmore: this one, in the Leaders Like Us series, and Pies from Nowhere: How Georgia Gilmore Sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott

The NYT did one of their “Overlooked No More” obits for her in 2019, and in part:

She organized women to form the Club From Nowhere, a clandestine group that prepared savory meals (fried chicken sandwiches, fried fish, pork chops, greens, lima beans) and baked goods (peach pie, poundcakes) and sold them out of their homes, in local establishments and at protest meetings.

In a 1986 interview in “Eyes on the Prize,” the award-winning PBS documentary about the civil rights movement, Gilmore elaborated on the club and its name: “We decided that the peoples on the South Side would get a club, and the peoples on the West Side would get a club, and so we decided that we wouldn’t name the club anything, we’d just say it was the Club From Nowhere.”