A Manual for New Homeowners

This week we hand off our house to new owners. In recent days I have been putting together an online manual for the buyers to make it easier for them to settle in.

The Consequences of Being Too Paperless

A few years ago we decided we would eliminate as much paper as possible.

Eliminating paper has been a satisfying but imperfect journey.

Our records are available to us when we travel, we no longer have a filing cabinet. 100% of our tax records, including receipts, are electronic and meet Internal Revenue Service standards.

However, along the way, we inadvertently tossed out the titles to our cars. We have scans, but a scan is not sufficient to complete a transfer of ownership.

In 2003 we purchased a BMW 3 Series car. It's the most (so-called) "refined" car we've ever owned, but ownership has been absurdly expensive.

Now, the engine won't turn over: it's time to donate it to Newgate School, a nonprofit that trains auto mechanics. If our experience is typical, the trainees, will make a good living repairing BMW cars.

Letting Go of the Big Stuff

We're not getting any younger. It's time to move from our home of 25 years to a condo where stairs are optional, and maintenance is someone else's responsibility.

Initially, we are leasing a place with less than half the floor area of our house while our condo is being built. We've been getting rid of much of our "big stuff."

You Can't Always Get What You Want

On Monday morning I cycled with my partner, Dwight, on his commute to work. He took the turnoff for work, I continued on to the town of Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka, 18 miles west of our home

On Excelsior's main drag, I noticed the yellow tile shown in the photograph at the top of this post. This tile connects the present-day restaurant to Bacon Drug that occupied this building from 1955 to 1993. Here, in 1964, there was a fateful encounter between Mick Jagger, who had performed at a local amusement park the previous evening, and local savant, "Mr. Jimmy."

Framing the Future

Today I came across some of my deceased aunt's papers: degree certificates and an insurance policy.

The policy covered two fur coats and a mink stole, total declared value UK£270 in 1965, circa UK£4,700 (US$6,000) in 2017.

She saved the papers for my safekeeping, presumably in perpetuity. I'll scan, catalog, then shred them.

The Zen of Empty Shelves

My material needs for a month or two fit into a small backpack, end-on in an aircraft's overhead bin.

I find it satisfying to carefully select what I'm going to pack in my 35-liter backpack before heading out of town for a few weeks. I now want that same compact, lightweight, self-sufficient feeling with our stuff in our home.

A Constant Supply of Fresh Spices

Time, light, oxygen, and heat are enemies of spices.

Enemy	The Problem	Mitigations
Time	I suspect the typical spice rack harbors spices from the last millennium.	Buy tiny quantities, use within one year. For spices you use rarely, buy enough for one meal.
Light	Spice jars are usually transparent and sit on a rack on the counter or wall.	Store in a dark place.
Oxygen	Eventually a spice jar contains more oxygen than spice.	Store in small plastic bags, squeeze out any air. Buy whole rather than ground spices. This greatly reduces the exposed surface area.
Heat	A warm place (e.g., next to an oven or above a range) might be seen as a convenient spot for storing spices.	Store spices away from heat sources.

How to Dispose of Unwanted Money

Tomorrow I'll be stopping at the post office to drop off a box filled with foreign coins and banknotes.

Last year, at Newcastle International Airport, I showed my nephews an easier way to dispose of foreign currency. I led them to a big, bubble-shaped currency donation bin, then handed them some UK coins. As you can see in the picture at the top of this post, they were happy to perform The Disposal. 

They didn't think to rush over to a concession to buy candy with their new-found wealth. I'm grateful they want to help others.

I was thinking about this coin-drop the other day as I was sorting through my collection of leftover foreign currency. I always tell myself the money will be useful "the next time I go."

Our Personal Kitchen Assistant

Welcomed Google Assistant into our home.
Me: OK Google, cook dinner.
The Google: Sorry, I can't help you with that. pic.twitter.com/Yo9BbdB5NH

— Tom Wilson (@TomPhase3) November 30, 2016

This week we welcomed a personal assistant into our home. Or, to be more precise, FedEx delivered a Google Assistant.

It's a stubby, round box you plug into the wall. It listens for our commands and talks to us via surprisingly good speakers. It connects to Google services over WiFi.

It sits in a corner of our kitchen and has already changed how we do things.

We've eliminated the need for a paper groceries list. Instead we keep a list in Google Keep, an application I use frequently for quick notes.

Immersion Blender

We have a simple rule in our kitchen: if we buy a new piece of equipment, something has to go.

We go a long way with good knives and a couple decent pots, and we don't use many gadgets. But I do like my immersion blender, and have been using it for over ten years. 

I can make a creamy soup in a few minutes from ingredients in the freezer:

Stock (see previous post)
Mirepoix (see previous post)
Leftover roasted vegetables (e.g., carrots, sweet potatoes, squash)
A spoonful of tomato paste (for acid, color, umami)
Salt and pepper

I just heat all this up, then blend right in the pot. The result is better than canned.

I never make the same soup twice. For example, spices, or fresh ginger (stored in the freezer), or garlic move the soup around the world.

Other dishes I make with the immersion blender include eggplant dip and a surprisingly good banana chocolate "ice cream." The "ice cream" is actually:

Bananas, a little past their prime, saved in the freezer, thawed slightly
A couple good heaps of cocoa powder
A small amount of milk to help everything to grip while it is being blended

Cleanup is minimal compared to the mess made transferring liquids to a countertop blender.

Mirepoix

I like to cook from scratch, but some days I simply want to assemble previously cooked ingredients.

The solution is to have a selection of "subassembly" ingredients in the freezer. I've written about one of these ingredients: stock. Another is mirepoix.

Freakin' Cheap: Almost-Free Homemade Stock

Risottos, soups, and gravies taste best when they're made with homemade stock. I want to make these dishes quickly, but stock takes a long time to prepare. My solution is to make stock in bulk and freeze it.

My stock is basic, and varies from batch to batch depending on ingredients on hand. It provides a foundation of flavor and body.

I don't buy any of the ingredients specifically for stock, and I try to make the preparation as unfussy as possible.

Freakin' Cheap: Eliminating Unwanted Phone Calls

A few years ago we reached a tipping point with unwanted phone calls.

When the phone rang, it was usually a call we did not want to take: fundraisers punishing us for our previous gifts, pollsters, sales people, scammers.

Then I came up with a solution that for a one-time cost of less than $25 has eliminated all unwanted calls. Over the past 5 years our phone has not rung several thousand times.

Afraid of Eggplant No More

This is the best time of year for eggplant (aubergines) in Minnesota.

Several varieties of locally grown eggplant were available at my coop today, including usually hard-to-find Indian ("baby") eggplant and a long, skinny Asian variety. I was set on making Eggplant Parmigiana, so I chose the most common type: the large, dark ones.

Once upon a time the thought of cooking eggplant intimidated me. I never seemed to get it right, ending up with a greasy, unevenly textured dish.

Then I learned a method that has worked every time. The resulting dish is not greasy and is consistently tender with no tough bits. The secret is the initial preparation.

Freekin' Cheap: Free Landline Phone Service

Google Voice and a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) adapter give us free dial tone on all our landline phones.

Almost all calls within the US and Canada are free. International calls are near enough free.

We use our home landline phones the same way we have always used them. People continue to call our old landline phone number.

We've been using Google Voice since 2009. It has most of the features of regular POTS (plain old telephone service) and a few extras for people who like to travel. It emails voice mails, filters spam, and lets us have a single number for our home and cell phones.

It takes a few days to set everything up, but if you value saving around $4,000 over the next ten years, this is the way to go. There are five steps:

Freakin' Cheap: Free Telecom

The typical household pays north of $20,000 over ten years in landline, long distance, and mobile phone fees.

In our household, we pay almost nothing for these services.

There is a long history behind free telephone service. In the 1960's and 70's, phreaking was the art of hacking the public phone system using tone generators called blue boxes.

Zen and the Art of Casserole Assembly

Oh, the things I wish I'd known when I was young.

Take the ingredients for a basic bake pictured at the top of this post. They look simple enough but for me they represent small lessons learned over decades.

Our Traditional Tree

Life, Phase 3, is an opportunity to simplify. Simplification will become a necessity when, one day, we move from our current home to something more manageable.

Kale Chronicles

We grew kale this summer, so it has been our default vegetable for the past month.

Kale is extraordinarily easy to prepare. Here's a 20-second video (my first cooking show) showing how to quickly remove the stem and break up the leaf, all without the use of tools.