Is real food scratch cooking just too hard to do? Most people think so. And they’re aren’t talking about some of the more labor intensive or time consuming things you could do as a from-scratch cook either. Mostly people are talking about things a fifties housewife commonly did like bake a cake from a mix, frying chicken, or squeezing fresh orange juice. A depression-era housewife would have done all of these things and more like gardening and canning but without the modern appliances. She would be crazy jealous of all the appliances women commonly had in the fifties. And this fifties era housewife would marvel at all she could get done with the tools we can get at far less expense that a fifties household would have paid.

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Looking for some inexpensive practical kitchenware? Stuff that looks quaint and will survive a nuclear holocaust? Comes in a very wide variety of sizes and shapes? Need a cheap hobby? Vintage Pyrex is the answer for all your varied needs! Vintage Pyrex bowls, casserole dishes, plates, platters, cups, mugs and refrigerator dishes are hard to damage, are so cute you’ll just want to pinch their little glass cheeks, and collecting them will provide hours of cheap entertainment making it a fun hobby to boot!

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If you find cooking a frustrating thing there is a very good chance that the cookware you have has an awful lot to do with it. Thin stainless pans and hand-me-down cookware make cooking so much harder than it has to be.

Now, I’m no great cook nor did I ever plan to devote enough attention to cooking to reach such a lofty level of skill. Rather I’m a good enough cook so ordinary cookware looked fine to me. I started out cooking with what I could find that wasn’t too expensive and seemed reasonably healthy. For me that meant stainless steel pans bought mostly at grocery store sales. But in the process of changing from a novice to a good enough cook I learned that cast iron both plain and enameled are so much more forgiving of an absent-minded cook like me! They are so much easier to clean and care for and if carefully selected they last essentially forever making them the most frugal choice over the long term.

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Want to cover up your ferments with something other than a towel and a clip? I’ve been doing more fermenting this summer and experimenting with my new little Pickl-It jars. With all these jars out in my little kitchen, well things look more cluttered. And I’ve been concerned that my rather thin little towels just weren’t cutting it in the keeping the jars dark department. So I decided to try to reproduce something similar to a jar cover I remember from the Pickl-It site last year.
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