Small Batch Lard

Lard is a healthy fat, much underrated in the 21st century. It’s one of the few – if not the only – cooking fats you can create yourself at home with standard kitchen implements.

People who buy their pork by the half-pig render large volumes of lard all at once. But most people don’t buy pig by the wheelbarrow – they buy it a few pounds at a time from the grocery store or butcher. This small batch lard tutorial is aimed at regular people who collect pork fat bit by bit.

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Best Bucket Gifts of 2013

I like to hunt for Christmas gift ideas on Amazon’s bestsellers lists. You can be assured that items on the list are good quality for a good price, and you can get a second and third opinion by reading the reviews.

This year I searched “buckets” in the bestseller list to see if I could find anything worth mentioning. And I found an embarrassment of variety! Here are some of the best.

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SD Card Storage

When you buy nails, screws, hooks or many other types of hardware, pay attention to the case they come in. This compartmentalized organizer can be used to store all your flash memory so you’ll never lose it again!

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I emptied the above box of nails years ago, and I’ve employed the case in holding all the USB and SD flash memory I’ve accumulated since.

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Saving and Using Leftover Coffee

It’s easy to overlook coffee when it costs just pennies a mug. But consider: for each cup, a coffee bean and 99 of its cousins must journey halfway around the world to be hulled, roasted and ground. The water must be purified to historic levels, heated, then dripped through. So it’s a damn shame when even part of that effort gets washed down the drain.

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Old coffee might seem to worthless to save, but just as with many money saving ideas, a little bit each day snowballs into a lot over time. But pennies saved are not the only reason to start saving those swigs in a container in the fridge… Continue reading