Alexandra Malecki

My primary purpose of my GAMCOD plot was to complete 2 BBs: BB: build a j-tube style season extender in a hugelkultur and build a hugelkultur 7 feet tall and 12 feet long

The secondary purpose was to fulfill the GAMCOD requirements. As such, my strategy wasn't optimized to minimize cost/labor and maximize growth. To sum it up, I'd say that my plot was a bit experimental in how it was planted, I didn't do as diligent of a job harvesting in a timely manner since I was offsite more than onsite, I failed to weigh all of the food before eating it every time, and I didn't try very hard to prevent the animals from eating it (building a fence was out of scope). I didn't include the labor of those in the community who irrigated my garden for me while I was away.

I've submitted 13 photos and 65 videos of my GAMCOD submission (some videos are still uploading).

My costs and harvest weights are accurate but my labor times are estimated:

Wow, Mike! I really like how you emphasized traditional/ancestral skills. Two things come to mind:
1) I was just reading about how the rubber tree changed the course of history. I recall when I was in school/visited the Ford museum in FL, I didn't fully appreciate the impact of this in terms of our recent human evolution. Last night, it occurred to me that only a mere 4 generations removed from my son, there didn't exist cars (or at least it was a rare sight). Only four generations ago, we depended on horse and buggies to get around. It's rather quite sad to reflect on how much knowledge has been lost in only 4 generations.
2) The art of willow basketry has also been lost due to the discovery and manufacturing of plastics. With the anticipation of exhausting fossil fuels, I wonder if humans as a species will be able to adapt back to our sustainable ways with so much knowledge lost. edited to add: it's not just knowledge but a re-adaptation to inconvenience and discomfort.

Lina -- thank you! I had hoped to share more about my better half and my kids on this thread but I'm afraid I haven't done it justice. A few days ago my husband and I were discussing what our next steps are because we had anticipated a certain outcome that hasn't come to fruition. One thing he mentioned that really struck me was that, we need to still make a change to our living situation in the city or else my "skills will stagnate". I'm not sure what our next steps are but I plan to capture it here.

Rebekah Harmon wrote:And now, my friends, I have passed 1 million calories by 1,771!

YAHOO!! I'VE OFFICIALLY PRESERVED ONE MILLION CALORIES!🕺🤸‍♀️🏋‍♀️

Wow!! You have documented an incredible amount of food preserved and sourced! I remember one time you even cycled to a local food pickup; that was so cool!!

Congratulations on this accomplishment! I wonder, in hindsight, what do you wish you had known at the onset?

Last year, my good friend Ally took a willow basketry class and gifted me the first willow basket that she made!! I still think she was crazy to give it to me!! I love the basket so much that I wore the handle out and replaced it with a recycled leather handle. It's just so cute:



Now that I have extra time for projects, I'm getting really excited about harvesting willow to make more baskets and maybe even a willow backpack! There's a really great willow patch with first year growth by her house that we've harvested from a few times and I look forward to going back again soon to harvest and hang!



I've been scouting a few spots around town to find some contrasting colors to add to the baskets and my kids alternate who'd going to tag along to help harvest:



Just prior to Paul's latest youtube live call - link to patreon early access, I decided that it was time to remount my hand-planed hooks to hang all of my baskets:



I previously didn't plan to re-mount those coat hooks to the walls because I wasn't planning on sticking around this house much longer. Now I'll need to patch the holes - which isn't a big deal. However, given that I can't control the future and I suspect that we'll be here for a while, it was a gift to myself to make my baskets accessible.

Yesterday, we met my sister out for a hike and I was impressed that she was willing to sample some wild fare: watercress. What a delightful, pungent flavor. It's obviously in the nasturtium family and related to brassicas with that sulphuric flavor.



I'm just going to call this limited post good before I get distracted by placing basketry book holds in at the library....

Almost exactly a year ago, I picked up deer roadkill. I don't have a meat grinder so I stuffed my freezer with the (unground) grind meat to figure out what to do with it at a later time. I've been so preoccupied over the last year with getting to PEP2 that I wasn't able to give attention to this unfinished (and unexpected) project. I decided that I wanted to make pemmican with it. So I dulled about half of my knives to cut all of the meat against the grain, marinaded it using this recipe, specifically option 3, and then dehydrated it at 160degF. The venison is so tasty and this is the last of it. I hope to find more roadkill soon!




A few days ago, I used a paper towel to clean up tallow from a mold. I tried to make pucks of tallow but the tallow didn’t harden enough to separate cleanly from the mold. This experiment was a lot to clean up. I love using these oil clothes as firestarter and I hope to have a wood heated home in the near future to make use of the firestarters I've been saving because I can't just throw it away.



I have now preserved 29 jars of applesauce and 7 jars of dried apples. I can fill 4 quart jars of sauce per batch and it takes 3 trays of dried apples to fill one jar. Then I need to immediately hide the jars or else it disappears into bellies! After 3 weeks of apple processing, the kids and I can tag-team this and get a batch done within 75mins, including the cleanup, but not including the simmering/tending of the sauce or flipping the apple slices drying.






Due to the added energy demands of datacenters, our energy utility/city council opted to increase our energy rates on Mon-Fri 5-9p. This has caused me to do as much of my cooking earlier in the day and turn off unnecessary appliances by 5p. I was just talking to my friend about how I wish I had a solar dehydrator. In the winter, I don't mind using the oven to also warm my house but it also seems ridiculous that I'm using an oven instead of the sun.
--I plan to build a solar dehydrator in 2026. I'm not sure where or whether it could be designed to be moved since I don't plan to stay at this house. I would like a way to dehydrate a huge volume of food without using electricity.

This summer, I traveled so frequently, that I wasn't able to ferment as much food as I'd like. I found myself spending so much $$$ for kimchi and kraut at the store because I just wasn't home to monitor the crock. I find that if the cabbage is overfermented and mushy, no one enjoys eating it. So, 3 weeks ago I finally got back to my fermentations! The first batch was a caraway kraut. Now that this batch is bottled, I currently have all of my apple scraps from all of the processing to make vinegar. I froze the rest of the apple scraps because I have enough for ~6 batches in this 5qt open crock.

Nancy Reading wrote:I can understand what you mean about involving your family. The way SKIP is set up is for individuals to prove their worth, but as you say you come as a package too. IF PEP3 isn't feasible, you could always pick and choose which aspects you want to do as a family and do them together. You wouldn't get certified, but would have a lot of fun and develop together. By logging the adventures on a project thread, you can still point to the evidence for future Otis' consideration.

At this time, I plan to just post about things that my family and I are doing regardless of whether it's a BB or not. I'm not looking to get anything more certified so I don't think it makes sense to post in the SKIP forum. I thought that I could just post about my family and I on this thread, similar to the BEL. I made it to PEP2 and I don't have an Otis. I think I need to pivot and market myself in a different way. My hope is to show Otis's that I'm a real* person with a real* family. *With personalities, values, priorities, etc. I wonder if an Otis would be interested in these factors as equally important as the fact that I can follow instructions and do hard things.  I think about how Paul puts himself out there so that other people know who he is and can then decide to pass or stick around. I'm thinking that I have to give this a try because it would be good for me to get out of my comfort zone and market myself.

Nancy Reading wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but do you put talllow butter on your body or cook with it? :rolling: Maybe start a new thread telling your secrets!

I use it for cooking and to make a whipped tallow butter. There was already a thread on tallow, so I just added to it, take a look: Tallow Thread

I'm currently in the process of making pemmican; my first attempt. It's basically tallow, meat powder, and other flavors (berries/nuts) for long-term preservation. I'll add to that thread when I've finished making it!

I like using tallow for cooking and for making lotion. Since a lot of people covered the cooking part above, I'll mention my (experimental) process for making a whipped tallow butter.

***It's most important to source high quality suet!! What I mean is suet from animals that lived a healthy life. I prefer suet from biodynamic beef but the suet I just used (that you'll see in the below photos) came from my friend's goat herd (specifically a goat named scroto baggins) and I know how well they treat and care for their goats. Your sourcing options and access will be different from mine but I don't recommend using the suet unless you KNOW how that animal lived. A lot of toxins are stored in fat.

1) I cut up the suet into small pieces, add it to a pot of boiling water and boil the suet until the tallow separates from the rinds. I separate the solids from the liquids and then let the liquids cool down in a bowl with tapered sides. I do this in the morning to allow the liquids to slowly cool throughout the day. Just before bed, I put the bowl in the fridge. If it's cold outside then the hot-cold cycles can be hastened.

2) In the morning, I'll remove the hardened disc of tallow from the bowl and skim the bottom of it. It's now been clarified once and will still have a meaty-smell.

This batch was so large I had to alternate the cycles and use two large, tapered bowls.


3) I then repeat the boiling process of tallow and water, then cool down and scrape. I do this at least 8 times or until there's nothing visible to scrape off.


When I know I've finished clarifying the tallow:



For the whipped tallow butter part:
option 1) whip the tallow until it has stiff peaks and the color is very white. simple and done.


option 2) add essential oils for (mostly) aromatic qualities. Then finish with option 1.
I use an aromatherapy book to provide guidance on blending top, medium, and low aromatic notes (my friend is pictured below doing the blending).


option 3) infuse a carrier oil (like EVOO) with herbs, like calendula, chamomile, plantain, etc that have skin healing qualities. After straining the herbs out of the hot infusion (bake at 180degF for 12hrs). I blend ~25% carrier oil to ~75% tallow by weight. Then finish with option 1.


option 4) do option 3, then option 2, then option 1. My preference to optimize the healing qualities.

I personally like adding rose hip SEED oil to tighten the skin. This anti-aging serum by BioMed Balance made a really fantastic batch without needing to figure out the aromatic profile.



I then store the whipped tallow balm in the fridge until I gift it (there's no way I can use all of this in a year!!). I don't use anything else on my skin (besides my homemade salves) and it's become very popular amongst my friends and family.


My daughter, friend, and I recently made our own batches and these are the numbers we used:

This is a badge bit (BB) that is part of the PEP curriculum.  Completing this BB is part of getting the sand badge in Food Prep and Preservation


In this Badge Bit, you will make a soup or stew or pottage or chowder. Basically, you're going to be cooking food in liquid. You can do this in a pressure cooker, slow cooker, haybox cooker, or stovetop or even oven. Throw your desired ingredients in your desired liquid (tomato sauce, broth, milk) and cook it!





Here are some great permies threads about soup:
Free and Frugal Soup

Fresh Fava Soup

Vegan Pho Noodle Soup Recipe

Favourite Bone Broth Recipes (Has recipe for egg drop soup and french onion soup)

Cooking with Dry Beans and Peas

Nanny's Chicken and Dumplings

Portuguese Lunch--Sopa Alentejana

I find it useful to find out common seasonings.ingredient combos for a region, and use those to season my soups. The flavors are complimentary, and even if you don't have them all, they'll generally work well together:

Chicken Soup: Carrots, chicken (or other poultry), maybe peas, onions, garlic, thyme, oregano, rosemary, basil, parsley, celery/lovage, marjoram.

Asian/Pho/Chinese Soup: We can't have soy sauce, but I've found that mixing ginger, garlic, green onions (if I have them) with salt and a bit of pepper and maybe honey makes for a very nice substitute. I like to use chicken or pork or eggs as meat. Peas and carrots work well, too. So do green leafy veggies. Beef+brocoli is also a good combo.

Moraccan-style Soup: Lamb or beef, with dates/figs/apricots. Carrots and potatoes make good fillers. Cumin+cinnamon+garlic+ginger+turmeric+paprika

Mexican Style: Beef or pork or chicken. Stewed tomatoes, corn, beans, rice, peppers.  Oregano+garlic+paprika+onion+chili/cayanne pepper. Cilantro, avocado

My soup combos are NOT probably authentic, but they work together. At least, well enough for my family to enjoy eating it! I suggest looking at a bunch of recipes for what type of soup you want, and using the most common ingredients!


To complete this BB, the minimum requirements are:
  - should serve at least 2 people (leftovers!)
  - ingredients are not pre-processed (no can-of-whatever soup or preshredded cheese, for example)
  - no microwave

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must:
  - post a rough recipe of what you put in your soup/stew/chowder/pottage
  - post a picture of you preparing some of the ingredients (chopping herbs or carrots, for example)
  - post a picture of your ingredients in their cooking vessel
  - post a picture of your finished soup!

Clarifications:
- All food prep and preservation BBs strictly prohibit plastic, teflon or aluminum touching the food at any point

Yes, I see. Thanks for the suggestion!  I'm unsure what I'm going to do just yet but working with the SKIP team makes sense.

Hello Joylynn, thank you for your reply!! It means a lot to get feedback that what I'm posting matters.

Funny you should mention doing PEP3 as a family made me wonder if I could just post what I do on a day to day basis similar to the BEL. Would it matter if I posted here or in a BB? If I post here then it's more of a narrative, a story. I'm curious what you think? It's my SKIP story in a way for someone to get to know me and my family.