Solar Powered Outdoor Bathing and Soaking Grotto

I learned to love outdoor bathing during the year Widget Man and I spent in Mexico. For a month we lived on an isolated beach in the Yucatan, in a bamboo palapa with an outdoor shower. There was something so amazing about washing my hair every morning in the middle of a white sand beach, watching waves break on the coral reefs.

When we go camping, we try to reproduce the experience with a Sun Shower, which is just a plastic bladder with a show nozzle attached, that we hitch up to a tree limb. It holds five gallons of water and heats up amazingly fast if there's any sun around. What really amazes me is that we can both shower with a shared five gallons of water, once we learned not to dilly-dally.

We have low-flow showers in our house, but I can guarantee we use far more than two and half gallons of water, even when we try to move fast. I also love soaking in a hot tub of water at the end of the day. I hate to even think about how many gallons of water that uses.

So even though we don't live in a palapa anymore, and we don't have a white sand beach or an ocean to gaze at, we are setting up an outdoor bathing and soaking space, in the interests of water conservation and for the pure pleasure of bathing outside, in nature, under the sky.

It's solar heated and pumped, with a UV filter. If there's anything we have plenty of in Texas, it's sun, so the water gets as hot as we want it to. The barrel is from Snorkel Tubs and the solar pump and various components are from a dozen different solar power vendors.

Our plan is to add an outdoor shower, also with hot water from the solar panels, so that we can have a Japanese-style bathing and soaking grotto.

The tub is surrounded by grape vines, cedar, oaks, and a huge fig tree, on a terrace below our house, so it's completely private.

Fire Roasted Tomatoes

My San Antonio grandmother used to make a fresh batch of salsa for each meal. She'd stab a tomato onto a fork and hold it over the flames of her gas stove until the skin began blackening and curling away from the fruit. Then she mashed it in a mocajete, also called a mortar and pestle, with salt, spices, and chiles, and that would be a meal's worth of salsa.

I don't know anyone anymore who makes fresh salsa for each meal, although I'm sure there are still some who do (note to those who do: when's dinner?). But a quick roast on the grill or under the broiler adds an amazing flavor boost to canned tomatoes, sauces, and salsas.

Here's how:

First wash and remove stems. Then pop tomatoes on the grill or under a very hot broiler. After the tops turn crisp and brown (about 5 or six minutes), turn over and brown the other sides.

Let cool, then remove cores and most of the skin, leaving behind a bit of the browned skin. Now continue with canning or salsa/sauce making.

This batch is going into some canned salsa.

Recycling Bin

By recycling I mean stuff I'm going to use again, like newspapers and cardboard for weed mat in the garden. Since my house is small, and the kitchen is open to the living room, I don't have an out-of-sight space for unsightly things. So I went shopping in my garage and found this lidded basket to store the very small quantity of things for recycling. Actually, it's empty right now, since I use newspapers and cardboard as fast as I collect it. Since we don't get the paper, and rarely buy anything that comes in paper or cardboard, I have to collect junk on purpose for recycling.