The best entertainment is free

Open Source Music: The Green Tightwad has recently discovered musopen.com, a resource of music recordings and sheet music, all of it in the public domain.

Its motto is "free access to music anywhere in the world."

I happened to hear a Brahms recording on WETA (the classical music station in DC) that I wasn't familiar with, and my wife and I liked it so we waited until the end for the announcer to identify the music. It turned out to be Brahms' Double Concerto in A Minor, Opus 102. Lo and behold, it's also on musopen. You don't have to pay for a music download. The version on musopen is played by the Skidmore College Orchestra. (In 2006, Newsweek/Kaplan identified Skidmore as a 'New Ivy,' an elite school providing an excellent education outside of the Ivy League, according to musopen.)

I have embedded the Brahms double concerto on my blog, just to give you a sample.





So the next time you need music for, say, your wedding, check if it's on musopen. Musopen has done some terrific things. According to Arstechtnica, musopen "has recently rolled out a new version of its web site, added freely-downloadable sheet music, and raised enough cash to professionally record the entire set of 32 Beethoven piano sonatas and place them in the public domain." Three cheers for Aaron Dunn, who started the site when he was in college. Donations, of course, are welcome.

Videos from PBS are now online: The Public television Service today launched its new video portal that allows online viewers to stream an array of its best-known shows over the Web. Pretty much the entire universe of PBS is now available online! You can watch programs in their entirety, just like Ian McKellen in King Lear, which was just broadcast some weeks ago.

These are just some of the shows available just one click away:

• American Masters
• Antiques Roadshow
• FRONTLINE
• Great Performances
• Masterpiece Theater
• NOVA

Small change, big savings

This "Small Change" column in the Washington Post by Ylan Mui and Nancy Trejos, is chock full of good ideas. For examples, ever wonder what you can do with the condiment packets when you order Chinese food? Make “Condiment Packets Pulled Pork”:

Take two to three pounds of boneless country style ribs, which you can find on sale at local grocery stores for 99 cents a pound, and place it in a baking dish. Sprinkle the pork on both sides with salt and pepper. Mix two packets of hot mustard sauce with two packets of sweet and sour sauce and massage into both sides of the pork. Mix three packets of soy sauce and two packets of ketchup and pour over the pork. Cover the baking dish with aluminum foil and bake at 275 degrees for 90 minutes. After 90 minutes, remove the foil and turn the pork. Re-cover and bake for another 90 minutes. Shred the pork with a fork and eat it as is or serve it on bread or rolls. You can also serve it with packets of barbeque sauce. It feeds three to four people.

They also clue us in to a website called Feedthemasses.org, a how-to-guide on inexpensive dinners. Their secret: They don't have recipes. They have principles.

• Burn your Cookbooks. Don’t look at a recipe and create a shopping list of items you won’t use again. There’s probably a lot you can do with what you already have in your fridge. Or with what you can get on sale at your local grocery store. “Mario Batali doesn’t know what’s on sale at your grocery store this week,” Christina said.
• Stock Your Kitchen: Keep your basic cooking supplies around: Olive oil, vegetable oil, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, soy sauce, honey, flour, brown sugar, corn starch, baking soda and powder, and yeast. Also have eggs, canned tomatoes, frozen vegetables, garlic, olives, dried fruit, nuts, beans, pasta and rice. You can get a lot of these supplies for much less at ethnic grocery stores. A tiny bottle of curry powder that is $4 at the supermarket is $6.99 a pound at the Indian grocery store. Pick up some pine nuts and chili paste at the Korean market, some chorizo at the Mexican bodega, and some goat from the Pakistani halal butcher.
• Stop wasting perfectly good food. Christina threw a party on Election night 2008. One of the desserts she served was banana bread, which she made with overly ripe bananas she had lying around her kitchen. “Never waste bananas,” Christina told me. Remember, she said, you can freeze food. “Peel, chop, grate, or dice into a convenient form, stick in a bag and toss in the freezer,” Christina wrote on her blog. “Then you’ll have frozen fruit anytime you want a smoothie, sliced peaches for cobbler, apples for pie. When you want to make zucchini fritters later, you’ll have grated zucchini ready to go.”
• Grow and make your own. Save the bones and make your own chicken or beef stock which generally costs $3 for 32 ounces. Christina said she makes a 10-quart pot of stock for less than $3 in ingredients. Even though she lives in a small apartment in D.C., she grows her own herbs outside her windowsill. She also makes her own salad dressings, marinades, hummus and a variety of sauces. “You just have to use a little creativity and imagination,” she said.