My favorite ways to reuse aluminum foil

Well, I am failing fantastically at NaBloPoMo, but here I am again! I thought it would be easier to get a post out if I just wrote out something short and sweet, so here it is!

I try to reduce the waste we produce around here, but sometimes, when the choice is between being eco-friendly or sane, I choose the latter. For example: cookie sheets. Cleaning cookie sheets is a major pain here because the kitchen sink is so tiny, so maneuvering a cookie sheet to scrub it usually sends water streaming all over the counters and the floor. It's a messy process. So I used to put off cleaning the cookie sheets, and I'd have a bunch of dirty cookie sheets hanging around, taking up valuable counter space. Eventually, to save my sanity, I started using a fair amount of aluminum foil in my cooking, so that cleaning the cookie sheets just involved lifting out the foil lining and maybe doing a quick rinse.

I feel bad about the extra consumption, so I try to make the foil do double duty before it gets tossed. Here are two of my favorite ways:

• Scouring non-stick pans. Sprinkle some baking soda in the dish, wad up some tin foil, and scrub away! It's safe on teflon, yet removes all the encrusted stuff easily. Maybe I should just learn to be a better cook and stop making stuff stick to the pan, but this is my go-to cleaning method for now!
• Catching cooking grease. Line a bowl with a sheet of foil, and use it to hold the cooking grease you pour off meat. Once it's cooled to a solid, you can just lift the whole thing out and toss it.

So those are my two trusty methods to reusing aluminum. However, I almost always have extra foil to use, so I'm open to more suggestions! Have any more ideas?

Wax Removal

Aaaaaaaaand I'm back from a nearly three-week hiatus! I haven't been home enough lately to be Downright Domestic, because I'm pretty sure my manager at work is trying to kill me. Lol. According to my little Sitemeter, however, nobody's been by here anyway, so everything's good. ;-)

One homey thing I did do the other day was remove wax from a doily. Apparently, my husband is so fascinated by watching wax melt that he will let it flow freely over any doilies in its path. *smacks forehead* After picking at it, freezing it, and searching the internet in vain for solutions (for some reason, removing wax from doilies is not a hot topic!), I threw the doily in a pot of boiling water, changing the water from time to time. Eventually, the wax melted off! Hooray! All in a day's work!

On a side note, does anybody know how to remove wax from a pan? :-D

Cleaning with FlyLady

One thing that has been so helpful to me lately is FlyLady's website. You would think that a 700-square foot apartment wouldn't even have room to get messy, right? Then you've never lived with me or my hubby, both of whom are Messy People! 

I had been living under the false notion that it was pretty much impossible to work nearly-full-time and be a housekeeper, as well. And I'm not going to lie, even with FlyLady, it's still difficult! If you have any spare maids, send them my way! ;-) However, what I love about FlyLady is that it makes housework manageable and seeks to make my house cleaner through little changes in habits! Now that's what I'm talking about!

Some of her advice I don't follow. I just... can't... wear shoes... in the house! Some of her advice made me think, "Are you for real???" but when I followed it, it made things so much better! One thing I'm thinking about in particular is shining the kitchen sink. It sounds kind of harebrained, but I've noticed that I really can't shine the sink without also washing the dishes and clearing the counters. This all takes me 5-10 minutes every night. Voila, instant clean kitchen!

The thing I like the best about this method is that it's extremely low-pressure. FlyLady says (to loosely quote her), "The house did not get messy overnight, so don't try to get it clean overnight!" How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time! How do you clean the house? One little task at a time!

I'm very interested in hearing from anybody else who uses the FlyLady approach to housekeeping. I've only been doing this for a couple weeks, and have had success so far, but I'd like to know what people a few months into "FlyLady"-ing have to say.

WFMW-- Handy Recipe Helper

Graciously hosted by Rocks In My Dryer.

Ahhh, sticky tack. Its uses have matured with me. That wonderful substance reminds me of Sunday School giving charts (why was the fifth-grade class "thermometer" always higher than my class-- except for when I was actually in fifth grade myself? Hmph), and later on held any thing I ever hung on my dorm wall in college.





Come to find out, it has also become very handy in my post-dorm days: namely, for keeping the recipe I'm currently working on from getting covered in oil, obscured by a flour bag, or just getting lost. Any cupboard will do!




Works for Me! (and for my recipes, too)

Cleaning the house made easy!- or at least more manageable

Howdy! In a nice irony, I am taking a break from cleaning the house to tell you exactly what I do to clean the house. Of course, if you had seen the mountain of dishes that I just tackled, you would understand why I deserve the break!

Speaking of mountains, that is pretty much how the whole apartment looks until I finally just up and clean the durn place. It is pretty intimidating to clean the WHOLE place in one day, but this is what I do to make molehills out of those mountains:

1. Turn on some good music.

2. Get a timer, set it for thirty minutes, and clean the worst room in the house.

3. When the half hour is up, go to the next worst room. It doesn't matter if room #1 didn't get spotless. Just go! Repeat steps 1-3.

I like this system because this way, Perfectionism will not keep me in one room for the entire day.  And the house ends up at least a little better than it was, if not completely clean. And I find that many parts don't even take half an hour! Sometimes I'll see how many rooms I can do in thirty minutes!

I just have a little apartment, so the half-hour time is perfect for me. I can get the whole house looking great in a couple of hours. For those fortunate to have a real house with more rooms, you could adjust the time to fifteen minutes. Or ten. Whatever it takes.

Well, I suppose it's time to tackle a new room. My husband's going out for a while, so I'm also going to surprise him some of his favorite tea. Shhhh.