Making Muesli

A few weeks ago, during a weekly grocery shopping trip, I picked up some muesli cereal instead of our usual raisin bran. Oscar loved the stuff so much that I decided to take it to the next level and have Oscar make his own! It seemed like a really good self-guided cooking activity, since it's pretty hard to mess up the ingredient ratios.

Part One of this activity involved a trip down the bulk food section of our favorite grocery store. Oscar picked out the oatmeal, a seed (sunflower), a nut (pecan), and a dried fruit (apple). I chose some flax seed and hemp hearts to add, as well. Oscar also had the job of writing the product bin numbers on the tags, which proved to be a valuable exercise in making sure his 2's and 5's were facing in their proper directions.

The next morning at home, we got our ingredients and utensils out.

Mini bamboo cutting board from T.J. Maxx, child scissors, small stirring spoon from Wegmans 

It would have been nice to have all the ingredients mise en place, but we don't have a dishwasher, and I didn't want to be handwashing a million bowls afterwards. So we did the infinitely less aesthetically appealing thing and scooped directly out of the plastic store bags.

One really cool thing about Oscar's choice of dried apples is that we had to cut them up before adding them to the mix! Oscar had a lot of fun with this.

We also added coconut and cinnamon, which we already had at home, to the mix. I was pretty impressed with how well Oscar's ingredient ratios turned out-- the largest proportion was oatmeal, with a smattering of the rest of the ingredients. I did measure out the cinnamon for him, as well as stop him after he added almost an entire cup of flax seeds to the mix (helloooooo fiber!), but other than that, he had complete creative license over the muesli.

We've been eating well for breakfast this week, and I'm looking forward to when we try this again!

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?

Downright Domesticity DIY: magnetic spice rack!

Since we ended up renewing our lease for another year, we have decided to really make our little apartment liveable. In Oklahoma, we fell into the trap of looking at our apartment as just a temporary place to stay... and three years later, we were still living in a bland, crowded, dorm-like space. As Adam and I packed up the house and prepared to move, we agreed that we would decorate and home-ify EVERY space we lived in thereafter, whether we were there for six years or six months.

This past year, we did a great job with the living room/dining room/kitchen area, but the den was a wreck and we never got around to getting little necessities around the house (like a toothbrush holder). So when we renewed our lease, I made a little home decorating wish-list, and I've been trying to tackle at least one thing a week.

First up... a magnetic spice rack!

 They stick right to the fridge!

Labels on the side...

Incredibly strong neodymium magnets glued to the top.

A word about the magnets. Every tutorial I found was vague on these magnets, so I was kind of shooting blind when I ordered them. I got the 1/2" x 1/8" magnets from here. If I could do it over again, I'd get magnets that are at least 1/4" thick, because the jar tops dip inward more than 1/8". I had a problem getting some of the heavier jars to stay put on the fridge until I stacked some of the magnets on top of each other so they could actually touch the fridge. If I had realized this earlier, I probably could have gotten away with using fewer magnets. But it is definitely a testament to the neodymium magnet's crazy strength that some of those jars are held in place without having a magnet physically touching the refrigerator!

4-oz Ball jelly jars (12-pack) -- $8

50 neodymium magnets-- $17

Gorilla glue-- $2

Reclaiming my cupboards from all those spices-- TOTALLY WORTH IT!!!

Linked to Works for We Wednesday at We Are THAT Family!

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)

The Great Kitchen Re-Do

I did something terribly Downright Domestic the other day. It all started innocently enough. The coffee pot for my nifty coffee maker/espresso machine has been broken for a while, so I decided to get the coffee maker out of the way to free up some space in the kitchen. Our kitchen has a ton of counter space, as far as apartments go, but I was always bumping into something when using a rolling pin, and having two people working on something at once was impossible. No "Honey-Do's" were possible at my house! (and DH was glad)

Long story short, after I got the coffee maker out of the kitchen and noticed all the fine space newly available, I couldn't stop! I rearranged all the counter space, with its various and assorted items, until everything was as streamlined and convenient as could possibly be. I can finally reach inside the canisters that previously required contortions. The knife block is right next to the area(!) where I actually chop things up(!). I had a CD player in the kitchen for those long nights of scrubbing dishes-- with an accompanying disheveled heap of CD's. No more! Now (and I really wish I could show you pictures, but for some reason, the computer isn't reading my camera chip! Grrrr), the CD's are inside a box, with the CD player on top. The microwave has been banished to a corner, leaving lots of free space for two people to work on things ("Oh, Honeeeeeeey....").

I love love LOVE it! I would encourage anybody to take a look at her kitchen and take stock. Are there any little frustrations with the setup? Is there anything that can be moved, or even put in a cupboard to free up some space? Are things in the general area where they are used? (potholders and utensils near the stove, canisters near the area where batters are made) Just a minor rearrangement can make a world of difference!