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Posts Tagged ‘kitchen’

Do One Thing: Cheap find for drawer organization

Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 13, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.

Day 42: I picked up a Michael Graves drawer organizer, priced at $4 rather than the normal $10, at Dirt Cheap, which seems to have an unending supply of items from Target this winter. I had three small kitchen cabinet drawers filled with accessories and gadgets, all of which I use sometimes, but some of which I use ALL the time. And drawers are like handbags — the thing you need is always at the bottom under other things.

Now I have the stuff that I use all the time sorted into four little organized rows in a larger drawer. I moved the contents of the larger drawer (rolls of foil, plastic wrap, parchment paper, etc.) into two small drawers, and the third small drawer holds the things I use sometimes.

The three small drawers before organization.

 

(If you haven’t heard of Dirt Cheap, it’s an offshoot of Hudsons Salvage. When I was growing up in South Mississippi, Hudsons was known for selling what I called “disaster merchandise” from stores that had suffered fires or flood. Today, Hudsons and its offshoots, Treasure Hunt and Dirt Cheap, sell what’s known as “problem inventories,” which apparently include everything from closeout stock to seconds. Shopping at these stores is an adventure, to say the very least.)

Also this week:

Day 41: Filled all the liquid soap containers with liquid soap, then forgot to bring them upstairs for a whole 24 hours. But it’s the thought that counts, right? And your hands can’t be that dirty anyway.

Day 43: Sort of organized some school files I brought with me on a CD from my last job. This is the sort of task that makes Dropbox pretty appealing.

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Healthier eating: Sometimes, your taste buds know best

Posted in Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 5, 2011| Leave a Comment »

An interesting side effect of cutting back on my sugar intake and cooking most meals from scratch: I’ve started to really taste the sugar in manufactured foods. Store-bought spaghetti sauce tastes like it’s made of tomatoes and corn syrup. A brand of hummus that I used to buy frequently is now inedible; it’s bland, and what little garlic flavor I can sense is overwhelmed by a sugary chemical aftertaste.

Luckily, my husband’s Uncle Vinnie sent me his family pasta sauce recipe when we got married, and I’ve got a working and flexible hummus recipe that I can throw together pretty easily.

I was going to say that it’s a double-edged sword, when eating healthier and thriftier forces you to forgo shortcut products when you really could do with a few extra minutes out of the kitchen. My taste buds and common sense have convinced me, however, that things that taste this revolting aren’t useful shortcuts at all.

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Do One Thing: The cleansing burn of anger

Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.

Day 28: Clean angry. Choose a room. Get rid of anything that you don’t wear, don’t use or don’t love. Get rid of anything that doesn’t make you less angry. Get rid of anything that makes you angrier. If you start to feel less angry, go have another strong cup of coffee and remember why you were angry to begin with. Choose another room. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Previously this week:

Day 25: Chunked a couple of small, miscellaneous kitchen gadgets into the thrift-story bag. I can’t tell you what they were for. Seriously. Better to toss than to research, since I’ve lived without them for this long.

Day 26: Faced my true feelings for 3/4-length sleeves. I despise them, yet always seem to have a few in my closet. I was always a little tall and long-limbed as a child, and I sometimes had problems finding shirts with sleeves that were long enough. So, 3/4-length sleeves always make me feel like I should be tugging them toward my wrists. They’re gone now.

Day 27: I organized nothing, but I did go to a King Arthur Flour baking demonstration and might stand a chance of making a proper pie now. And pie makes any home nicer.

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Useful unitaskers: rare, but invaluable

Posted in CSA, Eats, Home, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 21, 2011| 3 Comments »

Today, a friend sent me a link to Unclutterer, a blog about getting organized. The posts preach minimalism: the less stuff you own, the less stuff you have to organize. Every Wednesday the site mocks “unitaskers,” items that only serve one function while taking up valuable space. These products are often the worst of the “as seen on TV” club, and invariably enable you to do things that you can easily do without them, such as washing your feet or cracking eggs.

I admitted earlier this week to owning my own unitasker, an awesome cappuccino maker that, after a scroll through Unclutterer to see the ridiculous things that other people own, I’m liking more and more. While preparing dinner tonight, however, I realized that I’m actually the proud owner of two more unitaskers, both of which I needed for the substantial amount of produce in my CSA:

  • The Oxo Good Grips Strawberry Huller, which pierces the strawberry, scoops out the hull and releases it in a couple of quick moves. Using a knife to cut out stems is tedious and a bit slow, and poking a straw into the center of each strawberry simply makes a mess and often doesn’t remove the entire stem. This unitasker is also small and easy to clean, so it stays.
  • The Oxo Good Grips Corn Stripper, which strips and collects corn kernels as you move it down the corn cob. Sure, it does what a good sharp knife will do, but it does it without making a huge mess. Stripping corn with a knife results in flying kernels. The easy-to-clean container on this gadget is what makes it worth having. Fill it with corn kernels, dump them out into a bowl, then start filling it again.

So, in my kitchen a unitasker must perform its task much better than other multitasking accessories can and it must be easy to clean. (In fairness, apparently it also must be an Oxo product or an Italian import.)

I have this paranoid idea that most unitasker products are given as gifts by people who are hating on the clean, efficiently run kitchens of their recipients. What other explanation is there for the s’more makers that rampaged across American Christmas shopping lists a few years ago?

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A gadget I could live without, but don’t want to

Posted in Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on January 19, 2011| 3 Comments »

I’m not that fond of single-use kitchen gadgets — they take up a lot of space in exchange for performing tasks that other tools can usually do quite adequately. But I’ve found the Bialetti Electric Mukka Express Cappuccino Maker to be quite indispensable for the occasional afternoon pick-me-up.

It takes up less space than most fancier models I’ve seen, which makes it ultra-efficient since I’m the only coffee drinker in the house. It makes a rich, creamy cappuccino for way less money than I would spend at Starbucks. The only trick: Warming the milk slightly in the microwave before pouring it into the upper chamber makes the end product hotter and foamier.

All in all, the best birthday present I’ve ever heavily hinted around for.

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Do One Thing: Wine organization achieved

Posted in Do One Thing, Home, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 8, 2011| Leave a Comment »

The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.

Day 7: You can see why I had to have the Stack. Look at this perfect pyramid of wine.

Because I’m storing the wine in the pantry, I’m getting twice as much work out of the Stack, using the two halves of the device to secure two wine stacks against two cabinet walls. Better utilization of the pantry space enabled me to liberate four forgotten bottles of wine from the stairwell closet today, which led to all sorts of afternoon organizational maneuvers.

The Stack appears to have originated from an Australian company called Make My Day.

The Stack in its original packaging.

Electric Reindeer, proof that I will bring cheap, hilariously named wine to your party.

Two halves of the Stack.

 

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Do One Thing: Wine problem solved, piano bench cleared

Posted in Do One Thing, Home, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 4, 2011| 1 Comment »

The “Do One Thing” series chronicles my yearlong effort to tackle one project every day to organize my life and home.

Day 2: I labored over whether I should include purchases in this challenge. As the sole board member, I voted “yes.”

When we were in New York City in early December, I saw this nifty little device in Pylones that allows you to stack up to 10 bottles of wine safely and efficiently. I realize that other people have wine racks on their countertops and walls and even on top of their kitchen cabinets, but proper wine storage demands protection from light and temperature variations. Thus, most of our everyday wine (“everyday wine” … we sound so sophisticated) is stored in the bottom of the pantry, far away from the stove and other sources of heat.

The bottles, however, tend to arrange themselves in a mishmash, no matter how carefully they’re initially placed. Any stacking at all requires something extremely heavy and unneeded to prevent rolling, and unstacked bottles rolling around on their sides waste a tremendous amount of vertical cabinet space.

Thus, when I saw the incredibly neat pyramid of wine bottles enabled by the Wine Stack, I pointed it out as just the thing we needed to fix the wine problem back home. My husband looked at it and declared that we would definitely figure something out when we got back.

I should have picked up the Wine Stack and carried it to the register, but what I didn’t realize at the time (yep, still learning after 15 years) was that his comment could be translated as follows: “I do not recognize this wine problem you describe; therefore, I shall forget this discussion in approximately 3 minutes.”

So, when I was trying to put the pantry in order last week after a round of holiday baking, I mentioned this solution we were going to figure out. The husband paused for a couple of seconds, and said, “I guess we should have bought one of those wine things while we were in New York.”

Sigh.

I ordered my Wine Stack on Sunday night, and I’m counting it as my second Do One Thing act of the year.

Day 3: I cleared off the piano bench, a hotspot for downstairs junk like books, magazines, gloves and scarves. Every house has a spot like this. Of course, now that I’ve swept it clean, I need to maintain a subresolution of keeping it clean.

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Sweet alternative for using sweet potatoes

Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2010| 4 Comments »

True confession: I have never liked sweet potato casserole, that impostor of a side dish that shows up on the table every year at Thanksgiving. It always seemed more fitting as a dessert, but it in no way could compare to the pecan, egg custard or chocolate pie that sat in the kitchen waiting for the turkey to be cleared.

Sweet potatoes are put to much better use in pies; sweet potato pie, after all, tastes astoundingly like pumpkin pie.

(more…)

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Jake’s Ice Cream: inspirational and aspirational

Posted in Eats, Photographs, Travel, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2010| 1 Comment »

When I was a child, a visit to my grandparents was a magical event. They had a farm with gardens, cows, tractors and sometimes even horses. My brother and I were transformed into free-range children, loosed to explore the edge of the woods, climb big hills of red clay and ride the Big Wheel up and down grassy slopes, dodging excited dogs and fallen tree branches along the way.

The food was also an adventure. I can’t think of my grandmother without picturing her in the kitchen, mixing biscuits by hand, cutting up potatoes or rolling out a pie crust.

One of the culinary experiences we looked forward to the most was homemade ice cream. My grandmother always kept one of those old-fashioned hand-crank wooden barrels on the back porch; once it was deemed hot enough outside, she would make a ton of ice (or get someone to pick up a couple of bags on the way back from town), gather the salt, make the ice cream base and prep the grandkids for hard labor.

Because if we wanted ice cream so badly, we were going to have to work for it, turning the crank until the mixture thickened so much that we our little arms just couldn’t turn it anymore and our grandfather had to come to our rescue and finish the job for us.

The ice cream always came out thick and delicious, not as firm as it would be after a couple of hours in the freezer, but good enough to eat without having to wait. And while we were good kids, waiting for ice cream after all that work was not on our list of things to do.

Fast forward to the late 1990s, when I my husband gifted me with an electric ice cream freezer. I was disappointed when my first batch emerged from the canister not merely soft, but soupy. When the second and third batches did the same thing, I packed the freezer away and gave up.

(Yes, you can buy hand-crank ice cream freezers, but they make way more ice cream than two people [these two people, anyway] can eat, and we don’t have any readily available child labor.)

I was on the verge of tossing the freezer a couple of years ago when I gave it one more chance and it redeemed itself with a recipe for strawberry ice cream from the Ben & Jerry’s recipe book. Alas, that’s the only ice cream recipe that emerges from the maker ready to eat.

I’m ready to give it another go, however, because the Red Velvet ice cream from Jake’s Ice Cream in Atlanta is everything I’ve tried to accomplish in homemade ice cream and more. It was like a fresh piece of cake, cream cheese icing and all, mashed up in a scoop of ice cream. Only it had all been frozen together at once, without the cake drying out or freezing into crunchy, unsatisfying bits.

We visited the Irwin Street Market location of Jake’s, a former warehouse housing several creative food vendors. The building’s got kind of a Lowe Mill feel, for any Huntsvillians reading, only on a smaller scale.

The husband had the Nutella flavor, which I don’t even SEE on the menu. Jake must spend his days dreaming up awesome new flavors. I want Jake’s job.

Anyway, I’m trying to decide whether to dump a measure of red velvet cake and cream cheese icing into my unpredictable (or, I guess, quite predictable) ice cream maker or just mash some cake and ice cream together toddler birthday party style. It’s a win either way, right?

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One roast, many different meals

Posted in Eats, Photographs, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I love it when a plan comes together. Or, more specifically, when a half-baked idea actually works.

One of my go-to slow cooker dishes is Pepperoncini Beef, which is pretty much a 2- to 3-pound beef chuck roast stuffed with a few cloves of slivered garlic, topped with a 16-ounce jar of pepperoncini and simmered on low for eight hours. We make roast beef and pepperoncini sandwiches on sub bread; topped with cheese and baked in the toaster oven for about three minutes, these are more than mere sandwiches.

Problem: 2 to 3 pounds of roast beef leaves us with WAY more leftovers than we can possibly stand to eat in one week, and it doesn’t freeze well.

Yesterday, while filling the grocery list with ingredients for another slow cooker recipe, I found the solution. Household fave Cowboy Stew, from the Year of Slow Cooking blog, calls for a pound of browned hamburger meat.

In the end, what’s the difference between a pound of ground beef and a similar amount of shredded roast beef once you mix it all up together and cook it for eight hours?

It was delicious, plus it saved me nearly $5 and the guilt of tossing out perfectly edible food. Kitchen WIN!

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