Meet our Minions!

Meet our Minions - Dave, Kevin, and Jerry. Sadly our resident squirrel has already taken a bite out of Dave's face. 

Nut Butter Experiments

As we've been jumping into our Paleo journey Jamie discovered some yummy pecan cashew butter at the store. After quickly demolishing a jar we realized that at $13 a pop this might become an expensive habit. So we thought, why couldn't we make our own? Turns out you can and with a little experimenting you can tailor one to just what you like. After checking with the google a bit we decided to use our food processor instead of the Vitamix blender. We also decided to toast our pecans first. We did three batches and varied the cashew/pecan ratios which impacted the amount of time needed to process it to the texture we wanted. (Forgive my handwritten tape labels, my label maker ran out of tape and the replacement is in the mail from Amazon.)

The original $13 jar of pecan cashew butter.

 Batch 1: 1/2 cup cashews, 1 3/4 cup pecan (toasted 4 minutes), processed about 5 minutes. This one had the runniest consistency. It also tasted a bit more toasty. 

 Batch 2: Half cashew, Half pecan (toasted 2 minutes and chilled), processed less than 5 minutes. This one had a nice consistency, not runny, but not to chunky. It tasted pretty cashew-y.

 Batch 3: All pecan (toasted 2 minutes and chilled), processed 5 minutes. This batch too much longer to get even a chunky texture. It tasted very pecan-y.

Cleaning stove burners - part 2

Before:

After:

Cleaning stove burners - part 1

Our stove burners were super dirty after several years of use. Turns out it is really hard to get this off. I finally found something that works: bartenders friend and lots of elbow grease. Here is the before.

And the midway. 

And the final product. 

What to do with Gasoline in Clothes

Today Judah was being a super helper to his dad, helping change the oil on the lawn mower. He held the cup to catch the oil as Jamie poured it out the spout. Unfortunately, our mower has a bad gas cap (that may or may not have been run over accidently) that leaks and when the oil poured out so did gas...all over Judah’s arm. He was a trooper though and didn’t move the cup at all, even while being doused with fuel. He came in reeking of gas so I grabbed his shirt and tossed it into a load of laundry I was just about to put in. BIG Mistake. Don’t ever do that. I didn’t even think or better yet, google. Needless to say I ended up with a load of laundry that all smelled of gas. And because I have a huge washer, it was a big load. So I went to my friend google and this is what I did salvage our clothes.

1. Removed the offending shirt and rewashed the load (this was before I googled).

2. Washed with 20 oz Coke, Baking Soda (a box full), and apple cider vinegar.

3. Soaked in baby oil all night long.

4. Rewashed with laundry soap.

5. Hung to air dry in the sun for 6 hours. (this finally killed the smell in most of the clothes)

6. Rewashed with laundry soap.

I still have yet to deal with the offending shirt, which sadly is his Seahawks champion shirt. We shall see if it survives. At least now I know what to do (and not do). Let this be a lesson to everyone else, learn from my mistakes. Now back to the rest of my laundry.

Rendering Lard

Some back history on how we got to rendering lard, something I never thought I would do. First, we bought half a pig last Christmas and as a part of that got a bag full of frozen pig fat, which I had no idea what to do with. Someone mentioned rendering in passing but I brushed it aside since what do you do with lard? Anyway, then a few months ago I was invited to a soap making party where a bunch of us got together to make several large batches of various soaps. It was lots of fun and a neat thing to learn how to make. After getting excited that evening and doing some internet reading I realized that hey, you can make soap from lard! Wouldn’t that be an interesting experiment? And what do you know, I have a bag full of fat in the freezer right now that we could render into lard! Queue more internet reading, this time on rendering lard, and a few weeks go by before I really get serious about doing this thing.

I should also note that I made use of some excellent resources on this subject not found on google, my Grandparents and Great Aunt Arlene! Imagine that, they actually remember their mothers and grandmothers rending lard on the farm. We had a fun discussion about life on the farm in North Dakota back in the “olden days” when they were growing up. Interesting stuff, I am really blessed to have the ability to sit down and share in these memories with them. Life was hard on the farm in those days, they worked super hard all summer and fall to store up food for winter. They used root cellars for storage and when those were too cold in the ND winter, they would put food into the grain bins which provided better insulation. Some of the fun ones were Grandpa and Arlene remembering coming to their Grandma’s (My Great Great Grandma’s) house and finding the door locked, something that never happened in the small town of Parshall, ND. Turns out Grandma was inside ironing all of her money. You see she saved away all her egg money in a jar in her coal bin for years and years and it was time to take it to the bank, so it needed to be ironed (obviously). The kicker? There was something like $20,000 in there!

I found a great resource online HERE about rendering lard in a crock pot which seemed an excellent way to go. Funnily enough I mentioned this method to my Grandparents and Arlene and they had to think about it a bit because during their experience there were no crock pots to use in rendering lard! The other piece that gave me the courage to just go for it was having our friend Adam, who is a butcher at our house at the time. He had done it before and made it much less an intimidating thing to start.

I really debated about when to start it cause it could take like more than 15 hours! I didn’t want it to be all ready to go at like 2 am so didn’t know what to do. On the advice of Adam that it could take a really long time I started it at like 11 pm on Friday night. The benefit of this was that he was leaving to go to the ferry at 5 am and could double check it for more before he left. So off we went, with two crockpots full of fat to render. And it took a really really really long time. I started pulling it out into cans midday on Saturday (like 12 hours in) and continued that all the rest of the day. When we got home from our date on Saturday night I pulled more and then consolidated to one pot and let her go over night all the way to Sunday afternoon. Not sure if this is what its supposed to be like but even with all that time we never got those awesome cracklings they talked of. Maybe we needed to let it go even longer but I was kind of done at that point. In the end we ended up with 6.5 (16 ounce) jars of nice white lard and 1 jar of the “savory” lard from probably around 10 pounds of fat.

Jamie was anxious to try it out and we had planned on making some cornbread for a BBQ we were going to, so he substituted it for half the butter and to anit-stick the cast iron pan. It seemed to make the best crunchy textured crust on the cornbread. We’ll have to keep experimenting and see what other tasty things we can make and if all else fails we can make soap!

Potty Training Prep

In preparation of potty training I got busy being crafty and made some special training pants. I think I saw something like it on Pinterest first and thought it would be good to try. The project was basically taking a set of Gerber white training pants and adding additional padding on the inside and then adding PUL, the water proof fabric used for cloth diaper covers, on the outside. That way if an accident occurs it will be somewhat absorbed and contained within the training pant. I thought this would be helpful for giving clothes and bedding a better chance of staying dry, as well as being helpful for trips out and to his babysitters while I work. I got the PUL at Joann’s, I got a package with three colors, it was about $15 but I used my 40% off coupon. I made 9 pairs and probably used a little less than a third of the PUL I got in the packages. Judah picked the package and chose the red, yellow, and green set.

The link to the instructions for the training pants is HERE.

The other project came from some input from friends and an idea I saw on pinterest for a carseat cover saver HERE. I had lots of left over PUL and some fun extra fabric so away I went. I decided not to do the pattern from Pinterest, instead keeping it a bit simplier. I also decided to make mine so I could use a cloth diaper as the absorbent padding, which could be removed and washed with the cover. So mine has an open side, which happens to be on the front, where there is also a indent for the buckle to come through. In retrospect, it would have been much easier to make the opening in the back, lessons learned. The opening also has velcro closures to keep everything in place. I sized it so that it will fit a folded in half cloth diaper insert and would fit on the seat of the carseat. So far it has yet to be tested by an accident.

Cleaning - The Oven

OK, so I've been trying to find a way to really get my oven clean for several months now. I tried a few things including the baking soda paste and elbow grease. Last night I tried something I saw on Pinterest, I know Pinterest, and it actually worked! I was amazed. I totally laughed while doing it too, at the fact it was actually working. I'm super bummed I didn't get a before picture in all it's hideous glory. I got a pic mid-way to try to show what the WHOLE glass area looked like before. The second pic is my clean oven door, really, that is my oven door. The magic tool in this cleaning experiment? The razor for scraping, it did the trick where rags and scouring pads wouldn't. Here's the link to how to do it. 
-Michelle

Jean Quilts!

While I’m feeling all inspired to write about life I thought I’d tell you about my jean quilting project that I did for last Christmas. I had a stack of hole-y old jeans that I have been collecting basically since we were married. So when I say a stack I mean a big one. I’d collected them even before I knew how to quilt since its sacrilige in our family to 1. throw away a watermelon rind (why you ask? You make pickles with them of course! Though these new fangled watermelons don’t have nearly the rind they used to so those ones you can throw) and 2. throw away jeans that can be used to make blankets. Anyway, fast forward 6 years and I’ve learned to quilt, have a huge stack of jeans, a creative urge, and it’s Christmas coming up!

Now, my grandma’s jean blankets are usually squares but in order to maximize the number of blankets I could make I decided to get a bit creative and first start with strips. Also, this had the added benefit of minimizing sewing fabric back together. My other constraint was the fact that I had already procured several pieces of backing fabric at yardsales and the sale rack at Joann’s. This limited the dimensions of my blankets and in some cases made me get creative to use the whole piece of backing. In the end I was able to make 6 blankets! One for each of my female family members (they have to share with spouses) and one for me! Below is more detail on each blanket and the general order I finished them in, though I had them all mostly thought out well ahead of finishing the first.

 

1. Andi’s: Brown corduroy backing, 6” offset strips
2. Jenn’s: Gold upholstery backing, 10” strips with edging strips of 4” squares
3. Mom’s: Blue backing, 10” squares with 6” strip accents and a center of 5” squares
4. Grandma’s: Tan corduroy backing, 10” Strips
5. Amanda’s: Green backing, 6” random strips
6. Mine: Red upholstery backing, 6” squares