Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Dinner on the Last Night of Spring

Gardening is paying off! The work that began in February is now beginning to culminate. 3 quarts of yellow squash is the most obvious iteration, but there is much more as well!



For this post, I thought I'd go through recipes and how I made tonight's dinner with a hooray when appropriate to celebrate that an ingredient came from the garden:

Eye of round:
4 eye of round steaks, cut into strips and sprinkled with pepper and onion powder
1 sprig of fresh basil, chopped (HOORAY!)
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 c. vinegar

Heat up lemon, basil, and vinegar to a boil, place steak strips into it and cook until done. Reserve the juice, as this is the basis for the gravy. Reserve the steak, as this goes into the green bean dish.

Green beans:
1 quart green beans (HOORAY!)
2T butter
1/2 onion
1 clove garlic, minced (I have garlic growing, it's just not ready yet)

Saute all until green beans are done. I added 1/2 cup of water at the end to steam the beans. Add the steak strips at the end and serve together.

Gravy:
Steak juice (see above)
1-2 T flour
1-2 cups milk
Salt and pepper to taste

Put flour into steak juice and whisk until hot and bubbly. Add milk and whisk until thick, about 10-15 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.

Mashed Potatoes:
1 yellow potato per person
Milk, sour cream, butter, salt, and pepper to taste
Fresh garlic snips (the green bit off the garlic growing HOORAY!)

Cook potatoes, add other ingredients to taste. The snips give a mild garlic flavor that is delightful.

Roasted squash:
Zucchini (HOORAY!)
Yellow squash (HOORAY!)
Olive oil
black pepper, sea salt, and Parmesan cheese to sprinkle on it.

Roast at 425 on parchment paper on a baking sheet until it starts to brown on top. I put it in the oven to cook while everything else was going.

Believe it or not, there were no leftovers. Go figure.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Hand Soap/Body Wash DIY

Recipe and tutorial source: http://www.thefarmersnest.com/2011/11/liquid-hand-soap-diy.html

Ingredients: 1 gallon distilled water, 1 8-oz bar soap (NOT Dove or any "moisturizing"), 2T liquid glycerin (band-aid section at Walmart)

Nutshell version: Grate bar of soap. Add everything else. Melt in pot. Let sit 12 hours. Beat if necessary.

Cost: Liquid glycerin costs about $4.00 for enough to make around 10 recipes, so $0.40/recipe. Distilled water costs about $0.80/recipe, and the other variable is your soap. I spent about $3.80 on a bar of goat milk soap that smelled glorious and not too girly so that my husband can enjoy the body wash and hand soap as well. This brings my total per recipe to $5.00.

*I do have to note that I bought less than 8 oz of soap, so it made a little over 1/2 a gallon, whereas getting a bigger bar or two bars would have cost a little more and yielded more. If you get a cheap bar of soap you like, you can make this cheaper.  I wanted a luxurious soap, so I paid a little more.

This whole project is perfect for a rainy day and smells tremendous! I used Goat Milk Red Jasmine Rice soap, which is a rich red-orange color and has a slightly sweet, clean smell. I bought it at World Market and used my birthday coupon to bring down the price a little. The hardest part for me was grating the whole bar of soap on a grater not entirely made for that kind of punishment. I dumped everything in a pot on the stove, making approximate adjustments for the fact that I was using under 6 oz. of soap instead of 8. I heated it up until it was all melted, really only a couple of minutes, then took it off the heat and the waiting began.

In a couple of hours, it started to cloud. When we went to bed, I brought the whole pot in the bedroom and set it on my printer so that I could wake up to a wonderful-smelling room. Though it did smell great, the consistency when I woke up this morning was downright odd. The soapy part had separated from the watery part and settled on the bottom to cool, making for a pretty goo. I heated it up for about 30 seconds on the stove, then blended it with an electric mixer on low for about 30 seconds. That did the trick, and I had a pour-able liquid soap that smelled great and made my hands feel nice and soft. It's not very thick, but each soap works differently, and I would rather have a thinner soap than a thicker one, anyway, so I can squirt it from our existing body wash bottle with ease.

David's mom washed the dishes in the pot I had used, and the remaining soap on the beaters and funnel I used to pour the soap into the used milk jug was enough soap to clean the dishes and leave the kitchen and her hands smelling fresh.

Verdict: I would totally make this again, it's just that I doubt we'll be finished with this much soap by the time we're too old to remember how to make it! How amazing is that?

Summer Pinterest Challenge

I absolutely love summer! I love the first warm days in March (we're in Georgia, so yes, it can get mighty warm in March) all the way through the last few afternoons in October before the cold really sets in. The rest of the year, I'm more just surviving than anything else.

This winter, I did something unexpected and conceived a child. So the entire summer this year will be spent in my 3rd trimester of pregnancy. Hello, activity restrictions. I have been tending my garden (which deserves its own post entirely) in short, 2-hour increments and keeping the tanning to a minimum, especially since it's been raining stinking every other day.

But I've come to face that, once the heat sets in and I get another few weeks along, doing much outside for extended periods is not going to be easy. After I mourned for my normal summer routines, I decided to give myself some challenges to look forward to. The internet came to my rescue!

My Pinterest has a list of things I want to do. These are all DIY projects I'd seriously love to give a good try, and I used a little money to gather some ingredients. My mom bought a few more for me and saved me a lot of money!

1. The first on my list was an easy one--I want to make my own cleaning products. It turns out that this is a bit too easy, because baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, and lemon in different combinations will clean pretty much anything for ridiculously cheap. And, since my living space right now consists of one tiny bedroom, there isn't much to clean.

2. I want to make my own toiletries. This includes shower gel, hand soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. I have recipes for each of these things, and now the ingredients!

3. I want to make my own detergents. This will be laundry (liquid or powdered) and dish detergents, both sink and dish washer. Aside: God has randomly provided us with a free working dishwasher! How cool is that? This one may have to wait a little for me to have my own home so I'm not trying new products on my in-laws' appliances.

4. Finally, I want to make my own baby stuff. This will include cloth and paper towel wipes, shampoo, and soap. These I want to be fragrance-free as Raiden will likely have sensitive skin if he takes after his mommy. I have a pretty bad case of eczema and don't want my little bundle of joy to be a bundle of rash. Personal opinion, of course.

First up--hand soap/body wash