Another Swing of the Magic Wand

I teased you earlier this week when I told you that I had learned another use for vinegar.  I’m telling you, the stuff is a must have for any household.

My newest reason for loving vinegar is that I took my boys, including our nephew, berry picking.   Christopher has been berry picking many times.  Even his Majesty went a few times last year (although he didn’t so much PICK berries, as much as he did EAT berries).  However, unbeknownst to me, my nephew, who physically lives–and has grown up in– the middle of farm land in the midwest, has never gone berry picking.  Furthermore, he has a limited understanding that food comes from farms… a fact which actually rendered me momentarily speechless.

Have no fear, we’re breaking him in.  And taking him berry picking for the first time was even more fun than it would have been on an ordinary visit.

Except for one thing…

We picked a lot of berries..

8 pounds of strawberries and 2 lbs of blackberries to be exact.  They were having so much fun, and were so intent on picking “good” berries, that I didn’t have the heart to tell them to stop…

That is, until it dawned on me that I only had $31 in small bills, and that unless the farm could change a large bill on a day when we were the only people there picking produce, we were going to have to perform some manual labor if I didn’t put an end to things soon.

So, 10 lbs and $28 worth of berries later, we headed home, the kids with purple and red fingers, and myself wondering how we were going to keep all of these berries in edible condition long enough to polish them all off.

And then, I remembered this pin, which links to a great blog post by FoodLush, about how to use a vinegar rinse to keep berries from molding. It was really quite simple.

Combine 1 part vinegar to 10 parts water in a bowl or in your sink.  I did 1/2 cup vinegar and 5 cups water.  Then add your berries, a little at a time, and gently swish them around.

I did less blackberries at a time, because they’re more delicate than strawberries, and I didn’t want to damage them when I was swirling them around in their vinegar bath.  I changed the water out after every few batches.

After you dip them in vinegar, drain them, and  put them in the fridge.  You can rinse them with plain water afterwards, but I tasted them directly from the vinegar bath and didn’t notice a taste difference, so you don’t have to.

Or just start eating them.  Preferably with homemade whipped cream, made in 2 minutes in your “OMG-howdidIeverlivewithoutyou” Kitchen Aid Mixer.

I can’t speak for the blackberries, as we ate those the same day that we picked them, but I can tell you that 5 days later, the strawberries that were left were still nice and firm and perfectly delicious in homemade strawberry ice cream.  Ooh baby! Summer is here!

So yeah, like I said.  Vinegar is magic.  Why don’t you give it a try?

Vinegar is Better than a Magic Wand

I love having a clean home.  One of my favorite things to do in the morning is come down the stairs and take in the sight of  my lovely, clean, home before my children wake up and take the opportunity to redecorate it with their toys and shoes and books.

But the chemicals commonly used for cleaning freak me out.  Even with gloves on, the fumes make me nervous.  Luckily for me, a friend introduced me to cleaning with vinegar a few years ago, and I’ve been sold ever since.  I use it to wipe down counters, sinks, windows (mix it with water and a few drops of old fashioned blue dawn dish soap, and it will keep it from streaking), woodwork, you name it.  I still clean with the heavy stuff, too, but my every day cleaning, for the most part, is done with vinegar.

Over the years, though, I’ve been enlightened to the many used for vinegar outside of cleaning.  You can put it in your pets drinking water to help their coat shine.  You can use it to ease the pain out of wasps and jellyfish stings (but not bee stings, use baking soda for that), and to sooth a sunburn.  It is a good deodorizer for trash cans and diaper pails.  It is a good hair conditioner, and skin toner.  It is an excellent disinfectant for cutting boards and dishes.  Remember that movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the father keeps telling everyone to use Windex to cure all of their aches and pains?  I am getting pretty close to telling everyone to put use vinegar to cure their problems in every realm.  And if it doesn’t work, no love lost, because it’s about $3 a gallon.  No joke.

It seems that I’m always learning new ways to use vinegar, and this month was no exception.  Our ten year old nephew has been staying with us for a few weeks, and he’s not accustomed to removing his shoes when he comes in from playing.  He’s getting better about it, but for a week or so, my carpet got more shoe traffic than it has in the entire time we’ve lived here.  Thankfully, I remembered this pin, about using a vinegar solution to clean stains from carpets (even old, set in stains).  I took photos of my carpet, but you can’t really appreciate the spots in the pictures, so trust me, they were there.  Just dusky, dirty little spots from shoe tread.  Enough to drive me crazy, though.

The source blog, Lizzie Writes, spilled an entire bottle of salad dressing on her carpet, and this is what she used to clean her carpet.   Her results were so amazing, be sure to check them out.

So, I got to work with this magic carpet cleaning regimen.  All you need to do is sprinkle your stains with baking soda or corn starch, and let it set for a few minutes (If you are treating a new stain, blog up what you can first with a white cloth; I used a clean cloth diaper pre-fold, which is another awesome thing to have around the house).   I just poured the baking soda and rubbed it into the carpet, hoping to absorb any oils in the stains.

While you are letting that set on your stain, you can get to work mixing vinegar, original blue dawn dish soap, and water (my favorite multipurpose solution, by the way).

I keep this solution in a spray bottle lying around the house, but the concentration mentioned in the source blog was rather specific, so I mixed a new batch just for this.  You’ll mix 2 cups warm water, 1 tablespoon Dawn, and 1 tablespoon white vinegar.

I just mixed mine in a regular old kitchen bowl.  It’s nontoxic, so no worries.

I then vacuumed up the baking soda, and marked the concerning areas with glass beads (because that’s what I had handy).  That helped me to remember what areas I needed to treat, since they weren’t glaringly obvious.

Then I dipped a white cloth (diaper) in the vinegar/soap mixture, and applied the solution to the stained areas, blotting up all of the excess liquid with a dry cloth. Then I covered them with another dry white cloth, so that no one (the cat) would step on it overnight, and I went to bed.

The next morning, I assessed the dry carpet, and I gotta tell you, this simple solution really does work.  I’d post a picture, but you won’t be able to tell the difference in it, but I promise you, it was magical. I poured the leftover solution from the bowl into a generic plastic bottle, and put it with my cleaning solutions to have on hand in the future.

And I needed it within the week, when my (grown up) little brother passed out bowls of blackberry cobbler to the kids in the living room (shame, shame; he doesn’t have children yet, but one day, he’ll learn), and the morning after he left, I noticed a dime sized purple stain on the cream carpeting.

I wish I’d taken a photo, but I panicked and went straight for my magic solution, not expecting much, but still, ever hopeful.  I even skipped the baking soda step, and just doused it in the solution, and it erased all hints of that cobbler with very little elbow grease at all.

So if you have a hopeless looking stain on your carpet, give this solution a try.  The ingredients are cheap, you may even have them in your house already, and you won’t have to worry about your kids playing on the floor while it’s drying because it’s nontoxic.

And that’s not all I’ve learned about vinegar this month!  Stay tuned! But in the meantime, do you have a natural cleaning tip that you can pass along?

Why Didn’t I Think of That?! Pantry Storage Idea

Zip Lock bags, rubber bands, twist ties, mason jars, recycled sour cream containers… I have used all of these, and more, to help me store opened bags of dry good in the pantry.  But then, this idea made me palm slap myself and wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?!”

The pin is a user upload on Pinterest… those can really be a pain in the butt, because there’s no way to tell who the original source is.  I did a few google image searches to see if I could locate it, but I struck out, so, if you know where it came from, send me the link, and I’ll be sure to include it.

Basically, you need an empty plastic pop or water bottle, and your open bag, in this case, an open bag of peanut butter and chocolate chips.

Cut the top off of your bottle.  Or, have your husband do it.  He’s good with knives.

I had him cut just above the label.

Then, wash and dry the top of the bottle, remove the top, and pull the open end of the bag through the narrow end of the bottle.

Fold the open end of the bag down and replace your cap.  Know that it is not going to thread as well as it does when it goes directly on the plastic bottle.  After all, it is going over the plastic bag, and you may have to pull the open portion of the bag down a bit to make sure it’s not too bulky to allow the top to seal, but with a little pressure as you turn, it should seal the bag for storage.

That’s it.  Stick the sealed bag back in your pantry until you are ready to use it again, and toss the leftover part of the cut bottle in the recycling bin.

See what I mean? Why didn’t I think of that?

Any handy household or storage tips that you’ve pinned lately?  Share some great ideas!

A Watched Pot

I love to cook.  Well, let me rephrase that. I like to cook, but what I really love to do is to feed people the food that I prepare.  It’s a familial trait.  My maternal grandmother will try to feed you within moments of you walking in her door.  If you decline, she will phrase the question in a different way a moment later, testing your willpower.  If you decline again, she simply will start preparing food or getting food out of the refrigerator and placing it in front of you.  It’s a losing battle.  How do you say no to woman who drives a sports car, spanks everyone in the family at poker, bowls on a night league because she “doesn’t want to bowl with all of the old people” who join the day leagues, and, for her 80th birthday, chose to get her first tattoo?  You don’t.  You just don’t, ok?

My paternal grandfather was the same way, only he’d actually go so far as to shove food right in your face, in this adorable and loving manner than no one with a heart could dare refuse.  As a young teenager, I became somewhat of a vegetarian, stubbornly sticking to the claim for more than 5 years (mostly because I didn’t understand nutrition, and thought meat had too many calories in it, but also because it irritated my parents) before my sweet grandpa broke me down with his constant pleas for me to sample whatever amazing meal he was cooking up at the time. This was long before I knew how to (or rather, even cared to) cook anything that didn’t require simply reheating, so he was not misguided in his belief that I was eating rather poorly, and today, 15 years later, I’m a meat lover.  But food, food is love in my family, and someone allowing you to feed them is a wonderful blessing.  I am fiercely protective of my space in the kitchen.  I don’t like help while I prepare food unless I ask for it. My meals are a small gift to my family, and one of my favorite things about hosting out of town guests is that I get to feed them.  So, I guess you can say that feeding people is a passion of mine.

What is not my passion, however, is paying attention to little details.  Like boiling pots of noodles.  You know that old saying “A watched pot never boils”? Well, that’s pretty much my excuse for why I don’t watch a boiling pot.  Even when there is something boiling in said pot, which has in the past, reaped pretty cruddy results. For instance, in my quest to make His Majesty’s baby food, I ignored boiling water that was steaming carrots on no less than three separate occasions, each time resulting in a similar scorched outcome that had to be tossed out, and a pot that needed some serious scrubbing (and don’t even get me started on the smell– yuck!). Likewise, when Christopher was a baby, I once forgot about boiling bottles until the stench of burned plastic sparked my brain to remember that I had something on the stove.  I’m nothing if not consistent in my neglect of boiling pots.  Most of the time though, I at least remain in the room with pot boiling, and I’m learning to set timers.  I’m improving,  but often times, even when I am standing right there, I get busy making another part of the meal and the pot over boils, making a big mess on the stove.  So, when I saw this on Pinterest, I had to try it.

How have I not heard this tip before? There’s so much for me to learn in this life, I’m telling you.  The source, LeAna at A Small Snippet,  says that a wooden spoon will prevent a pot of water from boiling over.  Really, something that simple.  She even included a helpful tip in the comments section that says to place the spoon on the pot before it starts to boil, so I’m glad I read through them before I took this tip for a test drive, but other than that fact, I expected it to be a pretty simple experiment.

You take your wooden spoon     

and you place it over your pot.  Like this:    

Then you boil your water, and you wait.

And wait.

And… wait.

And this is when I realized that while a watched pot does in fact eventually boil, it does not, and in fact, stubbornly WILL NOT, boil over.  I attempted this experiment 3 times, back to back. Once with an pot of just water. Then I boiled water and made noodles.  And then, when that didn’t work, I boiled a pot of water with a few tablespoons of cornstarch in it. On NONE of those occasions, with me standing by, camera in hand ready to test this tip, did the pot even come close to boiling over.  Talk about an anomaly.  And no, that doesn’t mean the experiment proves that a wooden spoon will keep a pot from boiling over.  It just means that yours truly couldn’t get the darn pot to even come close enough to boiling over to test the effectiveness of this method.  You want to talk about frustrating?!

After that 3rd attempt, I gave up with the physical potion of this “study”.  But I certainly didn’t give up thinking about why it should work.  You see, the wooden spoon trick might not be magic, but it definitely can be explained by science.

Yep, that’s right, as with the majority of cooking, it all boils down (haha!) to science.  And pretty basic science, which is another reason that I am shaking my head at myself for not thinking of this basic idea years ago. As water boils, the cooler water goes to the bottom of the pan to be heated up, as the hot water simultaneously rises to the top (think about basements being cooler than attics, since heat rises and cold falls).  As the hot (boiling) water rises to the top of the pot and possibly threatens to boil over, it will first come in contact with the wooden spoon.   Wood is not a good heat conductor, so the spoon stays cooler than the boiling water, even though it is being bathed in the steam as it sits atop the pot.  When the boiling water touches the spoon, there is a small heat transfer that cools the water at the top of the pan just enough to push it back down again, preventing it from boiling over.  It won’t work forever, because eventually all of the water will still reach the same temperature, but it will give you that extra few seconds for your eyes and brain to communicate so that you can turn the heat on your pot down, give it a stir, whatever, hopefully preventing any actual messes.  (Or, just stare at the pot expectedly.  If you’re me, it will boil perfectly, and never come close to boiling over.  What the heck, go figure…)

I figure that I lost nothing by attempting this little experiment, because at the very least, my curiosity and stubborn nature will have me keeping an eye on my boiling pots when I prepare meals in the future, testing both the spoon and my newfound superstition that a watched pot will not boil over.  And if that diligent attention alone works to prevent me from having to use a razor blade to clean my stove in the future, well, I guess the end result is all the same.