All these geeky ice cube trays coming on the market makes me want to have some sort of Geek-themed party. Case in point:

This pi ice cube tray for $8.99 from ThinkGeek has so many possibilities. A cocktail based on a pie to pun on the words pi and pie? Some sort circle-oriented math joke wrapped in a cocktail? Yeah, I think like that sometimes.

Not all the time, though. I just think these Space Invaders ice cubes would look cool floating in a drink. $8 from Perpetual Kid.

And finally, Tetris ice cubes for $8.99, also from ThinkGeek. They make me want to use long, thin glasses and see how many of the ice cubes I can pack evenly inside.

More cool ice cube trays here.

I’ve been busily filling up my compost bin. Can you believe it is half full already? Most of it is from pulling weeds out of the garden, but still there is an astounding amount of green waste coming out of my kitchen. You don’t realize how much you toss down the garbage disposal until you start collecting it for compost. Between coffee grounds, egg shells, and bits of flowers and vegetables, that thing is filling up fast. It fills weirdly good to have a place to put all that that’s not the sewage system or the garbage can.

Anyway, since the compost was coming along faster than anticipated, I sat down and looked up what I shouldn’t put in compost. It turns out that my instinct was right about this. Compost works by rotting waste and turning it into a soil-like fertilizer that can be used in the garden. So anything you don’t want in the garden, like chemicals, diseases, rocks, etc., should be left out of the compost. Here is what I am avoiding:

* Meats or dairy–they attract pests and smell bad
* Grease or fat–ditto
* Human or cat/dog waste–possible diseases
* Cat litter–ditto
* Large branches/blocks of wood–they won’t break down
* Plants sprayed with pesticides–no chemicals in the compost
* Invasive plants–you don’t want them popping up in your garden
* Diseased plants–you don’t want the diseases in your garden
* Sand/rocks/ashes–they dilute the compost
* Things that don’t break down like plastic or metal–duh.

Two problem areas–

Paper. Lots of people put newspaper and cardboard in their compost. Apparently this is okay if they are printed with biodegradable inks (soy inks, not petroleum-based inks). You don’t want to put glossy paper (like in magazines) or wax paper in the compost. Personally, I’ll just recycle paper and leave it out of the compost.

Seeds. It is true that if you compost vegetables with seeds on them, they might sprout in the compost. This doesn’t seem like a big deal to me–If I see a sprout in the compost, I’ll just pull it up. I would rather do that than examine every bit of vegetable waste for a stray seed.

The New York Compost site has a good list of what you should compost and whether it breaks down into carbon and nitrogen.

Ha! I like this melting clock from Signals for $29.95. Pretty close to the one in the painting. (Via Rare Bird Finds.)

Camp Creek Blog has a tutorial of how to make a field bag from an old pair of khaki pants. (Via Recycled Crafts.)

It got me thinking about old clothes and how useful they can be. even when clothes are worn, torn, stained, etc., there’s usually usable fabric there. In the past, people never used to throw clothes out–they simply used the fabric over and over. Once a garment started to look old, they altered it to be worn again in a different way, then they re-used the fabric for other things (pillows, blankets, etc.), and finally, the remnants would be turned into rag rugs or cleaning rags.

While I wouldn’t trade our easy access to new clothes for that, it is nice to think of one piece of fabric being used until it simply had nothing left to give. Most of us have piles of extra clothes that we don’t know what to do with. So in the interest of decluttering and saving some money, here’s a few things to do with the old clothes:

* Use them as rags (I have a hamper in the garage full of rags that we use on household projects)
* Alter them to be worn again or in a different way
* Make an apron out of them
* Or some fingerless gloves
* Or a quilt
* Or a rag rug
* Or reusable cloth gift bags to use instead of wrapping paper
* Or a cloth shopping bag to reduce your consumption of plastic bags
* Or potholders
* Or cloth napkins
* And finally, of course, you can always donate them.

I like the idea of putting a wall clock on the headboard of your bed. This is particularly useful if you are the type who doesn’t need an alarm.

The picture is from a house tour on Design Sponge of designer Jill Dupre’s house.

(All images on this post are courtesy of Sunset Magazine)

Ok I admit it. I want to own chickens. I don’t know how to explain it, but somehow the world of chickens opened up for me one day when I went to the chicken portion of the county fair and realized how beautiful and weird these birds really are. (More here.) Besides, fresh eggs are wonderful, and I really do eat a lot of them. We go through about 8 eggs a week. And oh my gosh, baby chicks are so cute it’s almost unreal.

So there are the reasons I want chickens. However, I am not getting chickens, because a. I don’t want to build a hen house and b. I am afraid that with all the gardening and beer making and such that goes on around here, getting chickens would be crossing the line from hobby gardener to full-fledged farmer. I don’t want to be a farmer.

But then Sunset magazine goes and writes an article like this and makes it seems so matter-of-fact and simple to own chickens that I would be crazy not to. It’s a pretty good article, in particular because it answers some common questions about owning chickens, like is it legal (yes in most cities, but only the hens and not the roosters) and how do you keep them safe (they need a small yard and a hen house.) (The space behind my garage would work perfectly, I can’t help noting).

But what really surprised me is how many eggs chicken lay. Most chickens lay about one egg a day for up to five years. They do not need a rooster to lay eggs.

(This led me to a whole digression into how chickens mate. Basic rundown–hens always lay eggs but they are duds without the rooster. When the hens and roosters mate, the resulting eggs can then be incubated and turned into chicks.)

Anyway, I’m still not going to get chickens. Really, I don’t want to be a farmer. Even a cute urban farmer with an egg basic. I will just have to keep my dreams of fresh eggs to myself.

I discovered an exotic meat butcher near my house. They sell everything from buffalo roast to elk sausage to Kobe beef steaks. So for Easter, I made our first purchase from the store: rack of wild boar. While I had had wild boar in pasta, I had never had it as a cut of stand-alone meat before. Let me tell you: it was delicious.

Wild boar tastes like normal pig except with less fat and more, well, flavor. The meat is richer, somehow, and far exceeds regular pork. Since this was such a nice cut of meat, I kept the preparation simple, treating it as I would a rack of lamb but adjusting the flavors and temperature to match pork. It worked out great. Here’s how I did it:

Wild Boar with Red Wine Glaze

Ingredients:

2.6 lbs. rack of wild boar, French cut preferred
4 oz of vegetable oil
3 Tbs red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 of an onion, chopped
2 sprigs fresh rosemary
2 sprigs fresh thyme
2 cups red wine
Salt
Pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

2. While it preheats, sear the boar. Cover both sides of the meat with an appropriate amount of salt and pepper. In a pan or pot, heat 2 oz of vegetable oil until warm. Place the meatiest side of the ribs in the oil and cook for three minutes. Flip the ribs and cook for two more. Transfer the rack of ribs into the oven.

3. While that cooks, make the red wine glaze. Put the remaining 2 oz of oil in the pan along with the garlic. Heat the oil until the garlic is sizzling. Add the onions. Cook until soft.

4. Add the red wine vinegar and stir it around with the onions. When that has dissolved, carefully pour 2 cups of red wine in the pan. It will sputter, so be careful. Now add the herbs and salt and pepper.

5. Let the wine glaze simmer on low heat until the liquid has reduced to less than half. Taste the glaze. You want a good blend of flavors here–if it tastes too much like wine, add more salt pepper. (Conversely if you added too much salt, you can always add more wine and let it reduce again.)

6. When the temperature on the boar reached about 140, brush the meat with the glaze. Repeat at 150 degrees and 160 degrees. When it reches 170 degrees, the rack of wild boar is done.

My wild boar cooked much faster than I thought–about 30-40 minutes. Keep an eye on it. And most of all, treat it like normal pork. A lot of recipes for boar on the Internet act like it is some foreign meat, but it is just a pig. A very delicious wild pig.

This weekend, I made my 2009 garden journal out of a composition notebook, glue, and pictures from magazines.

I kept a garden journal last year and found it to be a helpful tool for understanding my garden. This year, I’ll use the journal to keep track of several things, including what I’m planting, where I bought the plants, how much I paid, how many vegetables or fruit I get, pest problems and attempted solutions, and so on. I’ll store the journal in the kitchen and add the data as I go along. At the end of the year, the journal will help me to see which plants were the most productive, the overall yield of my garden, and how to avoid the mistakes I’m bound to make in the future.

To make the journal, I got a basic black-and-white composition notebook that I bought during a back-to-school sale at Target for $.20. I cut some pictures out of a magazine and seed catalogs and pasted them on with a gluestick (also from the Target sale–three for $.75). Then I washed the whole thing with some decoupage glue, which you can get from any craft store. That sealed in the pictures and waterproofed the cover somewhat. Finally, I added some stick-on tabs to separate the sections of the journal.

The inside of the journal…

The whole thing took about 10 minutes. I was a little sloppy, so there are a few wrinkles in the cover. Still, I like it much better than a boring notebook.

The lemon verbena is growing like gangbusters in my garden, which naturally led to a cocktail! The resulting Lemon Verbena Spring Fling Cocktail was light and lemony and herb-y, perfect for a spring gettogether. Be careful, though–these things are strong. Check out Drink of the Week for the recipe.

This is such an obvious use of space, I can’t believe I never thought of it before–stairs as storage. Unfortunately, my house is a one story, but if I had a two story, I would probably seriously consider doing this. After all, the space is already there. Brilliant.

The above picture is from this Toronto house featured in Dwell magazine. Treehugger has some other examples of stairs used as storage.