NPR is declaring that corn pudding is better than sex. “You can grate the kernels off, or cut them off and then blend them into a sweet, sunshine-yellow hash that slides smoothly into a simple milk-and-egg batter. In the batter, melted butter once again becomes one with the corn. The eggs give it lift, the flour binds it together, the crust turns to gold, the earth moves.”

Whatever. It looks pretty yummy. Maybe I am going to have to make one of these recipes. Like this one:

Simple Corn Pudding

Ingredients:

6 Tbs unsalted butter
5 or 6 ears of corn, husked (depending on size)
1/4 c sugar
1/2 c heavy cream or milk
1/4 c flour
1 tsp salt
5 large eggs

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place the butter in a baking dish (an 8-by-8-inch glass baking dish or iron skillet works well) and slide into the oven so the butter melts while the oven is preheating.

Using a box grater, coarsely grate the kernels off four ears of corn. Use a sharp knife to cut the kernels from the remaining ears. Combine the corn kernels, sugar, cream or milk, flour and salt in a large mixing bowl. Lightly beat the five eggs and add to the mixture.

When the oven has preheated and the butter in the baking dish has melted, carefully tilt the melted butter from the baking dish into the corn mixture and combine with a few swift strokes. Then tilt the buttered corn mixture back into the baking dish.

Bake for 60 to 70 minutes, until a golden crust has formed and the interior has set.

There are also two other variations of the dish on the NPR site.

In a way, it’s good that there’s an Indian summer this year because I’m in the process of painting my house. My husband and I have been working on it for a month now on the weekends, and we’re not even done prepping yet. I am still putting primer on the unfinished wood and my husband is still replacing cracked boards with new wood. So far we have:

* Replaced 10 pieces of siding with new boards.
* Replaced the side trim around the doors, corners of the house, etc.
* Sanded most of the house–at least the parts I can reach.
* Fixed a soffit that needed some work.
* Primed the unfinished wood.
* Killed two yellow jacket nests that were in the eaves. Ick.

So that’s done. Still to go: my husband has to finish the soffit on the other side. Then we will sand the high parts of the house. And then, finally, it will be time to paint.

Big projects can be overwhelming. It’s hard to stay on task, it’s physically stressful, and it’s not very fun. That’s why so many people quit halfway through a project and end up looking at a ripped-up part of their house for years at a time. I don’t want that to happen to us, so here are some thoughts that are helping us along the way:

1. Break the project down into small components. When I’m sanding a wall, I often start to feel overwhelmed by how big it is, and how much of it needs to be sanded. I will look up and just want to quit. But if I concentrate on one board at a time, somehow the wall gets sanded. When you are doing a large house project, break it down bit by bit, and take each part one at a time. Somehow, the whole project gets done.

2. Stay on task. We are not allowing ourselves to take a break from painting (other than a quick trip to Portland) until it’s finished. Why? Well for one thing, the rainy season is quickly approaching. For another, if you don’t focus on getting a house project done, there’s a much larger chance you’ll let it slide and it will remaining unfinished. So you have to make a rule: keep going until you’re done.

3. Entertain yourself. Two words: audio books. Of course there are other ways to entertain yourself–music, talk radio, thinking, etc.–but for me, listening to other people tell a story turns a boring task into an entertaining one. Remember LibriVox, the free source of audio books? Anyway, the point is, make the best of things with some sort of entertainment.

4. Focus on the money you’re making. When we’re done, painting the house will cost us about $1,500. Most of that money is going to the wood for the siding. To get the house painted would cost $5,000. If you add in replacing the soffit, trim, killing off yellow jackets, cutting siding to shape, and replacing the old siding with new boards, it would cost us at least $10,000 to have someone else do this project. That means I am saving at least $8,500 by doing it myself.

On top of that, painting a house adds equity. It increases curb appeal, and the structural changes are improving the house, meaning that when we’re done here, our house will be worth more money. Market conditions aside, we could sell it for a higher price after doing this, much higher than the $1,500 we’re putting into the job. This is what people mean by sweat equity.

The problem with sweat equity, though, is that you have to sweat to get it…

5. Reward yourself for a job well done. I think that having a painted house for the first time since living here is a pretty good reward in and of itself. I know it will make me feel better about my home–I might even start to feel proud of it. Nevertheless, I fully intend to do something fun with my husband when this is all over, as a reward for all hard work. Celebrate everything you accomplish in life.

Onward!

I’m back! And I’m taken with this idea from Photojojo using cardboard tubes to make a photo display on the wall. All you do is trace the round from the tube, cut it out, and glue in the photo. Apartment Therapy posted the above version of the project with a photo collection of the world’s largest things.

That theme works well with this project, and if I were going to do it, I would go with a more abstract, unified photo collection than, say, family photos. But it sounds like a great way to display photos using those ever-useless cardboard tubes.

Well folks, I’m going to be going to Portland, Oregon for a week-long vacation. Hurrah! I love Portland!

Blogging will resume again on Monday, September 28. Have a great week.

I did another cocktail with Drink of the Week, this time with bell peppers.

The bell pepper cocktail have been haunting me with its illusiveness. I had heard of bell pepper gimlets, but had never seen one on a menu. Someone won a bar-tending contest with a bell pepper martini, but it was some place far away like L.A., and of no use to me.

So since I have a flood of bell peppers coming in from the garden, we decided to give it a try. We muddled bell pepper with mint, shook it with a mixture of citrus juices, vodka, and herb liqueur, and ended up with something quite delicious. As Drink of the Week described it: “It was light, refreshing, and slightly spicy. The grapefruit and the bell pepper complimented each other, since both combine sweetness with a little hint of bitter.”

Naturally, you don’t have to use homegrown bell peppers–store bought works too. Here’s the recipe:

Ultimate Bell Pepper Cocktail

Ingredients

2 bell pepper rings
1 tbs. mint
1 1/2 oz. grapefruit juice
1/4 oz. lemon juice (or orange juice if you want it sweeter)
1 1/2 oz. vodka
3/4 oz. Galliano liqueur or another herbal liqueur like Chartreuse

Directions:

In a cocktail shaker, muddle the mint and bell pepper with the grapefruit and lemon juices. Add ice, vodka, and liqueur. Shake vigorously. Strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with bell pepper ring.

It is time for me to buy checks again. Although I try to use online payment for paying bills as much as possible, sometimes you still have to write a check. So I called my bank and learned they wanted $20 for one box, or 150 checks, making it about $.13 a check. Plus they wanted me to come in and order them in person, which seemed like a hassle. Could I do better?

I did a Google search and discovered that there are lots of website devoted to selling personal checks. Not only that, they vary in pricing. I went through some of the most common sites and did a cost analysis of the check prices. I compared the basic check without duplicates. Here is what I found out:

Vista Print: $2.50 for 25 checks = $.10/check
Designer Checks: $22 for two boxes, or 250 checks = $.09/check
Checks in the Mail: $10 for 1 box or 125 checks = $.08/check
Artistic Checks: $11 for 1 box, or 150 checks = $.07/check
Check Works: $9 for 1 box, or 150 checks = $.06/check

I went with Check Works. One thing I liked about them, aside from being the cheapest, is that they charge the same price for any design. Artistic Checks, for example, can charge you as much as $20 for a box of checks if you go with their fancier designs, which is the same as the bank. I bought some checks with clouds on them.

I love this collection of lamps made out of wire sculptures by Marie Christophe. It’s a great idea because you can weave the wire that conducts the electricity into the lamp, making them any shape you want. Such as an owl!

I have no idea how much these are, but they look expensive. (Via Design Sponge)

(Courtesy Listeria)

First, let me say that I don’t look down on people for having TV and I don’t care if people watch it. I don’t think TV is inherently wrong or evil, I just came to the point where I felt that the cost of having a TV was not worth what was on it.

I mean, I don’t know if you noticed, but there was nothing on TV all summer. I have paid between $18-$85 every month for years for the honor of flipping around and marveling how nothing is on. Here is this fabulous technology that can reach millions of people at once, and yet so few TV executives manage to put anything on that’s worth saying to those millions. It’s sad, really.

But I digress. The point is, I got tired of it, and so last May my husband–who never cared about TV in the first place–and I canceled our cable.

It has been four months now and I’m still happy with the choice. Here are the four major benefits I’ve noticed so far:

1. Saving Money. Clearly, it didn’t make sense to pay for something I was so ambiguous about in the first place. I paid $18 for channels 1-40, which means I was paying $216 a year for TV that is free in less hilly areas. I used to pay $85 for all the channels, including HBO and Bravo, which meant I spent $1,020 a year on TV at that point. I would rather spend the money on something else.

2. More Time. This one surprised me. See, I was under the delusion that I didn’t watch all that much TV. I thought I spent about an hour a day watching TV and that I had beat common habits like numbing out in front of it after a stressful day. But when I turned the TV off, I was surprised by how much extra time I suddenly had. I guess I had been watching more than I thought. (I wasn’t alone–according to this study, TV is the fourth way Americans spend their time after sleeping, working, and eating.) Since turning off the TV, both my husband and I have been reading more, and have rediscovered the pleasure of reading in the same room together. We also eat dinner at the table more and listen to more music. I started playing piano again, something I haven’t done since I was a kid. I took up painting. On the weekend mornings instead of watching home-and-garden shows, we read the newspaper or make breakfast or go around to garage sales. You get the idea–our time seems richer now, more in our control.

3. More Peace. I noticed this when Michael Jackson died. I was completely, mercifully spared the media circus around his death. It was a relief not to have to hear about it over and over again because it was on TV. Likewise, I hardly ever see advertisements. Nothing ever blares at me so loud that I have to jump for the mute button. I am never confronted with the sight of a trashy drunk girl on a reality TV show. I can get my news in one 10 minute chunk instead of sifting through the bloated 24-hour news networks, and I like to think it’s more accurate that way too. It’s hard to overstate the value of peace in one’s life, and TV is one way it was seeped away from me.

4. I Still See All My Favorite Shows. Of course, there are still good shows on TV. Right now, I like True Blood, Mad Men, The Office, 30 Rock, and Project Runway, and I see every new episode that comes out. Between YouTube, Hulu, DVDs, and other means of getting TV online, I never miss anything I want to see. The difference is that watching TV this way feels more intentional. I am watching because I truly enjoy the show, and it feels more like watching a movie than TV. Thanks to new technologies, it’s no longer all or nothing with your favorite shows these days–you can still watch them without having to pay someone to stream cable to your house.

Clearly, turning off the TV is a personal choice and not for everyone. All I can say is, I’m glad I did it. It’s unlikely we’ll start paying for it again any time soon.

Sunset has a guide to planting cool season crops. It goes over the plants you can put in right now that fall is finally here.

I wasn’t going to do this this year, but now I am thinking I might put in a few fall crops after all. They include:

Lettuce, even though I can never get the darn stuff to get beyond the baby lettuce stage without it bolting.

Green Onions

And Cauliflower–which I have never grown before.

What are you putting in this fall?

The Artful Crafter has a two-part how-to on how to turn an old book into a secret hiding place. You know, one of those books that is hollowed out inside so you can put things in it? I have one of those on my bookshelf and it blends in with the other books so well that I forget to use it.

Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that.

Here’s Part 1 and Part 2. (Via Recycled Crafts)