My husband and I were looking for a hose holder for the side of our house and gave up when we saw that all the options in the hardware store were made of plastic and would therefore easily break. Maybe I should just go this route and use old wooden spools to hold the hose. It looks kind of cool, and hey: not plastic. [White Trash Beautiful]
Memorial Day means barbecue. Doesn’t it? It does for me. My husband, a Southerner, tells me there is a difference between barbecue and grilling. Barbecue is slow cooking food over indirect, low heat (think ribs or brisket) and grilling is cooking food for shorter amounts of time on direct, higher heat (hot dogs, hamburgers). Either way I love it.
Here’s a rundown of posts about this lovely thing called barbecuing:
* Homemade BBQ Sauce
* How To Use A Chimney Starter
* What To Do With Leftover Ribs
* 101 Recipes for Grilling
* Perfect Grilled Corn
* Five Burger Recipes
Have a great Memorial Day! Blogging will resume Tuesday, May 31, 2011.
So I did it. I made my own limoncello. And it turned out great.
Limoncello, as you probably know, is a sweet lemon liqueur that originated in Italy. It’s an after-dinner digestivo that goes well with desserts and general celebrations.
I had been thinking of making my own limoncello for some time. After all, I have my own Meyer lemon tree, plus I love limoncello.
Since I knew that limoncello was simply lemon peel and simple syrup steeped in grain alcohol (in this case, vodka), it didn’t sound too hard to make. The one thing that held me back was grating the lemons. Apparently if you get any of the pith, the white part of the peel, into the limoncello, it makes the whole batch bitter.
I read many methods of removing the pith from the lemon–using a box grater, slicing the peel and scraping off the pith with a knife, etc.–but they all sounded annoying. Then I came upon Limoncello Quest, a site all about making limoncello. Its method for grating the lemons simplified everything for me: use a microplaner. This tool allows you to quickly and easily grate the yellow part of the peel off the lemon and leave the pith behind, like so:
[Courtesy Christie's Corner]
Once I had that detail hammered out, I decided to try it. I used the Limoncello Quest’s basic recipe for limoncello, except that I cut both the ingredients and the amount of time it steeped in half. I steeped the lemon peel in vodka for 22 days, then add simple syrup and let it steep again for another 22 days (44 total). When it was done, I filtered the limoncello and that was it.
Incidentally, I found that I didn’t have to filter as much as Limoncello Quest recommends–running the liquid once through a sieve and then a second time through a coffee filter worked swell.
The recipe yielded two bottles of limoncello. Here’s one of them:
(Obviously, I am re-using a bottle for this experiment.)
And the taste? Good! It was easily as good as any store-bought limoncello I’ve had.
And it was cheap. The last limoncello I bought cost $40 for a 350 ml bottle. The homemade version yielded about 750 ml (or thereabouts) of limoncello, an $80 value. Since the lemons were free from my tree, I just had to buy vodka and sugar for about $20, or $10 a bottle, a $60 savings.
So I’m a convert. Limoncello is easy and cheap to make, and tastes yummy. I think I have found a new staple for my kitchen.
You should try it too. Here’s the basic recipe and more detailed instructions here.
Sooner or later, the Internet comes up with a solution for everything. Enter Coin Jar Calculator, a website that estimates how much the money in your coin jar is worth.
Since different coins have set weights–$10 in quarters weigh half a pound, $4.50 in nickels comes out to a pound, etc.–the site has you weigh different handfuls of coin, compares that to the overall weight of the jar, and comes up with an estimate for you of how much money is likely to be in there.
I don’t know how accurate Coin Jar Calculator is, but it certainly looks easier than counting all those coins. [Lifehacker]
Here’s a great way to spice up a beat-up upright piano: paint it. For example,
Or turquoise.
Or pink.
Even red.
Painting the piano not only gives it some pizazz, it makes it more inviting as well. Just looking at these makes me want to practice right now.
On Saturday, I pulled up the rest of the fava bean plants. Last time I grew fava beans, I only yielded 100 beans or so. This time I have 3 buckets full of beans! Clearly, I thought to myself, it is time to do something with them. So I decided to make fava bean raviolis.
To do this, I pureed the fava beans with leeks and garlic (also from the garden) and stuffed them in homemade pasta dough (using eggs from the chickens). The fava bean filling was bright green, which looked lovely, and dressed in a butter-sage sauce… well, let’s just say this is one of the better dishes I’ve come up with lately. Here’s the recipe:
Fava Bean Ravioli
(Makes approximately 25 raviolis)
Pasta Dough from Lidia’s Family Table:
Filling:
Sauce:
Directions:
Make the dough. I have gone over how to make the dough before in the Zucchini on Zucchini Raviolis post. That post also goes over how to close and crimp the raviolis, if you need a refresher.
Let the dough rest for about a half hour. Meanwhile, make the filling. First, shuck the fava beans. As I mentioned in the this post, fava beans have two layers, the pod and a bitter membrane that you have to remove. To remove the membrane, pop the fava beans in a pot of boiling water. Let boil for 1-2 minutes, then transfer to an ice bath. The membranes will come right off:
In a frying pan, heat the garlic and olive oil together for about a minute. Add the leeks, fava beans, peas, pepper, and salt. The peas are optional, but they give the filling a bit of extra sweetness. Cook until soft, then puree in a blender. Taste the filling to make sure there is enough salt.
Next, assemble the raviolis. After you stretch out the dough by hand or a machine, spoon the fava bean filling onto the ravioli. Using an egg wash, close and crimp the raviolis.
I used about 2 Tbs of filling per ravioli, which made them pretty big.
To cook, bring a pot of salted water to a boil. Gently transfer the raviolis into the pot and cook until done, 3-5 minutes.
Meanwhile, melt 1/2 stick of butter in a frying pan. Add the sage leaves and let toast a minute. Add the pepper.
Ladle 1/2 cup of the boiling pasta water into the pan and let it reduce about a third. Turn the heat down to low and carefully transfer the cooked raviolis into the frying pan. Spoon the sauce over them. When they are all in the frying pan, add the cheese and gently toss until it is melted. Transfer to a serving dish and add more cheese, if desired.
We served the raviolis with a salad of arugula, spring flowers, radishes, and homemade lemon confit. It complimented the raviolis perfectly.
Incidentally, almost everything in this dinner came from the yard. The only ingredients that were from the store were the peas, olive oil, butter, salt, pepper, and cheese. So this meal, while labor intensive, was very cheap. I serve three people for under $3, and it tasted like something from a fancy restaurant. I don’t say that to brag, just to point out that there are other ways to save money on your grocery bills than extreme couponing.
This Aquatic Condo from Chiasso is pretty stylish for a fishbowl.
The outside is white plastic and the glass bowl on the inside is removable for easy cleaning. Also, the Aquatic Condo is “stackable with air holes, so fish can enjoy their contemporary space on separate floors.”
I’m not sure how much water most fresh-water fish need, but assuming this covers it, this bowl is a cool-looking option for only $32.
This lemon thyme sorbet recipe from The Cilantropist looks delicious.
Lemon and thyme seem like they would go well together. And I also like the idea of serving it in a hollowed-out lemon. Very pretty.
Last week, I wore out the the drum unit on my printer. Which is a way of saying, I print a lot. In fact, printing is one of the biggest costs of my home office, and as such, I’ve learned some tricks to cut down and save money as best I can.
And for good reason, too. Inkjet ink is one of the most expensive fluids on earth. No, really. Look at this graph comparing it to other liquids:
So, the number one way to save on printing is to get a laser printer. The toner for a laser printer will often cost less per page than inkjet ink, especially if you use the extended cartridge. For example, the high-yield black toner for my printer prints 5,000 pages per $65 cartridge, which equals $.013 per page. The similar inkjet ink yields 200 pages per $14 cartridge, which is $.07 per page. Therefore, the inkjet ink costs 5 times more than the toner cartridge.
Another tip is to get your cartridges refilled, which means you are only paying for the ink instead of a new cartridge and packaging. You don’t have to do this yourself–many stores will refill your cartridge for you.
Here are 5 Other Ways To Save Money On Printing:
1. “Print” To PDF: If you can, go paperless. Much of my research is printed to .PDF, which means that I save the document as a .PDF on my computer. That way I have a personal copy that I can refer to, but it’s not on paper. This kind of “printing” is free.
2. Print In Draft Mode: Most printers have a draft mode that print a lighter version of the document for you. Using this mode can extend the life of your cartridge, sometimes almost doubling it.
3. Print On Both Sides: Many printers have a duplexing option that allows you to print on both sides of the page. You can also duplex manually by turning each page around (or just reusing old paper), but I hear that it can damage some printers, so look into it before you do it.
4. Copy And Paste Before Printing: If you are printing from the internet, copy and paste the information into a document and spend some time deleting unnecessary graphics, ads, and extra pages at the end. You will be amazed how much the document will shrink.
5. Play With Fonts: Finally, don’t be afraid to change the font style or size. For example, I have a 489-page document that I regularly print in Times New Roman size 12 font. When I knock that down to size 11, the document drops to 420 pages, saving me 69 pages of printing–although it is harder to read. Likewise, changing the font itself can make a difference. That same 489-page document balloons up to 598 pages when I use 12-point Verdana and shrinks to 441 pages when I use 12-point Arial Narrow. So experiment.
A note of caution on this last point–there are document standards that you should respect in professional or academic situations. It’s not a good idea to print a resume using 10-point comic sans font if you want to avoid looking a little nutty. Play around with fonts and sizes only when printing for your own purposes and save the fully toned, properly formatted printing for when you need to show the document to someone else.
How do you save money on printing?
Straight out of Chronicles of Narnia, this homeowner used a wardrobe as an entrance to a secret playroom for his child.
This is brilliantly simple–just cut a hole in the back of the wardrobe and push it against the door to the playroom. Voila! All that’s missing is the fur coats.
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