Here’s a cool project on Apartment Therapy: convert an old chair into a stool. Reader Hilary Hahn took the chair from this:

To this:

It’s a pretty simply idea. Cut off the seat of the chair with a jigsaw, re-cover the seat with some fabric, and paint. Hilary uses the stool in her entryway for when people need to take off their shoes.

Like me, David van Alphen liked prefab modern sheds like these for his backyard, but couldn’t stomach the $11,000 price tag. So, as he explains on Design Milk, he decided to make one himself by converting this old barn in his backyard:

To this modern studio:

He even drywalled the inside and added windows, air conditioner, and other touches. The end result looks great! And all for $3,000–much cheaper than the $11,000 prefab version.

If you have watched any cooking programs on TV lately, you have probably noticed sous vide even if you didn’t know that was what it was called. Sous vide is a slow cooking method that combines vacuum sealing with a kind of low-temperature water poaching. The idea is that the food is cooked for a long time at the exact right temperature, leading to two advantages:

1. Accuracy. The reason food gets overcooked is because we’re cooking it at temperatures much hotter than we want the food to get to, and sometimes we lose control and the food gets too hot. With sous vide, this is impossible. You set the temperature where you want the food to go, and it stays there for as long as you need it to.

2. Tenderness. The food, especially meat, comes out extremely tender with sous vide cooking. Why? Low temperature and long cooking times always mean tenderness, but in addition, the meat is sealed in a plastic bag, so there’s no oxidation occurring during cooking. The meat holds in its juices.

Chefs also love sous vide because, although the temperature has to be maintained, the cooking time doesn’t have to be exact. You can leave food in a sous vide oven for hours and it will stay the same. So if you are in a busy kitchen and someone orders a steak, you simply pull a perfectly done filet out of the machine, pan sear it for texture, and bam, you’re done.

To do sous vide at home, you can either buy a $449 machine or you can make one yourself. We tried DIY sous vide this weekend, and it worked out wonderfully. It turns out that home sous vide is easy and well worth the effort.

However, you do need some equipment, as follows:

A vacuum sealer. We have a machine that does this, but you can also use a pump, like this guy did.
A digital thermometer. An essential part of the modern kitchen.
A large pot.
A lid or basket to keep things from floating.
A frying pan.
Spatula
Tongs (optional but helpful)

For the food itself, we needed:

2 filet mignon steaks
salt
pepper
olive oil

We wanted the steaks to be cooked medium, which is 135 degrees. How did we know that? A chart telling cooking temperatures came with our thermometer, but you can also look it up online or in cookbooks or just ask someone. Meat cooking temperatures are common knowledge.

So we had our target temperature. Now it was time to try sous vide.

First, we put salt and pepper on each side of the steaks, just like you normally would. Then we put the steaks beside each other–but not touching–in a vacuum sealer bag and sealed them up.

Next, we set up our “high-tech” sous vide water oven. We filled a pot with warm water. Then we hooked the digital thermometer to the side of the pot so that the temperature gauge was sitting in the water but not touching the pan. We did this by extending it with a clip that comes with the thermometer. You can also use a black metal paper clip.

We put the stovetop on medium low and set the temperature on the thermometer at 135 degrees. Then we waited for the water to reach that temperature. It took about 10 minutes. When the temperature had reached 135 degrees, we put the vacuum-sealed steaks in the water.

Of course, they floated. That wasn’t good because the meat has to be immersed in the water and yet not touching the bottom of the pan (the bottom is hotter than 135 degrees). So, I took a vegetable steamer and put it on top of the pot. It pushed the steaks down so that they were immersed in the water. You can also use a pot lid flipped upside down.

Sous vide takes a long time. There’s no exact time table here because, as I said before, you can have the steaks in the water for hours and they will stay at your required temperature. We waited an hour, which turned out to be fine.

The only tricky part of DIY sous vide is monitoring the temperature. We wanted to keep the meat between 134-135 degrees. To do this, we set the stovetop on the lowest temperature and the alarm on the thermometer at 136 degrees. When the temperature got that high, the alarm went off and we added 1 cup cold water to the pot. This brought the temperature down to 134 degrees. It took the water 10 minutes to raise the two degrees again, the alarm went off at 136 degrees, and we added another cup of cold water. We did this every ten minutes and it kept the steaks right around 135 degrees.

After an hour, we took out the steaks. They looked exactly like boiled meat. It was time to sear them to get a good crust.

Why sear at the end of the cooking process and not the beginning? If you seared the steak at the beginning, the crust would get soft and weird in the vacuum-sealed bag. With sous vide, you cook the meat from the inside out.

To sear, we put approximately three tablespoons of oil in the frying pan, heated it up, and dropped in the steaks. We cooked each side for about 30 seconds to 1 minute, or until there was a nice brown crust. The end results?

This was one of the tenderest steaks I have ever eaten. It was perfect. I would absolutely do this again, maybe even this week with another easy-to-overcook meat: pork chops.

So in summary: Vacuum seal, get the water to the temperature you want the meat to be at, stick the meat in, monitor the temperature, and sear. The end result? Perfectly cooked meat.

ETA: There is some concern in the comments about this giving you botulism. As I said in the comments, I do not think this is an issue for the following three reasons:

If you are still concerned, please don’t use this method.

Having grown up in a rural area, I have heard about mushroom foraging all my life. The consensus: you have to know what you are doing–some mushrooms are deadly poison–but if you do, you can get a good haul of wild mushrooms to eat.

Yes, but I never realized just how big a haul until I read Justin’s account of mushroom foraging. He and a friend ended up with nine pounds of mushrooms from just one trip:

I see mushroom ragu in his future.

One of the questions people are asking me about getting chickens is: how do I think they will get along with our two cats? My answer: not very well! The cats are going to want to eat the chickens, especially when they are little. However, I think we can handle it because:

a. Cats can be trained not to do something and
b. Full-grown chickens are bigger than cats and tend to intimidate them.

So once the chickens are grown up, I think the cats will know to leave them alone. Dogs, however, are a different story. They can be relentless in their desire to kill and eat your pet chickens.

However, there is hope. The Dog Whisperer recently dealt with a dog that had killed two of the family chickens. In the below clip, he goes over a basic technique for training your pet to leave the chickens alone:

To tell the truth, I’m not so sure how successful the Dog Whisperer was here, but hey, at least he got an egg for his troubles.

Apparently, you don’t have to live in upstate Vermont to make your own maple syrup. Ava Chin of this NYTimes blog decided to tap a maple tree in Brooklyn to make her own syrup…and it worked.

You do need certain weather conditions, namely “a period of hard frost, followed by warmish days of 40-plus degree weather with evening temperatures that dip to freezing,” says Chin. If you live in these conditions–New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania also have sap-giving maples–you can make your own syrup. All you do is harvest the sap from the tree and then boil it into syrup. The process is called sugaring.

Chin tapped the tree using equipment from the hardware store, and was rewarded with 2 gallons of sap:

I held my breath in anticipation, but seconds later the sap began overflowing, even spilling onto the drill. Tree sap is watery and slightly sweet, not hard and stiff like resin, and reminded me of the way I had imagined rivers tasted in novels, where after a long day’s journey, horseback riders drinking from the running water always invariably said, “That sure is sweet!”

After getting the sap, she goes over how to turn it into syrup. Looks like it is a matter of boiling it. And the resulting syrup?

A warm spoonful of it revealed a concentrated sweetness that felt fully realized, old-fashioned, and mellow, without the cloying heaviness of store-bought, which is sometimes just glorified corn syrup.

Read the rest here.

I’m loooving these chicken coops by Chicken Cribs in Oakland, Ca. They come in a DIY kit that you assemble yourself. It can accommodate up to 4 chickens and is supposedly easy to clean. From the FAQ:

“The interior has plastic panels which are easily lifted out and rinsed with a hose or scraped off. The run area needs little maintenance – removal of uneaten compost, and occasional collection of droppings for use in other parts of the garden are all that’s required.”

It keeps the hens safe from predators too, which I understand is one of the major problem with chickens. Best of all, it is actually attractive! The kit costs $550 to $750.

Hmmm 2010… the year I finally get chickens? (Via Sunset Magazine)

So, as follow up to the post about Anthropologie Aprons, here is the apron I sewed this weekend.

First I looked on the web at some patterns, then I made my own pattern out of wrapping paper based on the fabric and the way I wanted it to look. I taped the pattern together and tried on the paper version to make sure that I liked it. Then I cut the apron out and sewed it up accordingly.

I like it. Really, the pictures don’t do it justice.

Since I already had the fabric, all I had to buy was some thread. The total cost of this apron was $.95.

While making my traditional English-ish Christmas dinner (which turned out great, by the way), it occurred to me that I need an apron. Because I entertain a lot, I often end up cooking for people while wearing, say, a cashmere sweater or a nice dress. But I want a cool apron, something interesting and fun that I will want to wear.

The next day, I ended up in Anthropologie and was enamored by their apron selections. They cost about $30. I particularly liked this one:

And this one:

But $30… You know, how hard can that be to make? I took a look around and came up with free apron patterns, such as:

* one made from napkins
* a frilly 1950s apron
* a baker’s apron from Martha Stewart
* a quilted one for children and small adults that could be adjusted
* and 52 other free apron patterns online.

None of these are quite right, but aprons seem like something that could be adjusted pretty easily. Maybe I will make one.

Quite a few people have pointed me to these cute little gingerbread houses Not Martha made. They are designed to sit on your cup of hot chocolate. There’s a very clear how-to on her site if you want to recreate them on your own.