Ah Kate Spade. You have my number, don’t you? I always love her stuff, including these air quote mittens. Because how else are you going to make air quotes while wearing mittens?
Of course, this being Kate Spade, the mittens are $65. But frankly, they don’t look that hard to recreate on your own if you know how to knit. [swissmiss]
After completing my homemade ricotta cheese, I stuffed it in some pasta shells and topped it with a fresh pasta sauce. It was great. Here’s the recipe:
Pasta Shells With Ricotta-Cheese Filling
(Makes 16 shells)
Ingredients:
2-3 c ricotta cheese, preferably homemade
2 c good Parmesan cheese
2 eggs
1 Tbs fresh parsley
Salt and pepper to taste
For the Sauce:
2 Tbs olive oil
8-10 tomatoes, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 onion, chopped
1 carrot, peeled
1/2 cup fresh basil, chopped
2 Tbs tomato paste
1 c chicken broth
1 pinch red peppers
Salt and pepper to taste
Directions:
To cook the pasta: fill a pot with salted water. Bring to a boil and add the pasta shells. Cook until done, then drain and set aside for later.
To make the sauce: chop up all the vegetables. When you cut the tomatoes, make sure to retain their juices. For the carrot, I first removed the skin with a vegetable peeler and then sliced the rest of the carrot with the peeler.
Add the garlic and olive oil to a large pan. Heat up until the garlic begins to cook and releases its juices into the oil. Add the onions and cook until soft, stirring often. Add the carrots and the pinch of red pepper flakes. Stir until the carrots are soft.
Carefully add the tomatoes and their juices to the pan. Stir until integrated, then add the tomato paste and broth. Bring to a boil and then lower the heat to medium-high so that the sauce is simmering on the stove. Cook until the moisture reduces by half, about 20 minutes. At the end, add the basil and cook another 3-5 minutes until wilted. Add salt and pepper to taste.
While the pasta sauce is cooking, make the cheese filling: Combine all the filling ingredients except the salt and pepper in a bowl and stir until combined. Taste. Add salt and pepper until delicious.
To assemble the dish: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Get a 9″X13″ pan and grease or spray with cooking oil so the shells won’t stick.
Pick up a pasta shell. If it is still too hot to handle, gently rinse with cool water. Fill the shell with cheese and place in the pan. Repeat until all the shells are filled.
Spoon the pasta sauce over the shells. Cook in the oven about 35 minutes, or until the sauce is bubbling.
Before serving, let the shells sit about 5 minutes. Carefully spoon each shell onto a plate–you don’t need very many, these things are filling! Top with more Parmesan cheese if desired. Enjoy!
I could not believe how easy it is to make your own ricotta cheese. I’ve been meaning to try it ever since I made cottage cheese awhile back and now I am wondering why I waited so long. This recipe is so easy, it practically makes itself.
And the results are tasty, too. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this cheese beats high-quality ricotta, but it’s definitely better than the stuff you can easily get in the store. This recipe is especially valuable to me because many times an Italian recipe will call for ricotta cheese, but many grocery stores only carry the skim-milk kind, which frankly, just doesn’t cut it.
To make this recipe, the only special thing you need is cheese cloth, an inexpensive item you can get at any grocery store. Otherwise, it uses basic kitchen supplies.
As for the milk and cream, the one thing to avoid is the phrase “ultra-pasteurized,” which means the nice cheese-making bacteria has been cooked out of the milk and won’t yield goods cheese. Also, the nicer (i.e. local and organic) dairy you buy, the better the cheese will taste.
After making the ricotta, I stuffed it in pasta shells and cooked it with sauce made from my homegrown tomatoes. Recipe to follow tomorrow.
How To Make Ricotta Cheese:
(Yields 2-3 cups of cheese)
Ingredients:
Directions:
Pour the salt, cream, and milk into a large pot. Slowly bring up the heat until the mixture is almost boiling, at around 200 degrees. Just before it boils, turn the heat to low and add the vinegar. Stir for 2 minutes and then turn off the heat. You will already start to see the curds of cheese at this point:
Line a mesh strainer with the cheese cloth and place over a bowl to catch the whey. Pour the cheese mixture through the lined strainer and let drain for one hour.
Voila! You have made ricotta. Let cool and cook as normal. Enjoy!
One thing I have learned from my post on turning a bar of soap into liquid hand soap is that some people prefer soap to have lots of foam. The homemade liquid hand soap doesn’t easily foam, and there is a good reason for this. According to a comment from Sabrina Sumsion:
The sudsing effect is actually added to all store bought cleansing beauty products. The reason is because of marketing. To convince women to stop making their own products and buy off the shelf, they spent a lot of money to sell the idea that suds are necessary to prove a cleanser is working. Since homemade products rarely produce suds (because it’s not necessary) they were portrayed as inferior. … The short answer is the suds come from added ingredients. Your bar may have a lower ratio of “sudsers” in the ingredients and when diluted further, the sudsing effect is basically negated.
Still, there’s nothing wrong with liking soap to lather. If that’s your ilk, try putting the liquid soap–homemade or not–in a liquid foam dispenser. These devices aerates the soap and makes it extra sudsy. Foaming dispensers start at about $5, but since they use less soap overall, they pay for themselves over time, which makes them a fairly frugal option for your house as well.
Back To The Lab Again made a Venn Digram Cake.
Half is heaven, i.e. angel food cake; hell, i.e. devil’s food cake; and the middle is purgatory, a combination of the two. Funny and delicious at the same time! [Neatorama]
This Star Wars’ AT-AT costume for a dog looks great. Katie Mello, who works as a stop-motion character fabricator at LAIKA/house, made this for her greyhound named Bones. Read more about it here. [Craft]
Happy Halloween!
Here’s a great one from Southern Living–turn a pumpkin into a cooler for drinks.
The idea is simple: cut the top off a wide pumpkin, scoop out the seeds, line with plastic, fill with ice, and pop in the drinks. Perfect for a Halloween party, or any other holiday party, too.
Martha Stewart has a how-to on making Haloween Pumpkin Creatures. It goes over how to carve a pumpkin to make all kinds of animals, like a porcupine:
Or a cat:
Or a snake:
And more! Great ideas.
When I graduated from college, I learned I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Here I was just starting out in life, yet I was heavily in debt and had to start paying right away. It was depressing and scary.
So I feel for the people in this NPR piece who are struggling with student-loan debt. Some of them owe $80,000 or $100,000. While that’s excessive, the burden for paying for college is worse than when I was in school, and the price of education is still going up.
It took me 10 years to pay off my school debt. I don’t regret going into debt for my education–getting a college degree is one of the best things you can do for yourself–but I could have owed much less if I had gone about things differently.
So learn from my mistakes. Here are 5 Ways To Save Money In College:
1. Pay Attention To The Loan Terms. Don’t just sign papers. Try to get loans that have low interest rates, or better yet, no interest rates–they do exist for student debt. Understands the terms of the loan: what are the monthly payments? What are the penalties if you don’t pay? How long can you defer payment after you graduate? It’s important to know what you’re paying for school, if for no other reason that it’s a motivator to do well in class. You certainly won’t want to pay for the same class twice.
2. Reconsider The Dorms. Let me put it this way: when I graduated from college, the vast proportion of my debt was from living in the dorms. Had I gone right to living in a house with roommates, as I did later in college, I would have had a LOT less debt to deal with. There are benefits to staying in the dorms, and many schools require you stay there your first year (although I find that rules are usually negotiable), but dorms are often overpriced for what you get. You may do better living off-campus, so do a cost comparison.
3. Cut The Meal Plan. Make sure you are paying for what you will actually eat. My first year, I paid for eating in the cafeteria three times a day when I really just ate there once. That was a waste of money. Also, consider feeding yourself–a microwave and a small fridge (if allowed in the dorms) may be cheaper than a meal plan.
4. Be Smart About Books. Textbooks are notoriously expensive, so don’t just buy them in the student bookstore. Shop around. Most college towns have bookstores that sell used textbooks for cheaper than the school, and there are websites that sell used textbooks for a fraction of the retail price. There are other options too–you can share a book with a classmate or get it out of the library, although this can be difficult and annoying during exam times. Another option, and this worked for me, is to wait until you get to the class to see what the professor actually uses. Many times, they will assign books that they barely glance at during the class, so wait to see what the syllabus says before purchasing. It can save a surprising amount of money.
5. Don’t Procrastinate. Late fees. Parking fees. Handing in student aid forms after the deadline passes. Not getting a scholarship because you didn’t apply in time. All these things have one thing in common: procrastination. And procrastination is expensive. I racked up hundreds of dollars in parking fees because I was too lazy to get the change I needed to pay the parking meters. Eliminating procrastination can save thousands over the course of a college education–and isn’t a bad policy for studying, either.
So there are my tips. What tips do you have for saving money in college?
This is so cute. Child’s Own Studio has a service where they will take your child’s drawing and make it into a custom soft toy. They look pretty close to the drawing too:
