Statistically speaking, it's not that hard to be cheesy.

First, a confession. I'm not really a fan of Cheez-Its. I mean, they're okay. And I'd eat them if they were around, and I certainly wouldn't starve to death if I could only eat Cheez-Its for the rest of my life, but they are definitely a product I have a hard time reconciling with my sense of healthy eating. Once, about a year ago, I bought a box of Cheez-Its and on the back it had pictures of wheels of cheese dressed up representing the different flavors. My kids were fascinated with this to the point of distractedly staring at it while standing still for an uncharacteristic length of time as if it were a great new TV show or a fascinating car accident. Really it was at this point that I vowed to never buy them again.

The magic is lost on me.

I was intrigued, however, when I saw a recipe for cheddar crackers on Pinterest and kept the notion of making a home made version in the back of my mind. But let's face it, 99% of the things on Pinterest just seem like a really good idea that you will never, EVER have the time to execute with any kind of success.

Enter a random library grab:

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter 

What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch - Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods

by Jennifer Reese

Author of the tipsybaker.com

While I may be a niche market, this is one of the most brilliant cookbooks I've ever read. Each recipe is rated for ease of use on a completely made up scale of something like, "Hassle: You will be amazed how easy this is" to "Hassle: You will want to bludgeon yourself with your rolling pin about halfway thorough this project," and also with a cost comparison between home made and store bought. There are so many variables that go into comparing the two, and cost isn't always the deciding factor, but I thought it was truly groundbreaking to see real money taken into account rather than just the vaguely condescending insistance to use "the very best grass-finished, organic, heirloom, artisan, homosexual squid ink pasta you can afford," as requested by many New York Times recipes.

Okay, I've never actually seen a recipe calling for grass-finished, organic, heirloom, artisan homosexual squid-ink pasta, but let's face it - it's only a matter of time.

I loved the prose between the recipes and the author's journey from normal suburbanite into the depths of surreptitious illegal goat owning bee keeper who occasionally butchers roosters and turkeys. Her stint with ducks really hit home and I laughed at the following passage both when Neal read it to me the first time, and then when I read it again on my own. This is EXACTLY what it is like to be friends with ducks.

(Owen and Isabel are the author's children, Mark her husband.)

April is the cruelest month for the spouses of animal lovers. On a sunny April afternoon, a year after I brought home the chickens, I went to buy them some cracked corn at the feed store. There, on the floor, sat a deep bin lit by an orange heat lamp and inside, quivering and twitching, was a mass of tiny downy ducklings. Some were black and some were yellow, like Ping, and they all had exquisite miniature rounded bills. I went to the cash register and asked for a cardboard box. 
I brought four ducklings home and put them in a cage on the office floor.

"I can't believe we have ducks!" cried Owen when he got home. 
Isabel raised her eyebrows and disappeared to her room.
Mark stood looking down at the cage.
"I know, " I said."But supposedly they lay a lot of eggs."
"They are very cute," he said.

Cute. And slovenly. It should have come as no surprise that ducks like water. Within hours the had splashed the contents of their drinking bowl around the cage and onto the wood floor. I moved them to the laundry room and replaced the shredded newspaper bedding. I came back after another hour to find the bedding soaked once again, and exuberantly soiled. By the end of the day it was papier-mache. By the next morning, it reeked. Animal cages smell bad enough when they're dry; they small worse when they're wet. I changed the feculent bedding in that cage daily, and each time, the ducklings scrambled into a corner, squealing, piling one on top of the other to avoid me. Ducks may be domesticated, but they aren't friendly. 

Soon the room smelled so noxious, I didn't want to do laundry anymore. When we'd had them only ten days, I filled a plastic baby pool with water, and put the ducklings out in the yard with the chickens. 

Three of our ducks turned out to be Indian Runners, as skinny, flightless bird from Java, tall and upright with a long neck that almost resembles a snake. Beatrix Potter's Jemima Puddle-Duck is thought to be an Indian Runner. They were very weird looking and they were, unfortunately, all boys. The fourth duck, and only female, was a brown Rouen duck."They make fine roasting ducks and have abundant  delicately flavored flesh," reports the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. I was done with slaughter, and this duck's abundant, delicately flavored flesh was useless to me.

Rouen ducks are not known for their egg production, but ours proved herself a champion layer. When she was about five months old, she delivered her first egg - long and heavy with a very hard, waxy white shell . Thereafter, she produced an egg almost every day and I scrambled them and fried them and they tasted like chicken eggs, except they were slightly richer and higher in cholesterol, and the yolks were the lurid orange of a California poppy. 

Just as there are cat people and dog people, I think there are chicken people and there are duck people. We soon figured out that we were chicken people. A hen might one day take it into her tiny skull to climb a tree all by herself to see what's on the other side of the fence. Or she might become so fixated on plucking every last centipede from under the woodpile that she loses track of her companions  Chickens squabble. Chickens have pet projects. Chickens have minds of their own, however small. Not so the ducks, who waddled in lockstep formation around the yard, wing to wing, all day, every day, muttering. They were like Hare Krishnas, always chanting in a gang. And they started their chanting just before dawn. I would lie there in the dark, listening to them.

"Those ducks are not right," Mark said one morning as we lay in bed. I had thought he was asleep.

"It's like in Rosemary's Baby when she hears the devil worshipers in the apartment next door."

"So you think they're harassing the chickens?
"Probably."

"I guess it's better than having a dog," said Mark, rolling out of bed.

"I don't' want you to remind me of this because I'll take it all back later," I said, getting up to join him, "but sometimes I hate having animals."

One day I heard a hen shrieking and ran outside to find two of the ducks jabbing at her with their blunt bills. It would have been pathetic, like stabbing someone with a butter knife, but the ducks were working as a team. A few days later, I caught them attacking another hen, but they had now figured out how to use their bills like clamps and had grabbed her neck feathers and were shaking her.

"Just say the word and I'll drive them out to the woods and leave them there," Mark said. 

"We can't do that."

"Why not?"

"A raccoon will just eat them. It would be inhumane."
"We're going to keep them forever?" said Mark.

"We could put an ad on Craigslist, I guess."

We did. No one answered. A week later we posted the ad again and received a single reply. Apparently, only one person in all of Northern California wanted to adopt out "chatty gang of flightless ducks." We did not ask what this person intended to do with them. 

A few days later, Owen and Mark took the ducks in a box down to the Safeway parking lot to meet their new owners. Twenty minutes later, with an empty box and downcast expressions, the two of them returned.

"I have no idea if we just gave them over to some satanic cult," Mark said. "I have no idea about those people. They had stringy hair and they say they keep their ducks in a hot tub."

"They were teenagers," said Owen contemptuously.

"A hot tub," said Mark.

We did not miss their chanting or the screams of the hens or the fetid baby pool, but I still feel guilty when I think about those weird, helpless ducks. And I miss those big orange-yolked eggs. 



Not that I will eat duck eggs. They are creepy, smelly, and I barely tolerate them in baking. But my six -year-old, a braver person than I, eats them scrambled with enthusiasm.

Which is to say that all of this is shared without consent, but I hope that if the author of this book ever sees this post that she will not object. Instead we will get together and drink fabulous home made margaritas, share some crackers and hummus, and I will try to explain to her just why gardening and canning is so much more cost-effective than she seems to believe while bonding over the shared trauma of having watched ducks rape chickens. It's kinda like watching Law & Order SVU, but with slightly less self-loathing afterwards.

I disagreed with a few things that were deemed better to buy such as potato chips (I only make them a few times a year, but I never buy them!) and hamburger buns (you just need the right pans!), but on the whole, I loved this book and highly recommend that anyone interested in a self-sufficient lifestyle check it out!

BACK TO THE CHEEZ-IT PORTION OF THIS POST!

So mixed in among tales of ducks, turkeys, chickens, and goats, there is a recipe for knock off Cheez-Its that sounded much better than the Pinterest recipe for one reason: cayenne.



THE RECIPE

Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Even cutting them isn't that bad.
Cost comparison: Homemade $0.32 per ounce. Store-bought: $0.39 per ounce (I'd guess my margins are wider, though, based on buying things in bulk.)

8 Tbsp. butter, cold and cut into small chunks
1/4 pound grated cheddar (about 1 cup)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/8 tsp white pepper
Pinch of cayenne (I think I used about 1/4 tsp)
1 cup plus 2 tbsp. all purpose flour (I used all trumps bread flour because here it's that or whole wheat)
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce

1. Put the butter, cheese, salt, white pepper, and cayenne in a food processor and pulse until the butter is broken up into bits and the mixture forms small curds, like cottage cheese. Add the flour and pulse until combined. It will now look more like wet couscous. Add the Worcestershire sauce and pulse again. The dough should be moist and come together in your hands.


2. Turn the dough onto a work surface and knead it once or twice until it forms a ball. Pat it into a disk, wrap in plastic, and chill for at least an hour.

3. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

4. Roll the dough out a scant 1/4 inch thick. (If the dough seems sticky, flour the work surface, though you probably won't need to.) Using a fluted wheel cutter (if you have one; if not a knife is fine) and a ruler, cut the dough into long 1-inch-wide strips and then cut the strips into 1-inch squares. Gather and re-roll the scraps and continue cutting.

5. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet. The crackers won't expand, so you can fit them fairly tightly. Make a small hole in the center of each cracker with a skewer or the stem of an instant-read thermometer. A toothpick isn't quite big enough.

It's at this point you realize, "This is gonna be AWESOME!"

6. Bake for about 15 minutes, until the crackers darken just a bit. Cool completely on a rack and store in a cookie tin for up to a week.

As if they'll last that long.

Makes 70 to 80 crackers.

The first batch was amazing. The next batch I made, I doubled the recipe and probably quadrupled the amount of wine I had before making them, so they didn't turn out as well. Actually, come to think of it, the first time I made them I was low on cheddar, so I used half smoked Gouda  And I don't like cheddar, but I love Gouda, so that might have something to do with it.

Seriously, though. I would have taken an artistic macro photo in a bowl or something, but they were all gone by the time the light was right for that. Bottom line - make the cheez-its, buy the book, look out for ducks. Now you know.

Soup's On!

Tomato soup has been my Holy Grail ever since I started growing far more tomatoes than I could possibly consume several years ago. I asked friends for recipes, and no one really had anymore more refined than "tomatoes, basil, add cream." So I tried that and while it was good, it wasn't GREAT. I asked the internet and it suggested, "Use tomatoes and onions, but ROAST them first. Maybe with some carrots." Somewhat better, but not exactly the tomato soup of my dreams. All perfectly edible, but not perfect.

So for the most part I gave up and just canned whole tomatoes or crushed tomatoes. This year, however, I happened across this recipe: 

Actually this is her photo for creamy gazpacho, but it looked more like tomato soup than her tomato soup picture.

http://www.thebakingbeauties.com/2011/09/canned-tomato-soup.html

Now there were several things that seemed interesting about it. For example, cloves which I would NEVER have thought to add to tomato soup. As it turns out, cloves are the magic in tomato soup the way nutmeg is the magic in mac and cheese. It just tastes right. And running it through a food mill before seasoning and thickening it is smart because it saves me from the frizzy hair and burned fingers that comes with blanching and slipping the skins off of tomatoes for canning. PEELING TOMATOES SUCKS. That's right. You heard me. And it's about time someone said it. 

So having only the internet's promise that this was a time honored and much loved recipe, I decided to chance it despite my limited tomato resources...

Okay, I lied. I was at risk of being crushed to death by tomatoes.

The recipe calls for "1 1/2 ice cream pails" of tomatoes. I have no idea how much that is given that the last time I bought any quantity of ice cream that could be described as a "pail," I had to bike to the grocery store and pay with change. 24 cups is the official quantity, but I'm not sure if that's whole or chopped or what. Now that I have made approximately 7000 batches of tomato soup I can tell you - it really doesn't matter. Just put in a lot of tomatoes. I have these TRYGG serving bowls from IKEA that hold about 12 cups of whole, fresh tomatoes.

It's like they're made for this.

So generally I aim to have two of these full per batch of soup. Now here's the beauty of this soup:

Tomato soup is like the statue of liberty of tomato canning endeavors. Tomato soup wants your bruised tomatoes, the ones with spots on them, the not-quite-ripe, and the 400,000 yellow cherry tomatoes popped up in the garden unasked for from last year's fallen harvest. Tomato soup doesn't judge! 

So just cut off whatever bits look unappealing and half or quarter them, then toss them in a big stock pot over medium heat. Just add the other ingredients as you prep them. Don't put a lot of effort into making small pieces or anything, a rough chop is fine. Add in:

• 2 cups chopped celery
• 4 cups onions, roughly chopped
• 2 large green peppers, chopped (about 2 cups)
• 1 small bunch of parsley, roughly chopped (about 3/4 – 1  cup chopped)

I've done it without the celery or with dried parsley and both turned out just fine in the end. I'd say the same thing about home grown peppers and onions as I do tomatoes, just cut off any blemishes and throw it in, no worries. This is a great way to use up stuff that wouldn't otherwise keep.

The first change I made to the recipe is to add a couple of jalapenos quartered (and seeded, if you like) because I prefer for tomato soup to have a good bit of zing. Also, if you think the tomato situation is bad, you should see how many jalapenos I've had to deal with this year. To the pot add about 5 bay leaves and 6 whole cloves. Again, this differs from the original recipe a bit. I like food to be jam packed with FLAVOR. Bring it all to a boil, then turn it down and let it simmer for a couple of years hours.

Sure, it LOOKS like rabbit puke, but the house will smell wonderful!

Eventually it will all cook down and look more like you think it's supposed to.

Mmm, gloopy!

So it looks good, but DON'T TASTE IT. Remember, there's no salt or sugar in it yet, so it will taste about as good as a used Kleenex at this point. Time to fix that. First, dig around in there and pull out those bay leaves if you can find them. The next thing you want to do is turn off the heat and use an immersion blender to puree it all into a fairly thin consistency.

R.I.P. white immersion blender

If you have an immersion blender with a plastic shaft, you might want to let it cool a bit before this step. I got away with it a few times, but eventually the plastic warped enough on this one that the blades scraped against the bottom of the pot. I splurged on a new red Cuisinart immersion blender that has a stainless steel shaft.

And yes. I realize how many times I just said "shaft".

Once it's good and pureed, ladle the soup into a food mill fitted with the fine screen (if yours is adjustable like mine). I tried running it through twice, but it didn't make much difference in the final product. The first pass-through will catch enough of the seeds and skin to result in a pleasantly silky soup.

Strain it back into the pot (I usually rinse it out first), and turn the heat back on. Meanwhile, whisk together the following:

• 3/4 cup cornstarch
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup salt
• 1 tsp Cayenne pepper

Again, I upped the cayenne because I like things on the hot side, although my six-year-old who refused to eat NOODLES and has screamed, "TOO SPICY! TOO SPICY!" upon making skin contact with mild salsa loves this soup more than Jesus. Er, more than the six-year-old loves Jesus I mean. Jesus would probably also love this soup, but possibly not more than the six-year-old. I'm not really sure I can prove my argument one way or the other.

Somewhere Michael Pollan is saying, "See, I TOLD you there's corn in everything."

In YET ANOTHER bowl, or the one you used for the straining, melt a stick of butter (the recipe calls for margarine, which might be after for long term canning. I think it's gross, so I risked using actual butter). Stir in a scoop or two of the reheating soup, and then whisk in the dry ingredients. Once you've got a good slurry going, stir it into the pot of soup. Bring to a boil and let it thicken. Now comes the fun part - the tasting! I like to add in a couple of frozen pesto cubes, along with about 1/4 cup of lemon juice both for the flavor, and to keep the balance acidic for canning safety. Add salt, sugar, and lemon juice as needed to adjust the soup to your taste. 

To can, spoon thickened soup into hot, sterilized jars. Top with sterilized lids and bands, and process in a boiling water bath 45 minutes. Each batch makes about 5 pints, but I usually double it and end up with 5 quarts and a little left over. 

To serve, mix it with equal parts milk or water and heat, then top it with loads of freshly ground pepper and cheese, ideally with a good crusty baguette.

The full recipe as adapted from The Baking Beauties:

• 24 cups whole tomatoes
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 4 cups onions, roughly chopped
• 2 large green peppers, chopped (about 2 cups)
• 1 small bunch of parsley, roughly chopped (about 3/4 – 1  cup chopped)
• 2 or 3 jalapenos, seeded if you prefer less heat
• 5 bay leaves
• 5 whole cloves

Chop all this up, boil it for a couple of hours, hit it with an immersion blender, run it through a food mill, then add all this stuff.

• 3/4 cup cornstarch
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup salt
• 1 tsp Cayenne pepper
• 1 stick butter
• 1/3 cup prepared pesto
• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Bring it back to a boil, then store it as you prefer. 

Voila! The BEST home made tomato soup!

The Problem with Pants

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm not a big fan of pants. Yoga pants, sure, and I'm pretty sure the whole jeggings trend was started just for me. They LOOK like pants, and you wear them where pants are supposed to go, but they are not, in fact, pants. Every now and again, though, I get the urge to wear jeans. There are nine billion pins a day of these cutely composed outfit centered around a pair of jeans. (And also usually a scarf, but scarves are a topic all their own.) But the big problem I have with jeans is just how hard it is to get a pair that fits right. If the waist is comfortable, the legs aren't long enough. If the legs fit well, then the rise isn't high enough and you either risk a plumber situation every time you bend over or they are far too tight in the crotch. So even though I don't frequently wear jeans, I have probably no less than fifteen pairs in my closet each CLOSE but not quite there.

A good example is this pair of American Eagle Outfitters Super Skinny jeans:

Looking sleek!

Which look great on the model, but on me, it was a little different:

So baggy I could carry groceries in the knees.

I don't know why it took me so long to think to tailor the jeans. I'm used to cutting off hems for the kids, but I never thought to restructure the jeans themselves. UNTIL NOW!

All I did was get a pair of jeans that had legs that fit well (and compared the two.

Another pair of American Eagle Outfitters jeans, but these are just the skinny and not the super skinny. Maybe there was some kind of mixup at the factory? 

The inside seam is flat felled, so I compared the straight stitched edge. Not much difference, and I actually ended up taking them in a bit more by about an inch and a half on the outside seam of each leg. But what a difference it made!

Still comfy up top, but now with a good fit on the leg as well! Hooray! Now I just have like another 14 pairs to go...

Ripped from the Archives - Pantry Edition

You see, there used to be another blog. An awesome blog, full of hilarity and mostly ducks. But then grassbags were grassbags and the ducks had to move and, although we could still easily get ducks for art and photo purposes, I would rather not have the government show up at the door again demanding that I explain my blog. Not that the government wasn't nice about it, it's just that apparently grassbags know how to use both the internet and the county's anonymous zoning tip line.

But I digress. These posts were some of my favorite projects we've ever done, and I want to share them again with the VERY CLEAR DISCLAIMER THAT ALL DUCK INVOLVEMENT IS PAST TENSE. We no longer have ducks living here and we are in compliance with all county codes and regulations. And also, if you're the sort of person who had a problem with ducks in the first place, you are a world class disk golfer. YES, YOU!

SO ABOUT THAT PANTRY

Our pantry was fine. Perfectly fine. Uber functional in design, and visually it was as if one of the old masters had constructed it from pieces of heaven that had the mis-fortune of falling from the sky. It was a bit art deco with hints of Victorian flourishes and just a dash of federalist finishes all at once.

I'm not sure I want to go to heaven anymore...

Alright, fine! It was wire shelving. Horrible wire shelving that you normally find in closets and Matisse paintings. The setup itself was straight up mind boggling (again, much like a Matisse painting).
Now if you own a pantry and odds are you might, it's normally a place where you store stuff. Big stuff, normal size stuff, small stuff. But not in this pantry. No ma'am. Any smallish container or packet would slowly tumble out of sight only to be found 3 months later during spring cleaning. The shelving was also only four feet long despite the fact that the pantry itself was six feet long. Why? No one knows. It was a riddle. And not one of those fun riddles that makes some semblance of sense once solved. More like an annoying riddle, such as why Carson Daly is still on the air.

Yet as bad as it seemed the pantry had grown on me. It was becoming part of the family. The fun little support struts that you couldn't put anything under. The fact that the shelving was only 10 inches deep when the space itself was twice that. It had character, panache, a certain "je ne sais quoi". The pantry was single handedly making me re-learn French and because of this I didn't want to see the old gal go.

Nothing beats having your stuff piled up on all your other stuff. 

Anyway, we started where all pantry planning should start. With a wishlist.

The rough draft only had one line, "Not to suck"

With these things in mind and the measurements of the pantry space, we set right to work to draw up some fantastic new pantry plans!

The tea and bags must be kept separate for obvious reasons.

We knew what we wanted but we weren't too sure how far we wanted to go. The original plan was to buy some plywood sheets from Lowes, have them cut it into strips and then go to town (much like the platform bed). But then we started second guessing ourselves because we didn't want to live without a pantry for a week (one of those nightmare worse case scenario). We began considering a series of cheap bookcases from Walmart and even the largest Expedit from Ikea which turned out to be *just* 3/4 of an inch too long (that was probably for the best). Of course then it dawned on us that we were just being lazy and that by going down any of those routes would still leave in the same situation. Using something that wasn't built for being a pantry.

So plywood it was. We did decide to kick it up a notch with birch front plywood.

That's right Dan Quayle, P-O-T-A-T-O-E-S.

The other problem was that we didn't actually have that many nice / useful storage containers. I mean honestly, when you're working with wire shelving it's not as if stainless steel canisters are going to save the day. Not that we would go in that direction, mainly because we're cheap.

No, we were in the market for something "cost efficient", something sleek looking, something you could picture James Caan using in a futuristic movie about a sport that evolved out of roller derby. Something like say, this.

Exhaust vents not pictured.

Finally we were able to come to terms with a plan. Something that would meet our needs and "wouldn't cause a disturbance in the force" as this seemed rather important to Edie.  Immediately we set to work and took the shelving down. Suddenly the pantry looked about one hundred percent to two hundred percent better.

"Better"

After that we got super paranoid and began writing on the walls. Nothing as cool as in "A Beautiful Mind", basically it was helpful stuff. Like where wood was gonna go. Because stuff like that is important.

WOOD GOES HERE

Then came the truly fun part of the project. Even though the pantry was six feet long there was exactly one stud within that six feet. And while yes, this is up to code, it seems completely dickish. If you build a closet / pantry type of structure that's six feet long, put a second damn stud in it, s'ok?

There was a lot of hate. It's the only emotion that can get you through installing 45 wall anchors. Sure we didn't have to install wall anchors but when we put items on the shelves, we kind of wanted to make sure the cleats would *stay* in the wall and not crash onto the floor with the shelves and said items.

And if you've never installed more than three wall anchors at a time, I really can't do it justice. It just seems to take *forever*. Once the wall anchors are in you then have to drill the cleats into them and hopefully, just hopefully, everything is level. If not well, you just do the whole operation over again normally at various uncomfortable heights because that's just how life works.

How this task didn't end up on All American Handyman is completely beyond us. You're slipping Mike Holmes.

It's up to code!

As stated, the main point of these wall anchors was so we could install some cleats which the shelves would be placed on top of as well as inbetween. Something like this.

We level everything, but only for entertainment purposes.

Then because we were tired of seemingly not making progress, we dry fitted all the boards we were planning on using. Frankly there's just not a lot of "glory" in wall anchors and cleats.

If this is Glory, where's Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman? 

Of course by the end of day two, it was getting *pretty* late. Which meant it was time to drink.

I love it when it's Drinky o'clock.

And of course if you've got time to drink, you've got time to paint.

BAM! Look at that abstraction!

Sometimes you paint with the colors you got, not with the colors you want. We may have had a gallon or two of "Abstract White" sitting around from a previous project. It's a harmless enough color except when it gets all abstract and is like, "Pablo Picasso was a sellout after the rose period!" Which is crazy since we all know that pieces from said period were not, despite their great popularity, much more than pendants to late 19th century Symbolism.

But hey, we didn't have to pay for the paint at least.

Of course if you *still* have time to drink, you got time to stain.

You ever walk through one of the stain sections in a home improvement store? You ever linger too long at the "one stop stain and poly" section? You think to yourself, one coat and BAM all my troubles will be solved! And you buy it despite the fact last time you needed stain you thought the same exact thing and that project didn't turn out exactly as you wanted it to, mostly because that stain sucks.

Well, we fell for it again but after staining one side of one board, we bailed on it. Smart play because again, that stain tends to suck. Of course we'll probably fall for it next time we need to stain because that pitcher of booze did not last through the two coats of stain and two coats of poly we put on everything. And it's upsetting to have to stop staining and the like to make more booze. Because we drink booze when we stain, or poly... or breathe.

Expectations are high!

So with the cleats installed, the inside of the pantry painted, all the wood stain it was *finally* time to do something fun. Like build a bloody pantry. Notice the pencil sharpener and candle on the on the table in the above picture, I have no idea why they're there but I know in my heart they played an integral role in getting us to this stage.

WonderTwin powers activate! Form of... a pantry! 

Nothing really fancy at this phase, just praying the stain and the poly didn't throw off all the calculations we made during the dry fitting. Of course we still had to cut down some pieces just right because again, that's just how life works. But at long last, we were done. Kinda like this post should have been eight pictures ago.

KA-POW

Look at that pantry. Just drink it in. Shelving that's not made up of wires. Shelving that goes all the way across. Shelving that is 16 inches deep. Shelving that looks, you know, good. And it suits our needs. And it wasn't overly expensive. And I no longer feel the need to learn French or make Matisse jokes.

Of course one of those is probably a lie.

WHITE BINS!

DARK STAIN!

And now... AN UPDATE OF THE UPDATE!

I was kinda shocked looking back at those "after" pictures! Even though we took down the doors long before this project, I'd had a curtain covering everything and planned on doing the same after the reno. Well, we rather liked the open shelving, so we decided that something had to be done to make it look more cohesive with the rest of the kitchen. Well *I* decided that, anyway. Neal thought it was fine. Neal thought it was silly to go to IKEA just for glass jars. Neal thought it was ridiculous to go BACK to IKEA again because we didn't get enough glass jars the first time. Neal got really quiet and went out to spend some time with ducks when I told him I was going to paint the plastic bins. But now, it's DONE! I guess. I mean, it's been this way for the better part of a year now, so it's probably done. We just need like three more trips to IKEA tops.

Finally.

I painted the walls the same color as the kitchen and sprayed the white baskets with Krylon. I think it looks much fancier that way! So, just to recap:

If Basil always came back like this, things would have been much different for Dorian Grey

So you find that it's spring. The birds are chirping, green is returning to the lawn, and the garden center is finally stocked with things that will most likely die in an late frost scheduled by mother nature about six hours after you plant whatever it is you've just bought. This year, I tried to thwart this by using cloches and growing delicate starts, like basil, outside early. The result of this is that this year, instead of lovely petite basil plants that yield up a few leaves to my occasional caprese salad, I grew monstrous, towering shrubs that have to be fought back almost weekly. At first we didn't know this, and we picked delicately, only a few leaves at a time from the tips. Slowly I grew bolder, and cut large enough pieces to root in a jar on the kitchen window sill. Which went really well, so I planted it out and soon had at least half a dozen MORE towering basil plants. Which meant... well... it was time to start squirreling away pesto like garlic before an impending vampire attack.

Or do vampires even avoid garlic any more? I know they used to fear sunlight, but evidently now sunlight is like sexy-juice for vampires and it just makes them sparkle while oozing teenage-appropriate sex appeal. But I digress. The point was my kitchen, while smelling heavenly, was full of this:

Too bad this isn't scratch and sniff.

That's about 12 cups, loosely packed of washed and trimmed basil. I usually submerge the basil in cold water because we've kept a largely organic garden this year and sometimes you get a few hop-ons in the harvest. I also pick out any bits with eggs stuck to the underside of the leaves and pull off the woody stems. Then I rinse it all again in the basket of a salad spinner and spin to remove most of the water. With that prep done, the rest is smooth sailing.

There's a lot of debate over whether you have to use the classic pine nuts in pesto. To me it comes down to cost. At Sam's Club (which is where we buy most of our groceries), pine nuts are available in a 15 oz package for $9.93. If you've ever bought a tiny 8 oz package of pine nuts at the grocery store for $6, you know this is a great deal. However that's $10.59 per pound. That's a LOT. Walnuts, on the other hand, run $11.74 for 32 oz.  (again, at Sam's Club) for a total of $5.87 per pound. I use 1 cup of nuts per 12 cups of basil, so my total cost per batch (for the nuts) is $1.47 with walnuts. That would be $2.64 with pine nuts, calculating nuts at a 4 oz. cup per the nutritional info. Not a huge difference to some, but when you take into account that I made at least ten batches of pesto like this, it adds up. 

And I'm full of omega-3, too!

Whichever nut you choose,  I prefer to toast them before adding them to the pesto. I'm sure this is also the improper thing to do, but here's the thing about cooking - if it's "right" but doesn't taste good, it's not really right. You can toast them in a pan on the stove or on a microwave safe dish for a minute or two in the microwave, just be careful not to burn them. 

When it comes to garlic in the pesto, you definitely DON'T want it cooked. That raw garlic bite helps to balance the anise-y flavor of the basil. I use home grown garlic which tends to be both smaller and milder than what you'd buy at the store, so I added two full heads, peeled, to the bowl of the food processor.

A good food processor will change. your. life.

Add in the toasted nuts and a little bit of salt and pulse till it gets fairly smooth. Now you start stuffing in basil by the handful. If it gets hard to mix, drizzle in a little olive oil or lemon juice and keep going until all the basil is mixed in. While the processor is running, slowly add more oil - probably at least half a cup. Now comes the tricky part of seasoning. Obviously the more oil you add, the better it will be, but then you're eating a lot of oil and you're wasting freezer space to store a larger volume of oil (which is shelf stable) than basil (which isn't).

Cheese is also a big part of a classic pesto, however the cheese you would use such as Parmigiano Reggiano is, by definition made using calf rennet. I know a lot of people who won't eat veal because it kills baby cows, but have no problem with Parmesan or other cheeses made with animal products. As a vegetarian, I have mixed feelings about this, but on the whole I try to avoid cheese made with non-vegetarian rennet. And since I make this to freeze, I don't use cheese. It's fantastic, but cheese doesn't freeze as long and it's just as easy to add it fresh when the pesto is thawed. If you plan to eat it fresh and you don't have moral objections, then knock yourself out. You will probably need at least a teaspoon and a half of salt, probably more. If it tastes bland which can happen with basil as the season drags on, you might want to try adding lemon juice to brighten the flavor or garlic or onion powder to make it richer. I also like to add black pepper. There's really very little you can do wrong here, so just keep adding whatever you think will taste good. 

Would you believe me if I told you it tastes better than it looks?

Once it's yummy, spray ice cube trays with cooking spray and then spread in the pesto as best you can. Tap it on the counter a few times to work out air bubbles. Put these in the freezer a few hours or overnight until they harden. Once they do, pop the cubes out into a freezer-safe ziplock bag to store indefinitely.

Well, as it turns out, this is sort of like what happened to Basil Hallward after all. :-O 

If storing fresh pesto, put it in a air tight container covered with a layer of olive oil to protect it. To make the recipe slightly less vague, here it is.

Vegan Pesto

12 cups basil, washed and drained with thick stems removed.

1 cup walnuts or pine nuts, toasted.

2 heads garlic, separated into cloves and peeled

3/4 cup olive oil (adjust to taste)

1 1/2 tsp. salt (adjust to taste, you use more than you would in a pesto that includes cheese)

1 tbsp. lemon juice

freshly cracked black pepper, to taste.

Try throwing these cubes into anything and everything tomato-based. Soup, spaghetti sauce, ketchup... It's also great thawed and spread on pizza dough or used as a dip for home made baguettes. You could also just toss some pasta in it and call it a meal. Pesto tastes like summer all year long!

Things I Learned on the Internet

In the past year I've gone from being a normal person with normal hobbies and normal expectations of the things in my life to being a woman obsessed with boards of tiny pictures that shine a spotlight on exactly how I've failed as a wife, mother, and woman because I don't wear a scarf perfectly layered over every outfit while making adorable lunches that transforms mere slices of cheese into the faces of Angry Birds and cracking glow-sticks open to delight my children with 20 different glow-in-the-dark experiences in their new PVC tent fort. I should probably spend 90-days doing simple exercises to get perfectly sculpted arms so I have a proper place to display the bracelets I made out of only brass washers and ribbons recycled from plastic shopping bags. And I should tint mason jars. I'm not really clear on why anyone would want to tint mason jars, or what one would use them for once tinted, but I get the distinct impression that I should be tinting them by the buttload.

 Usually I take it all with a grain of salt, but sometimes some of that sinks in. So this weekend when I had nothing better to do, I decided to make the laundry room more Pinteresting!

Calling it a "Laundry Room" is, I concede, a bit generous. It's a closet, really, but it's in the hallway right outside the bedrooms. You know, where the laundry actually is. This is the first house I've ever had that didn't have the laundry down one or two flights of stairs, usually in an unfinished basement full of spiders (or worse!). What this means is that the laundry actually gets done! Unfortunately, when the laundry is done, it's way too easy to just let junk pile up in there. It was pretty messy:

I warned you.

I'd spray painted the laundry baskets red for a laundry room of years past, but now it just leaves red scuffs on everything. The green basket used to be in the kids' room. The giant pile of lint gets saved up for making firestarters. It's important that you know it's there for a REASON and not just because I'm too lazy to throw it away. The unmatched socks... well they are all piled up there because I'm lazy.

Anyway, I won't drag it out. Here's the AFTER!

Oooh! Ahhhh!

The wire shelf was perfectly functional, but not lovely, so I attached a piece of trim to the front to make it look more finished. The paint was also fine, so I Mr. Clean Magic Erasered (yeah, it's a verb now) all the red marks off of everything. I painted the red baskets pale yellow, and this time sealed them with clear enamel to help keep things from getting yellow marks instead.

Technically speaking, it's art.

To fill up empty space and prettify things, I painted some weird flowers and stuck it in a frame that was in the basement. Then I called in my Pinterest training.

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THINGS I LEARNED FROM PINTEREST:

RULE 1: You *MUST* label everything, even if you already know what is in it. 

RULE 2: No project is complete without chevrons. 

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Label? Check. Chevrons? You betcha. 

To hold all the stuff that I haven't gotten around to ironing yet (which I do pretty often because I'm the only one who ever wears anything that needs to be ironed, and I have a LOT of clothes so I can put it off for awhile) I cut up some cardboard, covered it with burlap and added some trim and made a box to keep it all out of sight. 

I also upgraded my lint storage.

Much better, don't you think?

So now I can feel all fancy the next time I'm washing a load of t-shirts I've turned into maxi dresses to wear with my DIY fork ring. Which, for the record, is a ring made out of a fork, not a ring made FOR a fork. I know, I was disappointed, too.