Filling in the Awkward Spaces

You know that space above the cabinets? At least those of us with the lower end "builders" cabinets do. They do not reach to the ceiling, and in my kitchen, there was only an 11 inch clearance. I would have loved to extend them up, but I also didn't want to spend a fortune and have to work within my physical limitations.
Enter the answer: fabric. I love fabric. It can cover a multitude of sins, and in this case, it gave me some more storage that did not have to look like a house magazine to not feel cluttered. This is a very inexpensive project, less so if you have scraps of fabric to use instead of having to buy new.
Other resources could be sheets at the Goodwill, or yards sales, and a teeny bit of sewing know how. I did these on the machine because with all the straight lines I would have been bored silly doing it by hand, but a back stitch is all you need to know how to do.

This is the finished work. The curtain extends on both sides to the ends of the cupboards.

These are held in place with cup hooks and long dowels from the hardware store. To keep them in the ceiling, I suggest using a lightweight anchor to keep the cup hooks in place. To keep the look streamlined, I slit a very small hole in the fabric where ever there was a hook, I did keep the sections as panels, rather than one long piece. This is to avoid dealing with the whole thing when putting thing away, and will also make washing and putting it back up easier later on. This set up does not have anchors (yet). I was very impatient and just wanted to get them done, but I do strongly suggest a lightweight anchor. Unless your fabric is heavy, that is all you will need.
The top has a pocket hem of just and inch and a half, and the bottom was cut using pinking shears, so just a 1/4 inch hem was needed, but if you worry about strands of threads popping out, you may want to double the hem to hide the edges. The pinking shears tend to keep the fraying down.

Here is is above the sink

The curtains are a little slapped up there. It was a practice embroidered towel I did, but I couldn't bear to wash dishes with it after all that work, so I split it in two, hand sewed a seam and voila!

The Cheepah Chicken

Okay, maybe I am the only one who remembers "Father of the Bride" with Steve Martin, but hey, the title makes me giggle and it is what goes through my head whenever I get chicken. I am not a huge fan of chicken generally, which is unfortunate because a whole chicken is a budgeting dream. This fryer was regularly 1.49 a pound, and while the roasters are .20 cents less, they are also much bigger. With a small family and only one large appetite, the smaller ones work better for us. That and the roasters tend to be less tasty when fried, which is what the legs will be used for.
Since I am usually not well, the idea of spending "spoons" making a grocery list and menu within a budget, and then going to the store and fighting the masses, then lugging it all home, putting it away and starting to process meats and fruits for use, it is a bit too much. I have lost a lot of meat and vegetables trying to do it all, even in a few days, so now I often go through Peapod online. My husband can pick it up for free, and that way doesn't have to work so hard after working so hard at the job all day. I have learned how to keep within a budget this way, and have stopped buying some things that are much more expensive through the service than if we went down ourselves. All of that was a lead up to saying that I got two chickens by accident. This worked out for you all, because after I processed one bird, I had my husband come in and take some photos of the second one to share on this blog. I would like to apologize in advance for the photo set up. The pictures were great, but I had to compile them like this to keep the page from loading improperly. They also seem somewhat over-sized for the blogger format even though I used their settings. This is the smallest I could set them and still be able to see anything.

Each chicken left me with:

2 boneless chicken breast halves
1/2 pound of chicken tenders
2 drumsticks
2 thighs
2 wings
1 carcass, bag of innards plus scraps for stock
1 liver which I freeze in a container until I have enough to do something with.
2 quarts of clear chicken broth

Keep in mind that there are more than one way to process a chicken. If I were making a large fried chicken dinner, for example, I would have kept the breasts on the bone and cut each half in half again. If I wanted to also serve chicken wings at the same time, I would have cut them off slightly different, so that they would have more meat on them from the breast. In this case, my husband has been helping with the cooking a lot and is a bit leery of cooking meat on bones, so I went ahead and boned the breasts which gave me more bones for the stock pot.

The one thing that will save your sanity while doing this very simple task is preparation. Yes, processing a chicken from the market is pretty simple. Once you do it a couple of times you will be a pro and wonder why you haven't been doing this all along.
Clean your work surface thoroughly and remove any clutter. You will need:

1 large cutting board
Various knives, I use my 8 inch chefs, Sontuku and paring knives
Poultry shears, these are not a "must" but they do make some of the jobs easier
Soft headed mallet, OR a nice heavy cleaver
2 clothes, one sanitary one that is not to be used with any of the actual chicken or juices, and one that is okay to wipe your hands on, it should be immediately put in the wash after as salmonella bacteria spread pretty easily and cross contamination is how most folks end up sick from it.
Paper towels
1 bowl for livers
1 bowl for chicken wings
1 bowl or plate for finished parts
1 large stock pot, if you have any bags of scraps saved for stock, now is the time to put that in right off.
1 wash cloth
Dish soap for clean up and washing hands. You will wash your hands a lot.

Set up your work space, making sure everything is easy to get to. I keep the wash cloth rinsed and by the sink so I can use it to turn on the faucet to avoid cross contamination from my chickeny hands.

This is part of my set up. As you do this more often, you will find your own way that works best for you.

First, remove the wings

For a better view of the photos, right click and choose "open image in new tab". When your cursor is over the photo, you should see it become a magnifying glass with a + inside of it. Just click on the photo to make it original size.

Next we take the legs and thighs

Removing the back will help with boning the breast

De-boning a breast is easy!

When I was done I had a bowl of chicken parts, a stock pot of extra bits for the stock and froze the liver separately for another use one day down the line. I also freeze my wings separately until I have enough for a meal, because buying them pre-cut is ridiculously expensive.

I have a new found respect for folks who blog actual step by steps with photos now. Practice makes perfect.. right?  Practice applies to cutting up your own chicken too. My husband took a lot of pictures, but the best ones where the ones when I was not trying to show anything, because it has become second nature to me. It is like trying to say the alphabet without the song, something you have to think about, otherwise you just do it.

Wormy Composting

At the beginning of this summer I was bequeathed with red wigglers, aka vermiculture worms for composting inside the house.  Armed with the almighty internet and a passion for research, as well as a little pain reduced time, and I built a box for keeping them. The premise is fairly simple, one box to live in, one to make a new home when necessary and one to catch any drips. I did try to cheap out a little and just use two levels, but that makes transferring the worms difficult. It can still be done, using one of the lids to the totes as a drip catcher, but I found that set up to be less stable using the materials I had available at the time. I chose the most simple way possible, but when I think on it, I am sure that there are other configurations that could be more efficient in terms of materials.

This is what you need:

2 plastic totes.

Mine are of the medium sized variety. They should not be too deep, you want enough space for the scraps and then some bedding on top of that and I like having some extra head space in case these normally homebody worms get freaked out and try moving up, as they did when I first put them in their new home.
It is important that the totes do not nestle inside each other tightly. Since the ones I had available did nest tightly, I put a couple of rocks between the two, just under the handles, to give it a bit more space.

2 drill bits (and a drill!)

I do not have the exact sizes, and that isn't terribly important. The large holes were under 3/8th inch, but larger than 1/8th inch, and the small one was under 1/8th of an inch. The large holes are to allow the worms to migrate when harvesting the lovely composty material. They start out really small and skinny, but I had no idea how fat they could get, so I err'd on the side of a bit big. The small bit is just to pop in some air holes. I doubt they are small enough to keep the worms from crawling out if they really wanted too, but they are non migratory by nature, so my hope is that the narrow holes will dissuade any adventuring type worms.

Strips of damp newspaper. Just soak the strips and wring very dry.

Food scraps, a couple days old and chopped up ideally, but it is not necessary. Just do not feed them any animal products except some crushed eggshells (with the membrane removed, which is a pain, so my eggs shells go straight into the garden usually) and do not put citrus fruit scraps in there as too much acid messes with them.

Now for the fun.

Take one lid and drill some small holes in the top like so:

Around the top portion of two of the totes, drill some small holes too. These are for ventilation. I have a fear of opening the darned thing and having something terrible come out, like very strong odors or worse, decomposing worms.

These will be your worm nests. The worms live in one, and after a few months it will be filled with a compacted mix of bedding and worm poop! When that happens, they need another, clean nest, to live in. This is where the bottom holes come in. As well as allowing any liquid to drain, these holes make is easier for the worms to move downward when the time comes. I tried to just use the one nest, but when I went to sort through to remove the worms I realized that I was going to lose a lot of them because they look just like their surroundings at that point. So, I made two of the above totes and drilled these holes in the bottom:

So, now you have two totes with small air holes near the top and a few larger holes on the bottom as well as a lid with some small holes drilled in. The third tote needs no holes, but if your bins fit tightly you may want to put something there to keep a space between the totes so that the water can come out if there should be any. I have not seen any liquid dripping from mine yet, but they say it does happen. I am still on a learning curve, but I have had them for over six months and they are still alive and kicking, so to speak.

I just used some empty toilet paper rolls to lift the bins up a bit. They don't last long, but there is a continuous supply until I find four items of equal height to replace them. I don't use canned goods often, so I rarely have more than a couple around. That, and I do not want to deal with the rust. I am that lazy.

Now, put them all together, the one tote with no holes on the bottom to catch anything that may come out. So far I have only had a very little bit of what looks like worm poop (castings, which technically all the compost will be)

You are scratching your head and thinking "Why are there only two bins? Why did I put holes in a third?" The reason is, this was my first attempt and I have not had a chance to photograph the other and am too lazy at this moment to go take one. Hey, it is hot out there. Not good for the chronic pain, believe you me. The third tote just goes on top.  If you wish, you can just make the two totes with holes and use the lid that you did not put holes in as a catcher underneath. I am not so brave as I did not know how much liquid would come out and I was not convinced that the worms would not escape.

In the very top container, put your scraps. On top of the scraps, loosely layer the damp newspaper shreds (I used the ads and flyers as I do not get a physical newspaper anymore, and neither do my neighbors so I could not scavenge them from recycling bins). Put your worms on top of that, and here is a major trick, keep the top cover off and put the whole thing under a light. The worms instinctively move down, away from the light. I did not do it that way at first and even two weeks later, most of the worms were still near the top. You would think the need to eat would encourage them downward, but I am thinking that without noses they don't know it is there.
Mix a little dirt or used up coffee grounds in with the scraps as the worms need a bit of grit to digest properly.

After a few hours, check to see if the worms are no longer on top of the bedding and put on the cover with the holes in it. The rule of thumb is a one to one ratio of scraps to worms. One pound of worms (about a thousand red wrigglers) can eat a pound of food in a week. Mine are quite a bit lazier than that, so start with less and work your way up. If the nest material looks dry when you check, spray some water. They don't need a lot, as there is a lot in the food, but the damp is supposed to be good, as long as it isn't sopping.

In three months or so, you are going to have to change the bins. To do this, lightly loosen the castings in the occupied bin. In the unoccupied one, create a new home, just as you did at the beginning. then, set the old home on top of the new, making sure that there is space between the bottom of the totes. If they are not moving, which honestly, I am not sure how they survived long enough to get this far as mine are super lazy, just set them under a lamp again, coming in occasionally to remove castings and stir up any remaining to get the worms to move down to their new home.

That is it. I have thought many times that my neglect had killed them. When you have chronic pain, sometimes that takes priority, and my flare last a week or more sometimes, leaving me with a lot of backlogged work that must be prioritized to get done before the next flare which is not predictable. Despite this, my worms are thriving. I even found them mating in a big old squirmy worm ball.
These worms do not have a male/female system, but they do need each other to reproduce.

Ah, the pectin

So, I promised an update on the great homemade pectin experiment. So far it does work, but I have not been able to get it to gel as firmly as jams do with the store bought kind. I ran out of strawberries before I could continue experimenting with different batches, but it did gel a bit, more like a very thick and chunky sauce rather than a more spreadable jam. It is still delicious and some was eaten on waffles and I bet the jam would be excellent on a piece of sponge cake in the middle of winter while dreaming of the Spring's gardening ahead.

Making your own pectin is actually pretty simple, especially if you save all of your apple scraps in the fall from making all of those yummy goodies that the fall harvest brings.

The fruit that I know has the most available pectin (off hand, there may be others) are apples. Grannysmith have more, as do those that are slightly unripe. Crab apples are brimming with the stuff, so if you find a safe source somewhere, that is free pectin on a tree. The pectin lives mostly in the cores and peels, but in this case I used whole Grannysmiths due to that is what I had in the house and I did not have a lot of them in the crisper drawer.

The first step is to scrub those apples. Commercial apples are sometimes waxed and often sprayed with insecticides. Even organic types will have residue from handling and sometimes an organic waxing product to help keep them looking fresh for shipping and storing.

Yes, that is a regular scrubber. Make sure it has been sanitized though as sponges are notorious as little bacteria factories. No one wants to eat that. I use lukewarm water to help loosen any waxes that may be holding on to the skin.

Next, chop them all up, cores, peels and all. If you are using scraps you may want to chop up the cores a bit if they are whole. The more surface area that is exposed the less heating will be needed to extract the pectins.

After cleaning and chopping, throw them into a slow cooker or deep, non reactive pot for the stove top, or, if you are okay with heating up the house, this can be done in a covered baking dish on a very low oven. I have not used the oven method, so I have no tips on making it work properly. Personally, I love my slow cooker as has been mentioned in the past a "few" times.

The next step is to put in 1/2 a cup of water. This is just to prevent any scorching before the apples exude their own juices. If you are not using whole apple you may need to add a bit more.

Put the cover on your cooker and set the heat to high for just one hour. This helps the juices start coming out right at the beginning to avoid using more water which will dilute the final product.

After the first hour, put the apples on low and let cook for four hours or more. I neglected to take a picture of the finished product before straining, but it is a lot like making juice for a jelly, except you can give in and squeeze if you want.

You can use a jelly bag, a very clean tea towel or flour sack towel, or you can use cheese cloth, layer thickly. Line a colander with your material of choice or fill the jelly bag as normal, and carefully (slowly) pour the apples into the fabric. Cheese cloth lets the liquid through a bit faster, but I used a flour sack towel and it worked fine, you just need a teeny bit more patience as the liquid goes through. Stir it a bit if the draining is going very slowly.

The, gather up the ends (or close up the jelly bag) and secure shut with a large, sturdy, rubber band. This is where all of you jelly makers get to finally do what you always wanted to (do not deny it!). Squeeze the fabric to wring out as much liquid as you can. Then sit the bag in a strainer over the bowl, put a small plate on top and weigh it down with a can of tomatoes or anything that weighs at least a pound. Put it into the refrigerator over night and in the morning you will have a (mostly) dry product in the bag and a viscous liquid in the bowl. This is your pectin.

I have not tried freezing it yet, but I have been told it will keep in the freezer. Otherwise, remember that this product can get moldy, so keep it in the refrigerator and use it up quickly.

Here is the tricky part, and unfortunately I can do nothing to remedy that with quick and easy tips or tricks. How much pectin you need depends on how concentrated your pectin solution is, how much pectin was in the fruit you extracted it from as well as how thick you wish your product to be. For a regular sized batch of strawberry jam, I used a little more than half a cup, and it did set, it just did not set as firmly as I would have liked. If you used crab apples that may be enough to use, but if you used ripe apples you may need far more. It is a crap shoot, but a fun crap shoot. And a cheap crap shoot if you are using foraged crab apples or scraps from previously used fruits.

New Look in the Kitchen

A little over two weeks ago I received news that my estranged father had passed away.  Lots of drama and strife of course, so in an effort to ignore all that for a bit, I decided to finally tackle refinishing my kitchen island.
About a year after we moved in to this house, a store called "The Mill Store" opened a little under a mile down the road. I loved roaming the aisles and smelling the fresh pine scent of all the unfinished furniture. At one point, we got a great deal (well under 200 dollars) on an unfinished wood kitchen island. That was over 15 years ago. Other than putting a few hooks on it and getting some  metal baskets for the shelves, I didn't nothing to personalize it.

This is what it looked like after using it for so long and not having it finished. There are also two wood slat shelves that sit underneath.

So, in a fit of despondency and a strong desire to get something accomplished, I decided to paint and refinish the butcher block top. Tip: if you have a butcher block top you may want to do a little wet sanding before you oil it next time. I am happy I did!

After sanding off the parts that the cats used as a scratching and rubbing post and painting it a nice old fashioned cream color, my husband and I created a copper hang rail for it and I painted the knobs for the drawers black. I am looking for some nice, small, glass knobs, but that can wait a bit.

Here is what it looks like now:

We are hoping to create a paper towel holder using more copper, but I love having it handy there. I don't use paper towels often, but when I do it is almost always right there at the island with goopy hands, so having it here is perfect. Those holes behind it were from the original wooden hooks, I will probably hand herbs from it during the summer to dry.

This side is the copper rail we put up. It is just 1/2 inch copper pipe and brackets from the plumbing section at the hardware store.

All of the Tomatoes!

Hello everyone! I had my surgery last Friday and have been spending my time trying to keep up with the work around the house without setting back my recovery. Super fun, as I strongly dislike sitting around with things to do that I am not allowed to.

Before I went to surgery though, everyone's tomatoes came in! This may be coming a bit late for some, but just before I went in, I canned some tomatoes and salsa, and the one thing that you always have to do for those items is peel. There are some who don't peel for salsa, and that does no harm, but I tried it once and found too many sharp strips of peel in the condiment for my taste.

You may notice that I am not mentioning sauce with the peeling. There is a reason. If you are canning tomato sauce, there is no need to peel each tomato. That goes for ketchup or anything that you will be turning to a soupy sauce. In those cases, I just wash the tomatoes, core, chop them a bit and cook them down. Once they are nice and soft you can put it through a strainer or a mill and that will remove the skins and seeds. Some people find cooking the seeds in the sauce makes it bitter. If that is you, just scoop the seeds out of the slices before putting them in the pan.
Now, on to peeling tomatoes for other recipes. The pictures below should help lead you through any unclear bits.

1. Wash tomatoes thoroughly. Even organic vegetables are exposed to bacteria, and if you are canning it is best to be as clean as possible to avoid contamination in the finished product.

2. Lightly score an "X" at the blossom end of the tomato.

3. Plunge tomatoes into boiling water in batches. As soon as the skins seem to be slipping a bit, drop them in cold water to shock them.

4. The skins should peel easily from the cuts. Although I have always cored after peeling, it makes sense that coring before blanching would make the skins even easier to remove. Doh!

5. To "core", use a melon baller and scoop the stem end out. I hate that they call it "coring", to me that implies removing the center entirely.

6. Use as directed in recipe.

Coming up: Adventures in making pantry staples!

Clever Curtain Rod!

Where I live in the Northeast there are a lot of Victorian homes as well as homes built in that image but for the poorer folks. One of the features of these houses are strangely shaped rooms, or corners. So many of the apartments I have lived in where built like that, basically because Victorian homes are perfect for dividing into more than one living area. When I was around 8 years old we lived in one that had two kitchens, three bedrooms, two living rooms, a den and just two bathrooms, one in the attic. If we lived back then it would probably make a lot of sense, but not so much now.

Here is a picture of a typical window bay in an old home:

I apologize for the low light. Things have been crazy here so I have been snapping photos without as much care as I try to show normally. But I digress. You can see from these windows that the corners are close and at a 45 degree angle (more or less), which makes hanging rods awkward. I have tried just closing off the entire corner and use it for a bit of privacy, but nothing really looked right.

Well, my husband and I have moved back into the room which was the kids until my oldest moved out. It was the larger room, and kids tend to need a bunch of space. The arrangement helped keep things out of the living room too. We wanted a nice grown up curtain, but how to hang them? Especially the ones that have the large openings like these.

My husband and I gave it a lot of thought and realized that 1 1/2 inch PVC pipes would work. What you see above is the result of our combining forces. We used the PVC, and for the corners we used 45 degree elbow joints. Our window was slightly off, so my husband warmed the PVC to unbend it just a bit. I don't know how much manipulation it will take, but it worked for our purposes.

This is how we hung them up. The copper bit was found right in the same aisle as the PVC pipe, and the spacers (the white bit that is setting the holder a little away from the frame) were found with the screws. What is terrific about this set up is that: 1. we only needed four to hold up the window treatment and 2. no bottom screw! The curtains stay up beautifully, BUT, they are also extremely easy to removed without ripping up the window frame (more than I already have).

Because of the household crazy of my upcoming fairly major surgery, the garden and canning, and until recently, grad school, I do not have step by step instructions for this, and for that I apologize. You will want to pain the pipe. What we used was just an off white spray paint. 

A tip with spray paint is to do it right on your lawn. Any bits that get sprayed on the grass will be cut off when you mow the lawn!

Okay, here is the set up after it was completed. The little caps on the ends are also in the PVC pipe aisle.

Now I have to get back to canning. I have packed up 12 pints of tomato salsa and am now working on the whole tomatoes. My son told me that I am the only one he knows who finds out they need surgery and decides that I must do everything before hand. I am who I am. :)

Container Planting Root Crops

We have been very lucky this Spring despite the bipolar weather. For the last several days we have had overnight rain but the days have been nice enough to work outside. 
The soil in my yard may have lead contamination. My neighbor had her yard tested, and it abuts my property, so she was kind enough to share the information. The levels are perfectly fine for fruits and such, but not for leafy greens or root crops, so those require lined, raised beds or containers. 
This brings me to this week's project, making containers for beets and carrots that are deep enough, but not so heavy that I need a truck lift to move them. Adding a ton of vermiculite would be easier, but way more expensive and I haven't found a lot on how much crops like such light soil. Even then, the containers would be quite heavy. I learned this trick from a home gardening program years ago. Now, if you are super concerned about BPAs, you will want to use this to create your own type of drainage. Personally, I have done the research and do not see a problem with this method, but there are many studies out there and it depends on the ones you trust, don't judge me. *smile*

The first step, after finding a suitable container is to drill holes at the bottom to prevent water from pooling and causing root rot. Believe me, there isn't much worse than getting your plants going only to find a month or so later that they are not viable and there is no time to plant more. 

Drill holes in container

I chose to make smallish holes close together. I have seen folks make large holes, and they work too. I prefer it this way. Plus, the holes aren't as obvious. I just used an electric drill. This takes just a minute or two.

Fill the bottom

I gathered some plastic containers from the recycling bin for reuse. You crush them down well and then layer them on the bottom. It is that easy. Just make sure you don't put too much there because your plants need plenty of space to grow.

Cover those puppies

Ideally you would use a gardening cloth, but I was being incredibly lazy and thought that I was also being clever and reused some plain paper packing material from something I had shipped in. It is just newspaper paper without the print. You do this to avoid losing so much soil in between the plastic containers. The paper is going to disintegrate  hence me "thinking" I was being clever. It is going to work, I just don't know if it will for next year. Go with the cloth if you have it on hand, but do not use plastic unless it is very perforated as otherwise it will not drain, resulting in the aforementioned horror of root rot.

A nice, gentle watering

Ideally, one would research which soil is the best for the crop being grown, but who has time for that? Also, I am on a budget and these projects are already costing way too much. I am just using a garden mix made for vegetables and fruits. After filling the container a little higher than you want the soil to me, I planted beet seeds and very gently, dusted some of the soil over them. I want them close to the surface, but covered to maintain moisture and to keep it from getting too much sun while still staying fairly warm for sprouting. Then I gently drenched the top with water. I will have to keep this watered because I didn't moisten the soil before putting it in the pot. This time it wasn't laziness, just poor planning as I didn't have a container big enough to mix the soil and water together in first. 

I did make that baking mix, but forgot to photograph the process because things have been pretty crazy here. I would like to make some biscuits or something anyway before giving it the seal of approval. I am also going to try a brownie mix because it has to be better than the boxed type.

Also, if the pain subsides, I will be going out and planting the bok choy I started inside. Again, I hear that this is not recommended generally, but given the climate here, it seemed like a good idea to attempt anyway. With the bak choy I will plant my green onions (which take forever to grow it seems) and radishes. I also want to start some radicchio. 

Once the pallets that my soils and manure have been sitting on are cleared off, I will be attempting a horizontal lettuce and greens garden. Stay tuned!