I recently heard the sound of water running while out in the garden. I looked over my shoulder towards the sound, hidden, as I knew it would be, by the monolithic barrier that had appeared a few months ago. Large, healthy new branches peeked shyly over the fence of the adjoining yard, and everything clicked: The landscapers had been! The landscapers had been! My neighbor’s spa and patio was complete! Free mulch and sod for me!

I scampered down to the edge of their property to the zone traditionally set aside for things no longer wanted by its original owner. Sod! Mulch! Fresh! Free! And it was all mine, all mine! I made plans to fix the bare patch I’m sure the Home Obsessers Association is itching to send a note about, I plotted a spot to pile some mulch for my next compost pile, calculated how to get it from their house to mine, and which owner to ask and how to ask, depending on who appeared first. Continue Reading »

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Note to self: make sure the steamed rice bowl has handles!!!

Pizza tonight. Full report to follow.

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_{For more Works for me Wednesday ideas, see http://www.rocksinmydryer.net!}

Excepting the occasional date night out, I find I like nothing better than coming home to our own home cooked meals. Sometimes this means once a mood cooking marathons that then become quick hot meal: batches of beef crumbles, meat balls, meat loaves, chicken delights, pasta dishes or tamales. Sometimes a quick tossing of canned and fresh foods ala Rachael Ray. But my favorite kitchen tool is rapidly becoming the crock pot.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried on several crocks of various sizes. I’ve finally settled on two – a programmable crock that shifts to warm after cooking (but off after about 16-18 hours), and a multi-bowled crock that allows you to cook a lot or a little quickly and easily.

Throughout my experiments with crocking food, I’ve been somewhat disappointed when rice or pasta dishes promise crockerability, only to actually read instructions that say “cook everything but the rice and pasta in your crockpot at X for Y time, then serve over fresh pasta or rice”. Or that end with “just throw it in the crock at lunch time: your afternoon is free for errands!” Sorry. My lunch hour is usually 30 miles away from home and I think they’d frown at a crock pot in the lunch room. It also didn’t help that my first programmable crockpot tended to shut off a lot, ruining many a dinner, even before I dropped it on the floor and broke it.

Other thoughts for quick hot dinners including augmenting a crocked meal using my rice/veggie steamer. But that’s at least 40 min for white rice, longer for brown or other mixed grain alternatives. Pasta is quicker, but you don’t get the flavor of the dish as easily if they are boiled quickly and separately. And sometimes, darnit, I just like a nice bowl of dill-flavored brown rice with my lentils all ready for me when I or the hub walk in the door.

My little internet friends ragged on me for trying so hard to make all day or overnight rice in the crockpot. Mom and I spent hours hashing out different options for making it work, considering the merits of steamed versus boiled versus microwaved rice options. I kept checking my favorite crock blog of the year but she didn’t have the magic rice in the pot answer for me, though her posts gave me a number of clues.

Finally, after a lot of trial and error, I think I’ve got it. Plain rice, flavored rice, you name it. Basmati, Jasmine, long grain, short grain, brown, wild, or a scoop of everything in the pantry. I can throw the rice de jour in a crock and have it ready for dinner, whether I come home 5 hours after it’s “done” or 20.

And, it cooks in the same pot as the rest of dinner. Stew, chili, our crowd’s red beans and rice recipe (my own variation) … one pot, no waiting. Set it up in the morning, and have it ready to dish and serve when someone gets home. I’ll be making it Friday for the kids and the baby sitter, if you want to tag back and follow the recipe in pictures when we’re done. I’ll set it up in the morning, and it will hang out all day, cooking and waiting for the kids and the baby sitter (date night! whoohooo!) to be ready for dinner.

The secret? Silicone feet. I have a set of silly feet silicone cupcake holders I got at one of Target’s many after-holiday-mark-down-a-thons.

1. First, pop the feet in a crock (I use four).
2. Atop the feet, steadily balance one oven-safe bowl containing one part rice and one part water.
3. Pour the rest of dinner around the “feet” of the rice bowl, creating liquid bath. Don’t pour in too much food: leave at least an inch (if not more) from the top of the food to the top of the rice bowl to accommodate food bubbling away from the rice.
4. Cook on high or low for the amount of time desired to complete the main dish – at least three hours on high or four to five on low.

If your crock isn’t tall enough to do this and close properly, consider making small aluminum foil balls to lift your rice bowl instead. And only if you don’t mind tinfoil taste. I’ve got the feeling that a cooking trivet (cast iron, made for putting in the bottom of your cast iron dutch oven to grill meat) might work as well, but I don’t own one, so that’s still theoretical. While bowl-on-crock might be safe, it’s likely to scorch even if nothing cracks or breaks.

Happy crocking and come back Friday afternoon for pictures!

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I had grand plans as the internet started becoming more mainstream in the mid to late nineties. I’d revive and update the small business my mother ran on a mail-order basis in the 70s and 80s. My little site would be a store with home made stuff, some sewing tips, and patterns; studded with little stories about each (back before there were “blogs”). Which is pretty much what everyone is doing now, lol.

Then I met the hub, and we started our little family; I’d have time while on maternity leave! Nope.

I’d have time on the next maternity leave! (Insert laughter here.)

Maybe when they were all in school! (Well …)

Even launching this blog a few years later than even my most optimistic projections was part of the plan. But life and my own schooling have slowed my time table a bit.

And now I’m hearing that legislation to provide safer toys, clothes, and child care materials is coming on line. Great! I’ve been looking at joining various trade groups to make sure anything I produce is safe. They are voluntarily or self-regulated; we can see by the results of importing some voluntarily regulated toys.

However, as I and others read, this pretty much puts small toy makers, home craft industries out of business. I’d love to sell you a cute little doll I designed, or a lunch bag, or a diaper, but I have to test each item for lead and certify it because I’m not allowed to rely on third party certifications or allow you to sign a waiver.

And no matter how cute and fancy it is, I don’t think you’ll want to pay $4,013.95 for it. Plus shipping. And you know what’s gone on with shipping prices these days. Yeesh.

Various people have claimed that nothing specifically states diapers, clothes, toys, either hand made or resold new goods (so much for reselling overstock toys for profit later in the year after you clean out the local Target Dec 26th). Others claim this does cover diapers, clothes, toys, both hand-made in small-scale production and re-sale of other’s manufactured goods. Half the problem is the ambiguity and lack of plain-text language and decoding. But I’ve seen more that points toward shutting down a huge cottage industry than away from it.

Fire up your favorite search engine, find out more about CPSIA and how as thrown together it may to kill your favorite etsy store or eBay seller. Then DO something. Pick out a couple of the things that matter – this retroactive legislation is meant to protect, but it also effectively over-burdens small businesses. Pick out some solutions – third party manufacture certifications okay, help in the costs of testing for small businesses. Put them in a short letter to your representative and get your voice heard.

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Err, rather, astronomy. :) Well, actually ):.

A great big

):

Crescent moon and “stars” that look like a frowny face. Mooooooom, the universe is making faces at me!

But we had fun watching them and talking about stars versus planets, created light versus reflected light. Jupiter and Venus are paired near the moon again this evening. We missed the February convergence, but were prepared for this one.

The last few nights have been filled with naturewalks, discussions about stars, and moons, and planets, and comets and meteors; all manner of universal matter. Finally, tonight we saw two planets peeking at us as we sat on the car trunk as the clouds to cleared from our view.

Get up, get out there, just past sunset. A pretty show that won’t be back in the southwest skies for a while.

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Our kids have always been pretty good eaters. If they like it, they like it and get out of their way. The eldest was lunging for lo-mien before he could crawl, and the youngest realized cups were way more efficient than getting mama milk from the source and self weaned a lot earlier than I expected; she can consume more pancakes before nine am than most people do all week.

If they don’t like something, well, we give them a few options; trying it again on another day, dipping them in ketchup or a home-made sauce of one sort or another, feeding it to mom or dad and then trying a bite. But even with, or despite these measures, the youngest can get distractable around dinner time. She’ll amuse herself so much hat she forgets to eat until we’re ready for bed time, then try to shovel it in before dashing up the stairs, cheeks pouched like a chipmunk foraging for a harsh winter.

I’ve not had to sneak in veggies or meats; they luckily graze enough of variety that we can be straightforward in vegetable distribution. We did get a lovely red airplane spoon as a baby gift; that was used for a few attempts at apple sauce, but was more often played with than used to distract the kids into eating. Until this distractable age set in.

So we went back to basics. Dad picked up a spoon, filled it with rice, and announced to the youngest, “Here comes the choo-choo train!” while bringing it closer to her mouth. She chomped it down, swallowed, smiled, and piped up “beep, beep!”, until her father picked up the spoon again to feed her another bite. This time she opened her mouth so widely I briefly envisioned her being hinged at the ears, the top of her head flopping backwards like a marionette. But it worked. She’d beep, he’d pick up the spoon, give her a bite of rice, and set the spoon back down until she beeped him for another bite.

Makes you wonder if that’s how Pavlov got his start.

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