How to take things out of the oven

Re:  How not to hold a pot

Step 1.  Do not use a magazine
Step 2. Do not use cardboard
Step 3. Do not use old t-shirts or other clothing items.
Step 4.  Do use crocheted pot holders or towels!

5a.  Pick up pot holder or towel of choice.
5b.  If is a towel, fold it over once or twice, or use two.

6a. Using pot holder to shield hand, grip item firmly.
6b. If you feel a burning sensation, stop immediately and reconfigure your grip.

7.  Once you are firmly gripping the item with no burning sensation, pick it up and move it to where you need it to be.

Voila! You’re done… and hopefully burn-free :-)

Happy baking, folks.

The Advent of Pretzel Pizza

One day, Boyfriend was making soft pretzels and I hadn’t eaten dinner yet. My complaining led to something beautiful — pretzel pizza! We should probably patent this immediately. Anyway, he wanted me to pre-make some sauce for homemade pizza the following day, but I whined that I needed food now. He acquiesced and said he would use some pretzel dough to make a tiny pizza if I would make the sauce.

Neither of us knew how this would work out, but here’s the answer: AMAZING. I made the sauce a little too spicy, but it worked well for pizza purposes. Have you ever had those snack cracker things – Combos? The ones that are pretzel outside, pizza flavoring inside? Well, this was like a live-action Combo.

For your reference, he used Alton Brown’s soft pretzel recipe, found here.

The sauce that I made was much more haphazard. I used a can of tomato sauce (the cheapest stuff I could find).  Boyfriend chopped up an onion (minced it, really) and about 5 cloves of fresh garlic. I sauteed them in vegetable oil and tossed them into the heating tomato sauce. I added garlic powder, onion powder, basil, oregano (obscene amounts), salt and red pepper. I went a little crazy with the red pepper.

Put it together, add some shredded cheese and turkey pepperoni and you’ve got magic.

5 Worst Crochet Projects

Warning: This posts gets a little racy.

• 5. Toilet paper:

Decoratively speaking? Tacky. Awkward.
Usefully speaking? Re-usable toilet paper? I really hope no one was thinking that.


• 4. Anything anatomically correct:

This is so unbelievably common. Aliens with genitals. Giant crochet penises (penii?). They’re everywhere. And some of them have faces. Just say no.


• 3. Pasties: Yup. There are no words, really.
   
  • 2. Tampon holders on underwear:
    First of all, who’s going to be wearing crocheted underwear in the first place? Second… it’s so… bumpy. I mean, I already worry about panty lines, but “tampon bumps”? Whoa.
  And our number-one no-no is… 
  • 1. Man thongs! There’s an unbelievable variety of different types of man thongs you can crochet. I’ll leave it to your imagination, or maybe your Google skills. I could make this much worse, but here’s a mannequin sample:

  

Special thanks to What Not to Crochet and Maybe Matilda for providing the inspiration and photos for this post.

Kitchen Themes

What’s your kitchen’s personality?

I recently posted a link to cat-themed kitchen paraphernalia. Before I moved to Manhattan, my kitchen was cartoon-cow themed. Kinda like these little guys:

Only, I had matching salt & pepper shakers, paper towel holder, cookie jar, dish towels and more.  I could ask Lindsay to crochet black and white pot holders and dish rags to buy! If I decided to theme my kitchen again, I think I’d lean toward duckies. Real or cartoon? Not sure. But I’m at a ducky place in my life.

Or maybe something in primary colors:

Tell me:  What’s your kitchen theme, if you have one?

If you don’t:  Have you ever thought about one? What kind of kitchen would suit your personality?

If you have cute kitchen pictures, let me know and I’ll post them on the accessory page!

Baking and other weird kitchen happenings

I came home from work one day about a week ago,  and there was a freshly baked loaf of Challah bread on the counter. I was a little confused. Boyfriend had never baked before (ever, in his life).  It was confirmed that he had in fact baked it. And it was a braided loaf! And there were cookies, which he also made.  Not gonna lie, the bread was not fantastic (he admitted to forgetting two of the eggs), but it was good for a first try.

Since then, domestic food pursuits have continued in the form of:

1. Tuna/mashed potato/pea casserole
2. Tater-tot/ground beef casserole
3. Homemade Mojitos
4. Banana bread

The Mojitos are still a work in progress, and I keep trying to get the recipe proportions right. Plus, I’m not entirely sure I can muddle a mint properly. The banana bread is fabulous. The tater-tot casserole is also on my thumbs-up list. I don’t really like the tuna-pea one, but if that’s your style you might like it.

The real kicker to all of this is that magazines and cardboard were not used when removing items from the oven! Lindsay sent us three crocheted dish rags, which in addition to being completely cute, have been quite useful. When the oven is extra hot (400+ and running for hours), they have to be doubled up for pan removal (granted, they’re dish rags, not actual pot holders, which are crocheted thicker).  So, we’re burn-free and our fridge is full. It’s a magical weekend.

If my readers post comments clamoring for the recipes, I will post them. :-)

Bleach vs. …What is that?

On New Years’ Eve, during the day, I was seized by the urge to clean my kitchen. I cleaned and scrubbed within an inch of my life. The only product we had at the time was bleach-based, and our apartment is not so hot on the ventilation issue.   I felt a little dizzy while cleaning, but afterward I was sure I was fine.

Fast-forward to New Years’ Eve party.  I have a little bit of red wine. Maybe 3-4 little cups over the course of about 5 hours.  I became violently ill. “Oh, you were drunk,” you say? Tipsy, maybe, but nothing to merit what happened. I was sicker than alcohol had ever made me (this includes my college days, and we all know what happens in college).

After a lot of thinking, I decided only one thing had been different:  I used bleach. Inhaled it, most likely, while cleaning.

So the next time I had to clean, I went to the store looking for a bleach alternative to make my kitchen sparkle properly. Staring the bottles down, I wondered, “How do I know what to pick? Will it work?” Yea,  I’m that woman standing in the aisle at the store reading every label.

I decided on the 99.15% natural store brand cleaner. It certainly doesn’t smell like roses, but it is bleach-free. I didn’t get dizzy, and have had no repeats of the New Years’ Eve problem. To my surprise and delight, the natural cleaner scrubbed stains and spots (even stuck-on ones) way better than the bleach product!

What is this natural product? According to the label: Coconut-based cleaning agents! It is CVS brand, for the curious reader who wants to try it. I always loved to eat coconut, but who knew it was good as a kitchen cleaner?!

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How to clean a kitchen

Have you ever thought to yourself, “How can I clean my kitchen more efficiently”? Of course you have, if you ever clean kitchens. No one likes doing it. Except for me, but I don’t really count. This blog is basically all about how you don’t want to be like me (a hot mess).

We mentioned before how Boyfriend isn’t into “stuff” per se. Have you tried scrubbing stains with paper towels? To make it even remotely work requires waaay more elbow grease than the average person has. Even mine leaks out after a good ten minutes of scrubbing one spot.

I also hand wash our dishes (it wouldn’t make any sense to use the washer). I probably kill a tree every time I dry the dishes I wash. Do you like trees? Of course you do. You never hear about tree-haters, just tree-huggers. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not asking you to literally hug a tree. (I wouldn’t, I live in a major city — the trees are probably covered in scary things).

So folks, save a tree. Or two. Reusable hand-made kitchen accessories are all the rage right now.

How she does it

The artist’s process and materials

1. Sit down
2. Crochet a square
3. Have some wine
4. Profit
5. Repeat

… Just kidding. We have more serious crochet info for those of you who would like details.
She uses 100% cotton yarn and 5 mm H hooks. There are many different types of crochet stitches, each with a unique process for creation. Each full piece is made according to a pattern.

For example:

If you are interested in a much more detailed how-to, Lion Brand Yarn offers in-depth tutorials.

Why she does it

Lindsay’s History

I asked Lindsay to share how she got into crocheting, and I really enjoyed her background story, so here’s how it all started:

Lindsay and her family used to go to a hunting cabin in Pennsylvania for weekend trips when she was little.  “I didn’t like going there that much, because I like running water,” she said.  She did like playing with the decks of cards that people left there, and how the fireplace smelled.

There was a little convenience store where they went for drinks and snacks.  That’s where Lindsay first saw the dishcloths.  They were knitted squares in blue variegated, yellow variegated, and solid rusty red. Variegated means distinctly separate color variations. Lindsay convinced her mom to buy 5 of them.  Her mom then explained that they were knitted and that Lindsay could learn to make her own.

When her mom taught her how to knit, Lindsay discovered she didn’t like it very much.  She had a hard time keeping the yarn at a consistent “looseness” on the needles and her fingers.  It also wasn’t a neat, interesting pattern like the squares from the convenience store with fancy increases and decreases in the numbers of stitches in each row to make the stitch lines look diagonal.

Both her grandma and mom preferred crocheting over knitting, and soon after, her grandma taught her how.

From the artist’s mouth:  “You could probably say that those dishcloths inspired this whole thing.  It’s sort of like a thing that the three of us share.  Now that grandma can’t crochet anymore, when I visit I show her whatever I am working on.  I also made her a wool blanket for her her to use in her wheelchair.  I’m pretty sure she didn’t think I was ever going to finish that blanket, but she loved it when I finally did.”

This an example Lindsay knitted of the original style she encountered as a child:

Stay tuned for materials and method, history of crochet and “how to clean your kitchen.”