Closeted

Hi there - long time no see! It's been a while, but we've been hard at work around here and finally have something to show for it.

If you recall, our kitchen has two closets, one to either side of the fridge. Their doors are what we turned into my beloved chalkboard doors a while back.

The closet to the right is a pantry, one that was crammed to the brim and becoming difficult to use, despite my best efforts. To the left were our stacking washer dryer. While convenient to use, they were also a bit of a nightmare. The floor of this closet is not level, and whomever installed the washer and dryer did not bother to level them. As a result, every time we did laundry, it sounded like a rocket taking off. Very inconvenient if you wanted to watch television or, say, have a conversation. So when our washer kicked it a while back, we decided it was finally time to implement the plan we'd been talking about for a while: move the washer and dryer to our attached garage and reclaim the storage space in the closet!

Sounds great, right? The actual implementation took a while, until we found handymen willing to do the work without charging us an arm and a leg. But eventually, we got them moved, and had a decently sized empty closet. Which, of course, I forgot to photograph. But closets are all the same - use your imagination! 

So. What to do with it? I had already decided: turn the space into a canned goods pantry. Our guest room closet was crowded with pickles, jam and tomatoes, and they needed a new home. What better place than a secondary pantry? So I measured my space, mapped it out, and made a giant Home Depot run. Tom at our local Home Depot was invaluable, helping me find enough matching shelves for the space. I decided to run 24" shelves along the side walls, 10" deep. Doing this would give me 33" inches across the back wall, but Nick said he could cut the 36" shelves down without a problem.

Although this was basically my project, my fantastic husband was, as usual, fantastically helpful in making sure I'd mapped the studs in the wall correctly and assisting in the installation of the support braces.

Slowly but surely, with significant help (again) from the hubby, I installed the shelves, and then it came time to fill them! We decided to use both the very bottom and very top shelves as storage for various kitchen appliances and pieces of equipment that we use regularly but not regularly enough that they needed to be taking up space on the kitchen counter. The bread machine, for example, and our new juicer. We use them every week or two so we want them easily accessible, but they don't need to be out on the countertop. The remainder of the space I filled with jams, peaches, soups, tomatoes, applesauce, stock, and other canned goods. Some of it homemade, some of it storebought, but it's all together in one spot and I can find what I need! Hallelujah!

I have a shelf of pickles. No, seriously. A pickle shelf.

This is the peach shelf. Canned peaches & peach jam.

Tomatoes, anyone?

We love it! It's fantastic. I even have room at the top for my canning supplies - not counting the jars, which are out in the sunroom. Plus, the other pantry is no longer a hot mess:

Have I mentioned that I love my kitchen?

Blue Room

Have you ever painted a room and almost immediately decided that you'd made a mistake in color selection? Yeah, that's me.

The first room we painted in this house was the formerly pink guest bedroom. I went with a gray-green that ended up being more green than gray, and is actually rather minty. It's okay, but I don't love it. Major improvement on the pink, though.

I also put this same color on the walls of our boring, formerly white guest bathroom. This, plus swapping out three unframed elliptical mirrors for one rectangular framed one, served as a bit of a facelift for said bathroom. Oh, and we added handles to the front of the cabinets, too. When finished, it looked more or less like this:

The photograph, alas, does not do justice to just how bright green this ended up being. When I commented as such to the saleswoman at my favorite paint shop, she knowingly said, "Ahh, yes. Hollingsworth Green can end up sort of looking rather hospital green." Which pretty much summed it up for me. I did not like it. My husband suggested that perhaps it would grow on me over time, but it did not. So I eventually (about two weeks ago) decided that the green really had to go.

But what to replace it with? I hit up my beloved paint store for some Farrow & Ball samples, and turned the bathroom wall into a patchwork of color:

Again, the lighting in the room doesn't translate well for the photos. Essentially it came down to a couple of colors: Calluna, a pretty greyish lavender, Dix Blue, a stronger blue with a hint of green, or Parma Grey, AKA my kitchen walls.

  

The digital swatches all look lovely, right? On the wall, it was a lot more complicated. Calluna is very pretty, but in a tiny room brightly lit with artificial light, it's extremely lavender, with very little grey. It's still pretty that way, but I know myself well enough that were it on every wall in the bathroom, I would find it overwhelming. I really liked the Dix Blue, but Nick thought it was a little too dark and intense.

So that left us with Parma Gray. I'm pretty sure Nick would be down for painting just about every room in the house this color because he really, really likes it. But he and I both agreed the swatch on the wall honestly looked good. As it conveniently happens, I had about two-thirds of a gallon of it left from painting the kitchen. So last Sunday I went for it, and the result is pretty excellent. I also swapped the Spanish prints in brown frames out for selections of black and white photos I took when we visited Martha's Vineyard last month. I like the look to bring out the gray tones on the wall. Plus, the hallway behind it is lined in black-framed, brightly colored photographs, so I wanted something a little different.

Funny enough, the photograph makes the walls look more gray and less blue than they actually all and it still looks good. I actually wish the room in person was a bit more gray, but I like it nonetheless.  It's just a nice color, and the bathroom now looks like it belongs to adults, and not little kids who went overboard with green paint. I am much happier.

Now if only I could pick a color to paint our bedroom... 

It's Curtains for Us!

Literally, curtains. I finally found some to put up in the front room that my husband and I could agree on, which is kind of a big deal. Installing the brackets for the curtain rod was a bit of a production and he had to bail me out a few times, but it's done and it looks good!

This room is still not well-lit, hence the dark photos. Not sure about that color shift. I have moved my diploma to over my desk, as I was tired of not having a place to display it. I worked hard for that diploma and my parents had it framed for me, so it deserves a place of prominence.

Here's a close-up of the curtain fabric. I found them at Overstock for quite a reasonable price - they're pretty without being overly feminine, and we love the color scheme.

Tomatoes! Again!

Fall is officially here in Virginia. Thursday it was 95 degrees. Yesterday I walked out the door and it was in the low sixties. Tonight it's going to be in the fifties. Yup, fall is officially here!

While I'm excited about the prospect of more glorious crisp autumn mornings, DIY decorating with leaves and white squashes, and most importantly, fresh apple cider, I'm not quite ready to let go of summer yet. I haven't finished canning tomatoes and various tomato products to last us through the winter months. I had planned to can whole tomatoes from our CSA, but their crop apparently did not do as well as they'd hoped, so my hopes for buying a giant box of tomatoes were dashed. No problem, I said to myself. I'll just buy 10 or so lbs this weekend and next from the farm market, as they are selling off the last of their crop.

But what did I find waiting for me at the market, way in the back? Giant boxes of Roma tomatoes for a meager $20! Jackpot! I did not weigh the boxes but they are at least 15 lbs and probably more like 20 or 25. I plunked one down in my cart and as I wheeled excitedly up to check out, the lady behind the counter remarked, "Ooh, d'you mind if I tell Roger you're buying this? He was disappointed that nobody was buying these boxes."

I regarded her with a perplexed look. "But....they're perfect for canning," I replied. "I'm so excited you have them!" Roger (the tomato guy?) teased me for disrupting his display but was clearly gratified that someone would be using the tomatoes. I assured them that I would be back for another box, and I will...probably tomorrow. But yesterday I blanched, peeled, and quartered every last one before carefully packing them into pint-and-a-half jars (thanks, Target). By the time I finished it was getting a little late and I was starting to feel under the weather from a (thus far) mild cold, so my lovely husband offered to process them for me. We used the pressure canner. Worked great and did not make the kitchen horribly hot like water bath canning does, but only four jars fit at once because they were so tall.

That's not a problem, you say. I mean after all, how many jars could there have been? Well, funny story about that.....*cough* fourteen *cough cough*.

Yup. Fourteen jars, translating to twenty-one pints of beautiful, ripe Roma tomatoes. It's probably more like nineteen or twenty because some of the jars weren't as tightly packed as they could have been, but still... That's a lot of tomatoes and boy are they gorgeous! Boy was my poor husband up late! But he agrees, they'll be worth it.

Of course I labeled them. I'm obsessed with labels, remember?

Tomorrow....pasta sauce!

Squeaky Clean

You may recall from a previous post that we and our friends purchased a pig (processed) from a local farm, and that one of the products of this purchase was a sizable quantity of lard. We planned to use said lard for baking (it's fantastic), and tentatively speculated that we might also make soap with it. A few weeks ago, I decided to revisit the topic, and it became apparent that we all had far more lard than we could use up with baking. Time for soap-making!

This is not a post with instructions on how to make soap with lard. There are many websites out there that can teach you how to do that. This is just a play-by-play with photos of our day on Saturday.

We started with lard (of course), coconut oil, cocoa butter, distilled water, and lye. Yes lye, that nasty stuff you see people using on crime shows to dissolve bodies. No fingers or other body parts were harmed in the making of this soap! We also needed wax paper, a digital scale, heat-proof containers for mixing the lye, and various plastic containers as soap molds. Plus safety goggles and long gloves for handling the lye, and a cheap immersion blender because who wants to mix this by hand?

Bethany and Amanda were kind enough to handle the measuring of the lye and mixing it with water. That is the most important part as regards to safety. If you add lye to water it's an exothermic reaction (gives off heat), but if you're working with a heat-proof container it's fine. If you add water to lye it can explode. You know, little details like that.

While waiting for the lye/water mixture to cool, we measured, mixed and melted lard, cocoa butter, and coconut oil. All three have low melting points so you do have to be careful not to overheat them.

Once both mixtures had cooled to between 100 and 120 degrees F and were about the same temperature, we poured the oils into our mixing bucket and carefully added the lye solution. Saponification starts instantly, but you have to stir for quite a while. If stirring by hand it can take half an hour or longer, but we bought a cheap immersion blender that made things far easier. You do have to take breaks so that the blender does not overheat, but I would say it took less than ten minutes. Again, with gloves and goggles in case of splashing, although we really did not have any splashes.

What you're looking for is called trace, where if you drizzle some of the mixture across the top it leaves a trace or trail.

Trace is the stage at which you add other things, such as ground oatmeal (for exfoliating soap), lavender buds, or our lovely fragrant essential oils.

In several instances we were making a triple batch of soap, so we divided it into separate containers in order to add different essential oils. Rather than purchasing fancy and expensive soap molds, we used simple flexible plastic storage containers. Some were lined with wax paper, others not.

These were then sealed up, placed on our potting bench behind the window (this thing is so useful!) and left to cure for about 36 hours.

Here is the aftermath. We used up about 7 1/2 quarts of lard. There is a lot still left for future endeavors.

Early this morning I popped the soaps out of their plastic molds and cut them up into bars. Voila!

A few lessons learned from this first attempt:

1. Don't use wax paper to line the molds. It crinkled up inside the boxes and gave the soap a crinkled edge.  More importantly, the wax paper was difficult to peel off the blocks, while the soap in unlined boxes popped out easily. I think it's a good idea on top of the blocks, but next time that's all we should use it for.
2. Go easy on the mint essential oils. I am not just saying this because we used wintergreen and I don't like wintergreen. I asked my hubby (who does like wintergreen) and he concurs. It is much more potent than the other soaps, almost overpoweringly so. The cinnamon is a little strong too (though it smells delicious), so we should probably go easy on it next time.
3. Next time try tangerine instead of bergamot - the bergamot smelled great in the bottle but lost a lot of its citrus aroma in the soap.
4. Buy more oils! We made a couple of batches of unscented soap. It's not unpleasant, but smells a little boring to me. It does not smell at all like bacon - you know you were wondering.
5. Do not use a metal thermometer with lettering painted on it to measure the temperature of the lye/water mixture. Why? Well, let's just say that we may owe Bethany a new thermometer...

I love the random "4" just sitting there.

So how many bars did we make? I actually did not count them all, but it's over sixty. It was pretty easy, and also fun! We will definitely do this again. I'd be tempted to see how easy it would be to make our own molds, rather than paying $30 for a single one in the store. All in all, I would consider this first soap experiment a success - way to go, ladies!

The Official Office

I would like to preface this post by noting that as I type, I am indulging in a salad made from our ripe homegrown tomatoes and homegrown basil, sprinkled with a little balsamic vinegar. Pure heaven.

One of the perks of being two people in a three-bedroom house is that in addition to having a guest bedroom, you can use another bedroom as an office, which is what we've been doing for the past two years. Nick had a dual Ikea desk setup with a pair of monitors, and my computer was hooked up to the television to enable us to view Hulu and Netflix options on our television. This worked reasonably well, but it wasn't ideal. Using my computer as an actual computer was difficult on a gigantic screen as the font size was always too small, and I had no place to actually sit and work, as the couch and coffee table just didn't cut it.

When we first moved in, we had originally intended that the office would be located in what I call "the front room", which is the first room inside the front door. It adjoins the dining room and the hallway leads from it to the bathrooms and bedrooms of the house. It's closer to the kitchen and the main living space of the house, plus it has a lovely bay window. The previous owners hadn't really been using it at all, as best we could tell, and it seemed like wasted space. We put bookcases fully of books and a comfy chair in the room, but truth be told, we never actually used it.

This year, I decided to finally get serious about the project. This involved, first and foremost, replacing the boring white color on the walls. Our friends can tell you about the months this room spent with various swatches of brown and gray on the walls while I hemmed and hawed. Literally months, and I am using the word "literally" correctly here. I finally decided to go with a color called Purbeck Stone, from my favorite paint company, Farrow and Ball. Who else? I love them. It's a soothing medium gray that shades to taupe in the right light, and it's quite earthy. Darker and more brown than the light gray in the dining room. I hoped it would be just what we were looking for.

I purchased two gallons of paint back in June, while my parents were visiting, but only got around to painting about three weeks ago. My fantastic husband helped me empty all the bookcases of books (which are currently covering our dining room table) and move the bookcases away from the walls. I painted the trim with Benjamin Moore Impervo in White Dove (same as in the kitchen). The weekend I set aside to paint the walls unfortunately happened to coincide with the weekend I first received what's called trigger point dry needling as part of my physical therapy plan for chronic back pain (a tale for another time), so my motion was markedly limited. The fantastic husband saved the day again! I did all of the prep (cleaning walls and taping off the newly-painted trim) and did the cutting in, while he did the actual roller painting since I couldn't stretch to do that. Once the painting was done, we (read: hubby because I'm gimpy) moved Nick's desks into the front room and split them up to give us one desk apiece. I have a desk again! Over the last week or so I've been hanging artwork, and although this room is by no means fully completed, we are quite happy with it. See for yourself! The photos were taken at night so the lighting isn't quite right, but you'll get the idea.

View from the entryway 

 My desk

Nick's desk 

It's awesome! We have an office, one that we can both use at the same time (or rather, we will once we replace my wireless card and I have internet access again). We still have a lot of work to do, though. Needs some kind of window treatments, for one. I kind of want to put a cushion on the wide windowsill, but it's far too high to be a window seat so perhaps I'll just put out candles and seasonal things. On the far side of the room the wall juts out to make room for the hall closet, leaving a recessed area 15" deep by 11' long. Guess who's planning DIY built-in bookshelves? They're going to be a sort of 5th wedding anniversary present to each other, since wood is the traditional gift. Stay tuned!

Totally Tomatoes

It has been a busy canning weekend at our little house in the woods! Between the two of us, this weekend Nick and I put up eight pints of pickles, a pint of tomato jam, nine pints of salsa, and a pint of homemade ketchup. That plus decorating the new office (to be addressed in an upcoming post)

Salsa and ketchup? Yes indeed! Yesterday Nick used his home brewing grain grinder to grind up a few pounds of tomatoes, plus onions, bell peppers and garlic. To this he added chopped jalapeno peppers and cilantro to make salsa fresca. We used our old (new) pressure canner for the first time as well. Nick made two batches; a larger mild one and a smaller batch that was heavy on the jalapenos. How were they? We've only tried the mild so far, and it's...ok. Lovely fresh tomato flavor but the all of the bite of  the onion, garlic and jalapeno cooked out. Needed acid, too, though it tasted better with some lime juice added. So not amazing, but a good starting point.

That was yesterday. Today, after picking a few more pounds of tomatoes from the garden, we decided to try ketchup. I used five pounds of tomatoes, mostly garden tomatoes and a few from the CSA. We found a good-looking recipe online at the Journal Sentinel to work with. Onions, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, mustard seed and dry mustard powder, peppercorns, cumin seed, salt, cider vinegar, sugar and a smidgen of cayenne pepper. Doesn't it sound good? Pureed the veggies and tomatoes, drained them in a fine sieve, and cooked the liquid low and slow, adding the spices and vinegar halfway through.

We made 1 1/2 recipes' worth, except I did not increase the sugar and I cut the cayenne pepper in half. Altogether 5 lbs of tomatoes cooked down to one pint of ketchup, but it was well worth it. It was fantastic. I think it was perfect; Nick wants to add a little Worcestershire sauce next time. When our CSA sells bulk tomatoes later this month, I will definitely be making more of this!