In the mall recently I was excited to see a new store with clothing in my size until I neared the window and saw that everything was red and black.
I’m not into wearing red and black.
Even the catalogs I usually order from have not had much of anything to interest me lately. My husband probably doesn’t mind that as it saves money. 🙂 It’s a good thing I have plenty of clothes at the moment — I’d be pretty frustrated if I needed something right now.
Even in the realm of fabrics and home decorating I can’t find much in the colors and styles I like. Recently I was thinking about adding a little round table in the living room to coordinate with this one…
…but I couldn’t find any kind of pink tablecloth. I’ve been looking for pinkish table linens, too, but can’t find anything. Most of what I can find is either very dark or white or off-white.
I don’t know quite how I’d define what my decorating style is. I used to say it was somewhere between country and Victorian. Pure country is too rustic for me, pure Victorian too fussy. In the past years I’ve heard about cottage style, shabby chic, and romantic style. I like elements of those. Probably what I really love is what the older Romantic Homes magazine used to feature, samples of which are here: the newer issues under a new editor are even getting away from that look. It can be overdone, of course, but I still like the pinks and whites and roses. I can find a lot of that on online shops, but at great expense. There’s nothing on the Wal-Mart affordability level. Target does have Shabby Chic line, and while I like the overall look, the specific pieces don’t fit with my things.
Part of the fun of those kinds of styles is the freedom to create your own look and do your own thing. I just wish I could find more elements to create and do with.
I do dislike the way the whole industry of clothing and home decorating decides certain colors are “in.” I remember walking into a department store several years ago and seeing the entire clothing section in moss greens, mustard yellows, and rusts. I like those colors in nature, but not on my body. Whatever happened to diversity, allowing for different tastes and styles and colors?
I’m not too worried about whether I’m “in” or not, but maybe I’ll just have to sit tight until pink comes back into style to find things I like a little more easily. In the meantime maybe I’ll hunt around on ebay….
We’ve been tackling right and left this week.
Last week I showed “stage 1” of our bathroom renovation — taking out the old tile and replacing it with a shower surround. We decided, instead of patching up the wallpaper, to pull it off and paint. Jeremy and Jesse pulled off the old wallpaper, then Jim patched up several little imperfections and replaced some pieces of molding and primed everything. He and I went shopping for paint and towel racks. We found a really pretty light tan called “Pecan Sandie” — looks like coffee with cream to me. But he painted and put up the towel racks, then today I put the wall decorations back up. Here is the finished product:
Here are most of the decorations in there.
This print was a very inexpensive one at K-Mart years ago. The old sailor reminds me of Mr. Peggoty from Dickens’ David Copperfield.
We had gone with a lighthouse theme with the old wallpaper because the pattern looked to me like sand dunes and sea grass and seagulls and blue, beige, and tan as the color scheme, and early on I found the above Thomas Kinkade lighthouse prints for a very good price in a catalog. We decided to stay with that theme and color scheme. I looked around just a little for a lighthouse border or stencil but didn’t really have much time to put into it this week. I may look some more — I don’t know — I don’t want to overdo the lighthouses. I may expand into a general nautical theme. Or I may just leave it. Right now everything related to a theme is in the decorations and shower curtain, which can be easily and inexpensively changed if I want to do something else.
We’re also having out of town company come in tomorrow, so I had the boys tackle vacuuming, dusting, sweeping, taking out all the trash cans, and a few other odds and ends. I changed the burner pans and rings on the stove, cleaned the range hood, cleaned the microwave inside and out, moved everything on the counters out and wiped them off and cleaned the counters, dusted the little ridges on the cabinet doors that collect dust as well as the back edges of the dining room chairs, which do the same thing, did several loads of laundry, and did “my” dusting (my room, picture frames in the hall, and some of my decorative shelves). I also took Jason for an appointment at the oral surgeon’s: at his dental cleaning last May, before he left for the summer, they said his wisdom teeth would be needing to come out. He has none on the top, but one of the bottom ones is coming in exactly sideways, and the other one is at a 45 degree angle. There is some concern that one is close to a nerve, and if it develops more roots may cause problems, but they felt he could safely wait til Thanksgiving or Christmas break. He decided he wanted to do it over Thanksgiving break. I tried to talk him into waiting til after Christmas — there’s more time for recovery and a little more flexibility in his schedule then. But I think either he wants to get it over with or they scared him about the possibility of damage to the nerve. He said he didn’t mind missing Thanksgiving dinner — I wonder if he’ll still feel the same way when the time comes. 🙂
Anyway, Tuesday the one thing I have to do is clean bathrooms. I also hope to get the laundry finished, clean out the toaster oven, declutter the sunroom, vacuum the lamp shades in the living room (one of those odd little jobs that is often overlooked, but once I notice it I can’t stand it), and a few other little odd jobs. Once you get started, especially when company is coming, it seems like the more you clean the more you notice tings that need attention. But I have learned from experience not to spend so much time cleaning that I’m exhausted when company finally does come, so I’ll stop and rest in the afternoon.
Happy tackling!
When I posted about my latest cooking fiasco, my friend Carol asked for the recipe — the correct one, not my altered version. 🙂 I am glad to oblige.
This comes from a 1979 Betty Crocker cookbook and is originally for beef teriyaki. It called for 1 1/2 lbs. beef boneless top loin or sirloin steak, but I used this recipe a lot for cubed steak when I found it on sale. Then one day I decided to try it with chicken, and my husband liked it a lot better with chicken than steak. I like it with either.
The measurements for the sauce here are twice what they are in the book because we like some of the sauce over the rice. I like to use chicken tenderloin for this. I have made this for Sunday dinner before, leaving the meat in the refrigerator to marinate, even though it is more than the required hour. I like it that way, but Jim feels the flavor is too strong. I have also made it without letting it marinate — Jim likes it better that way. Probably the one hour time recommended is best, but you can experiment and see what you like.
Chicken TeriyakiÂ
1 1/2 to 2 lbs. or so of boneless, skinless chicken
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon garlic powder (original recipe calls for 1 clove garlic, crushed)
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Rice
Cut chicken into 1/8 inch or so slices (easiest done when it is still partially frozen). Mix soy sauce, oil, sugar, ginger, and garlic. Stir in chicken, coating each slice thoroughly. Cover and refrigerate 1 hour.
The original recipe says to drain the marinade from the chicken, but I usually just pour it all into a skillet. Cook and stir frequently over medium heat until chicken is done.
Then the original recipe says to add water to the reserved marinade to mix the cornstarch into, but since my marinade is already in the pan, I just take a small cup with a little water and stir in the cornstarch. Pour the cornstarch and water mixture gradually into the chicken. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; reduce heat. Simmer uncovered about 5 minutes until sauce thickens to desired consistency. Serve over hot cooked rice.
Somehow I don’t think so.
I was making chicken teriyaki for Sunday dinner and thinking that it’s pretty easy to make and wondering why I didn’t think of making it more often.
The last stage of preparing it calls for you to mix a little cornstarch with some cool water, then pour it into the chicken and soy sauce mixture, and stir for just a little while until the sauce thickens. It usually only takes a few seconds for the sauce to get to just the right consistency.
So I poured my concoction in and, instead of the gently, slowly thickening sauce, POOF — a foamy mess instantly formed and rose almost to overflow the pan. I thought, “What in the world….???” as I took the pan over to the sink to skim off the foam.
Then I realized….I had used baking soda instead of cornstarch.
If I had been really smart I would have called my kids in for a teachable moment in chemistry. When we discussed it later and my husband was explaining to them that the baking soda reacted to something in the soy sauce, my oldest said, “Just like those little volcanoes we used to make for science class.”
Yep. Neat for volcanoes. Not so good for dinner.
When I told my husband what happened (and yes, he laughed, and I can’t blame him), he came upstairs to look at it. By that time the bubbles had died down. He stirred and tasted it a little and said he thought it was ok to still use. I thought it might taste too salty, but it seemed ok. I had heard you could add a potato to soups and stews to counteract excess salt, but this was ready-to-serve except for the sauce, so I didn’t know if that would work. I didn’t have any more soy sauce to make new sauce, so I just added the right cornstarch and water concoction this time. It looked fine. It smelled terrible. It tasted way, way salty. None of us could finish our serving.
It took two tall glasses of iced tea to begin to relieve the salty feeling in my mouth. It might have helped if my tea had been sweetened.
It’s a good thing none of us is on a low sodium diet.
I didn’t plan this meal very well…Let me back up to say that I’ve been spending some time in the evenings when we’re watching what little there is to watch on TV (summer TV is an even more barren place in the vast TV wasteland!) or listening to music (now that I can get to my records) going through recipe magazines like Taste of Home and its affiliates that have stacked up over the last several months while I have been doing other things. Meal planning is not my favorite thing to do anyway, and I sometimes cringe at having just the same old stuff I’ve been making for years to choose from. So going through magazines and getting ideas sometimes revives the culinary aspect of my homemaking occupation.
I had found a couple of recipes for ham steaks that sounded really good. I had only made ham steaks maybe once or twice in 27+ years of marriage. I don’t remember that my mom ever made them. I thought they’d be a good addition to my repertoire because, as the boys get older and get involved in youth group activities and jobs and such, we frequently find only 2 or 3 of us at home at dinnertime. A ham steak would be a good way to make a dish with ham without having to roast a whole big one.
So I clipped the two recipes I found and put them in my folder for new recipes. The next few times I was at the grocery store I looked for ham steaks, but I couldn’t find them. Then one day at another store that I use just for quick pick-ups (it doesn’t have many of the regular things I buy and its layout doesn’t make sense to me, so I don’t do the biggest part of my shopping there), I suddenly remembered ham steaks and swung by their meat department to see if they had any — and they did! I got two to have enough for all four of us (the fifth family member is still working at a camp in CA for the summer for a few more weeks). I put them in the freezer when I got home.
Last Saturday night I decided to try the ham steaks for dinner the next day, so I pulled them out of the freezer to thaw. I got out my new-recipe folder to dig out the ham steak recipe to see what I needed to do the next day. That was when I discovered it called for fully-cooked ham steaks (mine weren’t), pineapple juice (which I didn’t have on hand and wouldn’t unless I bought it for a special recipe) and ground mustard (I only had prepared).
Hmmm.
Off and on through the rest of the evening and the next morning I pondered what to do with them. I thought through my other ham recipes and wasn’t inspired. I had really wanted to make something new. After breakfast I looked at the recipe again. I decided to use apple juice instead of the pineapple and prepared mustard instead of the ground. As I mixed up the ingredients for the marinade, it looked pretty good until the mustard — that made it look too yellowish. As I put the ham and marinade into a ziploc bag and put it in the refirgerator, I hoped I didn’t just ruin two perfectly good pieces of meat and tried to think of another quick-fix meal I could have on standby if this failed.
When we came home from church I asked my husband if he would grill the ham, to which he readily agreed. Since the recipe had called for already cooked ham and since he had never grilled hams steaks before, he used a meat thermometer just to make sure it was done. But it was sliced thinly enough that getting cooked through was no problem.
When he brought in the platter of grilled meat he said, “You’re going to wish you had more of this.” I said, “Why? Is it good?” He said, “Yeah!”
And it was! Really good! It didn’t have the type of flavor that just bowls you over when you put it in your mouth, but as you begin eating it, the delicious flavor comes through.
So I’m delighted to have a new great recipe on hand. And since it marinates for a couple of hours, it works really well for an after-church meal if you have time to make up the marinade beforehand. I thought about trying it to make it the way it was originally written next time just to compare — but I think I will stick with what works.
I didn’t take a picture, though I thought about it (in fact, I was thinking “You know you’re a blogger when you want to take pictures of a new dinner before letting anyone eat”). Just think dark pink meat with grill stripes.
Here’s my revised version, which I doubled for us:
Marinated Ham Steak
1/2 cup apple juice
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon margarine, melted
1 to 2 teaspoons mustard
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon paprika
1 ham steak
Combine first six ingredients and pour into a resealable plastic bag. Add ham; seal bag and turn to coat. Refrigerate at least two hours, turning occasionally.
Drain marinade and grill ham, uncovered, over medium heat. If the ham is fully cooked beforehand, grill only 3-4 minutes on each side; if the ham is raw, plan on 10-15 minutes or until meat thermometer reaches 140-160 degrees.
The original recipe says to baste the steak frequently with the reserved marinade, but that’s best only if the ham is fully cooked before it marinates. If the meat is raw when it marinates, you don’t want to use that marinade for basting and end up with residuals from raw meat on your cooked steak — only baste with that marinade if you allow time for the added basting to get fully heated: don’t baste with it just before serving or in the last few of minutes of grilling.
The original recipe also said to cut the steak in half before serving, but I cut it up into smaller pieces before marinating in order to get it to fit in the bag plus to let the marinade get to more surfaces of the meat.
If you ever try this, let me know what you think.
(Today’s Wordless Wednesday post is below this one)
We used to have…not conflicts, exactly, but awkward moments before dinner time. I’d start dinner, and my husband would come in from work and take the mail to the table and sort through it, or one of the kids would bring a game or their laptop or homework or something to the table. I would try to let them know that I would need to set the table within a certain time frame — I do feel that, even though I’m the authority over my children, I shouldn’t be harsh and demand that they stop what they are doing right now. Sometimes an urgent situation will call for that, but on an everyday basis I try to be considerate and give them a heads-up that I’ll need to start setting the table in ten minutes or so.
Well — sometimes it’s hard to get to a stopping place in a game or project or whatever in ten minutes. Then we would all be tense and frustrated — me, because I tried give them enough warning and felt they had ample time to get done; them because now they’re rushed.
So now when I put the meat on to brown or in the microwave to thaw, I go ahead and wipe off the table and put the plates on first thing. That’s kind of a signal to everyone that dinner will be ready soon. Then as I have time throughout the meal I’ll add napkins, utensils, condiments, etc. Not only does this make pre-meal time more peaceful for everyone, but then when dinner is ready I can get it on the table right away.
You might wonder why I don’t have the kids set the table. I do sometimes, when it’s busy or I’m running late. But I kind of enjoy the peacefulness of having the kitchen to myself while I’m getting dinner ready. Everyone does contribute toward cleaning up after dinner, unloading the dishwasher, taking out trash, etc. — believe me, there is no shortage of chores for everyone. 🙂
You can find some great tips at Rocks In My Dryer on most Wednesdays, and, by all means, share your own with us, too!
My husband grilled pork chops yesterday, and I thought I’d share with you his mouth-watering recipe. 🙂 I don’t remember quite how we stumbled across this stuff, but it’s wonderful. He just sprays the pork chops with spray-on margarine for a little flavor and for something for the spices to stick to, then sprinkles them with McCormick’s Garlic Season-all Seasoning Salt, then grills them. That’s it!
No, this is not a paid advertisement — just sharing a good find. 🙂
I was in the middle of making this dessert this afternoon when it occurred to me to take a picture of it and post the recipe, a la Barb. 🙂
Four Layer Dessert
2/3 cup butter or margarine
2 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
3 tablespoons sugar
8-ounce container whipped topping
1 8-ounce package cream cheese, softened
1 cup powdered sugar
3 cups milk
2 3-ounce packages any instant pudding mix
Turn oven to 350 degrees. Place margarine in a 9 x13 baking pan and place in oven until margarine is melted. Remove pan; add graham cracker crumbs and sugar; mix well, spread evenly over bottom of pan and bake for 7-8 minutes. Let cool.
Mix the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and 1 cup of the whipped topping and spread mixture evenly over the graham cracker crust. Mix the instant pudding mixes and milk and spread over the filling. At this point you can refrigerate the dessert for 15 minutes, if you’d like, so it congeals a bit. Spread the remaining whipped topping over the top and refrigerate 2 hours.
You can make up the graham cracker mixture in a separate bowl and then put it in the pan: I’d just rather do all of that in the same place.
We usually make this with chocolate pudding, and, if you’d like, you can take a Hershey’s candy bar and vegetable peeler and shave little chocolate curls over the whipped topping. But another variation we like involves fruit. I use banana pudding and, in between the cream cheese layer and pudding layer, I add strawberries cut into bite-sized pieces and banana slices (in which case I guess it should be called Five Layer Dessert). Here is a picture of the layer with the fruit. I didn’t take a picture of the completed dessert because it just would have looked like whipped topping.
Our church has “family camp” on Wednesday nights during the summer with different men in the church or guests speaking on some topic relating to the family, then we have a fellowship afterward, usually with some theme involved. Tonight it is supposed to be “Fruit Filled Desserts.” I don’t make pies very well. They taste ok, but they’re not very “pretty.” So I went with this dessert instead.
You may notice the little bowl above the pan. Well….whenever I make this, I always want some right then. There is always a chance that it might be gone before I get to it at the fellowship, right? And if I take a scoop out of the finished product, it will be really obvious (though I have thought of doing so and leaving a little paper that says “Inspected by #12” in the empty spot. 🙂 ). So today I thought of putting a spoonful of each layer in a different bowl for me to…ah….taste-test. 🙂 😳
My Life as Annie hosts Time Travel Tuesday in which we look back at some time in our lives in relation to the topic of the week. Last week I suggested our first cooking experiences might be a fun topic, and Annie graciously decided to use that idea for this week’s theme. Thanks, Annie!
I don’t remember exactly what my first cooking experiences were — I think I received a Girl Scouts cooking badge. But the first thing I remember cooking was fried chicken when I was maybe 11 or 12 or so. I must have had some experience with it before this — I can’t imagine starting out with this on my own! But for some reason I was cooking fried chicken with a friend — and we were so afraid of the hot oil that we’d drop the chicken in and then run to the back door. That sounds like a disaster in the making, doesn’t it? But somehow we avoided setting the house on fire or burning ourselves. I also remember making oatmeal cookies with a friend — it called for brown sugar and we didn’t have any, so we just used regular white sugar (I didn’t know then about the emergency substitution section in most cookbooks). The cookies all ran together — it looked something like those pizza-pan sized cookies you can get at the Chocolate Chip Cookie Factory, only they didn’t have those then, so we couldn’t claim we were imitating them. 🙂 They tasted good — they just didn’t hold a cookie shape.
I also remember now being younger than this and roasting a hot dog over the flame of a gas stove with a fork.
By the time I got married, I had been cooking for my family of 8 for a while — I would usually at least get dinner started before my mom came home from work — so having to take on meal preparation wasn’t that big a leap for me. I do remember when we were dating and both in the dorms, we didn’t have access to ovens, so a popular thing to make for one’s boyfriend was one of those boxed cheesecake mixes. Often at dinnertime you’d see a girl going to meet her guy with a cheesecake she’d made, and I do remember making those for Jim on occasion. I don’t remember what the first meal was that I cooked for Jim, but I remember a couple of early cooking disasters. Gravy was something that took me years to learn. I do fine with it now — though we pretty much only have home-made gravy when we have turkey. But my first attempts were awful. I remember one time getting my electric hand-held mixer out and “beating” the gravy right in the pan to try to smooth it out. Another time, the texture was ok, but it was really, really light. I thought I had read somewhere that red plus green made brown, so I put a few drops of red and green food coloring in. It turned very green, and nothing I tried made it look a normal color. For some reason, instead of dissolving in tears I started laughing hysterically, then Jim came in to see what was going on. I couldn’t make myself eat it — the color was just too awful. But we joked about green gravy for years, and for years I also kept a jar of ready-made gravy in the cabinet “just in case” mine didn’t turn out.
Another time I was making popcorn the old fashioned way in a saucepan with some oil in it (this was before the days of microwave popcorn. They had then these big popcorn poppers usually with a yellow plastic domed lid — but we didn’t have one). I had a little can of popcorn that I thought was enough for one batch. I was talking with Jim while I made it, and he saw me dump the whole little can in and knew it was too much, but just sat back to watch what happened. Blissfully unaware, I kept talking and shaking the pan back and forth — when suddenly popcorn erupted over the sides of the pan and spilled everywhere. I don’t remember exactly how I reacted — I’ll have to ask him — I think I just said “Oh! Oh!” He did help me clean it up, after he stopped laughing at me. 😀
Updated: I am adding this in after my initial post because I just remembered it. 🙂 Once in our early married years, when I was trying to be the frugal Mrs. Housewife, I discovered rutabaga was only 19 cents a pound. I had never made or even seen it before. But I got some and came home and looked in my cookbooks to see how to make it. There was a recipe to include it in mashed potatoes and another recipe with apples. So I made the mashed potatoes — and the rutabagas turned them kind of an orange color, but they tasted ok. The apple dish was “ok” but not spectacular. When my husband came home, he noticed the mashed potatoes were off-color, but he was trying to be polite and not say anything, while I was anxiously awaiting his comments. Finally I asked him how he liked the potatoes. He cautiously said, “What’s different about them?” I told him about the rutabagas — and he was thoroughly grossed out. That’s one of the few things that he just thoroughly cannot stand. When I mentioned that the apple dish I had made for dessert had rutabagas, too, he said, “Oh, no, not the apples, too!” So — no more rutabagas for this household, no matter how cheap they are. 🙂
You can read more “time travels” back to early cooking experiences at Annie’s today. Feel free to share yours, too, and add the link in there!
Stray Thoughts 