Check me out, it is FALL and I rock

Apples, before I brutally slaughtered them into
a delicious dessert.

Have you ever heard of apple butter?  I sure hadn't.  Prior to the Beans destroying all that is good about dessert by developing allergies to the worlds greatest food combo -- peanut butter and chocolate -- I had no reason to branch out.  Then he ruined everything and I had all but given up on anything good, sweet and fattening.  Oddly enough I wasn't loosing any weight, a fact I can't explain and which is entirely off topic ...

But, then came apple butter.

Its like applesauce, but not at all good for you and way creamier.

My parents wound up buying a place with a ton of apple trees, so we needed to use them ... my kitchen (and waistline) will never be the same.

In the interest of complete transparency -- it is time consuming and messy as heck, but it is easy.  Slap on a good podcast, movie, or some music and go to town!

You can search Pintercrack for much more thorough or serious sounding recipes.  Or you can hang out here.
 

Me picking the apples.
I should have Linda Hamilton Terminator arms by now.

I started by mixing cheap wine and Sprite.  No, seriously.  It doesn't actually go into the apple butter, but I find that it makes the process more enjoyable.  Why mix?  Because I will be singing show tunes before the apples are even halfway done if I drink the cheap wine straight.  I am not much of a sipper, more of a gulper.

So I mixed my Mommy Juice, snapped my iPod in because I could hear Handy (with his whiny assed tools) Manny in the background still.  And got to work.

My apples are small, and the skin is really thin so I don't peal them.  If you are getting store bought apples you may need to peel them and won't need as many because they are probably bigger.  Don't get horribly hung up on what kind of apples to use because by the time you are done cooking them with all the spices they will all be delicious.  Just know that if you want tang, pick a tangier apple, tart or sweet same deal.

For this round of apple butter I am using ... well, I am not entirely sure what kind of apples they are.  Here is a visual of the four main "types" but I think one and four may be the same kind:

I have googled them and come up with a couple different names, but I would love to hear what you think they are.

Now to the actual instructions.  Brace yourself for my thorough, foodie level instruction giving skillz:

Step one: Wash the bird shit and bug shit off.  Seriously, why they gotta poo on my food?

Step Two: Core and slice the muthahs.  And since my apple core-er sucks, I do this with a knife.

*insert possible brief intermission for ER visit here*

Step Three: Re-fill your drink, undoubtedly it is time.  Then toss the slices of apples into your food processor.  Process until they are in small chunks, smaller they are the faster they cook.

Step Four: Dump the chunky, wet apple matter into the CrockPot.

Blurry pictures happen when someone's hands are slippery.

Step Five: Spices.  Don't ask me to measure, I don't really do that and I am already a full drink in (my cup is 32 oz) by this point so my already low standards are dipping.  I eyeball it.  If I had to guess, for a full pot I use at least a full cup of brown sugar and then coat the top of the apples with cinnamon and allspice (so like 2 to 3 teaspoons each).  Here, I offer pictures to those of you who know what you are doing ...

It is a lot more spices than I have ever seen in another recipe, but to be honest I have never heard anyone complain LOL

Step Six: Set your Crock Pot on long and low.  For mine this is the 8 hour setting.  I try to do this as early in the morning as possible because you really do want the apples cooking for 8 to ten hours.  It makes for creamier apple butter in the end.

Step Seven: Try to not eat it through out the day and feel very Martha Stewart-ey because your house smells like fall and you seem to know what you are doing.  Stir occasionally, but really, you don't want to do much.

Step Eight: When the apples are plenty squishy, start shoveling them into a blender, food processor, or be uber fancy and have an immersion blender.  I know it is a huge surprise, but I am not uber fancy and lack an immersion blender.  I blend this bad boy until it gets creamy.

Once we have blended the snot out of the apples, we are technically done.  You can eat it straight, mix it in something, jar it, or even ice cube it like this:

I do that because then the Meatball can drop an apple cube in his oatmeal and it both flavors AND cools it.

I know, you are in awe of my general bad ass glory here, aren't you?

Anyway, it does freeze well, so jar it up and store it for later so you can have apple butter year round.  One full CrockPot made 6 full pint jars.

In a few weeks I will be cute-i-fying the jars somehow in order to give them away, so I will share that later.

Cheers!

So, laundry detergent, eh?

I was on a roll, I was feeling good, I knew failure was imminent!

But not today, or so I told myself!

As I was busily making my Ghetto Wipes and cleaning fluid I was also chatting with friends on the interwebz doing serious research.  In a facebook group of totally awesome people, many of whom far more skilled than I clearly, a recipe for laundry detergent surfaced.  The idea was born and I was obsessed.

I compared notes with about a million other recipes on Pintercrack.  I wanted a liquid and not a powder, and wound up doing one similar to this.  It is apparently the Duggar's recipe, but mine had slightly different ratios and made less than this one but I am not complaining.  Since it was a recipe shared by someone who makes this to sell it, I am not sharing the exact thing here -- not like I have such huge traffic it would matter but not risking it anyhoo!

So the ingredients are simple ... water, Fels-Naptha soap (or any bar soap apparently), Borax, and Washing Soda.  I made a quick Walmart run for the bar soap, the bucket (cheaper BTW at Home Depot or Lowes, NOT at Wally World go figure), and the washing soda.

Start by grating the bar of soap with a cheese grater.  Try to not be totally appalled at how much it looks like cheese.

Boil 4 cups of water and add the washing soda and borax to it (see, different steps than the Duggar one!) and once it is mixed around a bit add the cheesy soap bits.  I was trying to be really patient and get it to dissolve, but it was only mostly dissolved by the time I gave up and moved on.

I filled my big assed expensive bucket (it was like $5 instead of $3 at the hardware store LOL) with about 3.5 gallons of water by using an empty and rinsed out apple juice bottle.

While doing this step the Beans mocked my superior parenting skills by breaking into a room with a baby proof knob cover that *I* can barely use but he can remove.  Threw it into the bucket of water for good measure to let me know what he really thinks of my attempts to keep him out of my bedroom.

I then dumped that yellowish mixture into the bucket, clapped the lid on and let it sit for 24 hours.

The next day a hard film about a quarter inch thick had formed on the top and I tried to break it up.

Then the messy began.

I had an empty giant Costco-brand-of-Tide bottle and a couple big containers from the dollar store.  No matter how careful I was about it, I wound up smelling very very clean by the time I was done.

End result, we have been using it for a bit and I love it!  I use a full cup that came with the "Tide" of it for a wash load, because I read that somewhere... now that I think about it I may try less and see how that works.

What I Have will last a while.  I do have to occasionally shake the bottle because the chunks settle into the bottom and pug the sucker up.

So while I am not giving you a full how-to here, this should serve as a lesson.  I appear to not have caused any permanent damage to anything and am still off of all the government big brother watch lists (that I know of or wouldn't be on already LOL) ... so you can totally do this too!

So no massive failure yet ... the streak continues and I am not sure what I will do next!

Ghetto Wipes

So immediately following the making of my Ghetto All Purpose Cleaner I started butchering a roll of paper towels to make wipes because it appeals greatly to my inner lazy biotch to just have that around.

But let us start at the beginning.

I am a teaching supply hoarder.  Whether it is Sharpies or random containers that I insist on keeping while my husband rolls his eyes and tells me I am nuts, I just cannot help myself.  It is a compulsion.  One that behooves us more than my husband will EVER admit.

Point is, every time he goes through the garage and asks me "can I please throw this out now?!" I find a use for something that saves us money.

So the cylindrical cleaning wipes containers I insisted on keeping because YOU NEVER KNOW wound up being not only insanely useful but also part of saving us money!  Take that Bunyan!

I had my Ghetto All Purpose Cleaner ready to go, so I just needed the container and the "wipes."

This is where it gets messy.

First off, I had a roll of paper towels that are select a size, and I really thought I would like that.  I was wrong.  I may be getting ahead of myself here in reviewing my "product" before I tell ya how to make it, but in case you don't read the whole thing and try to walk in my footsteps (are you mad?) let me tell you now -- your wipes will be tiny!  Do not use the select a size towels if you use a dispenser like I am unless you want tiny wipes.  How tiny you ask?  Let me show you:

So I would prefer, and will do this next time because it is the only complaint I have at present, to use the full sized towels.

Reason being, step one with the paper towels is to cut them in half.  The whole damn roll.  Have you ever tried to cut a roll of paper towels in half?

It is a messy process.

Really.

I couldn't fit a whole roll of paper towels in the containers because they are just a bit too narrow, so I had to set some aside.  I did have the sense to do that before I cut the roll in half at least.

After sawing the roll in half and making your work space look like a blizzard hit, you have to wiggle the cardboard roll out of the center.  This is a lot easier than I figured it would be.  Then squeeze the roll into the container and pour the fluid mixture on it.

Seriously, that simple.

Now I had to clean the front bathroom, the one the boys all use.  I did not take a before picture, frankly who wants to see that?  But the after picture?  Seriously, my toilet was sparkling like a moody vampire on a sunny day!

Did you "ooooo" and "aaaaaa" because you should.

Again, like I said in the last post about making the cleaner, it was not like I was scrubbing obsessively.  It was no more work than a usual cleaner.  I did have to wipe the space dry, so I had one hand with a wet wipe and one with a dry one.  I also can't do a cost break down because again I had to purchase none of this that day, but I am sure it comes out exceptionally cheap when you really figure it out.

Feeling pretty in control of things I set my sites on a bigger battle because something else was running low and I would need to buy more soon ... laundry detergent ... oh yeah.  Stay tuned.

I am on a roll here, maybe I should change the blog up to be about practical cleaning tips ... something like ...

Seems legit.

is it over already?!

Amen. 

As the school year winds to a close it comes, again, that time where we need to brace our selves for the summer (yikes!) and thank the teachers who kept our kids out of our hair and educated the poo out of them for the last ten months.

Since I used to get "thanks for the great school year" prezzies people often ask me what it is a teacher really wants.  I always wanted Sharpies, but I have a small addiction to them which might not be wholly normal.  I have shared some of my previous teacher gifts with you before like how to mess up easy homemade hand scrub or the "thanks a latte" idea I blatantly stole-- er, um, borrowed from somewhere. *Cough, cough* Pintercrack.  We also used the glass etching stuff from Paul Bunyan's birthday project to make a jar for his teacher's last year at the end of the year, but I think I might not have posted about that ... well if I didn't just trust me, we did it and it was cute.

Anyway, as the school year winds down I find myself wanting to plan out the end of the year gifts better than I normally do.  This is two fold, one I would rather not be gasping for air while trying to figure out how to wheedle it into one week's budget because I forgot.  Two, Meatball is in 5th grade, meaning next year he moves on to middle school and will not longer be at the school we know and love and have been at since kindergarten.  While I am focusing on not sobbing about my baby growing up and me feeling wildly old, I am rather focusing on how we need to recognize more people than normal as a result.

A quick Pintercrack search yielded lots of cutesy things and this little gem: teachers love supplies as a gift.

Perhaps I was an exceptionally selfish teacher, but I would not have said that exactly.   Don't get me wrong, I wept with gratitude for every kleenex box, set of pencils and jug of hand sanitizer I was ever given.  But don't call it a "gift" for me, umkay?  It prevents me from spending my own money, as I would have had to, it is kind, it is generous, but it really isn't a gift for me.  It is a way to support me and my classroom and I am unspeakably grateful for it, but it isn't the same as a gift for me.  Make sense?

It depends entirely on what you are wanting your gift to be, no teacher will begrudge a gift that is for them versus the gift that is for their classroom.  However, since I donate supplies all year and do a big donation at the beginning of the year as a "gift" to the teacher who is setting up a classroom, I do not want to do this at the end of the year when they are busy packing their classroom up for the summer in the middle of everything else.  As the year opens it is an awesome idea to give your child's teacher a bunch of supplies they may need.  Awesome.  Giving it to them as summer is this --> <-- close?  Not as cool, in my opinion.  Teachers are just as eager, if not a billion times more so, for summer as their students.  They deserve a special, spoil-themselves type thank you that they can do whatever they want with, not 30 pencils to sharpen in anticipation of next school year.

I also don't want to laden them with useless crap.  So this is my solution this year.  Sheesh, that was a long round about way to get to the point ...

I shopped around for the cups, but found by far the best deal at Lakeside (I picked the blue ones).  At roughly $2.50 each this was a steal.

All the cups have the following inside:

• Some Bazooka bubble gum ($4.99 for a ridiculous bucket of it that I had to swat Paul Bunyan off of several times until I was done stuffing cups)
• Some lemonade, tea, and coffee packet thingies that I totally wanted to keep for myself.
• Some of the cups, for the teachers that have been with Meatball all six years of elementary, also have a $5 gift card to Starbucks.  Remember, Starbucks cards are teacher currency like cigarettes are to prisoners.
• His main teachers had a $20 Visa gift card, so they could spend it on whatever the heck they wanted be it dinner out, a pedicure, margarita, or some rocking school supplies.
• As it happens, every teacher that Meatball has had from kinder on up is still at this school.  So he also went around and gave all of them one of these bookmarks from tatertots & jello.  Current teachers also had one in the cup so he thanked everyone for being part of his story!  Isn't that  *sniffle* so cute?
• On the back of each was a personalized note to the teacher thanking them for teaching him back in whatever grade he had been in their class.
• I nabbed the idea for the cute little tags here via Pintercrack and made my own so they say "thanks a latte for the tea-riffic ade you've given me!" since there is coffee, tea and lemonade stuff in each cup.

cut out the tags and book marks,
I used a paper cutter so I could go a lot faster

cut the tags so that they can slip on the straw
like a flag

like that!

Meatball wrote messages on the backs
of some of his bookmarks.
This one was especially touching.

My plethora of cups before ...

now you fill the cups, slap on the lids and
BAM you are done!

 All told, when I add everything up and divide it out each gift cost me roughly $10ish max which is pretty good in my opinion.  I was scared it would be worse anyway so comparatively it feels better.

And with that ... now I have to accept that it is very nearly summer.  That, my friends, is entirely another post in itself!

oil pan magnet board

My love-hate relationship with Pintercrack marches on.  Some days I want to kick the whole website in the nuts, some days I am not sure how I'd survive without it.

Today is a good day ... for now.

Have you seen this one?

While I don't see me posting my kid on the internet in nothing more than a diaper, I do dig the idea.  You can nab one of those oil pan thingies at Walmart for like $12.

So I did.  Then I had to figure out how to get the stupid thing home in a Corolla with two kids and a driver.

It wasn't pretty.

But then I brought it in the house and freaked Paul Bunyan out by saying I was just going to Gorilla Glue the crap out of it.

Eventually, he is going to realize how easy he is to manipulate, right?

Anyway, he took over the hanging of the thing (which involved pre-drilling holes and using bits I wouldn't have known existed so it was for the best I didn't want to do that anyway) and just wanted me to tell him where.

And taaaa daaaa...

Apparently there is something weird in our wall and the bottom left hand corner of the pan didn't hit a stud, so he had to do it over just a bit to the right, which left a ridiculously sharp metal hole in the darn thing.  The cure?

Slap a cute pirate sticker on it and BAM, all better.

Beans loves playing with his "numbers" ... they are letters, but hey, he is two and we are working on it!