Raising tadpoles - part 1

Like most kids, my son has a fascination with animals. The problem is that while we used to have a ton of pets, we got rid of most of them before he turned a year old because with a baby in the house, we just didn't have time for snakes, lizards, rabbits, etc. We still have a dog and two cats, but he wants a turtle. Or a horse. Or the bird at the pet shop. Or the squirrel climbing a tree. Mainly he wants a turtle, and oddly enough I've seen two turtles crossing the road in the past week that I could have taken home with me instead of just moving them away from traffic. The problem is that I don't want a turtle or any other animal that I have to feed and house and possibly even buy.

A few weeks ago our tomato plants got attacked by tobacco worms, which are fairly attractive, very destructive caterpillars that turn into plain-looking brown moths. They reeked havoc on my plants but also provided me with a unique opportunity- a  completely free pet. I saved one of them from being a skid mark on the bottom of my shoe and put it in a plastic jar. My husband found a stick and some moss and drilled holes in the lid, and we dropped in a few of the already half-eaten green tomatoes. For almost a week, Ronan was ecstatic. he talked about his caterpillar (which he called a crap-pillar), all the time. He walked around with his jar showing it to anyone that would look. Then the darn thing cocooned and it was back to "Mommy! Mommy! Turtle. Hold it?" Even when there were no turtles anywhere nearby. (My son just turned 2 last month, so his vocabulary and sentence structure are understandably limited) I still hadn't figured out what I was going to do about Ronan's recent pet fascination when the answer forced itself on me.

Now for anyone that doesn't know me, I am a tree-hugger. Not literally, but I am more of an animal/nature lover than anyone else I know. I still go outside sometimes after it rains to save the worms from drying up and dying on the sidewalk. So when I went to clean my son's swimming pool and found hundreds of tiny tadpoles, there was no choice to make other than what I was going to put them in and where they were going to go. I think I ended up with about 300 miniature tadpoles, each approximately the size of a flea. Trust me, it was fun trying to separate them from the -even more plentiful- mosquito larvae. I put 200 of them in a ten gallon aquarium and the rest in a large fishbowl. I went to two of the local boat ramps but couldn't find any suitable pond plants, so I ended up adding some sphagnum moss instead. Now if you haven't used sphagnum moss before, let me just say that it is a good staple to have around if you are the sort of person that takes in random creatures from outside. It is very versatile. It can live in water or on land and if it doesn't get enough water, it will just dry up until it gets more and then quickly become lush and green again. It available at most pet stores, though I would recommend a reptile store if you have one nearby. We bought a block of it (It came in a cube shaped bundle, tied together and covered in plastic) at least 5 years ago, and even though we have used it for many things, we still have most of it left. it lasts a long time for three reasons: 1- It EXPANDS when you get it wet. (You should soak it for at least 20 minutes before you use it so that it reaches its full size and becomes more pliable) 2- You can reuse it. I soaked WAY too much for my tadpole tanks, so now the portion I'm not going to use is drying in sun and will be put back away later. 3- You can't kill it. I mean I'm sure you could burn it or poison it or something, but you can't accidentally kill it because of its completely flexible water and lighting needs. So:

aTank

aPlants (to hide in)

aNon-chlorinated water (We have well water, but if you don't, you can just let some sit uncovered for a few days)

rFood

What the heck do you feed a tadpole? In the wild they eat pond scum, but I didn't have a good way to bring any of that inside. And it's gross. So my husband did some research and found out that they love boiled letuce. He chopped a couple of leaves and boiled them for 10 minutes. Then he froze it in icecube trays so that I would have single servings. After it was frozen, I popped them out and moved them to a ziplock.  If I have to make more later, I will probably just spread it out on some wax paper so that I can break it all up and have more more control over how much food they get at a time. Anyway, they love the lettuce. I've had them for about a week now and they've grown a lot off of it. They still attack the lettuce with tenacity every time I drop some in, which is once every few days. I haven't read anything about tadpoles and iceburg lettuce (the kind that comes in a round head like cabbage), but iceburg lettuce has basically no nutritional value and you should never feed it to turtles, iguanas, or other animals that live off mainly greens. I gave my tadpoles Romaine lettuce, but I assume they would also enjoy other types of greens. If you don't have lettuce, you could even try using chickweed or dandelion greens, both of which are non-toxic.

Ronan doesn't seem very excited about the tadpoles. I don't think he understands what they are and they are too small to catch his eye. I'm not sure how big they will get since the full-grown tree-frogs are only a little over an inch long, but he loves seeing frogs no matter how small they are, and with 300 tadpoles, I think we're going to get a LOT of frogs.

Garden Chicken Bake

I have a confession to make - I can't cook. I mean, most of my friends would say that I can -in fact most people would probably say that I can- but that's just because sometimes I do. I can read and follow directions, so if I have a recipe in front of me, it tends to turn out pretty well. When I say I can't cook, what I mean is that I absolutely NEED a recipe. If I'm baking junk food, I can just kinda make stuff up and it turns out good. I rarely follow a dessert recipe to the letter. If I use a recipe at all, it's more of a guide or an inspiration. I usually end up changing at least half of the ingredients. And I've always wanted to be able to do that with real food. But I can't. Even with simple stuff like chicken, I need a recipe. I don't know how long to cook it, or at what temperature, or if I need to turn it, baste it, season it, etc. And don't even ask me to add, remove, or substitute ingredients.

I know there are a lot of people that are like me when it comes to cooking. Being able to "make dinner" without the help of frozen entrees has become a dying art. Now that most women work, making dinner from scratch has become too much of a hassle and no one does it anymore. Which means that we aren't learning how. A little over a year ago, I became a stay-at-home mom. I quickly fell in love with Pinterest, taught my son sign language and myself crochet, and started spending time outside. This year I have a garden, and we are already having trouble eating everything it produces. I decided that we are going to eat or preserve everything that comes out of the garden. We are not letting anything go to waste and we are not giving anything away. Now I realize not giving ANYTHING away sounds kind of selfish, but I am doing it to force myself to learn how to make the most of my garden instead of just giving away everything that doesn't conveniently fit into my meal plan. To reach my goal, I will have to dehydrate, freeze, and learn how to can. I will also have to find recipes that use whatever vegetable I happen to have large amounts of or  *gasp* I'll have make to some up. Today I created my first recipe, and amazingly enough it tasted good.

Garden Chicken Bake

1 zucchini, thinly sliced
4 banana peppers, sliced in rings (mine taste more like bell peppers though every once in a while you get a bite with a little bit of kick)
2 chicken thighs, cooked, deboned, and chopped
barbeque sauce (I used Jack Daniels Steakhouse)
parmesan cheese
mozzarella cheese, shredded

In an 8x8 pan, make a layer of zucchini, then a layer of peppers. Next sprinkle on a layer of Parmesan cheese. Add a layer of chicken and another layer of zucchini. Then put the barbeque sauce on. I didn't use much barbeque sauce, but my chicken had also been grilled with barbeque sauce, so if your chicken is plain you may want to be more generous. Then add the rest of the peppers and the rest of the chicken and cover with mozzarella. bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

It turned out great and used up zucchini and peppers from the garden AND leftover chicken without me having to add a bunch of new ingredients, so I call it a success! And now I'll be less worried making up dishes in the future :-)

Update: My zucchini are doing terrible this year, but the peppers are still going strong so I ended up making this recipe again, but layering it with cooked yellow rice instead of zucchini. It was also very good.

birthday cakes

I adapted this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker's chocolate buttercream recipe, which can be found here. My husband and I do not generally like whipped frosting. In fact, we don't like whipped food at all. Eating flavored air kinda makes me want to gag. I don't know why I thought this recipe would be worth trying- aside from the fact that pretty much all the other recipes I could find call for heavy cream, which I have never purchased in my life. But I tried it, and it wasn't good. Now if you like whipped frosting, I would recommend it. I could almost taste it, and for flavored air that's pretty high praise. I added an extra cup of powdered sugar, which made it thick enough for me to eat, though another cup or two probably would have been even better. It tasted very sweet but not very chocolaty, so I added some unsweetened cocoa powder, and I think the resulting frosting is delicious. In the future, I may try adding more powdered sugar and chocolate. I'll have to see how it tastes with the cake and how it stands up to the heat. Our party is outside and it's supposed to be in the 80's that day. Anyway, here is the recipe as I made it:

Whipped Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

1 C butter or margarine, at room temp
3 1/2 C powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 C semisweet chocolate chips, melted and cooled slightly
1 Tbsp special dark cocoa powder

Whip the butter with the whisk attachment on your mixer for 5 minutes on medium. Slowly add the other ingredients, starting with the powdered sugar, mixing the whole time. (While adding the powdered sugar you will want to mix on low speed) You will need to stop occasionally to scrape the sides of the bowl. Once everything has been incorporated, mix for another minute or two. Enjoy!

The white cake (which is actually confetti cake) also got buttercream frosting, but I just used this recipe from my homemade Oreos:

1/2 C (1 stick) of butter (or margarine), softened
4 Tbsp half and half (or milk)
2 tsp vanilla
pinch of salt
7 C powdered sugar

Mix everything except the powdered sugar together. Then add the powdered sugar one cup at a time.

I made both cakes from boxed mixes because I don't feel making cake from scratch is worth it unless it is a  flavor you can't get in a box (like Apple Dabble Cake - YUM!)

update: I wasn't really thrilled with how plain my cakes turned out, but they ended up sagging in the heat so I'm kind of glad I didn't spent too much time on them. Luckily, Ronan is only 2 years old so he didn't know the difference. Maybe next year I'll learn my lesson and have an indoor party. I didn't take a picture before we left because I was going to put toy trains on my son's cake before we served it, but after sitting in the heat so long it wasn't stable enough to put the trains on, so this picture was taken right before we cut them.

Our Built-in DVD shelf with TV mount

In December, we remodeled part of our house. In our entire 3 bedroom house, we had one tiny hall closet in addition to our standard bedroom closets. There was no where to store anything, but all of our rooms were enormous. We decided to rip out our closet wall and build a large walk-in closet, stealing the space from the adjacent bedroom. In addition to the wall we built to separate the closet from the second bedroom, we also had to build a wall where the front of our closet had been since we were putting in a standard door where the 7 foot closet opening had been. When you first walk into the room, there is a wall directly to your right. If you follow that wall to the back of the room, you reach the door to our new closet. I don't feel like my post so far is making much sense, so if you are confused, maybe these pictures will help:

View from the second bedroom:
Here the closet has been ripped out and the new door and wall have been added to fill in the space from the old closet opening. The brown walls are part of the second bedroom. The blue walls are the inside of the master bedroom's old closet. After this picture was taken, we added another wall separating the new closet from the second bedroom between the door and the vent in the ceiling.

This is the same wall from the other side, after all of the work has been finished and our new DVD rack has been built. The door on the left goes into the closet. The door on the right is the entrance from the hallway.
 Someday, my husband will get around to finishing the trim around the closet door.

Anyway, we didn't want to put anything between the two doors that would stick out into the isle because then you would have to walk around it to get to the closet. More importantly, it would become an obstacle any time you were moving anything large in or out of the closet. So, we decided a DVD shelf and TV mount would be perfect. It would only stick out about 6" and we could still get good use out of the wall space. The only problem is that DVD players never fit on a 6" shelf, and since we're cheap and don't pay for cable, the TV is useless without a DVD player. 

Luckily, we realized all of this before we finished building the wall. We noted where the cross-braces were, and my husband ran the electrical wires to where we were going to want an outlet before we put up the drywall. Then when he built the DVD shelf, he made a cubby in the wall so the DVD player would fit and he put an outlet into the ceiling of the cubby so we could plug in the DVD player and TV. This would have been much more difficult if the wall had already been finished, and I'm not sure we would've attempted it. We plan to divide another room in about a year and I will definitely spend a long time thinking about what we may want against the new wall before we finish building it.

New Fire Pit - Part 2 of 2

About 2 months ago, I wrote a post about the beginning of my latest project: turning my trash heap of a burn pit into a pretty, stone-lined fire pit. You can read about the early stages of my project here. I have finally completed it, and it is everything I had hoped it would be. To recap, this is what it started out looking like:

Technically, this is what it looked like after many hours of digging. It started out shallower on the right side, which is where we decided we wanted our burn area to be. So, in this picture I have already started digging the hole on the right side, using the dirt to help fill in the left side. We knew before we even started that we would need to buy dirt to fill in the old hole, and we were right. It ended up taking 5 pickup truckloads of dirt and we probably should have used 6.

I'm cheap, and patio bricks are expensive, so I spent a long time thinking about what to line my new burn pit with. When I thought up the answer, I felt like an idiot for not thinking of it sooner. Broken concrete! I've seen it listed free on Craigslist a lot (usually as fill) and always wondered why anyone would voluntarily put a big pile of concrete in their yard, even if they did need to fill in a hole. I still would never use it as fill, but for wall-building, I'm in. I looked through the free ads and did a search for "broken concrete". I got a few results, but they were all about an hour and a half away. I decided to wait for something closer. 

After about a month of waiting and religiously checking Craigslist, I gave in. Not only had there been no ads posted closer to me, there had been no ads posted, period. I e-mailed a guy that had posted an ad for broken concrete a month earlier, fully expecting it to be gone. It wasn't, and he seemed relieved that someone finally wanted the pile of rubble that had become a permanent addition to his front yard. He said that it had been put there with a loader and we would need to bring a sledgehammer to break up some of the bigger pieces. Perfect. I had been worried that all of the concrete would be broken too small to use as bricks, since apparently the only known use for broken concrete is filling in holes. We took the truck and utility trailer and loaded up all the concrete he had. I wasn't sure it was going to be enough, but it ended up being EXACTLY what I needed with nothing left over. 

After I dug out the new hole, I used a 3 foot level and a garden rake to make the whole circle even and level. Then I put my shovel in the middle of the circle and used a stick on a string to mark out a circle. Once I placed the first layer of concrete, the circle looked like this:

I added dirt to the outside of the circle after every layer and sometimes had to pack it in under the outside of the concrete pieces to keep them from leaning or wobbling. I saved the biggest pieces for the top layer to help stabilize the wall and because I think it looks better that way. Once I finished the wall, it suddenly became clear how uneven the rest of the yard was. In some places the wall stopped a foot and a half below the level of the grass, in others it was 6 inches higher than the ground around it. My husband tilled all of the ground within 3-4 feet of the wall, and I used a shovel and garden rake to smooth it as much as I could. I tried to keep the top of the concrete level with the ground around it so that mowing would be simple. Now we just need  to plant some grass! 

Final cost breakdown for this project: $60 for dirt, about $150 for gas to go get it and the concrete, ? for the grass seed.

Fruit Leather

Today I decided to try making fruit leather. I don't actually like fruit leather, but my husband thinks it's awesome. He was purchasing it regularly for a while, but then the novelty wore off and the stores stopped putting it in high-traffic areas. I think he pretty much forgot about it's existence, which I thought was great because the crap is expensive and I don't understand the draw. Anyway, I ran across a recipe on Pinterest a while ago, and it sounded insanely easy to make. We just went strawberry picking yesterday and came home with 18 lbs of strawberries, so it sounded like a good day to try it out. I looked up the recipe on Pinterest again, and also found a few recipes for fruit leather on the cooking apps on my phone. Everybody listed different amounts and different fruits, but the gist was the same: Puree whatever fruit you want, add a splash of lemon juice and enough sugar to make it taste good. Spread the mixture on a baking sheet covered in Saran Wrap. Dehydrate.

I put strawberries in my blender until it was pretty much full and included 3 apples that have been sitting in my fridge since God-knows-when. I added some lemon juice and spooned in a random amount of sugar, tasted it and added more. I ended up with about 6 1/2 C of pureed fruit and I think I put about 6 Tbsp of sugar in it. That was the easy part. I was a bit concerned about putting Saran Wrap in the oven, but every recipe I found said to do it, so I lined my cookie sheet. Did the Saran Wrap have to go up the sides? Would the puree get more liquid when it was heated and end up getting under the Saran Wrap? How big of a problem would that be? What was the point of the Saran Wrap anyway?

Sadly, my questions were the wrong ones. No, the Saran wrap does not have to go up the sides, in fact it's probably better if it doesn't. No, the puree never got more liquid. I doubt it would have been much of a problem if it had. I still don't know the point of the Saran Wrap. But the question I didn't ask - should I secure the Saran Wrap with anything? - YES, Tape. Once you put the puree on and start spreading it around, the sides of the Saran Wrap start trying to fold over. Quickly. And they don't stop or take turns. You need to tape that sucker down in several places on each side before you put the fruit on it.

I found three ways to dehydrate the leather. The most obvious was a food dehydrator with solid trays. Since I already told you I put it on cookie sheets, you've probably figured out that I don't have one of those. The second was in the oven with the door cracked for 6-8 hours at 150 or 170 or the lowest setting on your oven, depending on who wrote the recipe. The third was in your car with the windows cracked. Now I live in the middle of nowhere in Florida, so I figured the car idea sounded great. No electricity used, my oven would be available if I wanted to make something else, and hey, it's Florida, of course it's hot enough! No. The sun didn't come out today. It only got to about 80 degrees outside, and not much hotter than that in the car. I took one of my cookie sheets out and left it in the car for a few hours figuring that it was still morning and it would heat up later in the day. The second cookie sheet didn't have anywhere flat to sit so I put it in the oven and turned it to 200 degrees. My oven goes down to 170, but I've dried a lot of things at 200 and I'm not a patient person. Besides, I don't like running air conditioning with the oven cracked open. I checked in two hours, and it looked exactly the same. And the oven was cold. I don't know what happened, but it didn't make me smile. So I turned the oven on again to 200 and ended up baking it for 4 hours. I got my tray out of the barely warm car around 1:30 in the afternoon and put it in the oven too. I baked that one for about 4 1/2 hours.

In the end it tasted good (if you like that sort of thing), but the edges got crispy before the middles were done. Maybe that's because I was bad and baked them at 200. Maybe not. Either way, I don't suggest baking Saran Wrap at 200 degrees. For the most part, it did fine. However, Some the the edges got holes melted in them, even in areas where it was covered with fruit puree. I threw away all of the fruit puree that came in contact with melted Saran Wrap, but next time I think I will make this without the Saran Wrap. The fruit leather peels off of the Saran Wrap easily enough that I don't think I will have trouble removing it from my cookie sheets either. And next time, I will make sure it's sunny before I start throwing stuff in the blender :-)

Bathroom flower arrangements

My bathroom has been about halfway decorated for three years. I decided maybe today was a good day to finish -or at least continue- decorating it. So I pulled out my baskets and some fake flowers and greenery that I bought when I was maybe 15 to decorate a shelf along the ceiling of my bedroom. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it looked good. I can't find a picture, so I guess you'll just have to trust me.  Anyway, it took about 5 minutes to make these two baskets...

...which look great with the one other set of wall hangings we already had.  

I still want to hang a couple of pictures or something  on the other walls to finish off the look, but no ideas yet.

If you have never played around with flower arranging before, but would like to try your hand at it, I do have a few tips. If you are working with fake flowers, buy more than you will need and plan to take some back or keep the leftovers for a later project. Try to make sure that at least most of what you buy (especially the greenery) has wired stems so that you can bend them into just the right position. Try not to cut anything you don't have to. If a stem is too long, try folding it first. That way if you want it to be longer later, you can still adjust it. You will notice that I used a lot of greenery and very few flowers. Using too many flowers tends to make the arrangement look gaudy and unnatural. I could have used a few more flowers without making these arrangements look bad, but they would have needed to be small flowers placed in the background. You may have noticed that while I didn't use many flowers, I did use a lot of variegated greenery. Using greenery with different color patterns keeps the arrangement from looking boring which makes the flowers unnecessary. If you can make an arrangement with only greenery that looks good enough to display, then when you add a few flowers it will look amazing. When you add your flowers, please note that flowers should not always be placed in the front of an arrangement. Often people don't want to "hide" the flowers in the back, but placing bits of color toward the rear of an arrangement can help give it depth, and again, make it look more natural.

The hardest part is starting. I don't talk to people about flower arranging often, but when I do, they usually ask how to start. Which foam should they buy? How big should it be? Do you start in the center and work out, or start from the edges and work in? Answer: whatever you feel most comfortable with. Honestly, I don't like foam. So I don't use it. Sometimes, with certain arrangements in certain vases (usually fresh flowers in a shallow vase- think something you would see at a funeral) you do need to use foam. But I don't work for a florist anymore, so I can just avoid those particular arrangements.

When I did the basket that is hanging on the wall, I started from the outside and worked in. I knew I was going to want the big split leaves to be placed in a way that would give the arrangement character. They had wire running through the stems, so I just folded the stems so that they pinched the basket and held themselves in place. After that, I really had no idea, so I picked out a sprig of variegated leaves and put it in the basket. Too small. I needed something that would fill up all that empty space. So I grabbed a bouquet of fake pothos leaves and jammed that in there. After fluffing and repositioning most of the leaves, it looked pretty good, and there was an obvious spot for a flower. I tried putting two there, but it looked dumb. I think some wispy springs of tiny yellow or purple flowers on the left side of the arrangement would make it look a little better, but since I don't have any of that laying around, we may never know. I did this arrangement while it was hanging on the wall so that I could see how it looked with the other wall hangings, and so my three carefully placed leaves didn't get bumped or bent out of place.

When I did the small basket in the right picture, I didn't know what I wanted, so I figured I'd start with the base. I cut a loop of ivy big enough to fill the basket and jammed it in there. The leaves poking over the front of the basket just did that on their own. It looked good, but boring. So I decided to use some variegated leaves and since the speckly ones were just little sprigs, it seemed natural to have the leaves travel up the basket handle. Once that was twined into place, it looked kind of out of place, and I knew I would need to add a bit more of it on the other side of the basket. There wasn't much room left and I didn't figure I needed to add much of it anyway, so I stripped two leaves off of another sprig and pushed them into the ivy. That did the trick, but I wanted to add a splash of color, so I got two small bunches of flowers off of another vine and arranged them in the basket. And we're done! See, when you listen to my thought process it seems simple. And I don't sound like I know what I'm doing any more than you do. So stop planning (or staring at an empty basket and calling it planning) and just do the first step. The rest will fall into place before you know it.

I was going to do a step-by-step on how to arrange a vase of fresh flowers so it looks like it came from a florist, but I don't have any fresh flowers and I think that tutorial is going to need a lot of pictures... maybe some other day :-)

Update: My husband doesn't like the spotted foliage. He says it looks diseased. I don't have many other options lying around, so until I get around to buying something else, the baskets have been changed to crotons: