Week Ten- Produce Bags

This week's project requires some back story.  I do all the grocery shopping in my family and each week I find myself disgusted with the amount of plastic that comes home with me.  Before the move, I always used reusable cloth bags for my shopping.  Our local grocery store clerks in our new town are not supportive of that, but to hell with them.  Next week the bags are coming back out.

That said, I never solved the problem of all the plastic produce bags I need for all our fruits and veggies!  I tried bringing them back every week and using them until they ripped or got nasty, but that tended to be hit or miss.  So lately I have been looking at reusable bag options for produce.  I have seen net bags, knit bags, and vinyl bags, but recently I found the solution I love.  Sheer bags made from curtains.

I love this project!  It cost me exactly nothing and is the essence of reusing materials on hand.  The sheer curtains were given to me by my mother, and one curtain made NINE bags!  It was also an amazingly quick project.  Nine bags, an hour and half of work!  Wowza!

Next week's project is related to this one.  So if you liked this, stay tuned.  If not, bear with me.  The quirky, less practical projects are coming.

Five Best (recent) Reads

Another blogger (Forever Young (Adult)) asked what your five best, recent reads are, and I thought I would put up my list.  This has been a year of heavy reading for me.  Recent move, no cable, and no job means that I have made a lot of time to read.  No complaints here!

So here are the five I liked best from the last twelve months:

Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor.  I loved this one when I got an ARC for Library Journal (my review is towards the bottom).  It is beautiful, moving, and thought-provoking.

Nation, by Terry Pratchet.  I admit this was a reread for me, and in light of the terrible earthquake/tsunami in Japan, I will probably reread it again this week.  This is not your standard Terry Pratchett.

Skipping a Beat, by Sarah Pekkanen.  I reviewed this for a contest, here, and it has grown in my estimation the longer I have had to think about it.

The Passage, by Justin Cronin.  This one was surprisingly riveting.  But it ended so abruptly that I had to rush to the internet to find out if it was part of a series.  Thankfully there will be a few more to round it out and I cannot wait.  Plus vampire-zombies.  Awesome.

Maybe This Time, by Jennifer Cruisie.  I LOVED this book.  And not just because it is based on Turn of the Screw, by Henry James (a favorite).  She nailed it.  In fact this was one of those few that as soon as I finished it, I opened it back to the beginning and started again.  Just to seal it in my mind.  Hmm, may need to reread this one, too.

Wow, just looking at that list makes me happy.  And I would happily revisit all of these, so I think that is recommendation enough.

So what are your fab five from the last twelve months?

Our First Beer

I gave my husband a beer making kit for Christmas this year.   He gave me a cheese making kit.  It was a kit-tastic Christmas.  I have already chronicled my beginning cheesemaking (misses), but I kept forgetting to talk about the beer!  (Beer will do that to you, I guess.)

So I am here to rectify that lapse!  We found beer making to be surprisingly easy (when you use a kit!)  So if you have never made your own beer, here is what we did:

First you boil the grains together for about an hour.  Our house smelled so delicious that even the kids came running, asking what I was making for dinner.  If only the would do that when I actually cook barley.

Then you strain the grains and are left with only liquid.  This is when you start to add the hops, etc.  My husband did this part, so it is kind of a blur.

Once you have added all the ingredients and boiled it, then you have to cool the liquid rapidly.

The sink works well for this step.  After cooling, we straind the liquid into a glass jug and added the yeast.

 

 

At this point all the happy little yeast get to work and the juice starts jumping.  So you have to have a way to let the gasses escape while maintaining a clean environment.  For the first day or two you use a long, sterile tube that ends in a cup of sterile water.  

It looks cool and science experimenty.  Then, once the gasses have slowed down, you remove the tube and add a bubble trap.  It sits like this for a good while.

At this point, the process becomes hazy to me.  At some point you put this in a dark place.  Then you bottle the liquid, taking care to leave as much of the "pellet" (that sandy particulate stuff at the bottom, behind).  We used clean Grolsch bottles for our first batch, but we have been saving bottles for a while and finally bought a capper.  Our next batch will be in regular, brown bottles.

Then your beer ferments in the bottle for another 2 weeks.  I distinctly remember the 2 weeks!

Then, finally, you can chill and drink the beer!

I liked the IPA.  It was a richer flavor than what you can buy in the store, and it was definitely stronger!  I am looking forward to the Honey Sage Seasonal,

which is cooking on our counter right now!  (Look, we had so much, we had to start a mason jar for the extra!

Week Nine - Purse

I am so in love with this week's project! 

The design comes from Sew4Home, though it is slightly adapted to my needs.  (I didn't have enough fill to make it sturdy to the top, but I like the floppiness of my edge.)

This is a nice, narrow bag, with a cute, punky feel.

It has two, cute pockets inside.  And the pink is deep and saturated.  Just the way I like it.

I like the look of this project, and the usefulness.  I also learned a few new techniques, and got to know my sewing machine better.  We are developing a nice relationship.

And I definitely could not have done this project without the cutting mat you see behind the bag.  My mother-in-law sent it to me as a surprise, and it has been amazingly helpful.  Thanks, Kathy!

Starting Seeds

I started seeds for our garden this week.  This will be an ongoing process as seeds need to be started at different times, relative to the last frost.  I am not sure I knew that before this year.  Because I really, really, desperately want this year's garden to be a success, I made sure to read every seed packet I have.  That was a lot of reading!  (45 packets, or so.)  Then I organized all the packets based on when I need to start them indoors or straight in the ground.

You would not believe how much better I felt after this bit of organization.

This week I started all the peppers and one packet of rosemary.

I made tags to go with each, too.

I managed to find plain starter greenhouses for the seeds.  It took forever to find them at the home improvement store, even with 3 people helping.  But we got it done, and I am sure we can reuse these next year, too, so it was a good investment.

Add a little seed starter soil to give them an added boost, and off we go.

Now last year I complained about how I can never seem to get seeds in the right depth.  This time, I aimed for perfection.  So I actually measured 1/4 inch on a toothpick and marked it with a pen.  The toothpick made the perfect digger for the tiny seed holes.  

I think I have done all I can to make sure these seeds sprout.  They are now in a warm-ish place (nowhere in this house is warm), and I can tell but the condensation that there is some residual heat in their little greenhouse.

Next week, tomatoes and melons go in another starter greenhouse!

Book Review - Skipping A Beat

Today's book review is part of a blogger sweepstakes.  I received an Advanced Reader Copy (Free Book!) in order to provide this review, but no other compensation.  What follows is my honest opinion.

Skipping A Beat, by Sarah Pekkanen
Washington Square Press (Simon and Schuster). February 2010. 327 pages (also includes Readers Club Guide.) ISBN: 978-1-4516-0982-0 Fiction.

Summary:

Julia Dunhill is an exclusive party planner in Washington DC, married to her high school sweetheart, Michael.  If asked, she would tell anyone she was happy.  Why wouldn't she be?  She has a business she loves, her husband is the most successful entrepreneur in a decade, and she lives in a mansion that takes her breath away.  Julia would tell anyone she was happy.  Happy is the same as satisfied, as content, right?

But don't make assumptions, yet.  This is not your typical, "it is hard to be rich" novel.  Skipping A Beat is a novel of love and loneliness, fidelity and fear, life and death.

The story begins with Julie setting up a lavish fundraiser, and Michael in sudden cardiac arrest.  I am not giving anything away to say that he lives.  But it is Michael's experience during his four minutes and eight seconds of death that shapes the entire story that follows.

Back when they were just Mike and Julie, the two were secure in their love and their ability to fight their way out of their small West Virginia town and their unhappy households. They dreamed of a glamorous life, and when Michael suddenly hit the jackpot with his start-up company, life seemed to be on the fast-track to fabulous!

So what is Julia to do when her fabulous, if not satisfying life is irrevocably changed by her husband's near death experience?  What can she do when her husband decides to change everything?  As Julia so clearly states,

Four minutes and eight seconds.  That's how long my husband, Michael Dunhill, was dead.

Four minutes and eight seconds.  That's how long it took for my husband to become a complete stranger to me. (p. 8)

Isn't that the best hook ever?

Verdict:  I liked it

Sarah Pekkanen starts with an unusual premise for an exploration of marriage.  And it works.  I might not have been caught up in a novel just about the complicated, twisted turns of a regular marriage.  But add in a near death epiphany, unimaginable wealth and a crisis of conscience, and I couldn't look away.

This was a very emotionally honest book.  As in The Opposite of Me, Pekkanen expertly explores a dynamic relationship to the point where the reader is just as conflicted and invested as the protagonists.  I really felt Julia's struggle as she weighed her love for her husband against her pain and mistrust.  Julia and Michael's marriage is bruised, and as a reader, I ached with them.  I recommend this novel to anyone who loves character-driven stories and has made an investment in Kleenex Corporation.  You are going to need the tissues.

However, one word of warning, I have a feeling that readers who have a rocky relationship in their lives might find this story hits close to home.  It is that real.

As an aside, I liked Pekkanen's first novel The Opposite of Me, as well  It is an interesting exploration of how different twin sisters can be, and the turns life can take that bring them closer.  I admit that there were moments in the book when I was unable to completely buy in to the plot.  And there were choices the protagonists made that I didn't feel were adequately supported by their characters or actions.  But I loved the honesty in the sisterly relationship; these twins are two very different people who both love and envy each other.  All in all, I thought The Opposite of Me was satisfying, and a strong first novel.

(I actually received three copies of Skipping A Beat.  Two from Pekkanen's publisher, after a loooong wait and much confusion, and one from another blog where I won a random drawing. I am going to share copies with family, and donate one to my local library.)

Week Eight - Bag Dispenser

I gave up on the planned project for this week when I realized that I didn't read the instructions well and bought the wrong amount of fabric.  Typical.  I will keep the idea in reserve, for now.

Anyway, I took that fabric from the non-project turned it into something useful.

A Bag Dispenser!

I love it.  I always save my plastic bags and reuse them as much as possible, but I get really tired of the plastic bag tumbleweeds rolling across my kitchen.  Now I have this simple solution.  And it is huge, so it should take a while to fill up.  (I didn't mean for it to be so huge, but it is.)