Archive for the 'Home' Category

Non-edible Christmas Goodies

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on December 15, 2008
in Home
. 1 Comment

This is clearly a food based blog. We typically write about things you can eat. Technically, you could eat this week’s topic, but you’ll probably get a tummy ache.

Our friend (and first-commenter) Karin gave us the idea when she gave us a present of fresh all natural boiling potpourri. Potpourri, as a rule, smells like an old ladies bathroom, but when your potpourri is a bag with an orange, lemon, cranberries and cinnamon sticks, it’s pretty cool. Just slice up the citrus and boil everything in a big pot of water. It smells great, and adds skin-soothing moisture to the ridiculous dry winter air.

Orange, Lemon & 1/4 c Cranberries
1 whole nutmeg
1 teaspoon each whole cloves, whole all spice & juniper berries
Three each bay leaves and cinnamon sticks

Karin’s gift segued nicely into a problem we were having, how to decorate our Christmas tree in the post-Wilbur-is-walking world. Little-man loves to grab things and throw them over his shoulder. Glass ornaments would be terrible. So we went looking for alternatives, and found an easy recipe for baking your own ornaments.

Baked Ornaments: 2 cups flour 2 cups salt 2 cups water - stir, knead into a ball. roll to 1/4 ” thick. cut shapes with cookie cutters, poke holes in the top with a pencil (to hang them from). bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes or until hard. let cool, add a string, and hang from your tree.

We had some friends over (hi Zoe and Moon!) and whipped up a batch of ornaments. We also did some fancy string tying with cinnamon sticks and pie tin cutting for fancy tree topping stars. We now have a safe Wilbur-proof tree. Occasionally he plays the game, undecorate-the-tree-and-leave-the-ornaments-in-the-middle-of-the-floor, but it’s safe.

Doing Our Part to Reduce Global Farting

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on June 14, 2008
in Home
. 0 Comments

One of our favorite chef’s is on a mission to cut down on American meat consumption. The first we saw of his campaign was a talk carried on Ted Talks:

It’s an eye opening talk. Bittman advocates cutting down on meat, not vegetarianism, just cutting down. His argument is health based, but it’s also a move that he explains will help slow down global warming. Because of the huge amount of meat we eat, more than ever in history, and because of the industrialization of agriculture, animals are contributing more to global warming than any car. How? Farts. Really, farts. Watch the video.

So, to do our part for fart reduction, we’ve decided to try and cut down on the total amount of meat we eat each week. Luckily, Bittman has been helping with some how-to articles in his regular New York Times column and blog. We tried his recipe for spaghetti and zucchini, just substituting parsley for mint, and adding some onion and garlic. It turned out great.

We’ll see how it all sort of shakes out…it’s going to be a little bit of a challenge for us, but we’ll do it, satisfied to know that with each bite of veggie, we’ll be cutting down on farts…somewhere.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on November 21, 2007
in Home
. 0 Comments
A vintage postcard, from a time when we didn't mind knowing where our meat came from.

A vintage postcard, from a time when we didn't mind knowing where our meat came from.

We have an awful lot to be thankful for this year. Thanks to you for continuing to read our site, and for writing us with your ideas. All our cooking plans are in place for the big day tomorrow, we’re going to try two new things, cooking the turkey on the grill, and making our own pie crust from scratch. The turkey is going to get a heavy dose of hickory smoke, with some sage, thyme, rosemary and chopped apples for cavity aromatics. Our pie crust is going to wrap itself around a pecan pie. Camri has a big list of side dishes, including buttermilk mashed potatoes, french bean salad, and glazed carrots with cider. Should be a great meal.

Hope you and yours have a great turkey day!

Our Newest Contributer, Wil McAvoy

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on September 16, 2007
in Home
. 0 Comments
Wil, snoozing after some light reading.

Wil, snoozing after some light reading.

We’ve been away from writing the past two months, because we were preoccupied with the birth of the latest Tastebud contributer, William Christopher McAvoy. Wil was born August 4th, 2007. He weighed in at 7 pounds 1 ounce. So far, his favorite food is milk, but we’re pretty sure he’s going to have a diverse palette in the years to come. Why? Because we’re starting him early with a gift from our friends the Otto’s. They got Wil a series of books by Amy Wilson Sanger about different kinds of food in kid board-book form. You’ll have to give Wil a little time to do some research, we expect he’ll be ready for article writing in a decade or so. In the mean time, expect our future articles to mix in some kid friendly suggestions from time to time. Welcome Wil!

Cook’s Country

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on June 23, 2007
in Home
. 0 Comments

A friend at work lent us a few issues of Cook’s Country by the editors of Cook’s Illustrated. We’d seen the magazine on the newsstand before, but never bought it. Cook’s Illustrated is a pretty distinctive magazine, completely illustrated and ad free, with lots of good cooking tips. Cook’s Country is pretty similar, except they have full color photography, still no ads though. While Cook’s Illustrated focuses on cooking in general, Cook’s Country specifically covers American comfort food. Chicken pot pie, bread pudding, king ranch chicken, hot dog taste tests, it’s like having Aunt Bea in magazine form.

The recipes are great, as is the overall design and feel of the magazine. That said, it’s also sort of a heart-attack magazine. They don’t pull any butter-punches. This is a macaroni and cheese magazine folks, expect to put on a few pounds just by looking at it. All in all though, it’s pretty great. We highly recommend it.

Organic House Cleaning

Published
by
chrisandcamri
on March 17, 2007
in Home
. 0 Comments

Our cats like to lick stuff. It happens a lot. We’ll be eating breakfast, and one of them will lick the countertop for no obvious reason. It’s odd, strange, and makes us nervous. What are they licking? What did we use to clean the counter-top? Does it have something that tastes delicious but is actually poison?

Sometimes we drop our toothbrushes in the sink. Sometimes a plate isn’t as convenient as putting a slice of bread right on the table. Sometimes we might eat a piece of popcorn that fell on the floor. Are we eating little bits of poison each time we do this? Meh…maybe…a teeny bit. If nothing else, it made us think, “what’s in our cleaning products? Are they safe? Could we take a big swig of our laundry detergent?”

We take extra steps to try and eat organic fruits and veggies, so shouldn’t we do the same for our cleaning products? We started by buying the book, Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sandbeck. The book is excellent, thick, and full of good advice. It convinced us that it was important to try and buy cleaning products that were less harmful to our guts than typical stuff.

This all happened about a year and a half ago. In the meantime, we’ve tried a bunch of different products. Some have sucked, others are good. In some cases, the organic alternative cleaner just wasn’t good enough to justify its use, so we’ve stuck with conventional cleaners. What follows is the breakdown of products we’ve liked, organized by the area it cleans.

Surfaces

There’s a ton of surface cleaners out there in the world. They’re typically broken down by the kind of surface they’re meant to clean. You don’t spray 409 on wood. We were big 409 fans until we started on the organic kick. We tried a couple of different things, and found that we liked the Method brand of cleaners from Target the most. They have different stuff for wood and counter-tops, as well as cleaners for sinks and granite. They’re gentle, effective, and smell nice. We’ve never felt the need to wear gloves. It’s sort of dangerous, but if you get some 409 on your hands, you know what we’re talking about. 409 sort of burns. Method wants to be licked. It’s like we’re cleaning our counters with ice-cream.

We also have a bottle of very diluted bleach water under the sink for cleaning cutting boards. You make it by adding a cap of bleach to a gallon of water. It kills bacteria that can collect on a cutting board. We use it before and after we use the cutting board.

Floors

Our place is mostly hardwood floors. We were really excited to find out that Murphy’s Oil Soap is considered to be an organic cleaner. It’s biodegradable, and smells great. Remember that Murphy’s Oil Soap commercial with the lady cleaning pews in a church? No? I do. I love the smell of Murphy’s. Your house ends up smelling like a really nice library. Great stuff.

Bathroom

We have natural stone floor and wall tile in the bathroom, we haven’t found any cleaners that we trust. Instead we bought a terrifying steam cleaner. It’s called a Scunci steamer. This thing is probably the coolest cleaning product we’ve yet found. You fill it with water, plug it in, and in a few minutes you have the ability to shoot a jet of high pressure steam out the nozzle. It comes with a variety of attachments that make it relatively easy to shoot screaming steam at your floors and bathtub. When you’re done, the mirrors are fogged up and bacteria has been boiled off counters and floors. If you’re bored, it’s fun to pretend the Scunci is a jet engine. Everything is cleaner when it’s exposed to the uncaring hellfire of a jet engine.

Pots, Pans, Plates

This is where we couldn’t really hang with organics anymore. We tried some organic dishwasher detergents, they all pretty much sucked. We had to scrub everything before we put it in the dishwasher. We’re sorry hippies, we couldn’t do it. We switched back to normal Cascade.

As for hand washing, we use Seventh Generation Dish Soap. It smells like lavender, and gets stuff clean. For our stainless steel stuff, we use Bon Ami scouring powder. You can’t use it on teflon coated pans, but for stainless steel it’s great.

Laundry

We went 100% with the Seventh Generation brand of detergents and fabric softeners. Instead of using drier sheets, we switched to these Laundry Balls (as seen on TV). They clump around in the drier, beating our clothes into softness.

That’s all we have for now. It took a little bit of work to evaluate what we really like when it comes to cleaning products, but it’s been worth it. Although we still think the cats licking the counter-tops is weird, at least we’re not worried it’s hurting their tender little kitty bodies.