Going Domestic

Window Treatment

I've been trying to figure out if our home would be warmer over the winter if we covered a few windows that we know let the cold air in with that shrink-wrap plastic or if we invested in a tube of the removable weather-stripping that I read about in this article today. Ah, the joys of an older house ...

Dinner Interrupted

Last night, I stuck a fresh veggie lasagna in the oven to reheat for dinner. Chris had picked it up from our local Italian deli over the weekend; we'd had one before, and it was the yummiest lasagna ever! I had some difficultly re-heating it, though - I had it in the oven for an hour and the top of the lasagna still had some white-ish patches on it, like the cheese wasn't melting. Chris got frustrated waiting so long for dinner and put the lasagna under the broiler to melt the cheese. It was only after he took the pan out of the oven in resignation that we realized that the white patches were really mold(!), as was the frothy grey area! Boo. Completely ruined our appetite for anything Italian, anything pasta (even though we have a pantry full of Kraft Dinner), so we ended up running out to Swiss Chalet for chicken at 8:30 at night.

Power Hogs

The electricity bill that Chris opened up yesterday evening was quite a surprise - it was about $40 higher than the one that we received last month, and our meter reading had increased by about 600 kWh, which is the amount frequently used in the energy industry to represent the average monthly electricity consumption of an average household. How on earth did we use an extra household's worth of electricity? Was it the electrified eavestroughs that we plugged in when it snowed last month? Nah, that doesn't make sense. The home theatre sound system? We don't really use that much. The light that we leave on for our pet bird everyday while we're at work? Nah - it's one of those energy-efficient compact fluorescents from Ikea. What about running the furnace fan twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week? Well, that I don't know enough about ...

I couldn't find a concrete answer on the internet, but this article on selecting a new heating system and this article on furnace filters kind of alludes that household who prefer to run the fan constantly can spend $125 - $250 more on an annual basis than households who don't, unless they have an upgraded electronically commutated motor in their furnace. I'm pretty sure that technology wasn't around in 1969 when our furnace was installed. Just think of cars of that era and how much of a priority fuel-efficiency was then ...

Eraseable You

Over the past few months, I've been hearing whispers here and there about it. A small ad in a magazine ... an article in a newspaper ... but nary a television commercial in sight. What I'm talking about is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, the nifty cleaning product that Chris and stumbled upon in Safeway on Friday night. I had to buy a small package, of course - how could I resist? I tried it out yesterday on one of our new baseboards that had been marked with purple permanent marker. I dampened the magic eraser, and started rubbing, and before my very eyes, the purple began to get lighter, and lighter, until poof - it was gone. Pretty cool.

The Bake-a-Thon

This year at my office I'm participating in a cookie exchange. I recently found out that I'm going to have to bake about eight dozen cookies for it - we had a good turnout. Chris jokingly asked if I was going to make baker's dozens so that there would be extras left for him :) I am a little consoled that each batch of the recipe that I am going to use makes two dozen cookies - I figure that cuts the time that I had expected to have to spend in half!

It sounds like we get extra marks for presentation for the cookie exchange, and I'm thinking that this is a perfect excuse to buy some of those cute white chinese take-out boxes that I've been coveting. The more tradtional choice would be cellophane bags (Martha has cute ones with a snowflake print), which I might use anyway to hold the cookies in the boxes. I noticed that either Glad or Ziplock makes a special "holiday" edition of their reuseable plastic containers, so they're another option.

While trolling around on Martha's website, I couldn't help but notice that she's selling paper-quilling kits. I know that I have a good number of crafts already on the go, but I really like both the standard quilling kits and the floral one.

It's been a week since I talked about food!

Last night both Chris and I attended a sauce-making course over at the Cook*book Company. I'm not entirely sure, but this morning I feel like I learnt more about cooking pork tenderloin (sear both sides on the stove, and then transfer into a hot oven for about 12 - 20 minutes - apparently 450 degrees F in a conventional oven will do the trick) than I did about making sauces. Well, the thing is that I've already had instruction in making an emulsion (for example, bearnaise sauce) and I've made quite a few reductions, so the demos at the beginning of class were a bit of a review. I was hoping to watch a bechamel being made, but maybe I'll just have to experiment with that one on the side at home!

One food that we'd like to make more of is duck. The class that we took previous to this one was on French cuisine, and we were served lovely slices of duck breast with an apricot sauce - duck has such a wonderful distinct flavour! We might place an order for a couple of fresh duck breasts in a couple of weeks and try making it with the rosemary, juniper berry, and port sauce that we used on the pork tenderloin last night.

Haven't I Seen this Somewhere?

I have always thought that the most practical approach to Martha Stewart was to view her ideas as a starting point for creativity. I've rarely done a full-blown Martha thing, but there have been many occasions where I've seen an idea and said, "Hey, I want to do something like that!", and then made a sort of craft or recipe that is a hybrid of what Martha did and what I had the time, imagination, and supplies to. I never thought of this approach as anything marketable, but I guess that Sandra Lee did!

I read an article about her in a few-months-old issue of Gourmet yesterday. She's started a movement and a business with the label *Semi-Homemade*. From what I read, "semi-homemade" means cheating a little (ie. using a tetrapak of chicken stock instead of making your own for a soup, or buying plain curtains to embellish instead of sewing them completely from scratch), but then elevating the project at hand to something bigger and better. Haven't we all done this at one time or another? Even my grandmother would sneak a can of Cream of Mushroom into her delicious potato soup! Do we need a multimedia empire, though, to tell us that we're going something legitimate? Hmm ...

A Place for Everything

Chris and I were in the Co-op buying some odd groceries the other day, and lo and behold - I stumbled upon the highly sought-after Rubbermaid Wrap-and-Craft. I must say that I've wanted one ever since I caught the jaunty television advertisement for them last holiday season, and it's doing a mightly fine job at keeping my five rolls of wrapping paper tidy. I know that I didn't really need a Wrap-and-Craft - I could have stored my giftwrap in a closet or something. But it really is nice to feel more organized and know for certain where one's roll of scotch tape is!

Speaking of wrapping paper, Chris and I have made our annual pilgrimmage to Ikea to buy our holiday wrapping paper. I buy it there because it's pretty and they don't sell scanty rolls that will only wrap an average of 1.5 gifts, unlike most of the rolls I've bought elsewhere. It's a good thing :)

Address Unknown

So, on Saturday, Chris and I were on the verge of going out to run errands when he ran into our next-door neighbour on the east side. Neighbour mentioned that she'd had coffee or something with the elderly couple that we bought our house from, and they had asked if they'd had any mail. "There's been some mail for them," admitted Chris. "Did you forward it on?" asked Neighbour. "We weren't left a forwarding address, so we just scrawled "moved" across the mail and returned it to the post office!" Chris explained. Obviously not the answer that Neighbour was looking for, as she kind of snottily asked why we did that, and told Chris to put all further mail in her mailbox. Bah! If the elderly couple was so worried about their mail, why did they not take advantage of Canada Post's mail redirection service? Or leave a forwarding address? We obviously do not live in Mr. Roger's neighbourhood!

Off-topic, but what Chris told me is indeed true: Canada is going to get to see Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica after all ... I must make sure that we have popcorn ready!

For a Good Cause

I know that over on the left there's a note that my next project is supposed to be the Roman shade for our very bare dining room window, but I've been cheating! A little bit of holiday spirit hit me, and I've spent a few evenings making some of my tried-and-true marblized Christmas ornaments. I've given these as hostess gifts more than anything else, and now I've written them up on my projects page over here.