Things Still To Do Before Easter

It feels like I have a million things to do before Easter gets here. So what am I going to do? Blog-whine about it Make a list, so I don't forget anything. That's the ticket.

Maybe then I can stop loosing my temper with GeekBaby as we try to play games and he deliberately breaks the rules, then smiles about it like it makes him smart.

Newsflash, my son. It doesn't make you smart. It makes you a smartass. And angering your tired, hormonal, fussed-out mother is foolish. Also, you can too put on your own *redacted* socks and boots.

Anyway, here's what's left.

1. Go to work Wednesday AND Thursday.
2. Clean the house. At least the downstairs. Guests shouldn't need to see my bathroom.
3. Ruthlessly clean my kitchen. Don't forget the microwave, me, it's filthy.
4. Get the Easter tub out of the attic.
5. Pour unbleached tea lights for Tenebrae.
6. Format Tenebrae texts into something readable.
7. Look up times for Triduum services.
8. Pour a new Paschal candle.
9. But first, make a new pillar candle mold for said candle.
10. And buy some more mold sealer.
11. Decorate said candle.
12. There will be six people for dinner. Gotta find a sixth chair.
13. …Next year it will be seven chairs. I didn't have seven chairs even before I busted one. *sob*
14. Plan out the three-day long Easter cooking schedule. No last minute additions to the menu this year!
15. Calculate my estimated egg and butter usage.
16. Go to the grocery store with GeekBaby.
17. Go to the grocery store without GeekBaby.
18. Fret over whether my lamb cake mold will arrive by Friday. FedEx says it will.
19. Make cross pennant, just in case my cake mold does arrive on time.
20. Measure capacity of lamb cake mold to determine amount of Italian Cream Cake to make.
21. Avoid going into labor.

I'm tired just typing it all. Wish me luck as I prepare to check off #16.

Update: Lots of these are little piddling tasks, or things that will occur in their due time. But listing them out made me feel lots better.

Housewifery: Sterilizing Silver

Well, I'm going to try my hand at doing a regular Saturday feature on running a household. Given the current state of my house I'm not notably qualified to write such a feature… but hey, there's more to domesticity than cleaning.

One of the things I brought back from my grandparent's house was my grandmother's silver. My little family is still using the extremely cheap set I picked up during college (twelve place settings for $20, so cheap I can bend the spoons) and no one else in the family wanted the trouble of cleaning and caring for silver. So I took it.

Trouble is, it was filthy. Not especially tarnished, but filthy. Abandoned in a slowly disintegrating, mildewed house fithy. Rodent droppings in the silver chest filthy. A few pieces, where the plate was marred, had some minor corrosion. But it was still an almost complete set of twelve place settings, most of it was in good condition, and it was worth saving… if I could just get it clean.

There's lots of information, bad and good, on polishing tarnished silver out there. But not much on thoroughly cleaning such dirty silver. You can't use bleach. You can't use ammonia. You can't submerge hollow pieces. You can't even use rubber gloves to protect your hands. Here's the method I eventually settled on:

1. First, I separated out the knives from from the forks and spoons. The knives have hollow handles with cemented blades, and shouldn't be submerged. Submerging them could let water inside the handles, which would cause the base metal beneath the silver plate to corrode.
2. Second, I washed everything with dish soap and hot water as hot as my hands would tolerate. The forks and spoons went on one towel to dry, the knives on another.
3. I filled my biggest pot and when the water was boiling, I gathered up the towel with the forks and spoons into a rough bundle and carefully lowered it into the hot water. I brought the pot back up to a boil, and boiled the forks and spoons for 5 minutes. The towel protected the silverware from too much banging around, and kept the silver from direct contact with the metal of the pot. When the five minutes were up, I lined my sink with another towel (in case any pieces came loose) and carefully drained the contents of the pot into the sink. When the silverware had cooled enough to handle, I set each piece to dry on a fresh towel.
4. The knives posed a special challenge, since they can't be submerged. On the other hand, they were also cleaner than the other pieces since they were stored on the inside of the silver chest's lid and out of the general mess. I lined the sink with a new clean towel, laid the knives on it, and scalded them with boiling water from the kettle several times before removing them to another clean towel to dry.
5. Next, I polished everything. I used Haggerty's Silver Foam, and I put higher preference on removing tarnish and any remaining corrosion over preserving the patina. This polish, applied with a damp cloth, foams up soapily to clean the silver and was wonderfully effective. I rinsed everything as directed, and the silverware looked, if not new, definitely clean.
6. Then I washed it one more time with hot, soapy water. Just for good measure.

Then I took everything out of my flatware drawer and thoroughly cleaned the drawer and dividers. Because it would be ridiculous to put my nice clean silver, after all that effort, into a dirty drawer.

If you have silver that's dirty, not just tarnished, this method worked very well to sterilize it for use. Nothing was damaged, and no one has taken ill from using it. And as a happy side effect, (since it needs handwashing) my preschooler has learned to dry it and put it away.

Spring Garden

In spite of the nasty pollen counts that make my eyes itch and my nose swell, I ventured out into the backyard yesterday to give my badly neglected garden some TLC. Between last summer’s drought and last autumn’s miscarriage, I just didn’t do any of the things I’d planned out. The general apathy has now mostly worn off, and I was able to approach our weird little yard with something like interest. Too late to put in blackberries this year. But I got out there and weeded and clawed up the soil around the surviving plants and generally worked myself till I was a little wobbly in the knees.

My mongrel irises are getting ready to bloom. I don’t think they’ll make it to Easter. Oh well. One year, the irises and Easter will coincide. Then again, my irises bloom purple, so maybe it’s more appropriate for them to bloom during Lent?

My Texas honeysuckle didn’t die during last summer’s drought! It didn’t die when a mound of fire ants moved in over it’s roots! It is, incredibly, blooming.

The other honeysuckle isn’t thriving quite as vigorously, and it hasn’t put out buds yet, but it’s still doing quite well. It was a little smaller, and was hit harder by the drought. We’re going to mount trellises to the fence this spring for them to climb, and maybe next year we’ll be able to rig some sort of arch between the two to make a full arbor.

Flour Tortillas

 So… flour tortillas.  I use this recipe from Joe Pastry’s blog, and the first time I made it, Himself informed me that I had outmexicaned his mother.  (Sorry, Momil.)  So they’re pretty darn good flour tortillas.  Better than anything the local grocery stores put out, even if they make them fresh in the store.  They’re the next best thing to a real tortilleria.

They’re also a pretty easy 30-45 minutes clean counter to clean counter, especially with a stand mixer.  So I can whip them out essentially stress free on a Sunday evening for breakfast the next morning.

I highly recommend using a big wooden pastry board and a light wooden rolling pin to roll these out with, because these guys take significant flouring to roll out nice and thin.  I probably go through an addition cup of flour just for rolling.

So there you go.  Just in case anyone needs a good tortilla recipe.

Irish Oatmeal

Tuesdays and Fridays are Irish oatmeal, the easiest and cheapest breakfast to make, but also the least filling. GeekBaby especially likes oatmeal, but I have to make it on days when I’m at home. If he totes a little bowl of it to his MoMo’s, he won’t eat it, but at home, he’ll eat a full cooked cup… more if he’s in the middle of a growth spurt.

Irish oatmeal is really just steel cut oats, and there are usually steel cut oats in the bulk bins of the grocery store for very cheap, like $1.50 a pound. They are currently very trendy and so the bin is sometimes empty, which is why I try to buy more before we’re officially out.  But because they will go rancid when they get old, I don’t buy more than we can use in a month or so, and I store them in the refrigerator.

Steel cut oats have the least processing of all the various oatmeals, the oat groat is hulled, toasted, and coarsely chopped. There’s no nutritional advantage over more finely chopped oats (Scottish oatmeal), or even your standard rolled oats. But I prefer the chewier texture of Irish, and the larger pieces are especially suited to my easy cooking method.

Put 1 cup of oats with a scant 5 cups of water in a crockpot (this amount will just fit in one of the small 1.5 quart crockpot). Cover and turn on to low. Go to bed. Sleep 6-8 hours. Wake up and eat perfectly cooked oatmeal.

See? Easiest thing in the world to cook for breakfast. We have a dedicated crock pot just for oatmeal, although we no longer make oatmeal every day. Using an extra scant cup of water prevents a sticky crust from forming on the top and sides. When the crock has cooked off, fill it with soapy water and soak it while you’re at work, and in the evening it should clean up very easily.

Per cup of cooked oatmeal:

• 150 calories
• 25 calories from fat
• 2.5g total fat
• 0.5g saturated fat
• 4g protein
• 0mg sodium
• 3g dietary fiber (1g soluble, 2g insoluble)

Himself adds flax seed to his, for the extra omega fatty acids. I add cream to mine, because I hate oatmeal, and it helps me stay full a little longer.