Quick and Easy Dinner

I thought I'd share a recipe with you. I like this because it's so easy. It's somewhat healthy I guess, and the kids love it. I try to keep all the ingredients on hand for whenever I don't have time for cooking the usual dinner.

By the way, give yourself permission not to measure ingredients. Do you ever cook that way? If you aren't new at cooking, you know approximately what a tablespoon looks like. Just wing it. It saves time. If you don't get the proportions exactly right, it will still probably taste the same. And you'll have less measuring utensils to wash.

I hope you feel liberated now.

Easy Tuna Apple Dinner

1 apple, chopped up
1 pouch of tuna 6.4ish ounces
1 glob of mayonnaise
1 sprinkle of cumin
1 appropriate amount of sliced almonds
ritz crackers for everyone

Mix the first five ingredients and then put it on the crackers. Even a husband can make it if you set all the ingredients out for him. This makes enough for four of us, but our kids are small, and my husband doesn't eat as much as your husband.

Save money by cutting your family's hair.

I do not enjoy cutting hair. But I do enjoy saving money. I enjoy having a retirement fund, a savings account, and college funds for the kids. So one of the things I do is cut my family's hair. My boys' hair sticks straight up, and I don't want to put gel in it every day, mostly because I'm terrible at that, so I keep the kids' hair short. I cut it with clippers, so it's really easy. I bought some remington clippers seven years ago when I got married, and they are still functioning just fine.

If they got hair cuts every six weeks starting at age one and if it cost $10, which is a low estimate, then by my estimates, I've saved $1130 in the seven years I've been married by cutting my husband's and two boy's hair.  And I only spent about $20 on the clippers. One time a guard broke and I thought I would have to buy new clippers, but it turns out that you can buy guards at beauty supply stores.

Whew. Dodged a bullet.

But that hair gets everywhere. It makes me feel itchy. I don't like it.

One time I let David cut my hair. One time. I don't want to save money that much.

You don't need a pattern to sew.

First of all, patterns are very expensive. Second of all, I haven't always found the measurements to be accurate. So use your body and make your own pattern!

Start simple with a skirt. Figure out how wide you want the top by pinning it on your body, and how wide you want the bottom. If you aren't going to add a slit, it should be at least wide enough to let you walk comfortably. For me, that is two yards. My last skirt was not stretchy and I made it one and a half yards. I walk around taking itty bitty steps.  Use a yard stick to make a straight line between the top and bottom.

This is jersey knit cotton, which is stretchy and forgiving, so I didn't bother cutting two separate pieces for the skirt, and I didn't bother sewing the ends because they won't unravel.

When I held the fabric up to pin the size, I liked how the extra fabric flowed, so I decided to leave it there.

I added some elastic at the top.

I cut one of the drapey parts narrower than the other so you can see more drapeyness.

I added a pocket because I dislike being without my phone and my chapstick.

If you have some sewing under your belt, I hope you try making something without a pattern!

Colored stain

When you want to revamp your yard sale furniture, there is one more option that you might not have thought about.  Colored stain. I love that you can see the grain of the wood even though it looks like paint at first glance.

My husband did all the work on this Craigslist find. He had to sand the whole thing. Isn't he great?

Incidentally, this kind of long dresser makes a great changing table. I don't like the idea of having a piece of furniture that you can only use while your child is a baby, when you could use a dresser instead.

New handles help.

See all that beautiful wood grain?

I really like the idea of staining a wood floor an unconventional color. But I would have to be really committed to a color.


           
Aren't these beautiful?! 

Wood you do it? Charlotte Wood. No, actually, I wouldn't. I'm too scared.

Cappuccino mix recipe

I get about a hundred requests a day for my cappuccino mix recipe, so I thought I'd post it again.

I'm just kidding. No one asked.

If you want regular cappuccino mix, the cheapest route is to go to Sam's where you can get a giant Sam's-sized container for about $7.  But if I have caffeine after 12 p.m., it is literally still in my system 10 hours later and I can not sleep. And I mean "literally" in the correct use of the word, and not the blasphemous new definition, which I vow never to accept. So I want decaf cappuccino, and the only decaf at my store, is tiny jar for $2 or $3 with FAKE SUGAR which is unacceptable to me. Here's the recipe:

Cappuccino
1/3 C sugar
3/4 t vanilla
2/3 C sweetened flavored powdered creamer
2/3 C hot chocolate mix
2/3 C decaf instant coffee
1/2 t cinnamon

Mix the vanilla in the sugar and let it dry for an hour or so. Then mix everything else together.  Put two tablespoons of the mix in an eight ounce cup of hot water.

This recipe will fill a Great Value 24 oz. spaghetti jar. So be sure to keep some of those jars on hand. They're handy! If you want to use regular powdered creamer, increase the sugar to 1/2 cup. If you only have hot chocolate with marshmallows, just go with that. I did.

If you're feeling crafty, tie some twine on that sucker.

Dress it up with twine

I crocheted this dishcloth as a gift yesterday. It is a small thing, and it didn't take too long to make, but I wanted to dress it up a little.

So I folded it and tied it with twine and now it looks pretty cute! More gift-like.

I bet you've never had cappuccino with marshmallows.

I made this mix for decaf cappuccino today. I wanted to make sure that I would remember it was decaf without actually writing on it. So I cut a strip of green fabric, the color that always represents decaf, since I didn't seem to have any green ribbons. And I tied on some twine to keep it on. Now it looks less like an old spaghetti jar.

This is what I'm doing with my time instead of laundry, dishes, painting a mirror, sewing a skirt, taking in a shirt, fixing a strap and sewing a button. I think I'll go read a book now.

How to grow moss

Update: A lot of you are coming over from Pinterest. Welcome to my humble little blog! Be sure to check out the rest of my blog for more ideas on how to "save money" and "make stuff". If you like it, you can share my blog or subscribe. If you decide to plant any moss (or make anything else you find on my blog), I would love to hear about it! Leave me a comment, or send me a picture. It would make me feel so proud!

When I first wrote this blog, I had just planted the moss, and I didn't know how it was going to work out. That's why the link from Pinterest says "Two Ways to Grow Moss". If you read to the end, you'll see that it's really one way to actually grow moss, and two ways that don't work at all. On to the original blog:

My dad is building an outdoor model train set. It has a mountain with a waterfall that flows into a river, then into a pond. It's pretty cool. He put mulch in there, but I guess with the big, old trees that they have, it dropped leaves all over and they stuck to the mulch, so that wasn't working there. I've been dying to try planting moss, so that is what we will try to do.  Moss already grows well in their yard because it's shady and the soil is poor quality.

Have you seen this perfect picture of moss and thought it must be so easy to grow moss? Look at that perfect outline! It's so thick and lush! It kind of looks like they cut this out of the ground and glued it on to the bricks... I think I even see dirt stuck to the back... Suspicious.

Our first attempt to grow moss was about two months ago. We used a recipe that called for two cups buttermilk, two cups water and about a cup of moss. Blend it up, pour it out, grow moss.  Nothing happened. We also transplanted some moss. That is thriving nicely, but there isn't a lot of it. This is what it looked like before we got started on our second try.

I found a new recipe that is so disgusting and so smelly, that I feel something is bound to start growing.

1 cup flour
2 cups buttermilk
2 packages of active dry yeast (5 teaspoons)
2 tablespoons corn syrup
1 - 1 1/2 cups of dried and chopped/crumbled moss

Once you've done that, mix it all in a bucket, and leave the bucket outside in the sun for about three days (it's going to smell) After that, liberally brush a moist, shady place with the smelly mixture.

When you harvest your moss, you need to keep in mind that if you are trying to grow moss in dirt, harvest moss that is growing in dirt, and if you are trying to grow moss on rocks or concrete, harvest your moss from those places.

Yum!

Have you ever smelled buttermilk? It is so disgusting. And chunky. I can't imagine why anyone would put this in food. I used a blender, but I probably didn't need to. I should have just chopped up the moss and stirred it in the bucket. It would have been faster, since I used three quarts of buttermilk and the corresponding amount of the rest of the recipe. The dirt in the moss turns the mixture brown and it looks a bit like a chocolate milkshake.

But it does not smell like one.

This is a couple of hours in the bucket. It is bubbling away and luring many flies to a yeasty, buttermilky death.

This is what it looked like after 24 hours.

After 48 hours and a rainshower.

Here it is in the sun. I wonder if the neighbors will complain. I hope it's OK if it's rained on.

After 72 hours.

If I smelled the most wonderful food in the world, but I saw the corpses of those who had been eating the same food lying around, I don't care how good it looked, I wouldn't eat it. I guess flies don't feel the same way. I think we put a significant dent in the fly population.

Since my parents already have so much moss growing, and they're planning to plant grass in this spot, I can scrape up as much moss as I want in order to transplant it. I used a small shovel to scrape it up. But you might as well use a large shovel. Try to get the largest pieces possible. I dug up two bucketfuls.

See? They really do have a lot of moss in their yard.


This is where I dug up the moss. But if you want to keep your moss, you can spread out the places where you dig and it will grow back faster.


Then, just spread it out like so. Get it good and wet, but don't spray too hard with the hose. Keep watering it until it is well-established.

On the third day, I spread the buttermilk goo around the outside of the tracks and the bald spot near "Paris Mountain".

This goes on nice and thick, and smells a bit like beer.

If you have a lot of moss that you can dig up and transplant, I think that's the easiest way to go.

I will let you know in six to eight weeks if the goo method worked!

Update: Two weeks in, and the moss we transplanted looks like it has always been there. I don't see any sprouts yet from the yeast mixture, but it's quite early still.

Update #2: It has been two months since we spread the messy moss mix, and we haven't seen any new moss sprouting from it. There are a lot of different types of moss, though. So maybe it works with some kinds and it doesn't work with other kinds. I don't know what variety moss we have.  If you have tried this, or another method, will you let me know in the comments? Especially if you've had success.

The transplanted moss has taken root and looks great! I am very happy with that method.