Friday, August 29, 2014

8 Things I Learned in August



8 Things I Learned in August

1) A frisbee is a mess-free (and stress-free) way for a little girl to learn to paint her own toenails.  It started out as laziness.  Alaine grabbed a bottle of  nail polish and I grabbed the closest thing I could reach without having to get up.  It turned out to be genius.




2) I learned to make a frittata.  I've never made a successful omelet in my life, but I don't need to learn now because this was better.  I made ours with potato and bacon, but I want to experiment with other add-ins.




3) In the movie Felicity: an American Girl Adventure (which was released in 2005), Felicity is played by a very young, Shailene Woodley, who now stars in Divergent and The Truth in Our Stars.


4) The American way to pronounce Vincent Van Gogh's name is incorrect.  Instead of saying it like "van go," it is pronounced  "van gokh"  with a  gutteral, back-of-the-throat, kind of yucky sound. 


5) I finally got around to starting my own batch of vanilla.  Brian and I put it together on a Saturday morning and I left the bottle on the counter the next day when we hosted a small family birthday party for Maddie and Owen.  It sparked a discussion on various varieties of alcohol so while the kids all played in the next room, the adults learned that vodka is made from potatoes, gin from juniper berries, rum from sugar cane, and whiskey from corn.




6) I learned more about the inner workings of an Apple iPod than I ever wanted to know...and all for naught. During a morning run, the volume up button stopped working on my iPod nano.  In all the fiddling and experimenting I did to try to get it working again, I ended up with the volume all the way down with no sound at all.  We don't have a local Apple store and no other shops in town will repair Apple products so Brian and I decided to do it ourselves. 

I followed an online tutorial which had me melting the glue from the face and prying it up with a knife to get to the mechanisms.  Then using the tiniest screwdriver imaginable, tweezers, and a set of needle nose pliers, Brian did a series tinkerings and repairs.  Hunched over the iPod for several hours, he ended up with a headache and a kink in his neck before realizing that the problem was not repairable.





7) I've been experimenting with small batch canning.  I started with dill pickles and moved on to peach jam and pear caramel sauce. In the process, I learned how to sterilize jars, what head space means, how to blanch peaches to remove the skin, and how to do a water bath to sterilize and seal the finished product.





8) After making a salad for a family party, I had about a cup of leftover kale so I decided to try my hand at a green smoothie. I used plain yogurt, milk, frozen bananas, peanut butter, and kale.  All seven of us had a sample, but only the youngest two and I were converts.



What have you learned this month?





8 comments:

  1. Try berries (I use frozen) in your green smoothie. It mAsks the spinach a little more.

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    1. The problem wasn't the taste. We truly could not taste the kale. The problem was the texture. You could feel (and see) the little green flecks. Any ideas?

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    2. Berries do help hide the color and green flecks. As far as texture, we found it's better if you blend the greens and liquid first before adding the other ingredients, but in the end you need a really good blender to get a green smoothies perfectly smooth. The texture doesn't bother us most of the time, but I still dream a little of having a VitaMix :)

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  2. I learned that same thing about the pronunciation of Van Gogh's name (although I can't for the life of me remember where I learned it), but I don't know if I can reform. :/

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    Replies
    1. I can't remember where I learned it either. Perhaps we learned from the same source. It would be a strange coincidence to both learn it the same month.

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  3. I love what you said about van Gogh :-) Thanks for the frisbee-idea.

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  4. Baby spinach is what I use it blends up much better
    My recipe is : half a carafe of greens ,one banana, a cup of frozen fruit ,and i fill the blender up half way with water but oj is even better
    Yours sounds delish !

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    Replies
    1. I'll have to try with orange juice. My kids love OJ and it's a treat because we rarely buy it. I do like the bit of tang that yogurt adds to the smoothies.

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