Headband Holder

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and boy did we have a necessity here at our house.  On our main floor, we have a tiny half bathroom under the stairs.  It is the only bathroom on that floor, so is used for guests and family alike.  It came with a beautiful pedestal sink.  Pedestal sinks can be lovely, but there is zero storage.  If you have three little girls and zero storage, you are in for a world of hurt.  If you have three little girls with zero storage, AND a ton of hair AND about 5 billion hair accessories, you are in for a world of chaos!  One day I got a little portable plastic tower of drawers, which helped immensely!  Combs, brushes, and hair ties went in the top drawer, while fingernail polishes went in the second smaller drawer. We put all of our headbands and bows in one of the larger drawers.  Only trouble was, pulling a headband out on a busy school morning meant they would tangle together and the drawer could not close.  

The next person to grab a headband or bow would dig to the bottom and the whole mess would fall all over the floor.  We would come home from school and the bathroom looked like a complete disaster after our morning rush. It's hard standing at the sink trying to wash you hands, while trying traversing a sea of pokey headbands.   I had seen on Pinterest the idea of making a headband holder out of either an empty oatmeal box container, or a roll of paper towels.  Some of these things were crazily decorated, and a little on the gaudy side. Okay a LOT on the gaudy side.  Not only did I not want to gift wrap a roll of paper towels, I didn't want to eat 12,000 bowls of oatmeal just to empty my pretty full container of quick oats.  Suddenly.. it HIT me.  I knew EXACTLY what was a perfect head band size. Though it's original intention for use was no where near close to what I was going to use it for... but enter in the tubular toilet paper holder!!

I ran to the store and picked up one of these lovely stainless steel toilet paper storage towers for under $10.  It turns out this was the absolutely PERFECT size for headbands.  I immediately pull out by drawer of tangled headband-ness and went to work.  Look how beautiful it turned out!

A headband tower you can be proud of!

Well of course I put them in rainbow order!  Not only is it pretty, but functional.  The girls can quickly find the color that matches their outfit.  To top it all off, you can still use this thing for toilet paper storage if you want.  We actually put our flat iron and our curling iron in here to free up even more drawer space.  We also kept the brown and black headbands in the drawer (in case you were wondering about them), now that there was plenty of room.

Check out our headbands now!  It sits nicely on the back of our little stack of drawers looking all organized and easy to get to!  I so love this idea more than the other options that were out there. It's really given our tiny bathroom not only a pop of color, but solved one of our daily getting ready issues with organization!  Hooray.

Fold a Shirt in Two Seconds

So every once in a while you come across a time saving tip.  Then, on rarer occasions still, you find something so revolutionary you stop dead in your tracks and call people over to make sure what you are seeing is real.  So when I saw this link on Facebook the other day I was skeptical.  They claimed you could fold a shirt in under 2 seconds.  Say what?  I watched the friendly man demonstrate the technique on YouTube, then flabbergasted, I demanded my hubby go find the nearest t-shirt so we could try it ourselves.  Bing bang boom, a few mere seconds later we had not one, but two shirts folded using this simple technique.

You are gazing at 4 second shirts my friend...

How cool is that?  Soon we were running upstairs to the laundry pile to try this out some more.  By the way, I guess there are some minor limitations to this technique.  It only works for short sleeved and polo/collared shirts. Not too bad though, especially if you have a big pile of kid's summer shirts to fold and put away.  Even better, teach your kids to fold and put their own shirts away.  The nice thing about this technique is it's not just for the small fry. I can guarantee my hubby will be folding all of his graphic tees this way from now on.  So without further adieu, run and grab the closest short sleeve shirt (and someone to marvel at your awesomeness) and check out this video tutorial:



Enjoy and happy folding!

Great Way to Shred Chicken

Just wanted to pass along a neat little trick I learned the other day.  Many recipes call for shredded chicken: enchiladas, tacos, pulled BBQ, soups, and casseroles.  Though I love all these recipes, my least favorite part is boiling the chicken and shredding it with two forks.  I was surfing the interwebs (as I like to call them) when I came across a way I had not thought of and I wanted to try it.  Did you know you can shred chicken in your KitchenAid stand mixer?

It's sitting there right on my counter, why had this not crossed my mind before? Genius

Why yes, yes you can!  I just proved it 2 days ago.  First boil some chicken in a big pot.  I start with Costco chicken breasts (still frozen) which are just enormous (those must be some big busted chickens down at the Dolly Parton ranch).  I put 4 -6 breasts in the pot of water and let it come to a boil for about 20-30 minutes.  While still warm I take them out of the water and placed them on a cutting board.  Now I guess most people would just toss the breasts whole right into the mixer, which you can do, but I wanted to get off all the fat clumps and get rid of some of the main veins and "undesirables", so I chopped them into big chunks of just pure chicken meat.  Plus I wasn't sure this was going to work so I wanted smaller pieces in there the first time around.

The key to this is making sure the chicken is still very warm, to make it easier on your mixer.  Cold or refrigerated chicken will not work as well.  I locked down my mixer and decided to go slow, at the lower setting and kind of pulsed it, to make sure chicken wasn't going to explode all over the kitchen.

After a few pulses I realized it was going to work, and increased the speed a little bit.

Shredded chicken in the KitchenAid mixer... hey that worked pretty good!

After a very short amount of time, I had beautiful shredded chicken!

It was a bit finer than if I had done it by hand.  More like what a professional restaurant might use.   Now it is ready to use in whatever recipe you want!  I happened to use this in my chicken enchilada recipe, which I will post about very soon.  Thanks and enjoy!

Cutting Apples - The Easy Way

I was cutting away at an apple the other day when my friend stopped me mid slice and said, "why are you cutting them like that"?  I didn't realize I was doing anything out of the ordinary but it turns out she had never seen an apple cut that way, and she really liked it.  So, now wondering if I was the only one who slices apples like this, or if she alone had been blissfully unaware, but just in case you haven't tried this, I thought I would pass it on.

I know you've all seen Martha Stewart, with her little pairing knife cutting the peel off an apple in one perfect long thin strand, then lovingly slicing the apple in half, trimming away the seeds with a little "V" shaped wedges, blah blah chorus.  Ok so I don't have that kind of time.  I've got kids who want apples NOW and they don't want that yukky peel either.  Or sometimes I'm making a big ol' apple crisp in a family sized pan and it's going to take all day to slice up all those apples.  Here's a time saving tip:

First, peel the apple with a vegetable peeler.  It's quick, it's easy, it's just like a potato.  Take off the stem to get as close the the top edge as you can.  Once the whole peel is off, stand the apple up right and place the knife slightly to the right of the stem, and make your first cut

Next, lay the apple down the the flat side you just created, and slice again (narrowly avoiding the stem area)

Next, keep flipping the apple down on the flat side you just created

and... one last side

All that remains behind are these wacky, but fun square cores.  If you need a fun activity for the kids using these cores, check out our amazingly unexpected apple art here.

Now you have a perfectly flat, SEEDLESS surface to make even slices from

It makes quick work for the rest of the sides

Next, toss the slices in a bowl of cold water to wait while you finish cutting up the other apples (this will help them from turning brown too fast) and without having to use lemon juice.  

Look at these lovely even apple slices!

When ready to use, drain off the water and start your baking engines.  I'm thinking of making a crisp with these, so I will post that very recipe soon.

Hard Boiled Eggs - in the OVEN?

First there was bacon, now it is EGGS.  There has been many a pinterest post talking about baking eggs to cook them instead of boiling them in water.  I was extremely hesitant at first, but thought OK, if Alton Brown, cooking science mastermind approves of them then I shall try it for myself.  Not to mention, I really needed to cook a large number of eggs and doing them all in the oven might save me some time!

So throwing caution to the wind and with great abandon (ok, with gentle abandon) I put the eggs directly on the oven rack...

It felt very wrong to put these eggs right on the oven rack

This was sort of a leap of faith, since this was every single egg I was going to dye with the kids later, so if it didn't work out, I was going to have to run to the store for more eggs (talk about putting all your eggs "in one basket" so to speak).  

Next you set the oven to 325º for 30 minutes (place a cookie sheet underneath them in case one of them cracks or explodes) - then walk away!  That's right. No watching if it boils over, nothing. Nada.  Do your nails, do a load of laundry, play a couple songs on guitar hero and voila, thirty minutes later you have hard "boiled" eggs.  Shortly after you get them out of the oven, you are to put them in a large bowl filled with ice water.  I thought for SURE the drastic temperature drop would crack or destroy them but alas, I was incorrect.  They were fine.  Not one of them cracked actually.  Also they had little brown specks on them coming out of the oven, but they all washed off in the ice water bath.  After they cooled I put them in the fridge over night but was dying to know if they worked or not.  So in the morning, I cracked into one.  My method is tapping it all over with a spoon and running it under cold water, the shell came right off, so that was a good sign!

Here is my perfectly peeled hard "boiled" aka oven cooked egg.  The "believers" in this method claim four things:  

1.  It eliminates the dark ring around the yolk that is caused by boiling
2.  It makes a creamier tastier egg
3.  It cuts down on the sulfur flavor and smell
4.  It allow for many eggs to be cooked at once

So I was nervous to cut it open... but here goes nothin'.

Well as you can see there is a tiny bit of darker color around the edge, not too bad.  I guess I can attest for #4 on the list (saving time) but the jury is still out on me for numbers one through three.  Still had a slight dark ring (and I used fresh eggs), as far as extra creamy, I really could tell no difference.  It was good of course, just not oozing creaminess.  Also the eliminating the sulfur smell, these were just as stinky as regular eggs.  When the fridge door is opened, you can get a whiff of them, and when I cut one open to make an egg salad sandwich my 4 year old said, mommy, something is rotten (ha).  So all in all I'd say this was a great experiment.  Does it live up to all the hype?  Not sure.  Does it save time and allow you do cook tons of eggs at once with an almost "set it and forget it" mentality?  YES.

Don't cry for me Onion-tina...

OK, so you might want to brace yourself.  I'm going to give you a nice little cooking tip that is possibly going to rock your entire world as you know it (that is, if you have not already heard of it).  I discovered a little short cut in my day to day cooking that has turned into a real time saver, and even more importantly, an eye, nose and stinky house saver.  

It seems to me that most recipes start with a bit of butter, some minced garlic, and... wait for it... chopped onions.  Onions give great flavor to everything.  Chopped, diced, sauteed, fried, simmered, stewed.  I even like them "bloomin".  They are the "Baking Soda" of the vegetable world.  Only down side to these little babies are the eye watering fumes (nerdy term here would be propanethiol S-oxide) that waft up from your chopping board and scorch your retinas .  I've tried a bunch of online tips and techniques to get ride of those pesky vapors.  Opened windows, burned a candle close by, and even donned on sunglasses at night to avoid tearing up.  Recently I have found a way to now end all that... so without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my little friend:  Frozen chopped onions.

A little bit of lazy mom heaven right there in your grocers freezer aisle

I picked up a couple of these babies and keep them at the ready in the nearby freezer.  One 12 oz bag is usually good for two different meals, so if you do the math, that puts them at the SAME price as a regular onion you would have to chop yourself.  These are great for soups, stews, sauces, ground meat, stir-fry, anywhere you would put fresh chopped onions.  Just dump them in frozen (I like to smack the sealed bag around on the counter -  to break up the onions AND release any pent up aggression at the same time) then dump into your waiting pan.  I must say they are exceedingly handy in the morning if you are throwing a recipe in the crock pot.  There is just something about the smell of meat or onions at the crack of dawn that turns my stomach a bit.  It is so NICE to just measure what you need and go on about your day.  In case any of you are wondering, I have not turned my back on regular onions.  I use them just as much as these newfangled ones.  But I AM enjoying the option of using these whenever the mood strikes, so I try to keep a few bags lurking in the freezer for just the right time.  It seems lately when I use them, I feel like shouting from the rooftops Look MA... no TEARS!!  Hallelujah.