Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things

From the Readers Digest Web Site

Extraordinary Uses for Ordinary Things

Clean messes. Repair problems. Save money and time. 2,317 uses for common household products — all over your house. These household items have an amazing number of uses.

A - Adhesive tape to Aspirin
B - Baby Oil to Buttons
C - Candles to Curtain Rings
D - Dental floss to Dustpans
E - Earrings to Epsom salts
F - Fabric softener to Funnels
G - Garden hoses to Golf gear
H - Hair conditioner to Hydrogen peroxide
I - Ice cream scoop to Ice scrapers
J - Jar lids to Jars
K - Ketchup to Kool-aid

L - Ladders to Lip balm
M - Magazines to Mustard
N - Nail polish to Newspaper
O - Oatmeal to Oven mitts
P - Paint brushes to Pots and pans
R - Return address labels to Rubbing alcohol
S - Salt to Sugar
T - Talcum powder to Twist ties
U - Umbrellas
V - Vanilla extract to Vodka
W - Wallpaper to Window cleaner
Y - Yogurt
Z - Zippers to Zucchini
Browse Super Items: These household items have an amazing number of uses.

Found this on Bring Back Simplicity, one of the email groups at Yahoo, that I belong to,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bringbacksimplicity/.

Independance Days Challenge, week 2

1. Plant something - Nothing this time.
2. Harvest something – Tomatoes, Cucumbers, Green Peppers, Green Beans, Basil
3. Preserve something - Canned 2 batches of diced tomatoes, dried 4 batches of basil
4. Reduce waste – Accidentally ate the wrapper on a cupcake. Does that count?
5. Preparation and Storage – Stocked up on toiletries and paper products, double bought 1/3 of my dry goods
6. Build Community Food Systems - Nothing this time.
7. Eat the Food – Pickles, tomatoes, cucumbers, BBQ pulled venison sandwiches with home grown potato fry's

Killing Zucchini

Am I the only one who can kill 8 zucchini plants. They lived a short promising life until they committed suicide. And what promise they had. Such tender looking baby zucchini’s peaking out under lush leaves. Then a few days later they were as dead as a doornail. Haven’t a clue as to what I did. I can grow cucumbers, green peppers, greenbeans,and tomatoes. Except the expensive heirloom tomato plants that I ordered from the seed catalog. their outside soaking up the sun with a few flowers and nothing else. They don’t seem to get any bigger, add more flowers or drop the ones they already have, I’m beginning to think the catalog company sent me silk tomato plants instead of real ones. Maybe I need to get my glasses checked so I can tell if they’re silk plants, wait a minute my granddaughter’s has excellent eyesight, I’ll ask her to check.

Free Online Class

I spent the evening with the FoodSaver®, vacuuming up bags of dried rice, pinto beans and mashed potato’s for the pantry. I picked basil leaves from my garden and have the 1st batch in the dehydrator and now I have to can some relish and some diced tomatoes from my garden. I was looking around the internet for a diced tomato canning recipe when I came across this free online course on preserving offered thru

the National Center for Home Food Preservation,

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/index.html##

I’m all signed up, I really need a brush up on the new canning techniques.

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Here’s the preview the first steps of the course.

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and the how to for signing up.
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Announcing a free, self-paced, online course

for those wanting to learn more about home canning and preservation.
Introduction to Food Preservation

1. General Canning
2. Canning Acid Foods
3. Canning Low-Acid Foods

This course is offered in the University of Georgia WebCT system.

UGA requires registration for you to receive a login.

I made this bread

I still can’t believe it. I’ve made bread the old fashioned way, and have a bread machine and use it often in the fall and winter. But I never thought I’d find a way to make bread as simple as, drop in all the ingredients, mix with a spoon, dump it in a large plastic container, then let it sit for a couple of hours, put it in the frig, and when the mood strikes me, scoop out a piece of dough about the size of a grapefruit and sprinkle it with flour then pop it in the oven and tadah you've got bread.
I saw the author, Jeff Hertzberg, on a morning show demonstrating his recipe from his book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and I couldn’t believe it was this simple.

I did some searching on the web and found his website at http://www.artisanbreadinfive.com/. It still looked to easy so I searched some more and couldn’t believe all the positive comments I read about his bread. On top of that I found many websites and blogs that posted his recipe from his book, a blog I found listing the recipe even had a comment from Jeff Hertzberg in which he said this:

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jhertz10 said...
Wow Alexandra, beautiful loaves. Thanks for trying our method-- I'm Jeff Hertzberg, one of the co-authors of the book. Come visit us on the web at www.artisanbreadinfive.com, and you can post questions into any "Comments" field, or into the "Bread Questions" field on the left side of the homepage.

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I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t even to care if you posted the recipe out of his book on the web, hey, why buy the book then? Well after I baked his bread the first time I was on my way to the bookstore to buy the book and try our his other bread recipes. Since then I’ve baked more bread as loafs, artisan style and sticky cinnamon rolls, next it will be pizza and I can’t wait yum.
There’s a great tutorial with the recipe and lots of informative pictures at Alexandra's Kitchen blog, http://alexandracooks.blogspot.com/2008/06/artisan-bread-in-five-minutes-day.html

Who would have tunk it, Simple living this easy.