Homemaking Tuesday: Oranges

About a month ago we talked about oranges and using them in cleaning. I started infusing vinegar with orange peels, and I have been saving orange peels and drying them for making an orange scrub. This week we will we talk about the infused vinegar.

As a disclaimer, oranges are not in season right now. Soon you can get those small mandarin or satsumas for the holidays. Being pregnant, oranges have been one of the few things I will eat without feeling gross (oranges and spicy food... Go figure), so have been buy oranges from Costco they aren't too bad.

 

Orange Infused Vinegar

• Collect enough orange peels to fill up the jar of your choice.
• Cover the orange peels with distilled white vinegar. Close and shake the jar until the air bubbles come to the top and top off with vinegar. Do that a couple of times until you can't add anymore vinegar.
• Then let it sit for a month. You can shake it daily or let it just sit and look interesting.

After it has set for a while is when the real work happens.

• Strain the mixture using a mesh strainer. 

This is what it looked like after just the strainer. So I decided to filter it.

• Then filter the mixture. I just used two paper towel over the mesh strainer. (You could do these two steps together, I didn't, but you could) The filtering takes time, I was impatient and squeezed it through.

After filtering it, no more black particles.

Now to make the spray.

• Measure the amount of infused vinegar you have and the pour that into a spray bottle.
• Make a 2-1 ratio of distilled water to vinegar (I had 1 cup vinegar, so 2 cups distilled water)
• Shake, label and use.

Couple of Notes:
I read that some people had very orangey smelling liquid and not so vinegary. Mine smelled like pickled oranges... Once I mixed everything it hardly smells like vinegar. I also hardly noticed any fragrant orange smell while cleaning.

I am going to try a different version of this recipe, which is just letting it sit longer. Maybe that one will be more orangey.

Also another site said that after they let the spray sit for a while the vinegar smell started to come back. We will just have to see what happens here.

And, below are links to the sites I used to make my infused vinegar. If you want to try something different look there.

Sources:
http://cleaneatsinthezoo.com/index/2012/03/23/homemade-citrus-cleaner/
http://www.green-talk.com/2012/03/28/orange-peel-vinegar-cleaner-make-your-own-green-cleaner/
http://poppyjuice-poppy.blogspot.com/2012/03/vinegar-orange-peel-homemade-cleaning.html
http://www.vicariouslyvintage.com/2012/03/16/orange-oil-cleaner/
http://susangodfrey.com/orange-peel-vinegar/

Weekend recap and Questions

We had a great weekend. We went to our little niece's soccer game in the morning on Saturday. It was good, a little chilly but good.

Wonderful Man has started to clean up the garden and harvested an 18 inch long, 6 pound 6 ounce yellow zucchini. We thought it would be funny to put it in the crib we set up Friday night.

This weekend was also the semi-annual conference for our church. It was great, as always. It was streamed over the internet so we watch it from home and have a Waffle and Wisdom party between the two sessions.

We have been doing this for years! We invite some friends over for a waffle lunch, and then they can stay and watch the second session with us. It is fun, and we talk about what we learned and what we are looking forward to hearing about.

This year we had some friends over who are also photographers. We traded lunch and dinner for some halfway maternity pictures. They are pretty cute. I will share a couple after she is done editing them.

How was your weekends?

Time for some business, I have been asked if I can post to facebook when I do a post. Do you all like that? I go back and forth with it, but if you reader would like for me to do that daily I can work something out.

Next, I just wanted to point out at the VERY TOP under the title of the blog are some links. Blog- which is like a home button. About Engineering Homemaking- which is just a little about the background of this blog. And then the last two are Recipes and Frugal Cleaning. These links take you to a list of all the recipes for food or cleaning recipes. On those pages the recipes are linked to the original post. I hope that helps you when looking for something.

Also, I do read all the comments and greatly appreciate them. If you ever have something you would like to see, just let me know.

Finished Friday: The Stash

I have a HUGE stash of yarn. Honestly, TOO MUCH yarn. I have no clue what to do with it all. I also want to buy nice, wonderful, expensive yarn. But I do not have any more space to store more yarn.

So I have been knitting and crocheting to use it all up. Here are some of the more recent things I have finished.

 This is the horse/pony I made for one of the girls I nanny for her 4th Birthday. She LOVES IT.

I made these blocks for the baby. There were surprisingly easy and fast!

Lastly, this is the hat and socks I made for a friend for her adorable new little girl.

Thrifty Thursday: Meal Planning

Thrifty Thursday isn't just about thrift items, it is about being thrifty with your money. Meal planning is a GREAT way to save money, and one of the easiest things to do.

After my mother passed, my father and sister were at a lost as for what to for dinners. My youngest sister is 18 and had just graduated high school. Dad after 30 years of marriage, is now a bachelor again. About a month ago she asked me what to do for grocery shopping and for some recipes because she had no  idea what to make.

It got me thinking, that maybe not just the fresh out of the parents home people need some help with how to organize their dinners.

Some people when the meal plan the plan breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner for every day. I like to have a little wiggle room in the kitchen, so my meal planning is more like a meal guide.

1. Find a cookbook and flip through it for ideas.

This works great, because if I sit down with the purpose of planning our meals I draw a complete BLANK. The cookbooks help to get me thinking, and every so often we try something new.

2. Write down the dinners you want with ALL the ingredients.

This is probably the most important step. When I do our weekly meal calendar I do 5-6 meals, one night leftovers and one night Wonderful Man is completely in charge (usually date night). Writing down all the ingredients  helps you to make sure you have everything either in your kitchen or on you grocery list. There are a few things I 'skip' in this step: salt, EVO, pepper, and basic things I KNOW I have.

3. Make a grocery list.

From step two if it wasn't in the kitchen, it goes on the grocery list. That way it doesn't come to Tuesday, and you are missing cream for your pot pie or something important.

4. Grocery shop with a LIST.

Second most important step. With out a list you will wander the store and BUY MORE than you need, and stuff you can't make dinners with. So you just end up at the store more, spending more money.

5. Repeat.

Repeat weekly/bi-weekly/monthly/however often you want to shopping.

I think it is fairly simple, and question are always welcome!!

Focus Wednesday: Apples

With October comes the fall in full swing. Outside the trees are changing colors, harvest is almost done, and apples are at their peak!

There are a few things I look forward to with season changes, in spring it is Blood Oranges, in the summer it is the sun, in the winter it is snow, and in the fall I can not get enough APPLES!

Most of us eat apples year round, thanks to modern shipping and agriculture practices. I personally think apples taste better in the fall.

My love for apples wasn't something I always had. When I was little, in the south, the only apples we got were the Red Delicious variety.

YUCK!

They are so mealy and soft. I shutter thinking about eating them.

My absolute favorite apples, are Pink Lady's. 

Crunchy, slightly sour, and oh so delightful.

These also happen to be the most expensive type of apple, year round. I will settle for: Fuji or Honeycrisp.

However all apples were not created equally. So apple varieties are better for apples sauce, others for eating, and others for pie. Like the Granny Smith apple, sour to eat, but in a pie, YUM!

Most orchard's will help you find what apple you need for what you want to do with it. At our local orchard, Bishops' Orchard, we usually get McIntosh apples for apple sauce and Summerred, Liberty, Empire, and Spartan apples to eat. We also usually go multiple times each fall.

This year we are not canning any apple sauce, and so far only got a small harvest of Summerreds. I will be using some of them for a dessert tonight and for the levain I am restarting.

Borax, Safe or Toxic?

I decided to look into Borax because I started seeing things about how is it has “high” developmental and reproductive toxicity (source). I as I was doing my own research, I found that most people are confusing Borax with Boric Acid.

First off, these two substances ARE NOT THE SAME! It is almost like the difference between water and hydrogen peroxide.

There is this basic chemistry joke about the difference between water (H2O) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2).

Borax chemical formula is Na2B4O7•10H2O or Na2[B4O5(OH4)]•8H2O 

Boric Acid chemical formula is H3BO3 

Different? 

HUGE DIFFERENCE! 

Borax is a Salt. Boric Acid is an ACID.

Both are white crystalline solids, usually found in powder form, by the consumer.

Boric acid comes from the reaction of borax with an acid (reduction).

Chemically borax is safe compared to boric acid. But what about using it for cleaning? This is my main question.

According to the Environmental Working Group, they say get rid of it, it is not a ‘green cleaner’. But if you look at boric acid on their site, it gives the same rating of F to both. (Source: Borax, Source:  Boric Acid)

Most sites you look at with information about borax interchange borax with boric acid, AGAIN NOT THE SAME THING!!! So it is hard to decipher what is what.

Borax.com and 20mulelaundry.com (both manufactures of Borax) are very clear about the difference of the two. They also say that borax is something that should be kept out of reach of small hands. Which makes perfect sense; you want to keep most cleaning products out of small hands.

Greenfootsteps.com and Crunchybetty.com do the best to try and inform use about borax, but the decision to use borax for cleaning is up to you. I am not going to tell you to stop using anything, but for me I am going to keep using my Borax.

Other sources not linked:

Material Safety Data Sheet

Mother Nature Network

National Cotton Batting Institute

Wikipedia.org-Borax

Wikipedia.org-Boric Acid

October = Apples

It is October! In our house that means, APPLES, APPLES and APPLES!

Living in the Pacific Northwest it is hard to get away from apples. We aren't quiet lucky enough to have a crab apple tree in our yard, but we are lucky enough to have a WONDERFUL orchard just half an hour away.

This month I plan to make something with apples, at least every week. Today, I am restarting a levian I made last year, and forgot about which exploded in my refrigerator...

The recipe comes from William Alexander's 52 Loaves, a great read if you love bread, and love to make it too. Wonderful Man recommended the book after hearing about it on the Diane Rehm Show a couple years ago. After sitting in our local bookstore for a couple hours reading it, I decided I needed this book. We had wonderful artisan bread for a few months before the exploding levain... This year we hope to keep it going for a lot longer.

Some of the other things I plan on making this month include a couple fresh apple pies, an apple tart, apple cake, and an apple strudel. I know they are all desserts, and I might make apple pork chops, if I can find good pork chops.

For this week, I plan to have more than just a Monday and Tuesday post. Tuesday I will try to answer some questions about Borax, Wednesday will be able Apples, my focus this month. Thursday, we will take a moment to look at menu planning, and Friday, I have some fun knitting and crocheting projects I have finished lately.