Some spring resolutions

Unlike most people, I like to start resolutions at random times throughout the year. With the upcoming arrival of spring (?--my thermometer says 36, but anyway) I made a list of goals to begin on March 21st and continue through the spring of 2014.

I read the book "The Happiness Project" by Gretchen Rubin last year and am in the middle of reading the sequel: "Happier at Home." I was struck by the goals she set for herself with the end goal of attaining happiness. I realize that a lot of things that will ultimately make me happy won't actually be all that fun during the process (organizing medical records) but will bring me a sense of peace which will equal happiness. 

So without further preamble, here are my goals for the upcoming spring to spring year: 

1. Be more up to date on current events. Last night at church, I realized how woefully behind the times I am on the topics that polarize our country. I can tell you the top five ways to calm a crying baby or the arguments for or against "Ferberizing" or "attachment parenting" but I honestly could not discuss foreign policy with as much knowledge. I always said I didn't want to be a mom that completely lost herself in her kids to the point where she had no outside interests. So, while politics doesn't really interest me all that much, I think I need to know enough to be able to carry on a conversation that doesn't revolve around the best place to buy/method to wash diapers. 

2. Shop my craft closet. I have a habit of buying all the materials for a project, starting, then either losing interest, finding a substitute at a garage sale for some ridiculous price like a quarter, or moving on to another more pressing project and forgetting to go back. I want to finish up all those projects in my closet like the twin size quilt that was supposed to be a Christmas present, then a birthday present. Maybe it will be a Christmas present this year. Other than fill-in-the-gap supplies, I want to challenge myself not to buy any new supplies until my birthday (which is approximately six months from now and an easy way to remember).

3. Read one fiction and one non-fiction book a month. I kind of have a head start on this as I have been doing it since January, so this should be easy for me to follow through.

4. Complete one major renovation project a month. Notice I did not say one ROOM a month. At a different time in our lives, this might be possible, but for now I would like to set a goal to just finish one big thing. Our goal is to be completely finished by the end of 2014. So, toward this end, I've already started this goal as well. Past "big projects" have included painting my kitchen, removing 12x15 feet of old tile from our guest bedroom, and fixing damaged drywall in the same room and painting the walls gray (see previous post about my $12.50 paint). 

There are more resolutions but I'll save those for another post. These are definitely the more interesting of my goals, while the others revolve more around budgeting and organizing.

The Appliances are Conspiring...

Sunday night our dryer stopped working. My washer and dryer seem to have an arrangement: only one of them is allowed to break at a time. However, the washer typically breaks when I'm down to three clean diapers and no back-up disposables. The dryer breaks when it's raining, snowing, or both. Yesterday being a somewhat nice day in late February (39 degrees and windy), I did the obvious and hung one load of clothes on the line. It took six hours, but hey, it was free and the job got done.

Today is also 39 degrees but pouring down rain with the threat of snow later in the day. While my youngest is decently attired thanks to yesterday, my oldest has no pants.

Never one to back away from a challenge, I scoffed at the concept of lugging my wet clothes to a laundromat and sitting there for an hour while they tumbled dry. Too complicated and too obvious. Instead, I went on Pinterest and found a tutorial on making a drying rack from an old baby gate.

Wait, thought I. We have an old 6 foot baby gate that has been gathering dust for the past three years! Problem was, it wouldn't stay extended vertically. Thankfully, with our house being in such disrepair, I'm always finding random aftermarket pieces of our house that don't seem to belong. There is one such giant hole in our ceiling with a railing around it. I hooked the lip of the baby gate into the rail and extended it to the floor.

I think I can fix our dryer with a $20 part and a screwdriver but in the meantime, it's good to have this completely free solution.

In case you were wondering, I dug into my oldest child's summer stuff and paired some things up with tights and jackets to get her through the next few days. And yes, I did wash more diapers just in case. Don't want to cut it too close again.

My top 5 gluten free products

While I'm a cheapskate who likes to make most things from scratch, there are certain products it's well worth the cost to keep in my pantry at all times. Here are the top 5 that I can't live without:

5. Trader Joe's granola. I think this is too sweet for breakfast cereal but it's great mixed into a little plain or vanilla yogurt.

4. Trader Joe's corn pasta. Okay, I admit I have a thing for Trader Joe's. At my store, spaghetti and penne are only pennies more per package than regular old wheat spaghetti. Plus, with a good sauce I can't tell the difference. The rice is okay but it gets slimy quickly if you get distracted, say by your 4 year old and 7 month old at dinner time. Not that that ever happens at my house.

3. Okay, one more Trader Joe's post then I'll call it quits. It's a tie between these:

 and these:

I know cookies aren't a necessity of life but these sure beat making your own or doing without and watching everyone else at a potluck gobbling delicious treats. What makes the snickerdoodles even better is they are free of the top 8 allergens. When we get together with a certain group of friends, we represent five different allergies between us. It's almost like planning a military campaign to make sure the wrong people don't end up with the wrong food. These are a no-brainer.

2. This one's a little strange. Most other products I like because I can't tell the difference between regular and gluten free. This just tastes unique. Sort of chewy, full of spices, it might not be everyone's cup of tea. It doesn't taste like pizza crust as most people know it. It's an original and doesn't try to be a sub-par copycat.

And finally...

1. Pamela's baking mix. I don't know if Pamela is a real person or a fictional character like Betty Crocker but she deserves the Nobel Prize. This obviously helps Sunday night pancake dinner make a comeback in our house but it also makes great biscuits and is a good flour mix to use for those recipes that call for something like two tablespoons of flour for thickening.

There you have the five products I'm willing to pay someone else to make for me.

All photos from amazon.com and ebay.com

Beyond the kitchen: renovating on a budget

My new year's resolution is to keep up with this blog. In keeping with that goal, I realized I have to expand my topics beyond gluten-free cooking. I'm going to post recipes/substitutions when I find a good one, but will also post topics on the general concept of frugality.

In addition to raising a 4 year old and a 5 month old (already!), I am also working with my husband on renovating a house we bought last summer. We moved in 16 months ago but I have been a little busy for...umm...the last 14 months to really do any contributions to this time-consuming project.

Our current office/guest room was apparently done in a Hawaiian motif, complete with orange and blue walls and rust colored outdoor carpet. Anyone who knows me can guess this isn't exactly my taste; also, part of the wall was damaged. We are going more with neutrals (gray walls, wood print vinyl floors), with the color coming in the form of yellow curtains to replace the broken closet doors. For the last two weeks, we have spent several evenings after the kids go to bed removing the old flooring and patching the holes and other wall damage.

Which brings me to the frugal aspect of my post: custom $12.50 paint. I have long been a fan of the mis-tint paint section at most hardware and home improvement stores. Often, though, quantity is limited, hence my oldest daughter has a two color room: half dark purple, half light purple. I really don't want to do the patchwork look on all my walls, though, so I have been scouring the clearance section for good neutrals. I found two slightly different shades of gray. They were the same sheen and were close enough that I thought they would mix well. I dumped both cans into a bucket, stirred really well with a paint stick, and poured them back into the cans. Ta da--two gallons of paint for $5 each, plus a $2.50 bucket=custom paint for less than a quarter of the cost. Besides the savings, it's just fun to mix paint!

If you give a mouse a rice flour cookie...

The other day, a good friend bought a mix and made me some chocolate chip cookies for small group Bible study. I love friends like that. :-) Anyway, after I went home, I was hungry for more chocolate chip cookies. Being a few days away from a grocery shopping trip to pick up a mix, however, I decided to look through my pantry and see what I could concoct.

The recipe on the back of the Ener-G potato starch flour sounded easy and I had all the ingredients. I ground up some rice flour (1 1/2 cups), dumped it into my wet ingredients, THEN read the instructions. Add 1 c potato flour and 1/2 c rice flour. Oops. For some reason I didn't question the fact that the recipe came on the back of the potato starch flour and yet didn't account for adding any of that particular ingredient.

Not being in a position ingredient-wise to triple the recipe, I decided just to go with it and give it a shot with 100% rice flour and no potato flour. I did, however, throw in some walnuts. I figured it might help the taste and if not, I was only out 25 cents worth of walnuts.

Here is the visual:

Apparently using the called-for ingredients is essential to them looking like cookies and not pancakes. They tasted decent, although a little gritty. Plus, they crumbled to dust when I tried to peel them off the foil, a situation I remedied by purchasing upon my next shopping trip a quart of vanilla ice cream and making my own wheat-free chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.

I'm looking forward to attempting these again with the right flour mix and hoping for more cookie-like results. I have been very pleased with the Ener-G brand (and the recipes printed on the back of the box are great too!)

My three-year old's vocabulary

Despite our absence of a television (we own them, but haven't gotten around to setting them up since our move six months ago) our three-year-old has managed to pick up enough about the popular characters to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about Dora, Thomas, etc. What amazes me, though, is her understanding of a gluten-free lifestyle. Whenever I turn down a particular food, she asks me "Is that because it has wheat in it?" or "Will it make your tummy hurt?"

The other day, we were discussing cornmeal and she said, "Oh, that's kind of like cornstarch!" There is nothing like carrying on a conversation about gluten-free grains with someone not yet old enough to go to school.

On another tangent: I have been craving fish sticks for the last few months, and discovered that crushed GF Rice Chex makes an excellent substitute for the breading. Being cooked in oil, I'm not entirely sure where this dinner option falls on the health scale, but if you, like me, miss eating a fish stick now and then, I'm glad to know that there is a decent tasting substitute for bread crumbs.

I'm back with further rice flour experimentation

So after a long absence related to morning/all day sickness, here I am at 13 1/2 weeks feeling much better and much more up to baking. I made some bread the other day using a recipe from Bette Hagman's book "More From the Gluten-Free Gourmet." I picked up this copy second hand from a thrift store, and it's the only one of this series that I own, but I'm seriously considering adding the rest of these books to my birthday wish list.

Anyway, my bread was delicious and I would highly recommend this recipe to anyone looking for a basic white bread without wheat flour. I think I prefer it to wheat bread, despite its taking 3 hours from start to finish and being a little more expensive than $1.19 a loaf. It's just wonderful to be able to eat an actual sandwich again.

Update on my rice flour experiment: apparently the tiny bit of moisture I had to add to my rice to enable my food processor to grind it was a bad idea. When I went to use it, I found out it had molded. So, undeterred, I did some more research and learned that a coffee grinder might be helpful in my endeavors. I asked for and received one for Christmas and so far, it has been amazing. It's a quick enough process that I can grind just enough flour at a time for my baking needs without having to store the rest.

Now that I have conquered rice flour (I hope!) I am wondering how best to go about making flour from beans...stay tuned!