Beautiful, easy DIY recycled present

Recyclers, this gift is for you. I put together a soap dispenser out of entirely upcycled materials, and I swear, it could not be easier.

I'd saved several former spaghetti sauce jars from this past week's pasta party, because it broke my heart to get rid of that much glass. I feel like I spend plenty of money on vases and vessels of all sorts, so to waste glass jars, especially cute ones with "MASON" written across them, felt absurd. And since I had three of them, I figured I'd turn them into a set of candles, or something along those lines.

No need to start melting the wax, kids. This job is much, much easier than that. I got a little inspiration from The Blissfully Content Life, where Julia used actual mason jars. Just as I used what I had on hand, you should do the same. If you've got any glass jar that has a lid, this project will work. The more unique the jar, the better.

Once I had cleaned out the jars, I scoured my house for products that were almost gone that had pump tops. Lotions, soaps, whatever. This purple one is from a face wash.

Next, I sized up the widest part of the pump with my drill bits, picked one that was snug, and drilled a hole in the top of the lid. Once and done was all it took. And because it's a very good fit, I didn't have to worry about securing the pump to the top. That sucker is not moving. But if you are concerned, you certainly could use a little hot glue to hold things in place.

The before shot

Then, I pulled out a can of spray paint (the color is the cult favorite: oil rubbed bronze), and unified the look. About 20 minutes later, it was ready to be filled and used.

Obviously, you could put whatever you want in there--body wash, lotion, cleaning supplies. Top it off with a cute little ribbon, and you've got a fantastic homemade present--one that you won't feel guilty giving or receiving.

The after shot! Ta da!

And for a little perspective, here's something similar that you can purchase for $14.99. Did I mention that mine was free?!

The dog days of November

The family and I went hiking over the holiday weekend, which was the perfect time for an impromptu photo session. Here are some of my favorites:

He looks like a sweet old gentleman here, but he's still very much a pup. Love that face!

Holiday cards

Yep, I'm working on holiday cards already... Cuz that's what happens after Thanksgiving, right? Right?

Thanksgiving prep

I'm gearing up for Thanksgiving, as I'm sure you are. In our house, it's a little different than turkey and stuffing. We're going to the pre-hub's family's for actual Thanksgiving night. But we've got to show my fam a little love, too. So they're all coming to our house tonight for an Italian feast. We're having lasagna, meatballs, fish (hopefully, if all works out), salad, and enough veggies to blow your mind.

And with all of that in mind, I've really got to get to the grocery store. It's 10 a.m. already, and I haven't gotten anything but the wine and beer. Clearly I've got my priorities right, but a lot of work ahead of me. I'll update you with pics and recipes soon!

Enjoy your own holiday, however you celebrate it!

Free printable gift tags

I have a little present for you! I made up some gift tags for the holiday season and I figured I'd share.

These are meant to be printed out on 4x6 cardstock, and then cut out. You'll get two tags per print, one for your home cooked gifts, the other for your homemade ones. All you have to do is drag it to your desktop, and then size your printer for 4x6 paper. (It's a drop down menu from the print screen.)

Leave a comment if you have any trouble, and I'll talk you through it.

Out of sheer curiosity, I'm wondering when ya'll start the wrapping process. I stash my presents away, and sit down to wrap them a couple days before I need them. That is, with one exception. The pre-hubs' gift gets wrapped the second it comes home. He accidentally saw his birthday present this year the day before he was supposed to. It kinda killed the surprise, as you can imagine.

View this question on Skinnyscoop

Let me know, and I'll keep it in mind for my posts throughout the holidays.

Happy wrapping!

Decorating the guest bathroom

With the holidays quickly approaching, I needed a quick project to spruce up the guest bathroom. I didn't want something that screamed "Thanksgiving!" or even one that whispered a season. I wanted something that would greet guests, but would work all year long.

I thought about it for a while and came up with a little spray paint reno. First, I rummaged around for some old pots and found these, which clearly haven't been used since before the change of millenium.

Then, I pulled out my trust spray paint collection, and decided on Oil Rubbed Bronze--a deep bronze with little copper flecks. Then I got to spraying.

And spraying.

And spraying.

These guys devoured the paint, thanks to being made with ultra absorbent terra cotta clay. Since it's a small project, and I truly do have three cans of ORB hanging out, I didn't seal the pots first, but you certainly could do that to cut down on absorption. And it's not a bad idea since you'll use the sealant again to finish the project off. (It prevents flaking and water damage.)

After it was all dry, I plopped in some moss and candles.

TA-DA!

I think I'll pick up some rocks or pebbles or something to get a really polished look, but I'm not sure what color I want. I'll fill you in once I decide.

Rosemary Parmesan cookies

Tonight I'm off to a little wine and cheese party with a bunch of my girlfriends. That means it's time to troll my cheese-filled recipes. Not sure what I'll bring along tonight, but last month I made these cookies:

Yes, those are mittens. Yes, I served them in October. Whaddya gonna do?

Say it with me: Delish! Buttery, smooth and just a little sweet. They're perfect for noshing on during a cocktail hour or anytime you want something that's both savory and sweet.

Rosemary, almond and Parmesan cookies, adapted from Food and Wine

Ingredients:
1/2 c slivered almonds
3 T sugar
2 sticks of butter
2 T chopped rosemary
2 c flour
2 egg yolks
1/3 c Parmesan
1/2 t salt

Directions:
Toast almonds at 350F for 10 minutes. In a bowl, rub the sugar and rosemary until moist. In food processor, combine sugar, almonds, cheese, salt and flour. Add butter and pulse. Add yolk and pulse. Knead until combined. Roll flat and freeze for at least an hour. This will make stamping the cookies with cutters much easier. Once cut, bake for 20 minutes in 350 F oven. Let cool and serve.

Tuesday tip day: Thanksgiving, part one

Now all you need is the turkey. Really, these are the two most crucial items when it comes to Thanksgiving.

For the next two weeks, I'm spilling all the best Thanksgiving tips. It'll help make your holiday easier, and hopefully make sense of why you do what you do.

Brining: Think back to your  10th grade biology class. Do you remember studying membranes, and how water could move through them? No. Of course you don't. Just know that water and solutes (that's sugar, spice and everything nice) have an interesting relationship with membranes (in this example, it's what separates the turkey meat from the big, bad world). Basically, you want moisture and salt to get inside of the meat to fight off drying out when it's time to cook. To do that, just soak a thawed turkey in a brine for at least six hours. You'll want the brining solution to stay around 40 degrees, so that you don't have a huge bloom of bacteria on your bird, so make sure to pick up some ice, too. As far as what to put in the brine, simply dissolve 1 cup of salt into 2 gallons of cold water. Let it all sit over night, and you'll be good to go for roasting in the morning.

Stuffing: Don't cook it in the bird. You'll end up with dry meat. Top it with a little bit of the juices at the end, and you'll be set.

Crispy skin: It's not easy getting a balance of moist meat and crispy skin. Brining helps. Packing softened butter under loose skin does, too. Using a roasting rack inside the roasting pan makes a big difference. And starting high and moving low (in temperature) also goes a long way. Start off at 425 F for about half an hour, and then move to 325 F to finish things off.

Doneness: The turkey is finished when an instant read thermometer gives you 160 degrees in the thickest part of the breast, and 175 degrees in the thickest part of the thigh. If you don't trust your thermometer, test it by sticking it in some boiling water. It should read 212 F--water's boiling point.

For how-to's across the blogosphere, click here.

Cooking around the world: A new cookbook, a new vegetarian recipe

When I was in college, I spent a summer studying in Japan. While I was there, a Japanese man asked me about my favorite American foods. When I stopped and thought about it, I found that all of my favorite foods were from other places--Greece, Italy, France. The best truly American food I could come up with, and it is pretty good, was grilled corn on the cob.

With some time, I learned that my response wasn't such a bad thing. It means that I eat and cook much more than just the traditional standbys. I'm willing to try something new anytime hunger strikes, and I'm willing to look around the world for inspiration.

Because of that, I can appreciate the latest cookbook I received to review. It's "The I Love Trader Joe's Around the World Cookbook" by Cherie Mercer Twohy. The concept is that Trader Joe's has foods from all over the globe, and it's fun to try something that might be a little foreign in your house. She offers up dishes like potsticker soup, Moroccan sweet potato stew, salsa verde shrimp cocktail and yogurt-slathered grilled lab--just to name a very few.

The one that caught my eye was the stuffed bell peppers from Eastern Europe. (Actually, I kinda swooned over everything in this section, including the green beans with pears and bacon, and the beets with orange. Yum.) Twohy calls the bell pepper recipe a template, and I agreed, and added a few things that the pre-hubs and I love. Here's how it went down, with my adaptations in italics:

Stuffed Bell Peppers
3 medium bell peppers
salt and pepper
1 16-ounce bag of frozen Quinoa Duo (I used leftover Spanish rice.)
1 c chicken broth
1 c shredded cheese
1 package ground tofu
1 c halved cherry tomatoes
1/4 c frozen corn 


Preheat the oven to 350 F. Cut the peppers in half from stem to bottom and scrape out the seeds and membranes. I left the peppers whole, cuz that's the way my Dad used to make it. Place peppers in an oven proof dish in a single layer. Season with salt and pepper.

Since I added a few extras, I'm going to depart from the recipe a little here. Next, I heated up the ground tofu, and broke it up as much as possible. I tossed in the Spanish rice and veggies. Once they were thoroughly mixed, I filled the peppers, and topped with cheese.

Drizzle a little broth over the pepper, and pour the rest into the bottom of the pan. Cover with foil and bake until tender, 30 to 40 minutes. Remove the foil and bake another 10 minutes.

This was a ridiculously big hit in my house. We like to keep things veggie-based for the most part, and this definitely qualifies. I think I counted five servings of fruits and veggies in this meal alone. And the best part is that it's delish and makes a real presence on the plate.

Thanksgiving checklist

Thanksgiving is two short weeks away. If you're hosting the big day, the panic might be slowly settling in right about now.

I'm not hosting turkey day itself, but I am having the family over for Thanksgiving Eve's festivities. And yes, I'm starting to get a little anxious about it. So that means I had to get organized. I put together a list of everything that needs to be done.

You can use mine, if it'll make your life easier. You can download the Thanksgiving checklist here.

Tuesday tip day: Perfect trim

Last week's big project was painting the bedroom. The finished result sends my heart aflutter. I really, really, really love the color. It makes the walls seem taller, the floor more colorful, and the trim even brighter. And that brings me to today's tip--perfect trim.

There's a foolproof way to getting clean lines when you paint. And yes, I'm sorry, it does include tape.

The first step is to tape out the molding, ceiling, doors, windows and whatever other architectural features you have. It takes a while. Just do it.

Next, take the trim color, and run it along the length of the tape. It seems counterintuitive to paint a color you don't want, but think about it for a second. Some paint is going to wiggle its way past the tape. It may as well be the color of the trim, right? And as it dries, it'll seal off the tape so that nothing else can get in.

Be sure to let it dry, or else you'll have some funny swirls in your paint. And while that could be interesting say on the set of The Clockwork Orange, it's probably not what you have in mind for the formal living room.

Once you've done all that, you can go wild with your paint color of choice.

Then, just peel the tape away and enjoy your perfect trim!

You can check out this post, and other paint-related projects here.

Food and science? Yes, please!

On Saturday, the pre-hubs and I got scientific about our food. We stopped by the Franklin Institute (an interactive museum dedicated to the sciences) where there was a free food demonstration called Kitchen Science. It was all about the hows and whys of food.

The most jaw-dropping was the demo on how to make ice cream with liquid nitrogen. It was more or less half and half, flavored coffee creamer, egg, salt, sugar and liquid nitrogen. A pretty easy recipe, except for that pesky last ingredient. (You need a license to use the stuff.) The end result was some of the smoothest ice cream I've ever had--apparently because the nitrogen is so cold that it freezes the other ingredients so quickly that ice crystals can't form.

Impressive, huh?

Recognize anyone in the background?

We also checked out some experiments that happen in the more every-day kitchen. There was a demo on lactic acid as a preservative in foods like yogurt and miso. There was also an apple press that kids used to make apple cider. And get this: The cider, which was delish, had not a single mulling spice in it. It was nothing but pressed apples.

The other demonstration that blew my mind was about sugar contents. We had to match up different packaged foods with graduated cylinders that displayed their sugar contents. On the lowest end was a cylinder with 18 grams of sugar. The highest? Seventy seven grams of sugar. The foods you had to match included a 16-ounce can of Red Bull, a bag of Famous Amos chocolate chip cookies, dried cranberries, a Hershey's bar, 16 ounces of chocolate milk, a 16-ounce green tea, a 20-ounce Pepsi, and a 20-ounce Mountain Dew.

Go ahead and try to guess those in the right order.



G'head.



I'll wait.


Ok?


Got it figured out?

Here's the correct order:
Chocolate chip cookies
Dried cranberries
Hershey's bar
Green tea
Red Bull
Chocolate milk
Pepsi
Mountain Dew

Shocking, huh? I would have never put the cookies down as the least sugar-laden. And I wouldn't have guessed that the chocolate milk had less sugar than the green tea. But this was all about prepackaged food, so the lesson is check the label or make your own.

The other demonstration that I loved was about cheese making. There was a local goat farmer from Yellow Springs Farm who showed off his cheeses, and my heart skipped a beat or two. His wares were incredible, and gave me hope that one day I could produce a little on my own, too. And the science side of his table showed how to make your own cheese out of very, very easy ingredients. I'm going to give it a try later today, and I'll share the results with you. We'll see how it goes!

Hope you had a great weekend, too!

Friday freebie: MyMemories giveaway

The nice folks at MyMemories offered to give away a free download of their scrapbooking software to one lucky reader.

The program is pretty interesting. The first pro going for the company is that you can download all of the software from your couch. That's right, my lazy bum didn't have to move in order for me to give it a go. (Cuz you know there's no way I'm gonna give something away without trying it first.)

Then, once it's downloaded, you can start popping your pics into the customizable layouts. They can be used for photo albums, but also for cards, calendars, DVDs and interactive albums. There are dozens of pages already designed to get you started, or once you're feeling confident, you can go it on your own. Basically, it's a stylized version of InDesign, created with the crafter (not the accomplished designer) in mind.

Here's a quick page I put together of the pre-hubs and I. The best part is that it only took me a couple of minutes to do it. Sure beats hunting down your own backgrounds, embellishments and fonts.

For an entry, leave a comment below about which is your favorite scrap booking kit.  Make sure to include an email address, so I can contact you if you're the winner! You have until Friday, Nov. 11, 2011 to enter.

For an additional entry, you can also like the Garden Kitchen Home facebook page. Make sure you tell me about it below!

Prize: MyMemories Suite v2.0 (worth $39.97)
Deadline: Friday, Nov. 11, 2011 by 11:59 p.m.

Bedroom paint madness

The master painter hard at work

We've been getting busy in the house of GKH--busy painting. I knew from the day I moved in that the yellowy-beige covering every single wall of every single room was not working. For a kitchen, where lots of stuff is already going on? Fine. But for a bedroom, where elegance and relaxation are key? The color of my great aunt Mildred's khakis was not going to cut it.

The pre-hubs and I tossed around ideas about colors for a couple of months, but we were caught in Indecision Land. You know the place--filled with too many choices to be able to single one out. We liked greys. We liked blues. We even liked reds. Everything except builder beige seemed like a viable choice. Finally I broke down last week and decided it was time to picke a paint--any paint. We drove out to the paint store and started poking around. We were undeniably drawn to the grey shades, and one stood out almost immediately. But being ever aware of the funky chemicals in the world, we wanted something low-VOC. Our choice advertised as such, but we wanted to be sure we had the best of the best. So I asked the clerk, who not only had no idea which paints were low-VOC, he suggested we choose one made in California, because "That's how they are out there." Cue the eye roll.

Anyway, we went with our original, low-VOC selection, and maaaan, do we both love it! The color is called Driftwood Grey by Martha Stewart. (I swear I'm not paid by MS, I just like their products.)

It looks very, very grey in the color swatch, but as the evening lighting settles in,it reads a bit more blue. A little confession: I love watching how paint color changes based on the lighting. It's just one of those things that makes me happy.

Here it is in full grey glory. I'll try to capture a bit of the blue tonight, if I can.

Before I give you the big reveal, here's a pic of the old color--albeit taken once the painting project was already underway:

Old, funky beige

And the much-loved, new paint color is here:

Ya like how you can see the blue painter's tape in the reflection of the mirror? That wall needs another coat.

And here, you can see how badly we need to change out the lamp shade. Do I smell  a project?

The new color makes the room seem much, much taller, and it makes our art pop. We're still not done. There's got to be another coat on one of the walls, and we might add a stencil in another color for some va-va-voom. That's still TBD, though.

What do you think? Do you love it as much as I do?

Pinterest challenge: Linen napkins

If you know me, you know I have a Pinterest habit. (And not like the good kind of habit, more like the gotta-get-my-fix-right-now kind.) So when Sherry over at Young House Love announced the fall Pinterest Challenge, I knew I had to bite.

The deal is that you take one of your pins and make it your own. Depending on how ambitious you are, and the kinds of things you pin, this could mean a world of different projects. But for me, it meant linen napkins. I'm going to two different weddings within the next two weeks, and I need some physical heft to spice up the checks we're sending. And this is a simple (read: cheap) project.

Here's my Pinspiration. (Please ignore the poor quality of the picture. It's all I have to work with...)

I'd had my eye on these for a while now. The color is versatile, and the stripe is classic. Not much to not love in my book. Of course, I had a few ideas of my own to spice things up. I knew my bride was using whites and greens in her kitchen set, so I thought a warm brown would be more practical than grey. And I thought something slightly more rustic would work better for her stoneware collection.

With that in mind, I went down the street to a magical place called Fabric Row, which is every bit as fantastic as it sounds. If you're envisioning a playland of fabric, yarn and sewing shops, you're pretty much right on the money. I hit up my go-to store, where there's an entire aisle of linens, and it wasn't long until I found the right one. It has the perfect weight, texture and color to serve as napkins in my friend's house. I grabbed a yard, and got to work on my four napkins.

If you want to make your own, here's what you've got to do:

First, wash, dry and iron that fabric. I know it seems tedious, but it's clutch.
Next, cut out four 20-inch squares.  Make sure the cuts are as even as you can get them, because you aren't doing much more for the shape.

After that, run a stitch about 1/4-inch from the edge of the napkin, all the way around the edges. Make sure you don't go past that 1/4-inch allowance though, or else you'll make it very difficult for yourself when it comes time to fray.

Then, working from the outside in, start pulling at loose strings. This will give you a very rustic look, and it'll hide any imperfections in your cut. The stitching you did in the last step will keep the napkin from fully unraveling, so you don't have to worry about going too crazy.

Repeat three more times, and wrap with a bow.

That, my friends, is that.

Tuesday tip day: Soups on

Grow a pair and try your carrot soup cold.

Just a few words of advice for your soup:

Stock--Add a little soy sauce to pretty much any stock, and then start writing a letter to thank me. It'll change your soup world. Soy packs lots of umami, which is that elusive fifth flavor your tongue can pick up on.

Parmesan rinds--Toss 'em into your soups and simmer. It'll change the flavor of your soup, and give you some delish cheesy goodness. Be careful of this in a bean soup--it can bind right up with the fiber and leave you with a gooey mess.

Tofu--A great thickening agent. Just blend it up and use in place of cream.

Cannellini beans--Another thickening agent from the dieting gods. Blend and mix 'em right in. Delish.

Cold--Try not heating your carrot soup next time. I bet it'll surprise you.