Monthly Archives: November 2009

>Twice Baked Potatoes

Posted on by
2

>I have a few recipes for potatoes baked twice. I think this one will become my go-to for leftover or planned-over baked potatoes. No, I didn’t grow the potatoes. I didn’t make up the recipe, either; it’s adapted from Kraft Kitchens. I get their recipe newsletter, and it often yields a simple winner like this. Nope, they don’t sponsor me, and they don’t need to chip in. If they did, I’d have to admit to having a few of their blue boxes in the pantry. But anyway, here goes —

Daisy’s deliciously simple Twice Baked Potatoes

6 medium to large baking potatoes
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese, divided
1/4 cup diced green onion (mine were in the freezer, cut up last summer)
1/4 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon brown mustard
1/4 teaspoon paprika – optional

Step one: Bake the potatoes. I started them in the oven and then finished them in the microwave so I could bake both steps in the process in one evening.
Step two: Cut lengthwise and scoop out the potato centers, leaving a good solid 1/4 inch shell to support the filling.
Step three: Mix broth, 1/2 cup cheese, green onions, sour cream, brown mustard, and potato mush until it’s smooth.
Step four: Scoop filling mix into potato shells. Top with remaining cheese and a sprinkle of paprika on each potato shell.
Step five: Bake! for 20 minutes at 375 or until warmed through.

Serve with something delicious. Here, at La Casa de Daisy, it was pork chops. Amigo and Chuck enjoyed them, so they’ve passed the Guy Test. Enjoy!

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>The frugal and green teacher: reading edition

Posted on by
3

>Another sign of a frugal and green teacher: books procured through Paperbackswap.com. Our grade’s theme is trains, so I entered “trains” in the search box and clicked “children’s” for genre. I ordered ten books, all good quality literature, at a variety of reading levels. My students love them. This is a rare day; most of the time, these books are in someone’s desk.

The USA Pop-up books, however, were in the Target dollar aisle a few years ago. I bought five. Hmmm… I see four in the picture. One is in a desk somewhere, and I’m sure the kiddo is enjoying reading it!
Tune in next week for the next episode of The Frugal and Green Teacher, NaBloPoMo edition!

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Typical autumn weekend chores, reality show style

Posted on by
3

>Director: Ah, a beautiful autumn day.

Assistant: Who’s that guy on the swing? What’s he doing in the shot?
Daisy: That’s Chuck. He lives here. I married him twenty-five years ago.
Assistant: Oh. Well, I’m going to check the weather forecast so we can plan the rest of the week.
Director: That’s a lot of leaves. Shouldn’t you have something powerful like a leaf blower?
Chuck: Who needs a leaf blower? Picks up rake and tarp, clears lawn in record time.
Director: Get the shot from a number of angles; watch out for shadows. It’s really sunny. Is November always like this in Wisconsin?

Chuck and Daisy: laughter

Director: Make a note: when we edit this, show the before and after. Hey, wait a minute. What did you do with the leaves? Burn them?

Chuck and Daisy, to each other: Shake heads.

Daisy: It’s like this. Most residents rake their leaves into the streets. City crews will pick them up, take dump trucks full of leaves to the brush dump, and pile them up to decompose there and become mulch. City folk can bring their own buckets in the spring to pick up free mulch.
But me? I spread a blanket – a thick blanket – of leaves on the garden. It’ll insulate the soil and decompose into its own fertile mulch right here in my own yard.

Chuck, aside to director: Yes, she’s a science teacher. She’s channeling her inner Ms. Frizzle right now. Want to see where the rest of the leaves went?
Director: What’s the picnic table doing upside down?

Chuck: It’s weighing down the leaves and the cardboard barrier until the snows come. That’s the new tomato garden. It’s easier to set it up now than to dig and rototill the growing grass in the spring.

Assistant, running up to director: Did you see how much open space there is in the backyard? We could stage a weather balloon launch here!
Chuck and Daisy, shaking heads again: Let’s sit on the swing. They might take a while to consider this one.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Upcycling

Posted on by
3

>Reducing, recycling, reusing, repurposing, and – upcycling? What’s with this new trendy green term?
Reducing: buying less, buying products with less packaging, planning ahead for making less waste.
Recycling: returning something to a plant that will make it into the same product or something similar, such as aluminum cans.
Reusing: ‘Nuff said. Use it again. And again. And again.
Repurposing: finding a new use for a product. Chuck brings home Chinese food, Daisy turns the foil dish into a small baking pan. A store receipt becomes a bookmark. Old t-shirts get torn into strips to hold tomato plants to their supports. You get the picture.

So how is upcycling different? Upcycling takes repurposing to a new level. An object gets repurposed with an attitude, so to speak. One famous example is the old television turned into an aquarium. Not everyone can take upcycling that far, but think accessible. Think possibilities. Glasses from the thrift store can turn into candles for teacher gifts (mine was cinnamon, very pretty!). A pretty t-shirt gains a ruffled skirt and becomes a little girl dress (I bought one from a crafter and La Petite, then age 5, loved it). I’d place my rain barrels in this category, too; two fewer big plastic barrels in the landfill, used for a very eco-friendly purpose.

I don’t sew well enough to quilt, or some of Chuck’s and Amigo’s favorite t-shirts might become quilts or throw pillows instead of rags or tomato supports. I think the old-socks turned white-board erasers is more of a repurposing; it’s not a step up in the world for the sock, although it does make it more colorful. How about the polka dot chair project? I don’t think that qualifies as upcycling; the chairs are still chairs, just cuter than they were at first.

So, dear readers, add to the list.

  • What does it take for repurposing to become upcycling? Does the coffee can full of pencils count, or is it more of a simple repurpose?
  • What have you upcycled – or seen and admired as an example of upcycling?
  • No, I don’t consider Brett Favre in a Purple uniform to be an example of upcycling. That’s an example of – never mind.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>We’ve only just begun to prepare for spring gardening!

Posted on by
2

>The killing frost came. I harvested the last beans, tomatoes, peppers, and parsley. I pulled down the bean vines, yanked out the pepper and tomato plants, set aside the wire cages for spring. The second rain barrel is emptied and up-ended; I’ll use the main one for one last soaking, then open its drain and turn it, too.

Meanwhile, it’s fall, when the vegetable gardener’s mind turns to — spring! We’re preparing a new plot for tomatoes. Last year, the tomatoes grew too big for their spot, outgrew the wire tomato cages, leading to broken stems and shading the pepper plants behind. I moved them, and found another not-so-good season. No tomato blight here, thank goodness, but I planted them too close together and they didn’t have enough sun to really flourish. Solution: Prepare a new plot in a sunny location for the tomatoes. Decision: start it now.

This is the layered, no till, often called “lasagna” approach. The lowest layer is either newspaper or cardboard. I had boxes galore, so I flattened them and spread them out. The area is bordered by boards from an old deck; they’ll hold down the boxes for now and designate the sides in the spring. If I decide on a different edging, it’ll be simple; just pick them up!

Layer two: grass clippings, mulch in progress. I’ll add a little more each weekend until it (gulp) snows. As I carried this organic material from the brush pile, last weekend’s nasty chest cold reared its ugly bronchial head and I had to go inside. The first layer is enough; we can add leaves and more when we get time.


The decision next spring: To till or not to till? I’ll look it over, see how the soil weathered the winter, and decide then.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Ode to Bubba the Singing Fish

Posted on by
3

>(refrain)

Bubba; the singing catfish, fit to be fried,
Your outrageous talk leaves us fit to be tied.
Bubba, oh Bubba, you’re still quite a dish,
Hangin’ out on the wall like a filet-o-fish.

(background guitar vamp)

Bubba’s been fishnapped, with no ransom that could rescue him from the clutches of La Petite, who couldn’t stand hearing “Bad to the Bone” any more and hid Bubba high up in a closet. Unfortunately, her brother grew, and grew, and became tall enough to search the highest shelves of his closet and find his old friend, Bubba!!


Repeat refrain.

(background guitar vamp)
Bubba’s been eaten, too. Chewed up by a sneaky rabbit who liked the taste of vinyl, soft rubbery material, and found this funny looking fish to be the perfect material for gnawing. Bubba’s tail is down to nothing, but its hard plastic base still tries to wave when he says, “Hey, drop me a line sometime!” The head? There’s not much left. Maybe he needs to join the scarecrow in singing “If I only had a brain!”
(guitar improvises a short lick from Wizard of Oz tune)

Repeat refrain.

(background guitar vamp)
Bubba, the survivor fish, has been thrown across the room in frustration. Darn thing goes off when we’re not ready for it; sometimes even the television blinking will set him off to announce “I’m bustin’ outta here tonight; you with me?” Bubba, the adults in the house would be happy to oblige. Garbage night, perhaps? You’re too big to flush down the toilet like a requiem for a pet goldfish.

Bubba, oh Bubba, ne’er to be fried
We’d go on without you; believe me, we’ve tried.
Bubba, oh Bubba, your history’s long
And storied, I’ll say, as I finish this song.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>A Bridge Party

Posted on by
3

>

This was the view in front of us.
Behind us, the river.
Amigo applauded the band when the ceremony was done.


Then we visited Chuck, hard at work keeping the news of the Bridge Grand Opening on the air.
Doesn’t the inside of this truck remind you of the cockpit in the movie Airplane?


And finally, we walked the length of the bridge (before traffic was allowed!) to get us back home. Home, for a warm drink and a snack.

The bridge is open to traffic now; maybe soon I’ll drive across the brand new span!

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Apples and Banana and Dump Cake – Oh, My!

Posted on by
1

>I was making supper on a school night: planned-over brats from the weekend grill, a can of beans, and whatever fruit was handy.
Boring.
A big bowl of ripe almost-becoming-soft apples sat on the table. One lone ripe banana sat on the counter.

You guessed it. I baked. Here’s the result.

Apple Dump Cake Plus

Fill the bottom of a 9 X 13 pan with thin-sliced apples (about 4 cups) and banana.
Top with 1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened and sliced.
Dump over this one bag of basic yellow cake mix. I keep a store-brand box of yellow cake and white cake in case this kind of situation arises.
Top with another 1/2 cup butter or margarine, softened and sliced.
Bake for 35 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Cool — a little — and then serve warm with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream.

P.S. I also added 1 cup of frozen blueberries from last July. They added color and a little fun. If I did this with apples again, I might add a dusting of cinnamon and nutmeg. Come to think of it, cranberries might be a nice combination, too.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>The frugal and green teacher

Posted on by
2

>A sign of a teacher both frugal and green: provisioning, using repurposed and reused materials.

From left to right: coffee cans for ‘found’ writing utensils, wire basket (second hand) filled with notebook pages donated by last year’s class as they cleaned up in June, box of re-usable paper with one blank side (extra worksheets, memos, newletters), and junk mail envelopes (under the chunk of our state rock, red granite) for field trip slips and lunch money.

My students take to this like ducks to water. They even “play school” with some of the old worksheets! That box helps me empty my old files with much less guilt because there is much less waste. Those with messy desks often jump for the wire basket rather than dig into what resembles an archeology site.
Tune in next week for The Frugal and Green Teacher, NaBloPoMo edition.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares

>Just Another Saturday – or not.

Posted on by
2

>It was almost a typical Saturday.
The to-do list read as usual:
Laundry
Correct papers
Clean kitchen
Clean bunny cage

Added to the list yesterday:
Prepare Halloween candy for trick or treaters
Set up pumpkin, light candle
Start fire in fireplace
Rake leaves off sidewalk so trick or treaters can find their way

Here’s the Ta-Dah! list:
Laundry (dull, boring, but necessary chore, got done in between everything else)
Correct papers: lots of them! (Science, spelling, language arts, and more science: more than usual due to make-up work in the latest wave of H1N1 in my school building)
Clean kitchen, and re-do it after supper (and wonder why I manage to want to run the dishwasher when there’s a load of laundry in, every time)
Clean bunny cage (Why does she get so anxious when I’m taking away her dirty box? I replace it with a clean one right away. She doesn’t have to wait.)
Rake leaves: done, but only in the front yard and only enough to clear the sidewalk. It was so windy that raking is almost pointless, like shoveling 2 inches of snow when there’s a dozen more coming. (Did I say snow? I didn’t mean to even think of snow. Not yet. You didn’t hear that.)
Prepare Halloween candy; I tested one of each kind to make sure they were all fresh. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it.
I set up the pumpkin, but it was too windy to light the candle. Next year, we’re getting the battery operated tea lights.
Start fire: while I was out replenishing the candy supply, Hubs started a fire. Sort of. Eventually. It was kind of like this.
1. Open damper.
2. Set up wood.
3. Set up firestarters in form of old Braille paper or cardboard.
4. Light fire.
5. Realize damper was left open after last fire, and now it’s closed.
6. Open damper.
7. Take down smoke alarms.
8. Turn on ceiling fan, open windows a crack, turn off heat.
9. Blow on fire; get it started, finally, for real.
10. Wait patiently for house to clear of smoke.
11. Sample new supply of Halloween candy to make sure it’s suitable for late trick or treaters.
12. Settle down on couch in den – Ah. Saturday night. Life is good.

Now the to-do list begins for Sunday. That, folks, totally revolves around the Big Game that kicks off at 3:15 at Lambeau Field.

Share and Enjoy !

Shares