T.T.: Natural-Dye Homemade Playdough

Would you believe that in almost twelve years of parenting, I have never once purchased playdough? Kids love it, of course, but most parents do not. Messy, expensive, funky smelling, and inevitably ends up dried out in those little cups, which then get thrown away.

Not into it.

However! At least three of those problems can be avoided by making your own playdough. (Not the messiness. That's just the nature of playdough, purchased or no.)

I had never tried this, but on Jack's birthday this year, I did. Because it was cold, and the kids were bored, and, well, it was Jack's birthday and he wanted to try it.

I used this recipe for the actual dough*, and, to be honest, it is kind of a pain. Mostly because it's pretty hard to stir the ever-thickening dough around in the pot continuously. It's not complicated, though.

But of course, what is playdough without all the colors? And what if you don't have food coloring because the idea of putting it in food is alarming to you and you never buy it?

And by "you," I of course mean "I."

Luckily, I know from my adventures in Easter-egg dying** that it is perfectly possible to create a dye from random things found in the kitchen. Which is why I dyed my playdough with blueberries and coffee.

I didn't really follow directions for this part. All I did was pour boiling water over about six frozen blueberries, then mash the berries and strain the resulting liquid off. And I used my spent coffee ground in the French press to make a some second-run coffee. 

Then I separated some of the thickened white dough into two chunks. I put one chunk back into the cooking pot with the blueberry water, mixed it all together, and cooked it some more until the dough had reached the proper consistency again. This made pink playdough, which made Poppy very happy.

I did the same with the coffee water, although I think I added too much of the water to that color, so it was a little wetter. It never did get drier, even with more cooking and kneading in extra flour. It was still usable though. And that made brown.

Colored playdough! Yay me!

If you want to try this, I would say you only need a few tablespoons of the dyed water for about a cup of the dough.

I thought about making yellow with curry powder, but then I thought how curry powder stains and decided I really didn't want to have my children handling that at all.

The pink blueberry playdough is a little more damp than the white, and the brown coffee was more damp than the pink. But it was all a hit.

Playdough table and chairs made by my dad, table cover courtesy of a really cheap and awful shower curtain liner from a dollar store that I use to cover the kitchen table when the kids paint.

It was a little bit of effort, but now I have three bags of playdough (in quart-size ziptop bags that I wash and re-use) that I did not have to pay for, that do not smell weird, and that did not create any further plastic trash. Hooray.

* Because it was the first one that came up when I searched for a homemade playdough recipe. That's about as much research as I ever put into recipes, to be honest.

** This just reminded me that I should have tried using paprika to make orange. Next time.

Snapshots: Let's Go To the Tree Lot!

Of course, this being a very remote corner of New Mexico, our "tree lot" looks like this:

No sleigh rides and $5 hot cocoa here.

Just a dirt tank with, surprisingly, a little water still in it from the last rain we had, uh, two months ago.

Jasper came too, of course. 

There's the tree!

Then back to Adventure Van we go. (I will never stop being amazed at the absolutely saturated blue of the New Mexico sky.)

Decorating . . .

Putting on the star . . .

All done!

A small tree, but cheery.

There you have it! Our annual Christmas tree adventure, snapshotted.

Seven

Jack is seven today. He has a cold, as does everyone else in the family except A.

It's going to be a very snotty birthday.

But! There are Lincoln Logs to play with courtesy of Grandma, some very gooey-looking store-bought cinnamon rolls that were given to me by a student at school, and chocolate pudding to look forward to after a pizza dinner.

Happy birthday to Jack,

a fantastic big brother, a funny dude, and an all-around great guy.

Friday Food: Birthday Flan

Friday 

Short version: Turkey soup, breakfast sausage patties, chocolate revel bars

Long version: "Is this . . . turkey soup?" A. asked. "Wasn't Thanksgiving a long time ago?"

Yes on both counts. But it was turkey soup I had taken out of the freezer.

I had made a very large pot of soup with the last of our very large turkey and the very large amount of broth I made from the carcass. I omitted any starch before freezing, though, as potatoes or rice or whatever tend to get mushy in the freezer. So to the container of soup I took out of the freezer I added rice and the some leftover mushrooms and onions.

The sausage was separate. 

Cubby made the revel bars. He wanted to make cookies in the afternoon, which I told him he could do if he cleaned up the kitchen afterwards. The revel bars were a recipe he found in one of my cookbooks that involved a layer of basically oatmeal cookie dough, then melted chocolate, then a topping of oats and nuts. They came out well, and it made a LOT of cookies. 

So many bars.

And more importantly . . .

Dishes I did not wash. Hooray.

Saturday

Short version: Tacos, carrot sticks

Long version: I had made quite a large batch of taco meat earlier in the week, and we ate the last of it this night.

Sunday

Short version: Quail, shepherd's hand pies, roasted potatoes, green salad, chocolate revel bars

Long version: A. went quail hunting with Cubby and Calvin at some public land a few miles from our house. He got four quail. They hung overnight and I roasted them this day. They were tasty, but very small.

That's why I made the shepherd's hand pies, too. For those, I used the extra pie crust I had put in the freezer when we made the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie, plus some shepherd's pie meat from the freezer, and a bit of cheese. The children enjoyed them very much.

Monday

Short version: Shepherd's skillet, broccoli soup, apple/pearsauce and cream

Long version: Due to various chores that needed to be done when we got home from school before it got dark outside, I didn't even start making dinner until 5 p.m. Which meant speed was the name of the game.

I had some of the shepherd's pie meat left, so I micowaved a couple of giant potatoes, diced one and a half of them, and fried those with the meat.

The other half of the potato went into a soup for Cubby, who accidentally gouged a very large and very bloody furrow into the roof of his mouth on Sunday. He couldn't eat anything solid that would press into the top of his mouth when he swallowed, so I made a quite thin soup for him with the potato, leftover broccoli, some random cooked onion, a jar of beef stock, shredded cheddar cheese, and sour cream, pureed in the food processor.

He also had the apple/pearsauce. And then the rest of the children had the same thing, because who can resist apple/pearsauce with cream?

Tuesday

Short version: Meatloaf, rice, carrots, caramel milk

Long version: The ground beef we got from our last cow is definitely more lean than I like it, because it was a range cow and just didn't have a lot of fat on it to start with. I still had a package of fat from the cow we got a few years ago, though, which I recently rendered. So I melted some of that tallow and mixed it in to the meatloaf mixture. Much better.

Earlier in the day, I had made A.'s requested birthday dessert for the next day, which was flan. Flan requires making a caramel, and then, of course, I ended up with a pot that had rock-hard caramel all over the inside. Rather than boil that off with water to clean it, I heated milk in the pot and mixed the melted caramel into the milk. 

That was a pretty big hit, as you might imagine.

Wednesday

Short version: Birthday steaks, twice-baked potatoes, green salad with ranch dressing, flan

Long version: I know I saw a package of hanger steaks in the freezer, which is a particularly choice cut, but I couldn't find it when I went to get steak out for A.'s birthday dinner. I informed him he would have to settle for New York strip steaks and filet mignon.

He was fine with this.

I baked the potatoes the night before with the meatloaf, and then scooped them out, mashed, and stuffed them, so when I got home from work, they just needed to be baked another half hour.

The flan was from a recipe A. sent me. I've never made flan before, and so, predictably, I made some mistakes. The recipe calls for blending the custard mixture, and mentions it may need to be done in two batches.

It definitely does. But I didn't. So that caused a huge mess.

The caramel also refused to get smooth, despite my constant stirring, also at the behest of the recipe. A., who used to make flan years ago, came in while I was trying to get the caramel smooth and told me he always left the caramel alone without stirring to start melting in a single layer first. So I stopped stirring, and sure enough, it smoothed out.

I also forgot to cover it with foil when I put it in the oven, but I remembered after only twenty minutes or so, so no harm done.

The birthday boy very much enjoyed his dessert, particularly the texture. It was pretty sweet, though. Kind of inevitable, with all that condensed milk and caramel.

The following is a photograph the MiL sent me of a giant squash she grew or bought, I'm not sure which:

A., the appreciator of all giant vegetables, of course asked her for some seeds.

Thursday

Short version: Leftover meatloaf, leftover rice, lettuce with ranch dressing

Long version: I made it to the end of the marathon that is the last week of school before Christmas break, but I was not exactly bursting with energy by the time we all made it home after the last fun-filled day of school. That's why I made the most low-energy dinner possible with the leftovers I purposely planned for earlier in the week.

I didn't even put anything with the lettuce, which is why it was just lettuce, not a salad.

Whatever. The semester is over, our very long break has begun, and everyone is going to sleep in this morning. It's the most wonderful time of the year. 

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

Song Time!

It's December 15th, which is the birthday of that famous American . . . A.

And, as always, we will sing an original song of my own writing entitled "The Woodchuck Man Can." The tune isn't original to me, though. The words are sung to the tune of "The Candyman Can."

(The most recent version is here, and it links to the previous nine versions should you have a burning desire to read all the versions. Man, I've been doing this a long time.)

Here we go!

Who can dig all the holes

For bulbs to grow in spring?

Who can pull a house down so he can re-build everything?

The woodchuck man, 

The woodchuck man can

The woodchuck man can

'Cause he uses what he has and makes it work for him.

Who can load the van up

To camp with all four kids?

Who can kill a raccoon at night when he is bid?

The woodchuck man,

The woodchuck man can

The woodchuck man can 

'Cause he uses what he has an makes it work for him.

Happy birthday to A., the fastest woodchuck in the west.

T.T.: The Secret To Cast Iron Seasoning

It is undeniable that I have, um, a lot of cast iron cooking vessels.

Eight, to be exact, if I include the enameled cast iron dutch oven.

About half of my cast iron skillets were inherited*, and they, of course have the best seasoning.

If you're not familiar with cast iron, "seasoning" refers to the smooth layer that builds up on the inside of the pan as it's used. The best cast iron, with the best seasoning, is pretty much non-stick and doesn't rust.

So how does one achieve that magical state? How, exactly, is cast iron cookware seasoned?

Well! Let me tell you!

I have seasoned the other half of my cast iron cookware myself, and at first I tried using the commonly given directions, which is to rub it with a layer of cooking oil, and then put it in a warm oven for awhile, to kind of bake the oil in.

What this does, unfortunately, is create a nasty, sticky, thin layer of oil that doesn't at all create the smooth surface I was going for.

Over the years, I have discovered that what really seasons my cast iron is animal fats. And a lot of them.

The more cast iron is used for frying foods in tallow or lard, the better the surface of the pan. It doesn't have to be deep-fat frying, but really, the more fat, the better.

Rendering tallow has an excellent seasoning effect, as you might imagine.

This is, of course, why the older skillets are the best: Because people used to fry foods a lot more, and they weren't using canola oil.

So! If you have a cast iron pot or skillet that you need to season, go ahead and fry some doughnuts or make french fries. Then you'll have both better seasoning on your pan and some doughnuts to eat. 

Practical and delicious.

Bonus cast iron advice: Once they're seasoned pretty well, they can be washed with dish soap, and even a nylon scrubby, but they should be put in a hot oven or on a hot burner to dry them off immediately after washing.

* At least one from my mother, and today happens to be her birthday. Happy birthday, Mom! Thanks for the skillet!

Snapshots: Here and There

This week's photos are all over the place. Let's get started, shall we?

On a small side street of the town I took Poppy and Jack to for their adventure, I drove past this remarkable residence. I had to stop and take a photo for A. the Stonemason.

Is it a mini-monastery? Is it a mini-castle? Whatever it is, it didn't look inhabited anymore, which is a shame. This is a home with character, to say the least.

Poppy is the only one of the children who is always excited to go to school. Unfortunately, preschool is only two days a week, which means on the other two days, she's sad that her brothers get to go and she doesn't. A. and I had to go to the school to pick some things up last week, though, so she got to come along and play on her playground on a Thursday.

And then she climbed all by herself to the highest bar on this thing! Doesn't get much better when you're four.

A couple of the boys decided to be complete cliches and break a lamp in the living room during a wrestling match. Unfortunately, it was the reading lamp right next to A.'s chair. Fortunately, only the ceramic base broke. All the electrical components were fine, and sitting on the bookcase right next to the broken lamp was a wooden vase with a top that my dad had made us years ago and that was the perfect shape for a new lamp base.

So A. drilled a hole in the bottom, chiseled out a groove for the cord, and put it all together.

Broken lamp rescue.

Ta da! (Pay no attention to that picture on the wall. I had just taken it down to dust it and realized after this photo was taken that it was slightly crooked. It has since been straightened. I know you were worried.)

And, as always, we'll close with Walk Photos. This time, however, thanks to late sunrises and early school departures, we have a late-afternoon walk.

The sun wasn't quite setting yet, so we have a dramatic cross of light rather than a silhouette.

And of course, everyone was awake at this time of day, so I had more company than just my usual canine companions.

Yes, that's an old toilet plunger in Jack's hand. And no, I don't know why.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.