Food stuff and Marshmallow Treats

Like all families, we here at the Unwired Home have our food issues.  For the kids, food is truly fuel.    One of my kids requires a vast amount of protein to keep his mind and body in gear.  Huge amounts- he's a small kid and can out-eat me.  The other kid has a much slower metabolism and is less athletic.  While he wants to eat chocolate at every snack, a piece of fruit with meet his needs; for the high-metabolism child, protein is required in addition to the fruit.  As a family, we are big into 'five-a-day' fruits and veggies, as well as high fiber to deal with a gastrointestinal issue.

In our community, like in yours, there are folks with all kinds of food issues.  Some look like ours-- just preferences and lessons learned.  But some issues may be more critical, and even deadly.   Allergies to nuts, wheat and eggs.  Texture/food color issues.  Picky eaters.

Knowing that one of my kid needs protein, and both need fiber and healthy choices, I adapted the classic Marshmallow Rice Krispie treats recipe to fill a need (and a stomach).  This recipe has a good amount of fiber, is crunchy and gives them a reason to eat cereal, which they both love.

Nutty O's Treats
4 Tbsp butter
1 cup peanut butter
3 cups mini marshmallows
4 cups Os cereal
2 cups puffed rice cereal
3/4 cup peanuts
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)

Over medium heat in a large pot (10+ quart size, which helps to contain the mess), melt the butter.  Add the peanut butter and stir until melted.  Add the marshmallows and reduce the heat, stirring until well combined.

Turn off the heat, and stir in the cereal, nuts and chocolate (this is where it gets messy).  Combine as best you can, then pour the whole blob into a 9x12 pan.  Press the blob into the corners to make the bars dense and to fill the whole pan.

Let sit for 30-60 minutes to cool, then turn onto a cutting board and slice into bars.

Substitutions:  Virtually everything in this recipe can be swapped out.  Try sunflower seed butter in place of peanut butter to eliminate an allergen.  Take out the chocolate chips to reduce calories.  Use a GF cereal if you are celiac or wheat-sensitive.  Use high-fiber cereal to amp up the fiber content.

Design on a Dime meets Pinterest

For a lot of reasons, I've been exercising the DIY part of my brain lately.  I've always liked to do 'stuff' myself.  My father did a lot of his own work around the house-- I distinctly remember helping him tile the entry way in our house.  He did a lot of his own electrical work too, and taught me how to wire switches and fixtures.  Doing it yourself is gratifying, cheaper, and often faster than calling a professional.

Add to that a ton of years watching DIY shows like Design On A Dime, reading blogs on design and now, browsing on Pinterest.  It's a slippery slope.

Below are photos of my new dining room.  Same house as before, but the dining room was a small space near the kitchen.  Convenient, but too small.  We removed the leaves from the DR table to fit it in the space, which meant we needed to put the leaves back in to use it.  Big PITA.

So when I finished the new desk (future blog post-- the wonder of homemade chalk paint), it went into the small dining room, and became the centerpiece of the new study.   The dining room furniture went into the large living room, which became the new dining room.  The chair/ottoman from the living room went into the study, the sofa was sold, and I bought a beautiful credenza for the dining room from Craigslist.  Keeping up?

From a few yards back, no flash- this is the true wall color, but the photo came out very dull

With flash- the wall color is grey, not green, but this photo has more depth and life

So the images above are clearly of the new dining room.  The lamp is the DIY project in question... when you take a room not designed to be a dining room (and with poor lighting in general) and make it a dining room, you are unlikely to have the electrics in place to hang a fixture over the table.  Ikea makes this great cantilevered lamp, which we ended up getting from Freecycle.  Mr. Unwired had to do a bit of engineering to replace a broken piece, which he did and it's awesome.  My job was to repair and jazz up the lampshade, which was torn and boring.  Which is the rest of this post.

The lamp

The view from a dining room chair

What you're seeing is a generic, boring rice paper lamp shade, wearing the Sunday comics.  Pinterest didn't warn me about the nuances of this project, so I'll share what I learned.

First, cut your paper into strips.  I used one Washington Post Sunday comics section (4 pages, 8 sides), sliced up by a shredder.  Consider cutting them about 1/2" to 3/4" wide, not 1/4 inch like mine.  Wider will give you more coverage and be way easier to work with.

Next, hang your lamp shade over a work surface, in arms reach.

After that, prepare glue in a shallow bowl.  I used regular white glue, diluted 50% with water.  Dip the paper into the glue, then run it through your fingers to strip the extra glue back into the bowl. You want the paper to be wet, but not soggy.

Lay each strip, one by one onto the paper lampshade.  This is where the advice 'use paper 1/2" to 3/4" comes from.'  With the shredded comics, this took upwards of two hours, executed in 30 minute intervals.  It's a very zen project as my hands were covered in glue so I couldn't play with my phone or do anything other than paper mache the lampshade....  And I am a bit obsessive, so the focus of this project was nice.  But two hours seems excessive in the long run.  Your mileage may vary.

I love the scale of the lamp in the room, and the light it gives is perfect. It's nicely filtered nicely through the paper shade and the comics, and it makes me smile every time I pass by.  While I did this project to hide the tears in the lampshade (which it did perfectly), it ended up beatifying the space and making the large room more intimate. Time to invite folks for dinner!

In search of a definition.....

It's hard to say when it started....

First there came the rain barrels.  I grew up in water-starved Southern California, so rain barrels seemed to be a good way to conserve water from the hose, using instead what falls from the sky to water the garden when it's needed.  In the end, this simplifiies my life, as our rain barrels are closer to the garden than the hose.

Then came the consignment store shopping trip.  I'd always bought used clothes for the kids, and thought it was time to get some deals for me too. And I have gotten some really good deals!

Next, we had a stressed-out cat who ruined two sofas.  Sadly, not the kind of 'ruined' that can be fixed by reupholstering.  These sofas were toxic waste dumps and required replacement.  But not knowing how long the cat would be with us, we didn't want to buy new sofas.  So we purchased replacements off a local neighborhood listserv.  Because it's the folks on the list are local, I felt I could trust the provided description (age, wear and tear, etc).  So we ended up with a sofa for the family room, plus a sofa/chair/ottoman for the living room, all for a song.

Along the same time as the sofa adventure came our basement fix up.  We built a recording studio for Mr. Unwired two years ago, and then finished the area outside the studio, incorporating part of our unfinished storage/utility room.  Once the 'outside' space was done, it somehow became a personal challenge to spend little-to no money outfitting it.  One of the few things I bought was a $50 shelving unit to use as a pantry; but I reused containers/crates/boxes from other parts of the house to organize it.

No labels on the shelves.... yet.

The desk was once the solid core door separating the semi-finished basement (pre-studio) from the utility room.  I painted the door to have a metal like finish,and used legs that came off a table that had been in Mr. Unwireds last bachelor pad.

Here's the desk, fit perfectly into the space thanks to a kind contractor who trimmed it down. 
I had forgotten to measure before I painted.

Close up of the metal-like finish of the desk.  Really easy, very high impact.

The printer table is the old stereo stand (stereo is now in the living room, where it gets frequent use); it's painted in a grey complimentary to the desk, swirled on with fine grain steel wool.

This was a cherry finish wood when I started.  Not anymore!

The stairway carpeting came from Flor tiles, purchased from a local listserv for $20, and carefully cut to size by my handy husband.

Theses carpet tiles are from the Modern Mix collection.  Four shades of red in one rug- very cool.

The bookcase came from the studio (Mr. Unwired didn't need it inside anymore).   Even the light fixtures were reused, having been first purchased to replace ugly brass fixtures in the basement back when we moved in six years ago. 

Looking at the preponderance of evidence, I'm looking for a definition of my attitude and/or behavior...  am I:

Cheap? 
Frugal?
Green?
Thrifty?
Creative?

I've updated my blog roll to reflect the crafty, recycling, thrifty bent I seem to be on.  Check it out for inspiration.  Post in the comment how you would describe someone like me, and any other blogs you follow!

Kid Cooler!

This is going to be so great!

Too many blog posts by too many total strangers said that this was an easy project.  So the Unwired Family went to Home Depot on a Friday afternoon, and spent $17 on PVC.  $10 for the long pipes, and $7 for joints, caps and a hose inlet.

Several blogs touted a need for a PVC cutter.  Mr. Unwired found that a hacksaw worked just as well.  If we didn't own the workbench, he would have cut the PVC in the miter box on the ground.  But this eliminated kneeling on the cement... and hey, it's not like the workbench gets out of the garage much these days.

So this is what we built.  It took 75 minutes, which included all the re-sketching (due to a lack of imagination on my part), plus a trip to the local hardware store for the 4 elbows we forgot to buy at Home Depot (adding $3 to our total, bringing it to $20 for the whole thing).  If we'd bought all the parts the first time, we could have had this done in an hour.

The design is simple- two arches with three braces to stand them up; The legs are capped with PVC caps (to hold the water in).  Each of the legs and the top is made of two 2 1/2 foot sections joined with a T-shaped joint; the braces are five feet long (uncut).  We used 3/4 inch PVC, although other blogs used 1/2 inch.  For inspiration, a more decorative version is here, while a simpler version is here.

We opted not to glue the joints.  I agreed with the ideas in this blog, where she says that the pieces hold together well without glue, and no glue makes it easier to (purposefully) take the thing apart to store it.

The magic of this is that Mr. Unwired used a 1/16th inch drill bit to put holes (11 in total) into the PVC structure, so that when the hose is connected and turned on just a teeny tiny bit, it sprays water...  like this:

The number of holes is important.... we started with just 3 and when the water pressure built up, the joints popped and the thing exploded!  It was fun to watch... the water simply needed more places to escape.  Physics, you know?  Eleven was our magic number- if you build your own design, drill carefully and slowly, because if you make too many holes you'll have to blast the water in order to keep enough pressure in the system, or add more PVC, or swap out the holey PVC for less perforated pieces... and that would slow down the fun!

The blog linked above referred to putting misters in the holes.  That would be awesome, but I haven't been able to find them.  The guys at my local hardware store said that I should look in the sprinkler supply section of a garden center.  Sounds like a worthy addition to the fun!

Without the misters, I looked high and low for something we already had on hand that could be added to the cooler.  Yes, you guessed it... those are paint rollers!  These rollers came our way when a friend moved to NJ seven years ago, so it seemed like a good bet to string these on one end of the cooler to bump and splash the kids.  Worked like a charm, for no extra $$$!

And here is the finished product, complete with kids playing in it! They had a blast, and we look forward to setting it up and soaking them again!