Recipe: Short'nin' Bread

Here is one of my childhood favorites.  My mom always made this buttery, rich "bread" (which is actually a cookie) and even had a song that she sang to me about it.  To this day it is still one of my favorite treats and, best of all, it only has 3, count 'em 3, ingredients!

Ingredients:
     1/2 C softened butter
     1/2 C sugar
     1 1/4 C flour

Directions:
     -Grease 8 inch round cake pan.
     -Preheat oven to 275 degrees
     -Cream butter and sugar with electric mixer until fluffly
     -Add flour slowly
     -Press mixture into pan
     -Prick the dough all over with a fork
     -Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown.
     -Cool in pan.  Cut and store in airtight container...if you don't eat the whole thing in one sitting.

My Pantry

      My kitchen cabinets are probably the biggest conversation piece in my home.   They are organized in a way that I can easily see and access everything I have.  So that this post doesn't end up taking you 9 years to read, I'll just start with my pantry.   
     A few years back I started selling Tupperware (which I don't do anymore)  and I fell in love with their dry food storage containers.  I decided to redo my pantry with their modular mates.  These are things like my baking ingredients, dry goods like rice and elbow macaroni, boxed mixes and oil salt and pepper.  This cabinet is to the right of my stove for easy access while cooking or baking.

          I know it probably seems ridiculous to transfer things like baking soda, cocoa or baking powder into another container when they already come in a sturdy one, but when kept in their original containers these things don't stack well.  And don't even get me started on my fear of a weevle infestation! Anyway, most people don't utilize their vertical space in their cabinets.  Containers allow you to stack items on top of one another to make the most of cabinet space.  Then I use a label maker to label the container with their contents.  Containers also keep your items fresher for longer.  You can avoid having a brick of brown sugar if it is put in a container. (And by the way, if that ever happens, you can give the sugar a quick zap in the microwave or place a slice of white bread in a ziploc with the sugar.  Either way will soften it up again!)
     You don't need to buy fancy Tupperware to organize your pantry.  I have seen some great containers at the dollar store that could serve the same purpose.  Clear sided containers work the best because you don't have to open the box or move anything when you want to check how much is left.   Also, before buying containers, don't forget to look through the ones you already own.  I bet most of us already have a bunch that we never use and they just get tossed around the cabinet when we are looking for our favorite container's lid.  Re-purpose the ones you barely ever use for a pantry item. 

Here is my spice cabinet which is to the left of my stove:

I have 2 lazy susans - 1 for my spices and the other is for random items like toothpicks, food coloring and extracts.  The top shelf is Jimmies and my husband's HUGE container of Old Bay seasoning...which I have no idea why we need.

Here is how I store the other food items that can't be put in containers.  They are on shelves next to the basement stairs:

   

     I have the shelves labeled so I can easily tell what we are out of and so that my husband can find

his tuna without making a mess or asking for my help. 

     When you can open your cabinets or closet and, at a glance, see if you need or already have something, you avoid over buying products which saves you money.  How many times have you bought brown sugar or some other baking ingredient and brought it home only to realize that you had an opened box of that item hidden in the back of the cabinet?  That doesn't happen when everything has a place.  Before the shopping trip, you are able to open your cabinets and see at a glance whether or not the item is needed.  Also, you don't have to buy as many items each week for your planned recipes or impromptu meals.  I always have enough on hand to throw a side dish together and I usually have almost all of the items I need for my tried and true recipes. Every week I take a peek in the pantry to see if anything needs replenishing and add it to my shopping list.      

     Happy organizing!

Homemade Cleaners

I started making my own cleaners when my son was a baby.  He was sitting in the bouncy seat in the bathroom doorway while I was cleaning the shower stall and I realized that if my lungs were getting a tickle from breathing the cleaner in then his HAD to be burning.  I looked up a bunch online, tried a few over the past 3 years and here is what I ended up continuing to use:

-Glass Cleaner- 1 tsp dish detergent, 6 Tbsp white vinegar and 4 Cups of Water.

-Straight White Vinegar - I use this for kitchen counters, floors...basically as an all purpose cleaner

-Baking Soda - Great for scrubbing sinks, tubs, toilets.  Anything that you need an abrasive cleaner for.  When I run out, I buy new baking soda from the dollar store and replace the one in my kitchen pantry with it.  Then I take the baking soda that was in my pantry and put it in my cleaner container.  This way the baking soda I use for baking is always fresh.

-Bleach Cleaner - I recently adjusted this mixture after figuring out that my mixture was eating the grout in the shower. (oops!!)  So now I use 1 Tbsp of bleach in a full bottle of water.  Still a little bit high of a mixture but I am slowly trying to break my addiction to bleach.  I use this in the bathroom only.

For awhile I was using a vinegar and olive oil mix for my furniture but I didn't like it.  For now, I am back to using a store cleaner for that but I am on the search for something homemade that I like.  I don't like that the store cleaner makes my floors slick if any of it splatters. 

Both the vinegar and glass cleaner are in bottles that I bought at the dollar store.  I bought 3 bottles for each cleaner so that I have one everywhere I need it: 1 set in the bathroom closet, 1 set under the kitchen sink and 1 set in the laundry room.  The bottles are labeled so that if someone other than me is here, and one of my kids drinks the cleaner, they know exactly what they drank.  Plus I put the uses on the vinegar bottle so that when we started using it my husband would know what he could use it for.  The baking soda is kept in an old Parmesan cheese container so it can be easily sprinkled.  The bleach cleaner is in an old store bought bleach cleaners bottle.  I tried putting it in a dollar store bottle but the bleach will eat the metal spring mechanism. 

These cleaners are super cheap to make.  You can get bleach now at the dollar store and a HUGE container of store brand vinegar is cheap at the supermarket.

Here are my bottles:

I use rags that I got from the dollar store.  They are great.  The green one is for dusting, the middle one (a recent find) is EXCELLENT for keeping your stainless steel sink shiny (I'm actually gona buy another pack of them the next time I go to the dollar store) and the blue one is for glass.  The blue one has a small slit I cut in it so that it can hang on the glass cleaner bottle handle.  I use a lot of paper towels which is horrible, I know.  I'm trying to break myself of that.

While we are on the topic of cleaning, I have to show you these.  They make cleaning so much more fun!

DIVA!!!!!



And here is my new favorite mop.  It's called a T Mop and you use it to push around a wet rag on the floor.  SO much easier then dragging out a big mop and a bucket of nasty water.  Wet a rag in the sink, chuck it on the floor and push it around with the stick!  When you're done you just throw the rag in the wash!

My Mornings

At a recent playdate I was asked to describe what my mornings are like.  I went through my routine and, after hearing it, one of the girls asked me, "How long are you upstairs in the morning?"  I said, "About an hour" and we moved on with conversation.  While thinking about that exchange over the next couple of days, I realized that doing an hour of cleaning before coffee probably sounds ridiculous and overwhelming to people.  Then I realized that, in actuality, the hour  I spend upstairs only has about 15 minutes of cleaning or straightening up in it.  The rest is stuff I have to do anyway: dressing myself, dressing the kids, nursing the baby...and it is all done while watching the news or checking Facebook on my phone which probably adds about 10 minutes to everything I do. So here is my morning routine:

WHILE UPSTAIRS:
-Get dressed and put on sneakers - If I don't put shoes on, nothing seems to get done.  So even if I am staying in my jammies for the day, the sneakers get put on till my basic stuff is finished.
-"Make" my bed - I use the term "make" loosely because all I do is pull up the covers and comforter.
-Gather laundry - This takes 2 seconds because we only have 2 hampers upstairs.  1 is for the baby and the other is for everything else.  And since I don't wash her clothes with ours and since my son will put his Pj's in the hamper himself after I dress him, "gather" literally means drag the laundry hamper (which is a plastic structured bag with handles) to the top of the steps to remind me to take it downstairs.
-Dust Master Bedroom - I keep a feather duster in a decorative container in my room.  It's made of ostrich plumes that are black and purple so it blends in.  I take 30 seconds to run it over my furniture and lamps. I don't move any items on my dressers.  I just dust surface around everything.
-Wipe Down Bathroom - I have timed this whole process and it takes about 5 minutes to do. The point is to make it look presentable in case someone stops over, not to scrub it sterile.  With a dry paper towel I QUICKLY wipe across the ledge of the tile, the tops of he pictures and the top of the toilet.  Next, I spray window cleaner on the mirror, sink and toilet and quickly wipe them down. Then, I use window cleaner and a paper towel to wipe the floor around the area rugs.  Sometimes if the rugs look dirty I will shake them out first then wipe down the whole floor before replacing the rugs.  I then tie up the trash bag, replace it with a clean one and chuck the full one in the laundry basket to be brought downstairs.  What makes this part easier is the fact that I have window cleaner and paper towels upstairs so I don't have to go and get them from another part of the house.
-Straighten Kids' Rooms- Right before we go downstairs I help my son put away the few toys he took out while waiting for me to get my stuff done.  Because he has toy bins, and not a lot of toys with numerous little pieces upstairs, this takes only a minute or two.  We quickly chuck everything in one of the bins, he puts his paci and blanket under his pillow and I pull the covers up on his bed.

WHEN I GO DOWNSTAIRS:
-Put in the Laundry
-Make Breakfast while Unloading Dishwasher
-Eat Breakfast and Check Email
-Reload Laundry - I try to do one load completely per day.  At some point during the day the load will get folded and put away.

I have these routines posted where i can glance at them just in case.

This is the upstairs part, posted inside my bedroom closet on the door...

and this is the downstairs part, posted inside my kitchen cabinet door that is next to the sink.

My evening routine is on this one too.