How To: Dye Playsilks with Food Dye!

When I first heard of them, I thought the idea was crazy. Was my kid really going to play with some dyed silk squares for years and years? Well, I made my first batch when Eleanor was 8 months old and I have to say that I am a convert! She loves them and so does Emmett!

What are they for? Well, they are the ultimate imagination toy. They can be on the ground as a blanket, tablecloth, or river. They can be worn as clothes, they can be used to dress up toys. They can simple be flung up in the air for fun! They are the best! I liked them so much  I  Santa made some larger ones for Christmas.

I dye my own because they are very expensive from Etsy and I wanted to make sure they are non-toxic.

Here's how you do it:

First, get your silk. It must be pure silk. I buy the Silk Habotai Squares from Dharma Trading. Now go to your supermarket and buy packets of Kool-Aid. Yep. And try not to be embarrassed at the checkout. You can also use food dye. You'll also need some white vinegar.

Start by soaking your scarves in water until they are thoroughly wet and heat up a pot of water on the stove until boiling.

Now, dump a pack of Kool-Aid into the water.

...and put your scarf in. Give it a stir and glug in a good 1/2 cup on vinegar. Then forget to take a picture of the red, so pretend that it's magically changed colour.

 You see here that the water has started to go clear. When it's pretty clear, rinse the scarf out and hang it to dry (or put it in the dryer).

This is a great project to do with older kids too as it's pretty magic seeming. The funny thing is that it doesn't matter how much water you use as the silk fibres just sucks up whatever dye particles are in there! Wow!

Rosemary Garlic Roasted Pork Loin with Puy Lentils and Braised Red Cabbage

AKA: Possibly the most delicious meal I have ever cooked.

There. I've said it. I think that Saturday's meal was right up there. I don't know why it turned out so amazingly well - was is the pork itself? The creamy, dreamy gravy/pan sauce? The meltingly tender red cabbage with a kick of vinegar? The earthy lentils that Emmett ate 3 servings of? I dunno, but it was pretty darn good. Sorry, no humility here.

It was a bit involved but soooooo worth it. Reckon on it taking about 2 hours (though you can leave it alone for most of this time).


For the Pork Roast:
Preheat your oven to 450F

• 2kg pork loin roast. In Canada they don't sell it with the skin on. If you're lucky enough to live somewhere where they do, score the skin, rub it with oil and salt and it will turn in to a great crackling (if it's a bit flabby at the end of the cooking, re-crank the oven to 450F for about 10 mins to crackle it up)
• 4-6 cloves of garlic. I used 2 ginormo hardneck ones.
• 1 large sprig fresh Rosemary
• Salt and Pepper
• Zest of a lemon
• 1-2 cups crimini/portabellini mushrooms (the brown ones)

Take your garlic, chopped rosemary and zest and put it in a mortar and pestle and pound it. 

I don't know why I took a photo of it. Maybe it's because I love my huge mortar and pestle sooo much.

Now stick it in a bowl,add a good grind of pepper, quite a bit of salt and drizzle some olive oil in there to make a nice paste-y mess. Put a bit more oil in the bottom of a dish (you want it to fit the roast fairly well) and plonk your roast in there. Now rub that garlicky goodness all over it. If there are any cracks and crevices, make sure you fill those babies up. Then put it in the oven.

After 30 mins, turn the oven down to 350F. After another 30 mins - 1 hour total cooking time so far - chop up some mushrooms and put them in the dish around the roast. Around this time, start thinking about he lentils and cabbage. If it's dry on the bottom of the dish (probably won't be) add a cup of water. Once the roast has cooked for about 1.75 hrs, start taking its temperature. You want the internal reading to be 70 degrees Celsius. Mine took just over 2 hrs. Once it reaches that, take it out of the oven, tent it with foil and let it rest while you prepare the pan sauce.

The Pan Sauce
Once the meat is cooked, there will be some lovely liquid/mushrooms in the bottom of the dish. If your dish is metal, put it right on the burner for this next part. If it's not (mine wasn't), then scrape all the juices and the yummy brown-y bits into a frying pan. Now add a glug of booze. I used red wine. Marsala would have been my first choice. Anything will be fine. If you're using the metal pan, you'll then scrape the really caramel bits of the bottom of the dish (deglazing the pan). Now stick your  finger in there and taste the juices and assess what it needs. Mine tasted amazing and didn't need anything. Yours probably won't either because of the rub. Now put in about 1 cup of whipping/heavy cream and bring to the boil. You'll boil it a bit to reduce it/thicken it. That's it. Done.

The Lentils

• 1 cup Puy Lentils. These are the iny dark green lentils, not the regular green lentils. These don't fall apart when you cook them. They are sometimes called French Lentils.
• Chicken Stock - I used a tetra pack of organic stuff. Real homemade stock would be even better.
• an onion, chopped
• 2 diced carrots
• Worcestershire Sauce

Fry your onion and carrots in some olive oil until they start to soften. Add your lentils and about 2 cups of the stock. Season with salt and pepper, bearing in mind that commercial stock is quite salty. Bring to the boil and then simmer until the lentils are tender. If it looks too dry, add more liquid, but the aim to to get the lentils to absorb most of the stock. At some point (doesn't matter) shake in some Worcestershire Sauce. If you did add too much liquid, you can drain the lentils (that stock can be added to the pan sauce in moderation). But if you don't add enough you'll burn your lentils. Once they are cooked, you can put them aside and easily reheat them.

Braised Red Cabbage

This dish is a family fave of Peter's. It's a German-y kinda thang. I can't tell you how many times I ate this kind of dish in Germany. It was usually totally oversalted, so don't be too authentic!!

• 1/2 a red cabbage, shredded as finely as possible. I'm bad at this, so mine isn't very fine - it just takes longer to cook
• Red Wine Vinegar
• Caraway Seeds

Put the cabbage, 1/2 cup water and a good glug of vinegar in a pot with some salt and pepper. Bring it to a simmer and put a lid on it. Check periodically to make sure there is still some liquid in the pan. Taste the cabbage as you go to see what the vinegar balance is like. You want it a bit tangy but not like pickles! When you're almost done, add about 1 tsp of caraway seeds. The cabbage should be uber-tender and lightly tangy. Oh, and bright purple.

Serving the beast

OK. I know that was long. But it's not hard in reality.

On each plate, put a pile of lentils and then some red cabbage. Carve off a few slices of meat and arrange artistically on the top and then put a generous amount of the pan sauce and mushrooms on and around it.

This is the kind of dish that could woo a Mother-in-Law. Try it.

Vietnamese Turkey Salad

When you cook a 21 lb turkey plus all the trimmings for 3 adults there are bound to be leftovers. In fact, boundless leftovers is a fairly apt description...

We always cook a really large bird because I love turkey and I love dreaming up new things to do with the leftovers. Here's a new post-holiday staple that is modified from Nigella Lawson's Feast cookbook. Basically, it's a coleslaw with a nam pla prik type dressing. Nam pla prik is a ubiquitous mix of fish sauce, lime and chilli that is found in Vietnam and Thailand.

What you'll need:

• 3 Tbs rice vinegar
• juice of 1 lime
• 4 Tbs Fish Sauce (Squid brand is the best, but any will do)
• 3 Tbs Sesame Oil
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tsp grated palm sugar or brown sugar
• 2 red birdseye chillis 
• Cilantro - about 1/3 bunch, chopped
• 3 Spring Onions (green onions)
• Half a small Red Cabbage
• 4-5 Red Radishes
• 4-5 cups chopped turkey meat - white meat is perfect here because it will drink up the dressing!

 Crush or mince the garlic and add it to the finely chopped red chillis. Add the lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, vinegar, oil and mix together. Now chop up your spring onions and add them, along with the turkey. At this point you can put it in the fridge until you're almost ready to serve. When you're good to go, shred the cabbage as finely as you can, cut the radishes into rounds and add them to the turkey mixture, along with the cilantro. Toss really well and serve! My husband loves this dish and can't get enough of it.

New House Numbers!

 Before...

...and AFTER! 

(ignore the big hole near the shutter)

Rachel posted about buying our numbers from Re-Store here and I finally hung them on the weekend! We'd been suffering with the old ones for way too long. Here is how I did it. I'm sure it seems obvious to the more handy, but for me it was a first time.

First I pried the old numbers off with a hammer

Next, I taped the guides to the wall, trying to get as many of the drill holes in the mortar. I then used a screw and a hammer to punch through the paper to mark the hole placement. Then, using the worst drill in the world, I drilled 1/8 inch holes using a masonry bit, and then re-drilled using 1/4 inch.

Then, the instructions said to fill the holes with caulking and push the numbers in, holding them in place with tape:

  And here is the result. If you look closely, you'll see that the caulking is visible. I'm going to trim it back as far as I can with a craft knife and if that doesn't help, I might try pulling them out and using a clear or darker coloured caulking. Or I could try using a Sharpie to colour it in....

How to get a Shiny Sink Without the Nasties

For a while I was really into the FlyLady. She's an online guru for de-cluttering and it was really great for us when we were trying to lose our slovenly ways. Her big thing is to shine your sink before you go to bed so that you wake up with it all beautiful. It's a really nice thing to do and got us into the habit of making sure the kitchen was really spotless after dinner.

However, her method involves lots of chemicals - bleach, Ajax etc. Here's how I do it using safer products. Warning - this is not going to be a pretty post! My sink's pretty old and (was) crusty and if I can get near-new looking results on it then yours will be amazing if it's newer.

First, dump a pile of Baking Soda (Bicarbonate of Soda) and/or salt in there. I prefer plain baking soda, but I was almost out that day so it's a mix.Then add a good squirt of whatever dishsoap you use. I use some hippy-dippy stuff (7th Generation normally) but Dawn or whatever you use is fine. Please note how disgusting my sink was, pre cleaning.

 Now get a scrubbie and scrub away. Because you're not using anything harsh you don't even need gloves! Woot! Make sure you get around the taps. Then rise it away and dry! Drying it is the most important step.

If you want to go one step further into insanity, you can use some Windex on it to really shine it, but I don't do it (and didn't for these pics). Then feel totally Martha Stewart.

Toddler-friendly flower crafts

Spring has finally sprung! We've been spending a lot of time in our backyard lately, and it's been great to re-introduce the outdoors to our kids.

However our backyard looks like this:

...like a meadow. Very picturesque, but quite soon the flowers will die and it won't look so pretty. BUT until then we have a pretty much endless supply of Forget-Me-Nots, Dandelions, and Violets. The cute little posy above was Eleanor's very first effort at pick a bunch of flowers.

Anyway, we spent a good hour doing some fun little flower things in the backyard. You probably did them as a kid, but it's a great reminder to, well, stop and smell the flowers!

Here are some cute dandelion bangles. First you take as long a Dandelion as you can find:

Then you break the flower off (!) and discard it and push the small end into the large one. Simple but cute.

So simple, a 2.5 year old can do it by herself!

Then we made a flower wand by tying a big bunch of Dandelions close to the head using another Dandelion:

And finally we made some Violet and Dandelion necklaces.

All you do is make a slit through the stem and thread the next one through it (ad infinitum) To complete the necklace, make a larger slit and thread the first flower head though it.

You can see that with teh Dandelions I just tied a knot in the end of each one.

Happy Spring!

DIY Natural Linen Placemats

I have been lusting after some linen placemats for quite a while now, namely those by Fog Linen. The thing is, I really couldn't justify paying $16 each for placemats...especially when:

1. I can sew
2. I have kids
3. I can't afford to spend $16 plus shipping on placemats

By the way, don't you just LOVE these teak boards and knives I found at a rummage sale for 25c apiece? They are called frühstücksbrettchen which basically means breakfast boards. They're used in Northen Germany and Scandinavia for breakfast and other bread based meals. My husband's family has always used them and we had been using some terrible warped pine ones until now!

Back to the placemats...

Imagine my excitement when I found pure linen at Fabrics-store.com for under $7 a metre! I went ahead and ordered quite a bit to make my own. Here's how I did it:

Here is the 6oz weight, marked out into 39cm x 49cm rectangles. I used a pencil because my fabric chalk wasn't showing up on it. I cut it with scissors because my cutting mat isn't big enough.

And I had a lovely stack of mats. The end. Haha, just kidding.

Sorry for the blurry pic, but this is the best shot to show you that I turned the edges over twice and pressed them (total seam allowance is 2cm, so 1cm per fold).

Here's a better pic showing you...I don't know. Well the pressed hem, I suppose.

I then machined around the rectangle, not bothering to mitre the edges or do each hem separately. I just sewed a box. This may come back to bite me, but I was in a hurry while the kids were napping.

How to make moustache crayons

Mustache shaped crayons for the goody bags? Yes please! 

Inspired by homemade by jill's race car crayons, I decided to get really crafty and make my own. I ordered a mustache chocolate mould from here and more or less followed jill's directions.

Here's how I did it:

 The hardest part was actually taking the crayons out of the paper. I made a slit down the side of the crayon using an exacto knife or craft blade.

Then took my crayons out

I grouped all like colours together, so I had a pink/red group, a blue/purple one and so on.

Then I waved my magic wand and turned the pink crayons into orange and yellow ones. Um, yep.

I was far to lazy and unsafe to do the double boiler technique so I went to a thrift store and bought the cheapest pot they had (50c!). It was dinged and dented and was fantastic! I put it on medium heat and in a few minutes (with some stirring using a chopstick) I had...

this!

Now, please don't hate me too much because I forgot to take a pic of the most important bit - the crayons actually in the mould inself. Instead of an excuse, just take this warning - don't leave the room and start facebooking while you have your melty crayons on the stove unless you want a house full of smoke. And then try and remain calm while you put the pot of stinky crayon soup on to your porch while trying to remove your birthday boy from the toxic (or non-toxic?) fumes.

Anyway, just pour the soup into your mould and put it in the freezer for a while. When they are hard (about the same time it takes to peel and melt your next colour) they will pop right out with no residue! I just wiped out the pot with a paper towel between colours and went from light to dark.

The irritating thing about my mould was that it only had 4 slots so if you're just doing it for fun (rather than a specific theme) I recommend choosing a mould with many slots.

And there you have it!

How to tie ribbon on a gift without twisting it

 Don't you hate that stupid twist on the back of a gift? Well here is how you can tie a ribbon and avoid that!

Here's my gift, wrapped (using my kid's scribbles artwork)


Use just over 5 times the width of ribbon, cutting each end on an angle.


 Hold your ribbon about 1/5 of the way in, at the centre of the gift.

Wrap it once, being careful not to twist.

 Now twist here - on the top of the gift

 Bring the ribbon around the back, to the front (without twisting it)

 Now tuck that end around your twist

 And tie it!

 Then tie a perfect bow (unlike this one)

And here's the back - smooooooth!