Freezer Fun Time

I, like many bloggers, have a day job to pay the bills and keep my cats alive.  My work day starts at 6:30AM and ends at 4:00.  This means my day gets going way before I am anywhere near ready to eat breakfast which is why I wind up eating at my desk halfway through my morning.  Now, that the boring part of this story is out of the way, let me just say I love breakfast burritos.  That’s what this whole post comes down to.  The lobby of my building has a food cart that sells breakfast burritos that I want to devour every single day.  However, at $3.50 a pop, the cheap side of me just couldn’t shell out the cash.  

So I decided to make my own.  And it was amazing. Made the burritos at home, froze them, and pulled one out of freezer the night before I planned on eating it.  Two minutes in the microwave and I was in breakfast heaven at my work desk.  Doing this got me on a freezer food kick and I started prepping other foods to be frozen so that I would have a steady supply of grub that was ready to go after a little reheating.  One or two days a month now, I’ll spend a few hours cooking and restocking my freezer. 

This month I made a new batch of breakfast burritos, black bean quesadillas, turkey meatballs, and a huge batch of spaghetti sauce.  

My staple go-to food for Freezer Fun Day is spaghetti sauce.  It is my go-to Sunday dinner when I’m feeling lazy because it’s Sunday and that’s what Sundays are for.  Pull a bag of sauce out of the freezer and throw it into a pot on low.  Let it reheat as I cook up some whole wheat pasta and broccoli.  Dinner’s ready to go in 20 minutes.        

 

The recipe for this spaghetti sauce came from my Grandpa and is very simple but flavorful.  It consists of tomato sauce, an onion, some wine, a little ketchup, and then brown sugar and spices.  No meat, no other veggies, just a great minimal sauce.  This is one of those dishes that my Grandpa never needed a recipe for and didn't even know the actual proportions of the ingredients.  He just eyeballed everything and it turned out great every time.  My mom managed to preserve his delicious concoction by watching him make it a couple times and figuring out everything he did.   

Saute the onions in a little butter until translucent.  Add remaining ingredients to pot and simmer on low for 2-3 hours.  Done and done.  When I'm doing a freezer cooking day, I always start the spaghetti sauce first.  By the time I'm done fixing all my other food, the sauce is done and ready to be bagged up. 

Once the sauce has cooled down, I measure out 2 Cups and transfer it into labeled freezer bags.  

One of these bags will be enough sauce for dinner and leftovers for lunch for both my husband and I.  Those with more than two people (not including our cats, they don't like Italian food....I think they may be racist) in their family will probably need to adjust their portions so you may not end up with five freezer bags but either way, this is a great time/money saver.

Also, little trick I found, when freezing sauces or soups, lay them flat in the freezer until they're frozen.

Once the bags solidify, they can be stacked upright in the freezer for easy viewing access and it saves space.

I am unashamedly proud of how organized my freezer is.

After my sauce was simmering, I started in on my next freezer food, Chinese Style Turkey Meatballs.  This was a new recipe found on Pinterest (seriously, where else?) and I was super excited to try it out because meatballs freeze extremely well and turkey is one of my favorite meats to cook with.  I find it absorbs flavors much better than ground beef which is usually why I end up substituting ground turkey for beef in most recipes.  The original recipe called for cilantro which I opted to leave out.  Mainly because I didn't have any and didn't want to go back to the store.

Mix all the ingredients together and portion out into meatballs.  To keep the size of the meatballs uniform, I use a tbsp cookie scoop to portion out the balls (hehe...balls) and then roll them into adorable little meat spheres. 

After 20 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, we have these.  Yum!

Once the turkey meatballs had cooled, I divided the whole batch in half and put away in bags.  One bag is enough for dinner and lunch the next day.  Cook up some brown rice and a vegetable (steamed peas?), mix together the sauce for these, and dinner is ready to go in an hour but that's only because rice takes forever to cook. 

While the turkey meatballs were cooking in the oven, I assembled some black bean quesadillas that I could easily take into work for lunch.  This is another Pinterest found recipe but I was surprised I hadn't thought of making these before.  I make quesadillas at least once a week.  Most leftover meat (like steak) ends up in a quesadilla.  In conclusion, quesadillas are awesome. 

Drain and rinse the black beans, chop up the onion and garlic, shred some cheese, mix everything together, and divvy out the mixture between tortilla shells.

Once all my tortillas were stuffed, I wrapped them in parchment paper and filled up some more freezer bags.  These could easily be made with your favorite kind of meat as well, just cook it up and toss it in with the rest of the ingredients.   

Now, for the feature player in our freezer food party, the breakfast burrito.  With six simple ingredients (tortillas not pictured, they're camera shy), an awesome ready-to-go breakfast is only a few moments away.  Well, more like 30 minutes but that's still not very much time.    

Cook up the sausage until all the pink is gone, drain meat to remove excess grease.

Wow, half cooked pork looks pretty gross close up....don't eat your sausage if it looks like this....

Next, dice up the red potatoes and onion and cook in a skillet, covered, for about 10 minutes until the spuds are easily pierced with a fork. 

While the potatoes and onions are cooking, I whisk together a dozen eggs with a splash of milk plus some salt & pepper. 

Once the potatoes are done, I dump the already prepared egg mixture directly over them and cook.

Once the eggs have cooked, I turn off the heat and mix the sausage and around 3/4 cup of cheese into the potato and eggs combo.



Before burritoizing the breakfast mixture, it helps to wrap the tortillas in a damp paper towel and microwave them for 20 seconds or so.  Helps loosen everything up so the shells are less likely to tear as they're being folded up.

This one batch produced 12 burritos that cost under a dollar to make.  Compared to the $3.50 burritos at my work, that sounds like a good deal to me.  Plus, my burritos are better.  Fact. 

Prior to freezing, let the burritos cool, and then wrap them individually in paper towels.  When you feel like having some breakfast burrito goodness in the morning, pop one of these out of the freezer the night before and let it defrost in the fridge.  Without removing the paper towel, microwave for two minutes, flipping the burrito over after one minute, and then enjoy!

So there we have it.  For around $40 in groceries and a couple of hours time, I ended up with five bags of spaghetti sauce, two big servings of turkey meatballs, 10 black bean quesadillas, and 12 breakfast burritos.  Spending $40 to get the bones of over 20 quick & easy meals is pretty satisfying.  Eating breakfast and lunch at work just got way better. 

Aside from you know, eating two meals a day at my desk which is kind of lame.  Plus side, it does allow me to catch up on Batman comics so it could almost be called a win.     

I love lamp...only after it cleans itself up though

Oh, hello garage sale lamp my husband picked up to resell on Craigslist for a profit.  What's that?  You'd rather I clean you up into something less 50's brothel and stay home with me.  OKAY!

So that's my story.  This project was quick, easy, and resulted in some much needed extra lighting in our living room.  Previously, we had zero lamps in that room which was insanely annoying.  At night, it was either full overhead lighting or total darkness.  I'm more of an in between person when it comes to my lighting preference.  When BJ brought this lamp home, I was instantly in love.  It's so unique with the curved details of the metal that holds that glass white spotted glass shade.  The color of the base needed some work though.  It's that old antiquey but not in a good way bronze-brass color.  



Goodness, do we a fence or what....

These beads are terrible too.  They remind me of the leg lamp from A Christmas Story but not in a pleasant way which seems almost impossible to do when it comes to that movie.  Besides, as soon as this lamp was brought inside, the cats were WAY too into it.  Hobbes stared and talked to it anytime they were allowed in the same room together and Yigs stared it down the way she does to everything she intends to stalk/attack.  If I didn't remove the beads, the kittens surely would have in a much more destructive way.

Luckily, whoever added these beads must have realized how terrible they would be perceived in the future and made them easy to remove.  Velcro, people.  It's a miracle.

Here, you can also see a more detailed view of the original color of the lamp base.  I don't hate it but with the way our house is currently styled, this color would have popped out in a not so good way.

As you could probably surmise from the above pictures where this lamp is sitting on a piece of cardboard outside, I opted for my go-to when it comes to makeovers and planned on spray painting the base of the lamp an oil rubbed bronze color.  Prior to painting, I wiped the whole lamp down to clean up any dust/grime so the spray paint would have a clean surface to grab onto.  The only other prep work was wrapping some masking tape around the electrical element whatever that the bulb screws into and putting the cord in a plastic bag.  Three steps that took all of five minutes and then it was spray painting time.

One spray paint montage later and we have this.

Ah! Ghost!

So much better without the beads

Close up of the new color



Okay, so truth telling time.  I like how the lamp turned out and I LOVE having the extra lighting in the living room but I hate the way the lamp looks in the room.  A floor lamp just isn't going to work here.  It also feels dwarfed by the overall size of the room. 



Aw, it's just a lil' guy

Plus, we have a bit of a walkway on this side of the couch and the lamp gets in the way of that.  With my klutzy tendencies, having an obstacle in a walking path is a combination for trouble.  Or a combination for a broken lamp. 


Find the cat....and ignore the mess....

 So, as a result of all this, my newly redone lamp has not found it's permanent home as of yet.  It's still chilling in the living room until I can figure something else out because, as I've stated, the extra lighting is awesome.  There's a table lamp in our den that I may switch out here after some furniture switch-a-roos.  I love a good room makeover that costs nothing.  And who knows.  Once I find a permanent spot for this lamp, I may spray paint it an entirely different color.  Hence why spray paint is so awesome. The lesson learned from this whole project though was that floor lamps are not going to work in our living room. 

Also maybe put the lamp in the room before you paint it to see how it looks.  I just get so excited to work on stuff sometimes....I'm working on it....I was also a bit desperate for a quick project to post up this week.  Either way, if the lamp doesn't end up anywhere else in the house, it'll just fulfill its original desitiny and end up on Craigslist. 

Towel Bars Beware II: Towel Barred Harder

Wow....that title sounds unfortunate.

So when we last left off, this shelf had been built but not hung in its rightful place.  Unfortunately, since I built this shelf from scratch, it didn’t come with any hanger thingys already attached.  Weird, I know.

After a quick bit of research, the hanging hardware of choice that ended up on the back of this baby was keyhole hangers.  According to the couple of DIY pages the internet shared, these would be strong enough to hold everything up, lay relatively flat against the wall, and be easy to install.  So easy to install that I offer you four steps to attaching your very own keyholes hangers to a shelf or other apparatus that is in need of hanging.    

Once all four extremely crucial steps have taken place, TA-DA, a shelf can be hung.

Man, taking a picture of a bathroom that has no windows with a camera without a wide angle lens is tough.  But, I did the best I could.  To make up for the quality, I've included a cat butt in the below picture.  You're welcome.  This is what our bathroom wall looked like prior to the detowel barring. 



Blurry cat butts make everything better

 Now, truth be told, I've never removed a towel bar from anything before but luckily, it ended up being crazy easy.  The one tricky part was actually removing the screws that hold the bar to its wall hanger.  The only screwdriver on hand that was small enough came from a glasses repair kit but I couldn't get a grip on it enough to turn the screw hence the appearance of the needle nose pliers in Step 1.    

Once the wall was all spackled and sanded, it was time for paint.  This was the point where I realized that we have a lot of blue walls in our house therefore creating an excess of half full paint containers that are also blue.  Thankfully though, my husband was smart enough to label the paint cans appropriately.  Yep, prepare for bathroom adventure time. 

After the agonizing wait of allowing the paint to dry (no picutres of this because seriously, you want to see a picture of drying paint?), it was time for the hanging.  Now, I was home alone during this step so I couldn't get the fella to snap a picture so I tried to recreate it on the floor.  Just imagine the below picture happening 4 1/2 feet up.

"What's up with the ruler?", you may be asking.  "Pinterest" would be my reply.  Little life hack I came across after being on Pinterest for a gabillion hours.  Take a ruler, nail a small nail through it about an inch from the bottom, and you have created the most handy tool ever for hanging things.  In this case, place the nail inside the keyhole hanger (where the screw will be going), place shelf on wall, once proper placement is found, gently press the shelf against the wall which in turn will press the nail in the ruler against the wall.  The nail will make a small mark showing exactly where the anchor and screw need to go.  I've used this ruler/nail tool a dozen times to hang pictures up in our house and it's awesome.  No more guessing or measuring needed to hang pictures up in the correct spot the first time.

My process for this portion of the project was to use the ruler hanger to mark where the left anchor and screw would go.  Once those were installed in the wall, I hung the shelf on it and using a level and my ruler tool, was able to easily mark where the anchor and screw for the right side should go.

I also added some felt cirlces to the bottom two corners of the shelf to help stop any bumping around plans this sucka may have had. 

Once everthing was said and done, our bathroom looked a little something like this.  Or exactly like this.  It is a picture afterall. 



No more linen origami.  No more straightening out haphazard towels.  NO MORE TOWEL BAR. 

Here's a nice Before/After shot of the bathroom. 

To be fair, the cat butt does add a little something extra to the Before picture

I love it.  The shelf offers space to display some cool knick-knacks which currently consist of a ceramic octopus I bought BJ for Christmas last year, a glass bottle filled with agates and sea glass, as well as another bottle filled with beach sand. My family used to go to Newport beach every summer when we were all little so I wanted to take a bit of the beach with me on our final trip.  The octopus prints are also hung a bit higher than previously which I think adds some nice scale to the walls/ceiling.

And, the most crucial point of this entire endeavor, no more towel bar......or is there....BUH BUH BUUUUUUDUUUUUHHHHHHH. 

Towel Bars Beware

Oh, towel bars.  If I didn’t already have a nemesis, you would be my greatest foe.  I fucking hate towel bars.  Hate them super hard.  You can’t fit more than one towel on them without knowing some odd form of linen origami and when they’re folded up, they never dry fully.  Reaching in hope for a nice dry towel after getting out of the shower and wrapping yourself in what is essentially an annoyingly damp mold factory is one of the worst things ever in my fluffy bubble of a world. 

When the fella and I moved into our new house, one of the first things I did was install hooks next to the shower in the master bathroom.

Did they really expect us to comfortably fit two towels on that piece of crap bar?

I think maybe one box had been half unpacked before I declared, “Screw this noise!” and ran out to purchase two $1.99 hooks.  Still one of my favorite changes to the house.  Cut to over a year later and I have declared war against the towel bar in the guest bathroom.  Granted, the shower in this bathroom has only been used a handful of times (mostly as a wash basin for beer brewing equipment) so the issues I have against my second greatest adversary don’t pop up all that often but still, all towel bars must be exterminated. 

For once, the Daleks and I agree.

My plan of attack was to build a simple shelf with hooks so the towels could be hung sans linen origami and the shelf could hold some cool decorative/display items.  Due to my lack of woodworking knowledge, building something entirely from scratch was a little daunting so I opted for the most functional yet simple design possible.   Seriously simple.  Its two pieces of wood connected with a couple corner brackets, screws, and glue.  There are also hooks....did I mention the hooks?  Because they are kind of essential to this whole party.   

First step was to cut down and stain the plank of wood being used which was in no way pilfered from the scrap piles of a dozen or so construction sites located around our house thus making the main portion of this project free.  Made one cut and turned a 5x6x1 piece of wood into two 2.5x6x1 pieces of wood.   The bathroom this shelf is destined for is currently rocking an octopus theme so I wanted something more rustic and maybe nautical looking, like the shelf was created from old pieces of a pirate ship, all weathered, worn, and imperfect.  To create some distressing on the wood I used a crescent wrench and banged the shit outta this thing to create dents, divots, and scratches.  It was super fun. 

 

Top: untouched wood.  Bottom: banged up and stained...similar to a hooker on a rough night

The wood stain (Miniwax Wood Sheen in Colonial Walnut) pools in the flaws of the wood created from the cathartic wrench swinging session coloring these pieces darker and creating an aged look.

Once my wood was all awesomely banged up and the stain had dried it was time to start assembling this thing in way that it would hopefully stay together.

Ran a line of wood glue along the edge

Set with clamps during the drying period

For some extra security, I also added wood screws going through the back section of the shelf and into the actual ledge portion.  I marked where the hardware needed to go, drilled pilot holes, and then added the screws.

Yea, screws!

There was a slightly annoying issue with the hooks I bought in that they did not come with screws.  After digging through our large mish-mash of hardware, I managed to locate the six necessary to complete this step.  The other lame detail was my hooks were a bronze color whereas all the screws found were silver.  Silver screws on bronze hooks looked stupid so I painted them oil rubbed bronze with leftover spray paint from a previous project.  

Inferior stupid silver screw on left.  Amazingly awesome painted screw on right.

The corner brackets/screws also got a coat of spray paint

 After all the hardware had dried....or mostly dried....I'm really impatient, I rinsed and repeated the whole marking where things needed to go, drilled pilot holes, attached the hardware, and ended up with this.

I could not be more pleased with how this turned out.  Funny thing is, after I put this whole shebang together, I realized that I didn’t have the proper hardware to hang it on the wall.  So, this post will be split into two parts my friends.  In the follow up post, I’ll show everything involved with attaching the hanging hardware to the shelf and then removing every last trace of the old towel bar from the bathroom so that we may forever forget its existence and replace it with the glory of my newly constructed apparatus.

TO BE CONTINUED......

Bookcase Redo: Wine Bar Edition

So let’s make a long story short and then make it medium length.  One day I looked at the bookcase pictured below and thought, “That could totally be a wine bar.”  In probably what will prove to be record time, I thought of an idea and managed to execute it in the span of a day.  Good for me. 

On to the medium length story, the below bookcase sits in the corner of my kitchen with his buddy Wine Fridge where they hang out having grand adventures of keeping my booze at the proper temperature and storing serving pieces/cookbooks.  As you can see, the contents of the bookcase are pretty sparse and no matter how many times I wandered through the house looking for other pieces to make this look like a real space and not something that was thrown together in a corner (which it totally was) I kept coming up empty.  The husband and I just do not have that many decorative pieces.  Moving from a one bedroom apartment into a three bedroom home left a desire for a lot of different items and we’ve focused our extra money towards other things, like a kitchen table, bookcases, computer desk, etc. and not necessarily towards items to help beautify and personalize our home.

All in all, I like the placement of the bookcase, it helps adds some nice height to the corner and seems to ground the eating area.  But it lacked something to make it a stand-out piece.  And then the wine bar idea came to me. 

 

The only materials I needed to purchase were two of the upside down wine glass hangers.  One trip to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and $20 bucks later, I was all set to go.  After empting the top half of this bookcase (actual shelf area and cupboard are not connected) I enlisted some help from the muscles of the family i.e. the fella, and finagled the shelving half to the floor to get to work.

Attaching the glass holders took all of ten minutes.  The only tricky part of this process was I was attaching them to a fixed shelf (could not be easily/at all removed without taking the entire thing apart) so I was working sideways the whole time.  However you are working on this step though, whether it be sideways, from the top, upside down, or perhaps under water, simply place the hangers where you want them and mark the holes where the hardware is going to go.  I drilled small pilot holes as well, taking extra care not to drill straight through the shelf, so there was less chance of splitting the wood and the screws went in really easy.  Honestly, I probably could have skipped this step, but I like using power tools so I'll take any excuse to bust out the electric drill.

Not pictured: Hobbes on the other side of this shelf attacking the back of the bookcase.  Bookcase backings are apparently really threatening.

This project also allowed me to do something I’ve been dying to try which is add a paper or fabric backing to a bookcase. The pop of color and texture poking out from behind items displayed on a bookcase just makes me smile.  After digging through my fabric stockpile, I found a couple yards of a neat geometric pattern in a kelly green color.  The backing on this bookcase was the flimsy kind that was held in place by tack nails so it was easily pried up using the claw side of a hammer.  Once that was up, I used a staple gun to fix the fabric in place, trimmed the excess off, and then replaced the flimsy backing using some fresh tack nails being careful not to hammer them into the newly added staples.  Am I the only one who has a ton of leftover tack nails from assembling furniture?  I can never seem to use all of them up on their designated piece.



Back of shelving with backing removed



Hold the fabric tight as you staple around the edges. 



Kitten interruption: one of the many hazards of crafting



Shelving dekittened and excess fabric trimmed off.

Once the backing was back in place, the fella and I returned the shelving to its proper place and BAM, instant wine bar….well, almost.

A few glasses and accessories later and then BAM, instant wine bar.  Pictured here are a variety of wine glasses including our only set of champagne glasses that have Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas printed on them because that’s where we got married and they were free with the wedding package we chose.  So yea, we’re pretty fancy.  Also pictured is a half drank bottle of wine which used to take up space on the kitchen counter before I made this beautiful new home for it.  To help with the drinking of wine, I also snagged a small tray (pilfered from another room) to house a couple bottle openers, a foil cutter, and a glass container to collect corks. 

Yep, vintage milkshake tray to hold wine stuff.



Overall, I’m pretty stoked about this project.  It still needs a little tweaking, maybe a small piece of artwork to go in the glaringly empty space between the bottle of wine and the tray.  But, next time we have a party, I can totally see a couple open bottles of wine along with small bowls filled with antipasto goodies for snacking being stationed here.  Also, bonus, having the majority of our wine glasses in this spot cleared out some much needed space in our kitchen cupboards.