Last night we went to a Girl Scouts meeting. Well it was more like an orientation to the Girl Scouts. The leader relayed this story about a troop that went camping and invited a Daisy – who is a Girl Scout either in kindergarten or 1st grade – to come along. Part of the Girl Scouts mission is to teach leadership and self-sufficiency. So when dinner came around, the leader let the Daisy cut up the potatoes all by herself. When the Daisy returned from camping, it was that experience that she first told her parents.

Now I would have been like one of the other parents on the camping trip who wanted to take the knife away from her – that is only because I have such trouble cutting potatoes myself. It wasn’t until recently – oh how I’m ashamed to admit this – that my husband told me to use a larger knife to slice potatoes. It made cutting potatoes so much easier to use the largest knife I own. It’s also a little scary to wield such a huge knife.

I like to slice my potatoes and then cube those slices. It just seems to make the job easier and the potatoes cook faster – especially if I’m making mashed potatoes.

Now I will need to teach my daughter to use a knife in case she is asked on a camping trip to slice potatoes. A visit to the E.R. is not the way to end an outing.

So my husband and I were talking about the kid’s lunches when he mentions that you can brew tea in your refrigerator. How did we make the leap from school lunches to tea you might ask? Since school has started, it is once again time for the news to run every frightening story they can find. One said story is on bacteria that grows in too hot conditions. So in theory your child’s lunch could get too hot and be a “breeding ground for bacteria.” He read on LifeHacker that you can brew your tea in the fridge and avoid bacteria.

Martha says that you can brew tea in the refrigerator. I have heard of brewing tea with the sun but never in the fridge. This may be something I have to try. It seems like very little effort. Take cold water and add to it. Then sit in the fridge overnight. Seems easy enough.

I don’t drink a lot of tea but may have to try this for the sheer easiness factor. It just seems impossible to ‘brew’ tea in the fridge. This may be an experiment for the weekend.

Somehow I wound up with two flour containers – one has all-purpose and one has self-rising flour. I kept my sifter in the self-rising flour but took it out to use in something else. Now I’m not sure which flour is which.

I took to the Internet for advice on how to tell the difference. One suggestion is to taste it. The self-rising flour has salt in it, therefore it should taste a little bitter. I couldn’t taste the difference, so I tried another suggestion.

Since self-rising flour has baking soda in it, you can add some vinegar to it and look for a reaction. One flour just got wet but the other one did slightly bubble. So I guess I have my answer.

When I do some baking again, I will know for sure if this experiment worked.

Last night my husband made him some popcorn. I noticed that he used my mixing bowl to hold the popcorn instead of one of the three popcorn holders that are right by the microwave. He had to open up the cabinet, bend down, and reach for the mixing bowl. He might have even had to take a kitchen gadget or two out of it. He did all of that work instead of reaching right by the microwave and getting a popcorn container.

The night before when he made popcorn, he used my large(8 cups) measuring cup. Again, he could have used the popcorn container. Why does he do these things? At least with the measuring cup he was able to pour us some popcorn into a bowl with ease. Other than that, why does he have such a hard time remembering to use the popcorn containers?

We love our popcorn holders. I’m not sure why he insists on using everything but those containers to hold popcorn. If I asked him about it, he would probably say something like he didn’t think about the other containers or didn’t know where they were. Or he might have done it so I would say something. He loves attention. Good. Bad. Indifferent. It doesn’t matter as long as you are talking about him. That is probably the real reason he did it. He knew I would blog about it.

It’s really not a big deal but just one of those “what the heck are you doing?” moments. With my husband, we have those daily. I really shouldn’t be surprised by his latest antics.

While at the grocery store, I noticed that you can buy sliced peppers in a pack instead of having to buy the whole peppers. I pointed it out to my husband as a way to save money while still enjoying some of his favorite dishes. He then talked about how he saw sliced onions and celery that would make it easier for him when he cooks.

My husband does like to cook – he just hasn’t lately like in the past two years or longer. I’m not sure after that much time that he can still claim he likes to cook. His complaint is our kitchen – he hates it. Welcome to the club. I don’t like it either. It is an odd layout and very cramped. Now that I think about it, I don’t believe he has ever liked any of our kitchens. He still managed to work through his disgust and cook. Maybe he needs to be reminded of this.

It is fun to cook with someone. You can divvy up tasks and have someone to keep you company. Usually when I cook, my husband is still at work. The girl is usually watching her shows and some days she has an interest in helping. That usually lasts for about two minutes – about the time it takes for me to make her a spot at the bar to help out. Hopefully one day we will have a kitchen that meets my husband’s standards. Then he will have no more excuses.

Does your husband cook or helpful in the kitchen? I definitely want to make my current kitchen more husband-friendly.

Since I started back to work, housework is the last thing on my to do list. And apparently I’m not the only one. It seems a lot of working women at the office let the dishes pile up during the week. After I cook and eat the last thing I want to do is wash dishes. But it’s a necessary evil since I will need clean dishes to cook another meal.

My husband asked me this week if I would ever want to hire someone to do housework. I would have to clean for a week before I let anyone else clean my house. My best solution will be just to buy more dishes and then just wash on the weekend. That or just eat out more. Either way I won’t have to do dishes during the week. Both may be impractical but until I’m back to being a housewife, we need some easy solution to doing dishes.

We do use a lot of paper plates but you can’t really cook in paper pots. Guess I will have to keep doing some dishes during the week. If I use a pot a night, then I’m sure I have five pots. Problem solved. I’ll just do dishes on the weekend. Of course, who wants to spend the weekend doing the dishes? Maybe I need another plan..

How often do you change your kitchen sponge? Recently I’ve started using sponges again. Before when I had used sponges, I would use them until they got completely disgusting and then would be so grossed out that I wouldn’t want to use sponges for a while. But I really think a kitchen sponge is very useful to do dishes and to clean up the kitchen.

I just tossed the old kitchen sponges today and replaced them with two more. The dishes just seem cleaner like how my husband swears we get better gas mileage right after an oil change. The old sponges were looking pretty bad and were beginning to smell – a sure sign that it was time to toss them or at least out of the kitchen.

Apparently that old kitchen sponge can still be useful for other household tasks like cleaning the bathroom. According to some(Internet at large), you can sanitize a sponge by soaking it in vinegar.

So for now it seems a kitchen sponge lasts about a month before it becomes completely disgusting. I will try to clean up my old kitchen sponges to use to clean around the house since they are still in good shape and it would be a shame just to toss them.

After making blueberry jam a few weeks ago, I’ve been wanting a food processor since it would have been so much easier to prepare the blueberries with one. Much to my surprise, the food processors were cheaper than I thought, so I was able to get one for $29. Last weekend I tested it out by slicing up some vegetables for my husband’s lunch. It took longer to clean the food processor than it did to slice all the vegetables. I decided to try some new potatoes that I had bought since I love thinly sliced potatoes.

I can’t believe I haven’t bought a food processor before now. I guess I just had in my mind that I wouldn’t have any use for a food processor. I will be using it again this weekend to make blueberry butter and slicing up some vegetables for a salad. It does help to cut down prep time for meals. Since it makes food prep a breeze, I may even cook more. I’ve never been much of a cook but lately I’ve really had the desire to cook, so I’m glad that I have discovered a useful kitchen appliance.

This weekend I finally started to tackle the huge mess that is my kitchen. It had gotten so disorganized that even if I had something that I couldn’t find it. So it was high time to sort through it all even though I didn’t really want to.

We have very limited cabinet space and the space that we do have it oddly-shaped. That’s a big drawback of this mobile home. I’m not sure who designed the kitchen but it’s obvious they had never spent that much time in one.

I’m not sure why it seems the rule that spices reside in the small cabinet above the stove but this just doesn’t work well for me. So, I moved all the spices to a another cabinet. Now my pots and pans are in that cabinet. It works better for me to have the spices at a lower level.

Hopefully I can keep the momentum going this week and finish organizing the kitchen. Then it’s on to the rest of the house. If I can get that done, then I will be a very happy housewife.

My friend gave me a knife set for my birthday a few years back. One knife that I never used was the chef’s knife because it was so big that I just knew I would cut my finger off. Besides, I wasn’t exactly sure how to use it. So for years I would just use the smaller knives to grind through fruits and vegetables. That is until I was watching a cooking show and saw Rachel Ray use a chef’s knife. I thought it might be high time to try out my chef’s knife now that I’ve seen it in action.

I can’t believe I have never used this knife before. If you can’t tell, I don’t cook that much although recently I have begun to do more in the kitchen. I tried the chef’s knife on some tortillas that I had to cut in 1 inch squares for a taco bake.

It worked so well. Usually I have to do two tortillas at a time because my knife can’t handle the stack of six. I can’t believe how easy it was to use this knife. I really need to take a home economics class as I think now I would be much attentive and finally ready to learn about homemaking.