Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2017

Making home made Ghee from butter!

After reading a lot about the benefits of eating real foods, I decided to go a bit more "natural" with my cooking oils. I have come to realise that a lot of vegetable oils are made using all sorts of awful chemical processes that I couldn't hope to replicate in my kitchen - making them so altered from their natural state they couldn't come under the heading of real food anymore. Olive oil has been a standard in our house but its not so good at high temperatures, so I needed something that was able to withstand the heat of a stir fry for example, and then I remembered Ghee. Its just clarified butter. Butter is nice and natural and can be made in my very own kitchen so therefore its not a complicated industrial process. Ghee is even simpler and quicker to make than the actual butter itself. The reason butter smokes and burns is that its full of dairy "solids". Once you melt the butter and start to heat it, those solids start to burn, turning your butter

Homemade dog treat toy!

We have an Australian kelpie called Tia. I think she is a red kelpie crossed with a normal kelpie but at any rate - she is a kelpie through and through. She gulps her food like she has never been fed and also like to bury bones and other bits and pieces to the delight of the chickens who promptly dig it up and eat it themselves. In order to give her a treat that she cant bolt down in a half second and also to be able to leave something for her to find later - we created a time lapse capsule dog toy for her! I had seen something like this at our dog sitters place but it was free standing on a frame and moveable. I didn't have the skills, time or patience for something like that so decided we could use the same principals and make something similar with what we had. Once you've seen it - you don't really need instructions but I'll run you through what I did so you at least know the pitfalls to avoid and the improvements to make! Here's what I did...

Making a Terrarium out of an old Moccona jar!

I have always loved terrariums! The whole concept of an ecology system in a jar on my bench really appeals to me! There was a workshop at Capalaba Nurseries on making Terrariums for Christmas and so I went along to see how it was done. It was a fabulous hands on workshop with a great instructor called Emma who is unflappable and full of hints and tips as well as really knowing her stuff. After I attended this workshop I tried making my own at home for Christmas gifts and was really really pleased with the results... Here's what I did... Starting with a largish jar (the Moccona on the right is about a 2 litre capacity) I gave them a good wash and clean to make sure I wasn't locking any nasty moulds or bacteria in with my plants. Next comes a decent handful of rough rocks and gravel for drainage. Since these are going to be seen, its good to make sure they fit with your overall colour and/or theme. When I went to buy gravel for this project, they guy handed me a g

Dying a red dress purple!

I have this amazing fire engine red dress that I bought to go to a graduation. The young man I was supporting had a black suit with a red tie and wanted me to wear the same colours. I found this dress for $10 at the local op shop and managed to pick up a pair of shoes, a scarf and a clutch bag all for the princely sum of $20 in total! I wore it again to an 80th birthday party but decided that it was a bit bright for me and never wore it again. I love the dress but found bright, bright red to be a little (a lot, really) too bold for me. I toyed with dying it but didn't want to ruin it and so it hung in my wardrobe. I was reading some books about clothes dying and one author pointed out that if I tried to dye it and it didn't work, I wasn't going to wear it anyway so what difference would it make to try and fail??? I couldn't refute that logic and decided to give it a go! Here's what I did... I researched on line for the right kind of dye for the materia
Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...