Making Homemade Playdough

Last weekend the girls and I made homemade playdough.  The recipe has been stuck to the fridge for months and we finally got around to actually doing it.  So my two helpers were……drum roll, please…..

M doing the measuring:

 

And Z doing the stirring.  Well, she stirred until it got too hot for her to. 

 

The ingredients are pretty simple; flour, salt, veggie oil, cream of tartar and food coloring.  I printed the recipe off so long ago, and after a computer failure I don’t have the original link anymore for where I found it.  So I apologize, deeply, for not giving credit where credit is due for this recipe.

 

M got a little crazy with the stirring and got flour all over the place.  LOL!

I failed to take a pic of the first process, but basically we mixed the water, salt and food coloring in the pot and let it boil for a while.  It seems like the water got really saturated with the salt cuz a good bit of the salt didn’t really dissolve, so after a while of it boiling like that we decided to just start adding the flour.  Z wanted it to be pink so we picked the combination on the food coloring box and M, instead of letting it drop into the pot gave it a good squeeze each time.  At first we thought we were going to end up with black playdough because she put so much coloring in.  LOL!  Then after a little while it started looking more like dark purple.

 

When we first started adding the flour it look like it was gonna stay lumpy, but it smoothed out after we started using the sifter.

 

It didn’t take long before it got really difficult to mix, so we had to switch from the whisk to a wooden spoon.

 

The directions said to stir it on low heat until the dough started pulling away from the pan and was not so sticky anymore.  Well, neither of that happened before we just couldn’t stir it any longer.  So we just had to stop.  We dumped it out on the counter to cool.

Once it was cool enough to touch I kneaded it a little, as you would with bread dough, and moved it to a bowl where I covered it with a dishtowel and let it sit over-night.  And the next afternoon……….

 

FUN WITH HOMEMADE PLAYDOUGH!!!!!!

 

Just store it in a freezer bag.  This is a gallon size bag, so you can see how much this makes.  But they will have playdough forever!!  Next batch we’ll try for a different color.  I also plan to experiment with other recipes as well.  I’ll let you know how those go.

 

Wordless Wednesday [on Thursday]

 

Maddie showing off how high she can get her leg up.  She loves dance. 

 

Seasonal Cleaning ~ Autumn

So it feels like fall just plopped itself right down on our heads all of a sudden.  Last night we slept with the windows open  and woke up to nice cool, crisp air.  It was quite delightful!  And the best part is we got to sleep under the clouds (a.k.a. soft, fluffy down comforter) all night long without waking up drenched in sweat in a panic to get the covers kicked off.  LOL!  Sleeping under the clouds makes the bed SO MUCH more comfortable!  BUT…. that wonderful cool, crisp air wafting through the apartment made us really need to turn off all the ceiling fans promptly upon getting out of bed.

Now I keep a pretty darn clean house, if I do say so myself…

 

 

The clouds…

 

BUT as soon as the fans stopped and we looked up THIS is what we saw:

 

 FREAKIN’ GROSS!!!!

 

I mean, I know it’s Halloween month and all but still!  Granted ~ we have not turned off the fans all summer long.  I guess this is a hard lesson that I need to turn them off regularly and clean them off.  No wonder things are getting a bit dusty a day or so after I clean.  Time to get out the Kirby attachments that I haven’t used yet. 

 

Oh how I love my Kirby!  Not that I’m trying to be a commercial for Kirby or anything, but this is The Best $1,000 I’ve ever spent!  Seriously!  I don’t dust by hand anymore.  I use the hose and brush attachment to dust everything.  Weekly!  Including the baseboards and wall hangings.  I spend a little over half a day every week cleaning our home thoroughly (I touch up almost daily along with picking up clutter of course).  Well, ok so after I vacuum/dust everything I DO go over it with a Murphy’s brand wood surface cleaner and a rag.  I like the smell and shine it gives.

Anywho….I said all that to say that since I can clean so well weekly, my seasonal cleaning really only consisted of cleaning all three ceiling fans in our apartment.  About a half-hours worth of work on a chair reaching up for the ceiling and now they’re good as new…

 

Dinner Tales ~ Chicken Pot Pie

Tonight I tried something new.  I’ve never made a pot pie of any sort and Honey has been asking for the chicken sort.  So I started perusing my cookbooks and wasn’t really impressed with what I found.  Even though I have some pretty old ones like Betty Crocker and Better Homes…I was disappointed to find that they STILL contained canned ingredients.  Really?  Come on now….

Then to my surprise ~ on a recently discovered website called Pinterest I found someone had posted Chicken Pot Pie made from scratch!!  It was actually a link to THIS website.  Although I altered the recipe just a bit to suit MY fancy.  I didn’t at all cook the chicken and vegetables as recommended.  And used my own homemade chicken broth.

I started out by boiling a whole chicken.  I added it to a large stock pot along with two cut up carrots, two celery stalks (chunky cut), 1 whole apple (sliced) and one onion (cut in half).  I boiled it all together for, well….I really don’t know how long.  A good part of the day anyway, until the chicken was soft and nearly fell apart when poked at.  Cooking is not always an exact science with me, I just go with what feels right at the time.  Once the chicken was done I took it out and set it in a bowl to cool.  While that was cooling, I let the rest of the veggies boil slowly in the water, which was now a light chicken stock. When the chicken was cool enough to pull apart I separated the meat from the rest and let the cat nibble on the bones and skin for a bit.  There really was no seasoning in the pot, so I didn’t see it as a problem for her.  Although I like feeding her raw better, she was at least getting some calcium from the bones.

Anyway…HERE is my original post on making stock.  But I must warn you my method changes over time.  I will post my next batch.  And tonight’s meal really wasn’t all about making stock, but what’s left after the recipe will be worked on some more tomorrow.

Where was I ?  Oh yes…the next thing I did was fish out the carrots, onions and celery from the stock pot and sliced them all into bite sized pieces.  Or at least tried to.  The onions and celery didn’t really cooperate, so it ended up being mushed up in the bowl more than chopped.  Which is fine with us, since we don’t really like the consistency of either.  >SHUDDERS!<  I followed most of the soupy part of the recipe pretty closely; combined the butter and onion in a pan and let it simmer for a few, then added in the seasonings.  But instead of regular ole all-purpose flour I used gluten-free baking flour, which I stirred into the sizzling mixture.  Then added all the chicken and veggies to end up with this:

I let it simmer for only a few minutes before transferring it to my Pampered Chef baking dish.  There it sat while I worked on the next step.

I also didn’t use pie crusts.  I instead used THIS recipe, from Gluten Free Cooking School’s site,  to make Light & Fluffy Gluten-Free Biscuits.  I used the recipe exactly since I’ve never really made any sort of gluten-free breads or biscuits before.  I wanted to get a feel for how it all works before I start playing around with it.  I gotta tell ya ~ grated frozen butter isn’t really that easy.  But it’s Oh So Beautiful in the end.

 

You have to make sure the butter gets distributed well through-out the flour mixture.  Here’s my tool of choice.  it cuts through the butter, breaking apart the clumps since butter likes to stick to itself.

 

After adding in the liquids for the recipe ya just plop spoon-fulls of the dough on top of the chicken mixture.  It goes in looking like this:

 

And comes out about 35 minutes later looking like this:

 

All but Z loved it.  Anthony had two large bowls of it and kept saying it was the best thing he’s ever eaten. And I have to say it was pretty gosh-darn-good!  Although we don’t think the biscuits would be very tasty on their own, ya know as biscuits ~ they were PERFECT to top this dish with.  But we also think we could be judging a little harshly, cuz cooked by themselves they may taste totally different without all the soppyness of the pot pie soaking into them.  We’ll try it one day and I’ll let ya know.

I now think I’m addicted to Pinterest!  I’ve found several other recipes that I’ve saved for later.  So watch for more Dinner Tales coming soon.

 

Dinosaur Plants

 

They don’t look like much normally.  But these little plants are really quite amazing.  First of all they are one of the longest living plants in the world.  In prehistoric times the ancestor to this particular plant would grow to be larger than a Tyrannosaurus Rex!  Over 120 feet!  But today they are much smaller.

The really great thing about these is that they are great if you aren’t so good with plants.  They can stay dormant like shown above for up to 50 years and will still perk up when placed in water.

 

Not only do they perk up ~ they turn green as well!

 

Even though they can sleep for that long, they really do like to have some water every once in a while.  They can grow indefinitely in a bowl of water, but also like some rest too.  Mine usually looks like the first picture.  Every few weeks we let it sit in water for a few days.  We change the water daily and rinse the plant off when changing the water.  I have personally noticed that if left in water for too long it will grow mold, so definitely make sure to let it dry out.

Want it to go back to sleep?  Just let the water evaporate:

Some interesting facts:

1. Native to Mexico and Texas

2. They curl up into a tight ball when dry so the wind can roll them around to a new location.

3. Needs some dry periods, which keeps them small.

4. Often used as Christmas decorations.

5. They are used to make fireworks.

6. They retain 3% of the water when dehydrated.

7. Is made into a absorptive powder in the pharmaceutical industry.

I know they are sold out west in roadside souvenir shops.  I got mine from my aunt and I have no idea where she got them from.  I think you can order them online as well.  They are really quite fun to have!