Delicious Stickers

Eco-Kid Project: Homemade Recycled Stickers

All kids love stickers but they do come on those little glossy sheets most of the time; glossy sheets that are thrown away when your kids are done. There’s a homemade version that you and your littles can make that creates less waste.

You need:

• 1 package (1/4 oz) unflavored vegan gelatin (or normal gelatin if you’re ok with that)
• 1 tbsp cold water
• 3 tbsp boiling water
• 1/2 tsp white sugar
• 1/2 tsp extract — I like almond but you can use vanilla, orange, lemon, whatever you like

Creating the stickers:

1. Put cold water into a small bowl and sprinkle the gelatin in. It should sit about five minute.
2. Add boiling water. Mix until powder dissolves.
3. Add sugar and extract. Mix.
4. Grab a paint brush and brush the mixture onto sheets or scraps of recycled paper. Since kids will be licking this stuff be sure that you use paper that is still clean — at least on one side. This is a great idea for how to make use of scraps of paper used in previous art projects.
5. Let the paper dry for about an hour.

Later if your paper has dried and curled up just set something heavy on it for a bit. At this point if you covered full sheets with the gelatin mixture you’ll want to cut out shapes or strips — really cut whatever shapes you’d like your stickers to be. Use stencils for ideas. You can also keep the stickers abstract if using small bits of scrap paper. One cool idea is to use decorating scissors like Fiskars to give your stickers a fancy border.

Have your kids gather up all their art supplies and go to town. They can decorate the non-painted side with glitter, fabric, paint, markers, glitter glue, buttons, google eyes, and more — whatever catches their fancy.

After kids decorate their stickers they can lick them and they’ll stick to holiday or birthday cards, gift wrap, brown bags, and more. Because of the extract when the kids lick the stickers they get a little taste sensation. I suppose you could also use flavored gelatin instead of extract. I haven’t tried that but I bet it works.  

I am writing a post for people like me that just want to cook some whole grain barley in their GD rice cooker and can’t find a proper and complete how-to in all the land.  You know how we’re all going to Farmer’s Markets now (oh you’re not? yikes. you should) and getting all sorts of delightful things like fractal broccoli and honey from fresh squeezed bees or quail eggs and 36 kinds of tomatoes?  Well, this summer Matt and I got a ton of barley from some real legit farmers; each wee barley grain lovingly caressed into existence by dedicated hippies with sweet beards n stuff. (www.shakeforkcommunityfarm.com)  

I admit that the farmer lady that we bought the barley from did in fact try to tell me something about how to prepare it but I must’ve glazed over and figured it would be just like rice. Something about toasting it first to make them pop…cast iron…may smell kind of burny…I don’t know.  But now I’ve figured it out! And that’s what I’m trying to tell you.  Disclaimer: This is not for pearled barley, whatever that is. Just kidding I know what it is.  It’s cous-cous!  Just kidding again, it’s just barley that’s been fondled a lot harder than the barley I bought.

Ingredients

1+ Cup of Whole Grain Barley

1 Cast Iron Pan

1 Rice Cooker

2 3/4 cups of water

Directions

Put Barley in cast iron pan like so:

Heat the barley over medium heat until you hear it start to pop.   This part is kind of labor intensive because cast iron pans are heavy and they retain a lot of heat so you have to use a potholder to hold on to it while you’re shaking the barley around.  It’s going to smell kind of burny, but it shouldn’t smell too burny.  That is how chefs describe it I think.  My experience has been that not all the barleys pop, maybe half of them.  Do not sort out unpopped barley, in case you were tempted to do that.  The cool thing about this step is that, aside from giving your puny muscles a work out, it also imparts a really nice toasty flavor to the barleys.  

Once your barley is toasted, you can let it cool and store it, or you can toss it into your rice cooker with the water (or if you’re ready to get crazy, soak it some other kind of liquid like broth or something) and let it sit overnight.  For some reason, I missed this important little piece of the puzzle and suffered many unsatisfying barley moments trying to go straight from toasting to rice cookery.  So, after it’s passed this most crucial step, the Overnight Soak, cook on the brown rice setting.  My rice cooker plays a jaunty twinkle twinkle little star when it’s finished, but yours may only beep and that’s ok too.  I’ve been soaking overnight and setting the timer so it’s ready in the morning to transform into the star of my lunch.

You can pretty much do a billion things with barley.  Soup, cereal, salad, side dish, whatever.  I’ve been liking it with a little bit of fresh squeezed orange juice, orange zest, olive oil, salt n pepper, parsley, feta, diced red onion and toasted nuts.  Roasted beets are delicious in der too.  The barley is a chewy nutty satisfying popping kind of bite.  It’s like how I would imagine a bunch of tiny edible water balloons filled with rice might taste.

I’ve been making my own pasta sauce for a while.  I started out doing it the way my Grandparents do it but now I sort of have my own way.  Sauce evolution! So if anybody needs an easy sauce recipe that tastes like family love, this will work for you.  It can take hours, so you might need to buy a couple extra bottles of wine if you plan to make a day of it.

Ingredients:

Olive Oil

1 red onion

5 cloves of garlic

Italian sausage (I found a place in Loleta that makes fresh beef sausage, either in weenie form or ground up in chunks and it’s awesome.  I always lean towards fresh and local but I also like Molinari mild sausages. Again, whatever is your favorite.  My grandparents use pork chunks too.)

1 bay leaf (who knows what bay leaves do really.)

*Optional Red Pepper flakes

1 cup of Chianti (or any Italian wine that you like and I never measure, more is ok)

32 oz. Stock (homemade stock is rad, I prefer vegetable stock to meat stock though so if you’re at the grocery looking for stock, get the veggie stock and try it.)

24 oz. pureed strained tomatoes (I like Bionaturae in the glass jars if tomatoes aren’t in season.  I have a food mill that I’ll use in the summertime when tomatoes are bursting all over. Simmer fresh tomatoes for a little while first to loosen the skins before food milling.)

1 Parmigiano Rind (If you buy fresh Parm for topping off your pasta, just cut the rind off the back and throw it in the sauce. Flavor town.) 

1 handful of chopped parsley

1 handful of chopped basil

Mise En Place (aka prep work):

Get a wooden spoon.  You can only use wooden spoons when making sauce.  I don’t know why, but I’m sure there’s some science about it.  

Dice onions and garlic (I use the SliceSy by Bamix, it’s like a food processor/immersion blender combo) together in a food processor or with some other chopper gadget. Bust out your equipment if you have it unless you like sobbing over onions. I do not.  I imagine that I’m going to make my sauce melancholy or something.

Cooking the Sauce:

In a large sauce pot (I use Matt’s big Le Creuset) go 4 times around the pot pouring the olive oil.  Heat over medium to medium high heat.  Add the onions and garlic.  The oil doesn’t need to be hot, you just want them to get a little translucent.

Add the sausages and brown them. Throw in mysterious bay leaf and red pepper flakes if using.  

When the sausages are browned, add the wine and scrape up the bits off the bottom of the pot.  Cook the wine down so the booze evaporates (5 minutes seems like torture enough.)  This is also a good time to start drinking wine.  

Dump in the stock and pureed tomatoes.  If using the glass jarred tomatoes then put a half cup of water in the jar after you’ve dumped the tomatoes and swirl it around to get all the tomato out and pour it into the pot.  Stir it all up.

Bring the sauce to a bubble and then turn the heat down to Low so that it can simmer with barely any visible movement on the top.  

The sauce can cook for 2-5 hours depending on your booze tolerance or how patient you are.  It changes so much throughout the cooking time, the longer it cooks and reduces the more rich it is.  I’ve been liking a thinner sauce so I call it after 2.5 hours.  When you’re ready to take it off the stove, throw in the basil and parsley.  

If you left the sausages in link form, fish them out, boil some pasta and get down with your carbs.  Grate a really obnoxious amount of cheese on top.  If you’ve got access to some crusty fresh bread, everybody in the pool.

You & I by scalvosa

If you lost a loved one on September 11th, how would you feel if everybody was talking about all these abstract things instead of just saying, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”  Instead they talk about public manipulation, the insipid cynical response and the resulting loss of hundreds of thousands of lives across the world. Or the opposite, people flying their flags of Godly Governmental outrage and falling all over themselves to thank the troops (like the way you’re grateful that you can send your older brother or older sister out to check on that noise you heard in the backyard that may or may not be a serial killer waiting to dismember the next person that steps off the porch) for keeping them safe in the War on Terror.  I’m so sick of hearing about the war on terror! You can’t declare war on “terror.” Just like you can’t declare war on “drugs.”  It was base human tribal warfare, those humans wanted to hurt these humans, and then these humans hurt a lot of other humans and basically some humans are huge jerks; Power hungry and consumed with forcing their opinions about life, the universe and everything onto every other human. 

I think a true rememberence of 9/11 is appropriate and that today, we grieve and remember how horrified we felt and how Americans far away wanted so badly to hold your hands and let you know that we were with you.  Whatever you wanted, or needed, we were ready to help you and to love you and to comfort you.  But true rememberence of the following days might be appropriate too.  Remember when Colin Powell lied to the UN in order to get us into the war with Iraq? We should memorialize everything, do some Monday Morning Quarterbacking.  Would all those people posting the Pledge of Allegiance on their facebook statuses re-agree with all the decisions that were made then?  All of the following days, after today, should be a look back, a memorial.  I wonder if we won’t look back and really see things for what they were, 10 years later, mistakes and all.  Or if some of us will stick to their guns (haha! guns! get it?) and hold fast that we did everything just the right way and that losing hundreds of thousands of souls on our planet in response and in the name of war was just what the doctor ordered.  

So today, I think God and Government should be taken out of the equation.  It should be about the grief and checking in with each other, we’ve survived 10 years together, so how are we doing? It’s like picking up the phone to call your Gramma and ask her how she’s doing after you’ve been too busy to talk for a few months. You love your Gramma but you know, she makes you uncomfortable when she talks about how your Grampa died and how much she misses him.  But today we suck it up and let ourselves go there, miss Grampa, comfort Gramma, dive into that.  I’m thinking of all of us and all of you that lost loved ones, that still suffer, the brave people that risked everything.  Today I’m thinking of you, but tomorrow, I’ll be thinking about what happened on September 12th and I think we should all examine that.   

“I’ve attached my resume as a .pdf but I can send it in any format you choose.  I could probably figure out a way to laser carve it into a block of cheese using a satellite orbiting the Earth and my iPhone, while simultaneously podcasting the event, releasing key soundbites on youtube that I’m concurrently uploading to my blog that are then simultaneously released via twitter, facebook and google+ all while booking a rental car and a room at the Deer Creek Inn in Nevada City so that I can do some shopping before my interview.” 

I wish I could write whatever I wanted! If I could write whatever I wanted, or write with a trueness of personality, new co-workers wouldn’t be surprised and scared when they really got to know me. I hate applying for jobs. It’s so cheeseball all the time, everybody wants the same thing. “Can you use the facebook n the youtubes and the twitter?” Why, yes I can! “Can you multitask?” I’m currently peeing and applying for this job at the same time. “Can you use a telephone to talk to people?” You betchyourass I can. I will hop on that phone and talk you right down off a ledge when you try to jump off it after reading my resume and realizing how banging my qualifications are.  ”Are you eager to learn?” Hell yeah! I don’t care what you’re teaching, it could be some seriously vile halfway illegal shit but I don’t care, I’m eager to learn.  

Dammit employers. Go ahead and just take it for granted that because I’m under the age of 97 that I’m internet savvy and know how to use a phone, like I can really use a phone.  The average person’s eyes would become chaffed and bloody if they used their phone as much I do. You gotta work your way up to this kind of phone useage.  Also because I’m over the age of 23 it stands to reason that because of LIFE in general being pretty much a pain in the ass for nearly all people, I’m probably a bit more smartass than cheerleader; yet because I’m again, not 97, I’m going to have some pretty good energy.  No need to ask me about my energy level unless you really want a truly honest answer about the number of naps I’m going to take on your dime.  Matt would probably look at you earnestly with his totally impressive eyebrows furrowed and shake his head like, “No man, don’t even go there.”  

**Please note that I still currently love my job very much and that I’m still gainfully employed and that I’m just researching a move to Nevada City in the next 10 months.