I like this blue. A lot. Here is the second part of all the kitchen items I have! My partner and I have managed to collect a lot when we were introduced to the adulting world and needed to cook for ourselves.
We liked these pans, although they have since peeled and started rusting. We mainly use them for foods (or crafts) that need to be in the oven but not in direct contact with the pan. For instance, cooking packaged frozen food for dinner or cooking painted glass to set the design.
This was a godsend for me in my college marching band days. I would roll it up when it was empty and keep it in my shako. It’s great for having water around and takes up very little space when empty.
Inspired by Beth Terry’s My Plastic Free Life I caved and got a glass water bottle. I also bought an extra cap that came with a build in silicone straw because I didn’t want to have to tip the bottle to drink from it. My inner 5-year-old also wanted something that felt like a sippy cup
I was inspired by this video about making edible cookie dough and wanted to make a green tea version. Perhaps in the future I’ll even make a youtube video.
Green Tea Cookie Dough 3 Ways
Each variation serves 4-6.
Food Allergy information listed at the end of this post.
For those of you really like green tea, you can add more than 2 and a quarter table spoons of the powder to the base dough.
Matcha powder and most of the asian treats can be found at asian super markets or sometimes Whole Foods. If you do not have asian grocery stores near you, your next best bet is probably Amazon or eBay.
Matcha Oreos actually exist, but good luck finding them outside of Japan.
A lot of the matcha candy treats may have to be imported. If this does not sound good to your wallet, you can always make your own substitutions or find recipes online to make your own matcha chocolates so you don’t have to buy them.
My university had its Computer Science department in the School of Engineering. Not all schools are set up like this. Thus I am a computer scientist that can proudly proclaim to the world that I am also an engineer.
Friends and family have always said I’m good at coming up with solutions on the fly, using objects in my environment and finding alternative uses for them. Here are a few to share, to open source some of my zany creations.
Watch a Show or Movie on Your Ceiling
My boyfriend and I rented a movie and wanted to watch it from the comfort of our bed. Our apartment at the time did not have available open walls so I decided that projecting on to our ceiling would work best. Although we got the ceiling projection to work, we couldn’t take the movie seriously when one of the main characters sounded exactly like one of our co-workers from work.
The How To:
Loosen the belts as large as they get, then wrap them around the container (parallel to the short side). Connect the buckles on the outer side of the tupperware container. Then place the projector on the belts, hanging inside the tupperware container like a hammock. Plug in, adjust the picture and enjoy.
Last Minute Large Object holder
I made a great prank present for my brother where I proceeded to wrap 11 consecutive boxes and place them inside each other like Russian nesting dolls. The largest box was 18.5” by 16.5” by 18”. I needed a way to carry this to the Amtrak station for when I would next see my family and I made a strap for it using just a yoga mat sling and a small bungee cord.
The How To:
Place the yoga mat sling on top of your object and then turn it upside down (With the yoga sling underneath, the loops on the sides). Put the bungee cord hooks through the loops, one per hoop. Turn right side up and use the yoga strap as your handle. Works best with large, light objects.
Keep Your Water Bottles Cold
My partner and I travelled to Las Vegas for the first time and we knew it would be hot and dry. When we went adventuring, I had only thought to bring a plastic water bottle and not any kind of travel sized thermos. We didn’t want our icy cold water bottle to warm while walking around outside nor did we want the bottle to sweat all over our draw string bag. That’s when my inner engineer made a makeshift insulator out of a face cloth and a hair tie (left over from the days when my hair was long enough to need one). If you have hair that is too short for a hair tie you can always substitute a rubber band, or ask someone if they have either if you have neither.
The How To:
Wrap the face cloth around the water bottle and keep it in place using the hair tie or rubber band.
I am fascinated by miniature things and things that are the “wrong size”. Miniature (and usable) frying pans and oversized clothespins are right up my alley. I especially love miniature cookware and miniature food. So once I became an adult, I indulged and decided that miniature things were good for me because it helped me cut down on my portion sizes. Also, mini things are just really, really cute.
Thus I will introduce you to my first miniature inspired recipe: Mini Chocolate M&M Pretzels
Every year around the holidays, my mom would recruit my brothers and I to help her make various dessert foods for the many holiday parties that we would attend as a family.
One of my favorites, for its ease of creation and deliciousness, were pretzels with a melted chocolate kiss and m&m on top. Usually these were topped green and red m&ms to commemorate the holiday. They looked something like this but had milk chocolate kisses.
Place pretzels on a microwave safe plate. Put as many as you can fit on the plate.
Place chocolate chips on top of pretzels, flat side down. Try to place in the very center of the pretzel.
Place the plate with the pretzels topped with chocolate chips in the microwave. Microwave for 20 seconds and then again for 20 seconds. (See notes at bottom for alternatives to microwaving)
Pull the plate out carefully as it may be hot, then place on a trivet. For each pretzel, push a single mini m&m into the melted chocolate chip.
Place in the freezer for 5-10 minutes (until the chocolate chips hardens again)
Enjoy!
The finished product!
Allergy information:
M&Ms:
Contains Milk and Soy
Processed in a factory that produces peanuts
Chocolate chips:
Contains Milk and Soy
Varies based on what brand and flavor of chips you want to use.
Mini Pretzels:
No allergy information available. Try looking up the brand and calling :(
Notes:
For those of you who don’t like microwaves, you can also use the oven or a toaster oven (not a plain bread slot toaster though). Just be sure to use an oven safe surface (like a baking sheet) when putting pretzels into the oven.
I used Whole Foods 365 brand semi-sweet chocolate chips, but any brand that you can get a hold of will do. It doesn’t even have to be semi-sweet chocolate, it can be white chocolate, dark chocolate, milk chocolate, peanut butter chips or anything else that comes in a general “chocolate chip” shape.
The pretzels I used, I actually saved from flying. I saved all those little airline sized snack bags for a few months. You can actually buy them online, which is a cheaper alternative to flying somewhere just to get mini pretzels. Search around to see if you can get them in larger containers instead of individually wrapped bags.
They are not very good at remembering things. On several occasions they would have to check and re-check if they:
locked the door
turned of their car headlights
shut off the oven
And it would become inconvenient if they had just gotten into bed to go to sleep; they would have to get up, put on proper attire, and go check whatever needed to be checked (anxiety strikes again!).
To help them remember things so that they would not worry about what they might have forgotten, I came up with the memory lego brick.
How does it work?
A Memory Lego Brick
Here we have a memory lego.
The top row represents tasks, objects or goals that have been completed, remembered, or accomplished.
The bottom row represents tasks, objects or goals that have NOT been completed, remembered, or accomplished.
Each column represents the desired “something” to be remembered. For example, on my partner’s memory brick, they had
Column 1 - Bring lunch to work
Column 2 - Turn off car headlights
Column 3 - Lock the front door
Whenever a task is unfinished (or it’s a new day), one (or all pieces) should be moved to the bottom accordingly. Then when a task is completed/remembered, the piece is moved to the top. This way, the remeberee has a physical reminder that they “did” or “remembered” a specific thing.
Make your own
As you can tell this is a very easy idea to implement. You just need a small single piece for everything you want to remember, and a 2 by x lego brick, where x is greater than or equal to the number of things you want to remember.
Tips
Make sure you don’t use the single flat square pieces, like these those can be really hard to remove from a 2 by x lego piece.
You can use different colors for each item in your remember list.
This can help you color code each task.
Optionally, you can also use color to denote order of what tasks should be done in.
You can draw pictures on the 2 by x brick to be a reminder of what the task, goal, or thing to remember is. For the less artistic, you can also write shapes or use color to do this as well.
If you’re feeling really creative, find a way to etch using a knife or laser.
Alternatively, you can also print really small pictures on address labels and stick that to your brick instead.
This borrows the idea of the boolean from computer science. To those who aren’t programmers, a boolean is, in it’s most simplest terms, a binary variable, having two possible values called “true” and “false”. A great overview of booleans can be found on Khan Academy. Booleans have many uses, such as checking if a comparison or an equation is true or correct, used as flags, and also denote the “truthy-ness” of a statement/code. Thus the “things remembered” is equivalent to true while “things not remembered” is equivalent false.
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