Wednesday, August 8, 2012

All things bright and beautiful...

...all things great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all!

This was going to be a post about some fun and useful ideas that I had come up with, but then I was struck with the realization that all our "great" ideas stem from the Only Wise God from whom flows all understanding and wisdom and cleverness...

So, with that said, here are some ideas that I had, and fun things I've gotten to try out recently, thanks to God's great gifts and his grace for each moment!

I have a huge oregano plant in my herb garden, and every now and then I need to hack it down to size. That leaves me with a LOT of oregano, though, and I don't know what do do with all that oregano...

I needed a way to store it for later, but I don't like dried herbs... SO, I washed it all and pulled all the leaves off the stems, then stuffed them into an ice cube tray! I was able to fit a lot of oregano into the tray.
I put plastic wrap on top , pressing down a little in each section, to keep the leaves from poking through the surface (they need to be completely surrounded by water to store well as an ice cube). 

Then, I popped it in the freezer, and out came...oregano cubes! Ta da!

A similar idea, which I was pretty happy with, was using lemons that I had no immediate use for, and squeezing them into an ice cube tray with more oregano, so now I have lemon-oregano cubes, all ready to become marinades or sauces, or whatever! =)

Mike and I really like to add sprouts to things (sandwiches/wraps, Thai pizza, stir fries, etc.), so I finally decided to grow my own! Why didn't I do this earlier???

I bought a good-sized bag of mung bean seeds for sprouting at The Common Crow natural foods market in Gloucester - $2 for probably 2-3 cups of seeds!

On Monday I soaked 1/3 c. of seeds in 1 c. of water for about 10 hours, and this is what they looked like afterwards:
Then, I rinsed them (with fairly high-pressured water) and drained them (as thoroughly as I could, shaking out excess water), morning and night, and this is how they looked this morning, two days later!
My only equipment is a pint jar with a screw-top and a square of cheesecloth...
 Pretty cool! I am looking forward to eating those up!

My last idea of this post is a DIY Dollar-Store message board.

It's a lot of fun to use!

Supplies: 
1 Dollar-Tree picture frame
Paper (plain, pretty scrapbooking paper...whatever you want!)or Contact paper (or fabric!)
Dry Erase Marker

Directions:
Take off the back of the frame, and trace the cardboard backing to get your paper to the right size. 
Cut out the paper, and insert it into the frame just like you would a photo.
Use just like a dry erase board, to leave messages for your household!

**behind the frame you can see my other project, which I didn't like as much...a DIY magnet board, using a steel cookie sheet from the dollar store...I covered it with pretty contact paper (also from Dollar Tree!), but now it just looks like a cookie sheet covered with contact paper....it does work as a magnet board, though!


1 comment:

  1. breaking follow up news: The Sprouts are indeed delicious!

    ReplyDelete