Blog Binge

Throughout the week I kept wanting to write individual posts about various things, and didn't find time to...so they snowballed. This means that instead of each one of these topics having its own rightful post, they are now being jumbled up into one rambling entry. The topics I am treating in this post are:
1. laundry
2. project spice
3. pictures of Sunday dinner
4. this week's farmers market trip
5. church hopping

So let's begin!

1. We are officially grownups now. Don't believe me? See for yourself:

As of Friday, we are the proud parents of these big blobs of machine. I'm so excited about having them! I remember reading a meditation about a woman who felt sorry for herself because she'd read about these prominent women in the Bible who had maids helping them with their tasks, and she wished that she had maids as well. And then she looked around her house at all of these machines that took care of all this work for her and realized that she was surrounded by maids. So here they are: our new maids!
I thought this would be a good time to talk about laundry detergent. One experiment I have always wanted to try is the making of laundry detergent. Recipes for doing this are everywhere. What stopped me before was a lack of time, and a bit of difficulty finding the ingredients. Now that I am (insert the term that means the opposite of gainfully employed here), and given the ease of finding the ingredients, I think I'll try it out sometime. The recipe I've found that's safe for using in high efficiency machines produces a liquid detergent. I think I prefer powder, so I'm still shopping around for the perfect recipe, but at any rate, the ingredients are always:

* borax
* washing soda
* soap (REAL soap, either liquid or bar, but most of what you get at supermarkets/drugstores is not actually soap...soap is made of fats and hydroxides)
The soap that is most commonly recommended in these recipes is one called "Fels Naptha." This is something you won't find in Canada--at least not by that name. But not to worry...in Canada, Sunlight makes an identical laundry soap bar that can be bought at Home Depot (which also carries borax and washing soda); those laundry soap bars are ideal for these recipes. And I just learned that they are excellent spot cleaners for stained clothes as a pre-wash treatment (especially on stained collars, I hear). I wasn't looking for a reason to test this out, but the reason came: I had neon yellow turmeric stains on my jeans, and the Fels Naptha took them out beautifully! Why did I have turmeric on my jeans? Read on and find out!

2. The Spice of Life
Brian and I have a LOT of spices, and we've never really had a system for organizing them aside from throwing them into a box in a drawer, in no particular order. What ends up happening is that once a week, we think we don't have chili powder, so we buy an enormous jar of it. And then we later discover that our chili has been breeding, and we have 5 jars of it. And I can never find the basil which I was sure was lurking in the bottom of the drawer (because it doesn't exist). I read about various systems of organizing spices, and came up with a scheme. It took me a couple of days to implement it, but I finished it yesterday, and am pleased with how it turned out.
First, my top ten most commonly used spices go in the spice rack I swiped from Mom:

All other spices go into similar jars in a dedicated drawer in the kitchen, in alphabetical order:

Of course, there might be extra quantities of a spice bought in bulk that exceeds the capacity of one of these spice jars. My solution:

I picked up a bunch of these hilariously tiny containers at the Dollar Tree, and put excess spices in them. These in turn went into a larger container, which went in the freezer. It was a lot of tedious work, but seeing the difference it made in my efficiency with preparing dinner tonight made me so glad I did it! Speaking of dinner tonight...

3. Not much to say. Homemade bread, and roasted whole chicken. But we wanted to show you pictures:

Hopefully you can figure out which is the bread, and which is the chicken.

4. Yesterday we got up bright and early to beat the crowd at the farmers market. We got there around 8:30, and it was already about 30 degrees. One of the vendors asked if I was enjoying the cool weather. I started laughing, and then had to explain to him that I'm from Canada, which made him laugh. Anyway, our pick of the week was this guy:

Now, I feel a bit funny posting a picture of a watermelon; it's not like y'all haven't seen watermelons before. But you'll notice this one has seeds! I was so surprised to see this because I haven't seen a seedy watermelon since I was a little kid. As soon as I saw the seeds, I recalled a conversation I had with a woman at work a couple years ago where she was lamenting that the watermelons you can get now are seedless, which don't come close to the seedy ones in flavour. I'm not sure how true that is, but this watermelon was a delicious one. Very sweet.

5. Last but not least, a report on our church hunt. Today we tried our third church: Holy Cross Orthodox church in High Point (High Point, Greensboro, and Winston-Salem are referred to as the "Piedmont Triad" or simply "The Triad" collectively). It was about a 35 minute drive, and a fairly scenic one. Holy Cross belongs to the Orthodox Church in America. The service was lovely. One of my favourite sounds is the harmony that is characteristic of the singing in Eastern Orthodox churches. It was a small church--very similar in size and feel to the Chapel. They even had a similar stay-for-a-while-and-eat-after-liturgy type of gathering, where people brought in dishes that they made. Everyone was quite welcoming, and we discovered that a few of the members of the congregation live quite close to us.

6. Bonus section: we miss you all a lot. Thanks for reading.