Remember how I harp weekly on the premise that despite our attempts to fool others, we’re not perfect? I am currently in Nashville for the Blissdom Conference and while attending sessions, pretending like I have it all-together, wearing real-live-grown-up  clothes and everything. I left my power supply in one of the rooms.*

There have been sheepish calls to my husband, plenty of inquiry with hotel staff, and as of this moment, the mooching of a laptop from my roommate.

We all have our moments of spaz, we can either laugh it off or make ourselves miserable. What do you have to get off your chest?

*This brings me to the site admin portion of today’s discussion, posting will resume as soon as I have a power source for my computer, this may not be until Tuesday. I have not abandoned you and the winners of the T-shirt giveaway will be performed by Wednesday.*

I think it’s time for a little fun. I have a few t-shirts of various sizes left in my giveaway stash; it’s almost time for me to order a new batch. Leave your favorite tightwad tip as a comment and you’re entered to win one of the Martha Who? Home-Ec101.com t-shirts. The giveaway closes at 11pm on Saturday February 6, 2010.

To get the ball rolling here are a few of my favorites:

• To store onions, use an old (CLEAN!) pair of  panty-hose. Drop an onion down into the toe, tie a knot, and drop in the next, hang when full.  The knots keep the onions from laying on one another and the hose allows air to circulate.
• If you have children, reduce the flow to the faucets they have access to, this prevents them from running and wasting water at full blast while they poke around doing whatever it is kids do in there.
• Those mesh bags used to store produce make great pot scrubbers. Just snip off the metal clip and scrunch into a ball. If you need it to stay together, use a rubber band.

I don’t care how quirky it is, I want to hear it.

It’s still winter and the season’s interesting produce choices will still be lingering for a while, yet. Have you attempted to work any seasonal foods into your menu? Learning to utilize seasonal vegetables is a way average consumers can attempt to keep money within their local economies. Not every community has a Community Supported Agriculture program and not every family is ready to dive into the idea, but every purchase of in-season produce sends a silent, but powerful message to your food supplier, “Yes, there is a demand for these foods.”

Winter is a rough time for a novice cook, most of the available vegetables aren’t as gorgeous and inherently tasty as what we see on the Food Network, day in and day out, but don’t fear what is available can be marvelous, we just need to look past the humble exterior. This is an ongoing project and more recipes and tutorials will be added.

Yay, a downloadable, printable PDF

Here are February’s recipe cards, but don’t forget many of January’s recipes are still in season. I challenge you to try at least two seasonal recipes a month during 2010. If you want a gorgeous printable calendar for the month of February, head over to Cottage Industrialist and check them out.

February’s Recipes:

Leek and Cabbage Soup – Use vegetable stock, if you need a vegetarian version for Lent.

Mashed Rutabaga

Colcannon

Roasted Broccoli – Tutorial coming soon

Enjoy!

It’s time for another Sunday Confessional, this is a near weekly -I don’t always get it posted- event where I open up the floor to commenters. We’re human, this means we screw up. Our lives aren’t like the TV shows we grew up with, no one edits out the bad moments and there are no retakes. We have a choice when we screw up, we can either laugh at ourselves or make ourselves miserables.

I had good intentions this week, there was a babysitter here I could have used to my advantage, but I never went jogging. I didn’t run off and hide to write. Yes, I still made progress, but it wasn’t even close to what I had hoped. I had plans to get out and find a new dress for next week’s conference, to get my hair cut, to. . . yeah, none of that happened. Instead I chose to snack my way through the days and vegetate, although I did make myself climb the five flights of stairs a couple times a day to stave off the guilt.

Don’t make me stand up here all alone, ‘fess up. What do you have to get off your chest?

I had pretty much written off Fearless Friday for this week. Since I’m out of town, without a real pantry, that’s about all the cooking adventure I was willing to handle while working under the pressure of a big deadline. Then last night, I saw a tweet from Candice of Ragamuffin Design. She had taken my favorite pizza dough recipe, tweaked it slightly and used it to make flatbread for a Greek meal. She sent me her technique and I thought it would be fun to share with you. Did you do anything for Fearless Friday this week? Share a link at the end of the post or tell us in the comments.

Remember, Fearless Friday is about our sharing failures -I like to think of them as learning experiences- as much as it is our successes.

Home-Ec 101 and Ragamuffin Design Flatbread

Ingredients:

• 1 TBSP active dry yeast
• 1 1/2 cups warm water
• 3 1/2 cups bread flour + a little more for dusting
• 1 1/2 TBSP olive oil + extra to grease the bowl for rising
• 1 TBSP molasses
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 minced, grated, or pressed garlic clove

Directions:

Add the yeast to the warm water and set it aside.  Place the flour in a large bowl and whisk it to fluff it up.  With your hands, clean please, create a well in the flour.  Remember when you used to make a volcano with mashed potatoes and gravy? Yes, just like that.

To make clean up easier, measure the olive oil and then the molasses.  There is no chemical reason for doing this, other than the oil lubricates the spoon so you don’t have to struggle with the sticky molasses.  Add the salt and garlic clove, add all of this to the well in the flour.

Does the yeast and water look foamy?  Wonderful, add that to the well.  If you are using a stand mixer, use your dough hook to stir and knead.  Use the lowest setting and only knead it for about a minute after the dough comes together.

If you are kneading by hand, stir the ingredients until they are moist and well mixed.  Flour your work surface and knead the dough for around three minutes.  Estimate, this is pretty forgiving.

After kneading shape the dough into a ball. (Just like playdough folks, just like playdough).  Set aside.  Grease a large bowl with olive oil.  Place the dough in the bowl, turning it several times to coat with oil.  Cover with a damp cloth and allow to rise  / rest for thirty minutes. This gives the yeast time to develop flavor. It’s not going to rise a whole lot.

Divide the dough into balls about 2TBSP each. One at a time, lightly coat each ball with flour and roll very thin on a floured work surface.

Heat an ungreased skillet over medium high and cook each dough circle 1.5 minutes on each side. Stack until ready to serve.

Enjoy!

Share your Fearless Friday feats.

My living room desperately needs to be painted and I’ve rounded up a few friends willing to help sell their time for beer and pizza.  I really want to do this right, is it true that I have to wash the walls before I paint?

Signed,

Short-Cut Shelby

Look at it this way, washing the walls can save you money and time in this project. Seriously. Anytime you cook, open the window, spray hair spray,  etc particles that can adhere to your walls, do. Over time this creates a thin, mostly invisible but greasy layer of dirt and dust on your walls. This layer of funk isn’t evenly distributed, making it difficult to evenly apply your new coat of paint.

Any degreaser will do, but if you want the job to go quickly with little elbow grease, check out TSP or Trisodium Phosphate. This chemical, when mixed with water has a high enough pH to saponify grease. This simply means that it turns the grease on your walls into soap. TSP used to be included in both laundry and dishwasher detergent until it was found that algae really loved all the extra phosphorous in the water supply. Since then it has been phased out of detergents, but it’s still appropriate for small applications.

TSP is not your, gee-the-walls-look-a-bit-dirty-but-I’m-not-going-to-paint wall wash. Trisodium Phosphate etches or chemically scratches the paint surface while it strips away the grease. If you’re getting ready to apply a fresh coat of paint, this is pure win as it gives the new paint better adherence.

I strongly urge you to read and follow the directions and safety precautions. While the highly alkaline nature of TSP makes it fabulous for stripping grease off of walls, it also can cause chemical burns if it gets on your skin. Keep it in perspective, chlorine bleach also causes chemical burns when used inappropriately.

You should be able to find TSP at home-improvement stores. Good luck!

Send your domestic queries to helpme@home-ec101.com.

Quick Apple Dip

1 TBSP creamy peanut butter
2 TBSP vanilla yogurt

Stir and serve with sliced apples.

Feel free to jazz it up and sprinkle on all kinds of evil delicious, just don’t try to pretend it’s healthy.

Ideas include:
granola, chocolate chips, coconut

It doesn’t take kids too long to realize they can reuse apple slices, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

• Monday – Pizza & salads
  We could have ordered out, but the only place that delivers here is on the spendy side (14 for a large cheese + $2 for any additional topping. Yikes!)
• Tuesday – Slow roasted bbq chicken (we brought the rub), roasted green beans, potato salad
• Wednesday – Patty melts, steamed broccoli, potato wedges
• Thursday – Brinner (that’s breakfast for dinner)
• Friday – Chicken salad, fresh vegetables, crackers, fruit
• Saturday – Taco night + fridge clean out
• Sunday – on the road again

Many thanks to my friend Jo-Lynne -some of y’all know her better as the author of Musings of a Housewife- for providing the kick in the pants I needed to fix a few small issues.

The search box and categories menu should be easier to find. I also fixed some minor design issues including a some borders that randomly trailed off instead of running edge to edge as they should. I also managed to get rid of some of that horrid grey plaguing the recent comments.  These were all quick fixes I had been putting off.

Better organization of content is high on my list, but it will have to wait until this summer and for that, I apologize.

Also, thank you to everyone who submitted questions last week, they will be answered over time.

Enjoy the weekend.

Fearless Fridays are a chance for readers of this site to share what they’ve been trying in the kitchen. It doesn’t have to be fancy, all I ask is that it be a new recipe or a new technique. Share a link to your effort in the McKlinky or tell us about it in the comments. There is even a Flickr group that everyone is welcome to join and share.

What did you try this week?

I know I’ve been talking about eating seasonally, but there were green beans and they were cheap, so I cheated and bought them. Why? They were whispering to me, “Remember when you heard someone say after they tried roasted green beans, they’d never eat them any other way” Why yes, I did remember that. So the green beans were soon bagged, taken on a car ride, and tucked into the crisper.

I roast root vegetables, broccoli, and cauliflower all the time. The high heat does a beautiful thing to the natural sugars. So I decided, what the heck, why not try it with green beans?

Preheat the oven to 425F make sure one rack is in the top position.

Wash the beans, pinch off the stems and the tips -I had only done the stems in my batch, next time the tips come off, they crisped too quickly.-  Place the trimmed beans in a large bowl and toss with a small amount of olive oil.

Spread on a baking sheet and sprinkle with kosher salt. Cook for 10 – 15 minutes, watch them carefully the last few minutes as brown yields fabulous flavor, but if it turns black you may as well suck on a charcoal briquette.

Verdict? Fabulous. It’s an easy side for any evening where the oven has already been in use. It’s a side dish that can be prepped at any time during the meal preparation and finished at the last minute while the table is set and drinks are poured.

Enjoy.