Homemade Play Dough

Play-Doh brand play dough is a classic child favorite, but unfortunately it contains wheat, which does not fly in our wheat-free home.  It's also now made in China, which brings up questions of safety (and all the other issues related to outsourcing our economy).  There are wheat-free, American-made versions out there, but they are quite expensive, and therefore not well-suited to a 2 and 3 year old who like to leave their Doh sitting out on the table for hours at a time, growing rock-hard in the process.  So, instead of buying Play-Doh or Play-Dough we decided to make some wheat-free, organic play dough at home.  As usual, we had some excellent helpers. The recipe below produces white dough, which most recipes do not.  Dan found this recipe on the celiacfamily.com blog, and hopefully they won't mind us sharing it with you:

Gluten-free play dough

• 1 cup rice flour
• 1/2 cup corn starch
• 1/2 cup salt
• 1 T cream of tarter.
• 1 1/2 t cooking oil
• 1 cup water, hot but not boiling
• Food coloring, if desired

Directions:

1. Mix all dry ingredients together in a medium pot.
2. Add the vegetable oil, then the water, and continue to mix until thoroughly combined.
3. Heat the pot on the stove over low heat for about 3 minutes. Stir frequently with a silicone spatula.
4. When the dough starts to pull away from the sides easily, turn out the dough onto parchment paper or a paper plate. Let it cool briefly until you can work it with your hands.
5. Knead food coloring into the dough until you get the color you desire.

Additional Notes:

• Don’t overcook the dough. It shouldn’t need more than five minutes.  If you cook it too long it will fall apart when kneading.
• To add food coloring, make a well in the middle of the ball of dough and drop the food coloring into the well. Close up the well with the outside dough, keeping the food coloring in the middle of the ball. Then, carefully begin kneading it until the color is evenly distributed throughout the dough.
• If needed, adjust the texture with small amounts of water (for dry, crumbly dough) or cornstarch (for sticky dough).
• Makes about 2 cups of play dough, or about 2 baseball-size balls of dough.

Store in tightly sealed plastic bags or containers.
Samuel isn't sure what's going on yet...

...but he likes helping!

Daddy's little helpers:

Evie taste-testing the results.  I don't recommend it as a snack food, but it's perfectly safe!

This is what happens when you use too much food coloring.  The remedy is to grab another one of the white balls and mix it in to distribute the excess coloring.

Kitty or Kiddie toy?

Our cats, Buddy and Ivy, received a toy for Christmas.  It's a little arm that spins in a circle underneath some fabric.  It's a really simple design and Buddy will bat at it for quite a while.  But, I'm not sure who it entertains more...

The kitties or the kiddies?

Gluten-free, Low carb Pancakes

Since going gluten-free, pancakes have been one of the harder "breads" to duplicate.  We've tried a lot of recipes over the last year, but all fell short.  They were either too soft, too coconut-y, too mushy, too bland, etc.  Today I looked in a recipe book that I've had for some time.  It called for arrowroot powder, but I recently learned you can easily substitute cornstarch.  The recipe also called for 1/4 cup agave, which we don't use so I usually substitute honey.  But, this made it really high carb (at least too high carb for our family and Samuel's diabetes).  Dan is our resident pancake maker, so he took the recipe and tweaked it.  The result: the best pancakes we've had since going GF.  They cooked/browned like a regular pancake and the inside was light and fluffy and not mushy.  It's not to say we'll stop looking, but this one is our go-to recipe for now.

2 large eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup water
1 1/2 cups almond flour
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tbsp cornstarch


In a blender, combine the eggs, vanilla and water; process on high for about 1 minute or until smooth.  Add the almond flour, salt, baking powder, and cornstarch, and blend until combined.  We cooked our pancakes using grapeseed oil because it has a high smoke point and has a very neutral flavor (versus coconut oil).

Total carb count for the whole batch is about 19 net carbs and this recipe will make about 20 smaller pancakes (about 1 carb each) or 10 larger pancakes (about 2 carbs each).  (Comparison: your typical wheat flour pancake has about 15 carbs each).

Hope you enjoy!

Beauty sleep

Playing is sometimes so much work you just need a nap.

PSA: How to boil an egg. Seriously.

We eat a lot of hard boiled eggs - in salads, as snacks, for deviled eggs.  Heck, sometimes my dinner is just a hard boiled egg and a hunk of sharp cheddar cheese.  But I hate peeling them!  With as many as I peel, you'd think I'd be really good at it.  It doesn't seem like rocket science, but I've tried various methods in my 36 years and none have made much of a different.

Until now.

The secret?

Drum roll please.....

...

...

...

You don't boil.... you STEAM them!  Turns out it really isn't rocket science!  Here's how you do it.

1)  Place a cheapo steamer basket into a pot big enough to hold your eggs.  Fill it with water until it just reaches the bottom of the steamer basket.

2) Bring water to a boil.

3)  Place eggs in, like so...

4) Put a tight lid on, set timer for 12-15 minutes and let it go - don't lift the lid!  The water will stay at a hard boil, but it's the steam that actually cooks the eggs.  (I started with 12 minutes and they were fine, but a little soft in the middle.  If you like firmer yolks, you'll probably need to go the full 15 minutes.)

5) Put eggs in ice water immediate after the 15 minutes is up.  Use right away or transfer to fridge.

6) Commence peeling.  Here's a trick I discovered about a year ago and combined with steaming, it makes for really easy peeling.  Break the shell around the middle in three different places.  Then lay the egg on the counter and roll it around to create fine cracks all over the shell.  (Just hard enough to crack the shell, but not the egg underneath.).  Then find a starting point, get under the filmy membrane and peel away.  The shell usually comes off in two or three pieces for me, almost like a ribbon.  Like this...

 See how the shell looks like snake skin?  That's all of those little cracks you created from rolling it on the counter and thus separating the shell from the egg.

If you're not a hard boiled egg eater, you've probably moved on from this post already.  But if you are a hard-boiled egg eater, you should give this method a try next time!

Belated Christmas

We had to postpone Christmas with Dan's parents until mid-January.  Samuel and Evie thought it was so fun to have Christmas again.  Hopefully they don't expect one each month now.  Here are a few highlights from their visit.

Evie quickly caught on how to open presents (she did much better than she did just a month ago on her birthday)...

And Samuel confiscated the present shortly thereafter...

There's a present in this pic and Evie.  You just can't see Evie because she's in chameleon mode.  (Note: the wrapping paper and jammies were pure coincidence.)

Working together to figure out all of the features of their lawn mower/popper...

The kids LOVE playing with my laptop.  Now Evie has her own (which makes Mommy really happy too!)...

It's hard to see from this angle, but Samuel is unwrapping a semi with a flatbed trailer and a backhoe...

Daddy and Evie playing with her laptop...

Leaf piles

I was just going through pics and found a few I forgot I took.  These are from November just as the leaves were falling.  We had a beautiful, sunny day and had the kids outside playing in leaves.  Well, Dan was playing in the leaves.  I was supervising and taking pictures.

I'm not sure I have any pictures of Samuel and Evie looking at the camera at the same time.  Example below...

Barn kitties get to play in the leaves too.  You just have to be careful not to squish them.

Samuel and Evie required the leaf pile to be "fluffed" regularly...

So Samuel could dive in...

Evie got a diaper full of leaves that had to be taken care of...

And then she dove in too.  Although she never made it very far into the pile...

Plate Lickin' Good

Ah, the things you can get away with when you're two...

How can someone so mischievous and messy be so adorable... ?

Evie Turns Two

Here are few pics from Evie's birthday party.  Snow and icy weather kept distant family away, but our neighbors were here to help us celebrate:

If you look closely, you can see a tear on Evie's cheek. She was upset because she didn't exactly know how to eat her cupcake.  As soon as I cut it into smaller pieces, she was a happy camper!  Samuel on the other hand had no problems and was cramming cupcake into his mouth as quick as he could.  Their friend Gideon (on the right) ate his cupcake like a normal child.

Evie's first barbie doll, Ariel from the Little Mermaid...

How many people does it take to help a 2-year old open presents?...

Evie seemed a little embarrassed by all of the attention.  This face sums it up...

Christmas 2013

Yes, we're still alive.  Yes, I realize I've not posted anything for three months.  I told myself that I was just going to let the blog go, but I've thought more about it and decided against it.  However, my posts will likely be simpler and shorter.  I have to remind myself that Samuel and Evie won't be  all-consuming two and three year-old's forever and someday we'll be out of the trenches and able to resume normal life - which will include time for more in-depth blog posts. 

Someday. 

I hope.

For now, here are some pics of our Christmas.

 The train set/table was Samuel and Evie's big present:

A little over excited...

Evie got lots of board books that she (hopefully) can't rip...

Evie helping me make Christmas cookies...

Danny, Courtney and Brian arrived in the afternoon.  After dinner we had Christmas round 2...

Who doesn't love Curious George?...

Hard, double yolk

Have you ever cracked open an egg to find it had a double yolk?  It happens to me pretty often.  However, it never occurred to me that I'd never hard boiled one....

until now........





Note: the egg was a little "weird" (notice how it's grey at the top), so I decided against eating it.

Sandbox play

Not really a lot of back story to this post.  It's been such a long time, I just wanted to get a few updated pictures posted.  So here is some summertime fun...

 

Brother, can you spare some screws? Part 4

Step 6: Screwing down the deck boards.

It's been almost three weeks since my last post, and this is what I have to show for it:

As I mentioned last time, you're looking at 82 deck boards and 2,460 screws (give or take.  Several were inadvertently dropped under the deck, never to be seen again.)  The three weeks in between the first board and the last included a lot of work at my real job, quite a bit of rain, several trips to Lowe's for extra supplies and some replacement deck boards, several other projects around the house, several barbeques on the unfinished but still usable deck, and a whole lot of thinking about the next phase of this project: the railings, which I'll get to in a moment.  First, please note the rather ragged looking edge of the deck on the right hand side.  Tomorrow I will snap a nice straight chalk-line about 3 inches in and then run my circular saw all the way down the length of the deck, leaving a nice straight edge.

Step 7: The Railing.

The main reason I wasn't in a huge hurry to finish putting down the deck boards (other than the ache in my back and knees after about the fifth board each session) was that we didn't really know how we wanted to do the hand railings.  Well, Google Images to the rescue!  I could post a picture of the design we decided on, but that would ruin the surprise, wouldn't it?  

The downsides to our choice of handrails are it's complexity and cost.  I'm not concerned about the complexity, but this project is already over budget, and this would put us WAY over budget.  But there is a solution, and the main cost will be time.

Enter the sawmill.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I used our sawmill to make the posts that are holding the deck up off the ground.  Now I'll show you how I used the sawmill to make the lumber for the handrails.  It began with logs:

The three smaller logs are white oak, a fairly decay-resistant wood that is frequently used in outdoor projects.  The bigger log is red oak and won't be used for the deck.  There's a fourth white oak log already on the sawmill.  All of the white oak logs were cut down about 3 years ago.  The good news is that they're very dry and ready to use (checked with a moisture meter).  The bad news is that they're much harder to saw than they would have been when still green.

Here's that fourth log being squared up into a usable timber:

 

Here's a closeup:

 

After each slice is removed during these squaring cuts, the timber gets rotated:

Once all the bark and any defects are removed, we can start sawing out boards.  In this case 2x6s, 2x4s, and 4x4s:

And here's a completed 2x6, 14 feet long.  Oak is heavy!

The wood is not quite ready to use at this point.  It comes out of the sawmill rough, so I'll run it through my surface planer both to smooth it up and to bring it down to the same dimensions as the lumber we would buy from the home center.

Total cost for the wood for our handrails?  About half a gallon of gas, a pair of disposable earplugs, and a kilowatt-hour or two to run the planer.  White cedar from Lowe's would have cost almost $800 for the same amount of wood.

Next time: Building and installing the handrails.  Or the steps.  Or maybe both.  Stay tuned!