How to make daily chores less boring?

It always makes it easier to do boring stuff  like folding laundry or washing the dishes if you can do it while watching a movie, but what about when you have to get up and put the clothes away, or get ambitious and want(!) to do more cleaning all around the house after tidying up the sink area?

One word – audiobooks.

I’ve used the mp3 player on my phone before to play music, but it’s a little clunky to use for listening to podcasts or audiobooks, because it doesn’t have a bookmarking feature. Every time I would stop playing a file, I’d  have to start all over at the beginning when I came back to it.  So a little while ago a coworker recommended to me a small mp3 player which works very well to play audiobooks and podcasts as well as music. You can clip it on your collar or throw it in your pocket, and when you stop it and turn it off (or pause it and let it turn itself off), next time you turn it on again it remembers what audiobook you were listening to and asks if you want to resume or start over. The player I got also plays FM radio, and has a MicroSD expandable card slot to add memory. It feels like it weighs as much as a paperclip (actually, 0.8 oz. – probably more like 16 paperclips). Anyway, enough about the player. The point is I can pop the earbuds in and be entertained while being able to move freely all about the house.

I recently downloaded a bunch of audiobooks and full-cast radio plays of the two British sci-fi shows Torchwood and Doctor Who  (both stuffed full of action and adventure) and started one up while doing the dishes.

When the dishes were done, I actually found myself washing the cupboard doors without really realizing it. Wiping out the microwave  (oy, it was a mess. The next day I kept opening the microwave and being surprised at how clean and white it was inside).   Scrubbing the floor.  It was amazing.  I probably would have done even more cleaning if I hadn’t gotten company just then. All because of my audiobook.

If you’re worried about spending a lot of money keeping yourself in audiobooks just to get the floor clean, don’t think you have to buy all the audiobooks you listen to – there’s plenty of stuff out there for free (and legal). First, go get a library card. Your library will more than likely have audiobooks on CD, which you can check out and rip to your computer, then transfer to your mp3 player.  They may also have  an e-audiobook service, which skips the CD format and lets you download e-audiobooks from the library website. It’s all free with a library card, but there may be a limited selection of titles as well as a waiting list for high-demand titles (even for the e-audiobooks, because of licensing restrictions).  Check with your library for more information on what they’ve got. You can also download free podcasts from iTunes on almost any topic. I’ve started with some language-learning podcasts (French, German, and Hindi, with a sampling of Swedish and Turkish so far), Bollywood movie discussions (Masala Zindabad!), and NPR shows. 

Finally, one last random audiobook tidbit: if you were to listen to all seven books of the Harry Potter series (narrated by the awesome Jim Dale, 134 different voices in one audiobook!) it would take at least 115.5 hours, or in other words, 14.5 eight-hour days. Your house would be spotless by the time you were done.

Corn nuts!

When I was a kid, my dad used to make what we called homemade corn nuts.  I wanted to try it myself this year, and I couldn’t remember exactly how he did it, so I looked it up on the internet to see if anyone else had a recipe. I didn’t find any method similar to what I remembered him doing, so I just went ahead and did it the way I thought he had, and hoped I was right.  This method does not produce hard, crunchy, powder-coated kernels like the commercially-made CornNuts, but rather a light, fluffy-crunchy, shiny kernel, which is what I was going for.

When I was at my mother’s house in November, I found a few stalks of dried field corn still standing in a field that had already been combined (harvested), so I picked the ears and peeled off the husks and brushed off the dried silk and other bits of dirt with my hands. If you get your corn out of the field, the ears you take have to be pretty clean to begin with, because you’re not going to be able to wash them with water—you want them to stay dried. They will be mostly clean because they’ll still be in their husks, but you might get some moldy spots on either the husks or the kernels that you’ll have to get rid of.

To get the kernels from the cob, just start at one end and pop them off with your thumb. It takes a while, so I did this while watching tv.

 

 

It gets quite messy with the little red cob fluffs going all over the place. Once I got the kernels off the cob I also sifted them through my hands while blowing on them in order to get even more of the little red bits off.

 Seven and a half ears made these two bowls full of corn kernels. And a mess.

 Close-up of the dried corn kernels. Beeeyootiful colors.  This is the only picture in this set that happens to have a normal color saturation—I accidentally had a wrong setting on my camera phone and didn’t realize it until later. Sorry for the weird orangey glow on all the rest of them.

I used my West Bend Stir Crazy popcorn popper to make the corn nuts. I poured enough canola oil to coat the bottom of the popper—about two glugs, I think?  It was the same amount of oil I would normally use to make regular popcorn.

While field corn doesn’t explode like popcorn, the kernels will still actually “pop” and hit the lid, hence all the gunk on the inside of the lid in the picture.

Don’t try this without a lid!

When the popping slows down to a few pops at a time, you can take the kernels off the heat and turn off the popper. You might want to let it sit for a minute after you turn the heat off because some of the kernels might pop even after they’re off the heat. I salted my corn kernels right away so the salt would stick to the oil on the surface of the kernels. I use popcorn salt because it’s finer; the smaller crystals are lighter and stick better to the corn.

You should also be able to make corn nuts on the stove, if that’s the way you usually pop your popcorn.  But I doubt an air popper would work to make corn nuts, since  the air popper works by heating the popcorn kernels till they explode and then fly up and out of the chute, buoyed by their new white sails. If anyone has tried an air popper to try to make corn nuts, I’d like to know how it went.

Here’s what the “popped” corn nuts look like. You can see some of them actually burst open.  

This blurry picture doesn’t make the corn nuts look very appetizing, but trust me, they are.

 Popped kernels on the left, unpopped on the right. And a strange color haze over the whole picture.

After I got done with this whole corn nut experiment, I told my sister what I had done and she said that our dad had used dried sweet corn, not field corn, and he had shelled the corn and then let it dry out even more by spreading it out on pans in the basement. I think she said he also either had a fan on it (which would help to get rid of more of the red fluffs) or he set the pans on the radiator, or both.  She said he wanted it to be super dry when he popped it. I didn’t do any of that because mine was mostly dry already, and I was impatient to make it.

One of the things I noticed when I made my corn versus when my dad had made his, was that his corn had turned a darker brown when it was popped. My corn still stayed relatively yellow after it was popped. My sister and I thought that since the sweet corn he used had more sugar content than my field corn, it turned brown when it was popped rather than stayed yellow.

Notes:

The main difference between sweet corn and field corn is that sweet corn is usually grown for human consumption. It is, obviously, sweeter. Field corn is usually what is grown for livestock to eat, but that doesn’t mean humans can’t eat it too. See this article from the Extension Service for more information about both.  This is also a pretty good description of the difference between the two types of corn.

Store the popped corn at room temperature in a closed container. I don’t know how long it can be stored like that, since it didn’t last very long at my house.

Bossy No. 1! Fabric softener on towels? NO.

One of the nuggets of home ec wisdom my mom told me when I was a kid and which I've been burning to tell to every person I knew ever since, is “Don’t use fabric softener when you wash the towels. It may make them soft, but it also makes them not absorb any water.”  I’ve been to people’s houses where they did use fabric softener (lots of it, it seemed) on the towels, and those towels were just useless. Trying to dry off with a towel that has been fabric-softened is like trying to dry off with a cat. So here’s me being bossy: Don’t use fabric softener* on towels!

If you want fluffy, yet still absorbent towels, and feel you absolutely must use fabric softener, maybe just try using it every other time, or every third time. It seems to build up each time you use it until it’s a whole thick layer of non-absorbency.  For lots of user-generated discussion on the towel-and-fabric-softener issue, as well as alternatives to using fabric softener, go here (it’s not in the easiest format to read, but has lots of info).

I should also mention that it’s a good idea to wash and dry towels separately from other stuff, and to use hot water to kill germs and microbes. The best way to dry towels, if you can, is to air-dry them. 

*When I say fabric softener, I mean liquid fabric softener and dryer sheets both. It’s all the same.

You never told me that!

When I was in college, I was complaining one night on the phone to my mother that I hated certain types of apples because they always got  mushy and mealy after I bought them. The Gala apple variety was the one I was thinking of at the time, but Red Delicious is another offender (and even my beloved  green Granny Smith is not exempt). You bite into it, and it just rolls around in your mouth like wet sand. Apples are my favorite fruit, but there’s not much worse than a mealy apple. Ick!

Anyway, my mom said, “But you have to keep them in the refrigerator, so they stay crisp.” I was astounded. Why had no one told me this before? Why did my mother wait until I was in college to mention this?  To be fair, I had never asked her, but still.  It never came up once when I was a kid? She must have assumed I knew it already.

I’ve started this blog as a way to share with others the stuff that my mother (and father) did tell me, as well as the stuff I’ve picked up along the way that might be less-than-obvious to others (or maybe it is obvious; maybe it’s just me that’s clueless. Apples!  Who knew!). Also, it gives me a chance to be bossy.