lelizaparker's Profile

I have a wonder washer that I used to use all the time when I lived alone. It was pretty fast and the clothes came out cleaner than hand washing in the sink. I put it in storage when I moved in with my boyfriend, but when we move into a bigger apartment I am going to grab it from the storage unit. Makes easy work out of washing stuff by hand and everything dried faster.

Your house is beautiful, Emily.
I lived in Rochester for 15 years and would have stayed forever had the job market been a little brighter. I moved to SF 4 years ago for work, but still own my house in Rochester (I am currently renting to a student). I miss living there so much; for the size of the city it has so much to offer. Great restaurants, live music, community support. I completely miss the coffee shops open 'til 11 and eating outside in the summer. I never thought I would miss the snow!
People ask me why I keep my house, and they don't seem to understand. In this day and age of "temporary" I love having a back-up plan. I do hope to move back some day.

I was given an introduction to seasoning by a woman I babysat for when I was in high school an aeon ago. One night, bored after the kids went to bed I spent an hour scrubbing the grill on their Wolf stove until it was sparkly clean. The next time I went over, she asked me not to clean anything, stating that they had spent the previous month trying to season the grill plate on the stove. Ooops!

As for my cast iron now, I save all aluminum foil we use in baking and what not, rinse it clean, ball it up and use that to get the stuck on bits off my cast iron. Doesn't seem to take the seasoning off. When the foil gets really ratty, we recycle it as we would have before we had used it as a scrubber.

For those of you in the Bay area that don't care for gin, you may want to try the new Botanivore gin by St. George Spirits in Alameda. I'm not a fan of gin, but this is amazingly smooth and bright and not overly junipered! I was completely surprised at the last tasting I had there that I enjoyed drinking it neat.

I never chill my dough. I always replace all the white sugar called for with dark brown and I always use butter right out of the fridge. When I was in college I didn't have a mixer and would mix all the ingredients together with a wooden spoon, smashing the butter against the side of the bowl until it was incorporated. Ten years later after I bought a good stand mixer I found that my cookies turned out better hand mixed. I've also tried the half a banana trick (mash half a banana and add to the cookies) to keep them soft, but I wasn't crazy about the flavor it added. You can also add a slice of bread or a couple of large marshmallows to your cookie jar to prevent your cookies from hardening days after they are baked.

I have the Pad and Quill book for my 4S (from their etsy.com store: http://www.etsy.com/listing/86375389/little-black-book-vol3-for-iphone4-blue). Not only is the phone snug and protected, but closed it does indeed look like a notebook, which makes me feel a little more secure when I'm walking around with it in my pocket.

I'm not sure what I am going to do seeing that the BF and I just moved in together. The original plan was for us to both keep our own netflix accounts, but now it seems silly for us to both be paying for streaming, so I am most likely going to drop that option and merge my streaming queue into his. As for the dvd option, I need to think about it a little more. I currently keep around 15 titles in my queue where he has close to 300.
I think thought that $8 a month for streaming is well worth it. I think the selection is great and we watch it more than cable (that we are paying for just to be able to watch Stewart and Colbert nightly.)

bethaneebee, try breaking the suction seal of the top. That may help speed it up.

I made these the night my bf found the Chicago site. Ive made the Gingerbread stout cake from the Smitten Kitchen site and knew about using a super large pan, but ended up making a mess anyway. I use a silicone baking pan when making marshmallows, it is very easy to push them out of the pan with little mess. I also dusted the inside of my pan with baking coco before I filled it, and turned them out onto a silpat covered with baking coco. No sticking! I covered them in chocolate in two batches. The first had less beer in it, and was harder and the second I added a little too much beer and they were a little softer. I used a homebrew oatmeal stout that the bf had made a couple of weeks prior, and these marshmallows (a whole batch) didn't last but a week in his fridge.

I received a buckwheat pillow for christmas many years ago and love it and as soon as I find a local place to pick up the hulls I am going to make one for the bf's house. I'm thinking of using one of those zippered allergy pillow covers to hold the hulls.
As a side note: I pinned the zipper closed on my one at home after the zipper worked its way open one night. What a production that was at 3 am.