mandarinmarie's Profile

I don't know, my parents just got one of those mega-chairs (apparently it was sold as a "chair and a half") and I LOVED it when I visited for christmas. Actually, one of my favorite things about it was that it was a great, snuggly seat for two.

Love this. I'm that killer combo of busy and lazy, so usually fresh flowers just lay around dead for days and end up bumming me out. I do love a bowl of fruit, though, and something like a non-plastic soap dispenser would bring me joy on a daily basis (while also not dying and becoming gross).

I have a good chunk of leaf raking ahead of me (we have a small yard with just one tree, but it is ENORMOUS and dropped pretty much all of its leaves while I was out of town last weekend), but I'm also trying to make some headway on a couple of projects I'm in the middle of.

My absolute worst offender is crappy ice cream--specifically, the kind where you can tell that some kind of gum has been used as a thickener. So gross.

I'm with everybody else on the dense and chewy bagel thing.

I definitely want to do this. I have a ping pong table in my dining room (didn't need that dining room more than I wanted my father-in-law's old ping pong table!) and there's a big empty wall next to it.

So here's my question: would it be cool or stupid to have the letters actually spell ping pong? Maybe if those letters were present but mixed up? Mabye if there were other, random letters between "ping" and "pong"?

I've had some great cocktail-inspired marinades for grilled chicken and shrimp. Mojito and margarita are the two that stick out in my mind.

Oh man, when I was a kid we had an entire roomful (unfinished master bath space) of huge stacks of National Geographic magazines. Some of them were taller than me, and I used to like to go in there and grab a random copy to look at. My Dad had been hoarding them since he himself was a teenager, so we're talking maybe 30 years' worth of magazines before he finally decided my parents needed a master bath. My mom got him to pare his collection down to one shelf and we donated boxes and boxes of magazines to the library.

My parents love jarred pasta sauce, so it's a total comfort food for me and I have no guilt about keeping a couple of jars in my pantry. I get Safeway Select--Safeway is a grocery store here, and Safeway Select is their "gourmet at generic prices" store brand. Not bad at all!

I keep a tub of stock-appropriate vegetable cuttings in my freezer and make stock when it gets full--this applies to things like onion skins and ends, celery leaves, herb stalks, etc. I find it much easier than actually making something with each castoff. It's also a very easy way to avoid throwing away that last green onion or whatever that you just never got around to using before it started to look a little bit wilty.

Fruit stuff just gets composted.

My door to the back porch is in the kitchen. Like everyone else, the big con is that it eats up space in a pretty small kitchen and the big pro is how great it is for grilling and, if it's a nice day, air circulation. I also like being able to hang out on the porch while I'm cooking and not be too far away.