Aithne's Profile

I grew up eating artichokes, and I would say if you're trying to love them, start with baby artichokes! When we grew them ourselves, we never let them get as big as the huge ones at the supermarket. And the baby artichokes don't have the "choke" to deal with--the inner leaves are edible all the way through to the heart.

We always had them with a dip made of mayo mixed with lemon juice. Sooooo good.

Would it be possible for you guys to either caption the videos or post transcripts? I'm reasonably certain I'm not your only hard of hearing reader. Thanks!

My South African husband was astonished that Americans don't consider the electric kettle as standard as, say, a toaster. When he arrived in the country fifteen years ago, he had difficulty even finding one for sale!

I love ours. It's fast and shuts off automatically, and is pretty much the only small appliance in the house that gets used multiple times a day. (It gets more use than even the microwave.)

Ours cost a pretty penny, but with how much we use the thing it was worth it to have a good one.

If you can find halfway decent avocados and are heading northward, bring some with you! That's what I always ask my Sacramento-area parents to bring with them when they visit Seattle-area me. We have so much wonderful produce around here, but good avocados are super hard to find.

I had a shower window for 5 years in a house that was built in the late 40's. The bathroom had no ventilation fan, the window was the only ventilation.

Pros:

Natural light! I could have a plant in the bathroom.
LOTS of ventilation when the window was open.

Cons:

Frosted glass is not nearly as private as you think it is. A former owner of my house installed a homemade curtain in the window when she realized that when she was showering, she could be seen quite clearly from the parking lot of the complex despite the frosted glass.

The window ledge collected water and mildew and mold like nobody's business. Might not have been so bad had the window ledge been designed not to collect water.

When I started looking at replacing the window (I wanted to gut the bathroom and start over), it turned out to be prohibitively expensive to do so for a lot of different reasons. However, that was probably more about the rules of the complex than anything else.

Opening the window to ventilate the bathroom was *cold* in the winter.

I've known many, many people who leave butter out (in a covered butter dish) all the time, including my grandparents and everyone I know from Europe. Salted butter, in my experience, you can leave out for a couple of weeks without problems. Unsalted goes rancid a lot more quickly.

How about eggs? Does everyone keep them in the fridge? My partner, who is from South Africa, is bemused by the American insistence that eggs be constantly refrigerated.

I love making turkey barley stew in the crockpot...I don't any more, because I'm living with someone who hates cooked barley, but I have very fond memories of it.

We have a Papillon and a little red mutt with Dachshund in her, and they both get bathed whenever they need it--usually once a week in the winter (because they're muddy and stinky) and every few weeks in the summer. I think it's fun to wash them, at least a lot more fun than washing cats is--I have an elderly cat who needs partial baths on occasion.

We have a shower with a glass door and a handheld shower head, so I just bring the dogs into the shower with me, bathe myself, put deep conditioner in my hair, and wash the dogs. By the time they're clean, my hair is conditioned and we're all ready to dry off. The Papillon hates baths but adores being clean--he prances even more than usual when he's freshly washed and dry. Little red mutt prefers being dirty to being clean.

I love it, and so would my dogs! (two small dogs, each of them has a crate to sleep in my bedroom...I would love to have built-ins with a dog nook.)

The example shown is a bit too small for either of my dogs (enormous Papillon and slightly smaller Pomeranian/dachshund mix), but I bet, if I were planning built-ins, that I could figure out a way around it. I could put a linen cabinet above the dog nook, or a window seat.