Free Flowing

For the past three weeks or so, my bathtub drain hasn't been flowing as it should. It's been stopped up. The water will go down, eventually, but it takes a few hours. Yeah, hours. Gross, I know. I hadn't mentioned it to B, because he feels bad enough about being gone as is, and I hadn't gotten around to asking Dad about it yet. When B got here on Thursday night after taking the Greyhound up here, of course the first thing he wanted to do was take a shower. And of course the first thing he noticed then was that the drain wasn't, well... draining. He mentioned it to Dad when they came over for a cookout on Saturday night, and Dad offered his assistance.

Now, I normally think that one's drains are one's own business, but when someone offers their expertise and I can barely plunge correctly, I'll take it.

Dad came by today and looked at the drain. He plunged for a good long while before sticking his finger down the drain. I shuddered.

Dad: Lots of hair down here.

Me: Yes, but that's not my fault. That's your fault. It didn't come from Mom's side.

Dad: (nods.)

After about five more minutes of expert plunging (I had no idea there was such a finesse to it!), Dad decided we might need to get the snake involved. (Luckily, my dad's the sort who has a snake.) As we talked about the snake, he monkeyed around with the stopper. Flipped it from the down position to the up. And unstopped the drain.

My only consolation is that Bruce didn't try that, either.

Apple Pie

Last week sometime during one of my (suddenly frequent) trips to the grocery store, I bought a bag of Macintosh apples, for pie. Never mind that I'd never baked a pie before. Nevermind that I didn't really know how it was done. My new phillosophy with cooking is that people did it for centuries without cookbooks, it can't be all that hard.

Turns out, it's not. Basically, I looked at the recipe in the old Fannie Farmer cookbook I borrowed from my Grandma's house, and fudged it. I think it turned out ok.

Apple Pie

2 pie crusts (I bought mine at the store, but next time maybe I'll make them from scratch.)
A few apples, preferably ones that are good for baking. (I think I used eight. Enough to fill up the pie crust in a pleasing manner.)

1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (Which is actually just ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and the recipe called for nutmeg, but I didn't have any nutmeg, so I used this, and it's good.)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 tablespoon flour
1/2 teaspoon salt

Place the bottom crust on the pie pan, taking care not to touch it too much. (When you touch the crust, the heat from your hands melts the shortening in the crust, and then the crust loses it's flakiness.)

Mix the sugar, spices, flour and salt in a bowl. Peel and slice apples, and coat them in the sugar mixture. (I had too many apples and not enough coating, so 3/4 of the way through, I embellished the sugar mixture with a handfull of this and a pinch of that to get more, and mine turned out ok. This isn't as hard as it looks.) Then put the coated apples into the crust.

Put the other pie crust on top, fold the edges under and press them together, either with your fingers or a fork. Cut slits in the top of the pie, and then brush the top of the pie with an egg and sprinkle with more granulated sugar. Bake in a pre-heated 425* oven for ten minutes. Turn heat down to 350*, and bake for another 30-40 minutes.

(I've read that if you want to make sure you have a crisp pie bottom, you should brush an egg white on the bottom of the crust before you fill it. I forgot this, naturally, until just after finishing the pie. Oh well, next time.)

How to: Make "Indian Tacos"

The first thing you have to do is to buy frozen bread dough. Place the bread loaves into seperate loaf pans, and wait for the dough to rise. When it does rise, oil your hands and break off pieces of dough to flatten and fry piece by piece.

Taco meat is not hard to make, and any idiot can buy shredded taco cheese and shredded lettuce at the supermarket, if they choose to.

Make sure you have taco meat and all of the taco fixings on hand to garnish the flatbread with. It's like Gorditas, only more poofy and with more grease.

Eat up, and Enjoy.

How To: Dye Yarn with Koolaid

1. Wash the yarn gently in lukewarm water with a very mild soap. I used dish detergent.



2. Fill a pot with enough lukewarm water to cover the yarn.



3. Mix in your koolaid packets. A good rule of thumb is one packet per ounce of yarn. (If your yarn came labeled in grams, you can use an online converter like I did.) If you want lighter yarn, use less koolaid, if you want darker, use more. I also added a glug of white vinegar to my water, just to foolproof the mixture. Koolaid is acidic enough that you don't really need the vinegar, but I didn't want to take any chances.



4. Wring out the yarn and add to the pot of koolaid water.




5. Put the pot on the stove, and heat to nearly boiling. Stir the yarn very gently occasionally, to make sure the dye is well-distributed.

6. Turn off heat and cover the pot. Wait 30 minutes or so, stirring gently occasionally, until the water is clear. (I found that using a white plastic spoon to stir helped me see when the water was clear.) This means all of the color has been absorbed into the yarn.



7. Fill a sink with water the same temperature as the water in the pot. Don't use cold water, or your yarn could felt. Take the yarn from the pot, gently wringing excess water from it as you go, and place it in the rinse water.. Be careful of the temperature. If it's too hot, wait until it's cooled off a bit. There's no rush. (The water in the sink will cool at the same rate as the water in the pot, if it's the same temperature when you start.) Rinse the yarn very gently in the fresh water. Wash it again with a mild detergent, and rinse with water of the same temperature.



8. Wring the yarn gently as you take it from the water. Hang the yarn to dry, or if you don't have a place to hang it, lay it out in a cool dry place until it's completely dry.

When I was dying the orange/yellow, I started by using two packages of lemonade, and one package of orange. After cooking the yarn, I saw that it wasn't as dark as I would like, and I removed the yarn from the pot and added another package of orange to the water, mixing it in. Then I returned the yarn to the pot, and restarted the dying process. It turned out just like I'd hoped - a light orange/yellow color that I'll be happily knitting some lace from in a few weeks. Thanks for all of your input on which color to choose. (But as usual, I'm a complete jerk and disregarded everything but my own whims.)