I'm in my new house now and need to stock up on my mixes again. I either used them up, or gave them away, or threw them out (hey, sometimes you just don't want to pack one more thing!). So, here's a new start for Make-A-Mix Monday.
My family LOVES breakfast! We especially love Cornstarch Waffles! My father-in-law introduced them to me when he pulled out an ancient cookbook, and I mean ancient as in late 1890s early 1900s, and made breakfast for us. I've made many a waffle with cornstarch since. BUT, I wanted to make it a mix so I could speed up that early morning meal-making.
When I asked my FIL for the recipe, he wasn't able to find it again, so I found one that I thought was really similar here. These tasted a lot like the ones my father-in-law had made - delicious!
Here is my recipe for a mix:
3 3/4 cups Flour (Aldi flour works just fine)
1 1/4 cup Cornstarch
2 1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
5 Tbsp sugar (you could keep this ingredient out and add 1 Tbsp of honey with your wet ingredients instead)
This will make cornstarch waffles five different times.
To make the waffles:
1 1/8 cup Cornstarch Waffle Mix
1 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
Mix them all together and place in your waffle maker. My waffle-maker takes 1/3 cup of batter on each side, making two waffles simultaneously.
For best results, though, here are some yummy things you can do:
Put 1 Tbsp lemon juice in a 1 cup liquid measuring cup, then add the remaining cup with milk. This will act as buttermilk!
Separate your egg yolk from your egg white. Add the yolk to the batter, but set the whites aside. While your buttermilk is being "made", beat your egg white until it's white and foamy with soft peaks when you take out the beater.
Pour in your buttermilk and then
Fold in your egg white with the batter.
Mix gently; do not over-beat your mix.
I usually double the recipe and then place the extras in the fridge or freezer for future mornings. Pop them into the toaster and they are crispy and perfect!
If you've seen my other two posts about this, you will know that I love, love, LOVE Cosco stools.
It's all because of my grandparents! They have 5 or 6, or maybe more, and most of my memories are of late night ice cream scooped by my grandpa while he sat backwards on a Cosco stool.
Or of another one at their log cabin in the mountains (imagine the background for Heidi and you'll get a good idea of what it's like there).
Or even of my grandmother, a strong, practical, little lady from Germany who always encouraged us to do things on our own...hence the Cosco stool. Our days there would go like this:
"Grandma, could we have raspberries and yogurt for breakfast?"
"Yes, you may! Go pick them."
And, "Grandma, could I have a drink of water?"
"Sure. You know where the cups are."
"But I can't reach them."
"Well, get the stool and climb up and get one."
So, as always, I'm on the hunt for a stool like the one at their cabin and the one my grandpa sat backward on.
Here in the KC area, every first Friday of the month, in the area of the first real marketplace on the Missouri River, many reclamation stores and repurposed service shops open with countless amazing wares and wonders (and ideas for new ways to re-do furniture). I've lived here for over 10 years and have never been! Until the first Friday in March. It. Was. A. Blast!
I really went to just look and maybe find one item that was unique and fun. Our new house has a kitchen island and I needed four stools for it. I thought that maybe, maybe, I could find something that would work for our island. Luckily I didn't venture to First Friday alone, because my sister-in-law ended up seeing these red stools up near the ceiling of one of the reclamation stores.
Aren't they great?! Until we were loading them in the van, I just thought they were some cute vintage stools. But upon further inspection, I found "Cosco" written on the bottom of each seat! They weren't exactly like my grandparents' stools but the idea that they would be very functional in my house and remind me of good times at my grandparents was good enough for me.
There was a problem though, these were bar height and my island is counter height. Before purchasing we called the professional, my friend's dad, to see if we could cut them and still make them work. He said that it was possible and that he would even do it for me! I was holding the stools so I didn't get a picture of him cutting the legs but he used a sawzall (or a reciprocating saw) and then sanded down each leg tip with an electric sander.
The metals in my new house are oil rubbed bronze and brushed nickel so I wanted to lose the antique bronze look so these new stools would match.
Spray painting the legs was relatively easy. Just cover the chrome and spray paint the rest.
The seat decks were a little more tricky because each stool's seat could rotate all the way around (which was a bonus!) but I wanted to keep the ball bearings in tact as much as possible. So I covered them, and the entire seat deck bottom, with cardboard.
I then kept them upside-down and placed them on some plastic covered deck chairs. And painted to my hearts content.
(Picture of the ball bearings)
Re-upolstering them to get a more serene look and to match my kitchen chairs, was a little more difficult.
The vinyl was tied on the tops of the chairs; something I hadn't seen
before, but it made it easy to remove because I just cut the string.
When possible, I usually use the fabric/vinyl that was on the furniture piece as a template for my new fabric. (pictured below)
I glue-gunned this fabric in place.
Bear with me; this is my first video tutorial. This first video is of how to take the metal-on-metal part off of a cosco stool (almost all cosco stools are like this, though not all of them are circular).
I hope you can see how to stretch the fabric and smooth it into place so that there are no wrinkles around any part of the edge of the circle. I usually hold the fabric with two of my fingers while smoothing it with a thumb. You'll see where I do that at 24 seconds and 47 seconds.
As you may know, we moved recently and with school ending, so many people seem to be moving to knew homes in new places.
Here's a fun going-away gift idea that was given to my family from my good friend in Kansas City.
Each person at our going away party wrote a little note on every Jenga piece. I LOVE this idea because notes on paper are harder for me to keep track of! But on Jenga pieces, well, we get to read them each time we play! And each piece now brings a little smile or a fun memory or just a moment to reminisce.
Let me tell you about these chairs which were the dreaded chipping cherry stain, but that, after a lot of work, were re-stained beautiful, dreamy Driftwood stain. My husband's mother was acquiring antique rose chairs for her kitchen and didn't want these anymore.
As you can see, the stain on them is pretty rough. I have 8 brothers-and-sisters-in-law so you can imagine the wear and tear on these chairs!
As I've mentioned before, cherry stain just isn't my favorite, yet lots of antique furniture is cherry because it was a very popular color due to it's richness. But since I don't like it, for a quick fix, I thought I'd just spray paint them. You know, because spray paint can work magic!
Unfortunately, in this case, due to the age of the stain and varnish, and the fact that it was chipping from years of use, the spray paint ended up showing all the chips and marks.
And although I used my trusty sanding deglosser, the paint still went on blotchily and just ended up not as attractive as I had hoped.
I like my paint to be smooth and not chippy, so it became a goal to strip the chairs entirely and start from scratch.
Ah, the look of paint ready to be stripped off! It's sort of liberating.
Little did I know the extent as to which I would have to go to get these babies smooth and pristine again! It was a trying project but in short, here are some things I learned while doing this lengthy project (I took the time, so hopefully, your project will go faster).
Vintage varnish is very, very hard to get off - VERY! In fact, I pretty much was finished with trying to strip these four, when my far more studious and patient husband stepped in to help
me finish this project - they'd still be sitting in the basement
otherwise.
After trying various strippers, we finally found one that worked amazingly: Tuff-Strip by Crown .
We had tried Citrustrip, which is what I normally use; an acetone based stripper; a stripper specifically made for antique/cherry stain; but the one above worked the very best for these antique chairs!
Most of the strippers say to let it sit for 10-15 minutes to allow it to work, but don't let it dry on there. We found that it dried faster than we could cover all four chairs. So,
Do one chair at a time!
We tried to cover the chairs with plastic so that it could sit longer with the stripper on it. But
Plastic didn't work to keep it wet enough
Other things we learned:
On old or soft wood, use a plastic stripping tool; we used metal and really gouged up the chairs in places!
Use a fine grit sandpaper something like 220. We used 120, which is for fine, but I used my electric sander and it really ripped the wood up a bit. So, go easy on the sanding of older furniture.
When applying strippers, it is a good idea to use thick gloves. The food-grade gloves I had fell apart completely while I was wiping the stripper onto the chairs.
If you are trying to go for a lighter stain color from a red or dark stain, it is a good idea to bleach the wood after you've pulled off as much previous stain as you can.
Then let the bleach and the sunlight work together to lighten the wood further.
Don't hesitate to use toothbrushes, both to get the stripper in tight places, and then again to apply stain where your paint brush or staining cloth (an old sock) just can't get.
*SIGH* The finished chairs. These seriously took us weeks to finish! But it was so worth it, don't you think?
Are you a fan of homemade root beer? So far it's not my favorite thing to drink, but my husband and kids absolutely LOVE homemade root beer! My mother-in-law made it at least every summer while my husband was growing up. Currently, she is moving out of her home to another nice home across the country and she gave us her antique-still-usable pop bottle sealer!
How cool is this?
We also inherited these super cute glass "Pop Shop" bottles.
So I see a great deal of root beer making in our near future. Have you ever tried making root beer? If so how'd it go?
A few weeks ago, right after having a lot of family over for a long visit, as he was leaving for work, my husband, Nate, begged me to NOT clean the house. As I guffawed at this remark and kind of looked at the messes in each room and the large piles of laundry, he came back to me and said: "Really, please don't clean the house today. I want to use the messy house as an object lesson for our family night tonight."
Ever the teacher, Nate is always looking for ways to teach our children how to be better (though in the case of our house, we all could use help in keeping it tidy!).
So, instead I baked and made up some mixes for future baking and worked on furniture (which is waaaay more fun than cleaning!!).
Just about every Monday evening, our family gets together to have a lesson. Sometimes it's spiritual in nature, sometimes it's learning how to treat friends, other times it is just getting together to play a game or go on an outing. Usually we start out with a prayer, sometimes a scripture, we usually sing a song (because we all enjoy singing) and almost always play a game or watch a short video (this particular Monday it was music videos by "OkGo"). You get the idea.
Instruction on how to lead music.
We started out talking temples. He asked the kids what they think of
when they think of temples. We got great answers like: eternal
families, peaceful, etc. And some crazy ones, which of course at the
moment I can't remember.
Then Nate and I talked about how temples are peaceful partially because they are clean and neat and everything has a place.
We took a tour of our own home, quietly, no-one was to speak as we went
to each and every room. Then we ended back in the living room again.
Nate asked the kids how did our house look? Dirty, messy, cluttered. Was it peaceful? Hmmm, not really.
So, we made a goal to, together, clean it for five minutes each night.
For the first many days, we took about five minutes in each room. This is separate from their regular, daily cleaning jobs.
But as we kept things up, it turned into 15 minutes total and then about an average of 8 minutes total. And we can usually do it in the time of two songs from an MP3 player but our phrase to clean is: "Let's do our five minutes." Or sometimes: "We forgot to do our five minutes!"
If we kept it clean for a week, the kids were taken out for supper at a place of their choice.
Keeping the house clean for a week = supper at a place of their choice. This was their choice, The Dawg House Grill.
If we kept it clean for a month, then we'd have dinner and movie. If we keep it up (the daily evening cleaning) for a year, the kids get a cash reward.
We started this challenge on March 30th. And we did so great! ...for two and a half weeks. But currently we are in the process of moving and the packing and sorting has taken it's toll.
So, when we missed a night last Friday (my dad was also visiting from out of state that night), the agreement was that we had to start over. So, here we are on day five of the start over.
We are determined to make this a habit!
Some things we've learned:
The kids sometimes groan when it's time to clean, but most of the time they are the ones to remind us. Positive reinforcement works wonders people! aka: rewards
Let the kids help decide when to tidy. One of my kids, the morning bird, wants to do her "five minutes" right after school so she can go to bed (and not be grouchy).
Also include the kids in determining what their positive reinforcement will be.
Work with the children so they can see that it truly is a family goal. We've found that working together as a family can be fun (especially when you listen to music and make it game-like).
It's very hard to reach goals, but it's so very rewarding when you're able to complete one! Taking the kids to The Dawg House Grill was such a small thing yet they loved every minute of it: being with mom and dad, having delicious food, trying out a new place, and who wouldn't love the picture of the gigantic purple and yellow bedecked bulldog?!
