Since you’ve been such good students, the Damsel has been authorized to offer one lucky person an awesome gift–a copy of the scrapbooking program “My Memories Suite.” , a $39.97 value.

This program is pretty sweet. The Damsel was given a copy for a test drive, and she was quite impressed by its array of cool features. For those interested in digital scrapbooking, this program is top notch.

Digital scrapbooking fits the goal of the Old School fairly well–doing old fashioned things with a new twist. For the Damsel, the whole problem with this scrapbooking is not the desire…it’s just having the time to do it. So the Damsel thought she’d test how quickly she could make a page.

Understand that there are about a billion ways a person could make a scrapbook page–the options go on and on–but the Damsel had set herself a specific goal here. Speed. That’s it.

The Damsel hates to brag but she made this page in two minutes, using one of the application’s templates and a few highly adorable pictures of her grand-sprog.

Can the Damsel just say that she’s weary of contests where you have to do a whole raft of things in order to have a chance? **heavy sigh**  For this contest, you need do only two easy things.

1. Be a follower of this blog, via the Google Friend Connect button on the right sidebar or via RSS feed. All following instructions can be found by clicking the “subscribe” tab at the top of this page.

2. Leave a comment, making sure there is some way to contact you if you are chosen. If you follow this blog via email, you’ll need to click through to the site to leave a comment. The Damsel will look kindly upon you if you name an Old School post you’ve enjoyed, but it’s not required.

The contest will run until Friday, Jan. 6 at 10pm MST.

Also, any Old School student may have a  $10 discount off the purchase of the My Memories Suite Scrapbook software and a $10 coupon for the MyMemories.com store – $20 value. Just enter code STMMMS92539.

Good luck!

Here’s an “infographic” about what we’ve been up to:

Maybe you’re like the Damsel was before she saw the light. Maybe you think there is something magical that makes peanuts into peanut butter–some special process taking elaborate equipment and people in white overalls. And that “natural” peanut butter, costing approximately $123456789, is something even more complicated to make.

Gather close, dear students, and the Damsel will show you the truth.

It’s easy to make your own peanut butter. All you need is:

• peanuts (The Damsel was striving for a Jiffy-like result, so she used roasted, salted peanuts, but you can use any type you like)
• oil (vegetable or peanut oil; olive oil may taste off)
• something to puree it, like a food processor

That’s it.

Acquire two cups of shelled peanuts. Tedium Alert: Shelling your own takes time. When the Damsel first attempted this, scavengers ate the peanuts as fast as she could shell them.

This got less and less fun, and she at last resorted to child labor in the form of her adorable nieces who just happened by at the right time. One must shell a goodly amount of peanuts to yield 2 cups.

Put the peanuts, along with about a teaspoon of oil, into a food processor with the blade in place. Crank it up and let it go for a couple of minutes or until you’ve achieved the smoothness level you’re looking for. The Damsel loves crunchy peanut butter. In case you were wondering.

You may need to scrape the sides of the food processor and have another go, although the Damsel did no such thing. If it seems too thick, add a bit more oil, but the Damsel begs you to do so in very small increments. It’s easy to get too much.

Depending on how badly you want to duplicate “store” peanut butter, keep in mind that commercial crunchy peanut butter is made by adding chopped peanuts to creamy-style peanut butter. This detail may be lost once it’s between two pieces of bread. Your mileage may vary.

Yield: about a cup.

You just made peanut butter! It’s that easy. Your celery can now be filled properly.

Keep it in the fridge, since it’s got no nasty preservatives. You may or may not need to stir it a bit before using.

You know in a traditional lasagna recipe how it tells you to boil the noodles first and then layer them? Have you done this? Have you tried to get the slippery, slimy noodles from the pan only to have them tear, flop, splash and goober? Have you?

If so you may have taken note that stores now sell “oven ready” noodles that don’t need to be cooked first. You just layer them in, all stiff and hard, and they cook and soften just fine.

Your mileage may vary, but the Damsel has been doing this for years with REGULAR lasagna noodles, not special “oven ready” ones and nothing bad has happened.

She doesn’t know what the difference is between “oven ready” and regular noodles since they both look pretty much the same–except the price. There must be a difference. Surely this isn’t some grand conspiracy. Right? Right?

What the Damsel does know is that doing lasagna this way makes a formerly-complicated dinner into a pretty darn easy thing to make. Plus, and this is her favorite part–the lasagna turns out nice and firm, not soupy.

Here’s how it’s done at the Cottage:

Cook one gigantic pot of spaghetti sauce by combining a #10 can of crushed tomatoes from the Huge Mart with cooked ground beef and onion. Season it in whatever way seemeth thou best, marinara style, whether that means packets of spaghetti sauce mix or fresh herbs or something in between.

Serve it to the teeming masses over spaghetti noodles. Watch them hork most of it down.

The next day, use the leftover sauce to make lasagna. Layer sauce, uncooked lasagna noodles, ricotta cheese (how to make your own), other cheeses of your choice, and repeat layers 3 times or until you feel like stopping. The top layer should be sauce and all the noodles should be covered. (Parmesan on top is okay) You’ll love how easy it is to spread ricotta on top of hard noodles instead of goobery ones.

Cover tightly with foil and bake at 350 degrees F. about an hour, until the noodles are soft. (Poke with a fork in the middle and on the edge) If you feel nervous, check it after 45 minutes and add a little water to the pan if necessary. But normally, the moisture in the sauce is enough to soften the noodles. Bonus: the noodles are absorbing saucy liquid instead of plain water and are thus extra delicious.

Just in case oven-ready noodles really are part of a conspiracy, you’ll have struck a blow for right and truth.

1. it’s cheap, and in the olden days, people loved making something cool without spending a lot of cash

2.  it uses up something that might otherwise be thrown away

3.  it took only a speck of time, reserving that precious commodity for other Old Schoolish pursuits

First, a confession. The Damsel is a Halloween grinch. She thinks it’s a silly holiday, and only barely convinces herself to put up with it. She doesn’t like to be scared, and dressing little children up like icky dead cheerleaders and such has never been her bag. And then there’s the whole thing about sending these children out door to door, begging candy, with the threat of nasty tricks if the person doesn’t comply.

Seriously. The Damsel gets it that it’s all in fun, and she actually likes costumes and such. She’s acquired a live-and-let-live policy on Halloween.

To each his own.

The Damsel’s sprog have somehow grown up in spite of the grinchyness, being forced all their lives to dress up like superheroes or cowboys or gypsies or other non-dead things. They’ve survived the madness that is their mother.

So, enjoy those witch finger cookies, all! Gobble them right up. And here’s a fun, easy idea for lanterns for your Halloween porch.

Take a glow stick, such as you buy at the dollar store, and an empty glass jar.

Cut the glow stick so that the magic liquid inside the glow stick drips into the jar. The Damsel found it a little hard to cut through but not too bad. Careful if you use a knife, though.

The liquid isn’t dangerous, as far as the Damsel is aware, but try to get all the liquid inside the jar. The more, the better.

Put the lid on and shake so the liquid spreads over the inside of the jar.

The Damsel took the jar into the bathroom, (the only room with no windows and therefore dark) shut the door, and took this picture.

Cool! Make a few of these and set them on your porch. The pretty little princesses and dead football players will love it.

This is the sort of DIY project Grandma could have really gotten into.

1. It’s free
2. It uses up things that would otherwise be thrown away
3. It’s useful
4. It’s easy and only takes a few minutes

For this project, all you need is an empty salt carton, a mason canning jar with a screw band, and a sharp knife.

Take an empty salt carton. The Damsel won’t judge if she finds out you dumped the salt into something else just so you could do this project.

CAREFULLY cut around the top of the carton by inserting a sharp knife straight down and moving around the top. Hold the carton firmly.

The cut doesn’t need to be perfect and smooth…just do the best you can without drawing blood. PLEASE. The Old School doesn’t have a school nurse.

Fill a canning jar with some dry, pourable substance like sugar. Fit the cut piece on its top and then screw on the band. The serendipity of this project is that cutting a salt carton around its edge EXACTLY fits a wide-mouth canning jar. Neat, huh?

If you want to use a regular-mouth canning jar, use its lid (not the screwband) to trace a cutting circle onto the top of the salt carton.

The Damsel is pretty excited about using this, since she keeps her sugar in a huge bin in the pantry. (Even though the seven sprogs don’t all live at home, she can’t seem to stop her mega-cooking ways.) This way, she can measure out a little sugar quickly and easily, without having to open the big bin. This would also be a great place to put baking soda, if you’re one of those who succumbed to the call of the Giant Costco Baking Soda Bag.

The Damsel would love to hear any other great uses her students come up with.

Come closer, dear students, and the Damsel will tell you.

The Damsel lets her chickens run loose in her large fenced yard, eating mosquitoes and possibly earwigs. For this hope alone, it’s worth the risk they pose to the garden plants. They do like to peck and tear at the tender leaves. But although most of the plants have managed to grow faster than the chickens can peck them down, there is one sad row in the Damsel’s garden.

Behold the chicken devastation.

This was once a happy little row of beets. The Damsel had hoped for a few meals of beet greens as the plants were thinned, and then the rest would be ultimately pickled as shown in this post: Pickled Beets. But the greens have been pretty thoroughly whittled…maybe they’ll recover a bit, but hopes of beet greens are sinking low. Who knows if there is enough left of the tops to support growth of the beetroots?

Yes, the plants could have been covered with netting and thus saved from being pecked to within an inch of their little lives. But with the other, earlier-planted veggies, the chickens pecked at them rather half-heartedly, lulling us to believe they weren’t going to do any serious damage. Then the beets were planted. Before we knew it, the Beetgreen Devouring Festival had begun and it was all everlastingly too late.

Thank goodness the chickens didn’t kill the tomato plants. If that had happened, the Damsel just isn’t sure what measures she’d be required to take. She hopes she will never be asked to choose between tomatoes and eggs. Some choices are just too awful to contemplate.

Does this mean we should avoid organic food? Absolutely not. The fact that the sprouts were grown organically didn’t have anything  to do with them being contaminated with e. coli.

But it just so happens that the Damsel has been preparing a post on growing your own sprouts. Very timely, eh? This is one more example of how self-reliance can be a blessing. When you grow your own, you know what you’re getting…or not getting.

Growing your own sprouts is easy and requires no fancy equipment. In fact, you can do it with just a quart jar and an old nylon stocking. And seeds, of course.

The benefits of sprouting seeds are many. They’re quite good for you, and depending on the seeds you store, can make all the difference if you had to live off your food storage for a length of time. Alfalfa sprouts, for example, are a good source of vitamin C. If you had no access to any fresh veggies, they would be a welcome item indeed.

Nutritionally, sprouted seeds go through an amazing transformation. Look what happens to mung beans:

source

Truly amazing! Consider adding seeds for sprouting to your preparedness stash. (Buy seeds packaged for this purpose rather than farmer-seed, unless you’re sure they haven’t been sprayed with nasty chemicals.)

You can buy sprouters if you like, but really, all you need is a container and some way to rinse the seeds. Stretching a piece of CLEAN nylon stocking over the top of a quart jar and then securing it with the screw band creates a cheap and perfectly serviceable sprouter.

You can sprout most any seeds, but let’s do some alfalfa to begin with. At the Damsel’s house, we like to refer to this as “hay.” Well, it is.

The Damsel inherited a strainer-thingy that fits on the top of a quart jar, so she used that. No possibility of toe-jam flavored sprouts here.

Put 1 1/2 to 2 tablespoons of alfalfa seed in a quart jar and cover with lukewarm water. Put the top on, whether it be a nylon or what-have-you, and slosh them around a bit. Drain the water out, and replace with fresh water, enough to cover them by a few inches. Let them sit overnight.

For the next couple of days, rinse and drain the seeds every few hours, as often as you can remember. In between, put the jar in a dark corner or cupboard, because light will make the sprouts taste bitter.

See the sprouts starting to grow?

When sprouts start to peep out, after rinsing, hold the jar sideways and shake the seeds gently so they spread out along the side of the jar. Don’t fuss. They will be clumpy. Nothing bad will happen.

Continue rinsing, draining, and shaking them so they lie along the side of the jar until the sprouts look long enough to look appropriate on a turkey and avocado sandwich. They’ll look pale, but taste fine.

If you want to green them up now that they’re grownups, you can put them in the sun for a few hours without harming their fresh, sweet taste. The Damsel’s continue to get a bit greener even while they’re sitting in the fridge.

The Damsel stores her sprouts in a ziploc bag that isn’t zipped shut, but is lightly closed. They stay good for two weeks this way.

Mmm, hay!

That’s right.

Near the Cottage by the Mountains, there is a friendly horse riding arena/stables, and the “output” is prodigious. Thanks to the law of supply and demand, a person can get an entire pickup truckload of high-quality compost from this place for only $5. ($15 to have it loaded. Worth it.)

Don’t gross out. This is nicely aged compost, so it’s nothing like sticking your hand in horse poo. It’s light, airy, and odorless, and what it does to our heavy garden soil is magic.

We get a load every year and spread this stuff throughout our garden with a liberal hand. It both feeds and lightens our soil so plants can grow like…weeds.

It’s plain that this type of fertilizer is MUCH cheaper than the stuff you buy in the bag at the home center. Plus, it’s **cough** natural. No yucky chemicals here. The Damsel suspects there may be something like this in your neck of the woods, too. It’s worth checking out.