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.

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.

The Damsel now wipes a tear away, since the baby-sprog in this picture, so pleased to be smeared with chocolate, is now 11 years old, the one in the red is a senior in high school and the oldest is a missionary. They clearly have no regard for their mother’s diabolical plan to keep them little forever.

The sprogs that have graduated from high school are caught chucking stuff out of windows less often nowadays, but the Damsel suspects they secretly still harbor this unnatural desire. But they’ve wreaked havoc with the window screens. They tried to push their sock bombs or what-have-you out the window whether there was a screen blocking the way or not. Hence rips and tears in the screening.

One of the Damsel’s most favorite things: autumn breezes blowing through her home. One of the Damsel’s least favorite: mosquitos and flies. This means holey screens Cannot Be.

This method isn’t for patching a little hole, but for one bigger than, say, the Damsel’s heaping helping of garlic mashed potatoes. If you have a screen with a still-decent frame, but the screening has a large rip, this is it.

Examine your screen. There should be a ditch around the edge where the screening is held onto the frame with something called “spline.”

Spline looks like thin, rubbery rope. After prying it out of the ditch in one place, you should be able to pull it all out, all the way around, with your fingers.

Check it out. Is it still pliable and in fairly good shape? If so, save it to reuse. The screening will come right out now.

Go to your neighborhood hardware store and buy a roll of screening and a special tool called a spline tool. It looks like a cute little pizza cutter, with wheels at both ends. It’s cheap…the Damsel grabbed one for $5. If your spline was brittle or messed up when you took it out, buy some more at the same time.

Lay the empty frame on a flat surface and unroll the new screening over it. With an exacto knife or box cutter, cut the screening to roughly fit the frame. Don’t fuss. You’ll be trimming after, so don’t measure, don’t get too fancy.

Lay the spline on top of the screening and press it into the ditch with the spline tool, making sure the screening doesn’t get ripply.  You’ll see one end of the tool works better than the other…it has a channel in the wheel that fits over the spline. Just press and roll. The Damsel discovered this is quite a bit easier if someone else is holding the spline taut for you, and watching to see that the screening stays nicely smooth. Her dad dropped by at the right moment, and she tricked him into helping. Thanks, Dad!

Once you’ve rolled the spline in all the way around, trim off the extra and tuck the ends in. The Damsel was surprised that even though she used the original spline, there was extra when she finished. She shook her head at that weirdness and pressed forward.

Trim the edges of the screening close to the spline so everything looks nice and neat. The screening cuts easily, a fact the Damsel was unprepared for.

The finished screen. The picture looks freaky, but in real life this is a perfectly normal, reality-based screen.

You’re done! Flies, forget about it.

The Damsel was just sent this list of 50 websites with canning information. She found the list to be quite thorough. There’s even a website for canning squirrel, because it’s important to do it correctly. After all, you can’t take up your WHOLE freezer with squirrel, so you’ll need to can some. **wink

50 Canning Websites

That’s thorough. Let it be known that the Damsel works hard to make the Old School a good place to be.

Febreeze works by binding the stink molecules to itself, rendering them unsmellable. It also adds a scent of its own. It doesn’t remove the stink–it’s simply bound up and covered over. Still, it is different than just spraying a scent on top of a stink.

So you have to ask yourself: Do I want to do this, or do I want to eliminate the thing that made the stink? For some people, the answer is made even more simple, because they are sensitive to scented products. Febreeze=misery.

So what did Grandma do about stinky stuff? She really only had two tricks up her sleeve. Air flow (opening windows, turning on fans, etc.) or using vinegar and/or baking soda. Both of these things seem to “absorb” odors. For example, if you make a big stink in your kitchen, set out a bowl of vinegar overnight. Things will smell better in the morning. And who doesn’t know about the box of baking soda in the fridge? (by the way, the Damsel doesn’t partake in this habit. She forces herself to find out what’s making the stink in the fridge. Ew.)

So for fabrics, some folks put a little fabric softener in a spray bottle filled with water, and spray that around as you would Febreeze. It sort of works…it smells nice, anyway. But don’t use it heavily, because just as you would suspect, the stuff will build up and get gunky. Some have added vinegar to this mixture, and if you like the odor of the combo, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

Amounts: try a fabric-softener-capful, plus an equal amount of vinegar (if used) in a spray bottle of water.

If you try this, shake before each use, so the fabric softener will stay dispersed and be less likely to stain.

Static Cling. **shudder

Grandma didn’t really have a problem with static cling since she hung her clothes out to dry in the fresh sunshine. The Damsel recommends you try this if you have any possible way of doing so. There are plenty of benefits. Your clothes will smell fresh, not perfumey, and because they haven’t been tumbling around in an over-hot dryer, they won’t be staticky either. Plus, a dryer uses a lot of energy, so you can feel good about saving money/going green by drying your clothes on a line.

Have you ever slept on sun-dried sheets? Grandma would have laughed to think of it this way, but this is one of life’s best and cheapest luxuries.

The Damsel understands line-drying isn’t for everyone. And for those times when you need to use the dryer, many people love the ease of using a dryer sheet to both soften the clothes and reduce static. But is there a way to make your own?

Way #1: Take a rag such as an old washcloth and soak it in liquid fabric softener for about ten minutes, or until it’s thoroughly saturated. Squeeze it out, and hang it somewhere until it’s dry. Now you can use it like a dryer sheet . . . just hurl it into the dryer load. You can use the same rag over and over again, without resoaking it MANY TIMES . . . months, even, depending on use, before you have to resoak it. You will go YEARS before using up a bottle of liquid fabric softener used this way. Cheeep!

Way #2: Mix some hair conditioner (a cheap kind, if you like, but one that you like the smell of) with an equal amount of water. Either do the soak method in #1, or put in a spray bottle and spritz a few sprays on a washcloth and throw in the dryer. You’ll need to respray each time.

If you still have too much static (and even with dryer sheets, that happens) try crumpling up a ball of aluminum foil and putting that in the dryer. The Damsel has no idea why this works and kind of wants to know. Another part of her likes thinking of it as an unfathomable aluminum foil mystery.