Monday Made It: Food

I'm linking up for Monday Made It again!!!  I did something to my back last week, which has made moving around practically impossible.  So, rather than a detailed craft, this week I made ice cream.  Standing up hurts my back less than sitting down, so this was a good choice for this week!  I still have 4 weeks left to go before heading back to school, so I'm going to try to wait 2 more weeks before starting any school crafts and projects.  

My sisters gave me the ice cream attachment for my FAVORITE piece of kitchen equipment (my Kitchen Aid stand mixer!) for Christmas a couple years ago.  It was a drizzly day, and I had all the ingredients, so I decided to make some!  I'd put my ice cream bowl into the freezer when we moved in, so it was all set to use.

My sisters also gave me the Ben and Jerry's recipe book - so after some debating, my husband and I agreed on Oreo... I'd always prefer chocolate - it's my FAVORITE flavor for anything, but my husband doesn't really love it.  So we "compromised".

I'll put the recipe at the end of this post, and I will post the pictures I took - I seriously felt like I should be on a Food Network show while taking these pictures.  I was trying to be all artsy (see the whisking picture below!) and kept laughing at the whole thing! My husband was in the living room and I was trying to get this whole thing done without him seeing me - I can only imagine the grief he'd give me if he caught me trying to "style" our food!  :)

How cute are these measuring spoons BTW?  I think they're Martha Stewart - they're magnetic so the whole set stays together, and they have two ends - one that's oval shaped to fit into the narrow necks of spice bottles.  GENIUS!

My son kept walking into the kitchen while I was working on this.  My stand mixer is very quiet, but it was still a noise he wasn't use to.  I kept catching him standing on his tiptoes trying to peek.  It was adorable!

The recipe claims to make 1 quart - but I ended up with almost 2 full quarts.  So we'll be all set for ice cream for a while!!  (And by a while, I mean a day or two...)

The ice cream was still pretty soft when it was done churning, so we froze it for a while.  After dinner, we broke into it... and it was YUMMY.  I highly recommend it!

Oreo Ice Cream 

Ingredients

2 cups heavy cream

1 cup milk

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3/4 cup sugar

1 cup Oreos crushed up

Directions

Whisk eggs in a bowl for a minute or two until frothy and light yellow

Add sugar slowly and whisk another minute

Mix vanilla into the milk

Mix the cream and milk into the eggs

Add the mixture to the ice cream machine 

Follow your machine's specifications (mine was 25 minutes).

2 minutes before it's done churning, add in the chopped Oreos slowly...

Then freeze an hour or two!

Monday Made It!

Last week was so fun for me, that I'm back again!  

This week was pretty easy.  We have a couple of these HUGE bookcases.  One lives in our office, and one is in our little guy's bedroom.  I was tired of how plain it looked, so went on a Pinterest search.  Pinterest is my best online friend.  Anytime I have an idea, I just search for it, and dozens of ideas come up!  I searched for bookcase decorating and came up with this...

Fabric backed bookshelves!  What an easy and quick fix!  I went with grey polka dotted fabric because 1. it's my favorite decorating color and 2. it's gender neutral.  So the bookcases will be useful no matter what happens with our family in the future! 

It took me a little while to get it all done, but I'm loving how it turned out.  I wasn't sure how I would like it, so rather than glue the fabric straight to the shelves (making it permanent) I glued it to foam board I'd cut to fit the shelves.  Then I just pushed the foam into the shelf and it stayed.  The benefit of this is I can remove the fabric if I ever want to!

Materials Needed 

bookshelf

fabric

spray adhesive

foam board

scissors or an exacto knife

Directions

Measure and cut the foam board to fit the back of your shelves.

Measure and cut the fabric with an extra 1 inch perimeter.

Spray the foam board with the adhesive.

Lay the fabric on the foam board and press down to make it stick.

Fold the edges over.

Then, press your foam board into the shelves.

I wedged the foam board into the shelves and it stayed there - maybe I cut it a little too big?  But it works so that I don't have to adhere it to the shelf.  You may have to, in which case you can just use duct tape on the back...

Sorry I again don't have great pictures.  I didn't think to use this as a post until AFTER I'd completed the project.  Just imagine the shelf as plain white before I started... now it's backed in cute polka dotted fabric.  This would be great in a classroom too!

Monday Made It!

I told you I'd be back for Monday Made It!  It's my first one!  I'm so excited!  I'm linking up with 4th Grade Frolics - come join the fun!  

Over the years, I have collected a TON of direction manuals.  Between my wedding (Kitchen Aid stand mixer, blenders, coffee makers, etc) and my baby (swings, bouncy seats, cribs, etc) we have A LOT of books of directions.  Seriously.  I never kept them in a safe place, and I rarely needed them... but when I needed them, I REALLY needed them!  A silly example: we made grilled cheese on our panini press.  The plates were all greasy and I just couldn't get them clean.  I wanted to put them in the dishwasher... but didn't know if I could.  So I came up with this simple solution... a binder to hold everything.  I love binders.

Materials Needed

3 inch binder

page protectors

tabbed dividers

direction manuals

 I have 2 tabs - one for house manuals, and one for baby manuals.  On the front cover of each manual I write important information (AA batteries, dishwasher is ok, etc) so I don't have to go through the manual for a quick question.  But it's been invaluable to have everything in the same place and all organized.  I keep warranty information, receipts, and other little papers in the divider pages so I can get to them easily.

As you can see... I'm running out of room! I also need to make a cute cover, but since we just moved, my printer isn't hooked up yet. I'll get to it.  I love organizing things, and I love this binder... I know my pictures aren't great, but hopefully you get the idea!