Marking a pet milestone with baby kitten photos

I was planning to write a quick vacation wrap-up post after Aaron and I spent a long weekend in Ithaca, N.Y.

And then I realized that could wait, because you only switch your cat from kitten kibble to adult food once, and that deserves a post to mark the occasion. Or at the very least, it’s a chance to dig up a couple of his baby pictures.

A lazy morning last week, when I realized exactly how enormous my cat has become.

I mean, really that’s no kitten. He’s grown. Or at least I hope he is. Barley crossed the 10-pound threshold more than a month ago, and his body seems pretty filled out. He’s grown into his feet.

So as we were running low on his bag of kitten kibble, we decided to make the switch to adult food. All of the cat care websites say to feed kitten food until the babbies are a year old, and Barley is only 9 or 10 months old. But since he seems so developed, and since I’m afraid he’ll be 15 pounds if we keep him on the fatty kitten kibble for two more months, we pulled the trigger.

It’s a kind of bittersweet moment. I mean, look at how little he used to be!

This was the very first day he ventured up the stairs, just a couple weeks after we adopted him.

One of his favorite things when he was teeny was pouncing on our down comforter. I may have egged him on by rustling under the blanket.

Digging in: After one meal, Barley appears to pretty content with his new menu options.

Of course, Barley is still super playful and kitten-like. He’s not even a year old.

And he might enjoy a more refined palate now, but he still chows down like a champ.

More reminiscing:

Our SPCA adoption story

Barley’s favorite toy (which still holds true)

When Aaron and I almost both got the other a pet for Christmas

Spice rack organization: Bringing order to chaos

As I’ve been learning my way around my kitchen, I’ve accumulated a modest collection of spices, seasonings, oils and vinegars. It’s quite a mix: There’s the salt and pepper staples, alongside those $5 bottles that you need for that one recipe and swear you’ll find an excuse to use, but more often just get in the way of the staples.

My spice rack — or cupboard, really — had gotten out of hand, so I pulled everything out and started over again.

My spice cupboard actually has a very nice setup. It’s a corner cupboard with a raised, two-tiered lazy Susan built in, for a total of three storage surfaces including the base of the cupboard. So restoring order to the chaos didn’t take much more than a thoughtful consideration of what should go where.

I took this photo in April, Since then, the collection has grown by about six spice bottles. I swear, I’ll use them up.

First, I pulled out all of the spices, planning to dedicate the middle tier to my spices and other things in shorter bottles. I separated the things that I use nearly every time I cook: olive oil, Kosher salt, my black pepper grinder, table salt and recent addition Lawry’s seasoning salt. Those, I keep on the counter, right next to the stove.

Oh hello, loves. These guys get to live right next to the stove so I don’t have to waste time opening cupboard doors or spinning lazy Susans.

Next, I lined all of them up in alphabetical order, staggered into two rows: short bottles and tall bottles.

Conundrum: I buy big bottles of my oft-used spices, but I want to store the short ones in front so I can see to the back.

Then came the tricky part: how to keep the lot generally in alphabetical order so I can find things, while trying to keep the short bottles in the front, while trying to keep the frequently used bottles in the front.

I wanted to be able to see both the short and tall bottles. But spices I use a lot — garlic powder, red pepper flakes — are usually in tall bottles, which I’d like to have at the forefront.

The rest of my system, aside from the mostly spice-filled second tier, is taller boxes and bottles like vinegars, bread crumbs and rice go on the top shelf. Baking and bulk items like flour, sugar and corn starch are on the bottom shelf. Here’s a quick video tour of the second and third levels — the ones on the lazy Susan:

http://instagram.com/p/b0O9vsK6H1/

I’m not sure if I found the right solution yet. It’s been a work in progress, as I absent-mindedly return items to whichever empty space looks right. I also don’t think I’m making the best use of the space on the bottom, and I’ve always wanted nice, neat matching canisters to hold pantry staples like flour and sugar.

But having a system helps keep me organized when I’m putting things away, and it helps me know where to look when I neglect an ingredient or two during prep and have to scramble to add the nutmeg before the roux curdles for the macaroni and cheese.

Deviled eggs, inspired by Arrested Development’s mayonegg

We’ve been grilling a lot lately, what with the heat and humidity and malfunctioning central air conditioning system (until yesterday).

And I realized today that I’ve committed a major summer sin amid all this grilling: I haven’t had any deviled eggs.

So I fixed that today.

No, I didn’t make just four deviled eggs. There were six. Two of them didn’t make it to the photo.

After thinking about making deviled eggs for maybe a week or so, I was finally inspired to take action while watching “Arrested Development.” Specifically, this clip pushed me over the edge:

I hadn’t personally made deviled eggs for years. But I remembered the ingredients my mom uses — mayo, spicy brown mustard, Worcestershire sauce and a dash of salt. And I remembered her “recipe” — mixing the ingredients in a bowl with the hard-boiled egg yolks, tasting it and adding more until you’ve got the right ratio.

The egg filling ended up a little runnier than I’d normally prefer, thanks to my recipe method of “add more until it’s right.”

But finally, my summer menu feels complete.

Summer of grilling: Tomato and corn bruschetta-salsa

I think I invented bruschalsa yesterday.

As in something in between fresh bruschetta and fresh salsa. Maybe that means I prepared neither correctly, but it tastes darn good, so I’m rolling with it.

The only reason we had this much bruschalsa leftover was that we ran out of toast points or other eating vessels. Chips, toasted pita, maybe crackers would work, too.

Here’s what happened. Monday night, I ended up with some undercooked grilled corn. Long story short*, we got tired of waiting for the corn to cook, so I pulled the corn off and went with it. We didn’t eat it all, mostly because it wasn’t really cooked right.

So Tuesday, I stumbled upon this recipe for grilled tomato bruschetta and figured there would be nothing wrong with throwing some of the leftover grilled corn into the mix, as well. So I sauteed the corn a bit longer to make sure it got to that tender, sweet level of doneness that makes fresh corn so fantastic.

And then I started throwing stuff into a bowl. It came out really, really yummy. I only had some white bread on hand, which I toasted lightly on the grill and cut into quarters to serve. But I could see using some tortilla or corn chips, instead of the bread, which would take it more to the salsa side of the bruschalsa scale.

Original recipe	What I changed
2 tablespoons olive oil	I barely used any
1 1/2 pounds plum tomatoes, cored and halved lengthwise	I used three plum tomatoes, since it’s what I had. No idea the weight, and I dropped half of one into the grill. Oops.
Coarse salt and ground pepper
1 garlic clove, minced	Because Aaron isn’t as garlic-crazed as I am, I mellowed out the flavor by putting the clove on the grill for a few minutes before pressing it.
1 tablespoon red-wine vinegar	I poured in some, until it looked about right.
1/2 teaspoon red-pepper flakes	I poured in some, until it looked about right.
4 thick slices country bread	3 slices white bread. #classy
1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, cut into thin strips	Probably less than that — I just pulled some leaves off my plant.
	About a cup of leftover grilled corn with chopped scallions, seasoned with S&P, onion powder, cayenne, a little butter.
	A half a chopped onion, because it just seemed right.
	A splash of Sriracha. YOLO, I guess.

So the result was far less oily than a lot of bruschettas end up. I also really liked using the red wine vinegar instead of Balsamic. I think adding the raw onion might be another part of why it felt more like salsa than normal. I wish I hadn’t dropped that half a tomato into the grill, because the ratio of ingredients felt ever-so-slightly off.

But that’s sort of the fun of summer cooking: Throw some fresh stuff on the grill, put it together and eat it. Lock up the measuring cups. Throw away the key. Relish in the adventure of probably never making the exact same dish twice.

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*Short story long: I wanted to learn how to light the charcoal grill once and for all, so I could start it up and get cooking without having to wait for Aaron to get home from work to do it for me. While arranging charcoal, he alleges that I told him we had put enough in the grill. I contend that I was asking a question, not a statement, about the amount of coals in the grill. Regardless, it turned out to not be enough charcoal to cook the ridiculous amount of food I hoped to grill. And so the ears of corn on the top rack were a bit underdone when we finally got too hungry to wait any longer.

Cheers to another #cookingwithjsprenk adventure.

Hemming for dummies: How Ikea’s hem tape saved a non-seamstress

I’m no seamstress.

I can sort of darn a sock. I can mend a ripped seam. But that’s about the limit of my sewing abilities.

This is the “tape.” It’s not sticky or adhesive at all. It’s a sort of nylon mesh that works magically when you apply heat via the iron.

So imagine my glee when I found iron-on curtain-hemming tape at Ikea while shopping for curtains and fabric for my big long faux wall in the third floor guest room.

I was skeptical at first, to the point that I made backup plans for my mom to hem the curtains if the tape failed me.

But leave it to Ikea to make a solution for hemming to save us non-seamstresses.

If you’re planning to hem more than a couple of inches of fabric, you can cut off the excess before or after you iron on the hemming tape.

Step one: Fold the curtain at the point you want to hem it and iron your “hem.” You’re making a little flap where you’ll tuck the tape before ironing it again to activate the adhesiveness.

I’m not a huge fan of ironing, and I don’t even have a full-size ironing But I also don’t own a sewing machine, and the idea of hand-sewing the tops and bottoms of curtains for a 108-inch wide wall was horrifying.

Beating the heat with homemade popsicles

Mmm, popsicle.

On the last day of a recent heat wave, I remembered one of the spoils from the big Ikea trip: popsicle molds.

By the time I got around to picking a recipe and gathering ingredients, it wasn’t 90+ degrees outside anymore. But it’s summer, and that means popsicles are always a good idea.

Especially if you use fresh fruits to make a healthier pop than you can buy the freezer section.

I used this recipe for blueberry lemon pops. See how I made them after the jump.

Using a curtain to make storage space

Pay no attention to the boxes behind the curtain.

We welcomed our first houseguests this weekend, which served as the perfect impetus to tackle some of the bigger projects on our “eventually we’ll get this done” list.

Namely, we needed to get the third floor guest room in order. Or at least get it set up well enough that guests could stay there.

We’d always planned to make the third floor a guest room, as the house was marketed as a three-bedroom home. (We’re using one as the office and the finished third floor is the third.) But upstairs was full of boxes of stuff, and some supplies leftover from my chevron curtain project.

When Aaron’s sister made plans to come visit with her daughter from Wisconsin, we needed to get in gear so they’d have a place to stay.

So we upgraded our bed and moved the old bed up to the third floor. Acquiring a bed is a pretty good first step.

See what I mean about our wonky ceiling? The left side of the roof pitch narrows down to less than two feed above the floor. What am I supposed to do with that space?!

Next, we had to work around one of the quirks of this house. The third floor ceiling is slanted with the roof pitch. And one wall gets really, really short, to the point that the “ceiling” meets the wall about a foot and a half above the floor. So there’s a ton of space that a person can’t functually use.

But I still have boxes that need to be stored upstairs.

So in a stroke of brilliance, I decided to hang a curtain midway up the ceiling to create a faux wall and hide the boxes nestled in under the short ceiling. And then I used that as a backdrop for the bed, as well, so the areas where our guests would move around the most would have the tallest ceiling.

I found a long, long curtain rod at Ikea for about $5, plus a couple of brackets for about $2-3 each. A little bit of labor for Aaron, and the rod was hung.

I actually had the most trouble with finding fabric to fill the space. It’s about 9 feet wide, and I needed it to be almost 5 feet tall to hang from the rod to the floor. My instinct was to buy three yards of fabric and hang it horizontally. But most fabric bolts are only 40-44 inches wide, which wouldn’t be tall enough if I hung it on its side. And I didn’t like any of the fabrics I could find in a larger width.

Although it wasn’t the original plan to use three separate pieces of fabric for the backdrop curtain, I really like the way this ended up looking. Barley likes it, too.

So I opted to use three panels of the regular width fabric and hang each from the rod vertically. It worked out better, I think, because I can pull apart the panels to get to the boxes between them instead of getting in from one side or the other.

It also looks prettier than having one solid color or pattern the whole way across.

I’m very happy with how it turned out. It got a great reaction from our guests, too!

Making space for new stuff

It was a rare night when Aaron and I got home from work at approximately the same time.

Look at all that pretty, cubical storage space. Plus I’ve got great light and a view. Perfection.

He works the day shift, and I generally work the night shift, so we don’t really get to see each other often. Factor in our energy levels when we do get home, plus dealing with dinner, and it’s rare for us to manage to be productive in our home on those nights when our schedules collide mid-week.

So imagine my surprise when we actually got stuff done on Tuesday night.

Granted, I got takeout for dinner. But we watched the debate between candidates for the 95th state House district, ran some laundry, and — most notably — rearranged the office to accommodate my new Ikea shelf-desk.

New office set-up. The corner desk on the left used to be basically oriented where the new Ikea desk-shelf now sits. Previously, the room was mostly storage.

It was quite the feat. Just look at these photos of the office clutter, air-lifted to the hallway and, strangely and not by my doing, the bathtub.

Getting ready for our first houseguests

After a year in our house, we’re pretty well settled in. There are still some boxes stashed on the third floor, but the rooms where we spend most of our time feel comfortable and homey.

Just as I was getting the itch to start some new projects this spring, we got the perfect kick in the pants on a couple of the ones we’d planned for some indeterminate date in the future.

Aaron’s sister and niece are coming to visit from Wisconsin, so that put a deadline on our “one of these days” projects of creating a guest bedroom on the third floor and adding a shower to the guest bathroom.

On the plus side, this means tons of shopping for fun home goods.

On the other hand, it’s a lot harder than I expected.

The biggest hurdle so far has been the bathroom. My claw-foot tub is oriented oddly, or at least unusually.

If the options for adding a shower are any indication, most tubs are oriented the other way: with the plumbing against the wall. Then, the riser that holds the shower head gets mounted straight back to the wall. Except in our case, we don’t have a wall there. Dilemmas.

The faucet is not on the wall side of the tub, the way most tubs apparently are oriented. So we had to find a full-enclosure shower curtain rod that didn’t tether to the wall on that side.

The shower kit we finally found to match our strange bathtub needs.

That proved far more difficult than I expected. But we appear to have found one, and we ordered all the pieces to make it work. (Aaron had second thoughts after we placed the order, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll be able to make it work. He’s good at that.)

So in three to seven business days, we’ll be able to see if it works.

And by “we,” clearly I mean “Aaron.”

Next up: Mattress shopping. Need to give Angie and Emma somewhere to sleep, after all!

My first Ikea haul, or “I’m going back for more”

My first Ikea trip was a success. I didn’t get everything on my list, but let’s be honest. That would have bankrupted me.

The whole day was a bit overwhelming, from the showroom to the warehouse.

Aaron was already inside the building shaking his head at me and Kate as we documented our glee at finally arriving at Ikea.

And so after almost four hours of shopping, while Aaron went to get the borrowed truck to load up our purchases, my friend Kate and I looked at each other and acknowledged we both wanted to go back inside.

Luckily, I have a great excuse. I’ll be back in the White Marsh, Md., area on Friday to hop on a bus to New York for a bachelorette party weekend. And so I’m going back into that big blue building for a second run through. See what I got behind the jump.

Stuff I expected to get

This is what you’d see if you were laying under the desk. The top is what’s on the ground, with the one leg sticking up. The other side mounts on a shelf that has yet to be built.

My desk! I wanted a big workspace with lots of storage space so I can get comfy while crafting. And I found one I love. It’s got a big old workspace, and it mounts on one side to on of those cube organizers. I can also fit something underneath it for more hidden storage. But no Ikea trip is complete without some frustration over assembly. And that’s why the desk still looks like this on my office floor:

Why isn’t it assembled yet, you wonder? Funny you should ask. That’s because while trying to build the shelf that the desk mounts to, I broke something.

Sigh. I guess this is what I signed up for.

One of the dowels that stabilize the dividers of the shelf snapped off, and Aaron couldn’t pry it out. He says he can drill it out so we can finish putting it together, but that requires him to remember to bring home the drill.

Stuff I didn’t expect to get

Oh hey, kitchen cart. It’s real wood, surprisingly, and I think it’s unfinished, so I’m considering staining or painting it to fit better in my dark kitchen.

This kitchen cart! I spotted it in one of the kitchens in the showroom and exclaimed, “A baby island!” I’m really excited to bust it out for our next party or the next time I need to cook a bigger meal.

Stuff I didn’t get
I couldn’t pull the trigger on a couple of items. We were thisclose to getting a bench with shoe storage for the hallway, but the matching coat hook setup wasn’t actually the same width, which I really want. So we bailed on that.

I also almost bought this skinny cabinet with fold-out drawers for guest bathroom storage. But I hadn’t measured the width of that room to know whether it’d make it too crowded in there.

I was bummed in the nightstand selection, too. I thought that’d be an easy purchase, but I didn’t really like any of the options in stock.

Other odds and ends
I also ended up with a garlic press, a set of six rocks glasses, a set of tongs, three sets of six popsicle makers (I blame Aaron for the third extra set) and a $1 watering can.

In all, it was a good day. I’m excited to go back to see the things I missed the first time around.