I still don't like her.

Pioneer Woman, that is.

Since Chase has decided he's in a food rut, I put on my big girl panties & headed over to her website to dig through her recipes. I figured since it was for Chase, I could ignore everything about her that annoys me & just go straight for the food.

{A small side note: My husband thinks he's in a food rut now? Perhaps he'd like to keep complaining about it & then I'll show him what a real "rut" is when he's forced to eat PB&J for days on end, while my apron hangs in the pantry, nice & clean.}


Now. Were where we? Oh yes. The recipes I stole from PW & slightly modified. Steak bites & crash-hot potatoes. Along with sauteed zucchini & homemade potato bread.


And Chase promptly apologized for ever using the word rut. My secret? Butter. And lots of it.

Now, if PW could just quit babbling & get to the fracking point, she'd be goodtolerable.


In other boringly domestic news, I've been dinking around with my laundry detergent "recipe". We have a farmer's market here every weekend & one of the vendors sells handmade soaps. On a whim I decided to pick up a few bars from her "reject" pile to try out in my upcoming batch of soap & let me tell you. Spending the extra money on the soap was worth it.

The detergent smells uhhhh-may-zing. The soap isn't overly scented but just enough so that I didn't put any essential oil in. Perhaps it's just my imagination (although we all know I'm pretending it isn't) but I think the kids' skin has cleared up even more.

I also found that I like my detergent with a little more Borax than the original recipe called for. I usually do about a 2:1 ratio rather than a 1:1. Since it's a booster & a whitener, I've been able completely cut out OxiClean. You can also make a little paste with it & apply directly to spots before washing, which has eliminated the need for any kind of spot treatment products.

I played around with the amount of detergent I used in each wash, too, after reading a recipe on another blogger's site. When I started out using my homemade detergent, I was using only 2Tbs (or 1/8C) per load, as recommended by the original recipe I'd found. Her variation called for 1/4C if you had hard water. I've found that if I toss in a really dirty load of clothes (or Chase's clothes after a softball game) & use 1/4C of soap, the clothes come out clean & fresh smelling & don't require an extra wash like they sometimes did in the past, with commercial detergent.

So there you have it. Things have been so exciting around here lately I've been reduced to posting pictures of what I eat & debating the merits of an 1/8C of laundry detergent vs. a 1/4C.

I'm sorry.

(also? WTH Blogger. I've tried to adjust my font size about 09283 times & you still won't save my changes. Wench.)