miia monthly

I like tomatoes, but there is no way that I can eat all the fresh tomatoes that I have, so it’s time to test out some more of my canning skills.
I put off canning the tomatoes from the garden for a while now. Since I had a very tough time finding citric acid. But after [...]

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I haven’t posted any garden pics in a while, so here is a giant dump of pics from the past month.
On a side note during a random conversation with my next door neighbor who works on a organic CSA farm. We started to talk about my backyard garden and I was telling him about some [...]

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For some reason this year, I’ve grown all these jalapenos, but I’m not really in the mood it eat multiple pounds of jalapeno poppers. So instead of making jalapeno poppers I’m going to cut the jalapenos into rings and try to pickle and can them.
There is just something about canning/pickling that really interests me. Maybe [...]

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Its that time of the year again. With the fall harvest fast approaching, so it could only mean one thing. Time for fresh apple cider! And with fresh apple cider, it means that its time for me to make some hard cider!
Since the local homebrew shop that I use doesn’t carry White Labs (long story [...]

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Every once in a while I get a craving for Bloody Mary’s, the last fix was during the Forth of July this year. I don’t know if it’s the spices in a Bloody Mary, or the vitamins in the tomato juice. But when I want one, I’ve got to have one.
Since Bloody Mary’s are made [...]

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One tip on separating yeast in the fridge, don’t let it sit in the fridge overnight. Since the yeast in suspension will eventually settle on top of the trub. It may look pretty cool in the growler, to see all the gradations of trub and yeast. But all it does is forces you to start [...]

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All it took was less then $4.00 in parts from Radio Shack, and my Show-Vac was back in action. It cost me $1.69 for a thermal fuse, with a 129C limit/10amp rating, and $2.19 for a bag of mixed bullet electrical connectors. At first I thought about just hard wiring the fuse to the circuit. [...]

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And the hits just keep on rolling.
I set out some time tonight to finally vacuum and mop the whole house. And while I was vacuuming my bedroom, which by the way is the only room in the house with carpet, my Shop-Vac stopped working out of nowhere. At first I thought that the extension cord [...]

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What can I say other then the suspicions I had with the Wisconsin Cheddar Lay’s have been confirmed when I finally re-experienced Au Gratin Wavy Lay’s. Other then the obviousness of these being wavy cut chips versus the flat cut on the Wisconsin Cheddar. The flavors are pretty much the same other then the Au [...]

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I’ve been thinking about getting a watering wand the last couple of years, but all the models that I see in the store suck. They are either made with cheap parts (e.g. plastic valves), or they add crazy bells and whistles to jack up the price (e.g. swiveling heads and/or heads with multiple spray settings.)
So [...]

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