Accidentally Delicious Chocolate Coffee Mocha Cake

By Mary C. Tillotson

We had an occasion for cake not too long ago, and coffee-flavored cake was requested. Following the advice of the internet, I made a cake that ended up being way more delicious than I expected. It's not complicated. Here's the recipe:

1. Brew two cups of strong coffee. Luke usually buys high quality dark roast coffee, and I put 3/8 C coffee and two cups of water in the French press and brewed for three minutes, then poured it into my big measuring cup. It's nice to have a pour spout and I'm told bad things happen if you over-brew. The coffee doesn't need to stay hot so go ahead and get this ready ahead of time. (Luke's normal recipe is 1/8 C coffee with 1 C hot water, brewed in the French press for three minutes. His other tips: buy good coffee and keep the coffee maker clean.)

7QT: Seven ways to make your life smell better

Image by Hermann Kaser

By Mary C. Tillotson

A couple weeks ago, I had a cold, and about then I realized how much I really love good-smelling things. I remember walking back to my dorm in college in the spring -- three blooming trees grew right in front, and at night when everything else was quiet, I'd walk past them, not really thinking till I was startled with their sweet scent.

It was lovely.

Having a cold, however, is not lovely. While all I could smell was snot and sinus pressure, I compiled a list of seven ways to make your life smell better, joining Jen and the others for Seven Quick Takes Friday. I'd love to hear your ideas, too!

{one}

Image by Durova

Make bath salts. Measure some coarse ground salt (epsom salts, sea salt, etc.) into a freezer bag, drip in a few drops of essential oil (and coloring if you want), seal it, shake it so it's all mixed up, then poor it in a pretty jar. (Or your bathtub.) When I clicked around the internet on this topic, I found that all the DIY bath salts were some variation on this (though some included baking soda). The really artsy people include rose petals or dried lavender buds, and they decorate their own jars.

Note: You can buy essential oils at a craft store or online, just look for soap making supplies. There's probably soap coloring that's better for you than food coloring, but food coloring is probably fine.

{two}

Image by A Girl With Tea

After you make tea, leave the tea bag in the sink and let the hot water from your tap splash on it as you wash dishes. A tea bag is good for about a cup and a half, and there's no sense in letting that half a cup go completely to waste. Let the aroma rise up to your nose while you're washing dishes. When you're done, toss it.

{three}

Image by James Vaughan

Powder your carpet, let it sit for ten minutes, then vacuum. "Powder?" you ask. Crack open a sachet packet that's done smelling good (it's still got a little life left; you just have to vacuum it to smell). Use scented baby powder, baking soda, or baking soda dripped with essential oils.

{four}

Image by André Karwath

Put lemon or other citrus peels down your garbage disposal. My mom always told us not to do this when we were kids, so maybe this is actually bad for the disposal. I did it accidentally once, about four apartments ago, and it smelled really nice, so I kept doing it.

{five}

Image by nimble photography

Make candles. Or if you're not into DIY, buy some. And light them.

{six}

Image by Kham Tran

Use your crockpot. The easiest crockpot recipe I know is this: cut up a chicken breast or stew beef, some onion, and some carrots and put them all in the crockpot in the morning. Add salt and pepper right before dinner time. Your house will smell like chicken soup or beef stew all day.

{seven}

Marry a man who smells like he looks amazing.

Not Washing Dishes: A Tribute to My Mom

By Mary C. Tillotson

Image by Sarah Korf

Once upon a time, when I was a child, my mom made impossible pie for dinner. One of my siblings asked why the quiche-like food was called "impossible pie." (We were too young at the time to have "quiche" in our vocabulary, and that may have been the reason.)

"Because it's impossible to make anything better!" my brother piped up.

"Or because it's impossible to make anything worse," I grumbled.

My poor mother. Despite my picky eating and just plain not eating, I learned a lot of important life lessons from her, many of them regarding food. For example, whenever my dad cooked, she'd say, "Marry a man who's as nice to you as your dad is to me." (I did.) I also learned things like "Don't eat soap" (I don't), and, most importantly, "Don't wash more dishes than you have to."

My mom is a master at this last one, as you'll notice from her comment on my chili recipe a few months ago. She's amazing. This isn't something every woman gets to learn from her mother, so I thought I'd share her secret here and show you exactly how it's done. (She'll probably leave a comment that will eliminate one more dish. Just watch.)

Some general tips: Cutting boards double as plates when you're just having a snack -- especially if it's cheese and crackers or a sliced apple. Meat can be cooked in a saucepan before adding spaghetti sauce. And the only reason not to mix measured ingredients right in the measuring cup is to support the mixing bowl industry.

For the real demonstration, I'll make impossible pie (which I like now -- it's funny what adulthood does to you), after which I'll only have to wash the following:

one cutting board

one knife

one one-cup measuring cup

one four-cup measuring cup

one fork

one 8x8 pan

Here's the recipe:

The cheapskate-beginner's guide to non-committally dabbling in candle-making

By Mary C. Tillotson

It all started early in the week when my husband kindly asked me to put away some things I'd left strewn around the office.

I looked at my eclectic shoeboxes labeled beads+string and dremel+woodburner and so forth until my eyes fell on a navy blue box -- Florsheim, apparently courtesy of someone else years ago. I'd been too ashamed to label this one: inside were four jars with the last bits of scented candle in the bottom. The two largest jars I'd been lugging around since (*blush*) college, and the medium-sized ones since the year after.

I am a closet packrat, and all I can say in my defense is that when I married my husband, he owned -- meaning, had not thrown away on purpose -- more than one empty soap squirter. I mean the kind you can buy full of liquid soap for 99 cents.

I realize this is not much of a defense. But these candles had lovely scents, and it would be a snap to combine the last bits and make a new (smaller) candle. Plus, those jars with the gasket-lids are just so handy. I mean, you could clean them out and fill them with Christmas candy and give them as gifts!

Feeling competent and confident from something I'd just finished, and embarrassed at the realization that I still hadn't made the candles (or the Christmas candy, for that matter), I announced to my husband that I was hereby going to make candles this weekend, or I was going to throw the jars away.

mmmm...flowers

And scented candles, too, because without fragrance, what's the point of a candle?

The candles were three different types of floral, and I thought they'd blend well, but I would need to add some scented wax to what I already had.

Unfortunately, nobody sells floral fragrances this time of year. (Aside: candles with baked-goods or fruit fragrances generally smell like tween girl body wash; as for the rest of what's on the shelves this month, what does "Tis The Season" or "Distant Cabin" even smell like?)

I also hadn't realized that there are about 18 different kinds of candle wax and 16 different kinds of wicks, or remembered that in the world of crafts, anything can be really really complicated and expensive if you let it.

Getting Organized

By Mary C. Tillotson

Last night I dreamed that the word "Wednesday" in my planner had been changed to "Thursday," and I had no idea which block had my Wednesday appointments and which had my Thursday appointments. It was awful.

story of (part of) my life

Getting organized with my hectic schedule (I'm a reporter, algebra tutor, cook, homemaker, blogger, theology student, and wife) and Type B personality is a challenge, but I'm working on it! I want to share some helpful things I've found or learned.

*  *  *

First. Know yourself and be yourself.

The DIY Lie

By Amanda Allen
Guest Contributor

I suppose I was impatient, or perhaps we can blame it on nesting, but I put together most of our baby furniture by myself. The crib was wrestled into place while my husband was at work, as were the short bookshelf, both of the tall bookshelves, the china cabinet, and his desk. I really enjoy putting together flat-packed puzzles, and rejoice in the clean Scandinavian lines of the finished pieces. However, a lady well into her second trimester should really not be grappling with the upper section of a china cabinet all by her lonesome, no matter how Swedish the furniture, or how brave and strong the pregnant lady. I never did anything dangerous, just unnecessary and a bit dumb. Sure, it was empowering, but some things are meant to be done by two people; the cartoon man in the instruction booklets told me so, and he was right about everything else.

I’ve never been much of a feminist, and if my education taught me anything it was the extreme importance of the traditional family, but the one great lie I swallowed was the superiority of the Do-It-Yourself life. In high school, and in my first year of college, I assumed that I would get through school, then work and live “on my own” for a few years before getting married and starting a family. I thought I needed to prove myself, through some arbitrary series of tests or obstacles, before my opinions and experiences would be legitimate. I thought I had to brave the great unknown alone, and earn my way back to real life with stories and scars. Apparently I needed to be a pirate, but not even that, because an individual pirate is part of a ship’s crew. According to my model, I would have been alone in a rowboat.  A rowboat I built myself. Probably purchased from Ikea. I would have been one lonely Viking.

This is an unreasonable picture of single life, as my unmarried peers can attest. No one really lives on their own, or works on their own, or goes to church on their own, and our value as individuals does not depend on our ability to function in a vacuum. Had my path run otherwise, I would be living with my parents or with roommates. I would have co-workers and friends and neighbors. I would be learning different lessons, but I would not be any more or less a whole person. Trials we call down on ourselves because of pride win us no prizes, whether married or single, working outside of the home or in it. My sad little DIY fiction was based on the idea that what I really wanted to do, get married and have a family, was not enough of a challenge, simply by virtue of being what I most wanted to do. It doesn’t mean that I’m not good at other things, that I couldn’t have survived “on my own,” but why should I have to? My godmother once said that one of the nicest things about getting married young was not having to make all the tricky life decisions by yourself. You still have to make them, though, there’s no getting out of that.

My little family moved recently, back to the town where my husband and I went to college, and it feels like cheating. This town has its troubles, but it is home. We know people here, we like the smell and feel of the place. We arrived and emptied the moving truck into the living room, and then began sorting and re-assembling our life. My cousin helped me put the baby’s furniture back together, and it took less than half as long as when I did it alone. No, I didn’t get to rig up a clever system for holding up the other end of the crib pieces while I tightened bolts, but cousins are more interesting than chairs and stacks of magazines anyway. You can talk to them, and when you’re done you can go for a walk, or get a cup of coffee.

There is no “inauthentic” life experience, I’m not cheating or taking the easy way out by continuing as part of a community I joined, rather than one I founded. I’m not cheating by staying at home with my baby, writing, creating, praying, feeding my family. The work of life is hard, but it is for people I love, in a place I love, and that makes it more, not less, real. I can buy my furniture flat-packed and efficient, and I can put it together alone when I’m feeling stubborn, but I can’t approach life this way. The pieces are too big.




Amanda Allen is a wife/mother/artist/Orthodox Christian living in Hillsdale, Michigan, recently returned from exile in Ohio. She can be found at maroonish.tumblr.com and her blog archives are here. If you visit her, she'll make you soup or knit you something, or possibly both.

Super Easy Chili

By Mary C. Tillotson

At The Mirror, we like to think we're intelligent women, so lately we've been posting a lot of thoughtful, hopefully thought-provoking, stuff. Lest we get too cerebral, however (did I just ruin it with the word "lest"?), I'd like to share with you the easiest chili recipe ever. Take a look at the picture and that's about all you need to know.

Seriously. A can of tomato sauce, a can of beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and some hamburger.

If you'd like the more complicated version, here it is: Open your three cans and dump them into a saucepan - you don't even need to drain the diced tomatoes. Turn the heat on low or medium, just so it warms up. Put your (thawed) hamburger, between half and a whole pound, in a frying pan or skillet and brown it. When it's cooked, drain the grease and plop the meat into your saucepan. Mix it all up, then spice it how you like. Voila! Chili. I really don't think I can make it any more complicated than that.

This ends up being pretty meaty, so if you want it soupier, just add another can of tomato sauce. You can use almost any kind of bean - kidney, black, chili - or a variety of beans if you're making a double or triple batch. If you want an emotional experience, chop an onion and throw it in.

If you're going for simple, don't spice it, or just use chili powder. A Texan (the aunt of a college friend) suggested chili powder, paprika, garlic, oregano, a combination I think tasted very Southwestern. My husband and I also made Italian chili - same recipe, just with basil, oregano, garlic, rosemary, or with Italian seasoning and garlic, maybe topping it with some mozzarella cheese. Onion powder might be good, either for the Southwest or Italian version. We've also used this as spaghetti sauce, and that worked well, too.

Bonus: Chili freezes super well. It'll probably make more than one meal, especially if you're single or a small family, and you can't really halve the recipe because what would you do with half a can of tomato sauce? Pack up the leftovers in meal-sized, freezer-proof, microwave-safe containers and freeze them; when you're ready, microwave them. Easy meal for later!

This is a really flexible recipe. Try it, and let me know what you did to make it even more delicious! I'm always up for new ideas.

A legitimately easy painted flower pot project

By Mary C. Tillotson

The picture says it all, almost, so I'll start with that.

Once I figured out the three-stroke trick, the flowers were easy.

Some other thoughts:

• Those plain, boring, orange clay pots are super cheap. I paid about $2 for the 4-inch pot and tray.
• I like using acrylic paint because it's cheap, easy to find, washable, and fast-drying. It usually comes in 2-oz bottles which cost anywhere from $1.09 to half that, so it's easy to amass a wide variety of colors and store them in a shoebox.
• Acrylic paint is washable, so, not waterproof - which will be a problem if you plan to water your plant. You'll want something for a waterproof finish - I used some spray enamel, which I got at the hardware store for $5.
• I use a paper plate for a palette. Lots of room, easy to see the colors, doesn't leak, and I can throw it out when I'm done. I start putting dabs of paint on it, then try to narrow down to a color scheme that I like. Then, I take all the colors from the color scheme and dab them all in the same area to see if they look good together. This time, I also painted a little bit of blue on the plate, then painted green, pink, and purple over it to see what the colors would look like with a blue background.
• Do some planning about the colors and spacing of the flowers. If you want to make them high-low-high-low like I did, you don't want to get around the pot and realize you can't squeeze another one in to make the pattern work.
• Because acrylic dries quickly, I could do pretty much all the painting in one sitting. I started with the brown rim, then one side of the brown tray. By the time I was done with that, the rim was dry enough that I could paint the blue background, then I flipped the tray and painted the other side. Then some touch-up work, then the green stems, then the flowers.

Recipe: Mexican Rice-Beans-Meat

By Mary C. Tillotson

I met someone who frequently scores big when she makes one of those dump-the-refrigerator-into-a-bowl-and-spice-it-up dinners. Here's her latest.

Ingredients: rice (cooked), salsa, black beans, chicken (cooked - baked or grilled is best), sausage (Mexican chorizo or kielbasa)

This is really a matter of throwing everything in a bowl and mixing it together. Read through the recipe and see if you have any leftovers you can pull out of your fridge. I wrote the recipe assuming you were making it from scratch, but if you've already got leftovers, warm 'em up and throw 'em in the bowl.

Directions:

1. Start cooking the rice (1/4 to 1/2 cup of dry rice per adult). It usually takes a while to cook, so do steps 2 and 3 while you wait.

2. Cut the sausage into bite-sized pieces and brown in a skillet. Sausage usually comes in precooked links, so brown it just enough to make it a little crispier and not taste microwaved. My friend used chorizo, which tastes (to me) exactly like super spicy kielbasa. I thought it was too spicy, so I used kielbasa.


3. Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and throw it on the skillet. (One chicken breast was enough for my husband and me, and leftovers.) I had baked a chicken breast the night before, so it just needed to warm up. You could sautee the chicken while you're browning the sausage.

4. By now, you should have finished cooking the rice, so put it in a serving bowl. Add salsa and mix it in. The salsa should coat the rice like a sauce. This is where much of the flavor comes in, so use tasty salsa! If you want to spice it up, chili powder and cilantro are good choices.


5. Add black beans. If you use canned beans, it's easy; if you use dry beans and do the whole soak+boil thing, it's extremely inexpensive. Do what works for you.

6. Add the sausage and chicken.

7. Mix it all together and serve.