40 Meatless Meals: Slow Cooker Baked Potatoes

Baking potatoes in a slow cooker has changed my life. The potatoes are much more flavorful than oven baked potatoes. I'm perpetually running short on foil, so I just throw the prepped potatoes in the pot. The extras can be used in other meals (might I suggest twice baked potatoes)?

Portion control

I like to purchase pesto from Costco. It's a great price and really delicious. The down side, not surprisingly, is the size of the package. To get around that, I like to use it like crazy for a few weeks and then freeze the rest in reasonably sized portions. An ice cube tray is perfect for this! Each cube is about a tablespoon and after it freezes I just transfer it to a zip-loc bag or other freezer container. I used to make my own baby food using a similar method. Easy, thrifty, practical. (Like music to my ears!)

I would recommend using a separate tray for this purpose though or your ice cubes may end up with a slight garlic-y taste.

J

Swatching it up

On Friday, Therese and I are going to the biggest button store in New England. We are pretty excited.

Whenever possible, I like to purchase buttons after a project is finished. For one thing, you have a better idea of how many buttons you'll need. But being an urban, pedestrian Church Lady, I don't have the option of lugging several almost finished projects with me to the button store.

Instead, I've come upon a technique that gets extra mileage out of your gauge swatch. After you've worked the requisite number of rows, knit a few rows in garter stitch, then, while knitting in the button band stitch pattern, work a button hole every few rows. You'll get a sense of how much the buttonhole stretches and what size button you should purchase. You can also experiment with different kinds of buttonholes to see what works best with the fiber. And on a lighter note, all you'll have to carry is the gauge swatch.

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Hint of the Day: Strawberries

Yes, my egg slicer actually does look like this....

If you work gently, you can use an egg slicer for large batches of perfectly sliced strawberries.

Hint of the Day

It's easy enough to drop down to fix a stitch that's knit instead of purled. And this technique is great for fixing cables that are crossed the wrong way, but when you have to drop down more than a few rows, and with a six or eight stitch cable, how do you make sure you pick up all the ladders in the right order?

Reach in your medicine cabinet for your comb. The wider the teeth, the better. Start unraveling the cable stitches one row at a time, placing the big loop on to the comb teeth, starting from the outside in. Voila! All your ladders are in order and not tangled. Now cross your cable in the right direction, and insert the first (and smallest) ladder into the stitches. Then pick up all the stitches as you would an individual using a crochet hook and the remaining ladders/loops.

This just in from Ravelry: another use for your slow cooker.

Belated pictures of Easter Handiwork

The lamb cake made his usual appearance!

The purple, pink, and yellow eggs were hot dyed with natural ingredients (red cabbage, beet juice, and onion skins, respectively). I boiled the cabbage leaves and onion skins with 1/4 cup vinegar for about half an hour before I added the eggs; the beet juice was drained from a can of beets. After cooking the eggs, I drained them and put them in the freezer for 10 minutes so their yolks would not turn green (I didn't want to undo all my hard work with the traditional ice water bath).

The red eggs were cold dyed, a great way to get intense color without a lot of food coloring. I added a little red food coloring to the cooled onion peel liquid and kept the hard-boiled eggs it for 2 days.

C.L. Hint of the Day: Perfect tablecloths

To iron your whole tablecloth easily, pull your ironing board parallel to the table. With the minimum amount on the board, iron it, then pull it on to the table, flat. Keep ironing the material and adjusting it across until you're done. Voila! No wrinkles, little turning, and a freshly pressed cloth.

Church calendar meets e-calendar

As you're organizing your calendar for the upcoming year, consider adding the saint of the day. Of course, you can write each day's feast on your paper calendar or planner, but you might want to make a more permanent record by adding them to a calendar on your computer. Many email programs (MSN, and Gmail, among others) have built-in calendars. Pull your Lives of the Saints or favorite saint book off the shelf, grab a cup of coffee, and spend a couple hours on this project. Here's a few tips I've discovered after doing this a few times:

• You can enter a saint for every day, or just start by entering particularly meaningful patrons.
• Feel free to enter just the names, or go ahead and enter a detail or two ("Virgin Martyr," or "Bishop of ___").
• One of the greatest advantages of this system is that you can set it to repeat annually. Be sure to enable this for each day, or you'll have to redo your calendar every year!
• You can also set the calendar to send you an email or text message reminder ahead of time. Set it to remind you a few days ahead of time for a child's name day, or just make it such that you wake up each morning to a little reminder.
• You're not just limited to entering saints! My mom gets a steady stream of email reminders for godchildrens' Baptismal days (again, the annual repeat feature makes this project a great investment of your time).
• Don't feel obligated to enter the whole year at once. Spending 20 minutes or so at the end of each month will prepare you for the month ahead.

The investment of a little time and effort into this project will pay off through the year as you find reminders of the Church's feasts mixed in with the reminders of your daily life!

A Christmassy Hint of the Day

Your Hostesses have been rather busy attending to our Domestic Churches, so first off, a Very Merry Christmas to all of our readers! I don't say belated, of course, as we're only on the fourth of the Twelve Days!

This hint of the day will make your home both more festive and more comfortable, in these rather dry winter days. Set an uncovered pot of water to simmer on the stove (or in a small slow-cooker, if you're worried about forgetting it), and toss in a cinnamon stick, some whole cloves or allspice, and/or some citrus peel, to both humidify your house and make it smell just heavenly! Fair warning, though: make sure you have some holiday treats around, as the scent may make the occupants of your house just a tad hungry!

That's all I have for now, but do Stay Tuned, as we have some wonderful new features in the works for the New Year!

Hint of the Day: Cook Twice, Wash Once Revisited

Earlier this week I was making Pot-au-Feu from Second Thanksgiving's turkey carcass. Since I writing "Cook Twice, Wash Once," I had come across a tip from Amy Dacyczyn (The Frugal Zealot). Amy claims that adding 1 oz of vinegar for every 1 quart of water (up to 4 oz of vinegar) would draw more calcium from the bones, and that you can't taste the vinegar in the end result. So I threw in about 1/3 cup of white vinegar.

Now, I currently lack means of testing the calcium content of my soup, but the vinegar did something. A 12 lb bird's carcass, already carved pretty clean by my husband, produced 2.5 quarts of shredded meat- enough meat for three more meals, Turkey ala King, Turkey Tacos, and Turkey Chili. The vinegar may have also loosened the gelatin from the bones, because I ended up with only 2 cups of thick stock and was forced to bail on the pot-au-feu. But Church Ladies are masters of operating on the fly.

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