Here is my twist on the ranch dressing. I do not usually buy mayonnaise and I have never made my own, so my dressing had to be mayonnaise free.
The Dressing
Ingredients:
1/2 cup Sour Cream
1/2 cup Greek Yogurt
3 or 4 spoons of extra virgin Olive oil
Fresh dill finely chopped
Fresh chives, finely chopped
Horse radish (prepared in vinegar) per taste
salt to taste
pepper to taste
Add the sour cream, greek yogurt, olive oil, prepared horse radish and a little water in a blender and blend until everything is fully mixed.
Pour it out into a bowl.
Add the chopped herbs and mix by hand until everything is well blended.
dill
Fresh pepper and chives
The dressing
The Salad:
Mixed greens of your choice
Pepper Jack cheese (I am in love with this thing, but don't seem to like it melted)
You could throw in some nuts, but I did not.
Toss with dressing. Done!
Wood pallets come in several sizes and types. The ones I scored from my garden cinder block delivery were large and looked like this:
This was too big for the projects I wanted to try and so I put it off for a while. Until on the way to work one day I spied a stack of pallets that were just the right kind -- stronger boards and also heat treated. I talked to the owner of the beer wholesaler and got me a couple of those boards. They looked like the first pic on this post.
I started by sawing off the appropriate end of the pallet using a Ryobi reciprocating saw. To end up with this
It already looked like a shelf, except it had no bottom. To make a bottom, I sawed off one of the narrower planks on the remaining piece of the pallet which gave me this
And the leftover pallet looked like this
Hmm this itself is an interesting shape and is giving me more ideas. But, I have to stick to my project on hand for now.
Then came the Grand Sanding! I used some 3M sand paper with coarse and medium grit, but soon tired of it and decided to invest in a power sander. So got me a Ryobi orbital 1/4 sheet sander and went to town on the boards with it.
I then used Minwax Espresso satin to stain the bottom board to see if I would like this color for the entire shelf.
I really loved it, but was not too sure that I would like for the whole shelf to be this color, seeing as it is so dark. So I decided to paint part of it white with some house paint I had lying around and stain part of it this color.
All I had to do now was attach the bottom to the shelf and then hang it over the rods in the kitchen nook (see here for the kitchen nook). I originally planned on using an L-bracket on the inside to screw the bottom to the rest of the shelf, but it was impossible to get into that tight spot with my screw driver. So, I found some wood screws that I simply used to screw the bottom to the sides of the shelf
Wood screws attached the bottom to the sides of the shelf
Now I am all done except for the hanging on the wall part.
Now I finally have a place to put my oversized baking accessories that had to be stored in the oven until now!
All I have to do is find a safe way to put it up on the wall!
3 cups cooked black beans
1 egg (skip if you don't eat eggs)
1.5 cups pepper jack cheese
1 whole cauliflower
Oregano
Rosemary
Basil (fresh if possible)
4 pods of garlic
chili flakes (crushed red peppers)
salt
pepper -- whole and crushed
1/4 to 1/2 cup butter
What to do with the stuff:
Preheat the oven to 350 F
Blanch the cauliflower in a little water with a little salt. Make sure not to over cook it.
Break and egg and mix it in with the cauliflower and the black beans
Add the shredded pepper jack cheese
Crush some rosemary (releases the fragrance)
Add some salt and crushed pepper and chili flakes and mix it all up in a big bowl
In a pan, add some butter and add whole pepper corns to it. Let it pop (smells awesome!) Then add in the chopped garlic and some basil and saute until the garlic is sort of roasted
Add this into the rest of the stuff and mix it up.
Grease a couple of oven safe dishes and add this mixture in each.
This has got to be the fastest, easiest, smallest project I have ever done.
My entry way had a key organizer that looked like this:
Anyone who was married in the south of India has some version of this. In fact, I bet they have a million copies of some version of this. The clock stopped working perhaps the very first day we opened the package. But, it served its purpose for while until, as always, the number of keys that needed a home far out numbered the hooks on this thing.
Enter an old trivet from IKEA that I saved from the dumpster several times over.
I cleaned the thing, removed the hooks from the old key organizer and screwed them on to the old trivet and voila! I have something that is much more Zen.
I used to old nail that held up the old key organizer to hang this thing. I used the same nail to also hang one bunch of keys. There is easily room for three more hooks on this thing.
After I fixed all the hooks I realized that I wanted the pieces of wood to go horizontal -- that's more Zen to me than vertical stripes. Oh well! I will just have to find the other trivet and hang it horizontally!
