Tag Archives: bigtime

I like mine with lettuce (no tomato)

05/18/2015 Nichole

Last night I made soy-scallion flank steak on the grill Rockford and the kids gave me for Mother’s Day. I didn’t marinate it as long as I usually do, and the cherry wood chips I tossed in overpowered the marinade. It was a delicious learning experience.

It was also the first chance I’d had to use the grill, other than seasoning the grates and making some s’mores with it. Most of the kids’ evening activities ended last week, though, which frees my evenings up for grilling a variety of meats in the backyard.

Monday: Cheeseburgers

I didn’t quite get flame-broiled grill marks, but the burgers were the juiciest I’ve made in quite awhile.

Tuesday: Grilled chicken

I generally use my sister-in-law Chloe Poppins’ grilled chicken recipe, which calls for a brief soak in Italian dressing before hitting the grill. Rockford was in charge of the grocery this week, though, and he opted for a sesame marinade. I’m sure it will do the job.

Wednesday: Peanuts? Cracker Jacks?

We might be going to a baseball game.

Thursday: Spaghetti

Can you grill meatballs? I wasn’t really planning to try, but if you tell me it’s possible I might give it a shot.

Friday: Grilled pizza

I have been wanting to grill some pizza for years. My research suggests that the pizza stone I use in the oven will crack at the temperatures I’ll be using in the grill, so I need to get a grill-happy stone. It’s on my to-do list for the week.

I’m hoping to do a low-and-slow smoked something on it soon, but for now I’m still working to learn to keep the temperature steady. Do you have a go-to grill meal? If it’s not a top-secret recipe, share it with me! I’d love to try it out.

Domestic Blitz

Can you clean a filthy oven using baking soda and vinegar? An investigative report.

03/11/2015 Nichole 7 Comments

I have never, in all my decades of using ovens, done a deep-clean on one of them. I did the line-it-with-foil trick in all of the properties we’ve rented (which Real Simple and other sources say is a bad idea), but I never did it once we actually bought a house.

We use our oven a lot, and it was a filthy doom pit in there. Really. Here’s an unaltered picture to prove it:

See? Hideous.

After more than three years of pizza, pie and casseroles, I decided I should probably go ahead and clean the oven. I’d heard that the self-cleaning cycle could damage the oven, and I didn’t want to use any harsh chemicals. After a little research, I decided I’d give TheKitchn.com’s baking soda and vinegar method a try.

First I made a too-thin paste using baking soda, water and a little bit of salt, because I have a bad habit of not actually measuring things. I added some more baking soda to fix it, then I started glopping it onto the floor and walls of the oven. TheKitchn suggests using rubber gloves for this. TheKitchn is smart, but I didn’t have any rubber gloves so I just used my dainty little paws. The bad news: I may or may not have fingerprints now. The silver lining: My hands are pretty well exfoliated.

Twelve hours, two loads of laundry, and trips to the grocery store, Target and the library later, I sprayed some plain white vinegar over the baking soda and went to work with my brand-new scrub brush. The result? A good bit of the baked-on badness came off, but there was still a lot left to go.

It would seem that there was a large spill in there at some point, and it wasn’t giving up so easily. So I mixed up some more baking powder paste and applied it, and the next morning the scrub brush and I went once more into the breach.

The floor of the oven looks considerably better now. You can clearly see that I didn’t get any of the grease spatter off of the walls, though. I had a very hard and awkward time reaching the back one, and the baking soda & vinegar combo didn’t work very well on the sides.

So I wasn’t able to get the oven entirely clean with baking soda and vinegar, but it’s much much better than it was this time last week. I’m going to go ahead and use some oven cleaner to finish it off, but I suspect that the baking powder and vinegar combo would be sufficient on an oven that wasn’t as far beyond as mine. I’ll try it again the next time the oven needs a cleaning; hopefully that won’t be three years from now.

Kids are weird, Sports

Overheard at my house during Katy Perry’s halftime performance

02/01/2015 Nichole

Pete: “What is that?!?”

Me: “That’s Katy Perry riding a giant metal tiger.”

Pete: “What? This is supposed to be football. Where’d that all go?”

Me: “This is halftime.”

Pete: “Oh. This is a weird halftime. Does that tiger even roar? Oh, I guess it does. Is that a chessboard? What is this?”

Rockford, walking through the door: “What is that? She looks like she’s wearing taped-on flames. Is that Lenny Kravitz? This is weird.”

* * * * *

Rockford: “Land shark!”

Pete: “What is this?”

Rockford: “This must be her hit about summertime.”

* * * * *

Pete: “What is she lip-synching to?”

* * * * *

Poppy: “Why is she wearing that?”

Rockford: “Because she wrote a song about the beach? I don’t know.”

* * * * *

Poppy: “How could someone fit all this into a halftime show? Ha! Look at those people dancing.”

* * * * *

Poppy: “Did she say ‘Tri-state area’?”

Pete: “Or maybe she said ‘Give me a nacho!’ “