Tag: chunks

My Homemade Peanut Butter

On By Michel McDonaldIn Diet, Food, Health, Noom, RecipesLeave a comment

peanut butter

Peanut butter seems to cost a lot of money these days.  Don’t you wish you could make your own at more than half the cost?  Well guess what?  You can!

Today I bought a box of small mason jars and 2 tall 16oz jars of Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts.  I was looking for no salted, but all they had were dry roasted, honey roasted and some other flavor that was spicy.  Dry roasted was fine I guess.

I added 1-16oz jar of peanuts to the food processor and blended the nuts until they were in chunks.  I added 2 tablespoons of peanut oil and 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt.  I blended it until it was smooth.  Although, it was very dry and I decided to just add a touch more peanut oil to make it more creamy than it was.  I probably went overboard because it did get creamier, really creamier lol.  Next time I’ll just let it blend until it gets creamy on it’s own.  My partner tasted it and he said it needed more brown sugar, so I added 2 more tablespoons.  It did make a difference.

I like these little jars because if I want to make some peanut butter cookies, 1 whole jar is basically 1 cup, enough to make 1 batch of cookies.  Next time I go to the store I’m going to buy the bottling kit so I can start making my own jams and applesauce.  I could literally go crazy bottling jams and applesauce, but at the same time I know what’s in them so I know that I am eating healthier and saving a ton of money.

Plumbing Troubles

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

About 2 months ago, I was in the back yard trying to get it cleaned up so we could use it this summer.  I had big plans for pulling all the weeds, tossing all of the junk and pruning the orange tree so it wasn’t taking over the place but still have it so we could continue to enjoy the oranges year after year.

One day as I was out there with my ho… er um I mean my hoe, you know, a gardening tool… anyway, I was pulling weeds with the hoe and I ran into a snag.  The dirt underneath the weed was soaking wet which made it virtually impossible to pull on the roots of the weed because I was pulling huge chunks of earth instead.

Darrin called a plumber to look at the leaky pipe.  He came and he did something which seemed to have stopped the leak for a day or 2 so he called the plumber and said never mind, I don’t know what you did but it stopped leaking.  He spoke too soon.

A month later I noticed that the water was leaking in a 2nd spot.  I thought it was coming from the original leak, I was almost sure of it too.  I could see in my head that the water had eroded the earth under the cement over time and was making it leak out in that other spot.  But, I’m no plumber so I can’t really diagnose the problem in my head lol.

Darrin told me that he was going to get the plumber in here last week but he forgot to call him to make the appointment until the day before and naturally you can’t expect him to just cancel his appointments so we had to wait another week.  He came yesterday with his son, they were here for about 7 hours.

He dug out the sidewalk and all the dirt, found the problem and fixed it.  Turn the water main back on and that second place is still leaking.  So turn the main back off and destroy our patio floor to find that leak.  He thought that it was coming from another place on the other side but he was wrong.  He was able to patch it and they turned the main back on and another leak comes and he patches that too.

Turn the water back on and everything is good.  No leaks anywhere WHEW!  Our back yard is really bad though, now we need to have new cement poured to fill in the places that there is no concrete floor.  Either that or an area rug.  Or we can put plants in those spots lol.

The next morning, this is the 2nd leak.

The next morning, this is the 2nd leak.

The next morning, the original leak.

The next morning, the original leak.

The next morning, an area that they thought they would have to dig but turned out it had nothing to do with the 2nd leak.

The next morning, an area that they thought they would have to dig but turned out it had nothing to do with the 2nd leak.

It sucks having all of these open spots but it really sucks having a leak so I think I will settle for not having cement over a leak any day.  I’m going to be fixing up the back yard over the next few months to get it looking good now that everything is back to normal, somewhat.  Eventually we will have that all patched up with new cement before we have any visitors to have a BBQ.

So, my project went away but now it’s back.  YAY!

Busy All Day

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Wow I’ve just been busy all day long without 1 moment to catch my breath.  First off I woke up late.  I didn’t set the right time on my alarm for some reason.  The alarm clock has 2 alarm settings so if your spouse or whatever has to wake up at a earlier or later time then you can have them both set differently and both turned on.  Well, I have them both set for different times and the one that I needed wasn’t turned on lol.  I guess I just forgot to turn it on the right one.

So I woke up on my own at 5:30am and went out, Dell DJ battery was almost dead so naturally I had to charge that up.  6:30am comes and I leave the house.  I’m on my way home and my brand spanking new tube for the front tire blows.  UGH!  I’m like 5 minutes away from the house (not walking, by bike) so I have to pull over and put some air in the tube, just enough to get me home.  I come home and feel the tire and it’s goin’ down hehe.

I get in the shower immediately and then walk over to Albertsons to buy a bike repair kit.  My bike repair kit sucks, the patches aren’t patching lol so I needed a new one, one with that glue.  But Albertsons doesn’t have them so I go to Walgreen’s and get it.  Of course I had to go back to Albertsons anyway for other things.

I come home, put the new patch on the tube and I take one of my old tubes that the patch didn’t work for and I just cut it all the way around and since it has that green goop stuff (which doesn’t work by the way lol) I have to wash all that out, throw away all the chunks and then get it all off by hand in a bucket of water.  So then I wrapped that around my tube, the one that I just bought yesterday that already has a hole in it that I just patched up lol.  So hopefully this patch will keep it patched and if I run over another sticker then that extra tube in there will take the impact of it and not let it go through to the new tube.

So now it’s 11:45am, I’m going to drink my slim fast shake but then I have to go next door and clean the rental.  We were going to do it over the weekend but Darrin was just too exhausted to go over there.  He slept the entire weekend lol.

Hopefully it won’t take me too long, I’m going to bring my alarm clock and set it for 2:50pm so that I can come over here and watch Stargate SG-1 at 3pm.  If I still have more to do then of course I’ll go back but I don’t think there is too much to clean.