Bathroom update

So the bathroom is *almost* done. My hands are dry and white from grout. Part of the ceiling is in, amazing! Stay tuned for a guide to working with slate because I have learned a lot putting this together.

So we have been working on the bathroom for over 6 months now. What started as a remodel quickly spun out of control as is becoming the standard with each room we look at. We decided in the beginning that we wanted to have a wet room, but then we added on a (non-load bearing) rock climbing wall. Then rock shelves for soap and shampoo, then a massive shelf for the petrified wood sink. The bathroom is quickly evolving into a true cave, and conforming to our epic standards that have been applied to the office (penny floor, distressed textured paint and stain, see the posts about it.)

So we got a very custom sink, and PaGyver managed to pick up some rocking shut off valves for the sink from a company called CA Faucets. Basically they are 3/4" quarter turn valves with very long stems that can be cut to length. The idea behind these is that I will tap the stems into a rock, and have the rock be the shutoff handle. The same concept is used in the on/off valves for the shower and the dual shower heads.

I have "refurbished" the toilet. It will still have the "water closet" top down style but a trip to home depot has updated all of the guts. No longer is the crazy rusted upside down U joint necessary. We have replaced it with a slightly modified flapper valve. The problem with my modifications is that the overflow tube isn't present in this old a toilet so if the intake malfunctions, it will overflow and test out wetroom! I may in the future build a new U pipe but for now this will work fine. The only other modification was that I needed a counter weight to keep the chain from lifting the flapper. This was done with a rock epoxied to the other side of the lever arm. Fits the style and works well in testing.

The other cool twist I put on put on the bathroom was to slice 90 degree slabs off of rocks and cement them into the top corners. I had to cut the slate custom around them but it looks very cool. Still need to grout it in.

Whats left until we have the coolest bathroom on the planet:

• Sink faucet arrives and is installed.
• Ceiling green board installed.
• Toilet mounted on floor with "WC" mounted on wall.
• Tiling on west wall finished
• Grout finished.
• Electrical connected and lighting installed.
• False rafters installed with mushroom plugs pre-drilled (will be a post about this)
•  Window fixed and re-installed.
• Slate slab cut and door jam installed (this will keep water from flowing into the bedroom should it splash by the door.

soapnut shampoo

Is it just me or did it ever bother you that the actresses on The Walking Dead and Lost always looked so... clean?  No products, rationed showers, and yet... In an attempt to recreate this look authentically, I've scaled back a lot of high maintenance habits one picks up as a teenager (ironically, the demographic least likely to need any sort of beauty boost).  The latest experiment involves soapnut shampoo and in most circumstances can be parallel processed with weekend cooking adventures.  I read a derivative of this in the book "Making it" but didn't have any of the ingredients at the time.  A year or so into this DIY thing, I'm way better provisioned.

Inputs

• (Homegrown acorn squash and wide mouthed canning jars entirely optional.)
• Soapnuts (calls for 5 nuts, but I threw in 10 because I was using "brut" bottles) - these are laundry soap alternatives available on Amazon and with the greywater cistern experiment, I had about 5 lbs of them lying around.
• Water- I used a pint glass to fill 2 bottles.  This is as much as mini crock could handle and since this stuff is fresh, you probably don't want to make oodles of it at once anyway.
• Mini-crockpot or standard issue pot + burner- MaEpic sent me her spare which has been perfect for these sorts of Jungle Jane adventures.  Pot works fine, but takes more supervision and occupies a burner which you might need for your split pea soup project.
• Cheese cloth or other filtering implement (possibly clothes pins/rubberbands/etc. for ease of use).
• Funnel (possibly widemouthed container with spout for liquid transfer)
• Cool small bottles - these are single serving champagne bottles purchased after reading "Sparkle" a self-indulgent chick lifecoaching book which advocates a "champagne diet" and comes with requisite pink and rhinestone cover (all of this thankfully masked by buying the kindle edition and reading on my iPhone).  TIL you can get lifecoaching credentials through online programs for less than 40 hours of work!  Would suggest the darker J Roget brand if confronted with a selection in BevMo.  It tasted better and was fizzier than its clear wide-mouthed Karma cousin.  Big mouths --> this runny shampoo will slosh all over the shower before a small share of it will make its way to your hair.   Bonus points for spray bottles for applicators.  You may have misgivings about choosing glass if you are inclined to drop stuff in the shower or balance things on precariously thin/crowded ledges. 
• *optional and awesome: 10 drops of essential oils or sprig or two of fresh herbs.  Rosemary is rad any time.  Lavender has calming effects if you tend to shower to unwind at the end of the day (or want to encourage hair growth).  Peppermint has some pickup if morning is more your style.  

Assembly:

1. Simmer your pint of water and soapnuts for a while-- say 20 mins stovetop.  Or just forget about them until they've turned the water in the crockpot a steamy golden brown.  
2. Add essential oil or herbal amendments if using and allow to cool.
3. Move out of pot and into wide-mouthed pour-friendly container (if available)
4. Line your funnel with filtration medium and pour liquid into bottles.  (soapnuts can be transferred into a pouch for a second life on laundry duty)
5. Refrigerate if not planning to use in the next week or so as this is a fresh product-- goes double for folks taking the herbal vs. essential oil route.  Mentally note that while it may be chilling in the fridge, this is no longer a champagne product

Notes on use:  this stuff won't lather the way a conventional shampoo does, or make your hair "squeaky" clean.  Think of it more as a rinse.  It is soapy-- shake the bottle and admire the foam.  It won't strip your hair of natural oils and cause it to dry out, thin at the ends, or create a heavy duty conditioner dependency.  Plus you get to choose what your hair smells like.  I'm trying this to extend the life of a flagging supermarket shampoo bottle.  If it does the trick, I've got 5 lbs of soapnuts to experiment with.  If it doesn't work out, there's a bunch of interesting shampoo bars on Etsy to investigate.

Weekend Cooking with Moosewood

My latest adventure is to attempt every recipe in the Moosewood Cookbook.

At first, I was a little perplexed by Katzen's decision to handwrite everything and include her own illustrations.  Wouldn't it be more Kindleizable if it were typed?  Maybe a high-res coffee table book of the end result we are shooting for so we know what's worthwhile to attempt?

But I eventually concluded that this approach made everything much lower stakes and diy friendly.  There was no Gourmet centerfold taunting you with how messy your creation had turned out.  Everything felt a bit more experimental-- no celery?  that's cool, carry on and see how it turns out.  If you mess up, you're not "wasting" food, you're getting the cheapest cooking training ever from a self-taught pro.  Plus the ease of use features won me over.

• For containing 254 recipes, most draw from a pretty limited set of ingredients which are available even in streamlined SKU grocery stores like Trader Joe's.  Spares you a gianormous, expensive shopping list and gives you a lot of options for cooking leftovers.  
• Ingredients listed in the order you add them in, so you've got a built-in progress bar and don't forget to add some critical ingredient because you were skipping the instructions 
• Optional ingredients and garnish called out as such explicitly
• Requisite skills limited to chopping, boiling, sauteing, stirring

I'm about 6% underway, so if you want to join, there is plenty of time to catch up.  Here are some tips I discovered on the way.

**recipe selection**

1. Lunchables.  It is unrealistic to expect that you will be game for novel cooking adventures after a 14 hour day at the office.  It is also completely unrealistic to expect you will be game for eating any let alone a healthy lunch during your 14 hour day at the office. I found myself gravitating towards soups I could bottle up and reheat at work.  
2. Risk portfolio.  You want to make a couple things so if one is inedible or you're not excited to eat it two days in a row, you don't completely abandon the experiment.  That said, you don't want to pick stuff that you can't parallel process or which require small amounts of entirely different ingredients which are only sold by the bushel.  I usually pick a "comfort food" which I know I'll eat (i.e. Split Pea Soup), a "this ingredient languishing in my fridge, cabinet, counter forever" dish (i.e. Mushroom Barley Soup), some adventurous new hotness which might later graduate to one of the 2 prior categories (i.e. Lentil Walnut Burgers), some easy garnish so that if everything else is a wash, I still feel a sense of accomplishment (i.e. Berry Sauce).  

**shopping list**

• Recipes and their corresponding page number on the top half.  You can fold this part over and forget about it unless you can't find an item and need to see which recipes are impacted. 
• Missing ingredients and the recipe #s which call for them on the bottom half (notice 4 call for onions!)
• Tick marks or other indications of quantity next to them
• Miscellaneous ingredients for other projects/staples on the perimeter like the pre/after thoughts that they are (in this case diy pickles and gladware seedling pots... 5 recipes above required a combined 8 ingredients)
• If it's Saturday, take this to the farmer's market first and see if you can knock the produce items off locally.  Free advertising for Dripstop coffee also available at my Farmer's market.
• If it's a pretty straight-forward list, take it to TJ's for everything else
• If there are semi-obscure spices, oils, etc. (usually misc. additions, not Moosewood) take it to an Albertson's or Ralph's that have more selection.

**Mis en Garde**

Many lessons learned here.

• Tiny $1-$2 spice boxes you get in the grocery > giant sack of paprika you buy on Amazon... unless you really go through a lot of paprika.
• Tiny containers with magnets super glued to the back keep spice in line of sight and encourage you to experiment with it... however, these aren't exactly dark and airtight ideal storage spaces -- in fact, I think I've applied more spice to the floor than to food because of the loose caps.  Work in progress.
• Spices arranged roughly by geographic location.  Hypothetically, I think if I compartmentalized every herb/spice, I should be able to grab a set from a proximal region and end up with authentic Mediterranean/Middle Eastern/Asian/South American/etc cuisine (i.e. garlic, basil, oregano)... more likely brutal if I grabbed all of South America-- chili, cayenne, chili pepper, chipotle...
• Garlic is empty because you will quickly discover it's easier just to buy a bag of peeled garlic on the Moosewood program.  Get a Chef'n Garlic Zoom to save you from endless mincing.  
• Basil, sage, mint, thyme, and cilantro are missing because they are growing outside and are better fresh.    
• Spices (bark, seeds, roots) intensify the longer they're in the mix, so add them first.  Herbs (leaves) can start tasting bitter if cooked too long, so add them towards the finish.  Oh, and if you leave spices in a marinade or sauce, that intensifies over time... so you probably want to eat your Ginger Carrot soup while its fresh unless you anticipate needing to clear your sinuses later.  
• Knives:  Tim Ferriss says real men don't use knife blocks-- bacteria can build up.  I'm conflicted on this because if I leave cutting implements in plain sight, MacGyver reappropriates them for unorthodox uses-- like electrical work, or shellacking the skylights with more roofing tar.  I finally took one of the "good" knives I'd ordered from Amazon out of hiding it from him for the last several months.  He does most of the cooking, so I'm not sure if this affirms my uber witch status or drives home the point that Swiss be damned, we are not chopping firewood with the Victorinox when Belle isn't looking.  It's amazing what you can do with spare magnets from your spice container project.   
• [not pictured] Wide mouth canning jars.  Don't buy these on Amazon because they charge a bundle to make sure they ship without breaking.  Some higher-variety grocery stores and *gulp* Walmart have these for cheap.  I started with the narrow-mouthed ones, because that was all that was stocked on the shelf.  That was dumb.  They are really hard to fill neatly (particularly with boiling hot chunky liquids).  They tend to be "taller" for their proportions, which is all good and well until you want to try canning and realize to cover them with an inch of water you need a very deep pot.