Category Archives: Domestic Blitz

In which we don our aprons and putter about the house.

There’s a fine line between ritual and habitual

03/17/2015 Nichole

I had a plan for last week’s 52Frames theme. The theme was Ritual, and I was going to take a picture of Rockford and I watching “Saturday Night Live.” It certainly isn’t a ritual in the Merriam-Webster sense — there’s neither ceremony nor religious rite involved — but it’s something we’ve done most every Saturday night since Poppy was born. But I couldn’t get the picture to come out the way I’d envisioned it. The light was weird and my arm looked weird and SNL was a rerun and I was already tired, so I chucked the plan. And when it didn’t pan out on Saturday evening, I figured I’d just be skipping yet another week.

Then I woke up Sunday morning and heard Rockford and Poppy working on their Sunday morning pancakes, and I thought it would be a nice little ritual to capture for posterity.

52Frames, week 11: Ritual “Sunday Morning Pancakes" — 52Frames, week 11: Ritual
“Sunday Morning Pancakes”

It’s far too dark — you can barely find Rockford in the picture — so I may try it again this Sunday. I feel like it was a good thing just to get a picture turned in this week, though, lest I slip into the habit of giving up quite so easily.

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.

Domestic Blitz, menu plan Monday

In which we wage battle against some old wallpaper

01/26/2015 Nichole

Rockford got home from a 12-day overseas trip late Thursday night, and I greeted him with hugs and a completed house project. We’ve been talking about taking down the wallpaper in both bathrooms and repainting — one of many projects we planned to do when we moved in and have yet to start — and I figured I could get one of them done while he was gone. I told him that I was working on a surprise for him; he thought I was making a scrapbook. I’m not known for my DIY prowess. I spent the better part of five evenings on a ladder, but I got it done. I was pretty pleased with myself.

We started on the second bathroom this weekend, and so far it’s been a lot more work. There’s more wallpaper, for one thing, and from what we can tell it was applied straight to the drywall with no primer so it’s been a bit of a beast to remove. I’m hoping we’ll have it done by the end of the week.

Here’s what we’ll be eating this week!

Monday: BLAs

The good bacon was on sale!

Tuesday: Chicken enchilada casserole

I was going to make this tonight, but I forgot the chicken and it’s cold outside and warm in here and I don’t want to go out.

Wednesday: Meaty macaroni

Pete requested this. It’s a Velveeta boxed thing.

Thursday: Pizza subs

And Poppy requested this!

I’m linking this up with OrgJunkie.com’s weekly Menu Plan Monday thing.