How to clean silver without chemicals

I hate cleaning silver jewelry and sterling silver tableware. All that rubbing, polishing and trying to get the tarnish out of all the nooks and crannies. Plus the smell and feel of silver polish...Yuck! I have looked for years for a better solution and nothing really worked as well as I'd like it to. Until now.

I finally found a great way to clean Sterling Silver. It's simple, cheap and does not use any heavy chemicals. In fact, you should have everything you need for this homemade silver cleaner in your kitchen.

Here's what I used:

• Glass baking pan
• Baking Soda
• Boiling Water
• Aluminum Foil

I bought treeless paper towels....

Did you know that there are paper towels that are made out of other materials besides trees? Tree free paper products are a thing! Apparently they can be made with bamboo, quick growing grass and sugarcane products. I didn't know that until I accidentally bought some!

My adventure with this product started innocently enough. I was in a discount outlet and I saw a pallet of paper towels marked 2 for $1. That's a great price for paper towels, but not knowing the quality....I wasn't sure if it was worth it.

I thought about it a second and decided that since hubby uses paper towels in the garage for spills and such, I should get a few rolls for garage towels. Any quality will work for garage messes. Into the cart they went and that should be that. Right? Except I hadn't read the package, and when I finally did 2 weeks later it kinda stopped me in my tracks.

Treeless paper towels

That's right, these paper towels are NOT made of tree products. Hmmmm. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I'm sure sugar cane and bamboo can grow a lot faster than it takes to grow a whole tree. This is definitely a more sustainable product then traditional paper towels, plus I love earth friendly products. No matter how much of a good idea something is though, it needs to work too. So, do they work? Yes! While they may not be the 'quicker picker upper' they certainly work well enough for standard use.

The burn cage, my hate/love relationship

My husband bought a burn cage last week. I looked at him like he had 3 heads! Seriously, I thought it was the dumbest thing he could have done. What in the world did we need that for? I mean, we already have a firepit why get a stainless steel cage to burn garbage in? Seems like overkill to me.

So, he tries to explain it to me....and the explanation includes "don't put plastic in it" What the heck? That's the best part of burning! Plastic makes all the paper burn faster, right? Well, ok...I do know you're not supposed to burn plastic. You can try to explain that to me till you are blue in the face and I will still think 3 seconds of burning a plastic water bottle is better than 1000 years in a landfill!


If we had a decent recycling program out here, it would be different. Unfortunately we don't. I came up with the system that light plastics get burned, laundry bottles get saved as sharps containers and really heavy stuff goes in the garbage.

We do have a paper recycling program of sorts. You know those paper retriever bins? We have those at the high school. But you can only put clean paper or cardboard in those. I end up burning a lot of used napkins, paper feed sacks, pasta boxes etc.

Signs of Spring

Kind of silly since Spring actually started what....2 weeks ago? I'm excited about a few little flowers though. Funny thing is, I forgot I planted them! Now that I see them I remember that my mom had given me a pot of bulbs that she had gotten for Easter. 

They had almost died off by then but she asked if I wanted to plant them somewhere. I took them home with me and when we had a chicken death shortly after, I put them in the top layer of the freshly dug chicken grave. So, yeah.....our chicken graves are blooming. 

I guess it could be worse! It's odd though since these are into the woods a bit and the bulbs I have placed in the wide open gardens aren't even breaking the surface yet. You would think it would be colder in the woods and would bloom later? Who knows. 

I did find some bulbs this week that said "deer resistant" on them, so I bought 2 packs. I'm hoping they might be chicken resistant too. I planted them by the main coop. These might end up like the Tiger Lily's I had to move twice. They chickens let the leaves grow but eat the flower buds as soon as they sprout. *sigh* I'll keep you updated!

~L

Easy Sopapilla Cheesecake Bars

This is one of those recipes that originated in one place and somebody tweaked an ingredient to make it their own and posted it, then someone else did...then so on and so forth! I ended up finding it in 4 different places and no 2 were alike. I made 2 of them and they were kind of soggy, so after tweaking the recipe a bit I came up with the one I'm sharing today.

Recipes are funny creatures. There's really only so many combinations of ingredients to go around and while I adore my healthy foods, sometimes I just need something easy to make! This stuffed Sopapilla bar recipe came along when all the kids were young and it was SO nice to have things I could whip up easily. 

Kids have a tendency to need something baked and homemade, tomorrow! Like dessert for a class party...and these bars can be cut small and put in little cupcake liners so 1 pan can serve the whole class!

These cheesecake stuffed bars are made with 2 cans of Pillsbury croissants instead of having to make dough for the crust. Basically lay one can of rolls on the bottom, fill with cheesecake filling and put the other can of croissant rolls on top! Butter and cinnamon sugar and bake. So easy, such a time saver and the kids love them!