How to make Maximus - the horse from the movie Tangled

Every year our family dresses as a group costume for Halloween. The first year, we were The Royal Family, last year we were dressed up as Star Wars, and this year we LOVE Tangled, so it was only natural to choose that as our Halloween costume. We picked daddy to be Flynn, which was such a great and easy decision, I was Mother Gothel, B was Rapunzel of course, and T was Maximus, the guard horse. All the costumes were easy to figure out, but the horse. I was searching the web for a possible tutorial on Maximus but with no luck. So I decided to take pictures of the steps and leave you all with a little tutorial on how to make this costume. 

First of all find a cardboard box and remove the bottom and the top part. Then spray paint it white. I used white primer first and then one coat of regular white spray paint.

Then make a tale out of thick yarn. I cut long strings of yarn, tied them together in the middle and then pulled them through the hole in the cardboard box.

For the head I ended up printing a mirror side image of Maximus. It printed on 2 papers, I just had to align them and trim them to fit. (This will depend on the size you choose for your horse) They are taped together in the back, you can see the line, where the paper joins.

Then I used exacto knife to cut out the shape of the horse. Leave some extra card board on the bottom of his neck for easy attachment to the body. Tape the print out and the cut out together. This will be what you end up with.

Next comes the mane. I used the same yarn I used for the tail. While you are heating up a glue gun, cut few short and few long strings of yarn. Use the glue gun to attach them to the back side of the head - the short ones in the front and the longer ones along the back. I also cut another piece of cardboard and attached it to the bottom of the neck - see pictures below.

I was so pleasantly surprised how the mane added the right touch to Maximus. I used hot glue gun to attach the two sides together at the mane and stapler to attach the bottom cardboard piece to the body (see detailed picture bellow). I spray painted the staples white. 

I used clear packing tape to fix some minor blemishes, such as the front being too far apart from the neck.

See back shot for reference. 

Next measure the straps and attach them to the box. We used white ribbon.

I dressed T in all white clothes. 

Here is the final product!

I almost forgot important part of the costume - The "Wanted Poster"! Just print out an image from a web and slide it into Maximus' mouth. (I cut out a thin hole on each side).

Planting strawberry field

It is getting pretty cold around here and I am starting to clean up the garden. I still have some tomatoes trying to turn red but soon I will pick them and let them ripen in jars in my window, just like my grandfather used to do. I remember as a kid, seeing all those jars sitting on his window sill and watching them changing their color slowly.

That was a little reminiscence now back to my strawberry "field". I am proudly calling it a field but you know with my yard size, it is more like a garden bed. I decided to transform my backyard into a garden. I am incorporating more and more fruit and veggie plants into my landscape. Last year I started with the corn, this year I added pumpkin, and now strawberries! 

I never had luck with strawberry harvest because of little critters who ate it before I was able to pick it. Just when I saw an almost ripe strawberry in the evening and came to pick it in the morning, it was gone! I hope for better luck next year - I will keep you posted.

These plants came from a fellow freecycler! Have you heard about freecycling? I recommend it. You can get free things that other people don't need anymore and to give back, you offer your own "garbage". You know the saying "One man's garbage is another man's treasure."

Freezing summer squash

I have been spending quite some time in my kitchen preserving herbs and the last of veggies from my garden. Now I am sharing the way I freeze summer squash.

I wash and cut the heads in half. Then I scooped up the seeds from the middle and placed the halves on a cookie sheet. I put some olive oil on the cut halves and salted them just a bit. Then they were ready to be put in the oven at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes.

After the 40 minutes, I checked if they were soft enough to take out. Depends on your oven, you might check earlier. I took them out and let them cool down. Then I scooped up the flesh an pureed them in the blender.

Muffin pan would be the best to freeze them in smaller portions (by the way, this reminds me of making baby food for my kids - if you are doing that, don't salt the halves and put the pureed mixture in ice cube trays). I let it freeze overnight - don't panic if you forget about them... They will be fine until you actually need the muffin pan ;-) (you might want to cover it though)

Last step was bagging and labeling the squash for storage in the freezer! I can add this to my soups or simply spice it and use it as a side dish (cinnamon and vanilla sugar tastes especially good for kids' snacks - just saying ;-)

We might have to go to Trader Joe's...

When I was all caught up on blogging, I was behind on my garden... Now the garden looks great but my blogging is suffering... Go figure...
So let me just quickly catch up here with this short post - update on our turkey situation. The white turkey had to go couple weeks ago, as it's leg was getting worse and it couldn't even get to the food. It weighed over 20 pounds, which was just amazing to us... and it fed 2 families and guests for two dinners (well, with some side dishes and extra meat dish). Now we have our grey turkey left and this one is just too awesome! It follows us everywhere around the yard, and wants to get inside the house as well (it tried it out once when the kids thought it would be funny to let him in...)

The other day, I am washing dishes when someone knocked at the back porch door... No one would ever go that way so you can imagine how much I freaked out! I slowly peeked around the corner with a wooden spoon in my hand (I don't think I would use that on an intruder... I just happened to be washing it). And this is what I found...

Turkey making a mess out of my shoes, hanging with the dog, and knocking with it's beak trying to get in the house (like pushing it's whole body against the glass door)... Ok, how can we eat this guy? Someone will have to trick me into it, I am getting hooked...

I am including more shots of turkey hanging out on our porch - his favorite spot to make a mess!

If you click on the "turkey" label underneath this post, you can see all my turkey updates...

Freezing green beans

I have done this for the past couple of years and fell in love with this method of freezing green beans. 

Wash the beans and cut off both ends, just like you see on the picture below.  

Fill a pot with water and bring it to boil. Place the beans into the boiling water and press start on a 3 minute timer right away.

In the mean time, prepare a bowl with ice cold water where you will transfer the beans right away after the 3 minute timer beeps. Keep the water cool, you might have to add cold water or ice. You are trying to keep the beans from continuing the boiling process.

After you cooled your beans down, put them in labeled ziplock bag. I don't own food vacuum sealer so I use the straw method. you seal the ziplock bag until there is a tiny hole that you can only fit the straw thru and begin to suck air out of the bag until it looks "vacuumed".

This will assure you don't get freezer burn. Now that that's done, I can go on to do the same thing with my edamame. 

Old fashion catapult fun

Sometimes we come across the best books in our library. One of them is "How things work in the house" by Lisa Campbell Ernst. The kids are obsessed with this book. They looked thru it about million times and every time they do, they come up to me and ask to make a project they are showing on one of the pages. On the page about Spoons, there was a catapult made out of a plastic spoon and a piece of wood. Since we had all the supplies, I couldn't say no. And the fact that we used marshmallows could not have been any better for the kids. Try it! I guarantee you hours of laughter!

Enjoying some new friendships

Isn't it a blessing when you meet new friends? The other day I got finally together with a woman whom I have been seeing at several kids activities around our town and never got a chance to hang out with. My kids have been asking for play dates with her kids forever now, so finally this seemed like the best time to get together. Everyone had a great time... and you just never know what new things you can learn from new people. We bonded over some delicious muffins and home made lemonade. God bless new friendships :-)

Loving zucchini

This year I am a huge fan of this side dish - summer squash (or zucchini) with spices and parmesan cheese. I just simply cut the zucchini into cubes and put it on a pen with a little bit of olive oil. Then I sprinkle some garlic salt and oregano over it and slowly stir it while the heat is on medium. Now it's ready to be eaten! I just sprinkle some parmesan cheese on top and enjoy this delicious veggie either as a side dish or as a main meal if I am not too hungry.

Spearmint oil made easy

I am currently reading soap making books and I can't wait until I will be able to make my own soap. Playing with the ingredients and fragrance is my idea of having fun ;-) One of my favorite aromas is spearmint. I happen to have the spearmint plant growing in my garden so all I need is to turn it into oil to use it in my soap. And here is how I did that.

First I picked fresh, good looking spearmint leaves and rinsed them out. 

Next I stuffed the leaves into a dark glass bottle.

Then I poured a high grade olive oil over it. I filled up the bottle to the top.

Close the bottle with a lid and let it sit by a window for 3 days. 

After the 3 days I took gauze and poured the oil thru it into another glass dish to get rid of the leaves and then returned the finished oil back into the dark glass bottle, which helps it keep fresh and protects the oil from deteriorating in reaction to sunlight. Also you should know that essential oils should not be stored in plastic containers because the chemicals in the oils will react with and partially dissolve the plastic, which will then get into your oil.

Potato harvest

As we are coming to the end of the summer season, things are slowly disappearing from the garden. For example, my potato bed is empty by now, which makes for a really early season, considering that usually potatoes stay till at least September.

Look at these beauties I dug up couple days ago. We had 2 dinners out of this bowl and I dug up 2 more dinners couple weeks before that. 

I am pretty sure you can see that I made one huge mistake this year while I was setting these potatoes up in the garden. If not, I will give you a hint - notice their size. Many of them are too small. Apparently, you are suppose to pile a huge amount of soil around the the plants when they are just about 8-10 inches high. This will help the plant to form tubers deeper in the soil and the potatoes will have enough space to grow bigger. They like their space nice and deep, as much as possible. 

This is my potato bed with the spuds in the ground. This was the first year for this bed. I left the seed potatoes in a cool dry place for about 2 to 3 weeks and when the sprouts were about 2 inches long I planted them outside into the soil.

Here I took a picture of the plants way past their "pilling" period. I also read that you could cover them with hay, which will make it difficult for any ground traveling beetles to get to them. Something I will try next year as well.

This is how my potato bed looks today. You can start harvesting potatoes as soon as the plants start dying over. They will turn yellow brown and fall over. That is the right time to dig them up. You can dig up only few and leave the rest of them in, if you wish but don't wait too long because they might start sprouting again.

Good luck to you!

Fancy Nancy inspired

What little girl doesn't like the story of Fancy Nancy? The fabulous little girl, who loves everything French, fancy, and sparkly. My little girl sure loves her and we read Fancy nancy books often ( boy, am I glad our library has a great supply of them because otherwise my account would literally pay for it ;-)

If you are not familiar with this story, you should know that Fancy Nancy has this fabulous pink clubhouse in her backyard, made entirely from fabric. Both of my kids have been asking me whole winter to build one like that in our yard and I finally got to it the other day. It didn't take that long and the kids' reaction was worth all the sweating!

During projects like this I am glad that I am such a little hoarder and collect everything possible that has something to do with crafting. It so happens that I had lots of different kinds of fabric stashed on a shelf in my craft room and I could finally put it to good use.

Now the only issue was to find the right spot. T had an excellent idea to tie one end of the string to the tree and the tree house. And luckily I had enough fabric for that big of a stretch. And then all it took was hammering the pole into the ground, wrapping the string around that and it all created a triangle which allowed me to drape the fabric over for a small "roof". 

Clothes pins are the magic things that are holding it all together. And I should mention something that they don't show you in the book - and that is how to deal with an extremely high winds ;-) Oh yes, I had to run around a bit, try to catch the fly away fabric. But extra clothes pins was all I needed (I wonder if the neighbors were having a ball watching me run around like that).

Isn't this an awesome place to hang out?

Rain tangled with the family

I don't remember last time it was raining all day non stop. I have to say I enjoyed hanging out with the family, laying in bed, playing games, and watching Tangled in the afternoon. (Isn't Rapunzel awesome? She is my new favorite princess! And Mandy Moore gives her such a nice touch! Ok I am rambling now but really! B and I are smitten by her)

I was trying to get popcorn ready but ended up burning both batches. We don't own microwave for many years now and I found some good recipes how to pop the corn in the pot. I did this million times before and it always worked out but today just wasn't the popping luck on my side I guess. I got pretty upset about that... I din't hear the kids asking for popcorn after that - I can only assume they knew better ;-) We had peanuts instead and they enjoyed the full bowl. 

Now they are sleeping and I am sitting here with my porch door open, listening to magic sound of rain. It is very precious to me this year since there was hardly any and our grass and yard can show for that. I better stop my post right here and go work on the never ending homeschooling curriculum for this year. I set my goal to finish 3 more weeks by tomorrow night so we can send out files for printing. I can't wait to have a button from my other blog that I am sharing with my sister-in-law. Then you can see some of the work we do with the kiddos.
happy rainy Sunday!

How to freeze basil with parmesan

Basil is one of my favorite herbs. It has incredibly rich and spicy flavor and it can be used in many recipes. I grow it in my garden every year and at the end of the season I try to preserve as much of it as I can. Last year I found out that the best way to preserve it is by freezing it together with the ever flavorful parmesan cheese. This way the two absorb each other's flavor and you end up with a tasty ingredients for your culinary creation.

Pick the bigger and medium leaves that look healthy. This way the smaller leaves that are developing will have a chance to grow bigger. Wash them and prepare your parmesan - grate it if you have to. I buy my raw in Trader Joe's.

I use big yogurt cup for storage but you can use any other plastic container that will fit all your ingredients. Start with a layer of parmesan.

Then chop the basil leaves up into smaller pieces and place layer on top of the parmesan. 

Repeat the layers till you use up all your basil...or run out of space.

Last, close up the cup and write the description. Don't forget the date, this will last in your freezer for about 6 months. I was using it longer and it was still fine.

You can use it as Pizza topping, or as an ingredient in your pasta sauce. 

Make your own fruit water

What is the best way to refresh our bodies during hot summer days? For me it is definitely water! But after drinking it all day every day, I get bored, don't you? I start craving juices and pop but I know that is not the healthy answer. Then we started occasionally going to The Standard Market for dinners and I got hooked on their fruit water. They have four different barrels full of water and fresh fruit or veggies. This way the water gets flavor from the particular fruit without being overly sweet and unhealthy. Here are the simple steps for you to enjoy this treat and also some combinations I tried:

This one is Nectarine Mint Water

I used mason glasses (you can also use jars) because you can easily close them and place them safely into your fridge without spilling the contents. On the bottom place some fresh mint leaves first.

Follow them with cut up fresh nectarines.

... and put some ice cubes on top!

Pour water over the ingredients, close up with a lid and place them in the fridge overnight. They will really absorb the right amount of flavors, so make sure you make extra for yourself! My kids loved it too and they even got to eat the nectarines after we drank the water! They were nice, cold and fresh!

Some other combinations you could try are: watermelon/sage, watermelon/mint, peaches/mint, cucumber/thyme, lemon/strawberries, strawberries/mint. Those are the ones I tried but there are endless possibilities, go ahead, try some and share with us!