"diy" news and stories

Stuck in the house with a couple of bored children and nothing but a few pantry basics? Time for DIY Play-Doh.

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Recipe calling for powdered sugar, but you're all out? Here's how to make your own.

Oh, how I love a good DIY, and it's not that I happen to love sitting in my garage all weekend making things. It's that I am now on a very strict budget and can't go around dropping $150 at Dean & Deluca on a highly coveted spice rack!

A reader over at Apartment Therapy sent the blog her DIY Spice rack project that in the end, cost all of $40, and that's with the spices included! The shelving is from Ikea, the metallic tins are from Bed, Bath & Beyond, and the spices from a local spice store. I am sure that any of us could put something like this together, and what makes this even better than the Dean & Deluca version (aside from the incredible price differential) is that you can customize it to exactly what you like.

About a year ago, someone (probably an forgotten food blogger) tipped me off to the fact that you can buy volume lots of vanilla beans on eBay for cheap. I hopped on board that particular bandwagon and bought a ridiculously large number of beans for nearly no money. I shared some with my mom and used fresh vanilla in all my baked goods. I found myself with lots of used, fragrant bean pods and kept tucking them into my sugar jar to scent my sugar with vanilla goodness.

It turns out that Melissa, over at Traveler's Lunchbox, and I were doing almost the same thing at the same time, including occasionally running into the problem of needing unscented sugar and only having vanilla-fragranced stuff on our shelves. Only she did something much more clever than I did (I hate to admit that many of my used pods landed in the trash). She started tucking her used bean pods into a bottle of light rum, thinking she'd make infused booze for future cocktails. Only the alcohol in the bottle started getting darker, until she realized that she had created her own vanilla extract, just as good (or possibly even better) than the best quality stuff that you can buy in the stores.

You too can make your own vanilla extract. Just take a stroll on over to Melissa's post and see how she did it. She includes tips and sources for inexpensive beans. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go and bake something that requires vanilla, so that I can start my own bottle of extract.

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Several summers ago an older member of my church invited me over for dinner. She was turning the running of a committee over to me and wanted to discuss the details over a meal. She offered me a glass of mint-infused water with my plate of pasta salad, homemade bread and sliced tomato (dessert was a plate of cookies that she admitted to having purchased). The meal was generally memorable for it's tasty simplicity, but the thing that stuck with me the most was that mint-infused water. I asked her how she made it and she said that simply kept a bunch of mint in a pitcher, continually refreshing the pitcher with water as the level decreased.

The last few months have been my summer of mint, as several of my friends have large patches of it in their yards and gardens and like to pass along large bunches of it to me. I have made mint-flecked salads, tossed it with melon and a sprinkling of sugar and have kept a pitcher of mint water in the fridge steeping in the fridge. I have found that on the days when I want a slightly stronger mint flavor you can increase the intensity by gently bruising the leaves. A single bunch of mint can flavor a water for up to a week (if it starts to look slimy, it is time to change it). It is refreshing, inexpensive and has helped me kick the juice/sparking water habit almost entirely.

photo by Marisa McClellan