DIY Life

It seems that when I look at our budget, the greater portion of our expenses seem to be spent on food. Yes, we are self-proclaimed Foodies, so we tend to splurge on good things to eat. The good news is that there are ways to save money in the kitchen; your love of food doesn't have to break the bank.

1. Make a weekly menu and shop accordingly: Creative meal planning wastes less. You'll be less apt to buy things that aren't on your grocery list, and you'll have everything you need for the week's meals, thereby saving gas on fewer trips to the grocery store.

2. Use extra foods to make soups or stews: It's OK to buy that jumbo bag of broccoli florets. After you use what you need in Tuesday's stir-fry, throw the rest into a pot with onions, broth, some dried beans, and some seasonings. The result will be a healthy soup that you can freeze for lunches later. Some of my favorite meals have been the clean-out-the-refrigerator-stews!

I love wandering through the brand new show-homes in our area. I do it under the cover of looking for new decorating inspiration, but I think I might just like to tease myself with all the swanky stainless steel appliances.

Thanks to Life Hacker, who pointed us to this great tutorial on how to make old appliances look new again, I can have show-home style appliances in my eleven year old kitchen without investing in new ones.

Make sure you follow the cleaning instructions first. This is critical to getting the stainless steel look just right, but it will also improve the efficiency of of your appliances. After all your prep work is complete, you just need to apply stainless steel contact paper, accommodate for any dials, smooth out the bubbles, and enjoy your brand new appliances.

The tutorial details how to refresh your dishwasher and fridge, but I think it would be hard to stop there once you got started, so bring on the stove, range, and microwave... even the coffee pot -- this is going to be fun!

Remodeling a kitchen, there are a lot of things to consider: appliance choices, layout, storage solutions, and finishing touches. When we renovated our kitchen, flow was a priority for us. We love to cook, and the previous arrangement of the kitchen was awkward and inefficient.

If you want to take the flow of your kitchen to the next level, why not consider applying some Feng Shui principles to your remodel? SheKnows has some tips on how to design your kitchen, feng shui style.

• Plan the stove to be facing the door, as you should never have your back to the door while cooking. You can do this by creating a cooking island or by using a reflective surface.
• Avoid red, pink, or purple in your decor, as these colors can cause you to argue with your cooking partner. Instead, whites, blues, and light greens are calming choices.
• Use full-spectrum bulbs to simulate natural light.
• The traditional triangular model for kitchens fits into Feng Shui: refrigerator, stove, and sink, all about six to eight feet apart.
• Fire elements (stove, microwave) should be separated from water elements (sink, refrigerator) by wood.

The article at SheKnows has more details describing how to create Feng Shui harmony in your kitchen. A Zen kitchen sounds appealing, doesn't it?

We have notoriously bad luck with dishwashers at my house. The last one caught on fire, and after my husband, father, stepfather, and repairman each separately reminded me that I needed to scrape the dishes before I loaded them, I nearly fired each of them. Sheesh.

I think I take pretty good care of my dishwasher (yes, I thoroughly scrape each dish before loading), but after reading this post on how to properly clean and maintain one... well, I could probably be doing more.

I clean it regularly and run a cup of vinegar through it, but rarely do I get down in there and disassemble it to make sure nothing has gotten stuck. WikiHow also recommends wiping around the doors and in the "dead spots" where water doesn't reach.

As I said, I usually use vinegar when cleaning my dishwasher, but did you know you can also use Kool-Aid? (Be sure not to use a strong color, however, as it may stain.) Once your dishwasher is freshly cleaned and ready to go, you can get the most out of each cycle using tips and tricks from Good Housekeeping.

I'll be the first to admit it: I don't spend a lot of time in the kitchen part of my trailer. It has too many windows, too many drawers, and the smell of vinyl wainscoting gives me a headache something fierce! When the wives go out of town, however, I'm oftentimes forced to enter their unholy realm of sausage and flour; and it's during these rare forays into the forsaken principality of pizza rolls that I sometimes stumble upon a fantastic, culinary DIY project.

For instance, did you know you can make lasagna in your dishwasher? It's true. Apparently all you have to do is throw a bunch of ingredients into a foil-wrapped pod and toss it in with your dirty beer koozies. Set that sucker for two hours of steamy, soapy action, and you'll have a festering pile of delicious Italian goodness that will rival anything you've ever tasted from the Olive Garden... or even Fazoli's, for that matter!

Now, if you're like me, dishwasher lasagna might not come to you as quite a surprise. Hell, I've been eating dishwasher medley on a bed of crispy ramen noodles since I was knee high to a grasshopper! And that was back in the days before we even had dishwashers! Back then, mother would just slop all the leftovers together, add a mouth-watering burst of Easy Cheese, stir to a mashed-potato-esque consistency, and we'd be set for the next couple weeks. But I digress.

If you came across this post innocently you're probably wondering how somebody would manage to fill their dishwasher with regular liquid soap. If you landed here because you were frantically searching for a fix then you probably have suds pouring out of your dishwasher and are looking for a solution after running it through 8 or 9 times without luck. This happened in my house, and we were all in quite a panic before we found this simple solution.

1. Take out the dish racks and dishes. Wash them by hand.
2. Scoop out as much of the overflow suds as you can. Grab a towel and sop up any excess water pooled at the bottom.
3. Put a cup (or two) of white vinegar in the dishwasher. Adding ice will lower the water temperature and inhibit the sudsing action. Run it for a full cycle.
4. Repeat if needed.

So there really is no need to worry, this huge problem is just a cup of vinegar away from being your next funny story.

Recently, we showed you how to freshen a laundry load with vinegar. This reminded me of a similar experience I had.

For many years, I worked in an industrial setting. Our dishwashers ran for several hours per day. Despite the near-constant cleaning, they'd occasionally get stained. I was wondering what to do about it when someone suggested, "Run it with a packet of Kool-Aid."

Lemonade Kool-Aid, to be exact. With no dishes and Kool-Aid in the detergent compartment, we began a cycle. At the end, the stains were gone, as the citric acid in the mix had removed the stains (kind of makes you wonder about putting it in your body, doesn't it?).

It's a trick I've re-used, and the folks at Real Simple have made the same discovery. So, the next time you're grocery shopping, pick up some Kool-Aid. Oh, yeah!

Babies are messy and as a result they create many messy bibs. Most bibs are safe to wash in your washing machine but if you have a truly messy baby you will go through at least three bibs a day, more if you count snacks. In order to have a clean bib for every meal you either need several bibs or need to run your washing machine more often than you want to.

I have found a simple washing solution for plastic and plastic coated cloth bibs. The dishwasher. I am much more likely to run the dishwasher daily, even several times a day then I am the washing machine.

Simply loop the Velcro or snap around the edge of the top rack with the bib pocket facing into the dishwasher. You don't want the pocket facing the door because, for some reason, the pocket is much more likely to collect old food than if it facing in. I wouldn't recommend washing more than two bibs at a time because you don't want to block the soap dispenser. Also, it's best not to use the heated dry option if your bib has a thin plastic pocket.

Using this method to wash bibs I never needed to have more than four bibs on hand and even if the two I just washed we still wet I usually had at least one clean and dry one ready to catch yet another baby mess.