Karen Clare

Summer is here, and I'm trying to enjoy it. It's not my favorite time of year, but making the most of it and trying to have a good attitude as I pray that El Niño means a quiet hurricane season. I got a cheap, very basic outdoor lounge chair from Amazon and have been spending, or trying to spend, every Saturday and Sunday afternoon laying out for twenty minutes (ten for the front, ten for the back). I was looking a bit pasty so wanted to get a little color without ending up resembling Magda from There's Something About Mary . Exposure to the sun in moderation is good for you, and sunscreen actually isn't.  I'm also enjoying the extra light and the lighter traffic on my work commute from school being out. But I digress.  So far this summer, I've made a couple of recipes that I just love and plan on making a lot throughout the season.  The first is something I just kind of made up and call shrimp, potato, and corn boil. It's actually steamed, but I think it st...

As someone who enjoys cooking and cooks frequently in a rather small kitchen, I keep my spices in a kitchen drawer -- the drawer is large and fairly deep -- about 14 inches wide x 19 inches deep x 4 inches high.  The jars I had been using were cylindrical and just short enough that they could fit in the drawer standing up. But the drawer because rather disorganized and messy. Sometimes the drawer would jam if a jar went askew. So I found some new spice jars on Amazon with pretty Acadia wood lids. I like the jars because they're square instead of round, and thus won't roll. I also got some  coordinating Acadia wood "tiers" for the spices to go on ( also on Amazon ). Before I ordered, I measured to make sure that the dimensions would fit my drawer.  The jars and tiered "shelves", for lack of a better word, arrived today. So I spent the late afternoon and early evening tackling the project of cleaning and reorganizing my spice drawer.  First, I removed everyth...

 I know I've been on a cleaning kick on this blog, but it's a goal of mine this month to declutter, organize, and simplify my home a bit. I don't think perfection should ever be the goal, because life isn't perfect, but there's always room for improvement.  I love to watch "clean with me" videos on YouTube (some channels more than others), and doing so, I notice that a lot of these content creators' homes are super messy at the beginning. Yes, I know that some of them probably stage the mess or purposely don't clean for a couple of weeks so they have something to film.  But, still, how do these homes get to be such a disaster? I don't remember, growing up, my parents' home (or anyone else's) ever looking like a cyclone hit it. The I realized that the answer is in the question: homes in the past actually could not get that messy. Why not? 1. Houses were smaller. The size of the average suburban home has more than doubled since 1950s, fro...

Mother's Day is coming up, and Thursday I had invited my best friend "D" over for Mother's Day weekend. We always get together on Saturdays, not Sundays, and we spend the whole day because we live an hour's drive away from each other. Well, imagine my surprise when I hear a "ping!" from my phone this past Saturday around 11 a.m. while I'm sitting on the couch watching TV with my dog. It was a text from "D": "On my way!" I called her immediately and told her that we were supposed to get together next weekend and she said she was already packed up and ready to leave. I said no worries, I didn't have plans anyway. And then I regretted calling her instead of just going with it.  Thankfully, the house was already pretty clean and presentable. I was dressed, and I had about an hour till her arrival.  But what if my place hadn't been ready? How do you prepare for last-minute visitors? This is how I do a typical "company cle...

Today is officially Easter -- Christ is risen! But my best friend came over yesterday, so we celebrated a day early. I love holidays, even if it means -- or perhaps  because  it means -- cleaning, cooking, and preparing for something special. I think there is something in us humans that needs celebrations and observances.  On Good Friday my workplace was closed, but I worked much harder at home than I would have at the office. I cooked -- the Easter menu this year was make-ahead for everything except for the ham -- did laundry, and cleaned. Didn't go to bed till after 10 p.m. and I had started around 10 a.m.  I set nibbles out on the credenza that used to be my coffee bar but now serves as a kitchen work table in a sort of charcuterie board set up; I used a cutting board, but would now like to get a proper charcuterie board. There was cold smoked kielbasa with horseradish beet relish, deviled eggs, mixed nuts, and ridged chips with French onion dip.  Dinner (I d...

 I thought I would do a few posts on cleaning -- what I use, schedule, tools, etc. This one will focus on products that I use. I'm not huge on my cleaning products being "natural" -- I hate vinegar and baking soda, for example. Vinegar stinks and the residue baking soda leaves seems impossible to get rid of. It's also terrible for your vacuum motor. I like to limit the number of products that I use. So my first go-to is my homemade all-purpose cleaner ("APC" for short), which is a mixture of 1/3 isopropyl alcohol, a few drops of dish soap, and the rest water -- shake it up and you're ready to go. I got this "recipe" from Mack of the Midwest Magic Cleaning YouTube channel . As the name implies, his channel is about cleaning,  usually hoarder houses but sometimes his own, and he gives great tips and advice. He's hilarious and his channel is worth subscribing to, in my opinion, if you're interested in that sort of thing. Anyway, I love thi...

 As long as I've been into decorating (since the late 1990s). I've realized that sometimes the little things can make the biggest difference. I mostly finished decorating my place for spring last week, which included packing away the firewood I had for decoration in front of my electric fireplace/space heater. I was trying to think of something to do with the fireplace so that the front didn't look boring with just the dark glass front. So I got the idea to cover the glass with peel and stick plastic that looks like stained/decorative glass. I've been living with it for almost a week now, and absolutely love it! It's not dramatic at all, but it really elevated it the fireplace. It now looks a little less like an electric fireplace I ordered from Wayfair (which is what it is) and more like an historic feature of the house.  The decorative sheets arrived on Sunday, and I only needed one. I did the middle of the glass, leaving the ends clear, because number one, the sh...

 Every so often, I love to pull out the tea set that I got at the Biltmore Estate in Ashville, North Carolina back in 2004 during a road trip with my best friend, Dori. The Biltmore Estate was the Vanderbilts' summer home, and after touring the huge estate, we went into the gift shop. It was during September, my birth month, and I ended up getting myself this tea set, which is a replica of a set that was owned by the Vanderbilts.  Afternoon tea has three courses. the first course is sandwiches, so I made cucumber sandwiches: white bread, spreadable cream cheese on both sides of the bread, very thinly-sliced cucumbers (I used a mandoline), salt, and crushed celery seed. I cut the crusts off carefully, and then I cut the sandwiches, some into rectangles and some into triangles.  The second course is scones with jam and often clotted cream. The scones I got were store-bought from Publix, and I had some lingonberry jam -- which, if you've never tried it, tastes like cranberry...

 Today was the first day I turned off my heater because the weather finally warmed up -- pleasant and sunny.  I have decorated a bit for Valentine's Day. I don't do much for it, but the decorations that I have I keep up all February. I did break down and get a few inexpensive things from Amazon, which only totaled around $30. The other things I already had from last year and the year before: My electric fireplace mantle. All three of the things I have hanging from it were from last year: The pink heart wreath on the viewer's left came from World Market last year, and the middle wreath came from an Etsy shop called Blessings And Boxwood last year. The tin and wood heart on the right I believe came from Hobby Lobby two or three years ago.  The bottom picture is of the kitchen hutch that I got back in October that now serves as my coffee bar. I've been really enjoying decorating it. And here is where the new stuff is: the sign at the top, and the concrete hearts that I mad...