Reusable ice for iced water!

I had a lettuce in the fridge last week that was probably getting to its use by date but I really wanted to use it in a salad. I know that you can refresh salad greens in water that you have put ice cubes in to make them swell up and become crispy again but upon looking in the freezer I found that no one had refilled the ice tray.

Keen to use my lettuce, my eye wandered around the freezer and rested on the ice blocks that go into lunch boxes...

Here's what I did...

I filled a container with some tap water, popped in the mini freezer blocks,

Added some lettuce...

And left it all for 5 minutes or so before taking out the lettuce and drying it with a tea towel and adding it to the salad!

Easy as!

I'm never keen to use ice for anything other than drinks (and ant bites) as I only have one ice cube tray that holds maybe twelve cubes at a time - so this was a great way of getting ice cold water with out sacrificing a tray of cubes to the cause!

After the lettuce was done, it was the work of a few seconds to wipe the block and pop 'em back in the freezer which is funny as it would only take a few seconds longer to refill the ice tray with water and put it back in the freezer, but it NEVER happens!

Score card:
Green-ness: 5/5 for using the lettuce and not wasting any more water than nessersary
Frugal-ness: 5/5 for not having to buy another lettuce and throwing out one you have already paid for.
Time cost: Possibly slightly less than if I had used real ice cubes!
Skill level: There isn't one!
Fun-ness: really good to have crispy lettuce in my salad!

Comments

Killing cockroaches with boric acid v borax!

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But I'm not so keen on the chemical aspect of all this spraying and bombing. I hate the smell and can almost feel disease and cancer growing in me every time I spray. I'm OK with the resident cockies getting a lungful of chemicals and then keeling over but I feel its impolite (and probably illegal) if my guests and family members do the same thing!!!

We went through a faze of killing them by hand (and flyswatter and rolled up newspaper and underfoot) but its hard and frustrating work and it probably was only culling the dumb and slow ones - leaving the smart fast ones to breed!!!

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Here's what we did...

We found a box - popped an old towel in t…

Making homemade soap from lamb fat!

At work recently, we cooked up 3,000 lamb shanks (yes that was three thousand- and it took us a week!) for a feast which gave a us a huge amount of unwanted fat.

Normally that would have been thrown into the skip but I had remembered reading somewhere that animal fat - or tallow - can be used for making soap. If you have a look on a commercial packet of soap you will see something called sodium tallowate - that's scientific speak for rendered beef fat.
I have been making my own olive oil soap for a few years now with reasonable success, so I collected up all the fat I could, rendered it and gave making soap from fat a go!

Here's what I did...

I rendered the fat, which basically involves heating it to melting point and then filtering it through sieves that get finer and finer and then adding water (don't boil the fat or adding water will make it explode) and leaving the fat to set - on top of the water. The impurities should fall to the bottom and be caught in the water -…

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