Cold Brewed Coffee

I think this idea came up from one of the RSS feeds I read often. I did another google search recently and here's the link. Basic idea of cold brewing is to put cold water, and coffee grounds together and the flavor of the coffee work its way into the water... a process that takes overnight to complete. In the end, you get the coffee goodness that coffee shops store in a pitcher in their own fridges when they make you an iced coffee drink. This way is so much cheaper tho.


Materials:
- Ground Coffee (1 cup)
- Cold Water (4 cups)
- A pitcher or container to put it in the fridge. (If you have a french press, it should work great.)
- Another container (or the same one) to store it in the fridge.
- Coffee filter

How to:


1. Add cold water into the pitcher or french press along with the coffee. Place this in the fridge all night (around 12 hours). I covered the top of the french press with saran wrap because it wouldn't fit with the french press lid.


2. After 12 hours is up, I pressed down the french press and poured the coffee into a mason jar with a coffee filter placed and screwed on top. You can actually see the stuff that the french press doesn't filter out.


That's it. Fill a glass with ice, and pour the coffee in. Enjoy your iced coffee however you like. Keep the rest in the jar in the fridge and it should last for a few days.

LED Lit Birthday Card

Today is my sister's birthday. We had a grand time celebrating her birthday this weekend, out and about with family and friends. For her birthday, I wanted to make something cool and geeky. :-) I saw this idea during the last Christmas season, from a post on evilmadscientist.com (I wanna explore that site more).

This is actually pretty easy to do if you get past cutting the acrylic sheet to the appropriate size. This one is about 2" x 3" and probably took me about an hour to do because I was using an exacto knife then moved to a box cutter to try to score it deep enough before I eventually snapped the piece off. This was definitely not as easy as it sounded on the site. (Or I did way more work scoring than I needed to do).

Anyway, here's what I did.

Materials:
- Acrylic sheet 2" x 3"
- 1 or 2 LED bulbs
- 1 battery (cr2032 - I just bought one of those flickering LED candles from the dollar tree and grabbed the battery from it)
- black electric tape
- Design you want to etch out (something simple with not too much detail works nice).
- Sharp hobby knife
- Cardstock to make card

How to:

1. Cut the acrylic sheet to fit the design with a bit of space around (maybe half an inch of edge space). I scored it with the hobby (exacto) knife and broke it off. When breaking it off, please be careful to not cut yourself. Use gloves to be safe.

2. Place the acrylic sheet over the design you want to etch out and tape it together to avoid much movement.

3. Using the hobby knife etch in the design by tracing it thru the sheet. It helps look directly above the design you're trying to trace. Also, nice and slow does the trick. It's not a race - so take your time on the curves.



4. Attach the LED light bulbs so the bulb is against the edge of the acrylic. Make sure that the leads for the LED bulb are aligned... positives are on top and negatives are on the bottom or vise versa. You'll want to make sure that the battery will fit okay and the LEDs will light up. I've found success putting a small strip of electric tape along the bottom of the acrylic, turning it over, then positioning the LEDs on the sticky side of the tape.

5. I added a small piece of tape on one half of the battery and insert the battery between both LED leads with the piece of tape end in first. (see picture). Pull up the LED leads on top of the battery just slightly so it doesn't touch the LED unless gently pressed. This will create a make-shift switch so the battery doesn't drain too fast. Tape the battery to the LEDs on the side that you didn't pull the leads up on. Tape the LED bulbs down as well so their position doesn't move and you're covering the stick part of the tape you placed the LED bulbs on in the first place.


6. Using the electric tape, tape up all the edges. This will help the light from "escaping."

7. Attach the acrylic onto some cardstock then attach to a card however way you find.

8. Put a small button or piece of cardstock on the area that is just above the pulled up LED leads with a small note that says Press Here. Make sure to test it out.

9. Put the finishing touches on the card, and place it in the envelope. Placing the card in where the "Press Here" sign is on top is the best way, I found, to put the card in without turning it on.
(Note: for mailing, I'd place a small piece of paper with a pull tab between the leads and the battery to keep it from being on during the entire trip.)


That's it. Pretty easy, right? Enjoy giving out these LED lit cards.

And Happy Birthday, Frida. :-)

Never Buy Green Onions Again

I actually don't remember how the idea came upon us. I think maybe we saw a blog somewhere that talked about replanting green onions. We've been doing this for months now, and we are finding that we no longer waste half the bundle of green onions from the store. The idea is simple. Cut the part of the green onion you use, and replant the roots. Then keep cutting the greens off the plant.

Here's what we do:

1. Buy green onions from the grocery.
2. Use the greens for what you need, cutting and saving the bulb/roots part of the onion.
3. Put the bulb/roots part of the onion in water. It will actually start growing roots, and growing from there.
4. Plant bulb/roots into a pot with some soil.
5. Cut whenever you need green onions.

Okay, so technically you can skip 3 and it'll work out just fine. But, it's kinda fun watching all the roots grow. It's good affirmation that the process will work. :-D

Here are a few pictures:

This is from about a week of cutting

These last two pictures are the ones that we've had for at least 3 months and have been trimming for use when needed.