Patio Privacy: The Last Stand

When you complain about apartment neighbors, be careful what you wish for. After various complaints from all the other residents, the reclusive indoor-loving owners of the world's most obnoxious boston terrier got kicked out for not curbing their dog's excessive barking. Score! Little did I know what hell-spawn demons would move in and ruin my deck tranquility...

Three people cramming into a 2-bedroom apartment, OK. Sounds like a plan. You have blue dreadlocks and some tats? No problems with me, I use to go to punk concerts weekly back in college. But, when you add a little alcohol to the mix (several times a week) and a blatant disregard to the strict no smoking policy, then you invite friends over  to loudly burp, cough, yell, and make merry on your patio until quiet hours do I then have a problem. But how do I 'complain' about people who are just having a good time and I don't want to make eye contact with their scary friends from 5-feet away, and it prevents me from watering my plants when a dude is out there just sitting in a deck chair smoking? I have an idea, passive aggressive gardening!

Since we just renewed our lease and the deathly hot summer killed all my edible plants for the second year in a row (let's just call my lemon tree 'Lazarus' for coming back to life several times), I decided to ditch my urban homesteading ways and just go for pure utility in my next batch of plants. I'm talking invasive, water-sucking bamboo that yields and iron curtain 8 feet tall. Try to make your smoker's coughs get through THAT, neighbors! So goodbye tomatoes and hello vicious grasses! Hope by next summer I can keep my sanity and sip a beer quietly on the balcony without my introverted soul feeling scarred.

Bamboo all up in this heezy. I'll stick the tomato growing to real farmers who have access to more than 2 x 3 feet of potting soil.

Bookcases: Now for ceramic knick knacks!

If there's one thing that makes a house look pretty and organized, it's those damn 'styled' bookcases that designers artfully arrange. According to those images, I own way too many books and in reality would need at least 10 bookcases to keep the adorable ratio of glassware, ceramic owls, and perfectly covered books of the exact same height. Is there a tutorial for those who have giant Anatomy textbooks their boyfriends won't throw away? Or one that actually shows something with *gasp*, BOOKS in them? Please...because I'm sick of putting together flimsy Walmart shelving units.

I have exactly 3 sets of books that look awesome and matching, and the rest are various thrift store or ancient college purchases. And because getting rid of a book is like cutting a friend out of your life forever, it takes a lot to decide which to actually part with. I don't have a solution for this problem, just a rant that is ending NOW.

Just Some Funnies

Apart from decorating and cooking, sarcasm is just another free service I offer (I have a beer coozie that let's you know as well). The workplace is a treasure chest chock full of sarcastic gold doubloons and tasty nuggets of hatred! Here is my compilation of random workplace sentiments and Pinterest related musings. Taking full credit for all of these so please attribute to my awesomeness :)

More Patio Fun

More patio fun! Used a cheap plastic frame, rope from Home Depot, chain from Home Depot, and a printable quote. Hung this on my boring tan shed door:

I hate the A/C unit, especially since we are eco-conscious and budget-strapped and never use it. I surrounded it with planters and things that like the full-sun hot hot hot location on the face of Mercury in the afternoon.

(That healthy-looking tomato plant I grew from a seed? I killed it by using the A/C for 5 minutes one blistering afternoon and withered off all those nice leaves! )

Home-made fried rice

If you're trying to eat healthy, there's pretty much every downside to ordering Chinese food. Salty, starchy comfort food, soaked in oil and doused in sauces abound. But, it's not hard to make a satisfying healthy version, if you can live without the more oil-sodden version. Starting out with healthy ingredients like brown rice and veggies is key, and then flavoring with pepper, vinegar, and only a dash of soy sauce and sesame oil does the trick. Plus, it's way less more carb-laden than that white paper tub speckled with hints of chopped veggies. Filling and tasty!

Ingredients:
Brown rice (Trader Joe's instant), scrambled egg, chopped broccoli, carrots, peppers, onions, peas, cabbage, and pre-cooked shrimp with a dash of rice wine vinegar, olive oil, and sesame oil.

Instructions:
Microwave the brown rice to give it time to 'dry' out, then leave the opened steamed package on the counter to cool. Chop veggies and stir  in olive oil until tender, throw in the peas and shrimp after everything else since they are pre-cooked. Add a tsp of sesame oil and sprinkle in rice wine vinegar to taste, along with some black pepper (no salt!) Scramble the egg separately, and then mix in when you add the rice, turning the heat up to high to get a nice crisp. Let the rice heat up, get crunchy, and infuse with the veggies, then add soy sauce to taste. Since there is such a high ratio of rice to veggies, you only need one cup of rice per person and still end up with a huge bowl of food! Very filling and satisfying.

This would be easy to go full vegan without the meat, adding tofu, and whatever fake egg substitute they are pushing now. Easy to add whatever fits your fancy, including chicken, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and squash!

The Frugal Poultry

Now I love to cook, but there are several things I draw the line at including rolling my own pasta or trying to replicate a delicious rotisserie chicken. There's just no way I want to spend hours hunched over an oven basting and turning and whatnot. While my favorite local grocery store has these for $7.99, Costo has them for a mere $4.99 (I was shocked) and I definitely can make that meal stretch for several days for two people. My time is worth more than a few bucks saved, and you get a quality taste that would probably have left me with burned fingers and a dried-out chicken.

Hello, my tasty little friend.

Meal 1: Chicken Tacos

This is usually the first night after purchasing my beloved chicken, after coming home exhausted from work there is nothing easier than ripping off a few slivers of cold chicken meat. I like the mini corn/flour mix tortillas, and then pile them with lettuce, cilantro, salsa, and anything else I may have around. It is a taco, after all! Usually we'd eat 2-3 tacos each, so meal one is 4-6 tacos (for street taco sizes you don't need a ton of chicken with all the other ingredients)

These aren't mine, but they look good!

Meal 2: Chicken Sandwiches

Oh, I love me a good chicken sandwich for lunch! So tasty with tangy mustard and creamy mayo, piled with crispy lettuce on a fine sourdough bread. Needless to say I was literally watching the clock to hit noon so I could dive right in! I used chicken to make two full sandwiches, apparently I was the pig and finished mine while my boyfriend only ate half. Hopefully he snacked on it later or ate it for lunch the next day! So now we are up to 6 tacos and 2 full sandwiches.

Meal 3: Chicken Lasagna

Lasagna is my favorite pasta to make, thanks to Barilla no-boil noodles and the fact you can dump anything into it that you want. Since I was short on things I usually love to pile in such as steamed spinach and onions, I simple layered shredded chicken over one layer of noodles, sprinkled with some Italian seasoning, and then another layer of noodles and pasta sauce on top with some shredded parmesan. And that was the end of the chicken meat, filling half a large baking pan's worth. I was worried it would be lacking in flavor, but it got two thumbs up! We each ate one large piece and two small end pieces, with a piece left over for lunch the next day! So 6 tacos, 2 sandwiches, and 4.5 pieces of lasagna. But wait, not done yet!


Meal 4: Chicken Stock

I love making chicken stock, now that I know how easy it is. I saved all the carcass as I was finishing up my chicken tearing frenzy and dumped it into a pot, bones, meat, and everything but the skin. I covered with water, added some pepper, bay leaves, and dropped in a couple baby carrots I had on hand. The seasonings of the roast chicken works perfectly, as you get a delightful seasoning flavor to the stock. I made about a 'carton' worth and saved in a tupperware in the fridge, and will freeze whatever I don't use that week. Then whatever meaty pieces ended up in the strainer I picked at as a snack, yummm. This is where you can use your extra patience and make soup by waiting for all the meat to fall off the bone or pick at it and drop in the stock (too lazy and summer is not chicken soup weather)

Get fancy with jars and stuff!

So there you have it, 3 full meals and a big tub of stock for you, all for $4.99. Leaving the 'stock' out of the equation (even though that's like $3 a carton at the store usually), that comes down to just $1.70 per meal, or 83 cents a person!. Supplement with the other cheap per use ingredients such as tortillas, bread, noodles, and sauce, and you have yourself some mighty frugal meals.

Patio Weather, Making an Apartment Summer Bearable

Ahhh, summertime and the living's easy...come home, have a glass of wine as the sun is setting, gazing out at your impressive garden landscape. But not so much if you live in an apartment. Typically it means stark stucco walls, peeling paint, faded wood, or other ugly patio feature along with gazing directly into your neighbor's kitchen window across the way (ooh, meatballs!). I love alfresco dining and just coming home to a cool evening and enjoying a glass of wine, but so far my patio has served more as functional for bike storage and growing edible plants, with little emphasis on making it an extension of our living area.

This year I  wanted to get more of the "indoors out" feeling, so decided instead of purchasing expensive $40 chevron-print weatherproof pillows for our dull beige chairs, I would Google around to see what materials were recommended to make my own.

These were $40 at Overstock.com. Um, cute but no thanks!

I lucked out and found almost an exact replica yellow waterproof chevron print tablecloth from Ross for a mere $11, since I didn't want to go full cheap with a straight up flowered vinyl version for half the price. Then I stole one of our 'guest' pillows that are always shoved at the bottom of our closet we never use and I had my stuffing. Since I don't own a sewing machine, cement-type glue from Home Depot worked just fine (thought a little messy and extremely fumy), and I even had fabric left over to actually use it as a tablecloth. I wanted to add a nautical rope detail along the edge, but was already fed up with huffing glue fumes and getting my fingers all gross and sticky.

Potted basil, glass lantern, and birdcage table decor

We already had these cool patina birdcages for free from a parent's garage sale reject, so I put some potted plants inside that like a little filtered light, and this new glass lantern from Ross was $3.99 plus a cheap pack of tealights, and I was all ready to plan a romantic outdoor dinner. For once, none of our 'across the way' neighbors were home so it was a rarely quiet, enjoyable night of chatting until the sun went down along with the level of our bottle of wine.

A perfect outdoor summer meal!