Olive Penguins

These were so cute that I just couldn't help myself. Plus I had a great excuse to make them since my daughter as been learning about penguins at her daycare. She was telling me all about how they watched "Happy Feet" the other day and then she came home w/ a paper penguin. I didn't know what it was at first until the whole Happy Feet discussion.

When I looked at the picture, I thought it looked hard, but I am butter when it comes to my kids. If they asked me to build the Great Wall of China, I wouldn't be able to help myself. My daughter wanted a penguin snack, so a penguin snack is what she was going to get. I'm such a sucker...

THE PIN: Cream cheese-stuffed olives made to look like penguins complete with carrot beaks and feet

Pic from http://homestead-and-survival.com/

WHAT YOU NEED:
Jumbo or extra large olives (these are the body)
Large or medium olives (the head)
Carrots (cut them up into circle slices)
Cream cheese (make sure it's soft! You'll thank yourself later!)
Toothpicks (I used the fancy, frilly ones... I'll explain later)
Ziploc bag

I had to buy the olives. I don't usually keep them on hand, but I should because my kids love to stick them on the tips of their fingers and bite them off. I'm sure my kids are the only children on the planet to ever come up with this brilliant idea. Unfortunately for my kids (and my ears), they end up chomping the end of their fingers half the time inevitably ending up with a banshee-like scream filling the house. That's probably why I don't keep them on hand. Okay, so olives, CHECK. Carrots: we do always have those. They're a staple. CHECK. Cream cheese: I don't keep this on hand because it gets moldy in my fridge when it gets shoved behind a gallon of milk or a tupper-ware full of leftover soup. So I bought that too. CHECK. (Side bar: make sure you soften it up first! Like leave it out on the counter or stove for an hour or so. Trust me, this is better!). Toothpicks: luckily, I had just hosted a party the weekend before, so I even had the fancy ones with the colored frills on the top. DOUBLE CHECK! Ziploc bag: well, yea. CHECK.

So you slice the jumbo/XL olives down one side, stuff the cream cheese in a baggie, nip off the corner of the baggie and squeeze it in the hole on the bottom. The olive puffs up and out and the white looks like the little penguin belly. I did all of those at once because they took the longest amount of time. My six-year-old did the olive heads. After you slice the carrots into little discs, you nip a little wedge out of each one. This kind of took a little bit of time too. I had to cut some of the mini wedges in half because they wouldn't fit into the olive heads. So once I did that, my daughter shoved the carrot wedge thingies into the "star side" of the medium sized olives (not the hole side). After that, you can assemble them pretty quickly. I just shoved the olive head onto the toothpick up to the frilly part (sideways, obviously, so it looks like a penguin head), then I put the olive body on next, and finally stabbed it into the carrot disc that had the little wedge missing (so they look like penguin feet). Since the frilly toothpicks were the only ones I had, I thought it would look dumb, but they looked like those penguins with the crazy hair.

My daughters had fun turning their heads different ways to make them seem like they were all looking different directions. I stuffed, and sliced, and stabbed for what seemed like forever, but the end result was so cute and so worth the look on my daughters face when she saw them. She was so excited. Here's what I ended up with.

Finished product

I put them on a silver baking sheet to make it look like they were on an ice-skating rink. We put goldfish around them too, but I failed to get a pic of that one.

Army of penguins

COST: $ Since the olives I got were on sale, I think I spent less than $10 on all of the ingredients. Even if I would have had to buy the carrots, I still would have been under that amount.

DO-ABILITY: +++ This one was kind of hard. And it takes so long. I think I spent about an hour and a half on them AND I had the help of my sweet little girls and the hubby. Granted, the "help" I was receiving from the smallish ones was not the kind of help I would have preferred, but it was help nonetheless.

THE LOW-DOWN: These turned out pretty cute, but they were a bit difficult to make. I guess I would say these are not for the amateur craft person/chef. The hardest part was making sure the cream cheese stayed where it was supposed to. When I did it, the cream cheese kept squeezing out of the bag in places where it wasn't supposed to squeeze out of. The original pin that I found didn't have the toothpicks in it, but I had seen them on another, similar pin, so I added them. That made putting them together SO much easier. The first pin I looked at had you just sticking them together with cream cheese (that doesn't work, by the way, unless you want it to look like the great penguin massacre). Definitely make your job easier and use the toothpicks, but make sure you use the frilly ones (so people can see them and don't try to break their teeth off biting into them), especially if you're giving them to little ones, like I did.

GOOD STUFF: They are cute little edible penguins, so the kids might really be excited to eat them... or not. See below for more on this. There are some parts that kids can help out with. I love when I find things to make that my kids can actually help with!

BAD STUFF: When I served these at my daughter's daycare, all the kids were SO excited about eating them... and then they wouldn't eat them. I guess their palates weren't ready for the sophistication of olive penguins. So although they are super cute, the little ones might not like them. My own children, of course, couldn't eat them fast enough, since they love olives, carrots AND cream cheese.

PIN OR BUST?: Okay... this isn't exactly a bust because technically it did work, but there were a couple of things... First, it was kind of a toughie. If you pin it, make sure you have at least an hour to get it done. It works, but there's lots of room for error and it is not for those who do not excel in culinary pursuits. Also, the audience for these is obviously children, but since they didn't go over so well at my daycare, I'm not sure all kids would eat them. They are, however, a pretty healthy snack, if you can get your kids to try them. On the plus side, they might encourage kids to eat them, since they're cute little edible penguins.

FINAL THOUGHTS: I think these would be so good if you used different flavors of cream cheese (like the chive kind). If you do that, however, it might be even less likely that kids would eat them. I also thought if you could somehow find smaller olives (or something?) you could put little penguin babies on the feet, like in the Happy Feet movie. Might be another fun thing for the kids. There are all kinds of fun things you could do with this... red pepper scarves? 

Happy Pinning!

Avocado Deviled Eggs (Paleo!)

So I had all these eggs, you see... (see my post for THE best hard boiled eggs ever). I am trying out this Paleo thing. No dairy. No wheat. No sugar. No legumes. So all the good stuff is out... almost. I can still have eggs so pretty much I'm okay (except when I go through the occasional peanut butter cup withdrawal.. that one dings me three times!)

My problem is that I love deviled eggs. LOVE THEM! They might be on my top ten list of favorite things ever. But on this diet, I wasn't sure that mayonnaise counted as "Paleo". I think it's the sugar that the Paleo gods don't like. So I went out on a mission to find a Paleo deviled egg and I found this Pin.

Pic from http://www.amazingpaleo.com/

 Avocados AND eggs. Am I in heaven? It might be close!

WHAT YOU'LL NEED: 

12 hard boiled eggs

2 avocados

4 tsp. hot sauce (I left out the 4 tsp. of hot sauce because my kids were going to be eating them and I didn't want to burn their tiny mouths off...)

2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice (I used the bottled kind)

Salt and Pepper

Paprika

Pretty much you just take the yolks out, throw them in a bowl with the avocado and mush it all up together.

 + = :)

Then you have to season it w/ the S&P, lemon juice, and hot sauce (if you wish). The amount of S&P is a bit of a guessing game, but its kind of up to what you like. I'm usually a salt lover, but I was in a hurry, so I didn't put a ton in. In hindsight, I would have put in a lot more. Anyway, you mush and then you fill.

These bad boys are ready for some avocado goodness!

You can put it in a plastic baggie and hack off the corner and then squeeze it into the empty egg halves. It's so much easier and WAY less messy! I highly recommend it. The filling was kind of thicker than I was used to, but not too thick to pipe out of the bag. So I stuffed and piped and sprinkled the paprika on, because what the devil are deviled eggs without that red stuff on top?! This is what I ended up with...

Seriously... yum!!

Mine turned out a little "greener" than the one in the pic, but maybe my avocados were different (?)

Of course my 4-year-old took a single bite of one and then put it back on the plate. Did I mention I served these at a get-together? Good thing my friends like me... and my kids. I will definitely have to adjust the amount of S&P that I add next time. Everyone really liked these! My dear hubby said they were "bland" (I didn't say what I was thinking, which was "Then you make them next time!"). That being said, I really do appreciate his honesty.

COST: $$ It's really not that expensive, but considering avocados are so darn expensive (especially in the winter!), I gave this one two. I haven't given anything two "dollars" yet, so what the hey?

DO-ABILITY: ++ Again, not too hard, but I always break the whites when I take the yolks out of the egg and it does take some effort to actually (not like just boiling water!), so I gave it two... I'm on a streak. Overall these are relatively easy.

THE RESULT: Really good! They were definitely not as good as the "real" thing, but when you already have a preconceived notion of what deviled eggs are supposed to be like, nothing is going to be quite the same. Both avocados and eggs are on my top 10 favorite foods list, so these were definitely really good.

GOOD THINGS: Super good (and really good for you!). Relatively easy - some mashing, scooping and filling required.

BAD THINGS: Mine were kind of bland, but that was my fault, not the recipe. I will play around with the S&P in the future, as mentioned above. I added about 1/2 tsp of the S/P mixture. Next time I'll add more. Other things... nothing, really. They are good, easy and 

PIN OR BUST?: This is a pin you'll want, especially if you're crazy like me and are a food addict doing the Paleo thing. 

NEXT TIME... to make the filling a little creamier, I might play around with things... like adding some coconut milk or something. I thought it needed to be a little less thick. We'll see how that turns out.

Happy Pinning!

"Perfect","Peel-able" Hard Boiled Eggs

I was a skeptic. I am the worst egg hard boiler on the planet. THE worst. When I hard boil eggs, they always look like this...

Pic from http://sweetfatlies.com

Hard boiled eggs hate me. And at this point I kind of hate them. Except that I don't. I really love them. I still try to make them all the time because deviled eggs are one of my favorite things ever. And I can still eat them on this Paleo diet (no mayo - sub guac... tune in for that post). Because of my profound love for hard boiled and deviled eggs, I went out in search of the "perfect" hard boiled egg recipe. After some searching, I found this one. With my eye on the prize (the deviled egg end product) I thought I'd give it a whirl. What did I have to lose, besides about a half an hour of my time and 12 eggs?

Pic from http://michellebouse.wordpress.com

WHAT YOU'LL NEED: 
A dozen eggs
Large boiling pot
Water
Salt (if you want)
Vinegar (I added that in; it wasn't in the orinigal recipe but I've heard 1 tablespoon does the trick for non stickey-to-the-shell eggs).

We have eggs ALL the time. We go through like five-dozen in about two weeks... we heart eggs a lot. Check on the eggs. That's pretty much the only thing we'd have had to buy. Vinegar. I always have that too. Double check.

So when I made these, I was in a time crunch. And the first direction said, "bring the eggs up to room temperature". WHAT?!? I only have 40 minutes for my lunch! So I kind of skipped that step, and it might have been my undoing, but... what can a working mama do? So I put them in a bowl of hot tap water before I dunked them in the boiler. Same dif, right?

As per the recipe I let the water come to a full boil, like a good little cook. Then I dropped them in REALLY carefully because I wanted them to be the oh-so-perfect, just like the picture! I added the vinegar at this point... 1 or 2 tbsp (eyeballed it!). Boil for eight minutes. I even set the timer. (They ARE going to be perfect). Lid it and let those bad boys sit in the hot water for 20-25. (Time crunch again.. 20 minutes it is.) I set the timer again. Let them sit in a bowl of ice water for half an hour. Crap... time to go back to work. Enter: Amazing hubby. After the ice water part you're supposed to drain the water and store in the fridge. He came home on HIS lunch hour and did this. One brownie point earned for the hubster!

And how did they turn out?

Drumroll...

Perfect AND Peel-able! Holy cow!

They were... well, perfect... and peel-able. I was actually kind of floored. It was like the eggs were peeling themselves. Really. I was dumbfounded because I have tried other "perfect egg" recipes before and they never worked. I have done the vinegar, placing eggs in before water boils, poking holes in the shell routine and none of them ever gave me eggs like this. IT seems like I have tried every HB egg recipe under the sun. You can see my skepticism, but it worked! Holy cow, my eggs were, for once, pretty close to perfect. I never thought I'd brag about hard boiled eggs, but I kind of want to brag about these.

My other problem with hard boiled eggs was that they are sometimes not right on the inside. They're at that too-done point where they're all grey and crumbly or the not-done-enough point where the yolks are a little soft and then they're super gross. I was hoping for yellow, creamy perfection. So I did a little happy dance about the outsides looking perfect, but I was nervous for what the insides would look like. But I cut them open...

Insides... success!!

I actually did it! I am a hard-boiled egg destroyer... converted. This recipe works!

COST: $ This one only gets one dollar sign because while eggs have gotten so darn expensive (I think we pay about $2.50 for a dozen.. Ridic!) it's really not too much out of the ole pocketbook. I'd pay more than that for two dozen deviled bad boys! Otherwise, you really just need vinegar which is also conveniently cheap.

DO-ABILITY: + The actual process is as easy as... well... boiling water. The other part of this would be the peeling. I thought that would be the hard part but as I said before, it's like the eggs WANTED to come out of the shells. They almost slid off!

THE LOW DOWN: This is the best HB egg recipe I've found. I don't know if the vinegar did anything but it certainly didn't hurt anything.

GOOD THINGS: Easy, cheap. Best hard boiled eggs ever!

BAD THINGS: Took a bit of time. Just make sure you're around for an hour or so.

PIN OR BUST?: This one's a no-brainer. This one is definitely worth pinning! Go... Pin, share, like. Especially for my gluten-free, Paleo, egg-lovin' peeps.

SOMETHING ELSE...: I kind of want to try it without the vinegar to see if the vinegar was, in fact, a factor in the perfect, peel-able-ness of my eggs. Don't worry, I'm sure I'll have plenty of opportunity to do so. It's the whole egg love-affair thing. We're addicts. I will let you know how that goes.

Avocado deviled egg recipe to come soon. Stay tuned fellow Pinners!

Happy Pinning all!

UPDATE: Since I am always eating HB  eggs (the Paleo thing again) I busted out some more of these sans vinegar and they turned out just as awesome if not awesome-er (that's not a word...). So if you don't have any vinegar on hand, don't panic. These are just as good without!

UPDATE 4/9/2014: A friend of mine gave me some more tips through Facebook. Here is what she said:
I am about to boil up some eggs for a kids camp that I am running and they need to be easy to peel so the kids can do it themselves. Super helpful. I just want to add a few things to this... the fresher the eggs the harder they are to peel. Something about the pH and sticking to the membrane. Also here in England, NO ONE puts their eggs in the fridge. It has taken me ages to get used to this but I haven't done it in two years and have never gotten sick. So, if you wanted to leave some eggs out on the counter just for that purpose, you totally could. Also at the farm that I work at, our eggs (non-refrigerated) have a use by date that is 3 weeks from the date of collection. Totally standard UK practice and we don't have loads of salmonella deaths either.
Thanks Hope! 

Condensed Milk Crockpot Caramel

Here's a good one. My sister (go look at http://peepsinthewoods@blogspot.com/) found this awesome pin and sent it to me. Since we both love caramel (it's a family thing), I really wanted to give it a try. Here is the pin she found...

I'm gonna admit... I thought it looked kind of nasty when I first saw it (I hadn't read the title yet). I was thinking, What the H-E-hockey sticks is that?! (Yes... I actually think things like that in my head... it sounds a lot dumber when I write it down or say it aloud...) But then I read "CARAMEL" and I was on board!

WHAT YOU NEED:
A slow cooker/crock pot
Water
1 can of sweetened, condensed milk

I put this in my crock pot around 11 a.m., since I knew I would want to eat it around 7 that evening (it takes 8 hours to "cook"). I thought about that caramel all day long. ALL DAY! My stomach was grumbling because it says "Best Caramel Ever". I could not wait to eat it. So 7 p.m. rolled around, and I was like a kid on Christmas morning. YES! Then reality hit. This metal can has just sat in the crock pot for 8 hours. It was hot. Oh yea... Dang it! More waiting. That hour was like torture. On the positive side, it gave me time to thaw out my ice cream...

My ice cream is lonely

 How did it turn out? While it was amazing (I may or may not have tried to hide it from my husband) it was kind of not what I expected. I thought it would be drizzly and I can't really think of a consistency I would compare it to. Maybe like that hot fudge stuff you can buy, but before you heat it up. You can spoon it out and it holds up, but it will spread out if you put it out on wax paper for awhile (see below). It was soft, but not drizzly like ice cream drizzle. Don't worry, I didn't let it ruin my ice cream plans. We dropped it on some ice cream and ate it in about two minutes (maybe less). We did have to scoop out the ice cream first, so that took up about 30 seconds, but I'm estimating, so if it took us longer to scoop, then it could have taken us a lot less time to actually consume it.

Kid on Christmas morning!

The "After"

COST: $ I paid $2.49 for a can of sweetened condensed milk. I was kind of like, "$2.49?!? What?!" That seems kind of expensive since I can almost buy a whole jug for that much, but it sweetened... and condensed. I guess that means it comes at a premium.

DO-ABILITY: + It's so easy it's stupid. You throw a can in a crock pot of water. A really well-trained husband or boyfriend could do it. Or a monkey.

MY TWO CENTS: Start it an hour earlier than you'll want it. As I said above, I started it at 11 a.m., and wanted to eat it at 7 p.m. If I would have eaten it at 7, I would have burned my tongue off. You have to let it cool in the fridge for about an hour. Darn. That hindsight thing again...

POSITIVES: Really easy. Really delish. Easy clean up (actually, my crock pot might have been cleaner than when I started...).

NOT-SO-POSITIVES: It takes too long (when I see caramel, I want it yesterday). It's bad for you (is that really a not-so-positive... depends on your point of view. Since I'm supposed to be doing a "Paleo Diet" right now, that's why it's on the negative. This was worth the points it cost me though!

PIN OR BUST: I'm on a roll, because this one is a definite pin. Go. Do it now. You will want to kiss yourself in the mirror later (just make sure you're alone first...). This truly is so good and it is so so easy I wish I would have known how to do it sooner. Oh... the injustice...

MY EXPERIMENT: I thought maybe it would harden up and you could eat it like a regular caramel if I spread it out and let it dry out (I am about as good at candy making as a gorilla is at knitting). Well, it didn't. Now instead of being soft in a can, it is soft spread out on wax paper. Oh well.

Trying to make it into hard caramels

ANYTHING ELSE?: I thought of taking the label off, but then didn't. Don't worry about taking the label off first. I thought it would make a mess but it fell right off. I am at a crossroads now because while it is so good I could eat an entire can of it by myself, I'm not really sure how you're supposed to enjoy it? I think this would be sinful with some chocolate cake (like as a frosting) or as a dip for apples. Oh... the possibilities... I might experiment and try making two cans at a time next time I do this. That way my family might get some too.

Happy Pinning!

Headband Organizer in Less than 15 minutes?

This one is for my girls. Last summer, we had headbands everywhere. I mean one time I found a headband under my pillow. What was it doing under my pillow? My best guess is that it was probably a hidden treasure or else it got lost under there in the midst of a pillow fight or mattress trampoline party. Either way... we had headbands all over. I needed a place where we could keep the headbands in a neat spot. Now... headbands and neat don't really belong in the same sentence, so what is a busy mom to do? Pin it, of course! I searched "Headband Organizer" and this is what I found...

Pic from http://sunnytuesday.blogspot.com.au

So I thought I would give it a try. What the heck. All I needed was some headbands (no problem there!) old ribbon (I think I have some laying around), and 15 minutes (everyone has 15 minutes!). Can't be that bad, right? 

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

Ribbon - about 18 inches or a little more (make sure you have enough or you will have a really short hanger!) It's going to be doubled over, so if it looks long, that's okay!

Buttons

Needle and thread

Flower or other embellishment (you don't have to have this, I added it)

15 minutes

Okay, well my first mistake was underestimating the amount of ribbon I'd need. I grabbed a cute piece of ribbon and realized about halfway into the project that it was WAY too short. Great. Because I have so much time to go digging for more ribbon. But I dug. And I found this...

Not my favorite but it would do. Buttons - got a lot of those! Needle and thread. Yup. Okay we're in business. My second mistake was reading the "15 minutes" part and taking that at face value. Hindsight is 20/20. Onward into the fog... I began this project in the wee hours of the morning while my kids were still asleep. I find it is really the only time I can actually get anything done. Especially crafts. When I start something and my kids are up, they're like, "Mom, what are you doing... Mom... Mom... Mom can I help? Mom? Can we do a craft too? Mom.... MOoooooOOm! I'm hungry. When are we eating breakfast?" So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I thought 15 minutes... okay. it's 6:00, I have at least a half an hour before one of them wakes up. So there I was with my ribbon and my buttons. I started sewing the buttons on, as per the tutorial. And I sewed... and sewed... and sewed. Maybe I'm just REALLY slow at sewing buttons on? In reality, this took me close to an hour. An hour!! 4x the amount of time it said it would take. In it's defense, at least one of my kids woke up mid-project. So it could have taken 45 minutes. Still... I got it done and it turned out pretty decent!

COST: $$ Pretty cheap. I already had a lot of the stuff I needed but even if you had to buy the ribbon, needle, thread, buttons... you'd still only spend $5-$7.

DO-Ability: ++ Pretty easy. If you are not a person who sews, you might add another degree to this. Even for the amateur seamstress, I would still consider it pretty easy. You're just sewing on buttons. The hardest part is making sure the ribbon doesn't bunch up.

WELL...?: It's a pretty good project. It was cheap and easy (wait... that didn't sound good...). It did NOT take 15 minutes. The person who came up with it must have magic sewing fingers or a sewing machine that gets the buttons on there. If you're sewing the buttons by hand like I did, it will take longer than 15 minutes, so plan for that! All in all, my girls' headbands are now neatly organized, a feat I thought could not be accomplished! Another nice thing is you can hang one headband through each loop that you make, so it stores a LOT of headbands (which is good for us).

GOOD THINGS: Easy, cheap (is there a record player skipping somewhere...?), supplies are easy to find, GREAT organizer.for other accessories as well (clips, flowers, etc.)

BAD THINGS: The time thing is deceiving, might be hard if you don't have experience sewing on buttons.

PIN OR BUST?: Pin this one! Although the 15 minutes was not the actual time it took me to make this project, an hour is still not bad. Plus, like I said before, I had some "help" the last few minutes. I could have finished it in about 45 minutes. Overall it was pretty simple to make and I think my "helpers" could even assist me next time (although I may need to block out a little more time for that one!).

FINAL THOUGHTS: I said before I added the purple flower on the top (see below). I think I really added to the hanger and made it a little prettier for my girls. Plus, I had a flower hanging around that the clip fell off of (and no amount of hot glue would make it stay on again!). So if you have something laying around, the embellishment is nice. Wow... I never thought I would write that much about headbands... Aaaah motherhood. I love it! Happy Pinning!

Boiled Orange Peel & Cloves

So first of all, my goal on this blog is to experiment with all those pins that are out there on Pinterest and see if they ACTUALLY work, how good they are, my personal opinion on them (for what it's worth). Obviously, this won't work for ALL pins on the Site, as some of them are just cute pictures of puppies and the rad things that people who are much cooler than I have done. So this blog would be for all those DIY, Crafty McCrafterson, YES! You can! pins that exist in the Pinterest world. It is for all you do-it-yourself-ers who don't have the time or want to experiment yourself with the gazillion pins that are out there.

So for my very first, maiden post on this blog, I decided to do something easy, because I, myself, don't have endless time on my hands (although this probably makes it really look like I do when in reality as I write this my three kids are destroying my house.. but I digress...). So here it goes...

THE PIN: Boil orange peel and cloves to get rid of unpleasant smells in the kitchen.

From the page http://www.glamumous.co.uk/2013/03/101-household-tips-for-every-room-in.html

WHAT YOU'LL NEED:

Saucepan

Water

Orange Peels

Whole Cloves

Easy enough... A saucepan... CHECK. Water... of course CHECK. Orange peels, CHECK (I used peesl from "Cuties"). Cloves... crap. Where are cloves when you need them? Since it is currently colder than the dickens where I live and I am a warm-weather soul at heart, I was not inclined run out to the store. Note to self... get supplies before you try out the Pin next time! Okay, but I DO have ground cloves... close enough! Ground cloves it is! Below is my picture which, as you can see, is not as pretty as the Pinned picture since my kids peeled the oranges and pretty much destroyed the peels, threw them in the trash, got coffee grounds on them, dug them out and THEN put them in the saucepan. Even better... add coffee smell to the goodness! So here is my attempt:

So now is for the part where I tell you what I thought about it. Take it or leave it - you won't hurt my feelings. I am a middle school teacher, after all!

COST: $ Extremely cheap. We already had the oranges, plus my kids got a healthy snack. BONUS: If you use the little oranges (and your kids are like mine), they are more willing to eat them because they are "kid-sized" (except my son... he'll eat almost ANYTHING!)

DO-ABILITY: + Extremely easy. Throw in some orange peels, water, cloves. The hardest part is peeling the oranges, and I made my kids do that.

THE SKINNY: Despite my skepticism, the oranges and cloves smell filled up nearly the whole house (at least the kitchen and front room) and it covered up any of the other questionable smells I had going on. It did only last an hour or two but it was very strong during that time.

THE GOOD: Easy, cheap, some supplies already on hand (saucepan, water)

THE BAD: You can keep adding water, but the smell really only lasted for about an hour (two tops).

PIN OR BUST?: This one is worth a try! Go ahead and pin it. Next time your garbage or wet dog is filling your kitchen with not-so-desirable smells (if you're like me you often have this problem), give this a try! It costs next to nothing and you could even mix it up a bit. I am thinking... fresh rosemary or basil, apples, grapefruit.., the possibilities could be interesting. Stay tuned for that!

THE LAST WORD: I would suggest using real cloves, if you have them. Even though I did not for this experiment, it seems like it would add a stronger aroma. Maybe I'll have real cloves next time but probably not. Happy pinning!