Bacon

I have a friend who was ready to swear off bacon.

I know, the horror!

But a bunch of FB buddies stepped in and suggested

said friend try cooking it in the oven.

And since we had bacon that night for dinner, I thought I'd take some 

photos to demonstrate how I do it.

I preheat the oven to 400 - some people prefer to put the bacon in

the oven cold, but ours takes a long time to heat up, so I preheat it for bacon.

Then I grab some foil and make some 'boats'.

I make sure that each boat has a tall side, to keep as much of the fat in as possible.

 

I have a really large sheet pan, and I can fit a whole package of bacon on like this,

with three boats:

 When I use a smaller pan, I generally make only two boats.

Then I cook it around 12 minutes, until it's a little crispy.

 I don't think you can really see in this picture very well how much fat there

is left in the pan, but it kinda pooled on the right side.

I don't wash it right away - I wait a little while so the fat will harden/set a little.

That way, I can just ball up the foil and toss it in the garbage.

And the pan is pretty clean and doesn't require any scraping, just a quick wash by hand.

Mmmm...now I wish I bought bacon this week.

Girls' Room

Here are some pictures of the girls' finished room.

 New bunk beds & curtains.

Neutral, creamy new paint.

 Circle stickers everywhere.

I ordered these from an etsy shop.

I think we had 80 circles in four different colors, and it was

right around $27 for it all.

I thought it was a great deal, especially

since they'll be easy to peel off and take down when we are ready to move

out of here someday.

I taped off an area on each wall, 18" from the ceiling and 36"

from the ceiling.  Then I gave the girls turns (in between choosing myself)

of where they wanted circles to be.  This way, they are not in reach

of little hands, which have peeled off a couple & had to face the consequences.

 

 They love it!

And so do I.

It was kind of a pain to get the walls done.

Here's what they looked like before - 

floor to ceiling purple.  On every wall.

And there was some writing done by some previous

residents.  Apparently their little girl was bad one day

because she took a crayon and wrote her name really

big on the wall, followed by the word 'bad' and a frowning face.

It took two coats of a gray Gripper paint, which we 

used at the suggestion of the girl at the paint counter when I showed her

an approximate color of what was on the walls and how light we wanted to go.

It's a really thick primer, and it was really good we used it because it took almost the whole

can to get the purple to stop showing through.

The we used the premium stuff, Behr Premium Plus Ultra.

We wanted to be sure that the purple was gone for good.

This stuff ended up using two gallons to cover the walls and look good.

It looks great, and we are happy to not have a purple room anymore.