As I’ve mentioned before, my family makes Christmas gifts for one another. Last year we made hollow book safes, beaded earrings and teacup candles. The year before that, we made some wine bottle stands and beef jerky. This year, we made chalkboards, barbecue rub, monogrammed aprons, and pottery Christmas tree ornaments.
Holidays
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Dec 11
Dec 11
DIY Hanging Chalkboards
As a way to cut down on the amount of money spent at Christmastime (and to limit the amount of useless crap we each accumulated), my family decided to start making gifts a few years ago. It was touch and go for a while, but thanks to creative online showcases like Pinterest, the quality of gifts has dramatically increased lately. This year, we made these chalkboards for some of the ladies on both sides of our families.
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Dec 10
Dec 10
DIY Book Safe
As I’ve mentioned before, my family makes gifts for one another each Christmas. This year, I decided to make book safes for the guys.
10
Dec 10
Dec 10
Retro-Looking Christmas Tree Star
After our hefty investment in Christmas supplies last year, the wife and I decided to get a real tree again this year.
10
May 10
May 10
Minestrone di Smeraglia (A Classic Italian Soup)
The farmers market had a bunch of fresh spinach on sale this weekend and I was looking for a new way to cook it. I decided to throw it in a pot with some other classic Italian ingredients to make a dish that’s hearty. You can think of it as a thin pasta or a thick soup. Either way, it was so good that I ate three helpings.
In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m naming it Minestrone di Smeraglia. It’s basically just a variation of a classic peasant stew.
5
Apr 10
Apr 10
Grilled Shark Steaks Over Pasta With Spring Vegetables
We’re trying to eat a little more simply (and healthy) in the Chandler household. Instead of meat accounting for 70% of every meal, we’re reducing the fat and introducing more vegetables and grains to our diets. So instead of having the traditional lamb or pork dish this Easter Sunday, we decided to have some seafood.
15
Dec 09
Dec 09
Pelzer Light People
In a suburb of Greenville, there’s a family that gets decked out in light suits and waves to passers by. We’ve heard about this bizarre spectacle for a few years and decided to drive by last night:
I guess Louie the Lightning Bug didn’t visit the schools in Pelzer?
5
Dec 09
Dec 09
A Real Christmas Tree
The wife and I have been using a fake, four-foot Christmas tree since our days in Washington, DC. We’ve never had a grown-up tree, so we decided to finally get that stamp in the passport of life. It’ll go right next to the “endure three hours with a door-to-door vacuum salesman” stamp that we earned in October.
On a whim, the wife decided we needed a real tree this year. Like always, that impulse cost us a small fortune. Not only did we have to pay for an eight foot Frazier fir, but we also had to buy a tree stand, skirt, lights, topper, and some grown-up ornaments. We own several ornaments, but most of them are those little Hallmark collections that celebrate cartoon characters. You know, tiny Peter Pans and Tiggers and R2D2s and all the other symbols of the dreaded Consumer/Entertainment Complex. They’re just too small for a big tree. So after burning a few hundred bucks, we opened our arms and hearts to this slowly dying plant that will leak sap and shed needles all over my hardwood floors for the next five weeks.
UPDATE: The topper didn’t seem to fit with our other decorations, so I made a retro-looking star out of some wood scraps in my workshop.
16
Feb 09
Feb 09
Cooking Live Lobsters
For Valentine's Day this year, my wife and I cooked live lobsters. I wanted them to do battle for the privilege of being cooked last, kind of like my own personal Thunderdome, but the lobsters, sluggish from their fridge-induced coma, just flexed a little.
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Dec 08
Dec 08
Rocking Chair Footrests
My in-laws were enamored with these rocking chair footrests at Mast General Store:
They dropped a lot of hints that they wanted them for Christmas, but I didn't feel like paying $43 a piece for these tiny things. Plus, the store only had them in stained oak, and my in-laws have white rocking chairs. So I decided to make my own.
