My New Favorite Breakfast Sandwich

Sometimes I amaze myself.  I sauntered into the kitchen, knew it was oatmeal time for Cool Guy, just didn't feel like having that myself, and created something new from what I had around, and am I ever glad I did.

I'm sure I'm not the first person on earth to make this breakfast sandwich, but I've never seen it before (my wide-ranging experience -- not), and I am super thrilled with it.  I think I'm calling it something like Avocado Hamwich.  For now, it's just My New Favorite.

I'm even going to go out on a limb and say that it's healthy.  Yes, I know avocados are loaded with fat, but it's the good kind of fat, the kind that doesn't clog your arteries, and also makes you feel good and full all morning long.  And they taste soooo good and have lots of other good nutrients in them.  Not only that, avocados allow your body to more easily absorb other vitamins, like beta carotein.  If you're curious, or just want to justify the avocado fat to yourself, you can learn all about avocado nutrients here.  And please don't skip the little bit of butter.  (Yes, I know that it's saturated fat, but just tiny smear of butter is what we're talking about.)  It really makes it.  Really.

I would definitely cut this rich breakfast with some fruit.  I think the perfect match would be an orange, but it's not orange season, so I had some fresh pineapple with mine.

Avocado and Ham Breakfast Sandwich


Half an avocado, peeled and mashed
little bit of butter
diced ham
1 whole wheat English muffin, toasted

1. Spread a little butter on the muffin while warm.
2. Spread with avocado
3. Top with ham.

Yum.

5-S, The Final Chapter

At long last, we have come to the end of the kitchen reorganization, only to find out that it never ends.  Yes, the 5th S of 5-S is Sustain.  It's the hardest one.

It's not as if clearing out, cleaning, sorting, and organizing are easy, but sustaining takes more than one push to do, and it takes everyone doing it.

We're only middling good so far.

I went grocery shopping the other day, and was tired when I returned.  I just wanted to throw everything into the cabinets and be done with it, but I had to tell myself, that this was the slippery road on which I did not want to venture.  So I took the time to empty the cereal into the containers, open other packages and refill other containers, store excess in the basement, make note of what went into the freezer, blah, blah.  It took some time, but I'm hoping that that time will save me time and money and frustration in the future.  I can now look at a clear container and see that the cereal is getting low. (Since I don't like cereal, I never pick up the boxes.)

If I could only train the rest of my family to do this, it would be smooth sailing, but that is small potatoes, since I do most of the shopping.

The other area to train the family is to OBEY THE LABELS.  Sheesh.  The labels are there for a reason, so if you get the bread from the shelf marked "bread," it seems logical that you would return it there. *sigh*  Again, this is small stuff, and as long I consistently keep things in order and gently remind others to do the same, it will happen.  Eventually.  I'm glad that stuff like this doesn't tie me up in knots.  I can see how it would bother other people.  Just don't go folding my towels the wrong way.  In fact, don't fold the towels at all.  I'll do it.

So was it worth it?  After 3 months of living with a 5-S'd kitchen, I'd say definitely.  Cooking is so much easier now, and actually, even with the time it takes to put things away correctly, putting away groceries is easier because I know where stuff is supposed to go.  And I think I'm saving time and money by not accidentally buying, say, mustard 5 weeks in a row.

If you have kitchen logistic woes, I urge you to try a little 5-S-ing.  You don't need to do it all at once, though it is probably most efficient if you do.  However, if you can only do a little at a time, do it anyway.  If your kitchen is like mine, you can't be any worse off.

5-S, Step 4

The fourth phase of 5-S, which kind of overlaps step 3, is Standardize.  What does that mean?  It could mean many things, but I think we can all agree that if we standardize, things will be more orderly.

Burt informed me that standardization might mean storing certain types of things in like containers.  I really goofed there.  I was trying to make this project as inexpensive as possible, and took myself to Big Lots to buy every storage container I could get, regardless of its compatibility with other storage containers.

One goal I had was to be able to buy in bulk, store a reasonable amount of what I bought in the kitchen, and store the rest in the basement, as a refill depository.  So if I bought the mombo box of Cheerios at Sams, I would store some of the Cheerios upstairs, and when that supply ran out, I would simply run to the basement and refill the cereal container.  It makes sense.

However, I am regretting my purchases.  Some are glass and round; others are glass and square.  Some have airtight seals, while others don't.  A few are plastic, though I was really trying to steer away from BPA's.  I'm at the point, where BPA's be d***ed, I want everything to work well together.  For instance, I quickly found that storing freezer items, such as whole wheat flour, in a glass container is not very smart.  Frozen glass is not pleasant to grab onto.

My dream standardization line is the Tupperware.  Everything in their storage systems interlocks with everything else, making it easy to standardize the whole set.  For instance, if I had something big stored in a #3, I could also stack on top of the #3 a #1 and a #2.  It adds up, and makes sense.  Burt is really intrigued by this whole concept, and perhaps we can swallow the cost at some point and get rid of the pesky, space-hogging, round containers.  We'll see.

Rubbermaid makes a fantastic container that can be used for cereal and chips.  It is big enough to hold a decent quantity, and you can either pour from it or easily remove the airtight lid.  And the price is more reasonable than Tupperware's.  But Rubbermaid lacks the mathematical beauty of Tupperware's "legos for grownups," as the Tupperware rep. described the system.

Another step to the Standardization was labelling everything.  Burt suggested I buy a label maker a few years ago, and I have never regretted the purchase.  All containers were labelled: chips, cereal, flour, sugar, raisins, you name it.  You would not believe how much easier it is to navigate a cabinet or pantry just by having the containers labelled.  Never mind whether you can see through them and tell what's in them.  The label just makes life so much easier.  I took it one step further and labelled the shelves in the cabinets and pantry with what went onto each shelf.  That way, if it is someone other than me replacing things, ideally, things will return to their proper places.  More on that later.......

5-S Series, Humpday Edition

We are now in step 3 of the 5-S Series of Kitchen Reorganization, and I've got to say that if it had taken me as long to DO 5-S, as it has taken to write it, I would have disintegrated into a quivering pool of shattered nerves.  Thank goodness, it only took half a week.

Step 3 is Set in Order.  This had to be the hardest part of the process, making it a true humpday/midway kind of job.  First, I was tired of the whole thing by this time, and second, I had to really think about making a difficult kitchen more user-friends.

Setting in order entailed deciding where the very best place to put things was.  Some things were easy.  For instance, next to the stove, I have a built-in spice rack.  Spices go there.  Check.  In the cabinet next to the spice rack, there is a lazy susan, and I decided that cooking ingredients go there: things like olive oil, vinegar.  But the lazy susan can hold more than that, but not enough more to make it also hold baking items.  So do I keep all the baking items together?  Or do I split them up and put some with the cooking item?  I decided to keep all baking things together, even though the designated place for them, on the far side of the fridge, is not the ideal place, nor the handiest place.  But I cook more than I bake, so I'll just have to walk some extra steps when I need baking soda.  Not ideal, but it made sense to me.  You know, I can always change it at some later date.

The drawers also offered puzzlement.  Which is the very best drawer for silverware?  The one closest to the table seemed logical, and yet, that put it pretty far away from the heart of the kitchen, and I know that I need those spoons and forks and larger spoons for food prep, too.  I'm trying out a new system, which is to place all the untensils for eating in a caddy near the table, and keep the rest in a drawer near the stove.  Of course, moving the silverware there meant that the dishtowels and dishrags had to go somewhere else, so they took over the aluminum foil/saran wrap drawer, and then I had to find a new spot for those, which ended up being a rack that I installed under a cabinet.  You see why this is such a complicated step?

It takes living in a kitchen, deciding what are some problems that you would like to eliminate, and really thinking about your space to do it well.  For example, one thing that often caused problems in the past was that while I was flying around the stove area right before dinner, a boy would be trying to get silverware to set the table, and we would be in each other's way.  Moving the silverware to a caddy solved that problem.  If my priority is to get help while at the same time work efficiently, I had to identify what the problem was and try to solve it by rearrangement.

My challenge to you is whether or not you're reorganizing your kitchen, identify a problem and find a way to solve it by a little creative arranging.  And then let me know what you've come up with.  I may be able to use it!

Tweaks

I'm interrupting my 5S series for a bit about tweaks to breakfast.  I've done two lately, and they've been huge successes, so I'm sharing them to inspire you to devise tweaks of your own.

Tweak #1: Mary Poppins says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, but around here, all it takes is a spoonful of pork, preferably in the bacon or sausage category.  Here's the story.  I had some leftover cooked  sausage in the fridge and wondered what in the heck to do with it.  Sure, I could put it in an omelet, but I don't do omelets.  Lots of other ways to use it, but I ran across an idea from A Real American Breakfast.  This is one of those fantasy cookbooks, where only in my fantasies would I be cooking like this.  After all, I have lots of other things to do, and there are still only 24 hours per day.  However, I was glancing through and saw that they stuffed cooked sausage in the center of baked apples.  Up to this point, boys have refused baked apples.  I've tried stuffing them with brown sugar, raisins, pecans, cinnamon, all of the above, and no dice.  "What the hey," I thought, "can't hurt to try."  Let me tell you, those apples disappeared in nano-seconds.  Wish I'd made more.  Brown sugar won't do it, but sausage does.

This is super easy to make; all you need is to be awake an hour before eating.

1. Have some cooked, crumbled sausage left over.  You don't need much.
2. Peel the apple, just a circle off the top of it.  This helps keep it from splitting open.
3. Take a melon baller if you have one, and use that to scoop out the core.  This makes it so easy.  Be sure to leave the bottom intact.
4. Stuff a little sausage in the middle, up to the top of the apple.
5. Now place apple or apples in a pan with just a little water in the bottom, and bake at 350 covered for 30 minutes.  Then remove the cover and bake another 15 to brown things up.

That's it.  The only real work is coring the apples, which will take you about 5 minutes.  After that, the oven does the work, while you make coffee, and work your crossword puzzle.  And it is so worth it.

Tweak #2: The Mmmelvis.  This is named after the Elvis bagel plus our common first inital.  And you say "Mmmm" after eating it.  Get it?  Here, I was just make the ol' Elvis bagel and on a whim decided to add a few chocolate chips to the mix.  What a hit!  One caveat: you may not want your bagel toasted.  When I tried that, the peanut butter, and banana, and chips all kindof slid off the thing into a puddly mess.  Cool Guy was not amused.  So Mmmelvis is better eaten non-toasted for those who prefer not to get messy hands.

Tweaking is fun, and breakfast is so forgiving, that you should really try it sometime.  And if, as when I tried adding rhubarb to the oatmeal, it turns out a disaster according to the peanut gallery, there's always cold cereal to fall back on.  And life goes on.

5-S Continued

As I mentioned a looooong time ago, I was going to tackle my Kitchen Reorganization Project in the 5 steps that Burt, aka my husband, outlined for me, otherwise known as 5 S.  The first "S", if you recall, was Sort.  Now for the second, which, thankfully, I won't dwell on, is Sweep.

In other words, clean it all out while you can.  Look, as long as you've gotten everything dragged out of your cabinets, you may as well get a bucket, solution, and a sponge and get it all cleaned up.  Not glamorous, I know, but it's one of those things that it's nice to have DONE.

I'm not really a spit and polish kind of gal, I'll be the first to admit.  At the end of the day, when I've been up more hours than most, have dealt with all my high-maintenance family members (excluding Burt who is very low maintenance, but definitely including The Dog), fixed dinner, dealt with the fallout of that, done the dishes, swept the floor, I just don't have a lot left in me to go wiping out the fridge, sweeping up crumbs in the cabinet, or whatever.  And it seems that "later" never comes.  I think there is definitely some wisdom to the old Spring Cleaning ritual.

I guess early June, which is when I was 5-S-ing, counts as springtime.

My solution for the bucket, btw, is just some white vinegar diluted with water.  It takes care of most stuff.  Long story short, I totally cleaned out the fridge, including taking out the drawers and cleaning in and around them, and wiped down all cabinets, inside and out.  For the woodwork, I used Murphy's Oil Soap, and finished it off with a treatment of Old English.  Things were looking pretty good, except as long as you didn't look in the middle of the kitchen where all the stuff was waiting to be put back in a proper place.  That we'll deal with soon.

Was I tired and worn out?  You betcha.  Don't like doing it, but like having DONE it.  That is what I tell myself when I try to talk myself out of doing what I ought.

Until next time.....

A New and Improved Kitchen

Awhile back, I posted about making pumpkin muffins in the springtime because I had several cans of pumpkin that would not last until next Thanksgiving.  Now, I don't mind making pumpkin muffins "out of season," but you must understand that I had four large cans of pumpkin.  Why?  Do I love pumpkin so much?  No, unfortunately, I have a truly disorganized mode of operation, and things just get shoved in the pantry, and then I forget that I got something and get it again, and it madly repeats itself until one day I find four cans of pumpkin, or even worse, 6 huge bottles of mustard.

This madness had to be stopped, and right about the time that thought was going through my very little brain, Katie at Kitchen Stewardship was posting about buying in bulk to save money and then storing the bulk items so that they could be used and not wasted.  It was a Providential moment for me.  Don't you just love it when random things, like pumpkin, mustard, and someone else's blogpost, converge to point you in a direction?

To further boost me along my well-intended path, Burt took the boys on a week-long vacation to visit his mother, and I was given a week at home to do as I pleased.  Despite all the advice to get a massage, loll in bed all day, or whatever, I knew that my mind would be most at ease if I could get a handle on the chaos that I was calling my kitchen.

It was a three-day event, lasting about 12 hours each day, and I am extremely please with how it is working out one month later.

Burt learned a system at work with something called 5S.  I have used this system in the past to organize other parts of the house, specifically the basement, now rec-room/art center, and the spare bedroom, which is now study room/classroom.  Despite my boys' best efforts to return things to their former crazy states, things have been manageable for over a year now, due to the thoroughness of the initial 5 S-ing.

You, lucky reader, have the privelage to follow me through each phase of 5 S, as applied to my kitchen, in the next 5 posts.  I hope that you can take something away from this.

S #1: SORT

Again, I had this golden opportunity while the guys were away for a week, in that I wasn't required to produce anything in the kitchen.  Therefore, I was able to pull everything out of every cabinet, drawer, etc., and sort through it all.  I had things piled up on every horizontal surface in the kitchen.

Luckily (I suppose) we have moved a lot, and so I did not have 25 years' worth of things accumulated.  Stuff becomes a lot less precious when you have to find a place to put it.  Nevertheless, there was a lot of stuff socked away.

I evaluated what I had when I pulled it out.  Do I really need three bottle openers?  600 twist ties?  Since I'm the only one who cracks and picks nuts, one of each will do.  The extras were boxed up for charity.  If I really felt that I needed a "spare," it was put in another box to live in storage in the basement.  Anything broken, and likewise, anything that I really knew I didn't use or could live without got pitched.  That left me with a lot more room for when I put things back.

In addition to sorting out what to keep and what to toss, I also tried grouping like things.  For instance, baking stuff all was together, and cooking stuff, and you get the idea.  I would figure out optimum placement later.  For the time, just deciding what went together was enough.