I’d picked them out last year when I asked you for recommendations but then I never got around to buying them. I mean, my slippers still worked, technically speaking, so why spend money if I didn’t have to?
I’d heard really good things about Glerups, and even though I was a little nervous about all-wool slippers, I knew that my other wool shoes are some of my all-time favorites (and they are $20 off right now!). So I decided to risk it and wow, do I ever love these slippers!
my husband says my feet look like they’re wrapped in carpet padding
The material feels soooo good (I don’t wear socks), and there’s no sweating: my feet stay warm but not hot. The slippers aren’t clunky; once they’re on, they’re on. The first few weeks, I had to manually pull them on, but now I can wiggle my feet into them without using my hands at all. The leather bottoms are sturdy enough that I can wear them outside.
The only problem is that the top edge rubs the back of my ankle a little. It’s not enough to be an actual problem, but that’s the only part that doesn’t feel quite right. Maybe the mild irritation will fade over time? Maybe not?
It’s okay either way — I just want to be completely transparent in case you, too, are in the market for new slippers.
***
Now that there are only two kids at home, and they’re often gone with school, work, and evening commitments, family suppers are a bit sporadic. Same with lunches. So I’ve been making an effort to make a decent “real” breakfast several times a week: pancakes and sausage, eggs and toast, oatmeal and smoothies, etc. Days they have classes, I often pack my son’s lunch, too, along with my husband’s (my daughter prefers to pack her own).
Making breakfasts and lunches is my way of “moving food” — making sure the homemade leftovers are getting used up in a timely manner, and in creative ways. Like for both the Dutch puff and the vanilla pudding, I added some extra eggs yolks that were leftover from making the Italian meringue buttercream for my husband’s birthday cake, which gave me a productivity buzz.
Knocking out a big meal in the morning takes the pressure off for later in the day; if supper is just popcorn and apples, then so be it.
***
It takes me forever to get through a bottle of wine. My husband doesn’t drink alcohol, and contrary to appearances, or the fact that I freaking make the stuff now [puffs chest], I don’t actually drink that much. And re-corking a bottle of mead once it has been opened has thus far proved impossible, forcing me to settle for sealing the top with a piece of plastic wrap.
So! You can imagine my delight when I discovered that there exists a little thingy called a wine saver.
When I was on cross-cultural in Guatemala when I was in college, one of the guys in my group made a fresh salsa.
I begged the recipe — more a formula, really — and it became my go-to emergency salsa: stir together chopped roma tomatoes, some minced onion and jalapeno and a bit of garlic, a fistful of fresh cilantro, S&P, a hefty squeeze of lime, and some olive oil, if you want.
A couple weeks ago, I made a bowl of it to go with mountains of cheesy tortilla chips for supper.
We washed and sanitized the bottles, briefly soaked the corks in Star San, and then my husband began filling bottles.
Getting them filled to the correct level was a little touch-and-go at first, but we eventually got the hang of it. There was one major hose-down-the-kitchen-with-mead event, but we had spread a bath towel on the floor ahead of time so that soaked up the worst of it (and since our kitchen floor is perpetually in a state of Please Wash Me, it’s always grateful for an excuse to get a good scrubbing — there are worse things).
The corker thingy is an absolute must because there is no way we could’ve gotten the corks into the bottles without it. It’s not great for big bottling projects, though — it’s a little scarily wobbly, and my husband said it made his hands hurt after a while — but for our little outfit, it got the job done. I think we ended up with 22 bottles, or 25…can’t remember.
The mead is drinkable at any point though it should be aged a full year for best results. At that point, the flavor should become more mellow, they say. But I actually really like it as it is now. Like, really, really like it. I don’t know what the flavor compares to. I’m no wine expert, and I was a little shy about sharing the mead with people at first because one) I didn’t want anyone to have to pretend they liked it, and two) I didn’t want to suffer the giant soul crushing of a negative review. But then one girlfriend had some and requested to buy a bottle, and I took another bottle to a gathering and it got all drunk up that very night, and when I have guests over, I notice people helping themselves to seconds, so . . . all good signs, I guess?
I do have one problem, though: where to store it? Our old farmhouse is skimpy on storage space, and what with all my cheesemaking and now mead making, my projects are eating into our living space something fierce. (And I thought I’d have all this extra space once the kids left, ha!)
I guess we’ll figure something out eventually, considering necessity is the mother of invention and all…
