The Caramel Corn Recipe

Okay here it is, the most asked about recipe. It is right up there with my thin mints! I found the recipe on recipezaar which is now called food.com it is #273797. The poster said that it is originally from The Taste of Home.

Ingredients
- 8 quarts popped popcorn
-2 cups packed brown sugar
- 1 cup butter
- 1/2 cup corn syrup
-1 teaspoon salt
-1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Directions
1. Place popcorn ( 8qts=24 cups) in a large bowl and set aside. In a saucepan combine brown sugar, butter, corn syrup and salt; bring to a boil over medium heat stirring constantly.

2. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally

3. Remove from heat

4. Stir in vanilla and baking soda; mix well. Pour over popcorn until well coated.

5. Pour into two greased 13x9 baking pans

6. Bake, uncovered at 250 degrees for 45 minutes stirring every 15 minutes

7. When slightly warm break up and put in and airtight container.


My Notes
I use an air popper and 3 tablespoons of kernels equals about 6 cups of popped. 8 quarts of popped popcorn is about 12 Tablespoons.

Wait only about 3 minutes after taking it out of the oven to break up and put in a bowl. If you wait too long it will all just stick together.

Enjoy!

A Little Help For My Closet

A few weeks ago I started to work on decluttering and organizing my closet. I always put it off since it seemed like such a huge project to take on but at the same time was always a burden to me having it such a mess. With my new habits I am learning from Fly Lady I have decided to tackle it only working only 15 minutes at a time. I set my timer and when it is done so I am. It really is amazing how much you can get done in 15 minutes if you just buckle down and do it!

I found out that I have a good collection of baseball hats and I wanted a better way to store them. I posted on freecycle for one of those hat organizers. I had only 1 person respond and she suggested that I just put a bunch of nails in the wall and hang them that way. I thought that was a great idea (and also a cheap one). I have a perfect wall for that behind the closet door even... Well my husband has a thing about hanging stuff on walls correctly so he didn't go for it. He did however come up with an even better idea. He said he could build me a board and put knobs on it to hang my stuff off of.

I spent $4.50 on the fabric and $14 on the knobs, the wood was leftover from another project and ended you with and nice place for my hats and bags. I must admit I did get rid of over half on my hats as well. Once they were all hung up I noticed that I actually 3 out of my 5 hats that I kept say "Yellowstone". I now can clearly see that I should get rid of a pink "Yellowstone" hat and replace it with a new Blue U.C. Davis hat (I tossed all my old ones)




The closet is not done yet but it is much more livable and no longer stressing me. Just a few more 15's is all it will take.

Towels and Toys

For the past month I have really been working to get the house in order and so far I have been successful in keeping it clean and orderly (the parts I have gotten too to far). Many thanks go to Fly Lady and Motivated Moms. Today I will share a few organizing things that I have done that have helped keep things orderly.

I had one drawer in my kitchen for dish towels and pot holders. It was always stuff full and even more so now since I have been on top of the laundry. I saw this idea about folding dish towels on the Infarrantly Creative blog and thought it was such a great idea (the picture is from the blog). I had a drawer that was holding a few bags so I emptied it out and it became my new dish towel drawer. It looks great and it hold so many more towels! I now have a drawer that has just a few pot holders and a neat dish towel drawer. I liked this so much that I also have a wash cloths and bib drawer and folded my T-shirt drawer this way! It creates so much more room and you can see everything that you have.



Another project that I have been meaning to do for a LONG time was to label the toy baskets. I had great plans of taking cute pictures, laminating them and tying them on with some cute ribbon. Two of the lessons I am learning from Fly Lady if "Do it Now" and that is doesn't need to be perfect. What I ended up doing was just using clip art, Google pics, card stock, packing tape and some string. Once the toys were sorted and grouped I just found a picture that I like and printed it on the card stock. I have some wide clear packing tape so I "laminated" it with that and tied it on the basket with a string. It didn't take very long at all to do!

Since I was on a roll I decided to also tackle Alex's room. He has a shelf of bins that are from Ikea
( I got them at a garage sale) Since there were no clip art pictures to really fit his toys I used Google Pictures and he helped picked the ones that he liked. I just printed them on plain paper and taped them on. It really tool no more then 15 minutes to complete! It should also be easy to change out as needed. Making the baskets and bins labeled makes clean up time very fast and easy. Check out one of my favorite blogs Make It and Love It to see how she labeled her bins.