Saturday I got out the supplies to make soap from scratch. I have never made it with my Mom before, and I think that she was rather impressed with how quick it is and the interesting chemical reactions. For this batch we added food coloring for a bit of festive purple- but we should have mixed the colors together before adding them to the soap since there are patches of red and blue in the final product. I also was surprised that the inital amount of color added appeared to change the soap's color a small amount- yet after a few days, the color showed up quite well- another mystery of the world :)

That night, while the soap started its three month curing process, we cracked out the ingredients to make potstickers. For a similar recipe to what we made, you can look at Yee's dumpling recipe. The only major changes to the listed recipe were the use of 1 pound ground shrimp and pork and leeks instead of chives. Yee also had a great solution for cooking the dumplings well. Just steam them until the wonton wrapper getts nice and moist, then pan fry them in a bit of sesame oil. It worked amazingly well!

Mom and I then updated my plant stands to make it a bit more fire safe (no ropes holding up the lights) and plant friendly. To fix the lights we drilled two appropriately spaced holes into the bottom of each shelf and added appropriate screws to match the holes in the florescent light fixtures. We also added a new shelf to one of the more flexible wooden bookcases using culled lumber from Home Depot. Fortunately it only took two rips from the Home Depot employee to get the shelf to the appropriate size. Wrapping the shelf with imitation walnut shelving paper made the shelf fit in perfectly with the others. As a last tweak we covered up some of the lights with the contact paper to make a nice glow by the TV. Can't wait to see how the plants react!