Katemtsui

Oreos, marshmallow and Nutella? Sounds good to me. In fact, who decided S'mores require boring old graham crackers anyway?

Link

If you love vintage fashion, but really love geek clothing, then head over to Etsy seller CakeShopCouture's shop where you can grab such awesomely stylish gear as this cute little Star Wars frock.

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Lots of travelers, particularly those on business, find themselves stuck in hotels for weeks or months on end. The novelty of eating every meal at a restaurant or room service soon wears off, and the traveler craves nothing more than the taste of a home-cooked meal. However, in-room resources at many hotels appear to be incapable of facilitating cooking. This can be resolved through several innovative ways.

Edit Steps

Cooking Help

Breakfast

1. Make oatmeal in the coffee maker. Put two packets of instant oatmeal into the carafe. Add an individual packet of honey, an individual packet of fruit jam, and a pinch of salt. Put an herbal tea bag (e.g. orange flavored) into the filter basket. Pour 8-10 ounces of water into the coffee maker, turn on the machine, and the oatmeal will be ready in about 5 minutes.^[1]
   
   
   
   • Even old-fashioned (non-instant) oatmeal can be cooked either with hot water or in a microwave.
   • No honey? Try cut-up fresh or dried fruit. Raisins, apples, strawberries, and many other choices all add enough sweetness and they tend to be widely available in shops.
2. Cook bacon with the iron. Cut bacon strips in half and place them between two foil sheets. Crimp the edges of the foil sheets together to prevent grease from spilling out. Iron the bacon, opening the packet carefully with a fork every few minutes to check to see if the bacon is done and to let out the steam. It'll take about 10 minutes to get slightly crisp bacon.^[2]
3. Use the iron as a hotplate for eggs. Prop the iron so that the ironing surface is horizontal. Make a little foil pan and grease it with bacon fat or butter. Crack one or two eggs into it, wait 7-10 minutes (until the eggs hold together), then flip them over to cook on the other side.^[2]
4. Prepare soft-boiled eggs in the coffee maker. Place the eggs carefully into the carafe and let the hot water drip over them. Then let the eggs sit in the water for a few minutes.^[3]
   
   
   
   

Lunch/Dinner

1. Prepare ramen noodles in the coffee maker. Put the noodles in the carafe. Add enough water to submerge the noodles and turn the coffee maker on. After the water runs through the coffee maker, let the noodles soak in it for about three minutes, or however long it takes for the noodles to soften. Then drain carefully and add the seasoning.^[4]
   
   
   
2. Make a grilled cheese sandwich using the iron. You can also use the same method to make a quesadilla.^[5] There is also the dessert version of grilled cheese, using peanut butter and chocolate chips.
3. Use the iron as a skillet/grill. Wrap chicken, fish, vegetables, etc. in foil, place the foil-wrapped food on the ironing board, and put the iron, on the highest setting, over the top. Just make sure the foil is sealed so that juices don't come out and ruin the iron or the surface you're cooking on. The more cooking that the food requires, the less room there is for error, so try to stick with food that only needs searing, such as scallops.
4. Use the coffee maker as a vegetable steamer. Place carrots, broccoli, etc. in the filter basket of the coffee maker. Run water through the coffee maker several time to achieve desired tenderness.
   
   
   
5. Make instant rice in the coffee maker. Run the appropriate amount of water, per the instructions on the rice package, through the coffee maker and then add the rice to the coffee pot. Leave the burner on until the rice has thoroughly cooked and absorbed most of the water.
6. Make sauce in the coffee maker. Sauces and fondues can be made by running water through the coffee maker and adding the heated water to a sauce mix. You should not run anything other than water through the coffee maker. These machines are made to heat water only, and the water comes into direct contact with the heating element. Sauces will burn onto the heating element, ruining the coffee maker.
7. Make "Lemon Pepper Chicken" in the coffee maker. Place chicken breast in coffee maker. Add enough water to cover about 1/4 of chicken. Sprinkle with lemon pepper seasoning. Turn on maker and cook about 15 min per side. Add milk and butter to remaining liquid, allow to heat for about a minute, and add potato flakes for a quick side of mashed potatoes.
8. Keep uncooked options in mind. You can make a salad easily, by washing the ingredients in the bathroom sink, and you can make your own sandwiches from supermarket ingredients or, in many cases, buy ready-made.

Edit Video

Edit Tips

• After you're finished with the coffee maker, clean it thoroughly.
• If you want to cook for yourself, plan ahead a little. See if you can find a hotel, hostel, or extended stay place that has some cooking facilities. Many hotels do offer microwaves, toaster ovens, and even mini-fridges in the rooms. Many hostels offer communal kitchens. Long-term stay places have studio apartments with kitchenettes. Any of these options expands considerably the range of cooking options you will have available.
• These tactics may also prove helpful to a college student living in a dorm with strict regulations.
• Plates, cups, utensils, and condiments can often be obtained if your hotel has a breakfast buffet.
• Use the ice bucket as a salad bowl.
• For lighter fare when traveling, or to reduce your budget, aim for one larger restaurant meal per day. Lunch is ideal, because it is often lighter and less costly to order in a restaurant than dinner, and it is when you are most likely to be away from your hotel. For your restaurant meal, choose foods you cannot prepare as easily for yourself. Then, prepare simple, lighter meals for morning and night. Eggs, bread, and hot or cold cereal are relatively easy breakfasts to prepare on the go, and sandwiches, canned soups, and prepared foods can combine to make simple dinners.
• You should first practice at home.

Edit Warnings

• Clean out the coffee pot and filter before attempting to cook with it. You don't want your steamed cauliflower to taste like three week old coffee!
  • If the coffee pot has a dark, reddish-orange stain, it might've been used to brew methamphetamine, and the resulting coffee could be hazardous to your health. If there's a chemical smell in the room, that's another red flag.
• While cooking, do not leave electric devices unattended even for a short time.
  • Be aware that the hot iron does present a fire hazard. Make sure to use extra caution and never let children cook alone.
• Do not allow any uncleaned surface or appliance to contact food which you intend to eat.
  • After use, thoroughly clean anything -- especially the coffee maker and iron -- which has contacted raw poultry or meat, as failure to do this may result in salmonella.
• If you ruin something that the hotel owns, the hotel will charge a lot to replace the broken item. So be careful!=
• Keep in mind that cooking in hotel rooms usually violates most health codes. If you get caught cooking in a hotel room, you may have to pay fines, replace appliances, and/or be evicted from the hotel.
• You're really supposed to ask the hotel permission if you can do this (to which they'll probably say no).

Edit Related wikiHows

• How to Cook Food on Your Car's Engine
• How to Make Rice Cooker Bread
• How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich With an Iron
• How to Make Good Hotel Room Coffee
• How to Live in Your Car
• How to Make a Good Cooking Website

Edit Sources and Citations

• Read on wikiHow
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This ivy-covered, three-story stone mansion is the former home of botanist Oakes Ames and his feminist artist and inventor wife Blanche Ames Ames. (No relation prior to their nuptials, just an interesting coincidence).

The Ames's lives speak volumes: Blanche Ames Ames, daughter of a prominent Lowell, MA family, co-founded the Women's Birth Control League and created radical inventions including a disease-resistant turkey, a new color palette, a flushing toilet, and a device to trap low-flying aircrafts used during World War II. Oakes Ames was a world-traveling orchid hunter and Harvard professor who wrote what is still the definitive papers on orchid identification, illustrated by his lovely wife Blanche.

The eccentric pair, wealthy, artistic bohemians and grandparents of George Plimpton, used their country estate solely for their own enjoyment and therefore designed paths and grounds that can be explored for days, including a comfortable hunting lodge where one is sure to find a fire blazing and a cup of hot chocolate.

The mansion holds many surprises, including an Ames Ames designed (and then abandoned) swimming pool with pipes so complicated that the secret of their operation died with her. The mansion, tucked away in the suburbs of Boston, can be a bit hard to find - but wandering the paths that the Ames's built as their personal pleasure grounds uncovers a formerly untold history as wonderful and multi-valenced as these orchid hunters' lives.

Built and designed primarily by Blanche, the mansion features artist studios, dark wood paneling, heavy tapestries, and incredible landscapes that wind through man-made ponds, dams, and paths, leading the visitor languidly over 1.780 acres of rural environment. The furnishings inside the mansion have remained mostly unchanged since the 22,212 sq. meter house was finished in 1912.

Ames Ames's paintings grace the walls, and the heavy, dusty wooden library is covered in wooden engravings of serpents and fantasy animals. The large rose garden in back looks out onto a glorious field surrounded by azaleas and elder bushes, while the abandoned swimming pool lies overgrown with flora that seems to overtake the lush gardens and rolling hills of the estate. 

Brilliantly designed, beautifully old-fashioned, the Ames Mansion serves as a dusty reminder of a fabulous past.

We love cheatsheets as one can refer to them and make quick amendments to better our skills. Since many loved our last compilation of cheatsheet for designers, we’ve decided to compile another set of cheatsheets, this time for photographers.

Amateur photographers, and even pros can easily benefit from these cheatsheets as it is a resource for fresh and new ideas. We’ve scoured the Web and have found a wide variety of cheatsheets covering various aspects of photography and catering to the many levels of skills and interest of anyone who calls themselves a photographer.

Most of the pictures you see here are cropped for a nice fit, so remember to click on the links to check out the entire cheatsheet or infographic. Some of them are really long and can give you a ton of worthwhile information that you really can’t do without.

Recommended Reading: Five Vital Black & White Photography Tips

Focal Lengths

Manual Photography

3 Ways to Affect Depth of Field

What Your Camera Captures At Every Lens’ Focal Length

Photography Cheatsheet

3 Elements of Exposure

Color Temperature Scale

F-Stop Chart

Lighting Modifiers

Portrait Lighting

Portrait Lighting For Home Studio

Nikon vs Canon: Shooting Modes

Nikon Metering Mode

Reading The Nikon Viewfinder

Portrait And Posing Ideas

How To Read A Histogram

Portrait Cropping Guide

More Photography Resources

Here are more (but wordy) resources to help in certain photography situations. The following also includes keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture together with a few other cheatsheets for certain DSLR models.

10 Rules of Photography

Wedding Photography Cheatsheet

Family Portrait Cheatsheet

Landscape Photography Cheatsheet

Action Photography Cheatsheet

Macro Photography Cheatsheet

Photographer Rights

Best Shutter Speeds For Every Situation

Adobe Lightroom Keyboard Shortcuts – Windows & Mac

Apple Aperture Keyboard Shortcuts

Canon Memory Card Compatibility

Photo: Ben Coffman Photography

We've featured many Milky Way photos on Neatorama, but this one is probably the most beautiful: Photographer Ben Coffman took this panorama over snowy Crater Lake, Oregon:

You can see a few Lyrids in the photo (3 small ones on the left, in the Milky Way, and one larger one in the top right of the Milky Way). Andromeda can be seen near the tree to the left.

EarthSky has the larger pic: Link