10 things to do with clementines

It's the holiday season and clementines are in season! What can you do with them?

1. Eat them! Just peel the zipper skin and eat them as is.
2. Boil the peels with some spices in some hot water to perfume or humidify the house.
3. Mandarin cheesecake: try fresh, peeled clementine sections instead* with a little more sugar.
4. Stuff them in the toe of your stockings to eat Christmas morning.
5. Make a fruit salad with clementines, apples, pomegranate seeds and kiwi.
6. Add the peeled sections to a nice spinach salad with a poppyseed dressing.
7. Try making a clementine juice* mimosa.
8. Substitute* mandarins for sectioned clementine in this beet salad recipe.
9. Try this fruit dip with sectioned clementines*.
10. Add the peeled, sectioned clementines to your cranberry sauce instead of orange juice.

*Substitutions: mandarins are sweeter than clementines so you may need to add sugar to achieve the same result.


Of course, no post on clementines would be complete without addressng the wooden clementine box! What on earth can you do with that?

1. Come spring, use it as a planter in the garden or as a window planter.
2. Break it up, remove all of the plastic, paper and staples then use it for kindling in the fire (if that is allowed, double check in your area).
3. Use it in your home organization. Remove the plastic, staples and paper and sand down any edges that could give you splinters. Add items, a label and put on the shelf.
4. Make mulch out of it. Remove all of the plastic, staples and paper then give it to someone who makes mulch out of wood. Once it's all crushed, it can be used on flower beds in the spring.

Here are some more ideas:

• eHow: how to reuse a wooden clementine box
• Clementine box crèche
• apartment therapy: What to do with Clementine boxes
• fun in the making: category: reuse clementine box

Restringing Christmas ornaments

I bought some lovely wooden ornaments for my tree but I absolutely hated the flimsy little string that came with it. It didn't match my decor and I knew that I had to restring them with something stronger.

For this quick project, I used the wooden ornaments, scissors and jute twine (bought from Dollarama).

I cut the string that came with the ornaments with the scissors:

Then restrung the ornaments with jute twine that I cut to the proper length then tied a knot at the top:

Then I was done!

I did these ones too:

Estimated time for this project: about 10 minutes. Perhaps less than that to cut then restring each ornament but 10 minutes total.

Notes:

• You can do this with any ornaments. Now I am looking at my collection for other ones where the flimsy string just doesn't fit the style of the ornament. This also works for heavy ornaments with tiny strings.
• This was so easy and logical that I thought it would be silly to post this but you'd be surprised how many people don't buy ornaments because the strings are too thin. So, here is an idea for all of those out there.

Ideas:

• I used jute twine but you can easily restring ornaments with embroidery floss, ribbon or anything else that fits your theme. It all depends on how you decorate.