Confessions

In an effort to find my voice (and also to never give off the appearance that our lives are perfect) I thought I'd confess a few things:

1) I'm writing this post on Friday, even though I'm scheduling it to post on Sunday. I doubt I'll have time to post again over the weekend, and I have a writing bug now, so I thought I'd knock out a few posts for the future.

2) I haven't changed out of my PJs all day. (We're wrapping up Honeymoon #2, and when you only get a vacation once or twice a year, you make the best of it!)

3) I buy chocolate chips just so I can eat them right out of the bag. You heard me. I never make chocolate chip cookies. I just eat the chips.

4) Chocolate chip cookies are the only type of cookie I don't make. I've never been able to make them as well as my mom can, so I don't bother. (If you have a killer chocolate chip cookie recipe, I'd love to try it! Let me know in the comments.)

5) Left up to my own devices, I'd probably eat nothing but Ramen. I cook to feed my Mister.

6) My Mister turn on the hall light every time he walks past the switch. I turn it off every time I walk past the switch. I find this endearing and frustrating in equal measure.

7) Sloppy joe recipe found at My Healthy Ohana. I don't usually like Sloppy Joes but these are delicious, probably because she uses siracha.  We're obsessed with siracha in this house, and at any given time we've probably got two or three open bottles.

8) The Joseph Joseph Garlic Rocker pictured above was found on Amazon.com. I am obsessed with this thing, and absolutely not paid to say so. Buy one. Buy a few and give them as hostess gifts! You'll thank me later.

CSA Week 7

Welcome to another week of CSA food, complete with.... (drumroll please) ....more okra! Luckily I was prepared, and I put up four jars of refrigerator pickles using this recipe from Honest Fare. Slime free okra? I'm in!

Here's the box reveal. As soon as I saw those lovely little eggplants, I immediately started looking up a good eggplant stir fry. We love the eggplant at P.F. Changs, but this Thai Basil Eggplant recipe might be even better!

Make It Yourself

I've been on a huge homemade kick recently. The "urban homesteading" bug has totally bitten me, and while we're a long way from chickens and goats in our backyard, I'm trying to make as many of our daily necessities as possible.

So far, the list of successes includes:

Artisan Bread via Alexandra's Kitchen. I downsized the recipe to make exactly one loaf. This was so good that we ate the loaf basically in one night, and made another not even a week later. We'll probably use this recipe, split into two smaller loaves, to make bread bowls for soup once the weather turns colder!

White Sandwich Bread via The Baker Upstairs. Again, I downsized the recipe for just one loaf. Thank goodness I've got a stand mixer; there's no way I would have had the energy to knead this thing for 10 minutes! This was delicious, and we ate toast every morning for almost a week with a thick slather of butter and some homemade, No-Pectin Peach Jam that I made up from our CSA peaches. (If you've been taking notes, that peach jam recipe is basically a fruit compote that gets cooked all the way down!)

Last but not least, here's a great recipe for Homemade Chocolate Syrup. Chocolate milk is an absolute staple of my diet; I grew up in a house where the refrigerator always contained Hershey's syrup, and I've definitely caught my dad pouring milk into the Hershey's bottle to get out the last little bit of chocolate. I'm so glad I learned how to make this myself, because it is so easy and so, so good! Just definitely heed the warning and make it up in a 3 quart pot; it foams up quite a bit as it boils.

What have you made lately? I'd love to see your creations and add a few more recipes to my repertoire. Comment below with your links!

Red Coffee Table

Hey there! It's summer time and the DIY bug bit us hard around here. There's nothing like an upcoming move to get my butt in gear toward finishing all of my little projects!

Today, I want to talk about our coffee table. Technically it's the Mister's coffee table, and I love it. It's the perfect size for our sofa, it has a lovely shape, two handy drawers (One for remotes and one for nail polish, naturally! Not shown in the picture above.) and the lower shelf is the perfect place to stash the Mister's extra-large Spiderman coffee table book and a couple of extra coasters.

I love our coffee table... but I think it could do more for us. When the Mister and I merged our furniture, we wound up with a lot of black-painted and dark-stained wood in the living room. Paired with a very beige sofa and a few beige chairs, and the whole thing comes off rather... meh. So, somewhere along the way, I got the crazy idea to paint our coffee table red.

Not just any red, but perhaps the brightest shade of red Behr makes; Behr 150B-7 in "Poinsettia". It's the very bottom panel on the swatch on the left... which just happens to match my very cheery Hello Kitty tee! I really wanted to spray paint it (for speed and for the great finish that spray paint achieves on furniture) but I couldn't find a bright red spray paint in a satin sheen anywhere in town, so I went with a satin Behr interior paint and a smooth, low-nap roller.

I've been painting this table mostly at night the last few evenings, so I have very few decent pictures to show you. It ought to be done in the next couple days, though, and I'll be back to show you the after. I hope you stay tuned!

Literature Review: Periodic Table Quilts

In the science world, a literature review is a written work that sums up the current state of scientific research in a particular field.

After much anticipation and eager waiting, we finally got to meet the baby boy that my Mister's PI (which in the science world stands for Primary Investigator, i.e., his thesis advisor) has been gestating for the last nine months. My natural impulse was to immediately start work on a baby quilt, but what would be appropriate for the infant son of two awesome chemists? Well, why not a periodic table quilt!

My favourites from Pinterest include:

Source: patchandi.blogspot.com via Jessica on Pinterest

This first clean, minimal quilt left me asking, "How did they do that?" It turns out that it wasn't anything as complicated as I assumed -- this quilt was accomplished by professionally printing the periodic table onto white fabric and sashing with broad black borders.

Source: notonlyquilts.blogspot.com via Jessica on Pinterest

This version is extremely similar to the first in that the fabric was printed using Spoonflower, but I love seeing that the quilter actually cut and pieced each element together to form the finished quilt top. Also, the various quilting patterns and the unique binding stitch are really worth a closer look -- make sure you click through to see the whole post at Not Only Quilts!

Source: google.com via Jessica on Pinterest

Finally, I pinned this image of Elemental, a beautiful, abstract quilt by pivy. Something about the use of only coloured blocks to imply the periodic table hit home, and I think this is the inspiration I needed for the baby quilt I'm hoping to make!

Even if you're not a chemistry geek like me, I hope you've enjoyed this little review. There are plenty of techniques described in the three examples above that could add a little something to any quilting project!

Lone Starburst Paper Piecing

Tonight during #talknt I'm working on a new technique: paper piecing! I've had four pages of the Lone Starburst by Six White Horses Studio sitting on my desk for weeks, and I've finally mustered up the courage to get started.

I'm working in bright, super saturated colors broken up with a delicate white-on-white pattern, with solid white in the center of the star. I was going to invert this, with a colourful star and white backing until I saw this pin today and knew I just had to have one of my very own:

Source: Lone Starburst closeup by Curly_Boy, via Flickr

I have no idea why I put off paper piecing for so long -- it's easy and entirely addictive. I've got to go, #talknt is calling and I've got more blocks to sew!

Brownie in a Mug

This is just a quick post, because I'm burning to show you the details of my first sewing completion of 2013 but since it's a surprise late Christmas gift for a dear friend, I have to keep it a secret a little while longer. Instead, here's some chocolate!

This is a brownie in a mug (and some strawberry ice cream for good measure). Believe it or not, I've never even heard of these before. That's a good thing, too, because I'd be about 20 pounds heavier had I known of these earlier! But thanks to Pinterest, these are now a part of my life. The original pin can be found here!

The idea is simple. Blend a few dry ingredients (sugar, flour, salt, cocoa powder) in a standard sized mug. Add a little oil and water, and microwave for a minute and 40 seconds. Top with ice cream and indulge your chocolate craving!

S'mores

Well, Merry Christmas readers! The Mister and I took off to visit our families in beautiful, sunny, warm southern Florida for the holidays, and we had a great time. There was, however, one thing missing. It's great to see tall palm trees wrapped in Christmas lights and to be able to wear adorable sundresses for Christmas photos, but I'd trade it all for one good snow fall!

We got home a couple of days ago, and yesterday we were out and about running errands. (One of my gifts is my very own sewing "room" and I was eager to get started picking up supplies!) Sure enough, we pulled up to our local hardware store and down it came -- soft, fragile, fluffy flakes of the white stuff. Real snow! How exciting!

None of it stuck, of course, but it was fun just to see it fall. If you're from the frosty north and you've been snowed on (or snowed in!) long enough to hate snow in all of its forms, please forgive the Florida girl in me.

Anyway, the snow reminded me to get back here and get this post up. I'm not here to talk about snow, but to talk about s'mores. The treat seems to go perfectly with a backdrop of softly falling snow, especially when you add in a great mug of hot cocoa.

This is a great Pinterest find -- easy S'mores you can make at home. The recipe is over at Cooking Classy, but the only real secret is that you use your broiler to roast the marshmallows! Brilliant.

Full disclosure: I had my first s'more only a few weeks ago, at a bonfire. It was magical and wonderful but honestly, a little hard to handle and eat with gloves on. This may be sacrilegious to some of you, but I'd take this easy broiler method over the "real" technique any day.

I hope you all had a great holiday! Do you have any special treats you like to break out this time of year? Let me know in the comments below -- I'd love to try them.