counting creativity

inspired, i'll admit, by my own post on mushrooms over on domestic sensualist, the new cooking blog that i share with the fabulous bee, i made a gorgeous chicken recipe last night and it was so good, that i'm going to count it as #73 in the year of creativity:

it involved five kinds of mixed fresh mushrooms (which i bought at the store, i didn't forage for them myself in the forest this time), an organic chicken, three shallots and a bottle of hard, dry cider. it was absolute heaven. and i'm using the leftovers in a risotto this evening, so it was even economical in that it will stretch to two meals. i'll be sharing these recipes soon over on domestic sensualist.

while it was simmering away in the oven, i preserved some pretty little pears in a gorgeous mixture of sugar, vinegar, ginger, cinnamon, vanilla and star anise. i'm going to try to resist opening them for a few weeks, but it will be difficult. i give you #74.

and this afternoon, we finished sabin's little plushie man. i'm counting it as #75 because of the level of help which i was required to provide. isn't it adorable? i'm not sure about how i sewed the head to the body, but am chalking it up as a learning experience. and keeping my fingers crossed the head doesn't fall off.

when we got home from sabin's riding lesson this morning (thankfully she has moved to a morning lesson on saturdays), there was an exciting package waiting for me. it was from the lovely christina of soul aperture. and proved once again that bloggy friends are the very best kind of friends. thank you so much christina for the card and the fun cupcake supplies, plus real american popcorn boxes! sabin insisted on making popcorn immediately and using one of the boxes. is there anything more cheery than a traditional red & white popcorn box on a rainy, grey saturday? and i've already put one of the eat me tags to good use, but that's a surprise, so i won't say more. a big, heartfelt thank you to you, christina, you really made my day!!

hoping your saturday is going well too....

weekend creativity

it has been a wonderful weekend of nonstop togetherness and creativity with sabin. we had signed up weeks ago to attend the stitch café at our local yarn shop so that sabin could learn how to knit using a knitting loom. and learn she did. she finished two beautiful scarves and has started on a third. so if you're related to us, you can guess what you'll be getting for christmas this year. and it won't be one of those presents that you wear for show when you know the child is going to be present. we bought gorgeous mohair yarn in jewel tones and it has been transformed into soft, luxurious, beautiful scarves by a child consumed by a new craft.

while sabin took breaks from her knitting loom work, we made invitations for her upcoming halloween party. we clipped and glued and stamped and drew spider webs and drank countless cups of sweet, milky tea. did i mention that husband was attending his quarterly port wine evening on saturday and so it was just me and sabin at home together? tho' we love having him around, it was quite wonderful to have time together, just the two of us.

#72 - halloween invitations

we also came up with a new idea for a plushie design (inspired by the fabric i got last week in panduro). i helped sabin cut it out, but she's making it all herself and he's gonna be cute. we couldn't finish because we had run out of stuffing, but here's a preview:

at the yarn shop (very dangerous kind of place for me, despite the fact that i can't knit - i adore yarn anyway and they also have all kinds of embroidery things and quilting stuff), i bought two Drops knitting pattern magazines. tons of beautiful, gorgeous patterns for only 10 kroner (that's under $2). apparently the patterns are available for free online, but it seemed worth it for the pretty photographs.

doesn't it look worth learning to knit or crochet to be able to make such beautiful things? that beautiful sweater on the left above is only a knit stitch and variegated stocking yarn. i could do that. i'm sure i could. so i came home and got out my crochet bible book that i bought in singapore and gave it a whirl once again. of course, with the idea of making a little outfit for a stone. this one of some fine silky gorgeous decidedly mermaidy blueish-green cord.

i didn't get far enough to assign it a number in the year of creativity scale countdown. but i'm going to go to the wednesday evening edition of the stitch café at the local shop and get some hands-on lessons.

and speaking of hands-on lessons, the other activity the weekend was taken up by was sabin's riding lessons. she rides on both saturday and sunday and she's doing brilliantly.  here, she waits her turn to go into the ring, holding onto felix, who is quite a big larger than she is (and i realize she's a bit out of focus, i managed to do that with a lot of horse-photos this weekend - i was playing with my settings a bit in an attempt to learn something. which worked, tho' it meant i got quite a few pictures that weren't as in focus as i may have liked).

* * *

and starting today, my new project together with the divine bee. domestic sensualist. not your run-of-the-mill cooking blog. we hope you'll stop by and check it out, we've got some fun planned this week. and it's already been so inspiring to me that i just ordered three new cookbooks from amazon!

happy monday one and all!

recipe for a perfect saturday

if you want to have a perfect saturday, here's what you need:

1 glorious, sunny day with temps in the lower 70s
1 husband, busily working in the garden, but not requiring anything from you
1 8-year-old daughter, calling out cheerfully and laughing frequently in the distance
1 friend for 8-year-old daughter (keeps her out of your hair)
1 peaceful, out-of-the-way spot in the garden (preferably with lots of comfy pillows)
1 stack of cookbooks to browse through, looking for inspiration
1 macbook pro
2 nikons (one w/60mm macro lens and one w/18-200mm zoom)
1 pot of mint tea
1 excellent wifi signal

add buzzing bees, flitting butterflies, singing birds and 6 meters of lavender for atmosphere.

these are my four favorite cookbooks. the ones i return to again and again. nigella lawson's forever summer, jamie oliver's happy days with the naked chef, sam & sam clark's first moro cookbook and nigel slater's real food. if i had to get rid of all of my other (100 or so) cookbooks and keep only four, it would be these four.

add in that when i went to the grocery store, they had a special on 6 bottles of a great spiers vintage selection sauvignon blanc (i saved 330 kroner or $60 off the regular price) if i hadn't been on my bike i'd have bought 12, but six is good too and i also discovered i could carry a box of six bottles of wine on the little carrier on my bike, which is good to know. and i love spiers (only delheim do i love more and i never see any here in denmark).

i stopped by our wonderful fish store in town. the owner is so friendly and pleasant, i definitely go out of my way to go there a couple of times a week. today, i bought a beautiful piece of halibut, which is marinating in golden locally-produced cold-pressed rapeseed oil, ginger, slices of lemon and white wine, plus a bit of cilantro from the herb garden. i also bought a handful of big crab claws that i'm going to dig all the good meat out of and make a crab crostini appetizer (inspired by nigella). with tarragon potato salad - tarragon and potatoes from our own garden, it will be a lovely summer dinner. and it will go brilliantly with the sauvignon blanc.

hoping your saturday is perfect too, wherever you are.

evidence of creativity update (46 - 52)

welcome all of you new commenters (commentators?) who came out of the woodwork on the last post! i guess those flowers learned more than i thought they did at plant school. :-) i'm pleased you all hopped into the fray.

as some of you know, thanks to molly, i am attempting to do and document 100 creative things during 2009 and am sharing them here. i'm up to #45, and so it's time to do a bit of a catch up, since i haven't actually updated this list since april 13! thankfully i take a good 100 photos every day so i can go back in my iPhoto and figure out what i've made since #45.

#46 - a kickass fresh strawberry lemonade. this counts because i invented the recipe myself and didn't look at any of my 600 cookbooks.

6 lemons, squeezed

1 pint of strawberries

1 tray of ice cubes

1/2 C sugar (more to taste if your strawberries aren't super sweet)

whizz it all up in the blender, pour it into a pitcher and pour in one bottle of fizzy water. serve and enjoy the ooohs and aaahhs. add vodka or rum or tequila for grown-up fun.

#47 - a bunch more helleristninger, which i will count as only 1.

#48 - coffee cozies for blog camp

#49 - quite a lot of cakes made with rhubarb of which i will count only 1. recipe for this one is here. you can see that it was good because it was mostly gone before i could take its picture. we've got rhubarb coming out of our ears in our garden. from only two plants! it's apparently an excellent year for rhubarb.

#50 - artistically arranging rocks in baskets. i know this sounds a little suspect as evidence of creativity, but i travel to the far reaches of foreign countries to collect the stones and then spend an inordinate amount of time on arranging them just so and they look pretty when i'm done, so i'm counting it.

#51 - blog headers. i make and change my own frequently, but i recently branched out and made one for amanda and one for VEG. the ease of making fun headers is just yet another reason that i love my mac. because i do them in pages, mac's answer to word, only way better for handling photos--resizing, dragging & dropping them to exactly where you want them. it's all really easy. with free fonts from dafont.com, i can have endless hours of fun.  so it's definitely evidence.

#52 - just today, i made a mattress cover and two pillows for the iron bench in my upper garden. you just gotta love ikea fabrics. so bright and cheery.

bearing in mind that it is a holiday here, i'll give you three guesses as to how i spent the rest of my afternoon...and the first two don't count.

those kind of suspect-looking slabs in the upper left are where husband was at one time going to place the pizza oven, but it's going to stand somewhere else now, in fact, that's what husband was working on all day today. there's nothing you can't do if you can find directions online.

this was the view from where i was, just in case you still haven't guessed...

it was, in all a glorious weekend. hope yours was too.

* * *

a couple of other notes before i leave...

hermit book club - the next read is haruki murakami's hard-boiled wonderland and the end of the world. i'm rereading it so i can lead the discussion on friday, june 12. if you're not already playing along with us, please do join in, there's still time to become a murakami addict like me.

trans-atlantic learning adventures - if you want to see what we did on saturday at the local tivoli (or more accurately what sabin did, trot along over to sabin & addie's blog and have a look. while you're at it, stay awhile and check out their project.

we've begun the countdown to blog camp I--june 19-21 right here in denmark! come and check out the latest madness on our minds over at the blog camp blog. i'm going to get my act together and try to get a bit of a schedule up so you can know when you can find us live online via stikam (if i can figure it out) at blog camp, so that even if you can't be here, you too can participate! if you're new here and don't know about blog camp, check this post to see how the idea was born (husband is pretty brilliant sometimes).

sabin and i are still working on the questions from friday, but never fear, you'll see the answers sometime this week. if you still have a burning question on your mind, please leave it on that post and we'll try to include it.

p.s. i found my rock. :-)

weekend accomplishments

when the possibility of blog camp transitioned from fantasy to reality, i took at look at this little slice of hallway hell and panicked a bit:

but, thanks to the tidying frenzy which preceded my sitting down and getting to work, and an entire day of effort on the part of husband during which he put in a new floor, it now looks like this:

and i can tell you that is a big relief! and we now have our very own room in which to iron. which makes us feel strangely posh. but probably isn't really that posh as long as we're doing the ironing ourselves.  which are are.

* * *

other than that, i invented a new recipe for rhubarb-strawberry cake. it was necessitated by discovering quite a ways into a rhubarb-strawberry crumble that i didn't really have enough brown sugar. i've never invented a cake recipe before, but it turned out pretty well. this is a shot before i discovered the thing with the brown sugar.

those two mangoes in the upper right of the picture (looking suspiciously breast-like) were diced together with some red onion and served over grilled halloumi as an appetizer last evening. they were the really good kind of southeast asian mangos and are almost buttery in texture. they kick those green ones from south america right out of the kitchen. no comparison. tho' there was a twinge of guilt involved in the carbon footprint of buying either one. however, that was eased by the taste of the velvety sweetness mingled with the salty halloumi all smoky from the grill. yum. and gone too fast to get a picture of it.

* * *

after getting down to work this afternoon (thank you rain), i finished three articles and got a good start on three others. now there are only three to go (because yes, it was nine, not seven). but the night is young and there is much caffeine in the house, so i will soldier on.

but first an after-dinner walk in the evening sunshine, since the rain of the day cleared up around 4 p.m. the world was fragrant and green and so alive.  even the dandelion seeds were luminous.

thanks to all of my procrastination, the house is tidy, the laundry is done and put away, ditto the dishes and nearly half my work is done. i have that sunday evening feeling--when you feel relaxed and ready to face whatever the week brings and even have optimistic thoughts that you'll start running tomorrow. the sunday evening feeling is that good.

wherein she invents gin & tonic sorbet

i normally only post recipes only over on just know where you are, but i'm going to make an exception, since i mentioned the whole notion of a gin & tonic sorbet here on MPC. i did a little experiment and i am pleased to announce that it is a BIG SUCCESS!

gin & tonic sorbet

first, make a sugar syrup by bringing 3C water and 1C sugar to a boil.

allow the syrup to cool.

then stir together the following in small, flat dish that will fit in your freezer. i used a flat 1.5 inch tall by A4-sized tupperware container with a lid:

1 C of the sugar syrup

1 half liter bottle of schweppes indian tonic (do not be cheap about your tonic, only schweppes will do)

the juice of 2 limes

1/2 C of gin (i used g'vine, a posh french small batch gin)

i let mine freeze overnight, but it likely would have been ready sooner--the gin keeps it from freezing into ice cube-like consistency. then, you take a fork and rake it across until it's a lovely slushy consistency, put it in a glass with a slice of lime and serve in the sun.

it's heavenly. i promise.

and it's also #40