bad day

So i had a little bit of a bad day yesterday. It was actually more of a bad afternoon as I found out that all the work I had been doing had to be removed because someone needed the hardware I was working on >.<

So by the time i got home i was just not in the mood for anything. I ended up watching some cooking tv shows until the battery on my mini died and then I decided to cook. The other day when I made the pizzas I was also having a bit of a day and by the end of it I was actually in a really good mood so yesterday I decided to see if I could do the same thing again. I started by trying to make a kiwi sorbet from scratch. Grabbed some frozen kiwis, added about 1 cup of strawberry juice, and for a little kick I added blue curiso (an orange liqueur). Blended it all up in the food processor and left it in the freezer to chill. Every so often I would open it up and check. When it got a little firm I whipped it up to try and add some air so it wouldnt be a block of ice (hopefully it will work, i havent checked today).

But after all of that I still wasnt feeling any better so i decided to make some bread. half the recipe used for the pizza but with flour only. I also had to let it prove twice so it took longer. Baked it. Blah blah blah, long story short, we have some bread now. Looks good.

Still didnt feel completely better but mhe at least the day was done.

Today i slept in until 10 so I'm staying home and catching up on sleep. maybe I will play a  little guitar.

Weekend at the cottage

So we are back from the weekend at the cottage and while I didnt do as much creative stuff as I would like I did do some stuff.

I managed to get the entire day off on friday so we were able to leave by 1pm which means we had almost all of friday to enjoy the cottage. And enjoy we did. Did some fishing (nice 4lb fish caught by gf)...

and some cooking (even managed to get most of the bones out of it before we ate, still have to work on filleting the fish before I cook it thought)...

and all around enjoying the sounds and sights of nature all around us :)

I usually do all the cooking when we go to the cottage anyway but on saturday I decided to get a little creative by making some Moroccan flat bread. I had got all the ingredients together before we left so it was just mixing the dough up and dividing it up into nice pita sized pieces.

This is just a regular flat bread recipe but to make it Moroccan I added cumin and coriander and some whole chickpeas :)
I like to call it hummus in flat bread.

To bake the bread we used the barbecue  and it turned out amazing

Along with the Moroccan flat bread we had sweet corn, carrot soup made earlier in the week by my gf, and a very nice fresh salad with honey garlic salad dressing (store bought sadly :( but its easy)

 Very tasty, and on top of all of that we had a bit of a nature show as some endangered wild grouse came up to the cottage to forage on some of black berries and grasses that grow near by.

After lunch we had an amazing mid afternoon nap for about 4 hours and then we decided to go and have a bon fire out by the lake... unfortunately this is where things didnt go quite as hoped. While trying to get a log into position to sit on, my gf accidentally stepped on a rusty nail that was stuck in an old board from when the dock was replaced. Thus started our mad dash to get to the emergency hospital for a tetanus shot. I say mad dash but it wasnt really that mad of a dash, more of a slow drive to the closest town. After about a 30 minute wait we got a bandage and an updated shot and we were on our way back to the cottage.

This of cours put a damper on our adventuring cause my gf couldnt really walk but that was ok, we came up to relax and thats exactly what we did.

I played guitar for about an hour (no recordings unfortunately) and my gf cross stitched. And in case you thought that the flat bread from saturday wouldnt keep until the next day...

So to make a long story even longer, we drove back sunday afternoon, dropped off for dinner at my parents and helped them harvest some veggies from their garden. a nice batch of tomatoes and beans and even some red currents. My mom had made a delicious stew for us and so we busted out the flat breads and they were still very good. We also had a very nice cranberry wine that my parents found at some winery close to the cottage.

After dinner we had some tea with the parents and chatted until far later then we probably should have. We didnt get home that late (9:30pm i think) but we were all exhausted so we washed up and passed out almost immediately.

~(' ')~

Social Pizza night

So these posts are gonna be a little out of order because I have the pics from tonight's cooking adventure with me but not the cottage pics.

So again for tonight's creative event I decided to make pizza. Specifically I made a batch of pizza dough which makes 8 small pizzas and then my gf and i "decorated" and cooked them. yum, pizza for lunch for the rest of the week.

anyways, the pizza dough recipe is from Jamie Oliver's cooking school webpage Here and so I made it. As usual I measured out all my ingredients before starting. The nice thing about this recipe over other ones that I have tried before is that there are very few ingredients. You may notice that the yellow "flour" looking stuff isnt quite the same as the recipe. Its actually not semolina, its corn meal. I find it gives the dough a nice texture now that I have made it but in truth i misread the ingredients which is fine cause I don't actually have semolina.

The other interesting thing is that I'm not exactly sure what "golden castor sugar" is so I used brown sugar. turned out fine :)

So after mixing the dough up (note: I found that there was a little too much water so when i try this again i think i will drop the amount of water down a bit) and letting it rise for 15 minutes i cut it up into 8 pieces and rolled them into circular-esk shapes. I dont have pizza trays that fit into my toaster oven so i just used aluminium foil and stacked up the naked pizzas on top of each other

Once all 8 were rolled out it was a simple job to decorate them. Luckily my gf is amazing and helped to cut all the veggies for the pizzas so by the time I had rolled them out the veggies were ready to start decorating :)

Despite the webpage saying 7-10 minutes I found that 14 minutes worked better. Because we had so many I also put the large oven on and we made about half of them in that. Sadly i dont use the big oven that much so when I turned it on I put the heat on from the bottom instead of from the top and I think that the heat fromthe top would have been a lot nicer.

So the final test: TASTE...

 I dont like cooked tomoatoes so have of the pizzas have cherryy tomotoes for my gf and half dont for me. result: AMAZING

So now you might be wondering why I called this entry Social Pizza night... well as we were making the pizza we started chatting about how this would totally make an amazing thing to do when hanging out with friends. The dough would have to be made before hand but the decorating of the pizzas could be a social gathering kind of thing and everyone would end up with exactly the kind of pizza they wanted. To that end, the next time we have friends over for a games night we are probably gonna make pizza :)

~(' ')~

missed one

Sadly I wasnt able to post anything last night. We had a guest come over for dinner and then a movie so I didnt get much time  to practice anything. I did practice though. maybe 10 minutes of guitar.

unfortunately today is a completely different story. I havent had a second to even practice cause I didnt get home until late and then I had to pack for my weekend away at the cottage :)

Finally a chance to get up to the cottage. I havent been up in close to a year. I think it was christmas. Anway, since I will be at the cottage I wont be able to post anything or even to record anything but not to worry. I will be taking my guitar (by request of my gf) and maybe even my flute so hopefully I will get lots of practice in.

creative cooking

So for today's creative adventure we (me and my girlfriend) made vegan hot dogs from scratch. The recipe was found at Here and it was a lot of fun. Finding all the spices was interesting but a quick trip to our local bulk food store and we were off to the races.

Unfortunately I didnt decide to start taking pictures until after I had mixed most of the ingredients together but not much was lots, just putting a bunch of things into a food processor and pressing the on button. The fun part started with mixing the blended mix (tofu and spices mostly) with some flour. I decided to use whole wheat flour cause im told that its better for you.

My gf loves to make dough and stuff with her hands so she gladly helped me mix this part :) and since her hands were already wrist deep in dough she kept on helping form the hotdogs

As you can see we made 8 hotdogs. each hot dog is wrapped in parchment paper first and then in aluminum foil before being steamed.

 So after steaming out cigar shaped hot dogs they come out looking like this

So far they look really good. but of course it all depends on the taste...

 Not bad. Couple points:
1) we ate them when they were still warm so they were actually a little wet and mushy. not badly, but enough so that you would notice that it isnt real meat.
2) whole wheat, while better for you adds a little more wheat flavour that I had wanted. Next time I will try with regular white flour.

>.< still on a role but just barely

So today is a bit of a cop-out. I did play a little guitar but not much... let me explain. Today started out a little rough despite going to bed early and getting lots of sleep. I woke up feeling very foggy in the head and a little in pain from a headache. I was supposed to exercise but didnt could i couldnt even walk straight to feed the cat. then went back to bed.

Went to work, worked, had lunch, worked some more, then I had to go to the chiro and boy am i glad i did. my spine has been really stiff from sleeping on a crappy pillow for 2 weeks at the summer school and I needed an adjustment. That chewed up part of my evening, but since i have been away for 2 weeks i decided to invite my parents over for dinner. That chewed up the rest of the evening.

Now its only 21:20 but my head is still sore and im very tired so i grabbed my guitar and played a little bit. Todays recording is called "Spanish Theme" and it only uses the thin e string. 3 notes, thats it. not much to it but its good play play a little.

I still havent gotten around to finding some space to put the audio files up yet but i will soon.

~(' ')~

looking for some motivation

So over my years I have jumped around in the creative world, from music to video, to drawing and sewing. But often i find that I dont stick with my endevours long enough to become really good. Often life gets busy and I forget to practice and then when i come back to things i find im not as good as i was (understandably) and i get even more discouraged.

But the past 2 weeks have seen me get a little more motivated in following through with things. I just got back from a 2 week intensive summer school on highly technical topics and i met a lot of people in not art fields that were surprisingly artistic. Of the 30ish people I met at least 4 of them were piano and singing inclined and another one was writing a theme song for the summer school. A THEME SONG! another person I met had a $1500 camera and took pictures every day, and yet another one was an amazing drawer.

I have always felt that I needed to focus on my education to the exclusion of all my other hobbies and that would cause me to never prevail at anything except education. Often I have worried that this would cause me to burn out and I would end up in a flaming mess of a degree, but if this summer school has taught me anything its that I need those hobbies to keep my sanity (which is pretty cracked right now). So I am going to try and do more creative things.

Now like I said at the beginning, I have jumped around between a tone of creative things and I can never focus on 1 thing anyway so what I plan to do is post 1 creative thing a week. be it a practice song on my guitar/flute or a link to my deviantArt account with a new drawing. I know that I'm not particularly good at anything right now but I am hoping that with this blog I will find the motivation to create more often.

So here goes, I woke up this morning and after doing some exercising and eating breakfast I noticed my flute sitting on the same shelf it has sat since I moved into my apartment. and it made me sad. So i picked it up again and practiced for about 30 minutes or so. Sadly its been probably more than a year since I last played and I have gotten a lot worse than I was last time i played.

So here is my first post. Its a really simple 8 bar practice song (Little Robin Red Breast). unfortunately I dont have any space to post it up yet but I'm working on that. Like I said, i'm hoping to post somethign at least once a day.