Veggies to your door

So on Monday I managed to grab a metro newspaper on the way in to school. This is generally a rare event as there are no newspaper boxes at my bus stop so I usually only get one when I find it on the bus. But that day I was waiting for the bus a long time so I wandered across the street and picked on up.

Needless to say there wasn't much in it except for a very interesting article on Fresh City Farms. This is a company that grows organic fruit and veggies and delivers them to your door for $30.99 a week. Its probably a little more than what we are currently paying for veggies, but it peaked my interest.

So I went and forwarded it on to Talia and chatted with her. I also forwarded it on to my Mom through email and she got really excited. The cost was a big concern for Talia, but I convinced her to try it for 2 weeks and then we could compare what we got to what we usually pay for veggies.

So starting next Wednesday we are going to have veggies delivered to our door for a 2 week trial. Each week we will get a wine case of random fresh veggies. Curious to see what we get. Gonna have lots to blog about when it arrives cause we are probably gonna be making some cool random recipes

~(' ')~

 

I like the buttery biscuit base!!!

So tonight Talia and her friend are over sewing. I was sewing too but then Talia asked me to make plum dumplings that were in the freezer. While they were boiling away I showed her the recipe card from the shortbread pan my Mom got her and I told her to pick one and I would make it some time later in the week.

She really liked the sound of the lemon shortbread. So much so that she asked me to make it tonight. So off I went using the last of the butter to make shortbread. This time since I had the shortbread pan I put it in there. There was an oddness though. I added the 1 cup of flour to the creamed butter and it was still way to sort. Not dough like at all. So I kept adding flour until it was kind of dough like and then I put it in the oven. Oh, I should also mention that I don't have any vegetable oil spray so I just used some margarine to try and prevent it from sticking to the pan.

So as the bread was baking I started to think about the last time I made it using the Jamie Oliver recipe. I remembered that that recipe took half of the package of butter (I used the other half for this time) and so I looked it up and that's right, I had way too much butter. The Oliver recipe calls for 1 cup of butter and the pan recipe calls for 1/2 cups of butter. So I had twice the butter than I needed. But it was too late. It was already in the pan baking.

As you might guess it didn't quite come out correctly. But it still tasted good.

And for your listening/viewing pleasure.... Buttery Biscuit Base

~(' ')~

Vestacular

So today I finished the vest with Talia's help. Here are some progress pics

So this is one of the front piece with the interfacing on the back

All the pieces cut out

This is actually where I left if off last night. You can see the added pockets. The top ones are for watches and accessories and the bottom ones are for tools. My character for Halloween is a steampunk engineer so thatss why I wanted to have screwdrivers and the likes. I like the idea, but I am not to happy about how I executed it. To prevent there from being a raw edge I actually cut out 2 pieces of fabric for each pocket, sewed them together, inverted them and then top stitched them to the top of the vest. This proved to be very difficult to line up with the fabric pattern. On the other hand the top pockets actually turned out fairly well. They line up almost perfectly with the vest pattern. At this point I hadn't done the lining yet. That is what I spent all of today doing

So I cut out all the lining fabric and put them all together, I even pinned the pieces to the vest how they needed to be to sew them together, but then I lost steam and just couldn't finish. So Talia was wonderful enough to sew the rest of it together. I was cooking dinner when she finished it so I couldn't try it on so Talia went and put it onto her mannequin on top of her shirt. When I saw this it looked very much like a catholic school girl outfit, but Talia said it was missing a tie... So I got a tie for it.

Finally, the nice lining which I see as brown but Talia keeps calling pigeon grey. 

Now I just have to do the pants (should be easy) and a hat and I'm all good :)

~(' ')~

Halloween time

So its halloween and that means costuming galore :)

I`m running a bit behind as usual but here are some progress pics for the first part. This year all my friends are doing steampunk outfits. Which for me means a cool vest, a nice dress shirt, some cool boots and a hat. More specifically, this is what I am trying to get done:

So We have gone out looking for everything that we need. Sadly we have to date only found the vest material, and the pant material. No shirt yet, but I still have a week (and there is always the option of just wearing one of my normal dress shirts, we aren`t going for realistic)

So I have spent the last couple of evenings (for about a week now) doing a temp for the vest. The colours are kind of crazy but here it is

The pattern pieces with the temp fabrics

and all the pieces assembled

Now I have to go and cut out the actual pieces and start sewing them together

~(' ')~

Short bread

This is kind of an old post since I actually made the short bread on Monday, but things have been the usual crazy for me so I only have a chance to post it now. Not only that, I don't have pictures :( so this post is going be a little small.

I made Short Bread.

So this past weekend was thanks giving here and since I usually do most of my cooking creativity on the weekends I decided to make short bread at the cottage for my family. At least that was the plan. Last Xmas my mom gave Talia a really nice short bread pan and directions (very pretty with snowflakes on it) so I was goning use that at the cottage. But I wasn't feeling the best at the cottage and Talia and I spend most of the day wandering the forest looking for a good place to put a tree house (yes, we are building a tree house at the cottage :)). So long story short, I didn't make short bread.

So on Monday when we were home again I decided to make it just for talia and myself. Unfortunately in all the rush to get home Sunday I forgot the pan and the directions. But not to worry, Jamie Oliver to the rescue, lol. The cookbook that I am currently working through has a recipe for shortbread. The recipe is about twice as much as what i remember from the pan directions, and the baked result doesn't have any cool snowflakes on it but it came out very nice.

We are slowly working our way through the pan. it will probably be finished by Sunday. Very tasty, but very dry. I think that's just shortbread in general because all the shortbreads i have ever tasted are like that.

~(' ')~

Sticky Saucepan Carrots

Talia requested this so here it is:

All the carrots packed into the pan

And the finished result:

They taste really good :)
Next time i think I will add a touch more salt and a lot more margarine. Also, I have to remember to swish the butter around for the last 5 minutes so all the carrots get fried up.

The anti Mayo

That's right, I'm apparently the anti mayo. I tried 1 more time to make home made mayo.
Ingredients:

4 Oz of oil:

8Oz of oil:

around 14 Oz of Oil and splitsville:

BOOOOOOOOOO. Im not sure why its doing this cause I had Talia helping me and everything so I`m thinking that maybe its not a good type of oil. This was all done with Canola oil and the last 4 oz were going to be olive oil but I never got that far.
:(

Cauli Cauli Cauliflower...

Two posts in one day, WOW.
So this afternoon I tried the Roasted Cauliflower with cumin, coriander and almond recipe. It looked amazing when I picked up the book and I'm pretty sure its the reason Talia wanted me to get the book.

Unfortunately I don't have progress pics, only the final result. Its ok, but I think I need to work on it a bit more. The lemon I used was on the large side which is why the cauliflower is a little too lemony. Also, I don't have a large enough pan for an entire head of cauli so frying it up didnt work out too well. Next time I think I will fry it in my wok. The last thing was that I don't have a ovenproof pan so I fried it in one pan and then transferred it over to a baking tray that had been heated in the mini oven we have. Not sure if that would change the flavour that much.

Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention. I need to add more oil and butter when I fry it. I think that will really help the flavour.

~(' ')~

Would you like Mayo with that

So the last little while has been a little hectic with school. As a result I haven't have the chance to do as much in the evenings (or blog about as much) as I would like. But with a new month comes new motivation (or so I hope) and a new book :).

That's right, I have a new cook book. Two actually, both my Jamie Oliver.

Cook with Jamie

and 

Meals in Minutes

So with these new books, I have decided to work more on my cooking skills. I have spent the last week reading through all of the first book and now I am eager to try some recipes. For today's challenge, Mayonnaise. That`s right right, may from scratch. I`ve known roughly how mayo has been made for years (thanks oddly enough to comic cooking show "Chef") but I have never made it or even seen a recipe for it.

So to begin with, may consists mainly of egg and oil. Olive oil to be precise, but the book recommends that you cut the olive oil with vegetable oil cause olive oil is expensive so that's exactly what I've done. 50% olive oil and 50% canola oil (cause its what we have in he house). For flavouring I also needed dijion mustard, lemon juice, salt and pepper. 

Step 1: Beat the egg and mustard together

Step 2: Slowly add in the oil and beat.

 Step 3: Keep beating until all the oil is used up... and this is where everything fell apart :(
So the recipe says to be careful because the mayo may split... Now I wasn't sure what splitting meant and I was doing really well as I beat the oil in. I had about 3/4 of the  oil mixed in and it was looking really think and nice, and then things went bad. It was actually so thick that I was having trouble mixing it with just 1 hand. When i moved my whisk the entire bowl would move. Unfortunately this means that I accidentally added too much oil at once and it all went really runny and I could start seeing the oil separating from the beaten mixture

 Now the cookbook said that if this happens a little hot water may help bring it back together so I tried that but it didn't help. So my next option was to try and put it into the food processor and see if that could whip it back up...

Sadly, it didn't help so after trying for about 5 minutes to get it back to its nice thick consistency I gave up and dumped the batch. I still had some of the oil saved so it wasn't too bad. 

Gotta try again at a later time. 

~(' ')~