Gift tags

I was at my mom's house the other day. She was complaining about a party that she had to go to. The object of the party was to gather together and make little gift tags for Christmas presents. My mom was dreading it but felt obligated to go. It sounded like fun to me, though. A couple days later I saw her again and she had two little gift tags on display, hanging from her kitchen cabinet. One had a little snowman and the other had a little santa made of small pieces of paper glued onto a blue square. I expressed my delight at her handiwork, but she only groaned.

"You should've been there," she said. "You would have loved it. I am not suited to this sort of thing, though. I was there for two hours and managed to eek out these two little cards, while everyone else made twenty or more."

"At least they are cute," I said.

They were so cute, I decided I wanted to design my own gift tags. After some deliberation, I decided to make tiny little snowflakes and glue them onto blue squares. I used tracing paper for the snowflakes because it folds more tightly than printing paper. It took me a while to do all the cutting but they turned out really cute. It was really interesting to see how each one turned out differently, even though I basically used the same procedure and pattern for each one. I guess my little tiny triangles are never exactly the same.

I had expressed my intentions to justacoolcat when I was preparing to make the snowflakes, but he was surprised to see how they turned out. "When you said you were going to make tiny little snowflakes, I thought you meant really tiny. I wondered how you were going to do it. Is she going to do some ninja action on those snowflakes. Oooaaah!" He said as he made a ninja cutting action. Needless to say, a simple scissors sufficed.

Christmas Roast

We had a very successful Christmas this year. The in-laws came over on Christmas eve and I made a pot roast. It was only my second attempt at baking a roast in the oven. In the past I always made pot roast in the slow cooker, but we decided that we didn't like it that way. The meat just shredded into the broth and we ended up with a big sloppy mess. About a month ago I tried baking it, and it turned out much better. I used two recipes from epicurious.com to help me make it. I used the spices from "Gordon's Pot Roast" and I followed the cooking instructions from "Basic Pot Roast". It turned out really good. The only problem was that I didn't have quite enough broth to make my gravy.

For Christmas eve dinner I made the roast again. Here's how the recipe shaked out:

Roast Beef

A 3.5 lb beef roast
1/4 cup olive oil

1 medium onion

3 cloves garlic

1 cup red wine

1 can chicken broth

1 tbs pickled ginger

2 tbs worcestershire sauce

1 tbs packed brown sugar

3 bay leaves

1 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp margerum

1 tsp crushed dried mushrooms

1 tsp pepper

1 tsp salt

3 tbs cornstarch

Preheat oven to 350. Rub salt and pepper the roast on all sides. Pour oil in a large frying pan. Brown the roast on all sides. Add the garlic and onions. Reduce heat to medium. Cover pan and cook for 10 minutes.

While the roast is cooking, combine all the other ingredients in a 9x11x2 pan. Whisk together briefly to smooth the cornstarch into the liquid. When the ten minutes are up, put the roast and the onions in the broth. Cover with tin foil. Bake on the center rack for 1.5 hours. Turn the roast over and recover. Place potatoes (see below) around the roast in the broth. Return to oven and bake for 1.5 to 2 hours (1.5 for medium, 2 for well).

Green Mashed Potatoes
3 lbs red potatoes; peeled, quartered
2 cups raw spinach
1 stick butter
1/2 cup cream
1 tsp pepper
1 tsp salt

Ten minutes before the roast is done, remove the roast and transfer to another 9x11 pan. Cover again and put it back in the oven. Use a spoon with holes to remove the potatoes from the broth. Put the potatoes in a large serving bowl. Cut the butter into the potatoes. Use a potato masher to mash the potatoes. I prefer to leave them kind of chunky. Add the cream and stir. Chop the spinach into 1/4 inch strips. Stir the spinach into the potatoes. Salt and pepper to taste. The spinach doesn't really flavor the potatoes, but it gives them a little color for your table.

Pour the remaining broth into a frying pan and put on high heat. Add a tablespoon of flour. Whisk until the mixture congeals into gravy.

Serve the roast and potatoes with a colorful vegetable like baked squash.

Recipe Book

My most recent project has been to produce a recipe book for my mother's Christmas present. She keeps all her recipes in a spiral bound notebook. When I was a kid I helped her transfer all the recipes from her old book to this one by hand. It's kind of cute to see my old handwriting and how I used to spell kitchen items like "flower" and "pinapple". I was over at her house the other day making Christmas cookies and I realized that her recipes were almost unintelligible from splash marks and food stains. I offered to revamp it for her. She actually already had a new book my brother had given her a couple of years ago, but she never got around to transferring the recipes.

I decided to type the recipes up so that it will be easy enough to transfer to the next recipe book after this one gets wrecked--which it inevitably will. I thought I'd be able to find a recipe template on the Internet that would make it easy. There were a few, but they were all created on MS Word, and it was a huge hassle to put the recipes into the template. I thought about just typing it on MS Word without a template, but that would've ended wasting a lot of paper, and I would have had to fiddle around with font sizing. Finally I decided to use MS Powerpoint, which was a brilliant move. You can print the slides out in a handout form. One slide per page was about the right size to fit the paper, but I thought it would be a waste of paper. So I did that for the longer recipes, but the shorter recipes I printed two slides per page. It worked out really great. I was able to choose a design that matched the book, and Powerpoint automatically changes font size to fit the slide, so no fiddling around.

I think it turned out really nice. The best part is I now have all my mom's recipes on my own computer. Someday I'll print them out for a book of my own, but until then they are easy to look up in my documents.

Trying to be dedicated

When I was a kid I used to have a diary. I would go through phases of writing in my diary every day, and then I wouldn't write in it for months. I would feel so guilty about neglecting my diary. I always had to apologize to my journal and promise I would be better. Why? Isn't it there for my own benefit? So if I don't use it, I don't need it. I shouldn't feel guilty about an inanimate object.

This blog is the same way. The longer I put off putting in an entry, the more guilty I feel about it and the less likely I am to post anything at all. So I'm officially ending the self-imposed guilt trip. I will post when I have something interesting to say, and otherwise I will leave it be.

As far as my one-hour-per-day self improvement plan, it has been going pretty well. I've got the baby sleeping on her own in the mornings, so I'm able to get things done during that time. I don't accomplish something productive every day, but I do most days, which is good enough for me.

Past Accomplishments

Even though I haven't posted for over a year, I still continued to create. I set up a flickr account so that you can view photos of the scrapbooking and drawing I have done recently. Click the link to view scrapbooking photos or drawing photos.

Back again

Well, I let this blog slide into disuse for almost two years. I've decided to try and get back to it. My life has changed a lot since my last post. I am now a mother. I gave birth to my daughter CoolKitten in July, 2008. I decided to take some time off work and am staying home with my baby. I thought that this would give me lots of time to work on creative projects. I even bought some paints and fixed my viola to prepare for my time off. I've learned that it's pretty hard to do anything with a little infant in the house. A day goes by and it seems like I haven't done anything, but really I've been working hard taking care of the baby all day. However, I do accomplish some things, and I think that if I get this blog rolling again, it will encourage me to try and set aside time for self-development.

Here's my plan. Coolkitten has developed a sleep cycle that requires a morning nap and an afternoon nap. Generally, I need to nap with her in the afternoon because she is still waking me up at night. So I am going to reserve the morning nap time for myself. I am going to try and accomplish one hour of self-development per day. This may include: art, crafting, creative cooking, studying, or blogging. This may not include: cleaning, pointless IInternet searching, or reading fantasy novels. If I can't accomplish this task during her morning nap, I will try and do it after she has fallen asleep in the evening instead of watching tv. I am going to give myself one week for a trial period to see if this plan is a plausible reality.

In bed

I started this drawing with a completely different intent than what I actually produced. I was going to use colored pencils and make it more abstract, but I liked what I was drawing with my #2 too much to change it. Maybe I'll draw it again from a different lense another day.