on saturday, i had the pleasure of photographing another new baby from my circle of friends. this baby’s father is big into photography, so i didn’t spend tons of time just photographing the baby and tried my best to get photos of the whole family.
but i couldn’t resist at least one silly pic:
i like to make “art” but i also like to buy “real” art from other people. especially when it’s actually affordable. and that’s why i was thrilled to discover laura george’s etsy shop a few weeks back. i think one of the blogs i read had linked to her shop and when i clicked through… well, the hard part was narrowing it down to my very most favorite piece. in the end, i surprised myself a little by actually purchasing (only) one for myself! i couldn’t resist the bonsai party (and it’s very affordable price tag!):
(you can see more pictures of it here if you’re having trouble seeing details in the image above) so freakin’ cute! monsters? bonsai trees? a tree trimming a tiny tree? some of my favorite colors? swoon.
one of my favorite things about shopping on etsy (besides the pure joy of knowing that i’m supporting a crafty individual somewhat like myself) is the little freebies that some vendors include. i lucked out with this print and got this cute little bonus print:
i think that i may have to own some more of her art someday. especially those monsters of affirmation. who doesn’t need one or three of them hanging on your wall to tell you that “things are going to work out” or that “you’re doing everything right”? they make me smile.
awhile back, i read on one of the many blogs i follow about the concept of a “pantry challenge” and was intrigued. the basic idea is to try to go for a week (or two weeks or three days or whatever) without buying any groceries. the point is partially to motivate you to use up some food that may have been sitting in your house for awhile and that you always overlook and also partially to save money and also partially (at least for me) to get me out of the “we don’t have anything in the house to eat!” mindset. so anyway, we were walking around the farmer’s market one saturday morning earlier in august when i decided that this was the week for a pantry challenge. after we got home from the market, no more food buying for a week! (except for the milk that gets delivered every other wednesday–have i mentioned that i love living in a dairy state?)
we got all the way to saturday night (yes, the same saturday that i’d decided to begin this challenge) before i wailed in despair that we couldn’t even go one day without getting groceries! we were out of hamburger buns. we’d just grilled up a bunch of beautiful hamburgers and some yummy portabella mushrooms and we had no buns. we morosely ate them on slices of bread (so smooshy and leaky) thinking of all of the leftovers we’d have to eat on plain bread* when suddenly, i remembered a recipe i’d marked in google reader recently for… hamburger buns! it was too late to make them for that supper, of course, and i didn’t have any of the “bread flour” the recipe called for, but pantry challenge weeks call for drastic measures, so i just used all-purpose flour and look at the beauties i baked (see photo at top)! they were so incredibly yummy and not really all that difficult to make (especially with my friend, the kitchenaid stand mixer) and the only thing that i would change is to make them smaller next time. splitting the dough into only a dozen pieces made for some really huge “buns.”
they also fared quite well as the basis for leftover “scandanavian sandwich” later in the week.**
oh, and i ended up stretching the challenge to slightly over two weeks with only two eating-out cheats (one was a lunch date–how could i refuse my dear sweet hubby’s invitation?–and the other was on the night of the library carnival, which is probably the most exhausting day i have all year long). interestingly, when we finally went for groceries i found myself feeling less like i needed to “stock up” on things than i normally do. who cares if we run out of one particular ingredient? there’s other food we can cook.
i had meant to make a farmer’s market exception between the two weeks, but got completely rained out so i had to make the produce stretch too. i was intrigued by which foods i missed the most–cucumbers and lemons (and no, i can’t get lemons at the farmer’s market) were near the top of the list. who knew?
and hooray for mr. happy stuff who even participated in the pantry challenge for his work lunches!
*we have a charcoal grill, so whenever we fire up the coals, we tend to grill up about a week’s worth of food.
**if you actually follow that link (or if you’re related to me) you’ll find that normally the recipe i’m referring to is called a scandanavian sandwich wheel. i think it’s from some magazine from when i was a kid and when we were little we also used to slice a hard-boiled egg and fan it out prettily in the middle of the “wheel” and we also added a “celery tree” in the middle of the egg fan, but since mr. happy stuff is not a big fan of pretty much all of the ingredients of said wheel, i’m realizing that it’s more convenient to just make an actual sandwich (no flat, pizza-shaped wheel)–bonus points if you have a croissant or brioche-type bun to eat it on.
the last few times that i’ve attempted to make my own popsicles, i’ve been very disappointed with the results. they were always frozen so hard! somewhat like licking an ice cube. how did commercial popsicles get that nice, soft, bite-able texture? after last week’s successful rhubarb sorbet, i decided to try an experiment this weekend. i had a small batch of tiny locally grown peaches from the farmer’s market that seemed to be more trouble to eat than they were worth (tiny, hard to peel but too fuzzy to eat the peel, not super sweet…) so i decided to make peach popsicles. first, i boiled some water cut a little “x” on the bottom of each peach, and then put them in the boiling water for 30 to 60 seconds. then the skins slid right off (except for the two that weren’t quite ripe). i halved the peaches, then dumped them into my food processor. i had originally planned to stew the peaches with a little sugar, but i ended up just using them fresh. i blended them in the food processor until the mixture was smooth, then popped the puree into the fridge overnight.
the next day, i dumped the puree (there wasn’t much there!) into my ice cream maker and turned the crank every now and then.
once it reached a pretty firm consistency, i pushed the mixture into some popsicle molds and put them back into the freezer overnight. when i had one for lunch today…
it was the perfect consistency! bite-able, but still frozen. not drippy… delicious! now i just have to figure out how to pack the molds without air bubbles….
long-time readers will no doubt be familiar with my love of the tart, tangy vegetable that wants to be a fruit known as rhubarb. i’ve blogged about it many times before.
last week, mr. happy stuff brought home a gift of rhubarb from a church friend. it sat on the counter for a few days while i tried to decide what to turn it into. i still have several jars of canned rhubarb compote from last year’s canning, so i didn’t feel a strong need to make more sauce, but i was feeling too lazy to make a pie (plus, then i tend to eat it all myself since mr. h-s isn’t as fond of it as i am–and i probably shouldn’t eat so much butter) so i hunted around the web for some rhubarb inspiration. in the end, i chose to make three different things. the first was a rhubarb crisp from my own recipe file.
and before you ask, yes there was butter in this recipe, but look–it’s just two tiny ramekins of crisp! (and they were delicious!)
and the second recipe started very similarly to compote:
cook the rhubarb down with sugar and water (and a little corn syrup), then put it in the food processor and blend until smooth. then, let it cool completely in the refrigerator for a few hours and then crank it into ….
a beautiful rhubarb sorbet! i sort of used the recipe in the link, but i cut the quantities in half so that it would fit into a pint ice-cream container i had, plus i left out the ginger and the orange (sacrilege! why muddy the pure flavor of the rhubarb?) and i didn’t strain the pulp out after blending it (why get rid of the good stuff? it was blended so smoothly that you can’t even tell). if i were to make this recipe again, i think i’d cut back on the sugar–too sweet, not enough tart and i’ll definitely keep my eye out for redder (or more purely green) stalks to get a more intense color. but it was really pretty easy and definitely worth repeating!
the third recipe was for rhubarb soda which is wonderfully delicious, but again has a bit too much sugar for my taste. i think maybe this was a mild batch of rhubarb. maybe i’ll add some lime and make a virgin ruby june.
last week was the annual lotus pilgrimage canoe trip. this year we seemed to hit the water a little too early. there were lots of buds and not tons of flowers or seedpods. here are some photos for you to enjoy:
and although they are more “common” and boring, i took a few shots of the water lilies too. they’re so photogenic!
on my walk back to the car, i also took a few other nature shots:
as always, canoeing and seeing the lotus blooms was a fantastic way to spend a summer morning. thanks again, friend, for calling me out to the water.
(apologies if this is a duplication–we’re still ironing out a few kinks in the switchover)
my blog has a new address! the old address should still work, but if you have problems with your links, shortcuts or rss feeds, try the new, snappier address:
www.thisishappystuff.com
thanks for reading!
long-time readers might (maybe, possibly) remember the original “meets the neighbors” installment. (hint: click on the link in the last sentence to read that story if you’re interested.) the most recent example of me pestering meeting my neighbors happened… well, actually probably several months ago at this point. but it’s a good story and i want to tell it to you, so here it is, old news and all.
do you remember this photo?
after i posted it here, one my aunts who reads my blogs (hi, aunt r!) asked if she could commission some poppy prints from me for her newly redecorated office. i was honored by the request. at first, we were both thinking probably 8×10’s framed nicely. but then i got this great idea that i ran past her–how about gallery wraps? this is a process where the photos are printed onto canvas — you can see examples if you click on the link in that last sentence. she loved the idea and decided that 16″ squares (in a series of 3) would be about right. then i started to worry. the originals that she’d seen on my blog and that i’d e-mailed to her were taken in .jpg format and normally, that’s not a high enough resolution to print well for large formats like that. and i couldn’t go take more pictures of my poppies in raw format because by that time, all of my poppies were gone. what to do?
well…. i noticed that one of the houses down the street still had a fair number of poppies left in their yard. i’d never met the owners of those poppies, but i hoped that maybe they’d let me crash around in their flower beds to take a few photos. so, one early evening, i packed up my camera and put aside any lingering shyness about meeting total strangers and walked to the poppy house. i rang the doorbell and a very friendly woman (maybe about the same age as me? maybe a bit younger?) opened the door and said i was welcome to take as many pictures as i wanted. she even pointed out that there was another patch of poppies in the backyard that i was welcome to photograph as well. hooray! i fought my way through clouds of mosquitoes and got a few shots that were okay. this one was my favorite:
but no matter how much i tinkered with the image in photoshop (and with the “raw” format you can tinker a lot! maybe too much, really….) it didn’t have the same richness of color or visual pow that the original photos had had. i thought i’d try again in morning light to see if that helped. i didn’t want to bother them by asking again and she had said that i could come over any time and i was only going to use the front yard, so i hoped i wouldn’t startle anyone. but sure enough, as soon as i’d taken my lens cap off and was ready to shoot, the garage door opened and her husband came out on his bike. he seemed a bit startled to see me (who wouldn’t startle to see a stranger in their yard? sorry, dude!) but he recovered quickly and we had a nice, but brief conversation about the joys of bicycle commuting to work and how his bike was the exact same as my husband’s (except for the color) and then he left and i took a few more pictures.
i also snapped this shot of a daisy on the side of the road right next to their house:
i love the designs that nature stitched into the head of this simple flower, but my aunt needed poppies, not daisies. and these poppy pictures still had no sparkle. no pizazz. sigh. i decided to just see if, by chance, the original .jpg images might possibly maybe be big enough to print. i uploaded them to the site and was shocked to see that … they were big enough! i was originally planning to order the same photo from two sites and compare quality, but the cheaper site told me that the image wasn’t high enough resolution, so i chose not to bother with them and just went to the site i trusted more. (see that gallery wrap link above) i uploaded my original poppy picture and just ordered one as a test and had it shipped to my house so i could see how it turned out before dropping more money on the other two prints.
i was so excited when it arrived! here it is, still wrapped in protective plastic (that’s why it’s shiny):
here’s another picture where you can see how the photo wraps around the sides:
i love it! it makes me feel like my photos are “real art”! i wish that i could afford to do more of these for myself (i might need more walls…). i think maybe i just need to find the right photograph–one that i looooooooove enough to live with for a long time.
in the meantime, i’ll just use them as desktop wallpaper. in celebration of this new development in my life as an artist, i’ve added a few new pictures to the free desktop wallpaper gallery. enjoy!
p.s. a big, big thank you to my new neighbor friends for allowing me to crash through your yard, snapping pictures and slapping mosquitoes. if i can ever return the favor (or another favor. i can’t imaging you’d have any interest in photographing my paltry poppies), please don’t hesitate to ask!
p.p.s. if i ever get a good photo of the series of three in my aunt’s office, i’ll be sure to post it here!
here is the quilt i posted about earlier–all finished!
in the end, i decided to go with slightly wonky lines, both vertical and horizontal (good suggestion, ya’ll). i also decided to go with a pieced binding (my first!) since the backing fabric was just one solid piece of pink flannel.
i was a little worried that the flannel would be a pilly and yucky after washing, but now that i’ve washed it twice (once before it was sewn up as a quilt and once after) i think it will be fine. here’s a photo of it after it’s been washed–all wrinkled and yummy:
i’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. i probably say that about all of my quilts when they’re done, but i do really like this one. here’s a close-up of one of the birds:
i hope that my friend (and her imminent baby girl) like it!
i was so excited the other day when i received this super cutie wallet in the mail. it was a surprise, “just because we love you” gift from my parents and i just adore it! they ordered it from queen-bee creations, but if you ever decide to send a surprise gift from there, you should know that (apparently) it took about a month from the time my parents ordered it until it arrived at my house. i think my mom had a hard time keeping it a secret. but she did! i was completely surprised. it makes me smile every time i see it in my purse.
