what's for dinner: honey roasted carrots and orange ginger chicken

Once again a fork snuck into my dinner picture. I think this may be because I will grab one and start eating before I realize, whoops, I should take a picture of this. Hold your horses, there will be dinner soon, we just got to document this first. Speaking of dinners, this weeks was a lovely take on carrots, roasted with honey and onions alongside my orange-saturated chicken. I also had some simple steamed broccoli (for color and because I could eat broccoli until the cows come home) and rice. Pretty basic but the carrots and chicken had so much flavor that I didn't want to get too complicated and add something else with lots going on. If only carrots really did improve your eyesight I'd be set. Particularly if they were cooked this way. Yum, was like eating candy.

this one has heart (pun intended)

So I feel terrible admitting this, but I didn't bake this pie yesterday. Didn't bake it this week or even the month. No in fact I baked this pie LAST YEAR. I know. I've been holding out. Back when I was doing a lot of baking around the holidays and focusing pretty fiercly on pies, I made this glorious speciman and then the post just sat here and I was busy and distracted and I just didn't post anything for a whole month and it gathered dust and sulked and got sad. But I have coerced it out of it's corner and dusted it off and shined it up and conviced it to show it's pretty face so here it is, with a thousand apolagies on the tardiness, the blackberry apple pie.

These apples were from a trip to Mendocino, from my very own tree. Small and sweet if a bit of a pain to cut up for pie, all that coring and all, but totally worth it for the balance they brought to some dark and juicy blackberries.

And as you can see, I decided to do the top crust in hearts, because the filling was turning such a lovely shade of fushia I figured hearts and the color pink would just be so great together.

And they were. Juicy is an understatement, this pie had to be scooped out with a spoon and it didn't make a very attractive slice on the plate but it sure tasted great! And really that's the most important thing.

Also, as a added bonus, cause I feel bad for hiding this away and not sharing this pie before, like maybe back when I made it, here's on of many photos taken on the IAMSTERDAM sculpture by the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. It was very fun to scramble about on and I bet there are a few hundred pictures we took that afternoon, so here's one with my friend Rachel. Now go make a pie. Seriously what's stopping you?

whats for dinner : Sweet Potato Curry

So curry, and really most middle eastern inspired dishes in general, are not the most lovely to photograph, nor do they always look that appetizing, but they are so often what I crave. This time I was also craving a baked sweet potato so I decided to throw that in with the other vegetables. It actually worked remarkably well, the sweet potato's really breaking down until they just became part of the sauce and mixed with the coconut milk and all the spices to make a much thicker sauce than I am usually want to produce. Super yummy and I always like an orange colored meal in the winter, reminds me that someday it will be a color other than gray outside. Wishful thinking.

Oh there are also green beans and chicken in this curry, and white rice cooked with coconut milk.

i make things

I've finally produced a piece of art! So exciting to finish something.
And what is this I've made you ask? I decided to join with the hundreds of other people and be a part of the Brooklyn Art Museum's sketchbook project, where you get a blank sketchbook and you do whatever you like with it as long as it can be closed down to the original size, and then you send it back to the Museum and they will first tour with it across the country to places like Dallas and San Francisco, where it can be 'checked out' and 'read' by visitors to the mobile library and then be in the permanent collection in Brooklyn. I really like the idea of artist books being part of a library, and thought it would be a good thing the be a part of. So I made one.

I decided to focus on the part of the directions that said 'as long as it closes up to the same size' and make a big accordion that would pull out of the cover. That also provided me with a fun platform to draw over the edges of the page and onto the next. I liked that it could be read page by page or as a whole. I've also always found accordion's appealing for how, hm I think what I am looking for is, sculptural quality. That it stands up on it's own and you can mold it into fun shapes.

Yes I like a good long book (pun intended).

And there it is. I made something. Finished a project, checked something off the 'ole list. Put it in the mail and shipped it off to Brooklyn (fingers crossed that it makes it there unharmed and in one piece. And now I have to wait until it comes through the Bay Area to see it again, though I can track it's progress, they send an email every time it gets checked out. Looking forward to that!

What's for dinner?

And look at me?! Making this whole posting my dinner weekly thing happen. Do I get a prize? Oh year, I got to eat beets, that's the prize.

And such a yummy one too. For dinner this time I had green beans, salad with beets, roasted garlic potatoes (not sure exactly what I did with those potatoes but they smelled fantastic and tasted even better and I most definitely will by trying to recreate that effect in the near future because it was sooooo delicious) and lemon dill chicken. Overall tasty. With a pretty good mix of flavors and reasonably colorful too.

But Let me say, it's not easy to break out of my food routine, it's such an iffy situation. Sometimes you win big, like those glorious potato's, and sometimes not so much. Case in point, the chicken. Not so good, I mean the flavors were there but I botched the cooking time and temperature. However the best thing about mistakes is that you can learn from them. I made chicken again the next day and tweaked things around and it was much better. So, lesson learned with a bonus potato victory.
And hopefully I'll be back, same time same place, just a week later.

twinkle toes

Funny story: I needed some shoes to go with my dress for New Years Eve. Because I made my dress (more on that later) and the jersey fabric that I had was red and so none of my shoes, well matched. Or even clashed cheerfully. I know, totally tragic. So I decided to create my own from a pair of really boring shoes I had picked up for work at a thrift store for a mere $5.

See what I mean? Pretty bland. But I had a giant bottle of the gold disco ball glitter I used to make my friends shiny police badge back at Halloween, and a love for third grader style craft projects so I figured what is there to loose? Not much. What's there to gain? SPARKLES!

Step one, paint on white school glue.
Step two, pour glitter all over wet glue. Shake off the excess.
Repeat until competely covered.

To finish, cut off un-glitterized straps and spray shoes with about a million coats of clear spray fixative until the whole room stinks and you realize you have gotten just a little bit high on the fumes.
Finally...... enjoy! Sparkly shoes courtesy of a trip to Goodwill and some grammar school craft supplies that I already had on hand.

So here's to making do with what you've got, and getting Sparkles! Such a lovely way to say goodbye to one year and hello to a new one!

What's for dinner?

So one of my new goals is to be more creative with my dinners. And, to focus on making them more colorful. I was noticing that there was a lot of blah colors in a lot of past meals, with out a lot of repeats of certain items, also I need to do more vegitables. So I am going to try to post one dinner a week, and aim for more color and more creativity. And I figure if I am on a schedule and have to post, because I promised, I will be more likely to actually do it. So, here's to trying to keep it up. We will see if it works.....
So first we have dinner from yesterday. A green salad, baked sweet potato, and curry risotto. I have of course done salad and sweet potatoes before, but I wanted to do something different with the risotto (and something colorful) so I as I was cooking it I added liberal amounts of curry powder, tumeric and cumin. It ended up having a great amount of flavor and went really well with the sweet potatoes and a little crunch from the salad. Over all worked well. Old favorites with a twist.

First one down and now lets see if I can actually keep this up consistantly. Only time will tell.....

...and a happy new year!

So it is a new year, and a good time for a fresh start or several. I know that it's usually not peoples favorite part of the switch from one year to the next but I actually really like making New Years Resolutions. I think of them like as a sort of cosmically charged to do list.
And one of the things on this years list? More consistent blogging. Like post stuff regularly, and without the month long gaps in between.
So here is to new beginnings....

...and fresh starts....

...and fresh juice?

Oh yeah that's right! I decided to pull out all the stops and make a gloriously enormous amount of fresh squeezed orange juice. Well actually it was fresh orange/tangerine and it was super delish. There is something so decadent about real juice, and being able to drink it in massive quantities. Makes me feel rich, and very very pleased with myself.

festivities!!!

Its a new year! and there was a balloon drop which was pretty much awesome and allowed me to check something off of my bucket list.

It was a silly thing to want to do but it's something that I've always wanted to witness/participate in. And now I can say: "been there, done that" Oh the satisfaction. Pretty much my favorite thing ever is crossing things off lists. Makes me infinitely pleased. And what a great way to start a new year if I do say so myself. So with one thing crossed off my unbelievably long list and about a million and one things still left to be crossed off....I say, bring it on 2011!!!!!

And I hope everyone had an glorious New Years, with or without massive amounts of balloons.