Excellence in S’s and Zs!
Last night my school held its annual science fair and I donated this RARE saltwater specimen as a prize. Little did you know that the Great Salt Lake, once famous only for its bouyancy and clouds of brine flies, is now the habitat of several species of cephalopods!
Can it really have been a full year since the last science fair, when I made a tiny octopus specimen in a jar?
Look what my friend and co-worker Cindy brought me: A gorgeous new radish from her garden! She brought it wrapped up in a damp paper towel in a little baggy. It was perfectly fresh and delicious and Spicy! Nice treat for me on a day when I had to work late.
I am working on a new challenge where Zach will give me a smiley face sticker if I ride at least 6 miles in a day. After 20 smileys, he’ll take me out to eat! So, on Saturday I got up before the boys (at 8:30) and got on my bike to go for a ride by myself. Under normal circumstances, I would have waited for him, but his ankle is twisted and I knew he wouldn’t be up for towing the Boogedy in a trailer.
I rode good and hard on the outward 3.5 mile leg of the journey. When I reached my destination and found this gorgeous yellow tree, I decided to photograph the pretty stuff all the way home.
There was a pink tree:
And this nifty rusty bridge that made the best clunkety noise when I rode across.
Here I am stopped on the bridge:
I think this might be a beaver dam:
Here are at least three varieties of grasses, all contraindicated for inhalation up my dog’s nose:
I want you to know that I faced my fears and stepped out upon this grate-topped walkway over the river for blog’s sake. I am showing you my dorky riding pants and socks because I have no shame.
The view from there was grand and it was LOUD.
Another pink tree:
Some Russian olive trees and thistle with some blue wildflowers. Those Russian olives are the bane of my mom’s existence.
A spot of deep shade, at least 5 degrees cooler in here.
I went home and ate sauteed tilapia and green salad and a strawberry kefir smoothie. I lovely start to the day. You can believe that I took a long nap that afternoon.
A tale of woe. A tale of overconfidence. A tale of yet again saying “how hard can it be?” only to find out that I should have read up on it a little more.
So. I saw this beautiful tutorial over at Kleas. Felted beads…so easy that the preschoolers were able to do them. I thought, this is great, these are gorgeous, I will make these for my mom, who always wears interesting necklaces to coordinate with her outfits.
Such is my confidence in my fiber-wrangling abilities, that I waited until Mother’s Day morning before starting this project. My friend Kristin came over to help (I also consider her a specialist in wool control). She made the puffs.
I wetted and rolled a puff with a tad of soap. Ok, maybe too much soap. I labored alone in the kitchen, whining and wheedling that this was taking longer than I thought it would, and that the snakes weren’t felting properly. And that jeez, this is not working! Kristin felt certain that I was doing it wrong, so she came to the rescue:
She had no more luck than I did. Our snakes never did get firm enough; one felt hollow in the middle and the other had a permanent slit up the side.
When we cut the beads up, they were not as pretty as I had hoped. Worse, they started falling apart almost immediately. I am not as talented as the preschoolers at that other blog!!
I ended up giving my mom a baggie full of vaguely bead-looking fuzz stuff. Happy Mother’s Day from your not-so-talented daughter.
Zach kept teasing me that I should have glued them and some gold-painted macaroni to a piece of construction paper and told her the Boogedy made it for her.
My mother, bless her heart, oohed and aahed and tried to think of ways to salvage them and still use them.
A good mom praises a good effort.
Our neighbor gave us two freshly caught fish last night (already gutted and scaled). She called them “carpas” in Spanish, pointed generally south, and indicated they’d gone fishing that day in Provo. The big one probably was a carp, but the little one was a catfish. We invited family over to help cook and eat them.
I recommended filleting them and frying or sauteing. Working with the cold dead things with their still-bulging eyes gave me a bit of the oogies, so the eventual plan to make them “en papillote”–paper wrapped, was an easy, tidy solution. We seasoned them with olive oil, salt, and pepper; wrapped them in newspaper with lemon slices and crushed garlic cloves; tied them up with cotton quilting scraps; soaked the paper; and grilled them over our firepit.
We also threw some potatoes into the coals.
I made my new favorite lemon cake, but failed to adjust cooking time for a round cake pan vs. a loaf pan, so ended up with a dark brown rind. In the end, everything was a bit charred, and rather bland.
The Boogedy was just happy to see his Aunties and Uncle.
This cake is SO delicious and light and fluffy, not like many of the other things I’ve made using honey instead of sugar. Zach has been telling me that the reason I haven’t been successful is that I’m trying to do the substitution myself, rather than just looking for recipes that call for honey from the get-go. But for me, baking comes on a whim, and I’m not always up for recipe hunting the moment before I bake. I’m also not a big experimenter: if the recipe fails the first time, I’m unlikely to modify it to try a second time.
We have two kinds of local raw honey on hand at home in bulk (and I mean A LOT of honey). One is a golden liquid honey that tastes like commercial clover honey. It is good for using in recipes that have another overpowering flavor, like homemade hot chocolate with cinnamon and cayenne pepper, or my deep dark honey molasses ginger unsnaps, but it is too cloying to use in something like chocolate chip cookies, which was a big failure last week.
We purchased the other honey in a 5-gallon bucket last fall at the Downtown Salt Lake Farmer’s Market and it’s solid and creamy tan. It is AMAZING in tea or on hot toast with butter, but it is not easily spreadable and sticks like glue to every measuring cup. This is the honey I used this time, and I will be baking with it in the future (Oiling every spoon or licking my fingers where that fails!).
Here is the recipe for this delicious cake. The Jugalbandi blog was recommended by the computer as something I would like to read. It’s the best recommendation I’ve gotten so far! Jai and Bee have a beautiful site with gorgeous photos and an exotic feel.
Because I have a well stocked pantry, I didn’t have to shop for anything except a single lemon!
Zach found this awesome little sink and stove play station on the curb on the east side. He brought it home and washed it up, good as new! We got some little pots and pans (a steamer basket!? so cool) and a set of mini silverware at IKEA. We showed the Boogedy how to cook his veggies in the steamer (putta-yid-on!) and saute them on the burner (shake-um shake-um!). We “washed” our hands in the little sink. This toy is wonderful. It even has a little shelf for “cookbooks” under the sink, currently it holds his favorite cardboard books. Thank you anonymous neighbor who put this toy outside for free!
The Boogedy has gotten really into helping me cook lately, and my mom is planning to make him his own little apron. I love having a little guy.
Photo Credit: Jama Rattigan
Here is an adorable photo of Erica Perl, author of the new children’s book “Chicken Butt!” sporting a very cool hat made my yours truly.
Erica contacted me a few months back and asked me to make a hat modeled on the one I made last year for the Boogedy, but before the plucking.
The body and drumsticks are white cotton, “Luna” by Cascade Yarns. The feet are also Luna, and they’re crocheted around a brown pipe cleaner for stability. The “feathers” are a polyester fluff yarn but I don’t remember the name.
This project was fun every step of the way (ok, the feet were a challenge) and elicited lots of laughs from people who watched me make it on the bus!
Congratulations Erica on a fun book, I’m so glad you trusted me to design your reading hat!
In the spirit of this post at Earth and Living, I am showing you the very best from my outing with my mom and sis last week. We visited Gardner Village, a sweet little collection of shops in the southern part of the valley.
Shown: bleeding hearts by the cooking store:
Not shown: The huge, scummy koi in the pond there. I’m sure the fish are gorgeous, but haven’t yet shed their winter algae.
Shown: Forget me knows in the shade of the knick knack shop:
Not shown: Our flavorless lunch at the little bakery.
Shown: The dots and stripes M bought and shared with me. The florals mom bought to make a bag for her friend:
Not shown: The mess of construction cones on the road getting in and out of the Village.
Shown: The most glorious flowering tree I’ve ever seen. I don’t even know what it is, but the buds looked like pink marbles and the blooms like petticoats. This first photo is just begging to be made into quilting fabric!
Zach would like me to title this post: “Two and a half years after buying the house, Sara lifts a finger”.
I would like it known that, last year, (day 600 ish of our mortgage) I did some touch-up painting on the floor of the east bedroom, where the paint had run under the tape. I’m not a complete layabout. And one time I stabilized the ladder while Zach worked. And I scolded the dog after I accidentally let him run across the newly oiled hardwood floor.
Zach said that priming these shingles was making him suicidal and he kept howling his displeasure from the back room. He threw his paintbrush in a fit of pique. So I took over and quite enjoyed it. Zach believes that is because half the job was done before I arrived on my white horse.
My insistence that the task wasn’t so bad caused me to get saddled with the actual painting of this wall, which will happen next weekend, supposedly. If I choose not to apply a coat of paint, it has been threatened that my new large craft room will be relocated to this tiny (5′ by 8′ ish) room the color of…. let’s see… cigarette white tinged with yellow.
