My first peyote (stitch)! (lol)

I've always known how to do bead weaving and brick stitch, but the prospect of learning peyote stitch always kinda intimidated me. I figured it was time for something new, so I bought a pattern and ordered some Delicas from www.artbeads.com (who I would HIGHLY recommend). When my order arrived, off I went! With some help from various tutorials on the internet I found that peyote stitch is actually very easy! Here are my first few progress pics, I'm not going to say what the design is, it'll be a surprise as I go along!

That's all for now!

Dragonfruit

Yesterday I bought one of these at the grocery store:

It's called a dragonfruit and every time I see them at Safeway I say I want one and Craig says no because they are $5 each (*$5* EACH!) and he thinks I will forget about it in the fridge like most other fruit I buy. This week I put one in the cart anyways. I'd been told they taste like a combination of a pear and a kiwi, and I love both of those fruits. How can I lose?! When I got home I Googled how to prepare it, and it seemed pretty easy...

According to The Internet, I only needed a few simple tools, and delicious dragonfruit would be mine!

Step 1: Cut your dragonfruit in half the long way:

To my surprise and delight it looked exactly like the picture on my dish soap:

So far so good! On to the next step!

Step 2: Run your big spoon along the outer edge to loosen the white part, and then scoop the whole piece out. It comes out fairly easily, you can see by my pic that one came out a bit different than the other:

Step 3: Trim off all the pink skin (according to the internet it's unhealthy to eat, no mention why but I dutifully trimmed mine), cut into cubes and put them back into the skin "bowl". I don't think you have to put it back into the skin but it sure looks fancy!

All that's left now is to eat it!

So what does it taste like? To me it has the texture of pears from a canned fruit cocktail, but the taste of a kiwi that's slightly less sweet than usual. The little seeds are the texture of kiwi seeds as well. It's delicious!

The world's smallest to-go cup.

This is a real thing you can get at Timmies.

Today's *random loaf*

I like to make baked goods. Things like banana bread and soda bread are my favourites to make, and I even regularly make a baked thing I've named Franklbuns for my parrot, who won't eat veggies unless they are blended and mixed into a fruity bun. Little does he know the fruity buns he loves so much are... good for him! Anywho, I sometimes make random loaves of soda bread, and today was one of those days. There's not much science to it, I just kinda add random things to a basic mix, usually the last bits of stuff I have in the fridge or pantry. With that, we get today's creation... jalapeno garlic cheese bread!

The first step to any baking project is....

A clean kitchen! I hate starting to cook anything when there are dirty dishes and counters around, so I always clean the kitchen before I start. Plus I keep a sink full of hot soapy water going so I can "wash as I go" between steps, thereby making less clean up at the end! Next, gather your ingredients:

Then, pre-heat the oven! I went with 400 this time, but I would really recommend only 350. This oven is wierd.

I use plain all purpose flour, vegetable oil and baking soda for the main base, as well as a packet or spoonful of vinegar, depending which I have handy. I also put in a packet of malt vinegar to see if it would affect the taste. Regardless what kind you use you need some sort of acid as there is no yeast in this mix and the baking soda needs something to work with! To start, I put about 1 1/4c of water into the stand up mixer, along with 1/2c of oil, you can use regular oil but we had some chili oil and some garlic oil kicking around, so I added a splash of those as well. I also put in two big squeezes of deli mustard, the last spoonful of minced garlic in the jar, and although not pictured, the last spoonful of garlic cream cheese from the container (see what I mean about clearing out my fridge!). Finally I added a couple of chopped up jalapenos that were starting to get a bit old and wrinkly in their package (another bit gone!). If we had any eggs I probably would've added one or two but we were out of eggs, oh well. I gave this all a good mix (as well as you can mix oil and water), and then combined 3c of flour with 2tsp baking soda in a bowl. Depending how much liquid you used you may have to add a bit more flour to get a smooth dough. I will get to that part in a minute. Here's where we are at:

I forgot to take a progress shot, but basically you want to mix the flour mixture in a bit at a time at a slow speed. Your mix will go from liquidy to firm quite quickly. I usually start with 3 cups of flour/baking soda/other dry items (like spices) in the mixer and then knead in the rest. To do that, cover your counter with a good amount of flour and dump your sticky dough ball on there. Get lots of flour on your hands and then dump a good sized handful of flour on your dough, and knead it on the counter, pulling the ball apart to expose sticky dough and just kinda working all the flour in. I keep adding handfuls until it no longer pulls apart to reveal any sticky dough and it's in a fairly even round easy to shape ball. Once it's in it's final shape I oil it with a bit of veg oil to help the crust stay soft:

Slap that dough ball onto a buttered baking sheet, and cut an X on top with a sharp floured knife:

At this point I put it in the oven for about 10 min, just to get the crust to start to form. I then usually pull it out and add a bit of melted butter to the crust to help keep it soft. This time I also put a bit of cheese on top, and a sprinkle of salt and pepper:

Then back into the oven for about 20 mins, I keep an eye on it near the end though so the crust doesnt get too dark. Ta da!

Let it cool on the counter for a bit.

Yum!

And always remember to turn the oven off when you're done!

The 3-day turkey soup!

Craig and I recently had 3 days off together to celebrate our 4th anniversary, and among some of the things we did, we made turkey soup! We had cooked a turkey the week before and saved the carcass and drippings to make soup. What made it so awesome was that we had 3 days to devote to cooking the soup, so it was extra flavourful! To start, we divided up the bones and drippings and neck into our two biggest pots, and added some onion, carrots, celery, peppercorns, and a bunch of whole rosemary, thyme and sage tied into bunches. That's what the strings are sticking out of the pots:

We brought the mixtures to a boil and then turned them right down and let them simmer for the evening, I would estimate it was about 4 hours, maybe a bit more. Before bed we strained out all the big stuff, saving the bunches of herbs for the next day. Here's what our broth looked like:

I put it in the fridge overnight to harden the fat on top, which I skimmed off the next morning. When that was done we put in all of the shredded up turkey we has saved from dinner and off of the bones, as well as the herb bunches from before:

We simmered it like that for another hour or so, and then finally added some cut up celery, carrots and partly cooked potatoes, and simmered for maybe 3 more hours. Then it was done! Because we left the herbs in for so long it was super flavourful and delicious. I love making soup! You can use up all of your leftover veggies and meats and take it for lunch throughout the next week. It's so easy!

First Post... Kinda.

Well I went to design a new blog today, for posting all the random pictures I take of things. And wouldn't you know it, I already have a blog! I started it to keep track of my cross stitch progress (which obviously worked out well) so now I'm repurposing it into a blog of random things!