Cold Weather Running Skort

Now that I am a couple of months past the birth of my third (and final) baby and a few more months before my fortieth birthday, I have been feeling the urge to start running again.  In a happy turn of events, there are now a plethora of running skort options out there for those of us who would like functional clothes without feeling like we are running in our underwear.  These  Tough Girl Skirts from Skirt Sports caught my eye, as I will be running in the cold for most of the next three seasons.  Sadly, I’m not in a place in life where I can justify forking over eighty some dollars for an item of exercise clothing.  So I went to the consignment store sale in the hopes of finding someone else’s cast off skort.  No luck, but I did find a running shirt made out of the same material for $3.  I had an old pair of running tights that I got for free from a boyfriend who was training the BC Women’s Dragonboat team (always fun to look like a sponsored athlete!), but I saw tights at the same store for $5.

I cut the shirt off straight across at the under arms.

Next I pinned it to the waistband of the existing pants, just underneath where the drawstring lies.  I folded it over once and used a zig zag stitch to sew them together.

I don’t have a fancy machine, and I am not a great seamstress, and I have NO patience with stretchy slippery fabrics, so I made the cut off shirt fit the waistband of the pants mostly by making pleated folds and a little bit by stretching the two layers to match.  If I do it again, I might do some kind of darts in a more organized fashion.  Here’s a sample on the back.

And here it is on from a couple of angles.

Front:

Side:

Back:  (strange angle/ shot; taking a picture of myself in a mirror from the back is somewhat awkward!)

Not perfect, but totally functional, and soon I’ll be going so quickly, no one will have time to notice those funky seams!  It was enough of a success that I feel like going back and trying another one.  Maybe a shortie this time.  If it turns out better or I learn anything else, I’ll add to this post.

Fraisiers

Which, of course, comes from the French word for strawberries.  This month’s dessert is made with fresh strawberries, pastry cream, lemon chiffon cake, and marzipan.  How could one go wrong?!  Jana of Cherry Tea Cakes was our July Daring Bakers’ host and she challenges us to make Fresh Frasiers inspired by recipes written by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson in the beautiful cookbook Tartine.  While it was delicious, I think I made an already involved dessert unnecessarily difficult by making it in many little petit fours sized cakes instead of one big round one.  Definitely worth doing if you have lots of time and someone to impress, but for my next attempt, I’ll be making one big round cake.  In case anyone wants to try the little ones, here’s what we did and a pdf version of the recipe.

We cut up cardboard boxes (mac and cheese type boxes) and molded it into shape by wrapping and folding it around the star shaped cookie cutter that we later used to cut out pieces of cake and marzipan.  The forms were lined on the inside with plastic wrap to keep the dessert from sticking.

First: one layer of cake.

Insert into molds and soak with lemon syrup.

Then the fruit; pretty ones against the sides and chopped up fruit filling the center.  Next, the remaining space was filled with the pastry cream.

One more layer of syrup soaked cake. (We did some circles as well as stars because I ran out of patience with making star molds!)

Then a layer of marzipan, et voila!  Well, almost.  Then the desserts have to sit in the fridge for a while and become firm enough to stand alone when the forms are removed.

Rainbow Smoothie

It’s a craft you can eat, and a very sneaky way to get green veggies into your kids if that is a challenge. We just went through the fridge and the freezer and found fruits and veggies that matched the colours of the rainbow. We topped it off with a white fluffy cloud of yogurt.

Zizzed it up, et voila!  Leftovers (if you have any) make great popsicles too!  Things like kale make a great green layer, but it helps to use small tender leaves so the taste isn’t too strong.

 

 

Key Lime Pie

It began as a random craving brought on by an innocent bag of key limes on sale at the co-op. It turned into a three day baking odyssey that culminated in a pie which was, admittedly, tasty, but perhaps not worth that much effort.

To start with, I didn’t have graham wafers for the crust, so I decided that it would be simple to make them. Simple, and tasty, but somewhat time consuming and complicated when your coworkers decide that squares just don’t cut it; that some cookies must be airplane shaped, some gingerbread girls, etc. They are delicious, though, and I am enjoying the extras. I won’t go into detail as I have already talked about it here.  The recipe is from 101 cookbooks.

Then came the filling.  The pie recipe was from Cooks Illustrated.  It was called Key Lime Pie, but it became clear that they were thinking about much bigger limes; the recipe called for 1/2 cup of fresh lime juice, which they claimed could be harvested from 3 or 4 limes… 13 key limes later I was nearing the 1/2 cup mark!

The rest of the process was easy but I think next time I will see if it makes any difference to use regular limes and I’ll make those graham wafers ahead of time.  Up next, rhubarb pie!

The lazy gardener

Sometimes life gets busy and things like dates for seed starts pass you by.  This spring was one of those years but gardening with my kids is a priority for me so we chose some things like sugar snap peas that are tasty, quick to grow to maturity, easy to grow, and very forgiving of small children who forget to water them some days.  Do yourself a favour and start with good seeds.  Cheap grocery store seeds often have low germination rates and they may frustrate you and make you think you can’t grow things.  I love Territorial Seeds, their affiliated West Coast Seeds, Sandhill Preservation, and Seeds of Change, just to name a few goodies.  They all have great seeds, don’t sell GMO’s, and have lots of heritage varieties.

We also started some mint plants from cut mint stems that we picked up for $1.29 a bunch at the grocery store.  Mint is a vigorous, some would say invasively aggressive, plant which makes it challenging for gardeners who forget to isolate it, but perfect for busy families who need a tough as nails herb to grow.

We took the freshest looking stems, cut the ends off, and put them in a glass of water.  New roots and leaves are only going to grow out of the nodes on the stem so try to have one near the bottom as you won’t get rooting unless you have at least one node in the water.  (nodes are the “joints” between sections of the stem)  Start more than you want; we got three good plants out of five started stems.

We then put a plastic bag “tent” over the leaves and the cup so that it would be really humid around the leaves.  This is important because the plant has no roots and can’t support those leaves.  They may all fall off during the rooting process.  This is ok.

For the next week or two, just put the glass somewhere that it isn’t going to be directly in the sunlight or it will get too hot.  Make sure that there is always about the same level of water in the jar, and remove dead leaves if they fall in the water.  After about ten days, our stems had roots like this.

The next step was to plant the stems in potting soil.  You need to use potting soil unless you are planting these in the garden.  This is because regular garden soil in a pot will become like concrete in a very short time when it is used in a container.  If you do plant your mint directly in your garden,be forewarned that it may spread and take over.  The containers don’t need to be anything exalted; we used an empty yogurt container and an empty strawberry container.  The strawberry container was better because it had built in drainage holes.  Poke or cut some holes in the bottom if your chosen container has none.

We kept the starts well watered for a couple of weeks.

Then we planted them in a big pot to live on the deck in the sun.

And after two months, the peas are blooming!

Not your mama’s silkscreen

But rather, your dad’s!  Allow me to explain.  This year, for father’s day, we made silkscreened  t-shirts for the resident dad using a process that is significantly different from any silkscreening I have ever done.  I remember cutting out stencils and such, but this time, my sister introduced me to the mysteries of using a photosensitive emulsion.

I started by getting my five year old to draw a picture of our family.  For the other design, I painted my kids’ soles with non toxic watercolour paint and made footprints on paper.

We then photocopied the images onto a transparency using an inkjet printer.  Some lines didn’t come through as boldly as we wanted them to, so we touched them up with a sharpie.

When the images looked good to all involved, we laid them on a prepared silk screen saturated with the emulsion and exposed it to the light.  The instructions called for a 500 W bulb and exposing for 6 minutes, but we only had a 20 W bulb (go efficient bulbs!), so we left it for a couple of hours to be safe.  Once it was exposed, we rinsed it under cold water, which revealed the designs.

To get more out of our materials, we actually put the two different designs on the same screen and just taped over them (alternately) with packing tape when it came time to actually print the shirts.

There were some goofs on the screen, mostly because of the edges of the glass that we laid on top of the prints to keep them from moving during the exposure process.  We fixed these by painting the spots with clear nail polish.

When the time came to print, we got our MEC organic cotton t-shirts (which we pre-washed so the shrinkage wouldn’t ruin our designs)  and some water based screen paint and a squeegee.  We put some poster board in the shirt to stop the ink from bleeding through to the other side of the t-shirt, and used our screen to print the shirt.  There are already a million tutorials out there on how to actually do this, but I thought that I would post what we did because even very small kids can participate in this and produce a much more complex design than they would be able to do with a traditional stencil cutting process, and it was all really easy to do at home.

Oce the paint was dry, we ironed the shirts inside out to set the ink (again with a blocker between layers of shirt (this time we used parchment paper) and here are the finished shirts!

Baklava

So I’m back in the daring baker saddle with a great challenge.  I have certainly eaten my share of baklava over the years but never made it, and learning how to make phyllo dough was exciting for me as I have lived in numerous places where my cravings for spanakopita could not be satisfied.  Erica of Erica’s Edibles was our host for the Daring Baker’s June challenge. Erica challenged us to be truly DARING by making homemade phyllo dough and then to use that homemade dough to make Baklava.

Great instructions and a delicious recipe (adapted from these two sources:  ”Kaffeehaus- exquisite desserts from the Classic Cafes of Vienna, Budapest and Prague” by Rick Rodgers and Alton Brown’s Baklava recipe).

The only hitch I ran into was that my sheets of phyllo stuck together on one corner while they rested.  Next time, I will flour them excessively or put floured parchment between them.  They stretch a lot more after resting a bit; I was able to double their surface area after they sat rolled out for half an hour.  One tip from another daring baker  (Audax) was that the rolled out dough should be thin enough to read through.

It was a great recipe to make with my five year old.  He measured nuts and spices to grind in the food processor, brushed the phyllo sheets with butter, and helped layer the ingredients in the pan.  Delicious!  Thanks, Erica.

Coffee cake (bread?)

This wasn’t meant to be a food blog, but this monthly deadline seems to keep me posting.  I guess that means I am not truly a blogger.  Oh well.

This month’s DB challenge was somewhat bizarre sounding on first glance, but it was delicious and quickly devoured.  The March 2011 Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Ria of Ria’s Collection and Jamie of Life’s a Feast. Ria and Jamie challenged The Daring Bakers to bake a yeasted Meringue Coffee Cake.  It involved a brioche type dough rolled cinnamon bun log style around meringue, chocolate, nuts, and spices and then formed into a ring and baked.  Very tasty.  As one of my tasters said, just sweet enough to get you to eat more, and not sweet enough to get sick of it… dangerous!

Crunchy and Creamy

Well, I am finally back on the DB posting wagon.  I actually did the last month’s challenge as a birthday cake for my husband, but I was underwhelmed by my results (fatigue, morning sickness genuinely not great cake?) and not motivated to post.

This month, however, was delicious, easy, and I had friends to help make and eat it.  The only thing I don’t have is the fast computer, so photos will have to follow on Tuesday!  The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

Not only was it easy and seemingly foolproof (we didn’t have enough gelatin on hand and it still set up nicely), but both recipes together took under an hour in the kitchen from first hand wash to end of clean up!  To top it all off, it is a very fancy looking little dessert.

I made the vanilla panna cotta and topped it with a simple raspberry coulis, which was a delicious and easy way to cut the richness.  I have read about slightly different recipes which use part cream and part yogurt which I also plan to try out someday soon.

We used bittersweet chocolate with almonds a la Trader Joe’s for the florentine filling.  I chopped the chocolate fairly finely before melting it because we didn’t want to have the nuts hold the cookies apart, but they did anyway.  So next time, I will use just plain chocolate.  The recipe called for quick oats, which we didn’t have and couldn’t get quickly enough for the challenge, and I am looking forward to trying it again to see what difference it makes.  We used slow cooking oats and just zizzed them up in the food processor before adding them so that they were quite small (but still discrete little bits, not fine like flour).

All in all, a great challenge.  Thanks, Mallory!

Sugar Cookies

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking. It was a perfect recipe for us because the basic elements were so simple, and the kids could be involved in every step! We just moved to a remote community nestled in a mountain valley in northern Washington, and getting fancy ingredients or equipment would be more of a challenge than the challenge itself!

The theme was September, which for me always means school, having spent the better part of my life as either a student or a teacher. This last year in Virginia, though, I experienced my first “real” autumn, so my cookies were decorated in honour of the gorgeous display of turning leaves in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Of course we had to include some letters for the school part and the middle cookie is the happy chaos that happens when you give a pastry bag to a four year old!