ByJeni: January 2012

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Cooking Class Homework, Day 1

Baked Pototo Soup with a Cookie Supprise

I like to bake. We needed bread. I wanted to make bread. A quick cabnet sweep resulted in no bread flour, corn meal, or wheat flour.

I had a few cups of all-purpose flower so I made some cookies.

Down to business... Washing the potatoes.

Charlotte loves helping in the kitchen. she wrapped the potatoes in tin foil for me.

The potatoes were smallish Idaho potatoes so I cooked them at 350 for an hour.

I grabbed some Cashews I had in the cabinet to try and avoid eating the cookies I just made. They were delicious, and they did the job.

When the potatoes had about 15 min left in the oven I started cooking the bacon. I made a big batch to have leftovers tomorrow.

This photo looks so amazing. The food colors are so cool. I dumped my bag-o-veg from cooking class last night in the pot with the bacon and grease. I cut up another onion and cooked it all until is was all smelling amazing.

OK, yes I did use swanson stock in that bottel. No I had not tasted it before today. I did taste it today. It was not bad, not amazing. I had bought it though, so I used it. It did the job. The stock was a bit bland. I will be learning how to make my own stock though. I love figuring out how to make things from scratch.

The potatoes are all done. I chopped them up in 1-2 inch chunks. I wanted to keep them in nice big chunks so I didn't add them to the soup until the end.

Yum. Almost done.

I chopped up all of the herbs, and the kale from cooking class. I can't remember exactly what I had in there. Parsley... not sure what else.

While I was chopping I decided to make a salad as well.

OK, the cashews worked a little too well. My two girls ate a tone of these. I am a little worried that they are not going to want to eat dinner.

Yum, Salad.

Tossed in all the green stuff for just a minute and it was time to eat.

Hubby came home with some yummy ciabatta bread, and we had olive oil with parmesan cheese.

TA-DA!

Friday, January 20, 2012

Teal and Purple Tutu Dress

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Shell Frame

I know today's craft is not winning any awards for creativity but we had a blast making them. It was a wonderful day spent with a great friend and two beautiful daughters. The shell frame is such an easy craft it is great for little people.

We started our day at the amazing ArtScraps shop: 1459 St. Clair Ave. St. Paul, MN 55105. Charlotte my oldest (age 4) has been here for a birthday party and I have been meaning to visit this place ever since. It is a shop that sells "junk," you can use for crafting. I use junk like my husband would in reference to my basement craft stockpile. I think of it more like treasure. No more need to stock pile my basement with craft stuff just in case.

Art Start is a non profit organization that collects scraps, bits, and pieces of things to use in craft projects. They take donations and if you live in the area it is a great way to recycle some of your treasure. Art Start has a bunch of artists that work with schools and more. It is an amazing way to encourage recycling in a non traditional kind of way. I am so loving Art Start and Art Scraps please go check out there page, or shop and show some love. Tell them StitchesByJeni sent you

We picked up a bucket full of shells and two photo frames. The total cost for everything was $4.

We dumped the bucket of shells, laid down some news paper, heated up the glue gun and were crafting in minutes. It was a very easy set up, which is great for the kids. They can only pay attention for so long. There was a little fighting over all the "good," shells but after a little compromise we were off to the races.

We had one adult for each child. The adults started with the glue guns thinking the kids would burn themselves but it is so easy to do my 3 year old, Delilah was soon doing it herself. With my close supervision. Delilah did get some hot glue on her finger, she wined about it being hot for a moment but than pealed the glue off and got back to work. She didn't even have a mark form the incident.

There is no trick to the gluing part, just lay some glue down and put a shell on it. I would say that the more generous with the glue the better. You don't want big clumps of glue showing, but it will be more secure with lots of the glue.

Expect to have a bunch of those little trailing strings from the glue gun. Ignore the strings until the project is finished and just go back and pull them all off. No big deal, part of the process.

Delilah was so proud. She wanted to take the frame and play with it like a toy. We had a talk about looking at our beautiful work. The talk didn't seam to help so I hung it up on the wall out of there reach. The girls now like to draw pictures to put in there frames. We have changed the photos out at least 3 times now.

It was such a great day. We enjoyed ourselves so much. Such simple little things are so surprising when they are so fulfilling. It is a good reminder that the activities don't need to be elaborate they just need to be something.

Over all a great bonding experience. I will be going back to ArtScraps and maybe even volunteering to do some work for them. It is a truly wonderful place, there should be one in every neighborhood. The community is a better place when shops work to bring a community together in a responsible way.

Monday, January 16, 2012

Painting in the Entry

I love my painting in the entry of my home. It is a great converstion piece for people walking into my home. It belongs to my brother but it deserves to be in my house. It fits the area perfectly. I will have to talk to him and get the low down on the piece and post it here.