Flickr is updated! Five new galleries, and I have pictures of jewelry made by me! Tell me what you think, and tell me if it’s terrible, before I try to go sell it to people.
♥ Momo
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Category Archives: Humor
Life List 2010: Draft
Organization for Life
Vintage Hardware Drawers: I love them!
This year, I will:
Learn to Knit.
Learn to Felt.
Make Bread from Scratch.
Make Soup.
Make dinner from scratch at least twice a week.
Plan meals.
Sleep well.
Run, walk, breathe, stretch.
Go outside every day, if only for a moment.
Organize a cohesive wardrobe.
Make jewelry and sell it on Etsy or in the gallery.
Play with the cat each day until she flops.
Catch fish.
Read a new book each week.
Keep a clean house.
Be Happy.
♥ Momo
Inotomo
Grey Goose
Sunday Pounce!
I ♥ Inotomo: she feels like one of those Spring days where you walk out of the house in a sunbeam, suddenly realizing that it’s pouring rain, with the warm sun still on your face. Glee!
I don’t usually talk about music here, but it’s such a huge part of what I do; I can’t begin to clean the house properly without making the perfect playlist. I make a new list before I leave the house, to keep me warm and safe, to hold me up in the mold of who I am today. I cook to This American Life for dinners, to Concrete Blonde for box mixes, and Ms. John Soda for cookies. I walk to the bus to Múm, Psapp, Metric & Angelique Kidjo. When I want to be left alone, I listen to Postal Service, Death Cab & Azure Ray, but when I’m triumphant, I put on Brazilian girls and Louis Armstrong.I fall asleep to Pink Floyd because they make me feel safe, I fall in love with Anja Garbarek when I watch Angel-A, and I make jewelry to the Garden State soundtrack, because it’s the only CD that works in the player at the studio anymore….I need to fix that, it’s getting very old.
Have you ever seen Kikujiro? I ♥ Beat Takeshi, and this is my favorite movie of his. Joe Hisaishi did the soundtrack, and it makes our apartment feel like it has twenty foot ceilings and endless open square footage. I plan to make raspberry brownies to this album later this week.
In completely unrelated news, I made an Italian meatloaf! It was fantastic…and suspiciously easy, for how oishiiii it was…I had to touch raw meat, but it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as it might have been. Also, the kitchen has been completely sanitized, removing any possible trace of raw meat, making this an even better recipe for forcing me to clean the entire kitchen immediately ♣
I have new jewelry photos to put up, and a couple of fantastic pieces from a local designer. Love her!
♥ Momo
Rainy Sunday
I’ve had an epiphany: Let it rain, let it rain now, let it rain all night, because tomorrow I must do laundry. There’s no point in asking it not to rain, it’s too late for all that. But aha! the Poirot voice in my head exclaims, I can ask it to keep raining, rain a LOT, to get it all out now, because in the morning I will rise, run to the bead store, and when I’m home, I admit rain will seem like an awfully big impediment to laundry.
♥ Momo
Dueling Zucchini Spice Loaves, Part I
Let the games begin! First, a small disclaimer; I have made this without walnuts, because one of the possible judges has a nut allergy, and that just wouldn’t be fair to the first contender.
I think I ought to have a category tag titled “Serendipitous Breads”, because I started this post having found two zucchini recipes that are different enough from each other, one being considerably fancier, only to get word from my spy at the store that there were no. zucchini. in. stock. After a few deep breaths, spies then reported that they had found the last zucchini in the store! Huzzah! And so we find our heroine, with borrowed iPhone in hand for visual documentation, marching bravely into kitchen stadium…wait. That’s Iron Chef. I’ll just bake the thing and get on with it. ♥
2 c. all purpose flour
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
2 tsp grated lemon peel – I’m fond of lemon, and so I threw in at least 1 Tbsp, to be honest. I almost always throw in at least 1 Tbsp of lemon into everything. I even had lemon zest on shepherds pie last week, and it was surprisingly good!
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
2 c. coarsely grated zucchini – from the lovely zucchini pictured below:
1 cup walnuts, toasted, coarsely chopped
Preheat oven to 325°F.
Butter and flour two 8x4x2 1/2-inch metal loaf pans. (I made do with one looooong pan and one very baby pan.)
Combine flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, allspice, and baking powder in medium bowl. In a Kitchenaid mixer – what can I say, I love them – with a whisk attachment, combine sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, vanilla, and lemon peel.
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
Add Flour mixture gradually, remove bowl from mixer and fold in zucchini…and walnuts, if you don’t care about your loved ones with allergies.
Pour batter into prepared pans. If I were adding nuts, I like to place halved walnuts on top in cute daisy patterns. But not today…sigh.
This was my first experience baking two loaves at once, let alone loaves of different sizes. Epicurious advised a little over an hour, for two equal pans, so I baked them together for 35 mins, checking every ten minutes until at 50 mins the smallest loaf was done, and at 1 hour ten mins the long loaf was finished.
Let stand 10 minutes, if you can stand it! Turn breads out onto rack and cool completely. To store, I wrap in foil and leave at room temperature; these loaves of mine tend to go pretty quickly, so I’ve never really had to see about storing them for more than 24 hours.
Watched Tonari no Totoro again this week! Disney finally re-released the DVD, and while I suspect they’ve redone the Japanese actors as well as the American, it was still the great movie I remember.
We love Totoro!
I just got home from Eastern Washington to word that the enormous loaf I left with family is essentially gone. So the recipe is going up before the final pics, which I need from that borrowed camera…hint, hint.
Enjoy!
♥ Momo
I’ve Got “It” (But it don’t do me no good)
Poppies for Happiness
I was listening to Annette Hanshaw’s recording of “I’ve Got ‘It'” when I found this dress on Anthropologie, which is absolutely perfect. The dress conjures up visions of baking sugar cookies in a sunlit kitchen with huge french patio doors framed by vases of yellow and orange tulips and poppies.
It’s so funny that some things have that promise in them that surpasses what they are; that if I wore this dress it would give me the reality of that sunlit kitchen in the countryside that I crave. That those glasses will give me the dinner parties with tons of friends I long to have on Friday nights in Summer. That these plates will make up for the inherent inequities in my french toast, transforming them into fluffy, light, vanilla-scented triangles of brioche and egg, straight out of Bouchon. I’m no Thomas Keller, and there are no plates on earth that will make my french toast anything other than the heavy, eggy, dense organic rectangles that it is…which is fine, but not the stuff dreams are made of.
That I imbue these things with this energy and hope is fascinating to me; that I would on this day rather have the instant gratification of what is admittedly a lovely dress, a beautiful set of plates, or an adorable set of glasses than set the money aside for the house in the country with the french doors to a patio perpetually bathed in both warm sunsets and chilly sunrises is impractical. It’s silly, when I spell it all out like that. But think about it a little more. Think about the house in the middle of the day, during the hottest hours of the summer, or the coldest middle of the night, when you have been dirtying dishes all week and your kitchen is cluttered, it’s gray outside, and there are clothes strewn in complete disarray all over your bedroom.
When you have the dress, you have the dress and the promise of a beautiful kitchen which is always sunny and clean, which always smells like baking chocolate and bergamot, like pistachio shortbread cookies with whipped lemon cream cheese filling. There’s no mortgage. Our cat hasn’t sharpened her claws on any of the furniture, and there are always friends coming over for elaborate tea parties that appear effortlessly on a beautiful vintage 1960s table. Thinking of it like this, it’s so much more than just a dress.
This is silly. I should want to put away as much as I can manage so that I can have the greater dream, but I have in my time bought into these smaller things not only because they are nice, because they make me feel more like the imaginary woman in that lovely kitchen, but because I have been afraid that if I reached that place, it won’t be all it’s cracked up to be. That even if I manage to have those elaborate tea parties, messes happen in real life. Garbage accumulates if no one takes it out, dishes need to be washed every evening, and rain is a fact of life in the Pacific Northwest.
So the dress is perfect. It’s perfect because it’s lovely, well made and enviable. It’s also perfect because of that song – that once I had it, if I had it, the way I have had so many of these beautiful things, I might look down yet again at myself and think “I have it, but it don’t do me no good”.
Forgive the rant; the song is lovely, and for 99¢ won’t take me too far from my beautiful house, which isn’t mine yet, but oh, I hope it’ll still be there when I’m ready.
Birds on a Wire
Bees!
A final note – I’m open to new recipes for french toast, and would love some suggestions. Because great food tastes great even if you serve it on cardboard. ♣
♥ Momo
I Want to Learn to Felt
Love. It.
Wednesday Pounce! I have decided that I want to learn to felt wool. There are some rings at the gallery/studio fabricated from heavy gauge wire covered in felted wool in a variety of delightful colors – I want to stack them, mix them and match them, but more importantly, I want to know how they’re made and how to make my own. I think I can, I think I can…I will, I must! I have to, because I shared it on the internet, and it can never be undone.
I’ve really been enjoying Brown Cow Organic plain yogurt with crystallized honey lately. It’s replaced any cravings I might have had for candy or desserts, which is good because I’m too wiped to bake this week, but also good because it’s so much more incredible than candy. Really, you should try it!
Anyone notice that Egglands Eggs is advertising?? I feel uneasy about this, with a feeling similar to the one I get from watching the Corn Refiner’s Association commercials for HFCS…but without the outright indignation. I personally prefer organic local eggs, and the eggs I got once from a friend who raises his own (3) chickens were incredible – the color, the texture, the intense flavor – and I can’t help but notice that Egglands isn’t advertising hormone-free, cruelty free eggs, just that their eggs have more vitamins added. This sounds a lot like when Coke decided to release Coke + Vitamins….because it’s good for you now…right.
That’s your weekly dose of healthy paranoia; that’s what I get for keeping the T.V. on Iron Chef while I blog!
♥ Momo
Thursday Funny
Hilarious internet spoof that has produced something clever: “The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational has invited readers to take any word from the dictionary and alter it by adding, subtracting or changing one letter to supply a new definition.” While it turns out that there’s no such thing as the Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational, the list is pretty great, and it looks like the poor Washington Post receives so many unsolicited entries to this nonexistent contest that they have created something called the “Style Invitational“. This year they have entries for “prefains”; lines that might precede the first line of a book, poem or song.
My personal favorites from the hoax emails:
- Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it. (This will be making its way into my daily vernacular.)
- Arachnoleptic Fit (n): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
- Beelzebug (n): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
From the honorable mentions in the real prefain contest this year:
“My husband? The guy over there who’s dressed as a Klingon and playing Guitar Hero.”
All children, except one, grow up.
— “Peter Pan,” by J.M. Barrie
“Congress finally managed, on the same day and with equal skill, to repair both the country’s health care system and all the clocks in the Capitol.”
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
— “1984,” by George Orwell
“Eventually, there were only two people left in the world who had not succumbed to the lure of the Style Invitational.”
Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.
— “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” by J.K. Rowling
Eight days until Christmas! Baking begins tomorrow morning.
– Momo
Posted in Humor