Knitted Belt

A small aside to point out that this is my 200th post. Yeah, pretty cool.

I have this cool little book called The Little Box of Knitted Gifts that Nick gave me for Christmas last year. and this belt was one of the projects.

Obviously, it's not quite finished yet. When I have the money, I'll buy buttons to add to it and a belt loop. Until then, it's just a strip of cloth that someday wants to grow up to be a belt!

I'm Back!: Menu

Sorry for the long silence, I was in Tennessee looking at things like this:

 

Anyhow, now that I'm back, I thought I'd share with you something that me and my boyfriend do every week. We sit down, surrounded by cookbooks, and pick out that week's menu, writing the shopping list at the same time. It's a lot of fun, and it gives us a chance to balance new techniques with things we already know how to do (which is nice).

Here's our menu for this week (we used to start on Tuesdays, and now we start on Thursdays, for no particular reason):

Thursday: Rice Dinner-- Rice dinner is our easiest meal that we do at least once a week because it produces tons of leftovers. It's the typical college student meal: two cups of rice, sausage, a couple eggs, veggies, and beans...and then we look in the fridge to see if there's anything else we can throw in. I eat mine wrapped in a tortilla with some cheese: Nick tops his with cheese and eats it with a fork. It's anything but classy, but it's fast and filling, and we tend to like it!

Friday: Chicken Roast-- This recipe comes from More than a Cookbook, which my Mom gave to me when I moved here. The point of the cookbook is to use their weekly recipes, but Nick and I just pick one to do a week. The "chicken" roast we picked is actually called a "pork" roast, but we tend to prefer chicken to pork. 

Saturday: Colorful Frittata-- From The Taste of Home Cookbook. My grandmother (on my Father's side) gave me this cookbook just yesterday, and I love it. It's huge and I doubt we'll ever get tired of it. This recipe is an egg dish with tons of colorful (and yummy) veggies inside. I tend to forget to cook vegetables separately from the main dish, so I prefer dishes that have vegetables in them.

Sunday: Zucchini Creole: From Mama Trude's Special Cook Book which I am quite sure is a family friend of some sort. This book is written on a type writer with no publication information. The recipe calls for a pound of hamburger (we'll probably use ground turkey), 3 cups of zucchini (chopped), 2 large tomatoes (chopped), 1 large onion (chopped-- we'll used minced out of a shaker), 2 cloves of garlic (chopped-- we'll used powdered), 1 large bell pepper (chopped-- I'm thinking red would be pretty), 2 ribs of celery (chopped-- which we will skip because neither of us likes celery), 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 2 T Worcestershire (we're going to use bbq sauce), 1 t sage, 3 bay leaves: Cook the meat, put all ingredients into a large pan, add water to cover, cook all together like a thick stew. Eat over rice or noodles. Suffice it to say, we rarely follow a recipe to the T.

Monday: Macaroni au Gratin-- From the Rumford Complete Cook Book. This cookbook is from 1931, and an inscription on the inside cover declares that it belongs to my Great-Grandmother. She has filled it with other recipes and comments, and I am so in love with it. Hopefully the binding holds up-- I'd like to pass this one along.

Tuesday: Tempting Tacos-- From Good Cookin' from Good Friends: A Collection of recipes from family and friends around the country. This one is done by some friends of my Grandmother's, and while it does have some publication information, there's no copyright so I feel ok sharing :) 1 cup chopped onions (we'll use minced), 1 1/2 lbs ground beef (we'll use turkey), 1 T cooking oil, 1 15oz can tomato sauce (I have paste, we'll see), 1 cup beef bouillon (I have cubes-- we'll see how that works), 2 t chili powder, 1/2 t cumin, 1/2 t salt, 1/4 t pepper: Brown onion and meat. Stir in tomato sauce, bouillon, chili powder, cumin, salt. Simmer uncovered for 1 hour, stirring occasionally. Fry tortillas in deep oil (which we will skip). Spoon beef mixture into shell, garnishing with shredded cheese, chopped lettuce and tomato. Salt and pepper to taste (salt and pepper on tacos?).

Wednesday: Easy Pasta Skillet-- From No More than Five Ingredients, a cook book I bought as a fundraiser from my cousin. I can't find anything about it online, but it is a handy little book, and the recipes are quick and pretty good. This recipe is a one-pot meal (my favorite kind!) and has the meat, pasta, and sauce all cooked together. It's pretty crazy, but it looks pretty good!

So anyway, there's this week's menu. I'll share these from time to time!

Tea Cozy Sachet

Back when I made my Tea Pot Cozy, I decided to make the version that had a small pocket in the bottom of it for a scented sachet. On a walk through town I picked some lavender from the side of the road, and I let it dry in my kitchen window. When it was dry, I crunched it up and pulled out an old cloth napkin:

I cut circles out of the napkin that were about the same size of the pocket:

Last, I sewed it up by machine and tucked it into the cozy:

 And so now every time I make myself a pot of tea the smell of lavender fills the kitchen :)

Swap Gift Shrug

Remember the awesome yarn Jan got me for our swap gift? Look how cool the shrug I knitted up turned out:

 I plan on adding eyelet lace cap sleeves and a white ribbon border to the neck line, but for now I love my little shrug :)

I did have a problem with having enough yarn, but I wanted the shrug badly enough that I made it work by matching the color (although not the fiber). I don't recommend doing this if you can avoid it, because now it will be super difficult to wash the piece, but if you're desperate, it is an option.

Rag Rug Doily

I love love this idea. First take a bed sheet you don't need. Fitted or flat, satin, cotton, or jersey, whatever you have that you don't need. Now tear it into strips and string it all together to make yourself...yarn. Yeah, you're about to knit with an old sheet. How awesome is that?

So I made a doily mat using this pattern my boyfriend found online (and which was also on Ravelry-- very handy) and now it's next to my bed so that every morning I step out onto a rug instead of the wooden floors :)

 

Isn't it pretty? here's a close up of the detail:

  

The artist displays her half-circle version as a door step, and several other knitters made theirs as full-circle rugs.

The large needles and bulky sheet-yarn are difficult to work with, but I am of the opinion that the final result is well worth the effort!

I have one more sheet that I can use, and I'm lucky that this artist has a second rag rug pattern! I look forward to using that one, too :)

Colorful Cupcakes

A while back (before I blogged) I made a cake that had rainbow colors inside, and I decided to replicate the idea with cupcakes. I had a bag of Jelly Beans in my pantry, and wanted a cool way to use them.

When I went to Whole Foods to pick up a jar of frosting, I also picked up food coloring to color that frosting (and we all know how that went).

So when I wanted to color white cake, I used these same colorings. These are the cupcakes from the outside:

 

And this is the insides:

 

That white? That's supposed to be blue. So disappointing. Whole Foods can't even do food coloring right.

Kitchen Window Treatments

When I first moved in, I didn't have curtains that fit the kitchen window, and the sun coming in during evenings (right as we're washing dishes, usually) was absolutely blinding. To solve the problem temporarily, we put up a fitted bed sheet.

 

(P.S. You can see my air orchid hanging in the window-- I have two of them, and they're the only house plants I can keep alive!!)

So originally the plan was to take some of the floor length curtains I had and make it into Austrian Blinds...without buying any supplies. Needless to say, I had to find a new plan after failing miserably.

So when my Oma came to visit, she helped me make these instead:

 

 

This was really simple: we just took two store bought, floor length curtains that matched and cut them to the length of the window, plus a couple inches. We hemmed them, and hung them. Now I have an open window when I want the light, and a closed window when I'm blinded while doing dishes. Perfect!