Fabric Valentines (for next year?) {Gail}

At 11:30pm on Valentine’s Day, I realized I hadn’t sent along two little VDay gifts to Sam and Aaron – oops! But I was suddenly inspired, after spending the evening cooking and blogging about pink hearts made of ham to get creative and go make little fabric Valentine tags to attach to the gifts.

So I headed upstairs after everyone else, but they knew I wasn’t going to bed THAT early ;) I’m such a night owl. I picked out some pink and red fabric from my stash, grabbed a couple bottles of paint and a brush, and all of the “etc.” to go along with my vision and got to work. I ended up with 2 little heart-shaped tags I’m very tickled by!!

I knew right then that I wanted to make more so I didn’t bother cleaning up (ha – right, that’s the reason.)  I did know that I wanted to write about it here, and since I didn’t take pictures that meant making more. Therefore it made sense to leave it all out, right?





I *heart* getting Crafty!

 

Supplies -- see list below.

Here’s a little picture tutorial plus an instruction sheet at the end. If you have any questions, be sure to ask me in the comments! I’d love to help you create some of these yourself. You could make them Easter Egg shaped and put Faith, Hope, etc., on them, or use them for birthdays or Mother’s Day. Get creative!

By the way, cookie cutters make great shape templates!




Trace with disappearing marker
onto lights and mediums



Trace with chalk onto darks 







Use marker dots on batting
This is Warm n' White

  

Snip and tear a 1" strip oflightest fabric to use for banners

  



Press torn strip onto freezer paper.This stabilizes
it for painting and writing.



Dip opposite corners of stiff flat-edge brush
into light and dark paint, using less of the dark shade

Blend paint into brush with plenty of water



Use long parallel strokes, barely touching the fabric with an almost dry brush
to accent the fabric strip you will write sentiments onto.
I have gone back and "kissed" (or dabbed) some color for an interesting look.



Detail of fabric strip. (It's really not that dark of pink.) You can see my final layer of light pink just skiffing across the top. You never want to have the fabric be wet enough from the paint for it to absorb -- keep it sitting on top of the fibers and you'll keep that woven texture showing through.

 

Highlight the fabric hearts you have cut out with
pinking shears. Above is an untouched heart and
a highlighted one. Use very watered down paint
and a wetter brush to "dye" the fabric.






Red hearts highlighted.
The left two are the backside of the fabric
which I am using as the "right" side,
the right-hand heart is the frontside, touched with
the dark pink almost all over.

 


 


 

My trials with the pens, in order.
The first TWO are the Micron Brush tip that I really liked.



The pens I tried. I ended up using
Micron Brush in Sepia and
Zig Writer (narrow end) in a rosy purplish color.

Mark the freezer paper to show the space needed for one heart.
(see the pink hash marks along the edge?)
Place any embellishments your words need to fit with
and then practice writing in that size of area.

Cut banner strip larger than final size, peel it off the freezer paper, position and pin, then sew it down just inside the frayed edge

Use pinking shears to trim edges of banner to match heart,
or trim them however you want! The first two I did are
trimmed at a slant, mostly longer than needed.

Stack the front on top of  the batting and backing fabric layers.
Pin with pin-points going COUNTER-CLOCKWISE



 

 

1) Stitch around the edges -- I "scribbled"
with a straight stitch 1/8"-1/4" in,
(Directions below give details.)

2) Tape down buttons and hangers to hold in place

so you can machine stitch them on.

Choose a wide zigzag that matches your button's

holes, the shortest stitch length,

and carefully make sure you

target the holes in the button!!!

 





Click to ENLARGE :)  So you can see
paint, marker, and tape detail.
Taping buttons down and zigzagging them on saves so much time and hassle!!
"Magic tape" used for gift wrapping tears
cleanly away when you are done.











Tape down the hanger and stitch it like the button.

For elastic cord, knot it first, tape and stitch it down

at the base of inner point -- don't stitch  through the cord!

Remove the tape, then slide the

cord up until the knot reaches the stitches.

The finished fabric heart tags! ~not the best picture, but it enlarges if you click it for detail.

Written instructions can be found here!  

Gail

Paper-Crafting Presents! {Sam}

So I promised in my last post that I would share something other than food!  So I’m going to!  In this post!  After, I talk about food first…..  ;)

After seeing Mom’s post yesterday, I just wanted to jump in and say that I also made some much-appreciated-heart-shaped-pork yesterday!  Saw this idea on Pinterest, and knew that heart shaped bacon was definitely the way to hubby’s heart on Valentine’s morning!

 And now… crafting!  And not just any kind, but paper-crafting, my favorite!  Last year I got involved in this handmade pay-it-forward kind of thing.  One of the people on my list was my sister-in-law’s Mom, who has become family to me too.  For her gift, I decided to make something with these awesome 7 Gypsies frames!  I focused on the girls in the family, and had a lot of fun mixing and matching papers and punches and embellishments!  And here it is!

You may remember this picture from a previous post as a sneak peek before I gave her the frame.  This little flower is very easy to make!  Pick a color paper.  Cut different sized circles.  Rough up the paper a little bit.  Glue together (I think a little unevenness looks best).  Add a button for the center, and any kind of leaves if you like.

Featured here: American Crafts Journaling Sticker Books

EK Tools Swiss Cheese Corner Punch

Michaels Recollections brand Glitter Dots 

Featured here: Making Memories Epoxy Metal Frames

I love making layered flowers out of paper.  This one has the light pink paper folded and then wrapped around and taped together with the darker pink textured paper on top.  It is taped in multiple places so the flower kept its shaped.  I added a rhinestone brad through the middle and stuck it down with some 3D Zots.  I love Zots, they are used in almost all of my paper-crafting adventures!

In other paper-crafting news, I whipped together this little idea yesterday for my hubby for Valentine’s Day.  I found the idea on Pinterest here and expanded on it, partly because I already had this collage frame laying around with nothing in it.  We hung it in our bathroom and now we can write each other little love notes with dry erase markers!  Cute and fun!

Detail of LOVE. I LOVE my Cricut because it cuts these fantastic letters and shapes for me!

And with that, I’m off 2create some food for dinner!

Sam

Valentines for my guys {Gail}

Pink hearts that guys will LOVE! Yes, you read that right.

With two guys and no other females in the house, I’m not as inspired to get all pink and heart-y at Valentine’s Day. But since it is a good day to add a little flair to show some love and affection, I decided to put a Valentine-y twist on a simple dinner. The way to a guy's heart is through his stomach, as they say!

Tomatoes showed me surprise hearts!

I mad a salad to start, which wasn’t actually going to have anything Valentine-y going on, but when I sliced this tomato in half and nipped out the core, it looked very heart-like! I made a thin slice off each half, and then chopped the rest into the salad. :)

Salad may not be first on a guy's list of foods they love, but mine know not to argue when I say to eat vegetable matter. I make them eat veg because I love them and want to keep them healthier, right? Love.

We love pasta at our house, and in my perfect (aka dream) world I was going to make some red pasta using beets, yadda yadda yadda. However, some raviolis from Costco out of the freezer, plus half a bag of frozen tortellini that needed using were much more realistic.

I added protein with chicken and ham, and put together a quick cream sauce made from skim milk, low-fat cream cheese, and some butter and olive oil. Not that healthy, but healthier than regular Alfredo. I added red onion at the end so it just wilted and kept its color. Some chopped fresh basil and coarse grated parmesan topped it all, and then…  

Ravioli dinner, garnished with love for Valentine's Day!

… the Valentine-y part! Ham is pink. Guys (my guys) love ham. All I needed was hearts. ~TA DA!~ a heart shaped cookie cutter completes the guys + pink +  hearts equation! The ham I was using was a nice 1/4” sliced ham steak and wasn’t too difficult to cut with the heart cutter.

What guy could turn down pink hearts for Valentine's Day when they are presented in ham, over creamy ravioli with basil and parmesan? Not mine! They both chuckled and grinned, knowing that I succeeded in surprising them with pink Valentines they could truly appreciated, and dished up!

Happy Valentines Day to all the guys out there, via pink ham hearts!

Gail

Making some Wontons: Soup {Gail}

I'll be embellishing our site with embroidery soon since I have a couple weekly challenges to catch up on!

Tonight in the kitchen, I had three “firsts.” It was the first time I ever used those intriguing star anise pods, the first time I ever used lemongrass, and the first time I ever made wontons. From our 3 year soup project source, 300 Sensational Soups, I made the Pork and Scallion Wonton Soup which also includes making a second recipe for the complex broth. Now you might think that making a complex broth would be enough work for one day, and the wontons are just asking too much, but really it all dovetails nicely and doesn’t take that long! And this soup is really good! It is worth every minute – slightly sweet, not too salty, interesting broth flavors, tasty handmade wontons, and nothing ~weird~. I will definitely make this again. In like 4 years. Or for company – I would certainly make this for company.



By the way, my camera is … on vacation. I hope it is having a wonderful time in some sunny clime. When I find it, it better have brought me a really good souvenir. I think it is in Yakima at my MIL’s house, so it should bring me her good homemade cookies. All of them. (Any pictures you see below are not mine.)

To the soup! First the broth: you create the Chinese Chicken Stock by starting with chicken stock, either homemade or store-bought. Now the actual recipe calls for enriching the stock with additional chicken parts and that’s where I parted company with the true recipe. I skipped adding the chicken parts, but added all the remaining ingredients and continued. Why? Well, I think my Kitchen Basics broth (which I raved about here) is awesome enough, and I know my broths and stocks from years of making my own. If you have doubts about the quality of your broth, be sure to add the chicken parts. It doesn’t really add any other work to the recipe than rinsing them off and putting them in the pot, possibly defatting later. Aside from that (minor?) alteration, as the recipe asked, I added green onions (chopped), garlic (bashed), lemongrass (thicker bulb end sliced; farther out, cut into 1”-2” pieces – I just followed the instructions!), gingerroot (peeled, thinly sliced), carrot and celery (sliced), peppercorns (OOPS forgot those!), parsley, star anise* (whole pod – toss it in), and a piece of cinnamon stick*, a bay leaf, and a touch of dried thyme. Remember the cool thing about making broth that’s going to be strained later: you don’t have to chop pretty!!



star anise, gourmetsleuth.com



lemon grass stalks, 1 to 2 feet long



A note about the lemon grass. It’s big and not grassy. Think long skinny stick-like leek, or a bamboo stick. Just so you aren’t surprised if you’ve never shopped for it before. I was surprised; I was expecting something delicate ;). I haven’t been watching enough food TV in the last few years, I guess! Brought everything to a simmer over medium heat; turned it down and let all those flavors have a party in the kettle for about an hour. By the way, I only made a half recipe of the broth because that’s all the actual soup recipe itself needed. Now that I’ve eaten this, I wish I’d gone for the whole recipe and had some to freeze!!!!! I kept sniffing it as it simmered because it smelled so good.

While that was making, I put together the wontons. I have a technique I use when I need to do something with intimidating instructions, whether it be sewing, cooking, or whatever. I just do the next step. Then I do the Next step. and then… you get it, right? That’s how I approached these wontons, which over the years have taken on Bugi-man status: eeek, hide me from this scary thing now! Well, let me assure you that it is only slightly more difficult than making sandwiches. So jump right in and make some delicious handmade wontons!

Once you get the wontons made, you are basically done with the prep because this soup is broth with wontons – easy! This recipe makes some really good pork wontons, but you can probably substitute ground poultry if you prefer. I actually chose this recipe in order to use some extra ground pork we ended up with through a grocery shopping snafu.

First you make the pork filling – so easy! In one bowl mix together the ground pork, green onions (minced = sliced + chopped), soy sauce, five-spice powder*, ground pepper. Not so mysterious, right? Next beat up one egg in a small bowl and set out a small pastry brush. Then open the package of wonton wrappers – oooh, they’re like little silky squares of suede-like pasta/dough. (such as this brand (check out their recipes))

Lay a wrapper on a plate, brush the edges with egg (I almost covered the whole square on some and they turned out fine.) Add a teaspoon dollop of filling in the middle and then fold it on the diagonal, sealing out all the air possible and letting the egg do its glue-y work. When you cook them in the broth, you don’t want that air to burst them! Set each one on a baking sheet lined with parchment so they don’t stick. After the 3^rd or 4^th one, I felt like a pro. Well, no, I just felt like I knew what I was doing! I listened to TV while I did this and it went very quickly. Here's a link to someone else making wontons and how it would have looked if I'd taken pictures. If I had my camera. And if I were Asian. Oh, and we didn't fry them. Anyway, you can see how easy they make it look!

Once the wontons are ready and the broth has simmered long enough, you just strain out the stuff that gave it its flavor (mmmm, don’t miss out eating those carrot slices!!). Bring it back to a simmer and start dropping in the wontons. After I put in about 8 of them, the simmer started to disappear so I turned up the heat and kept adding them one by one, but quickly. After they were all in, (lots of wontons in this soup, not 2 scrawny ones per person like restaurant soup!) I gave it a gentle stir and set the timer for 8 minutes.

Then I did the worlds fastest stir fry with already chopped up stuff including bok choy from our

<-- Produce box and some Trader Joe’s frozen shrimp while hubby defrosted some of our pre-cooked brown rice. When it was time to dish up, I tossed in a couple Tablespoons of prettily sliced green onions to finish the soup.

If you like Asian food, wonton soup, soup, food… you’ll like Pork and Scallion Wonton Soup. It’s comforting in the winter, has a wonderfully interesting flavor, and is fun to make. It must be the Asian equivalent of American chicken noodle soup; my two sick guys sure appreciated it!

The only ingredients I had to hunt down turned out to be easy to find at my local upscale grocery store: lemongrass & star anise. You might also need five-spice powder and cinnamon stick. I keep the Costco container of cinnamon sticks on hand for my spiced apple cider (recipe at bottom of linked page).

Gail

*be sure to check your upscale grocery stores, health food stores, etc, for bulk spices. I paid 10 cents for the star anise pod instead of $5-10 for a bottle I may never use up.

Variation on our Theme: Soup {Sam}

I LOVE BROCCOLI.  Let’s just start off with that.  I don’t necessarily like it raw, but I could eat it cooked by the pound.  And when it is in things?!  Well don’t get me started… (Beware if you ever make beef and broccoli… I might just show up on your doorstep).  J  So when I picked my soup for the week, I gravitated toward one with broccoli in it.  Also, hubby had been saying that he wanted some sort of potato chowder, so this seemed like the perfect fit for this week:  Broccoli, Bacon and Cheddar Chowder!  In essence, what I made is the recipe from our cookbook (scroll back the last couple days to find it!).  I’m confident in saying that if you made this recipe exactly according to the recipe it would be a hit!  BUT, due to the ingredients I had on hand, and preferring fresh broccoli over frozen, I made some variations to the recipe.  Because of that, I actually get to share exactly what I did with you!!

First.  In a large pot I sautéed 8 slices of turkey bacon.  I chopped it up before I cooked it, but you could easily chop it afterward if you prefer.  After it was cooked, I set it aside wrapped in a paper towel.   Then I added 2tbsp of butter to the same pot I just took the bacon out of; let it melt and added 1 finely chopped onion.  I let it sauté for about 5-8 minutes to let it soften.

While the onions were cooking I grabbed from the pantry: flour, chicken stock, salt and cayenne pepper.  Milk from the fridge too!  When the onions seemed soft, I dusted them with flour, about 2tbsp, maybe less, and let that cook into the onions for about 2 minutes. 

Now here is the important part:  whisk, whisk, whisk.  You have to make sure in the following steps that the flour is getting whisked in properly and not forming clumps that are hard to get rid of later.  SO.  Gradually, as I was whisking often, I added in 3cups of skim milk, 1 can of chicken stock, a tsp of salt, and a good dash of cayenne.  Brought it to a gentle simmer, and kept it going for about 3 minutes, still whisking often.  I then added 3 medium sized russet potatoes, peeled and then diced into approximately ½ in pieces.  Keeping it at a simmer only (no boiling!), I stirred often so the potatoes didn’t get clumped up, for about 20 minutes.  I wanted them nice and soft in the soup!

Broccoli!!  There was A LOT of broccoli in our soup.  While the soup was simmering, I chopped up about 7 big heads of broccoli and put them in a pyrex with a small amount of water and stuck them in the microwave.  In total, they probably steamed in there for a good 7-8 minutes, but you could do them longer or shorter depending on the crispness of the broccoli you want for the soup.  I left them sitting in the microwave because they didn’t get mixed into the soup until the end.

SO, back to the soup on the stove…

Cheese… next came the cheese.  I asked hubby to grate some cheddar and next thing I know we have two kinds on the counter: Cougar Gold (a sharp white cheddar, famous from our college creamery) and some regular sharp yellow cheddar.  So we did both.  1 cup of each got melted into the soup (In reality, it was probably 1.5 cups of each… yummm, cheese).  I then added a good dash of buffalo Tabasco sauce (any pepper sauce would do).  At this point you could adjust the seasonings: pepper sauce, salt, cayenne, but the sharp cheddars in mine made for a great flavor!

I mixed in the reserved turkey bacon and the steamed broccoli, and ladled into bowls… VOILA!

SOUP.

Side Note: Hubby exclaimed frequently while eating it that he loved it, HOWEVER… he was not a fan of the fact that I used turkey bacon.  While he devoured what I made, he thought regular bacon would have added a little somethin’ somethin’.  Turkey bacon was what I had on hand because I have been trying to eat better breakfasts, it Obviously doesn’t have that much of an effect on the health of this soup since it is filled with cheese!  Haha, regardless of hubby's complaints, I thought it tasted great in this soup!

Hope you enjoy!  Next week, I’m actually going to share some stuffs other than food!  What a concept ;)

Happy Superbowl weekend!

Sam

Two-fer Post: Spontaneous Soup; But First, Some Stitching! {Gail}

I’ll start with stitching progress lest you think we’ve become just a cooking blog! I am almost finished with the little crazy quilt block I started on my snow day at Sam’s. You might remember it here. I'm new to this CQ thing and a little hesitant as you might notice: no beads, ribbon embroidery, layered stitches… yet. I feel I am about 90% done with this block. I thought I was all the way done, but it seems to be missing something pink on the left. The ribbon across the top is held down by little *-shaped snowflakes to help keep late January perspective ;) This will become a card, possibly I will keep it for myself – there’s a surprise… I love that little birdie; it makes me smile!

Oops!  That ribbon on the right isn't supposed to be tucked under the mat.
Once the stitching is secured to the cardstock permanently, it will lay atop.
I can see all sorts of ways to assemble the bottom papercrafty section!

And next: I “souped” tonight, with no prior plan. As I was browsing The Cookbook during my menu planning process (yup, I have one) I realized three things. One, I didn’t know what to make for dinner (HAVING a plan doesn’t mean it always works :P); two, there were green beans that really needed using; and three, our 300 Sensational Soups book probably had a recipe that would solve both problems!

 Sure enough, I came across Garden Vegetable Soup, which uses green beans and corn as well as the expected carrots, onion, and tomato. What it didn’t use was celery which you will see anyway in my photos, as I was sure I saw it on the list originally. That means either it spontaneously disappeared from the ingredients (uh-huh) or reading all those soup recipes just had me a little distracted! Hmmm…  

In the plastic bag at the right:

frozen roasted corn from last summer's ears.

Please do not let me forget to do this every summer!

Didn't end up using the celery after all.



Red fingerling potatoes from
my Full Circle Produce box.
They have an interesting golden gleam.

Tonight I skipped the photos of onions frying in the bottom of my stockpot and the whole assembly process because it’s very simple and I’m sure you’ll see plenty of onions frying during the next 3 years of our project ;)  

For the soup, sauté said onions, add most of everything else, simmer, add the rest of everything, simmer, season, and you’re done!  

By the time I chopped and added, chopped and added, things were simmering along quite well, so I set the timer for the first simmering session and left the kitchen, where the beans and corn sat waiting.

Trim and cut the green beans to short lengths,
convenient for fitting on a soup spoon.

Once the timer went off, lucky for me my son was standing right there in the kitchen as teenage boys are likely to do near dinnertime. HE added the beans, corn and parsley, and turned the heat up. After I finished Pinning a few more things ;) I wandered back into the kitchen and it was soup! A bit more salt and we dished those tasty veggies up!



It smells so good and fresh!

The  roasted corn added a nice sweet summery flavor to each bite!



Have a bite!

Have another!

A word about the stock I use. Soup makers and chefs say it all the time – you have to have a good foundation of tasty full-flavored stock/broth. I really love these Kitchen Basics stocks! They are good enough to heat and sip from a mug by themselves. They’re packaged in aseptic containers so that you don’t get that metal flavor you sometimes do, and 4 cups in each package means you aren’t endlessly opening cans. Because their pour spout closes, if you only use a partial package you can just refrigerate it (I write the date it was opened, right on the pkg with Sharpie); use it up by cooking some rice in it if nothing else (freeze the rice if needed – that’s so handy!) Kitchen Basics stocks are either low or no salt added, so you can control the sodium content and saltiness yourself. We LOVE them! We keep 1-3 of each flavor on our pantry shelf at all times: beef, chicken, vegetable, and sometimes turkey or seafood, too. You can find Kitchen Basics a lot of places, including *shock* military commissaries.

Mmmmm!

This Garden Vegetable Soup gets five thumbs up, not just for flavor which was simple enough to let the veggies shine (that’s three of the thumbs-up, from the soup eaters), also an extra one from the cook for how easy it was to make – it doesn’t get much easier than veggies and broth, salt, pepper, and parsley! – and the last for being such a virtuous healthy January recipe.

Even if it is February today.

Garden Vegetable Soup from
300 Sensational Soups