Tomatoes!!!

Yeah! Glorious garden tomatoes!! I love them so much, but I found myself wondering...what do I DO with all of these things? I have eaten so many this summer. I've had tomato soup, homemade pizza, spinach and ricotta stuffed tomatoes, Jambalaya (twice), salsa, you get the point. Then, I was at my sister's and she was making a bunch of hers into pasta sauce and then jarring it. Now, I don't have the equipment or the patience for that. So, luckilly I have the world's knowledge at my fingertips. I went ahead and looked up recipes for pasta sauce that you can freeze and then tried it! 

I mixed a couple different recipes and made bags and bags of the stuff. Just a basic garden veggie tomato sauce that I can kind of tailor to specific recipes all winter long! Yeah! 

Chopped up and thrown in the pan.

After about 30 minutes of simmering.

 I chopped up all sorts of my garden vegetables and added them (tomatoes, zucchini, and 3 different types of peppers!). Plus, I got to use my fresh herbs (basil, thyme, sage, and some parsley! 

Enter: One of the cooking world's greatest inventions since the toaster oven (the hand blender)

Yep, someone just left one of those behind here at my house and I snatched it right up. I am in LOVE with it. So cool. I don't have to spend 12 years taking small batches out and putting them in the blender only to have half of it splatter all over me because I didn't let it cool enough and the lid exploded off the top. Plus, you don't end up with a too smooth soup with random large chunks either. I can just stir it around, find the chunk, and BAM! it's gone. (Wow, I'd be so good at info-mercials)

I love it so much, I just might marry it!

     After that, I took my pre-labeled freezer bags and stuck them in a liquid measuring cup (for easy fill) and scooped up the sauce in about 2 cups per bag. I let the bags cool a bit in the fridge and then transferred to the freezer being sure to lay them flat on top of each other so they would take up as little space as possible. That's important for me because I love to freeze pretty much everything and my freezer is jam packed.

 

It tasted pretty good when I made it...I'll have to let you know a few months down the road how the freezer treated it. 

Pin Thing

Yeah, I know, I'm really clever with naming things. Years of practice, that's all it takes.
Anyway, my good friend Marla has a really cool thing (here I am being all descriptive again) in her room that she hangs jewelry on. It has patterned/textured fabric as the background and then she used lace and other fabric to make a tree shape on top. Anyway, guess I should have taken a picture. It made me want something to hang my pins (broaches?) on. So, I started planning. I really wanted it to be a special shape, not just rectangular or circular, but something more interesting. I couldn't think of anything like that that would still allow me to poke pins in and out of it. So, i was browsing a craft shop in Santa Cruz and found a couple embroidery hoops. Well, my roommate and I discussed possibilities and for less than 2 bucks I thought it was worth a shot. Here we go...

Here they are! 2 different sized wooden rings!

 Well, these lovely rings just sat on the floor in my room with my empty paint trays and crusty paint brushes for weeks I think. I had planned on covering them with 2 different canvas-type fabrics and then somehow attaching them together, but I was having trouble finding some cheap fabric with a print that would work (going to a fabric store may or may not have helped the situation). Finally one day as I was wandering through my favorite thrift store and found a silk scarf for 50 cents with a pretty awesome perfect pattern! Sure, silk isn't the best stuff to poke with pins all day, but hey, 50 cents, people! And behold:

Beautiful, huh!? Well, it's about to be
torn apart.

Here is it, afer I unstitched the poor thing.

 So, as you can see, I brought it home and immediately began to rip it up...(see seam ripper pictured above). Next, I did my best to iron out the creases. It had a lot.

And then fitting it into its frame.

The question of using it for the small or large frame was
answered for me. It would only cover the small one.

Cool! Progress! Unfortunately, after I excitedly put some pins on this and hung it on the wall, it just stayed there by itself looking way too small for a couple more weeks. I couldn't find a second fabric that was cheap and coordinated with this one and my room (again, a fabric store may have been useful here). I did find a really cute possibility in a dish towel at anthropologie, but it didn't quite go with my whole idea of cheap. So, I held onto the dish towel idea and looked a few other places. Fail.
Then, I randomly stumbled apon a rummage sale while I was baby-sitting and we went to check it out. It was a treasure trove! Besides our amazing find of almost new 2 dollar RocketDog shoes that fit the girl I was watching perfectly, but I found a couple fabric scraps that were fantastic (and 50 cents again)!!! So, now it was time to really get to work. I decided to paint the wood white to fit in my room a little better and to try and make them look like frames instead of embroidery hoops. Luckilly, I had some nice glossy white paint laying around!

Then, i got my new fabric out and it down to size. It's not canvas either, but just some regular old cotton. I think it will work just fine and I LOVE the print. LOVE IT. I love it so much I'm going to show it in full size.

 Ya like that?

I do.

Ok, so Then, I just had to put in on the frame and then figure out how to attach the two. I decided to just stich the smaller one right onto the larger one. I used white thread and made big simple stitches. That way, if I ever want to switch out the fabric or just detach the two hoops I just rip the thread and voila! nbd. It worked like a charm and was so so easy.

 Then, I just pulled the excess fabric around the back and stitched it together. I added a couple pieces of tape (I'm like that show my dad occasionally watched....RedGreen anyone?) And there you have it. All I had to do after that was add the remaining pins and hang it up. I love it.

Done.

Leftover Remix

I love making a lot of something and then re-purposing it for different meals. Then, I only have to make one thing when I get home from work and I'm starving! Example:

Get out the grilled chicken from previous meal.

Then, chop up some stuff from the garden (ok, so I bought the garlic)

Cook up some pasta and add delicious buttery farmers market olive oil

Put it all together and enjoy your fancy 10 minute dinner!

Some randoms!

Some delicious garden produce.
Yesterday I got more zucchini, romas, yellow cherry tomatoes,
 a cucumber, and a spicy pepper!

Some rummage sale and thrift shop finds. Love them.

I made this. Thanks anthropologie, I stole your idea.
And thanks for the cheap glass thing, Ross!

I have recently fallen in love with this cast iron grill pan I
got a few years back as a birthday present.

Delicious grilled chicken and zucchini from my garden.

Unconventional Summer Grillin'!

So...I was really feelin' falafel and Bryan was wanting to be all manly and grill (plus our house was already WAY too hot for real cooking) so we decided to go for the combination and see what happened! I usually just broil the falafel anyway, so I figured it wouldn't be too different.
First, I got the falafel mix out of the cupboard. I've heard the real thing is somewhat involved and I know I like the mix from my days as a cook at the ol' eating disorder center! Then, I found some cucumber in my own garden outside.  I went ahead and mixed up the mix while I went to the store and bought some pita pockets, lettuce, hot sauce, and hummus (wish they had had tahini). Since my own tomatoes weren't producing at the time, I went and bought one at the Farmers Market in Campbell a few days earlier...you just can't eat store bought tomatoes if you've ever had otherwise. It's wrong!

So, while I was chopping up the veggies (and the tomato), Bryan prepped the grill. He just got some tin foil and made a flimsy cooking sheet with it for the falafal. I went ahead and used a melon-baller to make the falafel balls and brushed them with oil. If we could go back, we would remember to spray the foil like crazy before putting the falafel down and to brush the tops with oil before turning them. They kind of stuck a bit. Also, we would smash the balls into patties for the grill because they would cook more evenly that way and be easier to flip over and what-not.      

There they are, chillin' over
the coals!

Well, it actually worked out really great! They tasted great and cooked well without heating up the house. All that remained was putting everything in the pita and eating up!

We turned them every couple minutes to brown all sides.

They actually cooked really fast!
We turned them a few times and
about 6 minutes later they were done.

Close up!

The delicious finished product. I should learn to make pitas...

Art Success!!!

That's right, it was a success this time! Ok, so I guess that's a matter of opinion, but I really like how this project turned out. Could be that it was a joint effort between Francis and I. I was really feeling the decor itch again and so I started perusing google images (of course, heh). I found some pictures of some wallpaper that I thought was really cool here. The second and third pictures down to be exact. I wanted to print them off for some frames I got at a yard sale ($7 for both!), but the size was really not normal and I didn't want to pay a lot, or even wait until tomorrow for that matter. Yes, I'm impatient. Sooo, Francis suggested we just draw them ourselves and I mixed up some paint for the occasion. I had some sponges laying around too so I could give in the same textured feel as the original source!

As you  can see, there's the basic design in pencil on the sponged up paper. I didn't mix the paint all the way so it would have even more depth. I really wanted that grey heather-type feel. Francis did all the drawing herself, just looking at the pictures online!

            At that point it was getting pretty late and I was starting to feel a little lazy. I was noticed that there were roughly a million (note: slight exaggeration) leaves on the two pictures combined and I did NOT want to have to paint all of those by hand and even if I did I'm sure the uniformity would have suffered. So, thanks to my mother and probably the 4-H, I thought of a brilliant idea! I made a leaf stamp out of a shriveling potato in the kitchen. Worked like a CHARM.

So, there you have it. I painted the tree and circle branches and then used a brush to put paint on the stamp (to keep the paint more even) and used different areas of my paint plate to get a slight variation in color. What do you all think??

I've since moved them to a new location above the tv
and there's a sweet little $1 garage sale find in the spot above the chair.

Fresh Food!!!

So, for some reason, even though I've recently started working full-time hours at work, I have been motivated to cook real dinners for myself. Or at least a real main dish. I have featured two of these below:

The artichokes I got from my garden
 and marinated myself.

The pizza I made using my artichokes, basil, and some farmers market tomatoes, peppers,  swiss chard, and turkey sausage and then I bought some feta cheese from good old TJ's to throw on top! A-ma-zing. Quite easily the best pizza I've ever had. Oh yeah, and the bread is Italian herb focaccia bread I also got from TJ's and just sliced in half and oiled with my farmers market buttery olive oil.

Kale...also from the farmers market and my first time trying it actually!

Pecans, garlic, lemon, nutmeg and freshly
grated parmesan cheese to go with it!

White beans (sure wish I had actually
 cooked them long enough...)

My almost superb beans and kale. Ha! Not too shabby though. Kale turned out to be completely edible. I was worried since it's green and supposed to be pretty good for you. Happily, it's quite mild with a good texture to boot!