Stuffed Jalepenos, and Christmas baking

“Where have you been?” I am sure you are asking. Well, I have been too busy making stuff to write about making stuff.

Sunday was the baby shower for a friend, and also the gift exchange between some of my good friends. I did the food for the shower, and also food gifts for friends. So, for the shower I made:

Spinach artichoke dip (I was originally going to make pitas with this, but then I realized I was crazy, and no one cared that much, and brought tortilla chips instead)

Bacon wrapped jalapeños with cream cheese filling

Winter vegetable kabobs (sweet potatoes, tiny red potatoes, blue potatos, tiny onions, yellow peppers and brussel sprouts)

Cranberry orange bread

Pumpkin muffins

Chocolate covered graham crackers

Walnut clusters

For friend gifts I made:

White chocolate peppermint fudge

Oatmeal butterscotch cookies

Rosemary Parmesan crisps

Pumpkin pie fudge

Oatmeal bread

Glazed almonds

And I think I am leaving something out…

Needless to say, I had a cooking schedule for the past week.

The bacon wrapped jalapeños disappeared almost instantly, so, here is how to make them:

Buy a package of nitrate free bacon, and twice as many jalapeños as you have bacon slices. You will probably need just over one package of cream cheese, depending on the size of the peppers.

You really want to wear gloves (I found them in the candy and cake decor section of the craft store) when you remove the ribs and seeds of the peppers. You can leave the stem on, and eviscerate them though a slit in the side if you prefer, however, I find that too time consuming, and just cut off the whole top of the pepper.

Next, stuff the peppers with cream cheese, don’t get them too full, you want them to still close (more or less). It helps if you sort of squeeze the pepper open, holding it at the top and bottom, then just scoop the cheese in with a knife.

Once the peppers are filled with cream cheesy goodness, cut all of the bacon in half, and wrap a piece around the middle of each pepper, and secure with a toothpick.

I baked mine on a wire rack over a roasting pan, at 350, and I think I left them in for a half hour or so, you just want to keep an eye on them, and when the bacon looks crisp.

In my experience, people will eat an astonishing number of these, so, make lots!

Winter Centerpiece

Bit by bit I am getting out the Christmas decorations. For the last couple of years I have been very into blue and white for Christmas, and this year, I feel drawn to very pastel and silver colors for Christmas. I found the robins egg blue bowl at the Canton First Monday market, and filled it with some red and white ornaments. The succulent and the papaya plant have been placed in pastel enamel and porcelain bowls, respectively. I love the look of the bright cherry red against the pale blues, greens and pewter.

The key to a good centerpiece is grouping of similar objects. My mom has difficulty with this sometimes. When I visited at Thanksgiving, she had arranged her collection of rabbits in one of the bedrooms. The rabbits were all spaced more or less equidistantly around the room. Bless her heart, she prepares income tax for a living, and just can’t help that sort of thing. I rearranged the rabbits for her, and they look much better now. I should have taken pictures.

Onion Deliciousness

I just got back into town, and since the weather has been less than charming, I have not been to the store. So, tonight when I opened the fridge, I found: a piece of colby cheese, half an onion and two eggs.
Really, other than the standard condiments, these were the only food items in the fridge. I did have some roasted red pepper and tomato bisque in the pantry. The boxed soups from Campbells are much better than one would expect.
So, I decided to melt the cheese on top of the soup and make some onion rings.
I don't know about you, but whenever I eat onion rings, the onion invariably all pulls out of the breading on the first bite, leaving me with three quarters of a sad, onionless breading circle. So, I decided to make onion petals instead, and I also decided on that name for them.... makes sense I think, based on the famed onion blossom of casual American dining fame.
So, I set out to make some onion breading batter.
I didn't know what goes in that, exactly, not having made this before, but here is what I put in mine:
one egg
some flour
some water
a little salt
a little sugar
pinch baking powder
hmmmm.... some more flour
a little corn meal
opps, too thick, a little more water

This process continued until the volume and ingredient mix looked right. I use peanut oil as my frying oil of choice, and I put some in a saucepan to heat. You know your oil is ready when a chopstick dipped into the oil creates little bubbles all around it. If you don't have a chopstick, you should save one the next time you pick up Chinese.
I dipped a test onion in batter, and tossed it in. I discovered that the batter adheres to the onions better if you dredge them in flour, then in the batter. I also discovered I needed to add a little more sugar. This time I added powdered sugar instead of granulated.

They turned out quite well, and all together made a good meal for a cold rainy night.
I have some leftovers, which I think will be fine heated up in the toaster oven. But, now I'm out of soup. I guess that means tomorrow I'll have to go to the store.

A Public Service Annoucement, or something...

For crafters:
I love making stuff, and I'll admit, I can get awfully worked up over a fabric store or row upon row of beautiful scrapbooking paper. But, now and then, and a lot more, recently, I start thinking about how much "stuff" we all consume. Do we really need all that stuff?
So, in addition to the "Handmade Pledge" which some of you may have noticed in the sidebar, I'd like you all to consider reusing and recycling materials. Don't buy new fabric when you could reuse old fabric, make or print your own paper rather than going nuts at the scrapbook store, and go through you crafting closet, drawer, room, whatever, and see what is already in there that you can use this year.
I don't want to give anyone a guilt trip... just something I have been thinking about for myself lately. I think the key to throwing away less stuff, is having less stuff to throw away.

Send me your comments. What is your best crafting "recycle or reuse" idea?

Happy belated Thanksgiving, enjoy the weekend with family and friends.
Cheers.

It Doesn't Get Any Easier Than This...

Ok, here's the deal. Go to the dollar store, the craft store, the closet, where ever, and get some straight sided clear glass votive holders. Go to the party store, (or the kitchen drawer) and get some napkins with a print you like.
Separate the extra ply layer of the napkin. Spread Mod Podge, or a similar glue, or acrylic medium on the outside of the glass, and carefully apply the napkin. Trim napkin so only a small edge will wrap over the top and bottom edges of the votive holder. Make sure those are stuck down well, then allow the whole thing to dry. Mod Podge even comes in an outdoor formula, so you could use these outside.
You can also do this with fabric, but, it is a cool way to save a really cute printed napkin that you have leftover from a gathering. Mine are a very cute vintage cowboy print.

Digging Clay

I don’t recall how it came up, something about drilling post holes for the new deck, but over the summer my parents mentioned that there was a lot of clay down behind their house. So, I went out and took a look at the clay. It looked like clay, it felt like clay… so, I decided to gather some clay.

As a ceramic artist, now, I know that I can buy earthenware clay, ready to throw, in 25 pound bags for ten dollars each. So, what possessed me to spend the better part of three days this summer digging my own? I am not sure.

It had rained recently, and there were large cracked plates of dried clay all over the ground. This clay was clean and fine textured, with very little contamination, so I decided that the first priority was to gather that. I got a ten gallon paint bucket, and braved going into the barn I never go in to find some window screen.

So, I gathered these tectonic plates of clay and ran them through the screen. They produced a very satisfying fine dry clay. Of course, they probably produced less than a pound of dry clay.

So, it was on to digging clay. The most likely spot seemed to be a big hole where an old tree had fallen. There was lots of clay, and it was easy to dig. So, my plan was to spread it out on a board, let it dry in the sun, then run it through the screen.

That was a no-go. When the clay dried, it set up like bricks, There was no way I was going to be able to screen this stuff.

So, I picked out the most obvious of the rocks and sticks, and started loading the clay into another couple of 10 gallon buckets, which I filled with water. As the clay (and rocks, and acorn caps) soaked in the water, they started coming apart into the component parts. Most of the organic matter floated to the top, though some stayed trapped within the clay. As each bucket soaked, I periodically poured the contents of a bucket though a screen into a new bucket. The dissolved clay and water went straight through the screen leaving the rocks and sticks on top of the screen. I discarded all organic matter, and any rocks that didn’t still have clay stuck to them, then tossed the rest of the clay covered pebbles back into the bucket to continue soaking. This is what I did every couple of hours for about two days. A ten gallon bucket full of clay, rocks and water, by the way, is about at the outer edge of my lifting strength.

When I was finally left with a couple of buckets of thick, silty water, and a couple of buckets of mostly clean rocks, well, I wasn’t really sure what to do. I knew the clay would settle out from the water, but I also knew that could take a while. I sat the buckets in the sun, and periodically scooped the clean water off the top. It was starting to look like I was not going to be home long enough for this process to complete.

My dad suggested sieving the clay through a couple of layers of old sheet. I wasn’t sure this would work at first, but I got an old sheet (70s orange and brown stripes) and a couple of bungee cords, and fastened them over the top of some more buckets. I poured the clay and water, slowly into these sieves. It worked. The clay stayed put, and the water went on through the sheet. Unfortunately, the water went though the sheet a few drips at a time, not all at once, so this process took well more than a day. Once the water had mostly drained through the clay, and I had, at last, very runny mud, rather than very silty water, I spread the sheets with the clay out to continue to dry.

Of course, we were in town when the rain started, and I knew my clay was still sitting outside, and if it was raining out there too, my three days of work would get washed away. We got back to my parents house just as the rain was starting, and my dad pulled some tarps out of his truck, or somewhere, and covered up the boards where my clay was drying, and helped me get the finished buckets of clay into my trunk. I thought this was incredibly sweet of him, since by all accounts the whole clay digging experience was a pretty silly thing to be doing at all.

So, by the time I had to leave my parents house to come back to Dallas, I had probably 40 to 50 pounds of clay. It has been continuing to dry and season, but I have now made one small flower pot, just to test how the clay would fire. It seems to be a pretty sturdy low fire earthenware. I would be interested to see if it can be fired any hotter, but I am reluctant to try it in my kiln. It is fairly sticky, but extremely plastic. It is very orange.

Overall, I’d say I this clay was about three to four times as expensive (in labor costs) as just going down to Trinity and buying clay by the bag, but it was kind of fun, and it is interesting to say that I am using hand dug, local clay.

Instructions for Purse

Felted Sweater Purse

Felting a wool sweater is really easy. Basically, you do everything to wool that you aren’t supposed to. Start by washing in hot water, and drying in the dryer on normal. With some wools, it is enough to do this once, some will need a few repetitions. I just threw this one in with my light colored laundry a few times, and that seemed to do fine. I always look for Abercrombie and Fitch lambs wool sweaters at thrift stores, as they seem to felt up particularly well. It won’t matter if there are small moth holes.

Once the sweater is felted, cut out the body of the purse, using one of the side seams as the bottom of the bag. I do not often make paper patterns first, but you can, if you are unsure. To cut the lining, I simply laid the felt over the lining fabric, and estimated the seam allowance I needed.

Sew the two side seams of the lining, with right sides together. My sewing machine is not working at the moment, so I did all of this by hand, but I don’t recommend it, if you have the option. Press the seams that you will need for the edges of the lining. I don’t usually pin anything, I just sort of stuck the lining in the bag and folded it over where it needed to go.

Place the piping between the felt layers and sew one side together. Then, place the lining in the bag. Place the piping between the felt and the lining on the flap of the bag, and continue sewing. Being careful not to sew the lining to the side of the bag, continue the piping down the opposite side seam of the bag, and cut the piping at the bottom.

Add piping to the top edge of the opening of the bag, and sew the lining and felt together.

For the strap, cut a long strip to make a tube. Take a piece of yarn or embroidery floss and sew it firmly to one end of the tube, then let it run down the inside of the tube, between the right sides of the fabric. Sew the right sides together. You can now use the yarn to help you turn the strap right side out. Use the end of a pencil to start turning the tube, then pull it right side out by pulling the yarn. This can be a little tricky and takes a little finesse, but for some reason, I love making these.

The main reason that I designed the strap detail that I did is that I did not have a long enough strip of fabric to make the strap as long as I wanted. Though the corners seem rounded in the photo, the fabric was cut as a rectangle, but sewing in the piping will round the corners. The straps were sewn into the shoulder piece along with the piping, but then reinforced with the box and “x” stitching.

I secured the finished strap to the purse on the inside, on top of the lining, rather than between the lining and the felt. It could be done the other way, if you prefer, but I felt that having the strap pulling up directly against the cotton lining would be sturdier than having the strap pulling directly on the felt. I used a whipstitch in red thread to add a decorative detail inside the flap of the bag.

The jackalope was the last element added. It is cut from white wool felt. I made a paper pattern, then used a piece of blue chalk to trace around the pattern. I cut the outside with scissors, but used an X-acto blade for the inside pieces. You really need a brand new blade to cut felt cleanly.

Press the bag with a little steam when you are finished, this will also help flatten down the fuzziness of the felt, and give the bag a slightly crisper look.