Minute Monotonous Monday

After the barrage of posts this weekend, I’ll keep this Monday’s post to a minimum.  Making Thanksgiving dinner from scratch last week apparently took a toll on me because I was sick sick sick last Monday (why does that always happen on holidays?!), so that is my excuse for last week’s absence.  Here’s what my cross-stitch looks like this week:

I’ve actually reached the bottom of this panel!  Exhilarating!!

Wasn’t that thrilling?  (if you’re looking for something a little more scintillating, check out my Man Booker Project posts.)

 

Monotonous Monday + Contrasting Cakes

Your Mondays once again contain 38% more monotony with the return of my cross-stitching updates.  Here’s what it looks like today:

I like that you can see the boat at the bottom now!  Since a few months have passed, I’ve made significant progress on my project, but the commencement of my new job has left approximately ten minutes per day of available stitching time.  Hence, I predict progress from here on out will be incremental, at best.  I am working towards finishing this panel by the end of the year and moving on to one of the side panels in the not so distant future.

On the baking front, this week is a study in cake opposites– one urbanite gourmet and one unsophisticated nostalgia.

Gourmet: L and I baked the most delicious cake I have ever tasted: Red Wine Chocolate Cake.  While the preparation is easy and relatively quick, the result is completely gourmet– it is moist and rich in a sophisticated, complicated way. If you have someone you need to impress, this is the dessert.  Don’t skip the topping– while the cake itself is delicious, the topping adds a divine dimension.

Unsophisticated: Next up, gumdrop cake for a certain birthday girl.  I think this cake borders on the disgusting– it is an East Coast recipe that does not appeal to my West Coast upbringing.  How exactly do gummy candy and cake fit together?  I’d never heard of such a thing until I was served it by my mother-in-law, who grew up in the Maritimes.  This is a different recipe, but in my opinion, the textures are all weird and the flavour is altogether heavy and bland.  However, the birthday girl gets what she loves, and so this bizarre cake is next on my horizon.

 

Poor abandoned blog.

I’m still here, buried by work stress, but stitching and cooking away.  Here’s what my cross-stitch looked like last week:

And this week:

Last weekend I made mint chocolate brownies, using a divinely inspired recipe from Our Best Bites.  They were eaten before I got a picture, but I spilled flour in the process leaving this enjoyable footprint on the floor:

Spent this weekend making dumplings, which were delicious and it turns out my husband is a master dumpling maker!!

We made two fillings, one vegetarian (but not vegan), which I found on 101 Cookbooks, a great super healthy blog, if that is what you are into.  I improvised the other pork filling and wrote my own recipe, pulled from bits and pieces of other recipes.  Original recipes are not really my thing, so I am pretty impressed with myself when I manage to create a good one.  Here it is (heavily adapted from Gourmet 2004, as posted on Epicurious):

Ingredients:

1 (1-inch) piece peeled fresh ginger, finely chopped

1-2 cloves of garlic, minced

2 tablespoons of light/reduced sodium soy sauce

2/3 bunch green onions, thinly sliced

1 lb ground pork

1 can of water chestnuts (drained), finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon white pepper

1 tablespoon sriracha or other hot sauce

1/2 small white or yellow onion, finely chopped

1-2 packages of wonton wrappers

Preparation

Combine 1 tablespoon soy sauce with ginger and garlic in a small bowl.  Set aside while chopping and combining other ingredients.

Reserve 2 tablespoons green onions for garnish, then finely chop remainder and put in a bowl along with pork, water chestnuts, hot sauce, onion and remaining tablespoon soy sauce. Add garlic and ginger mixture.  Gently knead with your hands in bowl until just combined. Chill, covered, 10+ minutes.

Assemble wontons by laying wrappers on clean counter in a grid.  Put a scant teaspoon of filling in the centre of each wrapper.  Moisten edges with a damp finger.  Fold wrapper in half diagonally, enclosing filling, and pinch edges together to seal, ensuring no air is trapped inside.  Fold one corner into the centre and roll the dumpling into a little package.  Moisten opposite corner to seal if necessary.

Gently drop desired number of dumplings into a 6- to 8-quart pot of boiling water, gently stirring once to prevent sticking, and cook 6 minutes. (Dumplings will float to top while cooking.) Transfer dumplings with a slotted spoon to a serving dish and sprinkle with reserved green onions.

Alternatively, fry dumplings in olive oil, turning once.  (Watch carefully, they cook fast!)

To freeze, line a baking sheet with wax paper.  Lay the dumplings on the sheet, ensuring they do not touch.  Freeze on baking sheet for one hour, then move to a bag or container for longer term freezing.  (This method ensures they do not stick to one another in the freezing process).

 

Squirrel Hide Crepe (also Monotonous Monday)

Only time for a quick post-yoga pre-bedtime post in this crazy busy week.  We had our friends over for a fancy grown-up dinner party last night, and I made savoury crepes with lots of fixings.. cheese sauce, veggies, fried garlic mushrooms and onions, chorizo.  It was the first time I have ever made crepes in my entire life (which was a little risky for a dinner party, but I like to live life on the edge, as you all know).

They turned out pretty well.  We had about half a crepe left of batter, so I made a creative shape with the last one– we decided it looked like a squirrel hide, especially once the other side was all golden brown, a la Oregon Trail, for those of you who grew up in the West in the age of Apple IIe.  (Just did a double take at that last sentence– I didn’t realize I had descended so far into nerddom.)  Here’ s a pic:

Amazingly I finished the top of my cross-stitch and moved on to a whole different section this week!  Here’s how the finished top looks:

Here’s how my new thrillingly varied and colourful section is shaping up (no, really, I’m finding this part fun):

 

Monotonous Monday plus cookies.

Good morning, happy Monday to you!

I have temporarily scaled back my crafting due to an overwhelming and super-mandatory online course with an approaching deadline.  Boo.  I promise to create some hideous/uninspired art work for you all to enjoy as soon as that is done.

Here’s this week’s Monotonous Monday cross-stitching update:

You’ll recall that I warned you against false hope last week.  This is my I-told-you-so moment.  Incremental progress at best.  Wait till I have a long weekend.. then you will see some actual growth.

In the meantime, I did manage to make some oatmeal raisin cookies with the recipe from Annie’s Eats.  Yes, I am essentially a parasitic blog for her lovely, useful site.  I’m not even going to feign symbiosis.

Oatmeal raisin is my favourite kind of cookie and these ones are delicious.  Too bad I can only give you a picture and not pass them out through virtual land.  I know you want one.

I also spent WAAAY  too long making chicken chili verde this weekend.  While chopping peppers, I got jalapeño pepper juice in a little hangnail-type cut on my finger- ouch!  I didn’t think it would be anything terrible, but it got all hot and pulsy and took three soakings in milk (including one this morning!) to cure.  Typical me.

Anyways, that recipe in the Joy of Cooking takes 2.5 hours.  I’m so glad I doubled it and had lots to freeze because it doesn’t matter how good a dinner tastes, no single dinner is worth spending 2.5 hours of my weekend slaving over a hot stove.  Literally. I was so exhausted by the end of it, I had no appetite and didn’t even bother tasting it.  I’d show you a picture but it looked kind of icky and watery.  I’m assured by my husband that it was in fact edible…

Despite the crafting dearth around these parts, I have a simple one to tell you about later in the week.  Something to look forward to in these January-and-online-course-induced-dark days.

 

Successes and the launch of Monotonous Mondays

Occasionally, all mediocre would-be creators emerge from a glue gun, sewing machine or flour and sugar induced haze to see a moderately successful project staring back at them.  Although this is a rare experience in my crafting life, I thought I would share a few of these successes (Read: I am building myself up for a later post about failures).

Once upon a time, my bestest friend L stumbled (I just typed stumpled there.. maybe this should be a new word?) upon a pattern for making sock monkeys.  We made an elaborate plan to make sock monkeys for our friend S, who had never heard of sock monkeys and thought the entire concept was absurd.  (S is male, can you tell??).  Although we never got around to gifting them (oops), the sock monkeys were a success.  Charles (right) and Geoffrey (left) got to take a short car ride around the neighbourhood.

When I am not sewing children’s toys for my adult friends/childless existence, I am baking stuff from Annie’s Eats.  Her recipes always turn out, so I cannot really take any credit for those successes.  However, I managed to add, however slightly, to her genius this fall.

After shopping for candy *cough* flour and rice at bulk barn (Oh how I love thee) and selecting a chunk of white chocolate peppermint bark the size of my hand, I realized how good Annie’s favourite chocolate cupcake recipe (which is really a Hershey’s recipe) would taste with white chocolate peppermint ganache icing.  I made up the recipe myself and this food is seriously the best thing I have ever made.  Ever.  I’ve made it 4 or 5 times since November.  I don’t have any pictures because we always eat it…  Next time I make it, I will post the icing recipe and some pics.

My go-to craft is cross-stitching, and I finished a GIANT cross-stitch pattern this year.  I had it framed and gave it to my parents.  They liked it.

Speaking of cross-stitching, this brings me to introduce a proposed weekly feature on “stupid crafts”– the introduction of something to spice up the worst day of the week, which I like to call the Monotonous Monday Update! When I finished that big cross-stitching project above, I started a new one.  This one is even bigger, so it should keep me going for the next two years or so.  I work on it frequently, and N suggested I update everyone on the week’s infinitesimal progress.  Here’s what I have done so far.

This might seem like a lot, but don’t be fooled.  I have been working on this since mid-October.  You’ll see next week why this special feature is called “monotonous.”   I’m not describing the day.