Hey Good Lookin', Whatcha got cookin'?

It was my turn to host book club this month, so last Wednesday I had everyone over.  While it's not required, sometimes if one of the books has a specific theme, we try to match the food to fit.  The book I chose, Unaccustomed Earth, is about Indian-American families (book review to come later this week!), so I decided to make Indian food to fit the theme.  Almost all of the recipes I used were from the cookbook 660 Curries, a favorite of mine.  I had never used the appetizer curry chapter before, so I was excited to try some of the recipes out!

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The first thing that I did was go to Uwajimaya, an Asian grocery store, to get some of the more exotic ingredients: tamarind, and poori shells.  I also picked up some pomegranate molasses, and buckwheat soba noodles, not for my book club food, but because I'd been wanting to try them in other recipes.

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Sweet and Tangy Tamarind-Date sauce.

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Sprouting Lentils for the Potato Dumpling recipe.

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Draining Yogurt to make Yogurt Cheese.

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The final result (from top left): naan (flat-bread), poori shells stuffed with potatoes and chickpeas, potato dumplings with a sprouted lentil-onion filling, cilantro-mint-chili sauce (the green one), tamarind date sauce (the brown one), breaded fried yogurt cheese, and a bit of hummus.  The hummus isn't strictly Indian, but it goes pretty well with everything, and the mild flavor helps to balance out the heat in some of the other food.  Over all the food was really good, and everyone seemed impressed with my mad cooking skills!  My favorite thing was the dumplings; I think that they will find their way back onto the menu before long!

Desk Update

The desk top is now in the office.

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It's just waiting for the desk bases, which are in the kitchen in the process of being painted.

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  Yep, they're in the kitchen.  It's way to cold to be painting in the garage.

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How does Sprocket feel about the desk?

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He's pretty excited!

Snow Day

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There's something amiss with my tea bag . . .

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Yep, practically the entire string is inside the tea bag.  Oops!

Kazul

I was up in Olympia over the weekend, visiting my Mom and my friend Jenny.  Melissa and I drove up and we celebrated my mom's birthday.  Then I got together with Jenny, and basically talked about Jane Austen for 24 straight hours!  Melissa's cat, Kazul, came to keep me company after I woke up Saturday morning, and I snapped some pictures of him.

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Mostly he ignored me and wouldn't look at the camera, but this last one is from when he finally got interested, but got a little too close!

Sunny Day

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Sprocket loves a sunny day!

Spring?

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My tulips and hyacinth are starting to come up . . .

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. . . and the daffodils are beginning to bloom . . . and yet it snowed this morning!

Norbert the Unicorn

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Over the weekend, we bought a few of the boards we need to finish our desk.  They were too long to fit in the car, so we had to put them through the sunroof.

The Geography of Bliss

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I recently finished reading The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner.  It was pretty good.  It's about Weiner's travels all over the world, to try to find the happiest places.  He visits Iceland in the winter, and finds that it is one of the happiest places, while Moldova sounds pretty bleak any time.  He highlighted about 10 countries, and I found that the chapters about countries that interest me were much more enjoyable than the countries that don't excite me at all.  I guess that's no surprise.  The book did seem to drag a bit by the end, but overall it was just fine.

On a Walk

The other day Sprocket and I went on a walk with Lacy and Mary.

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Sprocket was walking next to Mary's stroller, and she kept putting out her hand to pet him.  It was pretty darn cute!

Sweet Potato Gnocci

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A while back I made sweet potato gnocci with roast chestnuts and fried sage.  I've been wanting to try this recipe for a while.  It was yummy, but a lot of work.  There were a lot of steps: roast the sweet potatoes, make the gnocci dough, form all the gnocci, and finally boil the gnocci.  And that doesn't even count dealing with the chestnuts and sage!  I'm not sure if I'll make this again . . . maybe next year.

Desk

I know that you've all been awaiting an update on that "sneak peak" post that I did last week, so here it is.  For a while now we've been talking about building a desk.  In fact, before we built our media center we talked about building a desk instead.  We love the Bedford Corner Desk from Pottery Barn . . . but it's a little out of our price range (okay, a lot out of our price range!).  Luckily Ana White, of ana-white.com, has created similar desk plans.  While building our own desk will cost significantly less than buying a desk, we still have to save up the money to buy the wood.  So we figured that it would be a while before we could have a new desk.  Then one day I was in our garage and I noticed this:

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That's a pile of scrap wood, leftover from building the media cabinet.  It seemed like there was quite a bit . . . maybe not enough to build our whole desk, but definitely a start!  So I did what any good engineer would do, I mad a schematic.

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Yep, I measured all the wood that we had, and figured out what pieces we could get out of it.  Once we ripped some 1x6's down to 1x3's we had enough to build one of the base units.  And we still have enough wood to build most of the other one!  We will have to get a sheet of plywood to make the desktop, and a few 1x2's, but that's a lot better than all the wood we thought we would have to buy!

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We're going to start out with just shelves, and when we buy more wood later we'll build drawers to fit in those slots.  We'll be painting the whole desk white to go with the color scheme in our office.  

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Girasole

After the Ladybug Coffee Company went out of business last year I was disappointed.  However, a new restaurant has opened in its old location.  Girasole is a wood-fired pizza restaurant.  Driving by in the evening it has been pretty packed, so Lacy and I decided to try it out for lunch.

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All of the tables at Girasole are made from old doors.  They have been painted and have a sheet of plexiglass over the top so that it's flat.  Our table had sunflowers on it.

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The food was good.  I had a pizza loaded with vegetables.  It was thin crust pizza, which I really like.  All in all I would recommend it!

Stars and Hearts

A few months ago I went through my stash of yarn.  I got rid of about one third of it, mostly yarn that I had bought a long time ago, that I no longer liked.  There was some acrylic yarn, and a lot of "novelty" yarn.  With the rest of the yarn I tried to match up yarn with a pattern, and put them together in a Ziploc bag so that I could have ready made projects.  This way I would be able to easily use the yarn I already have, and not be as tempted to go out and buy new yarn.  In one of the bags I had a lot of small balls of yarn in the red-orange-yellow family of colors.  Many of these were yarns that I had dyed using kool-aid,  so I didn't have a large quantity of any one color.  I had matched this hodge-podge of yarns up with a hat pattern with a star design and ear flaps.

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This design was actually commissioned for the first Harry Potter movie.  Baby Harry was supposed to wear this hat when he was left on his aunt and uncle's doorstep.  However, the night that they filmed that scene was warm, so they ended up not using the hat.  I actually made the smallest size, which was supposed to fit an infant, figuring that I know a couple of people who are pregnant and this would be a great gift to have on hand.  But I didn't really check my gauge, and apparently I used larger yarn than they had in mind . . . so instead it fits me.  I'm not sure where I would wear this hat, so it may go in my gift pile anyway.

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When I was done knitting the hat, which took very little time, there were about a million ends to sew in.  That took forever!  When I was done I still had some yarn left, so I figured that I would save it and make another one someday . . . maybe once I'd forgotten about sewing in all the ends.

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The very next day I cast on a second one.  Oops!  This one worked out better however, because I sewed in the ends as I went along.  I also switched to the heart pattern.  

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Sprocket helped me block them!

Star Anise

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Yesterday I used star anise and ginger to infuse chicken broth for an Asian inspired noodle soup.  I've never used star anise before . . . isn't it pretty!

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The soup was pretty tasty, too!

Guilty Pleasure

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If I add vegetables to ramen that makes it healthy, right?