Watch this space....

So it's been a little while since I posted anything (sorry!) but between illness, SNOW and visiting friends, I've fallen behind not only on my blog, but also on generally being creative. Although I have occasional feelings of guilt about ignoring this space.. I've been having so much fun I quickly feel OK about it all! Once the snow fell I spent the weekend walking the dogs, drinking hot chocolate, feeding the birds and catching up on vital TV! All in all, perfection.

This weekend just gone I further managed to avoid all forms of creativity as I spent the weekend in London for a  friend's birthday  It was such a wonderful weekend of beautiful food (Haggis for burns night) wine, lazy breakfasts and burritos! The birthday girl in question is a school friend who I hadn't seen for over a year, and as always it was like no time had passed. It was also really lovely to just hang out with good friends, with no pressure to get anything done, other than prepare ourselves for further wine consumption...

Having spent an indulgently guilt-free weekend simply enjoying myself, I headed back home on the train Sunday afternoon with some interesting thoughts running through my head about work, happiness, money and the future. I'm thoroughly enjoying my job at the moment, it is great work experience and I work with some lovely people, as well as some wonderful young people too, but as is often the case I don't make much money. A fact I was reminded of after spending a weekend with people much the same age as me who earn significantly more, and it really made me think, should I be getting out into the world trying to earn more money, so I have the option to do all the things I want to in the future? Or should I accept my fortunes of the moment and focus on all the beautiful things I do already have in my life? I then read this post on a new favourite blog of mine, which just echoed all of my current thoughts, reassuring me that a) I'm not alone in all these thoughts and that b) if I'm not alone in them, then I really mustn't let them trouble me so much.

I might not make much money at the moment, but the bonus is short working hours, which leaves me with plenty of free time to do all the things that ultimately make me happy. So for now, whilst I work on boosting my CV and slowly (very slowly) saving money, I get to play around with beautiful fabrics, culinary delights and all things crafty. So for the next week I shall be monopolising my free time with plans to make a brand new day dress, and a skirt for work! So keep checking in on this blog to see how my sewing goes and whether I can finish this dress by the end of the week (I've been badly making a practice run over the last two weeks so hopefully I'll be ready to make the real thing now!).

Blue flowery fabric: vintage flea market bargain for the dress.
Cream flowery fabric: local fabric shop find for the skirt.

Mechanical Marvels...

I'm not very good at remembering to wear jewellery, I have lots, and I always take some on holiday or if I'm going away for a weekend, but when it comes to putting it on I just never remember. 

I find it often gets in the way, beautiful bracelets that dangle around your wrists end up getting stuck in jumpers or bashed against almost every solid surface I pass by. Necklaces get stuck to other necklaces or tangled in knots and start to strangle me ( this happened in the middle of a yoga class on the one rare occasion I put a necklace on and then forgot to take it off... my instructor had to untangle me as I started to choke.....) or they get stuck in my hair. Earrings undoubtedly attach themselves to jumpers, scarves, hair you name it.

I wish I wore more of it, I have some beautiful pieces from friends and family, but apart from the staple studs, friendship bracelets and travel based mementoes I really am useless. I think half the time the problem is, other than looking pretty, I find jewellery has little purpose. So while stumbling around on the internet under a blanket with a cup of tea this afternoon I came across an amazing website. Dukno Yoon is a metalsmith and jewellery maker who has created some of the most incredible mechanical jewellery that simulates the movement of wings when worn.

*all images from http://www.duknoyoon.com/Wings_e.html

Now if all jewellery was like this, I think I'd be more inclined to wear it! However.... I'd probably end up being so distracted by it I'd never make it out of the house to impress any one with it! Do take a look at the website to see more of his amazing pieces.

Pasta perfection

Dinner parties with friends are some of the best possible fun. There's wonderful food, copious amounts of wine and hours and hours of mindless chatter and catching up with each others' lives. The most magical thing about them is that even though they happen so irregularly, when the company is right it is always as if you've hardly been apart. To make a magical dinner party even more perfect, this time we made ALL our food from scratch especially the pasta....

Cooking a fresh meal is satisfying on its own but hand making pasta was something else! I won't lie it was a long process (and due to certain guests insisting the wine be opened before we started, it certainly took even longer than planned!) but it really was so much fun! Combining flour and eggs is all there is to it, then there is lots of kneading to be done and having many hands makes that a quicker process.

Then there's the rolling.... a pasta machine makes this an easy process but again a long one! Rolling pasta however is not only great fun, involving everyone in the kitchen as each chunk of dough gets stretched out to be about 2 metres long, its a lovely thing to play with. It feels like soft leather in your hands, it is so thin in the end, but still it feels strong and almost waxy.

On our first attempt at slicing the pasta we rolled the dough up and just roughly chopped it then tried unrolling it. This wasn't so successful as it all stuck together....it also didn't produce the most beautiful pasta! It certainly looked home made!

Our more successful attempts used the tagliatelle cutter on the pasta machine and this produced such beautifully even strips of pasta that we continued to use it for the final chunks of dough. All the pasta was then hung up on the drying rack to crisp up before cooking.. a hilarious sight to see in the middle of the kitchen!

Most importantly.... the taste. Fresh pasta is amazing, I'd never had it before but it is so light, fresh and juicy I really would recommend making your own! If you don't have a pasta roller, you could easily make ravioli rolled with a rolling pin and chopped up with something tasty inside. Our beautiful pasta was served up with a lovely home made tomato sauce, goats cheese and meatballs. Simple. Delicious.

Brioche Success!

The second instalment from my French cookery extravaganza was La brioche aux praline de Josephine and my goodness was it a success!

It rose beautifully, baked well and tasted amazing. I've never made a brioche cake/bread before and I was pleasantly surprised how well this attempt turned out. It wasn't a quick process, once the dough was made, its spent a day and a night in the fridge in the end (it should have only had a night), then it was rolled out, folded and re-rolled a few times. Next the filling was added and the dough was  rolled into a sausage, chopped up then left for a further 3-4 hours to rise somewhere warm. But it was totally worth it...

For the filling I used a bar of dark chocolate with fruit and nuts in which I crushed up then sprinkled on the flat dough before rolling it into a sausage, this was a lovely almost-healthy-filling..... The recipe asked for pralines however I couldn't find a translation that really explained what this was so we improvised with chocolate!

Most importantly... the bake was so good there wasn't a soggy bottom in sight and with friends round for dinner it also didn't last long.

Baking The Unknown

So here is my first foray into French pudding baking! Taste wise, a total success, everyone enjoyed this recipe Les tuiles aux amandes (Almond tuiles). However, this cookery book has no pictures whatsoever.... so those final preparation and presentation points are all left to guess work!

I've never made/seen tuiles before so I wasn't sure how they should look and my first attempt saw me trying to wrap them up too tight (around a wooden spoon) rather than merely curling them (over a big rolling pin) so shape wise, in the end I just left them as flat biscuits!

The sneaky technique of giving them a lovely dusting with icing sugar did however cover all manner of sins and finished of a lovely dessert. I'll definitely bake this one again and next time I might make a tasty little sauce to drizzle on the top too.....

2013 has some BIG boots to fill

New years resolutions. 

I never usually buy into them, mostly because I'm not fussed about celebrating NYE so I normally drift into January on a Christmas come-down focused only on short term goals. In the past those goals have revolved around university. 2012 was a brilliant year and has left behind some big boots to fill. 2013 however, has left me feeling a little unsettled already. This is the first year of post education life and I've been working in a 'proper job' as every one describes it since September, for the foreseeable future. The next few years of my life are no longer split up into years at university, terms and holidays, essays and exams and as delightful as this new pressure free life is, I feel like I'm drifting towards a completely unknown goal, or simply just drifting.

With no impending Olympic fever to look forward to (wasn't summer 2012 just amazing?), no end-of-uni-celebrations/trips/shenanigans to break my year up I just don't know what to look forward to. So for the first time in as long as I can remember, I'm jumping on the resolution bandwagon.....and I'm really looking forward to it!

I currently have very little planned for this year, no gigs to look forward to so far, no trips planned and no life changing career plans so I'm seriously going to have to make this year as exciting as I can. So, 2013 is to be my year, as I make it, and this blog will form one of my resolutions, as well as document the rest of them.

So those resolutions....

1. I'm going to cook more. I promised my mum when I moved home I'd cook once a week and that lasted a month at most. I have this wonderful French cookery book I bought in France a few years ago and it is dedicated solely to puddings so every week I'll be cooking a different pudding from this book. Not only will this test my cooking skills but my understanding of French. (As a warning it should be noted most of my cooking attempts are exciting to say the least...)

2. By Easter I'm going to open an Etsy shop full of beautiful things I've made and start directing my crafting skills into something useful.

3. That age old favourite... get fit. Last Easter I ran a marathon in my fastest  time yet of 5h32, for me a real achievement.  In the summer I cycled 180 miles from home to Cornwall, and since then I've done NOTHING. So I shall hop back on that bike and sort my life out. I work 14 miles from home and by March I will be cycling to and from work at least once a week.

That's all for now. I think three is enough to be going on with, especially as they are long term goals. I think it will be a better success story if I can continue all three of these throughout the year, rather than take on 13 different goals that I will undoubtedly only drop along the way.

So, 2013 blog post number one done. Watch this space for a weekly update on all things crafty and inevitable cookery disasters.