I got to meet up with Mariko and Melissa for lunch at Pine State* Biscuits yesterday and… wow. I have to say that as a Southern girl living on the West Coast I miss the delicacies of home, and the luxury of biscuits like these in the adjoining zip code is a huge improvement to my day-to-day quality of life! Now if only I could have an occasional dose of my other favorites (fireflies, thunderstorms, Carolina home games, and hushpuppies, not to mention my family who all live three hours ahead of me), things would be perfect.

But back to the biscuits: they are awesome. I had a scrambled egg and cheese biscuit sandwich with Stumptown coffee and it was perfect for a chilly, rainy day. I was too busy eating to get a picture of my delightful food, but Mariko snapped one of me with about 2/3 of my sandwich left, and even had the willpower to photograph hers before starting in on it. Impressive! As a bonus, I got a bottle of Cheerwine to bring home, along with a biscuit for Andrew. I have not had a drop of Cheerwine in the eleven years I’ve lived out here and it was pretty fantastic… and speaking of Pine State excitement, I can’t wait for the Carolina game this afternoon, and the Davidson game tomorrow!

And on the subject of my adopted state, the always-wonderful Jill Bliss is having dual art openings in Portland tonight. Both shows run from today through April 20, and they’re both on Alberta St. From her announcement:

“the colors of nature” collaborative show with jill bliss, seth neefus and amy ruppel
reception: march 27, 7 - 10 pm
together gallery
2314 ne alberta st. in portland

“califoregon” duo show with jill bliss and brittany powell
reception: march 27, 7 - 10 pm
office pdx shop + gallery
2204 ne alberta st. in portland

Jill says, “brittany’s a native oregonian, i’m a native californian. we met at c.c.a. in san francisco a few years back and have been planning the idea of this show ever since. now that we both live in portland, it’s the perfect time to make it a reality! collaborative drawings and paper cut-outs, gocco screenprints, and postcards — all relating to our favorite things and places in our two favorite states.”

p.s. Just wanted to mention that Kayte of Love Forever is doing a fun contest this week to celebrate the release of Bead Simple: just comment on this post and tell her about your favorite piece of jewelry, and she’ll pick a winner to send a copy of the book to on Friday. Don’t miss her beautiful Lacy Trio Earrings on page 39, too!

*the nickname for my native state, North Carolina.

Happy 2008! I hope your New Year has been fabulous so far. Mine has involved a nice long walk, a holiday milkshake from Burgerville (Andrew and I used a 2-for-1 coupon in the Chinook Book, if you want to jump on that too) and a big pot of black-eyed peas for luck. Maybe you can take the girl out of the South, but you sure can’t take the South out of the girl — I wouldn’t think of missing them on New Year’s Day and I’m making collard greens to go along with them too.

I’ve heard that each black-eyed pea you eat on New Year’s Day is 1) an extra-lucky day in the upcoming year, 2) an extra dollar in the New Year, or 3) just general good luck all the way around. So regardless of your preferred superstition, I figure it’s well worth eating a bunch today. If you want to make some too, here is the way I like to cook them:

New Year’s Day Black-Eyed Peas

Soak a pound of dried black-eyed peas — I put them in a saucepan, cover them with water, and let them boil for five minutes, then take them off the heat, cover them tightly and let them sit for 2 hours. Drain and rinse them well and then cover them with about an inch of water again. Add one chopped onion and bring everything to a boil for 15 minutes, then simmer them for about an hour to an hour and a half, tasting them for done-ness along the way.

Now, when they’re just about done, is when you add the extras: salt, pepper, and olive oil to taste, and two cans of stewed tomatoes. Let them cook for another ten minutes and serve with greens and rice. Then get ready for your extra luck to kick in this year!

Speaking of the new year, inspired by Linda’s beautiful photo collage, I just put together a mosaic of my favorite things I made in 2007:

Last year I crafted my first two quilts (that was exciting — I was nervous about the first one especially), two sets of curtains, a jewelry box, lots of fund-raiser earrings, a monkey costume, some Gocco projects, a handful of refashions, and some baby presents. This mix doesn’t have much of my jewelry, or any of my Bead Simple projects, but you can see plenty of those in March when the book is out in the world. I can hardly believe that it’s so soon… yay!

After a grueling few days, we are happily moved into our new house, and I’m still trying to catch my breath a little bit… but we have unpacked three rooms (and counting!). Resurrecting my craft room is first thing on my list tomorrow, since it currently looks like this:

I’ll post after photos soon, I can’t wait to have it all set up. Andrew and I decided to make that beautiful wood room upstairs a guest bedroom instead of the craft room — I think things will work better that way. This room is longer, so two Expedit bookshelves fit into it side by side… luxury! Especially nice when you have as much fabric and jewelry supplies as I do.

Happy new year, and I’m wishing you a lucky, crafty 2008!

I made a pretty gigantic batch of vegetable soup last week and just finished the last bowl today. It was such a nice color — a crazy vivid beet pink! Two quarts went out to friends, and Andrew and I polished off the rest handily.

If you want to make yourself some too, this is my very easy, very flexible recipe:

Pink Soup

You’ll need:

1 cup barley + water for cooking it
3 containers of vegetable or chicken broth
1 onion, chopped
1 bunch of carrots, chopped
1 bunch of beets, chopped
1 can of corn
1 can of Italian tomatoes, coarsely chopped
olive oil

Bring water to a boil and cook the barley for 40 minutes until it is nearly done. Drain the excess water away and add 1/2 container of broth and the onion, carrots, and beets. Bring it back to a boil and simmer it for 10 or 15 minutes. Add the tomatoes and corn and stir in the rest of the broth, bringing it back to a lively simmer. Let it cook until the vegetables are a nice consistency, and serve with Parmesan.

Makes about 10 servings and freezes well. Like most soups, it’s even better the next day…

ps: don’t forget, if you want to enter to win the Adorn craft book contest, tomorrow (Tuesday 12/11, by 5 pm EST) is the deadline!

ps 2: a warm welcome to beautiful baby Wren, who came along this morning! I have never been so happy to edit a post!

I went to a fabulous cookie exchange party at Mariko’s last night and brought two batches of spelt chocolate chip cookies, one with peanut butter and one with almond butter. It was so nice to hang out with the ladies, the babies, and the dog!

I hadn’t been feeling that holiday-ish yet and now I have this gorgeous selection of cookies to enjoy, since we all brought home a mix of them. Here’s just one half of the table of cookies:

Amy, Melissa F., Melissa L. put their recipes up this week, if you’re looking for some new delicacies to try, and I am just writing mine up now…

Here is my plate (with a bowl of vanilla ice cream alongside, of course!).

and here is my recipe:

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1/2 - 3/4 cup peanut butter or almond butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 1/4 cups white spelt flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 375°. Cream the butter, peanut/almond butter and sugars. Add the egg and mix well. Add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture and then mix in the chocolate chips.

Drop cookie dough by spoonfuls onto lightly greased baking sheets. Bake for 10-12 minutes at 375°. (Don’t overbake even if they don’t look ready after 12 minutes!)

Mariko’s Christmas tree was so pretty, I can’t wait to get ours and decorate it too. She gave me the hot tip to go to Michaels and use the 40% off coupon, so I’ll definitely be heading out there this week — I’d already scoured Fred Meyer and a bunch of vintage stores in search of a festive pink or silver tabletop tree with no luck.

Speaking of holiday cheer, I posted about some of my favorite ornaments to make over at the Adorn blog today, if you’re interested — all free online tutorials, which is nice for instant crafting. I love ornaments!

Okay, I’ve eaten three cookies while writing this so I think I better hit post before things get any crazier around here.

Things got so busy with work last week, and then it was so tempting to just take a few days off from everything for the holiday so sorry to be absent for so long! Here’s a little photo catch-up of a few of my favorite things (food and day trips) and I’ll write up some crafty stuff (Felt Club, the Sampler) starting again tomorrow…

food

The night before real Thanksgiving, we had low-key vegetarian Thanksgiving at home and it was awesome. I made acorn squash stuffed with wild rice, cherries, and cranberries along with sesame green beans. My first actual Veggie Dinnerplate entry!

Then for Thanksgiving we cooked at home and brought everything over to a potluck: sweet potatoes with maple-glazed pecans, vegetarian gravy, and stuffing with vegetarian sausage and cranberries. There was also a big piece of salmon in the oven that didn’t make it out in time for the photo:

day trip

We had a really low-key weekend, which was so nice, and then went up to Centralia, Washington yesterday to walk all over downtown, go to thrift stores, and check out the train station. It was beautiful out and we had such a nice time.

I loved the window display at Centralia Printing Co. downtown.

There are so many murals on the sides of buildings, I liked this one especially:

And the train came through while we were there!

I’ve been craving my grandmother’s pound cake for the last few days, but I’ve had no luck finding anything like it anywhere here — so today I went through all of her recipes that my mom gave me for my birthday and halved the pound cake recipe to make a batch of cupcakes. They turned out really nice, I love the crisp, buttery brown crust especially.

The traditional 1800s version calls for a pound of sugar, a pound of butter, a pound of eggs, and a pound of flour, which would make an incredibly decadent, luscious cake — but my MeeMee’s recipe is still plenty rich with a fraction of those quantities. I added chopped cherries and pecans to the “plain” batter since I had them in the house, but one thing I will do next time is cut down on the sugar a bit — it’s nice and sweet without the full amount.

This half-version makes 16 cupcakes; if you’re doubling it for a full cake, use a buttered and floured bundt pan and bake for 1 hour 20 minutes, checking on it after the first hour.

You’ll need:

1/2 cup softened butter (1 stick)
1/6 cup canola oil (optional)
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs (if doubling the recipe, use 5)
1 1/2 cups flour (I used spelt) and 1/4 tsp. baking powder, combined
1/2 cup milk and 1/2 tsp. almond flavoring (I used vanilla since I didn’t have any almond), combined
1/4 cup each chopped cherries and pecans

1. Cream the butter, oil and sugar together and add the eggs. Now alternate adding the flour + baking powder and milk + almond/vanilla mixtures, stirring well, until it’s thoroughly mixed.
2. Stir in the cherries and pecans. Fill cupcake papers about 2/3 full and place the pans into a preheated 325-degree oven.
3. Bake for 30 minutes, checking for doneness at 25 minutes. I turned the oven off and left mine in for a few extra minutes to brown.

Last Sunday’s Church of Craft meeting was the last one ever at Rimsky’s! It was a little sad to say goodbye to the house, but I am excited for the Central Library meetings, too. We all made garland flags as a thank-you to the coffeehouse for having us over to craft every month for the last three years. Here are two of my five, representing Rimsky-Korsakoffee House:

The other three I made were all dessert-themed, using some amazing, scary Poundy-esque 70s recipe cards, since Rimsky’s is such a sweets paradise. You can see a lot more garland photos and crafty details courtesy of Diane and Christina.

Some other stuff I’m excited about today:

•Amy Butler has posted free downloadable project how-tos on her website! There are some really nice things to make, like portfolios, gift tags, and cards — all of them use her new Belle and Sola patterned papers, though I’m sure you could adapt them to any styles that you like or have on hand.

•Linda has posted such a cool patchwork oven mitts project with instructions and photos. I love how hers came out! I want to make some myself, for sure, I have some Superbuzzy fabric that’s just perfect for them.

•Last, just wanted to mention that if you’re here in town, John of a broken spoke and Liza Rietz are having a grand opening party for their new collective space on Friday night. Here are the details:

Grand Opening of Liza Rietz and a broken spoke
When: August 31st, this Friday, from 5-8pm
Where: 2305 NW Savior St., Portland
There will be food, beverages, and the great Hostile Tapeover will wow you with his ability to DJ with cassettes!

Well, I’m back from a lovely, crafty, busy weekend in San Francisco! I want to post all about it tomorrow along with some pictures, but in the meantime, here are a few nice things I’ve run across online lately:

Craftlog has just created a very, very Good Thing: a searchable archive of all the Martha Stewart magazines back and current issues, Marthadex! Just type in “cupcake” or “pomegranate” and everything related will pop up instantly, organized by issue date and title. So cool. Thanks to Junior Society for tipping me off to this one.

I originally saw WalkScore on Apartment Therapy and then it was profiled on the excellent new blog Tiny Choices — I love it. Just type in your street address and the site gives your neighborhood a walking score from 1-100, based on how close necessities are and how walking-friendly it is in general. My neighborhood scored an 86! Which I can attest to wholeheartedly, since I walk it every day.

I missed the boat on this one completely, but Nancy of Belle Epoque just organized a very nice online recipe swap and posted the results: everything from mozzarella-stuffed arancini to buttermilk-cornbread soup. I’m bookmarking it right now and excited to try out some new things! Nancy, if you accept shamefully late entries for an encore, I’ll write something up soon…

[ps: if those recipe swap links above are at all weird, just go to Belle Epoque directly and look at the August 9th and 17th entries!]

One of my crafty heroes, Jean Railla, has recently started a lovely cooking/community/sheer love of food blog called Meal by Meal in which she documents her series of dinner parties, one by one. I adore food and cooking, and I am always pleased when she has a new entry up. I love her enthusiasm and storytelling, and the details she includes make her culinary adventures very warm and accessible… if the dishes do not match, so be it!

Jean is visiting the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge this month so in honor of her time here, I’d like to spotlight Meal by Meal as a honorary Northwestern production. Anyone who DIY-smokes meat outside and joyously serves it with prosecco on the lawn, with views of the river and Mount Hood, has well earned her West Coast cred in my book!

In addition to her love of food, Jean has a real sense of the generosity of craft culture — she started getcrafty.com ten years ago to foster community, and tons of crafters (including myself!) flocked to it in waves, to post about everything from marble magnets to meet-ups. I can never thank her enough for introducing me to this whole world — the front page of getcrafty is the very first place I ever published anything (aside from high school literary magazines and college essays), and the first book I ever had a craft project in was Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec, so I really credit her with the building blocks of so much of what I’ve gotten to do as a writer. And the friends I’ve made through the site are some of my nearest and dearest.

So it’s such a pleasure to read Meal by Meal, thank you for sharing your dinner parties with all of us, Jean!

Andrew just left for a month of freelance up in Portland, so last night we had a fancy (by my standards, anyway) farewell dinner, which I cooked while he finished our self-employed taxes on the fly — yes, our horrifically complicated taxes are finished in March, I love that man. His reward was stuffed mushrooms adapted from How to Cook Everything, fresh tomatoes with basil, sesame albacore tuna, and grilled asparagus. I also got a bottle of champagne as kind of a last-second splurge but it turns out that buying it put us over the top for the Ralphs wine club (whatever that is) and now we have a $10 gift certificate for wine there. So that was cool. And it turned out to be good champagne, too!

The sesame tuna was inspired by my favorite dish at my favorite restaurant here in LA, the Kitchen. I’ve ordered it so many times and I just love it. So I invented my own version and it turned out really well! The instructions (amounts, cooking time, etc.) are pretty flexible depending on how rare or cooked you like your fish — I don’t really measure things when I’m cooking, either, so I did my best to guess at it all.

No pictures of dinner last night, but here is one of the two of us having a ridiculously huge lunch at a pub in Glasgow two years ago, just so you have something to look at besides text on a white background.

Sesame Albacore

You’ll need:

two tuna steaks (I used Trader Joe’s albacore)
1 beaten egg
Black sesame seeds (I used Penzeys)
Another spice blend of your choice (more Penzeys: garlic salt and Northwoods seasoning mixed together)
Olive oil
Lemon

Two dinner plates for dredging and coating, and a frying pan for sauteing

1. Mix about three parts sesame seeds to one part other spices on a large dinner plate. You’ll need a good amount for coating several large pieces of fish — but you can always add more later though. Go ahead and pour some olive oil into a large frying pan and heat it over a medium flame.

2. Cut the steaks into large strips about an inch and a half wide and put them on the other dinner plate — two steaks turned into six strips for me. Dredge each one in the beaten egg so they’re well coated.

3. Now coat them in the sesame mixture one at a time, covering all four sides and both ends. Gently place them one at a time into the pan. If the sesame coating is sticking to the pan, add a little more olive oil. (And not to sound like your mom, but make sure you wash your hands really well to get all the raw egg off, too!)

4. Use tongs or a spatula to rotate each piece to a new side every minute or so, so each side gets a little browned, but not burnt. If you like your tuna rare, take it off the heat now. If you like it cooked through, keep rotating it over the heat for longer — you can always slice one open to see how rare the center is. When it’s finished cooking, squeeze a little lemon juice over it.

5. Serve it hot — the sesame will be so crispy and delicious.

After dinner we watched LOST (man, I thought that was a good episode — it freaked me out!) and then watched Star Wars for about the millionth time. Love Star Wars!

A bonus is that since Andrew and I are the same exact age and both grew up as huge fans of all the Star Wars movies, we always reminisce over which action figures we or our brothers or our friends had. How huge of fans are we? Well, from that same trip to Glasgow, here we are at the midnight premiere of Revenge of the Sith — five hours before anyone in the US got to see it, which was kind of cool. Not my favorite of the six but it was exciting to see it in the theater in the middle of the night anyway!

And then thanks to Pink is the New Blog, I saw that the USPS is doing a new Star Wars stamp series and turning 400 mailboxes nationwide into R2D2s to celebrate! Can’t wait to see them, I must find out where the closest one is…

p.s. Did you know that Star Wars offers free craft projects online? That almost makes up for Jar Jar Binks, as far as I’m concerned!