A Thank You Card

I've been trying to do this embossed resist technique that looked really cool (I used regular paper so I didn't need the gesso step - if you don't want to watch the gesso step, start two minutes in on the video). I didn't think this card turned out to be a masterpiece but it's plenty nice for thanking someone! I would like to try this a few more times with different inks and stamps and see what all I can make with this idea!

Working

It was a wedding work weekend for me. I am the church representative/coordinator for rental events at our church in downtown Austin. That turns out to be mostly weddings.

I realized I never write about my weddings; even though they can be quite interesting, it doesn't seems like it's usually my story to tell. This one was challenging because of a family tragedy the week of the wedding, but it was very beautiful. I thought I would at least share some pictures of the flowers!

1981 and 2010

Deanna, 1981

Zack, 2010

Don't these two photos need to go together on a scrapbook layout? One of the things I have realized recently is that the kind of scrapbooking I want to do is the kind that makes connections and tells stories close to my heart.

So far, I've done baby books, gift albums, and mini albums about trips or holidays. I have been thinking about what is going to happen when I get the baby books done. Although I love to make pages with pictures from a holiday or birthday party, I am not excited about the idea of trying to put all the events we attend in scrapbooks. I would always feel behind and I'd end up writing about birthday parties and not the things I want to write about.

These two photos are more the kind of thing I want to write about. My bookworm-nature was a major aspect of my life as a child and I see some of the same tendencies in Zack. His personality is so different in a lot of ways (so boy!) but I wonder how he'll be the same.

Special thanks to my sister who has been scanning our family photographs!!

He's the King...

... of books, I guess?

It's a prestigious position around here. Better than king of ratty old recliners that I should have already gotten rid of.

Beef Bourguignon

I made something I've never made before: beef bourguignon. Although this looked mighty tasty back when I saw the movie Julie and Julia, I didn't actually consider making it. French food's a little intimidating to me. And there are so many versions of the recipe out there that I didn't have any idea which to use.

But last week we were at Costco (that bastion of fine and artisinal foods) and we tasted a beef roast with balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes that was really good. James suggested hopefully that I could make roast like that. I laughed, because I don't like roast and never make it, yet he never quits suggesting it. He likes nice traditional food. I like what has been called "weird food", although I tend to think of it as interesting food. I like strong flavors and new tastes. It occurred to me that maybe I could make a roast that was both strongly flavored and well, still roast.

I did want to at least try. James has been running even more than usual in preparation for an upcoming singing performance, but he's been making the extra effort to come home for dinner so that even though he's out late and I'm doing double-duty, we still have the family dinner time that we believe is so important. I was thinking of his extra effort when I made him his "bland fish" dinner he was so pleased with and thinking of it again when I bought a nice roast, not knowing exactly what I'd do with it.

I was thrilled to find a version of Beef Bourguignon in Everyday Food - now it wasn't intimidating at all. I know they call it "beef stew", but to me it's really roast with lots more flavor and the gravy already made. I will admit that while I was making it I was cursing the French ("leave it to the French to make roast this time consuming!"). It took a little longer than I had planned, but that's because I talked myself into also making mashed potatoes and a fresh batch of bread dough. Nothing about the recipe was difficult. There were no complicated techniques. The steps just took time to step through.

When we ate it I had to give the French their props: "Leave it to the French to make roast this good."

Anyone up for trying it?

The Everyday Food recipe is in the March 2010 issue but I have provided an altered version here. There are a few reasons I had to make changes: First, I believe it has a small error in that it tells you to drain off all but 1T fat after cooking the beef (there wasn't any to drain) and not after cooking the bacon (reducing to 1T would have been perfect). Also, 3 lb. of meat was just too much for our family. We want to have leftovers, but not so much that we get sick of eating it before it's gone! So, I cut the recipe in half (with slight alterations like keeping the full amount of garlic). Finally, I don't have a dutch oven so I used a skillet and then transferred everything to a baking dish. If you are trying this and you have a dutch oven, you can do everything in that one pot.

Recipe: Beef Bourguignon

1.5 T olive oil
8 lg. button mushrooms, quartered
1.5 lb. boneless beef rump roast, cut into 1" pieces
coarse salt and fresh black pepper
2.5 strips bacon, cut into 1" pieces
1/2 T tomato paste
1 T flour
1.5 c dry red wine
1 c low sodium chicken broth
1 bay leaf
1 lg. garlic clove, smashed and peeled
2 lg. carrots, peeled and cut into 1" pieces
5 oz pearl onions
1T butter, cut into pieces
1T fresh parsely, chopped

Preheat oven to 350.

In a heavy skillet, heat 1/2T oil over medium-high. Add mushrooms and cook until browned, about 10 min. Remove and reserve until end of recipe.
Season beef generously with salt and pepper and add 1 T oil to skillet. Brown beef, in batches if necessary, and remove from skillet.
Cook bacon until crispy. Remove all but 1T fat. Add tomato paste and cook, stirring, 30 sec. Add flour and cook, stirring, 30 sec. Return beef to pot. Add wine, stock, bay leaf and garlic. Bring to a boil. Use the liquid to get all the brown bits off the bottom of the pan, then transfer to a deep covered baking dish.
Bake 1.5 hours.
Add carrots and onions and cook until all is very tender, 1-1.5 more hours. Add mushrooms 15 minutes before cooking is complete.
Finish with butter (optional) and parsley.

Good made ahead and reheated on stovetop or in oven. Can serve with roasted new potatoes.

Lettuce Harvest

James' garden is really churning out lettuce these days! It's very tasty and I'm enjoying it, but whereas earlier I was only picking a bit at a time so as not to decimate the crop, now we have much more than we can eat.

We harvested as much as we had energy to clean up and took it to my weekday church class. It was lovely to share.

Any other locals want some lettuce?

Playing around with Photoshop Elements

I recently purchased Photoshop Elements 8 and I'm excited to start using it. One of the things that is new to me is the "Actions". If I'm getting the gist of it, it's like a macro in Excel - using the Action automatically performs a series of adjustments on an image (if I don't have that right, chime in). I just installed a set of actions free from Pioneer Woman.

Check out the pretty results! The original is in the upper left; all the others are altered using the actions in her set. Can't wait to try some more stuff!

Funky Chicken Coop Tour

We spent Saturday morning taking in the eastern half of the Funky Chicken Coop Tour of Austin. We would have loved to see all of it, but ran out of time before we had to get Sammy home for a nap. If you wanted to see a little but couldn't make the tour, you can get a little taste of it by visiting the coops and garden at the Eastside Cafe, which are open for walkthroughs. We also saw the Green Gate Farms, a CSA in east Austin. The pigs and the gigantic rooster in the top two pictures on the left are from there.

It is so neat to see people working chicken ownership into their regular neighborhood backyards. The coops don't smell and the chickens aren't noisy (though a rooster would be). They eat the eggs and enjoy watching the chickens with their funny mannerisms. The owners were so pleasant with the kids and happy to share their methods. One even gave Zack an Americauna egg (the pretty blue ones)! Maybe someday that will be us - we can dream!

Easter

If this is our family Easter picture, does that tell the story of our day? As we were driving to church it occurred to me that this might be the only time we were all clean and wearing our easter outfits and I hadn't taken a picture. So this was the backup. And although we later got some pictures of all of us, this does tell a bit of the story: we were all happy and healthy, it was very good, and it was very busy.

We had a really lovely day. We enjoyed the brunch, egg hunt and worship service at our church so much and then we had a wonderful lunch and egg hunt at James' parents' house.

I want to show some pictures of our Saturday here as well, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Hope your weekend was fabulous!

Quite the getup

This was a stay-in-jammies day for Zack. But that didn't mean it had to be boring! Oh no, he had on the full dressup combo over the jammies. Made me laugh, but he did not want to pose for a picture.

For Austinites...

The Funky Chicken Coop tour is tomorrow. These are photos from our visits last year. It was fun and we felt we were doing our part to Keep Austin Weird.

Check it out!

A Spring Salad

This was just an Everyday Food recipe that I didn't even make according to the recipe, but boy was it good! I made James a dinner that was mostly what I call "bland food" (and he calls "just right") so I had to toss in one zingy dish for my tastebuds. I'm sure you can look up the original recipe, but here's what I did. It was a great spring taste and Sammy liked it too (Zack was just medium about it).

Mango Cucumber Salad
2 small yellow mangoes, peeled, sliced off the seed, and chopped
1/2 of a medium cucumber, peeled, deseeded and chopped
few sprigs cilantro, minced
lime juice (half a juicy lime or all of a drier one)
2 t extra-virgin olive oil
salt
pepper

Mix all ingredients and season lightly with salt and pepper.

Money-Pocket

This boy loves money. Not in the root-of-all-evil way, he just wants some for his pocket. He has no concept of buying things or what money is for, but as soon as he could say words he started saying "Pocket. Money-pocket." and pointing to coins. Nothing (well, except cookie-bites) makes him happier than being given one coin for each pocket. He's very proud of them. I think he believes his pockets are fulfilling their true purpose if he can put a nickel in each. Or more likely he thinks it makes him like Daddy!

A Spring Card

My friend and stamp teacher, Cheryl (here's an an example of her work), challenged her group this past month to make a spring card using a theme of circles. Here was mine.

I made the flower a while ago so it was time to get it onto a card. I used a resist technique to create raised circles on the pink background circle of paper, but the effort doesn't show much (here's an example and video that shows a much more dramatic result). In person it shows more that the main areas of that pink circle paper are slightly lighter and sparkly. One thing I like about this card is that green raffia, partly because of the color but partly because was a bit of trash off something else - that kind of reuse makes me happy.

Al Fresco

This was one of those evenings that looks delightful on paper. Steaks on the grill, beautiful weather, everyone out on the picnic table, even flowers my son picked out for me for no occasion. It should have been the perfect outdoor dinner, right? Do you think I'll look back at this picture in a couple of years and remember it that way?

Because right now, all I am thinking is how James refused to put my steak on later than his and I didn't like how it was cooked but couldn't define why and how I set the bread on fire under the broiler and how I hid the strawberries so that Sammy would eat some real food but then James un-hid them so that Sammy spent the entire meal refusing to eat food and whining for strawberries and nobody liked my roasted corn and black bean salad but me and Zack refused to smile for the first eight pictures and... you get the idea.

Maybe we should try again. After we've built up our energies, maybe.

Train Cake

Lately I've been feeling really desperate to write, but then for some reason I haven't been writing here. Instead I've been moping around about how I don't have any good ideas for writing fiction (yes, I know the real answer is to just start putting words on the page. sigh.).

So, I started looking back through my pictures for stuff I might post about and realized I hadn't shown Sammy's train-shaped birthday cake. This cake turned out cute but it was not easy. I was rather frustrated with the quality of my work while I was frosting it. Of course later, the imperfections of the little icing stars don't show at all. I even had trouble with them not sticking to the side of the cake. I was in a hurry, though, so I just powered through and now I'm glad I did because the difference wouldn't have shown anyway.

The engine was a Wilton pan borrowed from a friend (thanks!). The little coal car and flatbed cars were made of the extra cake batter that didn't fit in the train pan. I put it in a mini-loaf pan and then cut the top third off the resulting cake so that I'd have two cars. Oreos for wheels and crushed oreos for coal and voila! Let's pretend it was all so easy!

At least Sammy was really excited about his "choo choo happy bir-day cake". That made it worth all the trouble.

Hold off a little longer, green!

That's something I never expected to say! As much as I believe the desert is beautiful, I usually put green and growing at the top of my list of what is valuable in landscape. But that was before I lived somewhere with redbud trees. These are such jewels in the already lovely landscape of Austin. They burst into bloom in the earliest part of spring and last a beautifully long time. But my favorite thing about them is the seeming determination in the way the flowers emerge directly from the trunk.

It has been more than a week since the bradford pear tree, already covered in new leaves, lost its flowers in a sudden and highly localized snowfall of white petals. I want the redbud's green to wait as long as possible before it covers the fuchsia flowers.

Star of Texas Fair and Rodeo

James took a day off work, just for a little break, and we decided to check out the Rodeo. When I was a kid in Arizona we got "Rodeo Weekend" off of school - two days at the end of February. We never actually went to the rodeo, though - we went skiing. If only that had been an option for us this year! Still, we had a fun day together.

Zack selected his own outfit and he fit right in. We alternated between a few scheduled events and the kids tent. Nothing was blow-you-away-fabulous, but it was fun. We saw the puppet show, a cow milking demonstration, the petting zoo, some of the livestock auction, some cow-herding dogs doing their contest runs and the pig races. The puppet show was just a couple of songs and a few bad jokes from a stationary puppet, but the kids liked it. We all liked the petting zoo, though we steered clear of one baby goat that was eating all the kiddies' shirts! The livestock auction was a little bewildering - we don't know much about it so we had no idea why two identical-looking cows fetched three or sixteen thousand dollars. I liked the dogs herding the cows through various spaces. It was pretty entertaining, actually! Although I have to admit the pigs were pretty cute racing, it did feel a bit surreal that I was sitting in packed stands, watching four pigs run in a circle. They even succeeded in making Zack long for a plastic pig nose for the low price of only one dollar (he didn't get it). We stopped in between things to listen to a little music, but there wasn't much going on at the time. I know there were great concerts at other times. It was neat just to walk through the livestock area and look at all the animals.

The Fair part of it was kind of an exercise in parental denial. Everything, from the rides to the food, is designed to make the kids want it (well, not just the kids). Zack wanted everything from all the food-on-a-stick to the pony rides to the Ferris wheel. Everything is purchased in tokens and the tokens are one dollar. It seemed like we could spend a ridiculous amount or spend the day saying "no" twenty times in a row. We got tired of that pretty quickly so we let Zack pick one thing to do - he chose the Ferris wheel. He was so excited. He insisted he wanted to hold his tokens in line, even though we said if he lost one he'd be stuck without enough to ride (there's a scary statement for a parent to make knowing it will be miserable to follow through!) Thankfully, he kept hold of his tokens through the entire line and I went with him - what a beautiful day! He said it was just as great as he thought it would be.
Overall, I thought it was a great family activity, and with the "pick one" approach, not too expensive. Most days there is some way to get free parking or admission or both, though we paid for our parking and partial admission (James wasn't willing to wear a pink shirt just to get in free. I did my part- I don't know what his problem was!). If you are going to do a lot of the rides, it would be a full day activity, but with the little ones we weren't. That made it just right for a half day. I think we'll be back in future years!

"Sammy do it!"

I guess all toddlers have some particular way of saying they want to do things themselves. Sammy's is "Sammy do it!". Anytime he doesn't want help, it's "Sammy do it!"... and when he gets frustrated and wants help after all, it's "Mommy do it" or "Daddy do it". When the activity in question has anything to do with sweet food, he goes into excited-mode, in which he tenses all over the the point of shaking and it becomes "SAMMY DO IT!!" with his lips pulled back past the point of smiling so that his bottom teeth show.

That was the case last night when he had a "vita-mix treat" (which is just a fruit smoothie made in the industrial strength blender we love so much). He was so adamant we just let him do it himself, and he did a great job. By the time he had only a half-inch of smoothie left in the bottom of his cup, I was cleaning the kitchen and not paying a lot of attention (cue the ominous music, right?). I'm thinking it was at that point that he was tipping the cup toward him but pushing the bottom of the straw away from him and not getting any smoothie. He must have tried to just drink it out of the cup because the next thing I knew he was saying "dip it? dip it?" and trying to use his straw to dip into the puddle of smoothie on his shirt. I poured the last drip into his mouth while singing out, "all done!" then quickly pulled his shirt off, hoping I could carry him upstairs without making my own shirt into a smoothie puddle... only to find he was happily soaked head to toe. Even his socks were full of smoothie!

I guess that's just how Sammy does it.

The Angels are Singing

We've made a major breakthrough at our house. It may not sound like it, but it's HUGE:

The children are playing outside by themselves.

The clouds are opening and a single shaft of divine light is shining down on me! Yes, that is the voices of the angels! The times of, "Boys, go out and play" can begin! Oh sure, someone will get injured after six minutes, but that would have happened anyway. This way I can do some amazing task like, oh, say... clean the kitchen.

These milestones are mixed blessings. Moms always feel some sadness at the little ways in which the baby isn't a baby any more, the small losses of dependence on the mommy...
But wait, let me think.
Nope, I'm completely happy about this.