Weekend Baking: Lime Tart

I made a lime tart this weekend and I did something wrong when I made the crust. It's actually the second crust I made for this thing and it still didn't turn out right. The recipe came from Donna Hay's Flavours and you make a sweet shortcrust pastry and blind bake it (first with pie weights) before you put the filling in so the wet filling doesn't turn the crust to mush. My crust did not come out flaky which is what a shortcrust pastry should be, it was dense and chewy. I found a wikipedia entry that says:

"In both sweetcrust and shortcrust pastry, care must be taken to ensure that fat and flour are blended thoroughly before liquid is added - this ensures that the flour granules are adequately coated with fat and are less likely to develop gluten. Overworking the dough is also a hazard. Overworking elongates the gluten strands, creating a product that is chewy, as opposed to 'short', or light and crumbly."

Perhaps this was my problem. I think that need to get a food processor. Ever since my old one broke years ago I have been making do without one, but I think the time has come to acquire another appliance. I have also seen a lot of recipes that use both shortening and butter where I only used butter. I am starting to think that it may be a good idea to research this sort of thing before I start baking...

Aside from the crust, the tart was really really good and I would make it again. The filling part was super easy aside from squeezing the nine million limes. Oh! Another lesson learned - when a recipe calls for eggs, it may be a good idea not to use JUMBO eggs. I had about a cup of extra filling that didn't make it into the tart.

Garage Sale Score!

These past two Saturdays I have been going to garage sales like I keep telling myself I was going to do for the past fours years. I read the listings in the Friday paper and highlight the ones that look promising. I then Google map the route. This is what I got today:

Other peoples memories. Specifically 35mm slides of a vacation through Europe sometime in the 1950's. The photos are absolutely stunning. I have been wanting to make a lampshade like these for a long time now. I am almost positive that I have an issue of ReadyMade that has the tutorial for it. I hope so at least...yikes...I should so see if I can find it....

At any rate, I want to get the images preserved digitally so I am going to take them in batches to a local place that will convert them to jpgs. I would do it myself but slide scanners are super-duper extremely pricey.

I taped a few slides to the window and took a picture with my digital camera and they didn't turn out half bad. In fact I found a tutorial on how to do this and get better results, but I don't have a tripod or a slide light box so the window will have to do for now.

Guess where this is:


The handwriting on this one says "Verona - Juliet's Balcony": (I love that car)

Amsterdam I think:


I haven't counted all of them but I am going to guess that between both cases there are about 350-400 slides. Maybe I'll make two lampshades.

A post about food

First the rant:

J and I have been talking recently about certain food items that seem to be a total rip-off in terms of what you get for the price. His main gripe is cereal, my main gripe is salsa. I was getting groceries yesterday and added another item to the list: bread. I want a healthy whole grain/wheat bread that does NOT have high fructose corn syrup in it that doesn't cost four dollars a loaf! It's almost enough to make me want to dig out the bread pans. Almost.

On to the raves:
I bought a cookbook recently that I am utterly in love with. I may have posted about it before, but it's called Hollywood Dish by Akasha Richmond. It's rare that I have a cookbook that I have tried almost every single recipe and almost every single recipe has been fantastic. This book is mainly filled with vegetarian/vegan type of dishes (a lot of soy milk and cheese) but she also has some chicken and seafood recipes. The cookbook is also a history book of the health foods movement in Hollywood and it's really fascinating. I highly recommend checking this book out and seeing if it's for you.

I really try to make a menu and shopping list for a few days when I get groceries in order to save money. It seems like if I have to go to the store to get one night's worth of food I end up getting a lot of other things I don't need and end up spending too much money. I read about a service in the paper a while ago that I have tried out and really like. It's called Relish. It's about five bucks a month to subscribe, and each Thursday you get a PDF to download that has five days of main dishes and a side dish to go with each. They have the shopping list on one page and they try to make the whole menu cost about $80 for the five days, which I have found is usually about right. Each meal is coded (A, B, C, D) so if you don't want that meal you don't buy the items with that letter next to it. My only gripe about it, and I feel bad for griping because it's a great service, is that it's a little too meat focused. I understand why they do this in order to appeal to the average family, but some weeks I just can't deal with the all of the meat. The recipes are easy, and I have found them to be really good. They are coded to let you know if you need to marinate all day, or use the crock pot, and if some would need to be adjusted for children's taste buds. Try the free trial and see what you think.

This may be to soon to rave about since I just found this but I recently stumbled across this website's food section and have been printing recipes like a mad woman. I have made a couple of recipes so far and they have both been great. The recipes are collected from a variety of different sources, but they are all vegetarian and more health minded than most. The Italian Supper Dumplings are fantastic, as is the Venus' Onion and Goat Cheese Tart. I'll keep you posted.

Little Doors

I was talking to my mom on Mother's day about how I wanted to make a small door to put at the base of the cherry tree to add a bit o' whimsy to my yard. I LOVE little doors. One of my favorite scenes in Alice in Wonderland (Disney version) is when she can see the garden through that little door before she drinks the potion that shrinks her.

I was talking to a friend about this over coffee recently and she sent me this fabulous link to Urban Fairies. These are places where people have added little doors, sometimes more, to their houses and places of business. That's just awesome.

But my fairy, or gnome, or whatever is going to be a garden dweller. I am going to do some research into miniature gardens with Liquid Sky Art as my inspiration and I have been transplanting moss from all over the yard to the area around the cherry tree. I am slowing turning this into a woodland garden, I have ferns, hostas and that little blooming thing in the lower right hand corner is wild bleeding heart.

Here is a close up of the hole itself:

I want to make a little shiny red door with what looks like iron hinges and a doorknob. Sort of like these. When we get the flagstone to pave my raised bed area I am going to a little extra and break it into small bits to pave the walkway I have created. I was telling mom about my idea and she started to tell me about the miniature door she had made. I had completely forgotten that she was going to do this! Her door is twice as big as mine will be, I think she said it's about a foot or so tall:

It's right on the edge of the pond, you can see the beginning of it in the lower right hand corner. She made the door out of weathered boards and the door knob is an old drawer pull. The fish was scavenged from something else and the hinges are painted on, and I think there's a little bell there too. Here's a close up:

I can't believe how great that turned out! Although... Mom, question - how does whoever lives here get in or out? His little door is blocked.

Thinking about decorating

I have been thinking a lot about the house lately and how I really admire the homes I see of people who somehow manage to pull it all together. Like Stef's beautiful home Scarlett. (I would kill for that kitchen!) We have been living here for almost two years and our home still looks like we just moved in, meaning we still have the ugly orange carpet, hideous drapery, original grotesque paint, empty rooms with little or no furniture, and the furniture we have is mismatched - and not in the funky good way. I know it takes time (and money) and blah, blah, blah, but there are some things that I could be doing that I am not. Call it laziness or being too busy, it's probably a combo. At any rate Once School is Over* and I get a wee break I am going to focus on the things I can do to make our house more of a home. Like paint! And put art on the walls! Jeff often complains that there is none of my art on the walls. I think about that a lot and I just don't know what I want! Where do I start? I have no idea. We don't have family pictures anywhere either, I don't have any frames and I really don't have a lot of knick-knack type stuff and what little I do have is all congregated in the same spot. Basically what I am saying is that I need more junk.

And some vases. I have NO vases. Our lilac tree is blooming:

and I wanted to bring some of that wonderful smell into the house and I realized after I hacked off some blooms that I had nothing to put them in. I had to use my Eva pitcher which totally works in a pinch but I was wishing I had more containers to choose from. I put the pitcher on my bedside table and even though the rest of the room is empty looking and is the home of the elliptical machine this little spot is a little beauty oasis in an otherwise aesthetically barren room:
Not to mention the smell..heaven!

*Once School is Over - I find myself saying this a lot lately about some of the things I want to do that I haven't had the time, like sewing, cooking, painting and other crafty-arty related business.

School Progress

It's getting down to the wire! I have about a week and a half before school is over and I still have a ton of stuff to do. In the mean time here is the latest assignment from my Color and Design class: a Mandala painted in gouache. I am still leery of this medium but it's getting easier. The scan doesn't convey how beautiful and bright the colors are in person, which is a bummer.

This is from Analysis of Form, rendering a portrait in charcoal from a photograph. I have found out that I absolutely LOVE working with charcoal. I am going to experiment more with it over the summer, maybe figure out how I can incorporate it digitally.

Weekend baking

Chocolate cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing = yum