Painting Things

It has been a long hiatus from blogging. (not that I was regular at all to begin with !) I wouldn’t say I’ve been totally lazy these past months, but I sure am relaxed. 

I’ve always been fairly decent at ‘Looking and drawing’. I decided to step things up a notch and started watercolor painting. I found a few great tutorials online. The tutorials showed me that what we all used to do in Art class ( keep daubing paint water till the paper tore or the bell rang) was pretty much the opposite of what one is supposed to do. 

Here is a picture of a tea pot next to a picture of an orange and a teapot

Curtain Makeover

The old orange curtains that I bought when we moved into our first apartment 2.5 years ago were a constant eyesore. However, I cannot take them down because we have far too many nosy neighbors, random construction workers and what look like slum dwellers’ children meandering about the house. Gated community.. pish tosh!

Fabric Pens!

So I dug out a stencil and a fabric pen from the depths of my craft drawer ( yes, I have a lot of storage space in the new flat – remind me to tell you about my shoe room).

One episode of Bones and some vigorous stenciling later:

<drum roll please>

Crepe Squares with Ham

I was browsing Martha Stewart’s website a couple of weeks back, morbidly fascinated by the fact that a convicted felon was telling me how to decorate for Christmas. (tee hee)

I shortlisted a bunch of recipes and then promptly forgot about them all.

Then on the 24th of December, I decided I would celebrate Christmas after all, and went grocery shopping. The only thing i remembered from the recipe was the title and I thought to myself “must get HAM”

Recipe

As the name suggests, the recipe has two major parts

Express Christmas

We had a plastic Christmas tree at my parents’ house. The neighbours had  given it to us when they moved back to USA .  I toyed with the idea of buying one here after the husband hinted that he never had a tree, ever! But the insane rates bothered me. In Kerala, one traditionally hangs a paper star with a bulb. I did that last year, because of my love of giant shiny things. It hung around till April or so

So one fine Sunday, 2 days before Christmas , I dropped the husband off to see The Hobbit : An Avoidable Boredom and pottered around the malls for a good 3 hours.

Granita / Sorbet

On a whim, ignoring common sense, i made a lemon granita.

Everything happened rather quickly. I saw the lemons idling in the fridge: Scrape cut squeeze mix freeze. Then came the gentle afterthought. When on earth will I get around to finishing 600ml of crushed ice dessert in the winter?!

I prodded the dessert in the direction of the husband yesterday night and he munched it all away without even glancing at the cup. I wonder what that says about my cooking in general

Oh well! Here is the recipe. It barely takes 5 minutes to do, not counting freezer time.

• As much sugar as you have lemon juice
• Water : around 8 times the juice
• grate the lemon rinds
• Boil the water, Add the sugar.
• Stir till it dissolves.
• Add this to the lemon juice. Top it off with the rinds.
• Freeze.
• Check in every couple of  hour and stir the liquid ice mixture. OR If you cannot be bothered / have other things going on in life, you could process the frozen block by blitzing it in your food processor, or by scraping with a spoon till you have the snow like consistency that one is looking for

You could eat / drink it on its own . or top it off with soda / liqueurs..

Cheers!

Beetroots Crisps in 7 minutes

Warning – Do not attempt on an empty stomach. You will end up eating every batch as it comes out of the microwave!

The end product tastes just like regular potato chips, but i just love the color.. reminds me of dried rose petals!

Joy !

I just had a whirlwind crafting day! I opened about ten tabs from Pinterest and ended up doing 7 crafty things

Here is the first:

I had been seeing these 

on the interwebs for nearly a year. But the old apartment was too gloomy to illuminate with lamps! We had to rig up the flat with super bright CFLs. The new flat is super large and very very bright, Here’s what I did:

Jewelry Display

I’ve had pieces languish in the depths of drawers for years – never worn, always regretted. So I picked up two wire hangers and hung it all out!

Put your jewelry Out There!

I don’t necessarily wear it more often, but my cupboard looks quite pretty now!

Fun Way to Separate Yolk from White

So this cool way to separate egg yolks has been doing the rounds on Pinterest and everywhere else on the interweb lately. ..And I couldn’t resist sharing!

Personally, I would still continue to use my fingers to separate yolks – It is much easier and you are left with one less dish to wash!

Tiny Things I’m Grateful For

 

… while I lolled on the sunny lawns.