No more boom and bust! Sparkle and shine! Blitz!

Once you get the idea behind deep cleaning and de-cluttering you see that these are activities that can't be indulged in very often.

It's exhausting and mighty work.

You want to put it off as long as you can and not go back there once you've done it -- for a good while, at least.

Think a little differently about crafting: Anne's Quilt Project.

You were all so much fun about the knitting. I enjoyed reading all those comments, I have to tell you!

To keep up the inspiration level, I have to tell you that I made two more baby gifts using leftover patches from my goddaughter Anne's quilt. I hope you don't get tired of them. You aren't getting tired of these patches, are you? Because I see many more little gifts in my future!

 A "fancy-dress" bib -- every baby girl needs a few in her wardrobe. "I never spit up, this is just for show."

And a doll quilt for big sister:

I quilted them quickly with thick cotton thread and an embroidery needle -- took me about one dance lesson to do it! The other mothers are always like, "you and Nancy are always sewing. We should sew too." Yes, you should! If you want to!

The solid pink was leftover from Bridget's Easter dress, which I still have to show you.

Oops, that corner didn't meet perfectly! Tsk.

If you will remember (did I tell you this originally? Read about Anne's Confirmation Quilt), I made the original quilt from fabrics in my stash, exclusively. I did not go shopping to make this quilt!

Last time I made the baby bib using four leftover patches from that project. Remember that one? I know you are all memorizing my baby bibs.

See, I had made the quilt by making the squares first, before I knew exactly what I was going to do with them. It was easy using the quick half-triangle method. I made oodles of them...I'm not sure exactly how big I thought the quilt was going to be, but I wanted enough to be able to play around with them.

So I had lots left over.

I keep them separate from other scraps, and now I can just dip into them whenever I like! I'm anxious to make a little baby boy quilt with my blue squares!

I even keep pieces of leftover batting stashed away. You can easily baste them together, and no one is the wiser once they are inside the quilt. Perfect for a little one.

Since making these last little gifts, I thought I'd share with you what might be a little different approach to making things than you might be used to.
 
I myself used to think of a sewing project as something I drive to the store to get the materials for, make a mess in the dining room to sew, and then, exhausted, put it all away, sort of determined to buy, rather than make, the next dress or baby bib.

But what if you made the most of your trip to the fabric store (I live thirty whole minutes from the nearest one, although that is about to change, hallelujah!), and scoured it for things you liked every time you were there, buying this and that on sale or from the remnant bin. What if you carefully cut up usable fabric from an old blouse? What if you nabbed a good sheet at a yard sale for a backing?

Keeping in mind your storage capacities, which I realize might not be huge, what if you put the scraps from the last project in a clear plastic bin or on an open shelf so you could really see them, rather than tossing everything into a container and shoving it to the back of the closet? I hate pawing through the bin. It's so deadening to my creative juices...

Even a shallow under-bed container would be better than a deep bin.

What if your sewing machine were on a little table in a closet, under a window, or in a corner? Mine is in my pantry on an old desk I spray-painted!

I've seen a perfectly neat and tidy, well appointed little master bedroom with a sweet little sewing machine table against one wall. (I wasn't snooping -- the hosts asked us to put our coats on the bed. That's how presentable it was.)

There are many ideas online for creating a craft corner. The key is to make it pretty! If your machine is out, you won't dread it. It's only when you have to take over main living spaces that it becomes burdensome.

Knitting. You should try it.

I'm happy to say that I have met one of my New Year's goals -- to knit socks! I'm so excited about this.

I want to encourage you ladies out there, no matter how busy you are, to take up a little craft that you can slip into a bag and pull out at random times. Even if you are nursing a baby. Even if you have toddlers who like to throw your precious craft items around. The hard part is collecting everything you need in one place. Once you've done that, you're all set, even if you only look at it once a month.

If you put in the energy to get a project in a bag, you will have it for those 20-odd minutes a day everyone is otherwise occupied, and you will thank yourself, because making something beautiful is really very fulfilling, no matter how long it takes you. If you don't know what to do, ask a friend to get you an easy project going. She'll be delighted and you'll be on your way.

For years I've done a lot of quilting this way -- on the go, during ball games, in the car. I think that there are some conditions under which knitting would be more unobtrusive or safer (I don't think it's a good idea to bring pins and needles to the beach! Wince!).

I really feel I was born to knit.

Unfortunately, I seem also to have been born to rip out and re-knit. Many, many times.

I have become expert at UNknitting, in fact, an interesting side skill to add to the original one.

I decided to do both socks at once, doing the tricky part of one, then going to the other set of needles and doing that same tricky part on the other.

This was genius. Why am I so darned smart?

But I think it would help if I could count, at all. I also think it would help if I didn't constantly try to knit while talking a mile a minute to a friend, when I should be counting, or in the dark, instead of watching the movie.

Somehow I had it in mind that you can knit lickety-split without looking. And maybe if I had been knitting all my life, instead of six weeks, this would be true. And maybe if I were knitting something that didn't decrease and go around a corner, it would be possible.

I got to the end of both -- all but the very last step of grafting the remaining 16 stitches -- when I realized that sock #1 (as I fondly named it) was ALL WRONG from the beginning of the final decrease to the toe, regardless of the eighty-twelve times I had ripped it out and started again.

I had to take it all the way back almost to the gusset to get it right.

I think I could have made ten pairs of socks in the time it took me to make this one pair, had I only mastered the blankety counting.

Pretty cute, though, huh?

Are you a committed crafter?

If you have a little project you tote around even though you are busy, tell us about it in the comments! I'd love to hear your crafting ways!

Specs: Super Fine #1 75% wool 15% nylon, washable. #2 needles. The pattern is here: Self-Striping Knit Socks.

The truth about woman as bride.

If you would like to catch up, here are the other posts in this series:

1. Lenten Reading Suggestions

2. Equality is not the deepest thing.

3. In the beginning...

4. Bone of my bones.

Good Change

 

Here at LMLD we certainly don’t like change. We try to avoid it as much as possible. But we’ve been working on some much-needed updates to the blog to make it prettier and easier to navigate.

The first changes, which are mainly cosmetic but will serve the functional ones to come, should (barring any unexpected problems) be implemented later on today!

It has taken us quite some time to get this far. We have very strong opinions, we think wonderful taste, and very little experience in actually designing a blog.

 

We know what we like and we keep changing our minds. We have looked at three point two million fonts. We have set up two test blogs. We are trying to make how things look (and work) here a huge improvement. But we are babies in the world of graphic design, which we deeply respect.

So bear with us, remember that on the one hand if you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all, and on the other hand do tell us if something doesn’t seem right or isn’t working, especially later as we go along. It would be good to know how the blog appears on your computer screen, for instance. We promise not to go all advertise-y on you or in any way to change our mission, which is to maintain the collective memory!

Gateau Paris-Brest, a lament.

The comments on my previous post have led me to this one. Dear Decadent Housewife, I have to say, never should I have gotten rid of my collection of Gourmet magazines from the 80s and 90s. It was because we were moving...

 ...and now I'm trying to rebuild from used-book sales, which is silly, really. But they were so good...so much better than what followed...


After Ruth Reichl took over, I was not so fond of the direction it went in. It got very New York Times dining section-y, and mind, I love Wednesdays and my dining section, but not re-hashed into my Gourmet.

Chocolate-Orange Gateau Paris-Brest, recipe below at the end of this post.

Gourmet used to be where you could find something refined and tested, and you didn't need the frantic New York foodies breathing down your neck. Also, the writing was high quality and the art -- and later, photography -- was first rate.


In the old days, it always seemed like the food might be styled on a silver platter, but a down-at-the-heels cook wasn't beyond the editors' imagination; as if they were fine channeling the old-money comfortable, patched-sweater approach to life -- so preferable, if you are dealing with money at all, to the snobbish and slick new-money "you don't have a Wolf range??" attitude.

I felt robbed when they started the "renovating your kitchen" series, as if those who love good food necessarily have a spare $100,000 lying around for the upgrade, or, furthermore, that there aren't many publications devoted to renovation, and very few to really good yet accessible food. Way to eat up precious pages with something other than recipes!

I liked staid. I liked elegant without ironic. I liked the thought of a magazine spending months on articles about British (!) and Viennese food, along with discussions of curries and herbs that were way before their time. I liked rambling pieces on personal memories of far-off childhoods spent absorbing culinary secrets from impatient servants.

Anyway, last week I found a cache of magazines from the 50s and 60s on freecycle. Oh my! I hope to share some pictures with you...this is a bit of a setback in the de-cluttering aspect of my life, but what a joy to see these old issues!

 

Commenter Joy from the South asked for the recipe for the Gateau, so here you go. Hopefully you can click on it and read it okay. The cake came from the October 1990 issue featuring "Desserts for Entertaining" -- I ripped out the whole section for my files when I was discarding my stash. Sigh. At least I had the wisdom to do that much, because this recipe is not on the website.

{The old Gourmet two-volume cookbook has shored up my menu-planning many a long year, and now I see it's not available either! I got rid of my first set in another move, and then replaced it with a yard-sale find. Phew.}

A couple of hints: when you make the choux paste, do let the flour mixture cool slightly before adding eggs, because if it's hot enough to cook the eggs, the dough won't rise when baked. And you might think you can skip taking out any moist dough after cooking, but no, take it out, or you will get a soggy crust.

As for the filling, all I can say is that it's just really extremely good...

Easter, I love you.

Easter Sunday was amazingly beautiful. I can remember warm sunny Easters (not many), but never a day when we could just sit outside all day and enjoy the loveliness. Somehow after weeks of rain this sunshine took on a supernatural significance...

Now, not to distract from all that or anything -- I mean I know you expect deep thoughts from us here in uber-Catholic-mother-daughter-land, such as what sandals we're ordering (and I didn't even tell you which ones *I* ordered! mainly because their name is something utterly unconnected with anything else -- Arezza, who even knows what that means) -- but Easter is a day when it's hard to know what it is that you don't want to eat.

Elimination is not an option.

Do you not admire my apron from the lovely Daily Decadent?

So we have a little of everything. Having gone to the vigil the night before, we have the day ahead of us to do justice to everyone's creativity.


First is the Easter (really Panettone di Natale -- Christmas -- but let's not cavil) bread from my old Gourmet cookbook. You know those tempting Panettones they have at the grocery store -- the ones that are a little suspicious with their everlasting freshness? But they are good, aren't they? (Also the packaging is fabulous. I have been known to succumb to the Panettone tin just out of sheer materialistic covetousness -- as opposed to gluttony.)

This recipe satisfies the Panettone urge.

It comes out looking like it might be disappointingly dry, but oh no, it's not! It's remarkably toothsome and buttery, and keeps for a long time (in a trustworthy kind of way), so you can make it the day before and it will be fine. For feeding a crowd it's invaluable. Of course, had I thought it through, I could have put more than a little orange peel and some currants in it, but all was well. I'm annoyed that they don't have the recipe on the Gourmet website, because it has taken me forever to upload this scan for you. I hope when you click on it you can read it.

Somehow Gourmet recipes are the most satisfying, especially the older ones. I've been making this Gateau Paris-Brest for years, preparing the puff paste ring the day before and the chocolate ganache filling in the morning as others are trying, mostly in vain, to find their cleverly hidden Easter baskets. (The recipe is in this post about how much I miss the old Gourmet.)

For the visual and taste impact, you can't beat how easy it is.

Meanwhile, Suzanne was cooking up her ham-egg cups. Oh my. These are to die for. (Sukie posted the recipe in the comments!)

Habou makes her pecan coffee cake, for which the words "tender and moist" seem weak and inadequate...

We had some time out on the deck for sunny relaxation, even before our friends arrived. We had killer appetizers, and no, I don't mean dog treats, thought they do seem to be featured -- including Sukie's pecan, blue cheese, fig, and caramelized onion tart (she used the crust I had frozen from the rhubarb pie!), the only defect of which was its limited size, and my homemade lox with cream cheese.

I forgot to put out the pistachios, I realized yesterday.

Then I stopped taking pictures, so I can only give you a verbal description of the dinner, and another time I'll try to recreate it all with proper documentation. I must say that all my frantic work leading up to all this paid off, and I truly rested on that glorious day!

This is the menu we've had, more or less, over the years, so I'm very used to getting it all together. It really does help to have someone bring a key side dish or two, and honestly, roasting a hunk of meat is easier than a turkey, you know? Most of it, including getting the lamb ready, can be done days ahead, especially if you have a second refrigerator.

Roast Leg of Lamb. The key with any roast is to have a good size. Have you been disappointed with your pot roast? Sad about your pork? Next time get a much bigger one. So often what's for sale is just too small, emerging from the oven dried and tasteless. Fortunately I found a hefty semi-boneless leg that I cut all over with little slits, the better to receive the many slivers of garlic. Then a rubbing with olive oil, mint, thyme, a little rosemary, salt, and pepper, and in it goes at 325* with some red wine in the roasting pan.

Gravy. Degrease the juices and proceed as for pork roast gravy, adding a bit more wine or water depending on how reduced the liquid had gotten during cooking. A little salt and you're all set.

Potato rolls. These came out so light and fluffy. Any sweet dinner roll recipe will do. Just reduce the sugar a bit. The dough can be made a day or two in advance and refrigerated in roll form. Get them out on the counter to warm up a bit and bake while the roast is going -- that adds good steam for proper fluffiness.

Asparagus. I bought these on Thursday and carefully boiled them right away, to just a little short of doneness, quickly refreshing with cold water to stop the cooking, a la Julia Child. They will keep for days if you cook them, lose all flavor right away if you wait. A little toss with butter in the oven and they were perfect.

Salad of tender greens, orange sections, and thinly sliced fennel (anise). Refreshing and light, with a nice orangey vinaigrette.


Twice baked potatoes and roasted sliced sweet potatoes with whiskey (two dishes not one) both brought by our friends, which was a tasty and welcome relief to the cook.

Oh, and meat pies, using leftover pizza dough and leftover kofta mixture. They were good, although I think I could do better. I'll just have to try!

Thanks to Nick and Natasha for a regal bouquet!

Baklava (Egyptians call it Ba'lawa), made by Sukie (I did take a picture!). This comes out differently each year, and due to the helper's (my) distraction, this iteration's syrup somewhat crystallized. However, these vagaries -- a bit more crunchy than usual, a bit more syrupy than usual -- add a certain verisimilitude, because these very same things happen to the Egyptian grandmothers too!).

Gateau Paris-Brest. Sort of like a giant round eclair with a rich chocolate filling. See photo from Gourmet above!

Thinking about Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter, yes I am...

{Goodbye to the flannel. Hello to the sunshine and thrifted pillowcases to go with my patched sheets. I figured that if I was going to preach to you about the importance of the bedroom, I'd better clean mine too. And change the sheets.

Oh yes, I do things after I tell you about them. If I'm telling, I'm not doing, which is why I don't post every day ;)}

 Eggs from dear Susan's hens...aren't they gorgeous?

The Easter Triduum was amazing. Having even some of the kids come home felt like a balm after the long weeks of Lent. I know that Bridget was bursting with joy to see the returnees.

So much of how we live the spiritual side of our lives as mothers and wives has to do with how we live the feeding and clothing side. Since that's inescapable, I long ago decided to embrace it. Don't expect anything too deep or, for that matter, very timely, here.

If I show you some things here, maybe next year I can look at them again and remind myself of how much I could have done before, and avoid that panicky feeling that arises as I'm mixing dough, vacuuming long-unused rooms, and sewing an Easter dress (more about that later!).

This could work if I could get a message from the post-event me on what exactly to do...because if I've learned anything it's that I can't figure things out when it's dark and gloomy, i. e. during Lent.

It all came together, however.

For Holy Thursday I made the flatbread I mentioned here. Everyone loved it and it was indeed easy.

  

Here is the menu, which is usually the same lamb meatball idea with little variations. I liked this year's, because the dips and beets just came out again on Good Friday along with the mujadara, and that's a day that it's better not to focus on cooking.

Flatbread and Pita Bread
Greek Salad
Kofta -- I certainly could have made this in the middle of Lent on a Sunday and frozen.
Beet Salad  -- I could have made the beets days before.
Muhammara -- would freeze perfectly
Hummus bi Tahini -- I often make and freeze part of it; but why do that just before a holiday? That would be so easy...
Olives-- Opening a jar, relatively stress-free, I forgive myself for doing this at the last minute :)

This year the schedule was a bit different, so we ate before going to Mass, saving our homemade ice cream for afterward. Didn't get a picture of that, but it was beyond fabulous, even with me not really reading the recipe properly, what else is new: raspberry chocolate-chip... (I added the dark and white chocolate chips, and ended up having to make my own syrup for the raspberries, since I bought the wrong kind and not really enough. However, it was over the top.)

Did I tell you I found an ice cream maker at TJ Maxx for less than half the price on Amazon? I'm only sorry I didn't buy all the five they had...I bet you would have wanted one too :)

An almost completely frivolous post

I bought myself a new pair of everyday sandals (my old ones, which I'd worn for at least two years, were truly falling apart) on Endless.com. I love Endless, their addictive search features, free shipping, and amazing customer service. They're not paying me to say any of that, either.

But I got my sandals the other day, and am very pleased indeed. They're cute, were a reasonable (not amazing, but hey, I figure I didn't buy any last year...) price, and are very comfortable, too. But get this: look what they're called!

(That's how I knew I should buy them)

Field notes: paper-covered Easter eggs

I have great admiration and respect for people who have the foresight to plan, execute, and photograph their seasonal crafts in time to blog about them before the fact. However, I am not one of those clever souls. Luckily, Easter is even longer than Lent, and if nothing else, we can just file these notes away for next year.

(While we're on the subject of doing things ahead of time, I went to the store for our Easter candy on Thursday, and the girl at the register asked  me with a sympathetic look, "Getting in some last-minute shopping?" Seriously? You really expect me to buy candy weeks before I can actually eat it? Do I look like a crazy person to you? I don't think so.)

I made these Easter eggs on Good Friday, and would've been able to post about them before Easter had I not spent pretty much all of my time since then (going to church and) making food and subsequently eating it (for a truly decadent but make-ahead brunch, I highly recommend Creme Brulee French Toast. I used homemade bread, maple syrup instead of corn syrup in the sugar mixture, and added a healthy dose of nutmeg into the batter. We didn't have any appropriate booze on hand, so I just left that out. It is a deliciously indulgent treat).

Our current temporary living situation meant I wasn't up for ordering supplies to make psyanky, so I just blew the insides out of a dozen eggs (which insides later went into dough for cinnamon rolls, a delicious-if-I-say-so-myself lemon ginger cheesecake, and the aforementioned French toast), treated myself to a bottle of Mod Podge, and decided to try a few different ideas from Martha Stewart's Easter egg slideshow.

One of them involves covering eggs with pretty origami paper, but since I was only using what I already had, I thought it would also be pretty using these pretty paper bags which I bought (on clearance right before Valentine's Day) for another project I've been meaning to tell you about (and will soon).

I cut a strip from the bag that was a little longer than the circumference of the egg at its widest point, and a little wider than the egg was tall. I was much less precise than her directions specify, and it turned out lovely, so I wouldn't worry about being exact. Snip the paper towards the middle on both sides (leave a quite narrow strip intact in the middle), paint a strip of Mod Podge around the middle of both the egg and the paper, and then smooth the paper around the egg.

Use scissors to snip each strip at an angle, and then use the Mod Podge on both surfaces again to smooth the strips down and cover each end of the egg. Again, Martha does this very precisely, and I'm sure that if you did it her way your egg would be smoother, but I just snipped willy-nilly on one side of each strip, and didn't worry about them overlapping at the top of the egg. When I was all done I covered the whole egg in MP to seal it and give it a little shine.

I also had some colorful tissue paper on hand from wrapping baby shower gifts, so I just folded some narrow strips accordian-style and cut out some simple shapes. Then I painted some Mod Podge onto the egg and used tweezers to place the pieces in various patterns (this was a good call on Martha's part; the tweezers are key with the delicate tissue paper, especially once your fingers are covered with glue, as mine certainly were).

Again, I covered the whole egg with a topcoat of MP when it was done, which gave it a bit of shine and tacked down any loose corners.

Both of these techniques worked really well; the ones with the red and white Valentines paper on them looked very fancy and elegant, and the tissue paper is so thin that the designs look very crisp and delicate, and almost like they were painted on. These were also both easy enough that they could definitely be done with children old enough to wield a paintbrush and some glue. The tissue paper might be a little tricky for young hands, as it tended to tear when it got wet, but I imagine that any thin colorful paper would work well - I think wrapping paper would be great!

I also happened to have some food coloring in my cupboard, so I had gathered some little leaves and things to make botanical eggs and used a bit of trim to make lace eggs, but neither one was successful. The leaves and lace just didn't stick to the egg well enough to make a clean pattern like it did in the pictures (I used rubber bands for the lace and egg-white-and-nylons for the leaves, as instructed by the directions). So I just dyed them again to make them a solid color, and tried to contain my disappointment at my lack of lacy, leafy eggs. Has anyone else had any success achieving these effects? Is there some trick I was missing?

This is the whole batch of eggs, minus one more Valentines/Easter egg that somehow didn't make it into the carton for this shot.

Side note: my egg carton has scripture verses on the inside. How fabulous is that?

We drove down to Dallas to spend Easter with the Lt's brother (a student at the University of Dallas and our only family within hailing distance). The eggs went into our baskets - this one belongs to my brother-in-law. And yes, that is a squirt gun (I didn't have scissors to cut off the dumb plastic tie), and yes, we did have a water fight at two in the morning after the Vigil (oddly enough, college-age boys don't mind indoor water fights in their apartments). And yes, they did come in packs of two, and I did give myself the extra one. I figured it was only fair, considering I was up against two boys, one of whom is a Marine.

In other news, I have fallen in love with Mod Podge, and am planning using it on every available surface in my apartment...