Bread

I am really into bread. I was always into carbs even when the no carb craze was at it's peak. How could I say no to potatoes? Bagels? Bread to hug my sandwich? I never got into that craze. Actually, I've never really been into any diet craze. Too time consuming. I do well with just eating when I have physical hunger and stopping just before I'm full. That's it. It's hard sometimes, but it truly works. I can't make the food behave (i.e. take out all the fat, carbs, sugars, and eat 'diet' food), but I can make me behave. 'Me' is always at the heart of the matter, right?

Ouch. I get another little stab when I see that all typed out. So true. In my case, really.

Well, my therapy lately has been a quest to discover how to make bread. Really, REALLY good bread. I'm discovering that I will ultimately need a wood-fired oven in my back yard (I have already downloaded plans for one). Until then, my little oven and I are trying to figure it out.

Bread baking is truly a science and an art. I can weigh my ingredients, have a gorgeous starter going, only to have one batch turn out drastically different than the other. That is, I feel, also the beauty of baking.

Like sketching or knitting, I sometimes just need to feel the repetitive motion with my fingers. I enjoy the scritch/scratch of the lead on paper, the click of my needles and the feel of the dough in between my fingers.

After many batches of ciabatta, I can almost feel the dough and know if it's not going to have those huge holes and crunchy crust. I have only tried the bagels twice. The first time I didn't have enough flour and the dough was too soft and sticky.

The second time I let them get a little two brown and used salt grains that were too large. So that batch ended up looking more like round pretzels than bagels. Both batches tasted really nice.


I've been doing all of my bread baking lately out of this wonderful book. It is not the easy route, let me tell you. But I really wanted to do artisan breads and no matter what the recipes say, I think that most true rustic, artisan bread can't be done in a few hours. Also why I want one of these.

I was never a fan of the bread machine but I understood why it was popular. It wasn't that the bread was bad, but it wasn't good either. I liked the crust, the smell of the yeast, the heat of the oven. Sometimes my mom would decide to bake bread and it was a lovely smell.


Now we're still trying to eat up my experiments here at home and I'm really itching to try this lovely recipe for babka. I just have to empty out a few tomato cans and I'm all set!

On the path...

I say Hello, Hello, Hello...

Back when I was in high school I convinced my parents to become a host home for three weeks to a short-term exchange student. I was actually always pushing them out of their comfort zone, which they ended up enjoying. They told me this later, but I always assumed they would be up for all that stuff. It seemed perfectly fine to me.

They're probably thinking, "What if this child is not well-behaved? What if she has conflicts with the family members? What if she gets sick?" I'm thinking, "Awesome." That's about it.

She was incredible. A girl I keep in touch with to this day. We LOVED her and still LOVE her. Capitals. Well, one week we decided to take her to Kings Island for a day of eating too much sugar and riding crazy rides. She was always trying to practice her diction and had problems with the letter H. So we taught her the Beatles song, Hello. Aaaaaand we sang it the. entire. day. How irritating could we be at 15? Well it turns out, I was right. It was awesome.


So that was a super long story to say hello again to you. I am so very sorry that I stayed away so long. I really missed this little spot here. I always look forward to post-Christmas quiet and I am always hit with a super busy schedule mid-January. That starts my busy time for work and with the rounds of layoffs that happened last year, I was busier than usual.


Unfortunately I had to put a lot of crafting and blogging on hold in order to keep my priorities in check. I missed keeping up, but I knew I was doing the right thing. I sailed through the busiest time I have had in a long time without tears, breakdowns and everyone somehow had clean underwear. Good, no?

We have truly been enjoying our play room. This used to be a guest bedroom and one day, while my husband and I sat in our living room among piles upon piles of toys, books, crayons and picking plastic dinosaurs out from underneath our bums, we realized something. We needed to take back our living room. Besides, when our parents visit, we usually end up letting them have our room anyway. Our house is not a hotbed of overnight visitor activity.

So we took out the dresser and bed and put in shelving. I even made some fab fabric bins from this tutorial. Now it is a room full of organized chaos and lots and lots of fun!

I ended up finding a sweet children's table from craigslist.com of all places. It's my virtual garage sale, I love it. I don't know about your neighborhood, but I believe that my neighborhood is the best place for garage sales. So, when it's not garage sale season, I like to surf craigslist.



We do so many crafts on this table. We can also have a great place for Chutes and Ladder, Hi-Ho Cherrio, and other games.

Baking was still going on and instead of cookies this year, we had copious amounts of chocolate cupcakes for Easter:

I mean, haven't you heard of the Easter cupcake? No? Urm, well.

We did have fun this winter and welcomed spring with open arms!

We're back. I hope you had a great year so far. Stay on that path!

When the Day Sucks ... Make Soup

This week was a hard one on me and subsequently, our family. Things have changed quite a bit at work, making my schedule very hectic and very stressful. Fortunately, I work from home. Unfortunately, I work from home. So my family felt the pressure and stress right along with me.

Friday was a particularly difficult day. I had stayed up until 2AM the night before working under a tight deadline. The next morning, we found out that the babysitter was up the previous night with the stomach flu (we're happy to report that she is doing much better). I had a major deadline and tried to keep up with phone calls, spreadsheets and mind-boggling details while trying to corral my toddlers and being sleep-deprived to boot.

After a few breakdowns, we decided to get some doughnuts. Because, what else can you do when you're completely frazzled but go have a doughnut? With chocolate ganache? Then when we pulled into the library to rent a Pingu movie, we saw that they were closed for a furlough day. Urg. Much crying in the back of the car.

We all went stir-crazy, the littlest one fell down the wood stairs and I shut off my computer and hunkered down. Not knowing what to do with all the tears and frustration (all three of us), and the fact that we had nowhere to go, I decided we should make some soup.

I LOVE homemade chicken soup. I went to our freezer and got out a bunch of thighs, wings and drumsticks and went to work. The kids supervised, dumped in the chopped veggies as they were finished, measured out the spices, poured in the stock and started to perk up a bit. So did I.


While our soup was simmering, I got out this beloved cookbook:

We regularly watch Lidia Bastianich on our public television station and her show is it. I have done more recipes from Ms. Lidia than I ever would from a Food Network star. Sorry FN, I really like you, but this lady rocks.


One of my favorite things to make are her noodles with the three eggs (she rates her noodles in richness due to the amount of eggs). They are the perfect texture and taste for almost any dish. We just rolled out our dough, cut it into strips and put them in the soup about 10 minutes before serving.


The noodles were kind of thick, so you really don't need any fancy dough rollers. Just a good rolling pin and some muscle. The pizza cutter makes short work of cutting out all those strips. Upon reflection, I think I would have made these strips even smaller as they really puffed up in the soup.

So, when daddy finally got home and we had our soup, our day slowly started getting better.

On the path...

Woah! Winter Wilndess

Yesterday, the kids and I went out to let the snowflakes fall on our faces and just get out for a bit. It was encouraging until I stepped into my yard. Every year we re-seed this exact patch of ground and every year, the grass just disappears. Anyone else ever have this problem?























Just like last summer (which wasn't really a summer, that was our fall), this winter has been pretty wild. It was mild with no snow for a while and then WHAM! We're hit with a blizzard (right in between Christmas and New Year's on our eight hour drive). Thank you nature. ;)

Now, when we're ready for some cross country skiing, just as we're getting out our skis and boots and the excitement is building ... the snow melts. Well, not entirely. It's sort of in the gross, half-melted brown stage with the crusty top.

Well, I certainly haven't been away from the Creative Path because of weather. Just as the holidays brings on travel, shopping, to-do lists, etc. I think that January is a little of the same: cleaning, organizing, starting a new year. I have been creating, I just haven't been posting.

I did get some wonderful books that I'll share with you soon. One of them has inspired me to start a rag rug project. I'm positive I won't have a finished pic for you anytime soon, but I'll definitely be updating you on the project and will let you know how easy or hard it turned out to me (my guess is easy, just time consuming).

Staying on the path!

Little Mouse

Hey guys. I've been ultra-busy last month and I'll bet you've all been very busy this month as well! ...and we're only four days into December. Yikes!

Just thought I'd pass along a link to a fun little project to do with your kids. This craft is based on something my grandma used to do with her grandchildren. Little felt mice. They are painfully cute and even more painfully easy to create. Have fun!

On the path...

Where I've Been

Where have I been since September? Well, I have to say that blogging hasn't been first on my list of things to do. In the past few months, work has been a little overwhelming as well as the kids, the house, travel, etc.

I must confess that I have also been working on a little something in the past two months that I've been conceptualizing since very early this year. It's take a lot of time; more time than I'm used to, but all that thinking and planning was necessary.

You see, I have been all eaten up this year about launching a business but trying at the same to time whittle down my ideas into a concept that I am truly excited about and feel there is a need for in the sewing and crafting community.

As most of you know from reading this blog, I am also very interested and passionate about fine arts; mainly drawing and sketching. It's not very practical at this point with two toddlers to take back up that oil painting or printmaking (can you imagine?) so a sketchbook and pencil suit me just fine.

I also have been very frustrated by the lack of boys designs, projects and patterns out there in the crafting and sewing world. Now, I know that there are some out there and a lot of them are cute, but I'm looking for fun, edgy, quirky stuff. I know how easy it is to find the absolute cutest dress pattern/sweater pattern/appliqué/purse/bag/hairbow designs for my girl. I just have to click the nearest blog link to find thousands of these projects at my fingertips.

However, my little boy is just as interested in handmade or even more so than my little girl. Of course, she is only two, but I am sure she'll be making more requests down the road. Channy is always asking me if I can "knit him an umbrella", or put a dinosaur on his book bag or make him a big spider! Yes, things like that. I have yet to find the knitting pattern for an umbrella.

All that is to say that I'm proud to launch a new blog and store called Puddle Jumping Designs. It will hopefully be a collection of projects and designs geared toward boys. Right now I have a small collection of really cool appliqué patterns in the shop. I am not sure if I will stick with BigCartel as my storefront, or move the entire thing to it's own web address. Time will tell. I want to get the designs out and start blogging about boy stuff. That is not to say that I won't add the girls in there as well (see my post about William Worm and his sister, Wilhelmina). Currently, my little girl adores princess stuff as much as she loves her "dy-see-nos" (dinosaurs). Gotta love a girl like that.

Please don't think that I still won't keep up the Path, but I have to say that I am a much happier person to have a clear focus now with a blog so I may be posting to the Puddle more than the Path. But I still want to keep the Path for ALL my crafty/life stuff.

Thanks to everyone who checked on this little blog the past to years. I have made some really great friends on this site! Please check out PJD, and please come back to the Path once in a while as well.

Sincerely,
Jen

Stay on that path!

What We Did This Summer

Or to be more precise, What We Did Since the Last Post (A Sneak Peek):


So, it's been too long, eh? I think that in my absence, I've probably lost the few readers I had and for that, I apologize. Are you still there?

This summer has been wonderfully full and busy - so much so that I just now downloaded our summer photos from the cameras onto the computer. In late September. I know that's quite the norm for a lot of people, but for someone who's supposed to be a blogger, it's pretty shabby.

So, let's start with a recap of what we've been doing this summer, shall we? To start, we'll head over to the county fair where copious amounts of ice cream, hot dogs, popcorn and cotton candy were consumed (much to the delight of the kiddos):

Hubby and I were finally able to carve out some time to celebrate our anniversary (a month late but at least we celebrated). This B&B is so awesome, we just go because of the great rooms.

I wanted to live in this tub. I think I did. Directly from that weekend we celebrated at the annual Great Lakes Folk Fest like we do every year. Mainly, we stay at the dance tent and shake a leg or two and make a few friends in the process:

More sunny days at the family cottage where being lazy and eating a lot reigns supreme!

We also spent a lot of time fattening up the ducks on our local college campus. Because, you know, campus ducks need more people food.

We drove MANY miles in just a couple of weeks.

No, we don't try to suffocate our daughter, she does that herself and sleeps like a dream. The boy, on the other hand, stayed wide awake and hyper, to his parents' chagrin.

We stopped by to see the elk and see what they thought about the impending winter weather.

A lot of time was spent wandering up and down piers on one of the great lakes looking for birds, fish and making up names to imaginary yachts like "ComeonIwannalayya", "Stabin Cabin", and "College Fund". I prefer "Mortgage Part II".

Much time was spent gazing out across beautiful landscapes...


...exploring lighthouses...

...and hanging out under the Mackinac Bridge at Fort Michilimackinac. Say that 10 times fast. We had to pass the redcoat to get in (it was pretty easy considering his apparent boredom - no riots or gunfire to brighten his day).

Then on to explore a fur trader's camp:

The entire park was just wonderful. Channy spent most of the time insisting on watching and listening to a historical actor play the hammered dulcimer. I enjoyed watching a housewife make potatoes au gratin and apple cake in real dutch ovens and have her show me her (very real) stock of dried herbs and spices along with her very neat pantry. I really wanted to play too, but I think we were supposed to stay behind the ropes. Sigh.

During our travels, we also spent a lot of time checking out local libraries (a favorite past time). This one was our favorite:

Finally, we ended the season by going blueberry picking at the very end of it's season:
Good, GOOD times were had by all.

With all of that travel, I wasn't left with much time to craft, but I will report that I successfully completed a really cool hunting sock (complete with a secret message for good luck knitted down the side) that didn't fit my hubby's foot. A smidge too tight. Oh well.

Because we were traveling, I decided to whip up a great little carrying case. More on this to come.

Staying on the path...