Category: Cooking and Baking

Cooking and baking experiments

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Heidi’s dress fitting and blueberry muffins

At first glance, it may appear from this photo that my kitty assistant from my last post has been magically transformed into a doll, but this is not the case. He would never fit in that dress.

This is Heidi, the tabby cat. She is Max and my first collaborative original folk art cat doll. I did the final fitting on her dress today. If you look closely, you will see the pins holding it together here. I sewed all the finishing details by hand. It’s a real challenge sewing little things on a machine. Now I have to get our Siamese’s sweater and skirt set assembled. It’s going to be fun photographing them together.


I also made my blueberry muffins that I had planned to make along with the last batch of muffins I made. These are from the same book, Deborah Madison‘s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. They are made from the Basic Buttermilk Muffins recipe. I added a cup of thawed blueberries and a teaspoon of orange zest. These are so good! I ate too many.

I had them with the orange I used for the orange zest for breakfast. Really good.

And thanks, Eric, for sharing an inspiring site…it’s our cosmos, with a new view of our universe every day. Check out Eric and Melissa’s music too. They’re putting together an LP of their own original songs. Pretty exciting. It’s great to see other people pursuing their dreams too 🙂

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Banana oat muffins and sundry

Just a quick note for those of you waiting to see our new dolls finished…They are still in progress and I will be sure to post a note here and on our Ruffing’s blog when we’ve got them finished and photographed. I was under the weather for a couple of weeks, and I’ve been in slo-mo. They’ll be posted in our doll gallery too. Just so you know you haven’t missed them.

I decided today was going to be muffin day. I’ve been saying I’m going to make muffins while watching my ingredients expire. I was going to go all out and make two kinds today, but I just made these Banana Oat Muffins from Deborah Madison‘s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. I didn’t do her muffin recipe justice last time. So, this time, mid-recipe, when I saw my ingredients were, once again, over-the-hill, I just drove to the store and bought new ones. I found some King Arthur Unbleached White Whole Wheat Flour, which I’d never tried before, and used that. It seemed to give them a lighter taste and a finer texture than when I tried them with regular whole wheat flour. The recipe recommended whole wheat pastry flour, which I haven’t seen. I also used less nutmeg and added a little cinnamon, but only because I don’t go for nutmeg in a big way.

They came out nicely, not so sweet, more like a muffin to have with eggs, or another breakfast food. I keep feeling that there isn’t any reason I’m not making more home-cooked foods, except that I’ve gotten lazy about it. And muffins are easy!

I’ve been trying to add more vegetables to my diet too, and trying to have a mixed plate of vegetables for lunch each day. A friend sent me an interesting video from Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat. It’s about twenty minutes, but I felt it was worth watching. He talks about how we need to eat less meat, more plants, less fast food, and more home cooking, not only for the sake of our own personal health, but for the sake of our environment. He makes a case for becoming at least a partial vegetarian, but he keeps his focus more on our health and our world, for anyone worried about being upset by watching a video on that subject. Anyway, I’m trying to do better in those areas.

And thanks, Lisa, for giving me the the “Kreativ Blogger” award! Thanks just as much for saying I am an “awesomely fabulous person” You know I like that just as much 😉 Now I need to think of seven things I love and seven artists to pass the award along to. I’ll have to give this some thought…

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Sewing and soup-ing

I started sewing our kitty doll bodies today on my new sewing machine. I’m still getting used to the buttons I need to push instead of dials I need to turn. So far, it’s great. I really like the “fix” button that ties the thread off, and the “needle up/down” button, which I used a lot when I was pivoting around tight corners. I borrowed my mom’s Ott-Lite and put it right over my fabric so I could see better. The newer machines have stronger lighting, but that’s okay. It worked out fine. Incidentally, I hate that I look like I have big, old man paws in that photo! Foreshortening does some odd things.

We were so cold today that it seemed like a good day for some homemade soup. I made some vegetable soup using a hodgepodge of ingredients. I had some stock I made and put away in the freezer maybe two years ago! I thawed it out and everyone told me it tasted fine. None of us have come down with botulism yet. So, I think it was okay too. I added a can of diced tomatoes and a little chopped onion and garlic, and then I put about five cups of other vegetables into the boiling stock, about a cup each, adding them in order according to their cooking times. I used fresh carrots, fresh parsley, frozen cut green beans, frozen peas, and frozen corn. I also added a cup of whole wheat macaroni, and some salt and pepper.

I probably could have used more stock in my stock-to-vegetables ratio. As it is, my soup came out more like a stew, using about six cups of stock. Closer to eight cups might have made it more soup-like, but it was hot and warming, and we were cold, as I said. So, there were no complaints!
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Cool artists, snowflakes, and “after” shocks

My “Rabbit Dances” print was included in this “Cool Artists and Snowflake” Etsy Treasury today. Thanks, Iris, for including me!

I’m thinking of adding some more print sizes over on our website, so that there will be more options to fit standard-sized frames. We stopped at A C Moore yesterday so I could see which sizes were more popular, or available. The most popular smallish sizes are always 8 x 10 and 11 x 14 inch frames. I’ve made the smaller prints on 8 1/2 x 11 since that can easily go in either an 8 x 10 or an 8 1/2 x 11 mat and frame set. I may add an 11 x 14 paper size, and possibly 12 x12, and 12 x16 paper sizes. We have some prints that will fit 10 x 20 as well. I’m still fixing the pages that are on the site, but if anyone is interested in other paper sizes for prints, just contact us.

Today I went down a list of miscellaneous things I needed to do that I hadn’t gotten to yet, including cleaning up and vacuuming my workroom. Believe it or not, the above picture is the “after” photo. I should probably invest in a snow plow so I can clear a swath to get in there from time to time. After cleaning, washing, packing, shipping, and I can’t remember what else, I felt the need for some cookies.

Fortunately, “make some Toll House cookies” was also on my list of miscellaneous things I meant to do that I hadn’t gotten to yet, which meant all the supplies were ready and waiting. So, I took care of that too 😉

Oh, and by the way, when I went to pick up that Interlibrary Loan book that I thought was never to be, it was the wrong book! Too funny. I thought I might be in trouble when I wrote out the title and the author and she said, “Which one is the title?” But then, maybe it was another library that sent over the wrong book. Maybe next time.