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Archives for May 2012

A Queen’s Cocktail: The Big Liz

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In honor of The Queen’s diamond jubilee this weekend, asked my friend Beth to come up with a signature cocktail to mark the occasion. When I initially emailed her about it, I had three requests:
It must be pink and sweet – After all, she is a Granny.
It must be slightly sour – 60 years on the throne, y’all.
It must have gin – It’s The Queen’s hooch of choice.
Beth, who can make a good stiff drink out of lighter fluid if she had to, came up with something I think you will adore. It’s sweet and sour with a kick – just like The Queen.  I call it a Big Liz. The recipe below is in bulk format because you will want to serve it in good company.
BIG LIZ
6 cups of seltzer (that’s roughly 3/4 of a 2 liter bottle)
1 can of frozen limeade (lemonade works in a pinch)
1 jar of maraschino cherries
1-2 cups of Gin (more or less to taste)
5 dashes of hot sauce
limes to garnish
Mix the frozen limeade, gin, cherry juice and hot sauce together at the bottom of a pitcher, gradually finishing with seltzer. Serve straight or on the rocks. Garnish with lime wedges and cherries on Union Jack cocktail picks. 

Don’t like booze? Serving children? Want it extra sweet? Try a Little Lizzy. If you have ever had a cherry limeade at Sonic (holla!) this will taste awfully familiar.
THE LITTLE LIZZY (The kiddo version)
1 two liter bottle of lemon-lime soda
1 can of frozen limeade (lemonade works too)
1 jar of maraschino cherries
Mix and enjoy.
***BONUS TRACKS***
PRINCE PHILIP (Sweet with some heat and an iron fist)
Mix equal parts Tabasco flavored tequila, cranberry juice and pineapple juice. Shake over ice and serve in a martini glass.

DUCHESS OF CORNWALL (Old fashioned with a touch of sass)
Single barrel vintage bourbon with a splash of sparkling lemonade. Garnish with mint.
 You have to see the collection of portraits over at The Sun. I’m especially fond of these portrait mosaics by Jane Perkins.

Evening of Roses

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There was a fire under the train tracks yesterday. No one was hurt, thank goodness, but my commute from downtown to Evanston went from 50ish minutes to 4ish hours. As you might imagine, the train car was packed, sweltering hot, and smelled of body odor and fried chicken. And not the good kind of friend chicken, either. 

By the time my feet hit solid ground, I was just about ready to explode.

…Lucky for me, my walk home included a stroll through a public rose garden. It’s always a pretty little swath of park, but last night must have been the peak of the season. I’m telling you, no lie, there must have been thousands of roses in bloom, each of them beautiful than the next, each of them smelling so much better than fried chicken.

I always try my best to always appreciate whatever nuggets of beauty I can find in the course of my day, but yesterday, of all days, I have never been more grateful for those roses. 

The park has every color rose you can imagine, but I have a fondness for big fat pink roses!

And Lord only knows what was going on with the toast.

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Have you ever seen strawberries this big?
Summer is here and strawberry season continues. My neighborhood market is selling them cheap; two pound boxes for $3.00. They are huge, meaty berries with glossy pelts that ripple and shine like snake skin. Firm too. They seem almost unnatural. When I was a kid and we went strawberry picking, we were lucky to come back with berries much bigger than marbles, most of which would melt in the car ride home, whereas, these strawberries appear hardy enough to withstand a round of flag football, much less 30 minutes in a warm car trunk.
Beautiful as they are, their near-bionic exterior makes me wonder…

Yes, I know that any plant species can be tinkered with to improve their survival between farm and market, and that is important when it comes to keeping food affordable to the masses, but honestly, doesn’t this seem a bit much? Would it be so bad if we had to stick with those squishy, marble size strawberries?
Five yolks and two egg shells. Something isn’t right.
When I was a kid, and the teacher was explaining how the reproductive organs worked, someone in the class asked “How do twins work?” and the teacher replied “Same thing times two. It’s like a chicken laid two eggs in one shell.” and ever since that day, every time I crack an egg, I have been looking for two eggs in one shell. Never found it. Until… 
Last weekend  I not only found two yolks in one shell; I found three yolks in the shell right next to it. For a moment there I felt extra lucky until I got curious and cracked two more eggs and found the same thing. The whole box. All double or triple yolks. Clearly they did not all come from the same chicken; could there really be an entire farm where all the chickens lay double eggs? And if so, what do they do to the chickens to prompt such a thing? Do I want to know?
Probably not. 
And that is the problem.
There is an expression that goes something like “You wouldn’t eat that hot dog if you saw how it was made.” and I know a lot of people who do not eat dogs precisely for that reason. And they are probably smart for it. But I’m not talking about hot dogs; I’m talking about strawberries. And eggs. And Lord only knows what was going on with the toast…
  

Friday Flowers: Ombre Chrysanthemums

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I love this project.
It’s fast, cheap, easy, AND it’s fun to say aloud: obmre chrysanthemums. 
Chrysanthemum is one of my favorite words of all time. I like the way it requires you to scrape your tongue across the back of your teeth to pronounce it properly. Chrysanthemum.  Why people feel compelled to shorten their name to mums is beyond me. What’s the fun in that?
And, for another thing, it is one of the few multisyllabic words I enjoy spelling. I like the way it breaks down: Chry-san-the-mum. For someone with lousy spelling skills, such as moi, this is a good one. There is a scene in Anne of Green Gables where Anne wins a spelling competition when Gilbert Blythe and Prissy Andrews fail to spell it correctly. In this way, I feel Anne and I are superior and kindred spirits in every way. Obviously. Never mind I still can’t spell catalogue to save my life, I feel very accomplished when I type out chrysanthemum and that indignant red wiggly spellchecker line doesn’t pop up.

Ombre is big again this year, so I thought I would incorporate it into a flower project. Melly asked for something with coffee filters, so here you go, Melly!
I was all set to show this to guys last week, but then I decided it was missing something. It was too orange. Too big. Too blah. So I moved version one to my *closet and made the second, smaller version.
*Can I just take a sec to point out that I even have a closet that can hold a giant chrysanthemum lantern? A year ago I couldn’t even fit something like this in my bedroom, much less my closet. Why, hello, fancy pants.

What’s the difference between the two versions? It’s all about where you dye the filters. here, this should explain:

***MATERIALS***
Coffee filters: $2.00 (tip: I buy packs of 700 coffee filters at Costco $2.50)
Required quantity varies. I used 50 for a 8” lantern, and 300+ for a 20” lantern.
Dye: $4.00 per bottle
I used Rit liquid fabric dye because I wanted a rich, vibrant orange and I have found (through much experimentation, I might add) that nothing else produces saturated orange/red colors like this dye. If you are looking to produce a pastel/muted shade, food coloring or watered down acrylic paint will do the trick fine enough.
Paper Lantern: $3.00
You can find these all over the place. Target just started carrying them in their party section, and Ikea carries some as big as a Labradors.
White Glue: $1.00
Hot glue will speed things up, but I have found from previous projects that it gives way after a few months (so that’s not a problem if you are making this for a party). Simple white glue from the dollar store will get the job done.
Instructions for this are like an enlarged version of the hydrangeaI showed a few weeks ago; cut the flowers, dip them in glue and stick them on the lamp. That’s it! It’s hard to mess up. If your lantern base is big enough, you could get a few kids working on this at the same time.
I swear, Lola is like Paris Hilton when it comes to taking photographs. Soon as she hears the shutter click, she comes running.
Have a great weekend!

Postcard From A Hoarder: Gift Bows

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Gift bow drawer pic

I am in the process of cleaning out my craft room. While I’m sorting things out, I decided to designate a drawer to ribbon…

…. then that drawer split and begat two more drawers, one for loose fabric ribbon, and one for spooled ribbon; then that drawer begat three drawers, one for curling ribbon, one for wrapping ribbon, and one for raffia …. and so on and so on through every type of arts and craft supply under the sun until I filled an entire wall of drawers (thank you Ikea Antonius). There was a lot of sorting and dividing. A lot of begats. It’s practically the Old Testament up in here.

I had five or six bags of plastic bows floating around the house — some salvaged off of gifts, most purchased at after Christmas sales for 50cents or so. Now that they are consolidated, it’s quite the collection. The sad part is, even though I have made some into peonies, I don’t even remember the last time I gave a gift with a bow on it. Why am I saving them?

***ALTERNATIVE GIFT TOPPERS (AKA: MORE STUFF THAT WILL PREVENT ME FROM DEPLETING MY BOW COLLECTION. WHICH ISN’T REALLY A COLLECTION SO MUCH AS A SIGN I NEED TO QUIT BUYING CRAP THAT I WILL NEVER USE) ***

 

It’s Friday

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I was busy making a Friday Flower project last night when it took a turn for the worse. I am still hoping to resurrect it from the bowels of craft failure, but until then, the best I can give you is a sneak peek:

The extra large letters makes it seem purposeful, no? 
It’s orange. Almost Muppet-like. That’s as much as I will tell you right now.
You will have to forgive me for running behind. It’s been an odd week around here…

The NATO summit takes place in Chicago this weekend and protesters have been pouring in for days. It’s weird. Sometimes I see them clustered in sleeping bags under the train tracks. Sometimes I see pictures on the news of the riots that took place at previous NATO summits and think, How could these people in sleeping bags be preparing to set fires and loot and throw bags of poo? They just want to get their point across. They just need their voice to be heard. We should be saluting them for their determination to speak out for the little guy. Where is our tolerance?

Then yesterday on the train I looked down at one of the clusters of sleeping bags and saw a guy going to the bathroom into a bag.  
And there goes my tolerance. 
Will the contents of that bag end up smeared across some corporate bank office window? Or thrown at a policeman’s riot shield? Or peacefully into a garbage can (most of which have been removed to ward off small bomb threats)? I don’t know. But holy cats, I’m glad I don’t live anywhere near the summit location this weekend.
Even just working downtown is eerie right now. Helicopters everywhere. Trains are half-empty today. Not a suit in sight. Everyone, including my boss, instructed workers to “dress down” this week and work from home on Monday.  Some glass-front buildings are boarded up. The jewelers and high-end retailers have emptied their windows. It’s spooky.
My office overlooks a plaza in the center of the business district, which apparently is some sort of target. I’m not sure if that is because of the central location, or because it is the front yard of a giant bank headquarters, or because the plaza is owned by a much-despised energy corporation, or because it is the only open square downtown not located on government land*…but it is currently under guard something fierce.
*Something they don’t teach you in Kindergarten:  If you are going to commit a crime, like defacing property etc., avoid doing it on government property because, if/when you are arrested, the sentencing will likely be harsher than if you committed the same crime on private property. At least that is what my Anarchist lawyer friend informed me on Facebook last week. And yes, there are Anarchist lawyers. Weird, right?
One of the nicest things about my office is that the view includes The Four Seasons, a giant mosaic by Marc Chagall. I like to come out here at lunch to read a book, or chat with co-workers, or eat my salad and people watch. It’s my special place. I share its specialness with hundreds of other people, though. This is how nice I am.  I share and such.
But today the plaza is blocked off, so I am eating inside, writing this blog post, and mad as a box of frogs just thinking about how they had to board up my beloved mosaic. Just look: 

I know it is just a precaution, but still… it’s a sad day when a 20-ton work of art has to be protected from the public. Just looking at it puts me on edge.  Between this, the police presence and the non-stop drone of helicopters, I am anxious to start the weekend. At home. Away from Crazytown. With the cat. Busy beavering away at another art project.
What are you doing this weekend?
Looking for something fun to do or read? Here are some of my random favorites this week:

Dear People Who Used To Live Here

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Dear People Who Used To Live Here,
Thank you for planting the giant patch of purple zebra striped iris bulbs out back by the garage. Wow. I realize you did not plant them with me in mind, but I feel as though they were put here especially for me, seeing as very few people on the planet could, or would, appreciate them as much as I do. Let’s face it: this is destiny. I don’t know where you live now, but if I did, I would secretly dig up your yard in the middle of the night and plant you something pretty just to repay the favor. Except that would be creepy. And possibly illegal.
Maybe I can make them into a hat and send your way instead?
Let me know,
Peaches

In the Pantry

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I need to borrow a wide angle lens so you can take in all the Easter goodness at once.
I cleaned out my pantry.  While I was in there, I bleached down the baseboards, threw out 3 bottles of salad dressing, and made room for some of the baskets I picked up atTarget on clearance last month.  
 I’m not going to brag about the deal I got on these baskets and rub the price in anyone’s face…but let’s just say it started “35” and ended with “cents.”
Boomshakalaka.
Now, on one hand, I found a great alternative to all the pricey crap they sell at the Container Store. On the other hand, it looks like the Easter Bunny exploded all over my pantry.
This is the sacrifice of a bargain hunter.

Shakespearean Insults

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Partridge’s Shakespeare Statue, Lincoln Park, Chicago, IL

I’m not saying I like to insult people, or that I’m good at insulting people, or that I attempt to insult people a lot. I am saying the term douche bag is getting really old and we could all stand to expand our vernacular. I’m thinking Bill Shakespeare might be a good place to start:

Courtesy of Tastefully Offensive

Is it wrong to have a favorite insult? If not; what is yours?

Friday Flowers: Kaleidoscopic Berry Baskets

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I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but around here, it’s strawberry season.

In case I didn’t mention it, I love strawberries. And strawberries on sale are even better. If I let myself, I could eat a whole box in one sitting. As is I probably polish off two boxes a week — which is a lot for a single person.

And, since I hoard nifty food packaging, (and-not-so-nifty too), I thought I would find a new way to embellish the boxes.


Painting these clear plastic boxes from the inside out is a lot like painting sale signs inside windows, but far more forgiving. Start by drawing some basic shapes on the inside of the plastic with a permanent marker — I chose flowers, but you could do letters or triangles or dinosaurs, etc. Unicorns might be cool…

…then it’s just a matter of adding blobs of paint. I started with blobs of white paint over every flower, then let it dry and added yellow circles. Then that dried and added red. Then purple, then green, then used more white to fill in the blanks. Very little artistry involved; it’s all about layering.

Boom, that was it.

These would make for nifty gift wrap, or a fun way to contain odds-n-ends around the house.

OK, now let’s be honest; what sort of food packaging do you hoard?