Aunt Peaches

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Archives for January 2013

And they are off!

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It’s time!

If you signed up for the third annual Valentine swap, you will have received an email from me with your swap partners information last night. If you don’t see it, check your junk mail just in case. If you still don’t see it, send me a direct email.

This year nearly 400 people are participating! Swappers come from 12 different countries and just about every state in the union. Even a few of my friends and relations signed up to swap (so if anyone gets a weird Valentine made from old soup labels or guitar strings, there is a 90% chance it’s from someone I know). 

PS: Be sure to take some pictures of your Valentines and send to me. Or better yet, share them on my facebook wall so everyone can see what you are sending and receiving!

PPS: Want to swap cards with me?  Send me a Valentine by Feb 14 and I will send you a St. Patrick’s Day card in return sometime in early March. Didn’t you always want a St. Patrick’s day card? Yeah you did. Send to:

Aunt Peaches
332 S. Michigan Ave
Ste 1032 #A987
Chicago, IL 60604-4434
USA

Be sure to CLEARLY print your name and return address on the envelope.

Happy Valentines!

Yarn Hearts

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Six excuses I tell myself to get out of learning to knit:
  1. It will give me carpel tunnel syndrome.
  2. I already crochet and suck at it. Do I really need one more thing to suck at?
  3. It will allow me to make custom sweaters for my cat. My cat already hates me and the last thing she needs is a legit excuse to get angry and pee on stuff.
  4. It will distract me from learning to hand quilt. And macramé. And install faucets.And other stuff.
  5. I will do it and I will get addicted and the yarn will suck all the moistness out of my hands and one day I will wake up and see a hand coming out of my sleeve and think OH CRAP, THE CRYPT KEEPER IS HERE!
  6. I can make other stuff with yarn. Like, this…
As I mentioned last week, I’m not big on knitting. And I don’t crochet much either. But for whatever reason I can’t help but stroll through the yarn aisle every time I go to a craft store. It calls my name. I can’t turn away. On rare, rare occasions, I let myself buy something too. This time it was red and pink and orange.  It came home with me and said, GURL, you need to make something with me. What’s it going to be? – A scarf? – A hat? – Some badass granny square potholders?
I said, No Gurl, today we are making yarn hearts.
It doesn’t get much easier than this.
This is about the easiest, laziest, fool-proof project on the planet. In fact, I am ripping this idea off a daycare craft I made in 1983 (shout out to all my peoples at Palisades Preschool!) as Christmas ornaments using bits of acrylic scrap yarn and paste made from flour and water. They were supposed to be stars but came out looking like spaghetti – that’s the charm, right? Preschool art. It’s open for interpretation.
The only problem was that after the spaghetti stars dried and went home looking pretty, they fell apart and flopped over on the tree. I think the paste might have reconstituted when put in contact with the moist tree or something. That said, I am swapping out the old fashioned glue for Mod Podge – I trust it will last a long time. Did you see what it did to my Eastereggs? Twelve years and counting!
Note: Mix the glue solution in a disposable cup with a plastic fork, or similar.

Also note: Cotton yarn, or yarn that is at least partly made from natural fibers, will absorb the glue and work a little better for this project. Straight acrylic yarn works too but I find it does not stiffen quite as nice as the cotton stuff.

If you have never worked with Mod Podge before, don’t worry, it’s pretty much works the same as regular liquid white glue but it dries to a sort of plastic-like finish. I used gloss finish because that’s what I have on hand, but I would have probably used the matte finish if I had been working with a nice wooly yarn.  
The heart on the far right was made with one yard of yarn and it dried in about 8 hours. The one in the middle was made with four yards of yarn and still has some damp spots after three days of drying! It also has some obvious looking glue flakes that don’t show up in these photos – meh, not a big deal, they are easy enough to rub off with my fingers, but I would urge you, if you are going to pile up the yarn thick and such, wring it out thoroughly before you shape it into a heart.
The Valentine tree is coming along bit-by-bit. I can’t wait to show you guys the finished result!

Jambalaya Boxes

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It’s that time of the year when tourists descend upon New Orleans like a bunch of drunk and shirtless locusts. Middle aged conventioneers with names like Stew and Skip take up with sorority girls, frat boys, and Lousianans alike in America’s spring break: Mardi Gras. Yes, it’s that time of year, but it isn’t all bad for the good people of NOLA — they get free jewelry.
And by jewelry, I mean beads. 
Lots of beads.

Hippy Ti Yo beads!

Mardi Gras is the only holiday I know in which people throw shiny things off of floats and hang said shiny things on trees and doors and fences and anyone who will flash a tata or two. If anyone else knows of another free jewelry holiday, YOU LET ME KNOW, OKAY?

It’s been a few years since I have been to New Orleans for the season, but last time I prepared as best I could by grabbing beads enough for ten people plus half of Jackson Square. Plus, I get abuncha green ones around here every St. Patrick’s day, plus the occasional bag full of beads in the thrift store now-and-again…plus…well, put it altogether, and I am always stocked with a drawer full of Mardi Gras beads. No, literally, there is a drawer labeled MARDI GRAS BEADS. It comes in handy more often than you would think.
This year, considering Fat Tuesday is February 12, I thought it would be fun to mash it with its neighboring holiday—Valentines, on February 14.  The end result is a glitzy chocolate box with Cajun flair that I can use to harness my sparkle tooth. Of course you could use it to give away cookies or homemade treaties…I have my sparkles to think of. 
Like the creole dish they were named for, these boxes are an eclectic jumble of decadent elements. Jambalaya is also a popular song and a line dance (click here to learn en français!). The idea came to me after thinking of other songs to use describe this project. For a while I’d call them I Left My Heart in Louisiana Boxes but decided that would be too tacky. Not nearly as tacky as Cajun Stripper Boxes, (the beloved Doug Kershaw song), but that’s a personal call.

So, the question is, how do you make one of these nifty boxes for yourself? Read on!

What will I need?
  • Heart shaped box, salvaged for free or buy new box (and eat all chocolates)— Target is selling these Snoopy Whitman sampler boxes for 99cents. Or you can also make your own.
  • Thick white glue, $2.00
  • Hot glue, 50cents (assuming you already have a glue gun)
  • Mardi Gras beads, recycled for free or buy a dozen at the dollar store – $1.00
  • Miscellaneous beads, salvaged from broken jewelry, etc
  • Seed beads, $1.00
Total cost: $2.50 – $6.00
Total Time: 20 minutes to assemble, dry overnight
How will I make it?
After removing any bows or frills or extra fabric from the top of the box, rim the edge of the box in a single line of hot glue and beads. 
Filling the heart is entirely up to you. It’s a jumble. Jambalaya. 
I put the center focus on an old heart shaped collar tag, then scattered a few chunky pieces of faux turquoise, and encircled each piece in a single row of Mardi Gras beads. Then I used other larger, single beads to form bridges in between each cluster, then wound more plastic beads around those…eventually forming a thick path of beads the wound all over the heart. To fill in the gap spaces, I used a thick white glue and liberally sprinkled inexpensive seed beads. 12 hours to dry, and it’s ready to go!
 You can tell the glue is still drying on this one as it’s not 100% clear just yet. In retrospect I probably could have painted the box beforehand, but who has time for that when they are staring at a giant pile of sparkly beads?
My mother used to keep her jewelry in a ruffly pink chocolate box. There was a crushed velvet rose on top and the inside was segregated into a grid of waxed cardboard dividers which made it great for earrings or small items. I’m very loosy-goosy with most of my jewelry, and none of it is real, but some of it is old enough that I don’t want them bumping around and losing stones. These little candy linersare just the thing!
 That center heart piece was from the collar of my first cat, Sam. He was an all-white longhair kitty that weighed in at 22 pounds. I named him Sam after my childhood idol, Samantha from Bewitched. 
So the good news is I now have four nifty boxes to sort and store my baubles. The bad news has made me hungry for the last thing I need right now — more beads.

Anybody else have some ideas on how to use up old beads?

Old Fashioned Chicken Boil

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This is not a food blog.

I just want to clarify that.

It’s not that I don’t cook (I do) or can’t cook (I can)…it’s just that there are plenty of people who do it better. In posting recipes here, I fear that I would over-inflate my skills by trying to shove my recipes down your throat.

This post, however, is not a recipe; it is a way of life.

Plainly put, the power of chicken soup is not to be underestimated. And I’m not talking about some old Touched-By-An-Angel-Offshoot 1990’s self help book. No Ma’am. We are talking soup. Chicken soup. It’s important. Especially in winter, and double especially for someone like me who takes public transportation every day and comes in contact with every manner of residual filth. Seriously, y’all, one day, just one day, I would like to walk into a subway car in winter and not have it smell like hot dog water. One day I would like to gaze through a bus window and not find it smeared with ketchup and, Dude, wtf is that? Maple syrup?

I’m still waiting on that day. Until then, I supply my immune system every advantage I can give it; clean hands, ample tissues, lots of sleep and…*drum roll*… frequent rounds of old fashioned chicken boils.

I know what you are thinking:

What is an old fashioned chicken boil? Isn’t that just like chicken soup? Can’t you just get a can of chicken soup?

Comparing a can of chicken soup to an old fashioned chicken boil is like comparing a kitchen knife to a surgeon’s scalpel. They are not the same thing. And while anyone can make a great chicken stock by boiling up a carcass for a few hours, there is something scared in the act of making soup. Healing. Nurturing.

The recipe below comes from my father who got it from his mother, who got it from Big Alice, who probably got it off a cabbage farmer back in the old country or something. I don’t know. But I do know this: it’s good. If you grew up on homemade chicken soup, your recipe is probably 95% the same. The only thing different about mine is that the end result usually looks thick, silky, and opaque — as opposed to the golden brothy stuff.

Note: Like a lot of old family recipes, the ingredients are only approximate. Regardless, it always comes out tasting the same. You can’t mess this one up (believe me, I have tried!). Just boil as long as you can, run it through a blender, enjoy in good health.

Ingredients

  • One fryer whole chicken (or buy parts already quartered), wrapped in cheesecloth and tied with cotton twine
  • 6 yellow onions (or more), peeled and quartered
  • 1 whole celery, washed and chopped into 3″ lengths
  • 5 large carrots, washed and cut into 3″ lengths
  • 3 cloves of garlic, peeled
  • Salt and pepper to taste

*If making this for medicinal purposes, triple the garlic and add a spoonful of red flaked paper (or, per Kelly’s comment below — fresh ginger.)

Stage One
Line the bottom of a stock pot with onions, sprinkle generously with salt and pepper and lay chicken on top. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. After one hour, remove chicken and unwrap cheese cloth. Use a clean dishtowel to scrape off fatty skin from chicken– discard. Use fork and butter knife to remove the meat from the chicken — set aside for chicken salad, etc (be sure to set some aside for furry friends!).

Stage Two (you can do this in a slow cooker if you want)
Put the bones back in wet cheese cloth, rewrap, tie, and return to the pot with the onions, this time adding adding carrots, celery, and garlic. Fill up the rest of the pot with more water, 2″ short of the top. Simmer at least three hours, up to eight, adding a cup of water every hour or two. When ready, remove chicken carcass (discard or freeze to use again) and the remaining soup through a food mill (these days we would use an immersion blender or a high speed hand mixer). Results in a pea soup like consistency. Serve with toast points and enjoy!

***

Variation: Chicken Noodle Soup.
After removing the chicken carcass, strain* away broth and bring liquid to a second boil, adding noodles (or matzo balls), shredded chicken bits and carrot coins. Best served with grilled cheese sandwiches.

*Save the strained away carrots and celery — they won’t look very pretty but they are still rich with fiber and nutrients. Mash them up and use the pulp to thicken stews, enhance meat loaf, or as baby food.


Variation: Potato Leek Soup
Last hour on the stove, add in some chopped leeks and four or five potatoes with the skins still on. Just before serving, use a stick blender to combine it altogether. Serve with garlic bread.

Variation: Tortilla Soup
Last hour on the stove, add one large can of spicy diced tomatoes, 1 tsp cumin, 1 chopped jalapeno (seeds in or out depending on preference). Use a stick blender to combine. Serve topped with sour cream, shredded cheese, and cilantro.  

Variation on a variation: Same as above, but leave out the jalapeno and cumin and add a hefty cup of plain Greek yoghurt to make THE BEST tomato soup on the planet. You can also swap the can of tomatoes for a large can of black beans…or white beans…or lentils…. or a chopped up butternut squash…or…you get the point. Endless variations on this one. The chicken boil base creates a richness you will never replicate using an off-the shelf box of stock. You have to try it!    

Bramble Patch: January 2013

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A list of my favorite internet distractions from the month of January. 

Two words: Confetti Bowl. I am making this. I am soooooo making this.

I had planned to write a post on my top ten favorite camera phone tips/tricks/apps. But then I found THIS POST and I’m all, Ughh, this is waaaaay better than what I could have produced!

Does your house get dry in winter? Mine sure does. This is a simple (and delicious) way to perk things up.

A Valentine care package? And it’s super cute? Why, thank you.

Speaking of Valentines…let them eat cake. Awesome cake. Awesome mailable cake.  

Fifty percent of the time I check in on Twitter, it’s to see if Anti Joke Cat has posted anything new.

A mother’s prayer, courtesy of Tina Fey.

My other baby, I Believe in Strangers, is chugging along. Anyone who has ever struggled with job hunting will appreciate this one.

Reading: Fraud by David Rakoff.

Watching: Downton Abbey. But isn’t everyone?

Munching: Homemade chicken soup. I would like to declare that everyone around me is sick but me. BUT ME. This is the healing power of an old fashioned chicken boil!

Listening: Radical Face, Always Gold.

Wearing: This parka. It took me 14 years of living in cold weather to break me down into buying a fugly old snow parka…but now Parka and I are besties. She is always warm, wind proof, waterproof, has 7 enormous pockets so I don’t even need a purse half the time, AND she comes with built-in fingerless gloves (great for driving or phone doodling). Holy crap I love this coat.

Most popular post this month: Sexy Men Who Knit.

Moment in cat history: Lolabelle has taken to keeping warm under the covers of the bed. I am petrified I will accidentally sit on her.

 

Photoshop: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

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I’m not good at giving gifts. 
Look, it’s not that I don’t try. I do. It’s just that I tend to make or buy things that I think the recipient needs; fingernail cufflinks… a leopard bathrobe…a gift certificate to the Jamaican beauty supply store. Granted, I am absolutely right, the recipient would indeed benefit from such things. But do they actively want such things? Perhaps, not so much.

To combat this problem I have taken to the gift of Photoshop. Fact is, I am pretty good at using Photoshop software. I can say that without conceit because my talent is limited in scope. Very limited. Useful skills like airbrushing or batch processing—nope. Imposing cat faces on 1980’s hair bands—yup.

 
This skill came to me as the result of a brief college internship in the photo archives at a well known magazine. I won’t say the name but it started with Play and ended with Boy. And before you ask, no I never dealt with naked people.  Skin grafting birthmarks of off centerfolds—nope. Etching in hair plugs on Gore Vidal—yup.

Since I don’t get to use my Photoshoping skills much these days, I take it out on my friends and loved ones. For example…

Neil and Lola. You may have seen this last summer. Lola was pasted into a photo of Neil and it hangs in my dining room portrait gallery. Everybody who comes over asks about it.  

How’d you get Neil Diamond to pose with your cat? Can you hire him for parties? Can I get him on my Christmas Card?

Today, January 24th, is Neil’s birthday. So we took him off the wall and set him down for cake and kitty time. 
Happy birthday Neil!

Speaking of wonderful people born on Jan 24, my friend Amy (aka Mod Podge Amy) has a dog Roxie who loves Star Wars. Okay, maybe it’s Amy who likes Star Wars. But Roxie and Yoda are like twins. The resemblance is staggering.

Happy birthday Amy!

My friend Kelly‘s birthday was back in September. Given the fact that this is the Kelly who once made me a flamingo dressed as Pippi Longstocking, this needed to be special. Kelly loves Hall & Oates (pardon my redundancy, I mean, everyone loves Hall & Oates) and since her maiden name is Ott, well, this just needed to happen….

Do you have a weird talent that comes in handy for birthdays? Caricatures? Custom limericks? Astrology forecasting? Custom cakes shaped like feet?  Do tell…
 

Wax Paper Pillar Candles

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Have you ever been to one of those hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants with red checkered table cloths and big drippy candles in Chianti bottles? You know the ones that dribble wax all over the bottle? It builds and builds and builds up over time and it looks sort of creepy but you let it go because you think This is just like Lady and the Tramp!

Well, this post is like that except with Shabbat candles and diet coke bottles. Romantical much? And no dripping wax. And no Lady. And no Tramp.

Hashtag Disappointed.

Hashtag WhoWillEatSpaghettiWithMe?


Last month, a reader, Guinevere, asked me about the candles featured in a post from last fall. It didn’t occur to me to do a tutorial on it but since I was setting the table this weekend, I thought I’d do a quick demo. This is a cheap and easy way to get some height on your table without buying a bunch of expensive candle sticks.An it involves drinking abuncha soda and a trip to the ‘Ethnic Foods’ aisle. Wahoo!

The hard part with this is finding candles and bottles that fit perfectly. Too big and they are useless– too small and the candle slips inside the bottle. I have found that most soda bottles fit perfectly with Shabbat candles* but you experiment and see for yourself. Some larger long stem candles fit in beer bottles, or sometimes you can use a butter knife to whittle the bottoms (or use an open flame to melt it down) to make them fit, but this is one combo that always works.

*What are Shabbat candles? Traditionally lit by the woman of the home 18 minutes before sunset each Friday, Shabbat candles are are part of most Jewish households. You can buy a whole box of them in the kosher food section of most grocery stores for $2.00, sometimes less. They burn clean, no drips, and last 2 to 3 hours.

They look really good bundled together on a glass cake plate or platter, just don’t bundle too close. Hello fire hazard! Although no paper is fire proof, wax paper is slightly safer as the melting wax will smother the flame and prevent a full out flare up. But still. Don’t catch fire y’all. Smokey says so.

***

So there it is Guinevere, I hope that helps!

Anybody else have a follow-up question on something you saw here? Send me an email…it might make for a future post! 


Homemade Confetti

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After my confetti mirror post earlier this week, a couple of people emailed me to ask about making homemade confetti. I had assumed, wrongly, that everyone was well practiced in the time-loved art of shredding tissue paper. I did it a lot as a kid. In part because there were a lot of confetti occasions, and in part because my parents asked me to make it when they needed to keep me busy. Note: next time you need to a few hours to prepare for a birthday party and your kid won’t leave you alone — set them in the corner and tell them to make confetti. BOOM, right there, you have three hours minimum.


As an adult, it takes a lot less time to make confetti. Ten minutes? Maybe less. I’m a lot handier with scissors. All you have to do is fold up some tissue paper, cut then 2″ fringes along the edge, then slice across. Sort of like dicing an onion. The smaller the slices, the smaller the pieces. The smaller the pieces, the longer you will find them in your carpet. Consider yourself forewarned. It’s pretty easy. Like, really easy.


Let’s take a sec to talk about scissors. In short, you need good ones. Sharp. They need not be funky flower print scissors like mine (I know, awesome much?  A holiday gift from Aunt Annie), but they need to be very sharp. Otherwise this will take forever.

Adding sparkle to confetti is hard because most sparkly stuff (like glitter) weighs much more than tissue paper, and so it settles to the bottom. I get around this by trimming the tips off tinsel garland, which is much lighter and fluffier.

Who needs confetti business cards? Yeah you do.
   

Elizabethan Baked Goods

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Hey you.

Happy Thursday.

I was making you some jumbo banana nut muffins because I know how much you like them, but the thing is, I ran out of liners. They got used up on a lamp or something. Or maybe it was giftwrap. I could have just greased the pan but my muffin rack is sort of gross. That was not a pun. My muffin rack is perfectly clean, but you know, it looks rusty in the corners. Is your tetanus shot up to date?  You should work on that.

Anyway, the bananas were already blackened to mush and they couldn’t wait until the weekend for me to get to the store, so I made do with coffee filters. They worked fine. Now your muffins have bananas, nut and ruffled collars. 
Elizabethan baked goods – you got ‘em.