Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Potato Chip FAIL

I think I was slightly over-confident when approaching this whole homemade potato chip making process. They did not turn out the way I anticipated…at all! I bought 2 lovely organic potatoes from Whole Foods yesterday. I had some ideas for flavors; rosemary-garlic flavor and sea salt and vinegar with black pepper.

Mistake number 1: I do not have a mandoline. I thought I could use my big hand-held veggie slicer. I tried, but I only got inconsistent chunks of potatoes. FAIL. So I had to slice by hand. I admit I’m a pretty good slicer but it’s so hard to slice them evenly and thin. They were all slightly different thicknesses so they all finished baking at different times.

Mistake number 2: I put too much vinegar and not enough oil on the vinegar/black pepper chips. They all suck to the baking sheet. I could barely scrape them off. FAIL.

Chip FAIL
Mistake number 3: I put way too much salt on the chips. I gagged when I ate one. FAIL. So to say the least I learned a lot from this. I think making baked potato chips could be really easy. I now know (well I think I know) the proper seasonings to use, I just need to get a mandoline.

Stay tuned for more potato chips posts. I will get this right one day!

Salty, but yummy

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Lizz Wright

Rob introduced me to her music many years ago. Her voice is like buttah. Just beautiful and calming and soulful. The first I saw her live was at Schubas Tavern here in Chicago a couple years back. I was stunned that first time. She has an amazing live voice and her stage presence is hauntingly comfortable.

We saw her again just last week. As we were waiting to get into the venue we struck up a conversation with the woman behind us in line. She made a statement that I think is so true. She said something along the lines of, "She's lived many lives to develop a voice like that". Her comment really stuck with me because I think it's true. I think she's an old soul.

I took a few pictures with my point-and-shoot. It was dark and I wasn't really close so I had to do some editing of the photos to clean them up a bit. Here are a few pics followed by a YouTube video of one of my favorite songs by Lizz. Click the pics to enlarge. Enjoy!





Like buttah!

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Spring (Label) Cleaning


I had an excessive amount of labels on my blog posts. I felt like a lot of recipes were getting lost in the oblivion of older posts, never to be seen again. I decided to simplify my labels to make things easier to find. They are now broken down into simple categories like, ‘scones’, ‘cupcakes’, ‘my artwork’, etc. I positioned the search box above the labels in case there are specific recipes/flavors people are looking for like, ‘pumpkin’ or ‘chocolate’ or whatever.

Since this past autumn I have been creating printable recipe pages for each post. I’ve only done this with recent posts and a few older, popular ones. My plan is to (eventually) make a printable page for each and every recipe. It will happen, soon. Now if someone could clean my windows and scrub my floors…