Cardamom Christmas

Joululoma on täällä ja olen palannut elävien kirjoihin. Ja blogiin. Syksy on ollut aivan uskomattoman rankka eikä minulla kerta kaikkiaan ole ollut energiaa blogaamiseen. Työ koululla on imenyt minut täysin kuivaksi ja myös motivaatio käsitöiden tekemiseen katosi sen myötä. Mutta toivottavasti kevät on helpompi ja inspiraatiokin palaisi auringonpaisteen myötä.

Suurestä väsymyksestä huolimatta sain kuin sainkin muutamia asioita väsättyä pukinkontiin. Tässä enismmäisenä sukat, joista sain vihjeen jo loppukesästä.

Malli: Elinan pitsiunelma blogista Kardemumman talo
Lanka: Novita Nalle
Puikot: 3 mm

Tein sukista lyhyemmät versiot 57:llä silmukalla. Muutoin seurasin ohjetta melko tarkasti. Sukat ovat ihanat pitsiunelmat, ja mukavaa neulomista, joskaan en onnistunut oppimaan pitsikuviota ulkoa kummankaan sukan kohdalla. Mutta se on ehkä ennemmin omasta päästä kiinni kuin itse mallista. Eihän se kovin monimutkainen ollut...

Tässä vielä vinkki ihanan jouluisesta aamupalasmoothiesta näin välipäivien ja lopputalven iloksi:

Kaikki määrät ovat suurpiirteisiä, voit vaihdella niitä oman maun mukaan.

Jouluinen omenasmoothie

150 g pakastettuja omenalohkoja

1,5 dl maitoa

0,5-1 dl mehua (esim. omenaa tai neljää hedelmää)

kanelia maun mukaan

Itse pakastan joka syksy useamman pussin omenalohkoja. Useimmiten käytän niitä omenapiirakoihin pitkin talvea, mutta tänä vuona keksin tehdän niistä smoothieta. Kun laitat omenat tehosekoittimeen suoraan pakastimesta, on valmis smoothie juuri sopivan kylmää ja raikasta. Nesteen määrää voi hyvin vaihdella oman maun mukaan, riippuen siitä kuinka löysän smoothien haluaa. Korvasin myös kerran osan maidosta vaniljajugurtilla, ja sekin toimi erittäiin hyvin!

Rentouttavia välipäiviä toivottaen,
malin 

First Christmaspresent is out after a very long silent period in the blog. I love these socks, so light and airy but still warm and comfy. Also, here's a good recipe for an Christmassy apple smoothie to enjoy during the rest of the holidays:

150 g freezed apple blocks
1,5 dl milk
0,5-1 dl juice (e.g. apple or four fruits)
cinnamon to taste   

Blitz and enjoy! Happy Holidays!

Things in my kitchen

Geez, we had a real thunderstorm here in Helsinki last night. I woke up to the sound of a lightning that must have hit something really close to our house. And the sky just kept on flashing, like if it had discolights. But today is a new day, and hopefully we'll see some sun again.

Anyway, this is a small project I made to try to use up some of my stash:

My kitchen stools needed some soft covers and I happened to have 1,5 skeins left of this beautiful red yarn. The colour fits our kitchen perfectly. And I don't remember when I've made such a fast and brainless project the last time. I mean, thick yarn combined with crocheting in a circle, without any fuss. Can it be more simple?

Pattern: from my head
Hook: 8 mm
Yarn: Phildar Ondiaflamme
 
The only thing I have to redo is the straps holding the covers to the stools. The yarn itself stretches too much, so I'll have to come up with something else to hold them in place.

One other thing I like doing (apart from organizing my yarn) is to put everyting in order in my teabox. I bought this beautiful wooden teabox in London a few years back and I always try to keep a nice and diverse assortment of teas inside it. Then I also have a lot of loos leaf tea that lives on an open shelf just next to our tiny kitchen table. The small beautiful turquoise teatins are from London, too.

Last but not least, we've had some herbs on the windowsill this summer. (Guarded by some tiny moomin characters...). And since our basil was getting quite big, we had to come up with something to do with it. The result was a delicious basil oil.

I forgot to take a picture of it right away, but here's a picture of the bottle almost empty. I really recommend this oil. It's great as a salad dressing but also for frying or grilling vegetables. Yummy yum, I'll definitely make more of this!

If you want to try it, here's what I did:

1 basil plant
1,5-2 dl olive oil (just enough to cover the leaves)
1 clove of garlic
some salt and pepper

Mix them all together in a blender and it's ready to be served!

Piece of cake!

Last monday I had the wonderful opportunity to celebrate my birthday. Very rare delicacy, only happens once a year. What made this year more special was the cake I made for the first time ever: a pancake cake! Yummy yum!

Wonderful blueberries on top and jam and whipped cream as filling. Tasted like heaven.

Perhaps inspired by that sensational taste and the colours, I made these super easy and soft summer accessories the day after:

Want to make some of your own? Do so, it's the easiest piece of accessory you've ever made, I promise! As yarn I used some tricot weft rags and the hook was size 10. Then you just crochet a chain as long as you want, leave a 10 cm tail in both ends and put a ribbon on it. And voilà! Doesn't take more than 10 min to make a whole set. See? A piece of cake! :)

Tea time!

 

During the midsummer holiday, I went to my parent's and took advantage of my mother's garden. I had heard from several sourses that it isn't hard to make home made blackcurrant tea. So I went out, picked a whole lot of leaves from the blackcurrant bush and dried them in the owen at 50 °C for some 3 hours. After that they were so crispy that they broke into small, small pieces as soon as I crushed them once in my hand. Already the smell of the fresh leaves on the bush was lovely, but I was surprised to notice that the leaves kept their smell even after the drying process.

There was enough crushed leaves for filling a small metal tin my mom gave me. And now, every time I oped that tin, the lovely blackcurrant scent hits my nose and it really smells like summer. I think I'll very much look forward to opening that tin in the middle of the winter.

When I got back home, I got so inspired by my new tin and my new home made tea, that I decided to rearrange my stash of loose tea. So far they've just been inside a kitchen cupboard, losing flavour while stored inside simple paper bags. But now, I put all of my loose tea in different tins and jars, put a sticker with the name of the tea on the jar and moved them to this small shelf on the wall:

I especially like the white tin to the left. It's a souvenir a friend brought me from London with the Underground map printed on it. It used to be filled with English breakfast teabags, but now I filled it with loose Earl Grey in stead - so still remembering the origin of the tin.

I also have a lot of teabags in a wooden box made just for them, but perhaps I'll show you that another time. Maybe when I've finished my mug jacket I've been planning to make to prevent burning my fingers on the hot cup of tea.

Rhubarb!

What's summer without rhubarb? I'd say: not much. At least for me it's an essential part of this time of year. I simply love rhubarb. I like it in pies, in ice cream and in fool. And yeasterday I tried out a new recipe with rhubarb. It was a recipe I found already last summer, but I didn't have time to try it out back then. But yesterday, when it was really warm, I decided it was time for some rhubarb lemonade!

Here's how I made it:

1 kg rhubarb

1 dl sugar

2 dl water

1/2 lemon (the juice of it)

1 vanilla pod

First, mix all the other ingredients except the rhubarb and bring it to boil. Then add the rhubarb (peeled and sliced) and let it come to the boil too. Then take it off the hot plate and let it cool in the fridge. When it's cool, strain and serve with crushed ice. The taste was quite strong but perfectly sour. Really refreshing in the heat. With the left over rhubarb (after the straining) I also made a pie. Mmm, delicious!

Since it's finally summer, I've taken my camera with my outside and photographed a few things. Here's some of the pictures I've taken:

 

And finally, a sneak peak of a project I've been working on lately. More of that later on in this blog! Meanwhile, enjoy the summer!

Chicken pasta

A very long time and no see. Sorry about that. I've just been so incredibly busy that even the thought of updating my blog while I had some spare time made me even more tired. And all my crafting projects have had zero progress... But now when I can actually see the end of this semester in my calendar, it has started to feel a little better. Only six weeks till the summer holidays start.

Well, since my knitting projects look the same as in the end of february, I though I'd in stead share one of my recipes with you. It's a recipe for a chicken pasta that I have come up with myself, although inspired by some other recipes. Over the past few years this has become one of my favourite dishes. But since I've never written down the recipe, it tend to turn out a little bit different each time. So what I write down here are only approximate amounts of everyting.

Chicken pasta

500 g pasta

400 g chicken

1 big onion

1-2 red bell peppers

1 can of mushrooms

200 g sun-dried tomato Crème Bonjour

4 dl milk

1-2 tablespoon butter or margarine

1-2 tbsp of flour

3 teaspoons of red pesto

grated cheese

salt

pepper

(chicken spice)

If you use "normal" pasta, you need to cook it a little bit first, but for example last time I bought some Barilla whole-wheat Piccolo Lasagnette pasta and but them in the casserole just like that.

For the chicken I usually use honey-marinated chicken slices. Fry them on a pan adding some onion, the mushrooms and the pepper. Flavor it with some salt, pepper and chicken spice if needed.

The sauce: let the butter melt in a saucepan before mixing it with the flour. Then, when the pan is hot, add a little bit of the milk at a time, beating it at the same time to avoid lumps. When the sauce is ready, add the Crème bonjour (unripened cheese) and let it melt into the sauce. Flavor it with some red pesto.

Mix the pasta and the chicken (with the veggies) in a big casserole. Pour the sauce on top of it, add some cheese and mix a bit more. Add some more cheese evenly on the top and gratinate it in the oven in 200 ° for about 30-45 min (depending on what pasta you use, but at least until the surface turnes brown). It is now ready to be served.

Of coure you can make a smaller amount of it if you want, I just usually put some of the food in the freezer to take with me for lunch to work.

Bon appetit!

Snowflake mittens

This is the last Christmas present I had time to finish this year. Hopefully I'll have more time next year.

I promised already over a year ago that I would knit a pair of mittens for my friend, that would match her winter sharf (which is somewhat orange-pink-ish). And since this winter has been sooo cold, I decided that now it was really time to get it done. So here is the result:

Pattern: a mix of several ones

Yarn: Marks & Kattens Carolina Tweed

Needles: 3 mm

I call them snowflake mittens since I happened to stumble over those big white buttons and thought they looked just like snowflakes. Not more complicated than that :)

The other day I noticed that I had way too much milk, so I decided to bake a little.

This is only 1/5 of all the buns I made, all with cinnamon and sugar, because those are my favourites! Yummy.

The same day I had also been to the supermarket and picked up the newest Pirkka Ruoka -magazine (it's a small magazine filled with different recipes) and I decided to try out a recipe for bread that I found in there, just because it was made out of milk, too. But as I am horrible in following recipes, I had to make some small changes. I chose caraway in stead of fennel and mixed in some rye flour too to make it a bit darker. And I have to say it turned out delicious! Probably because I like caraway-bread so much :)

(Almost) 100% homemade!

Inspired by a friend at work, I made som homemade muesli and I have to say it turned out delicious!

It contains four-grain flakes, cornflakes, hazelnuts, pinenuts, raisins, dried cranberries, dried bananas and some brown sugar. I roasted the nuts and flakes along with the sugar in the owen and then just mixed them up with all the other ingredients. Especially the cranberries where actually quite expensive, but I decided I could afford a more luxuary muesli-version this time. Maybe I'll make a cheaper version of it next time :)

Then I also made homemade hamburgers a while ago:

I even baked the bread myself. Homemade hamburgers are just so much better than what you get in e.g. McDonald's. There's no extra fat (or other suspicious stuff) and you can choose exactly what you want to have in it and how much of everything. Then I also made some spicy potato wedges as a side-dish to the burgers. Yummy. Cooking at home is just so great. ...As long as everything goes according to plan...