Exercise.

I spend forty hours a week sitting on an exercise ball at my desk and about that much additional time knitting, reading or doing some other seat-based activity which means that I spend very few hours moving or standing, let alone exercising. I joined the Green Microgym on Belmont a few months ago and have been steadily clocking in hours on the cardiovascular equipment. Most of their cardio machines generate electricity and tie back into the electrical grid. So, every step I take generates a bit of power to keep the lights on, the music playing and helps off-set the other machines that use power rather than generate it. All this helps get me up and out but I have a ways to go before I’m exercising enough just to keep my circulation going not to mention actually staying fit.

Make more food.

Since moving away from the delightful three-a-day meals at Sterling College I’ve been very conscious about what meals look like. I’ve made a point of making each of the two meals I eat at work each day from scratch. That looks like a lot of oatmeal with whole milk and flax seeds in the morning and leftovers from the night before for lunch. I rarely eat out as it is and the drive to keep eating whole, simple, healthy foods has kept me at home and in the kitchen even more often. I love craving warm naan and a hot bowl of curry and then finding a recipe and making it myself instead of getting some down the street. I make exceptions for good hash browns and croissants though. Something I’m going to try to make is granola, especially after seeing this picture and reading the recipe:

Click the photo to read the recipe and get inspired too!

On another note, I’m working on cutting all canned foods out of my diet. Grist published an interesting article about Five Packaged Foods You Never Need to Buy Again and I already make four out of five of the foods on their list from scratch, but I do buy plenty of canned black beans. I never wanted to plan on using beans far enough ahead of time to start soaking them but after realizing that the cans are lined with BPA plastics I just can’t get another can. So, I realized that all I needed to do was change the way I think of dried beans. Instead of a process that I start ten hours before I want to use them in a recipe, I just cooked a large batch over the weekend and stored the cooked beans in the fridge until I want them throughout the week. It’s the same way I think about granola, yogurt and crackers… all foods that I cook in batches and eat over a long period. The only thing I haven’t been able to work around is canned tomatoes.

Fermentation.

Yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, ginger ale and sourdough are all on my expanding list of foods that I want to have fermenting around the apartment. I have my Wild Fermentation book and a new ceramic crock ready to go for the sauerkraut and ginger ale. I recently got my  hands on a loaner scale so I can make the sourdough recipe from Tartine again, but this time I’ll have a bit more precision and perhaps more success (all of the recipes are weight based instead of ye olde imprecise cups, teaspoons, tablespoons of most recipes). I’ll be sad when the scale is gone but I’m definitely planning to invest in one of my own ASAP.

Pickles, dilly-beans, maraschino cherries are another beast that I’m getting ready to grapple when their various ingredients come into season.

Craft.

Most things have been on pause for a long time. I want to go in and dust off my Etsy shop now that I’m back in Portland and feeling inspired. I’m getting tired of seeing things in boutiques and sassing myself with “I could totally make that” snark snark, and then not actually making whatever I was eyeballin’. I’ve joined the whole Pinterest rush and started hoarding even more ideas and lovely photos and now it’s time to get cracking. For example, I’ve been wanting to make some pillows… I’ve got the perfect stitch for the front from Karen Barbe’s blog and even have the inserts just lying around the apartment.

Where are the pillows now, you might ask? Still in my brain, waiting for me to sit down and actually work on them.

So New Year, new tries and fun times.

Oh, and the bunnies are vowing to nap more, cuddle better and stay cute.

A little birthday cloud…

And a Totoro cake!

I used this yellow cake recipe (which turned out pretty darn well) and tried to make a rainbow cake like this one. But, I think the yellow batter (and the fact that I didn’t use a cake mix) meant that the rainbow rings didn’t turn out very clearly. It was still delicious though!

Onion skins with a copper sulfate mordant! Much darker than the onion skin dye I made with alum mordant a while ago…

My first recipe from Tartine Bread, my Christmas present from himself! Oh it’s so exciting to have a naturally fermented/yeasted bread turn out %100 wonderfully! You can see my earlier post about this book/bakery here, before this sort of baking was even a twinkle in my imagination…

Brought to you by: Craftzine

The recipe we used from my cousin is pretty simple:

Dill Pickles
1 qt vinegar
3 qts water
1 C salt
Garlic
Dill
Don’t scrub pickles. Wash and let soak overnight in clean cold water. Put
cucumbers in jars (don’t pack tight). Bring solution to full rolling boil and pour
over cucumbers (for 1/2 gallon jar, use about 4 cloves of garlic and 1 large
stalk of dill). Let jars stand a little before sealing.

We’ll see how they turn out in six weeks. The brine made enough for eight small jars and two large jars so we had a little extra.

It had been a while since I’d been down to look at the lambs. All of the sheep have had their babies now (all adorable) and there were quite a few little black lambs (pretty obviously from that handsome fella McCain/Fabio). This particular black lamb was having a great time climbing up his mother and leaping off into the air over his siblings…

Amanda wrestled one of the sheep into the first shearing position almost all by herself. It was great to see people working with sheep and trying to figure out how to wrangle them.

Amanda wanted to make sure her sheep was ok with this whole “reclining” thing. She was rubbing her tum tum and crooning to her while she waited to shear.

In other news, Joe and I have been experimenting with Kombucha. We got a mother from someone at Sterling and made a batch. Which tasted like fizzy apple juice! I think it’s amazing that we can take black tea and sugar and turn it into something that tastes like cider without the alcohol or the apples! All natural and pretty cool to watch.