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Cocoa Pasta

So this is what we had last night for dinner. We bought the pasta at Culinary Conspiracy a while back but I have been looking for the perfect recipe for it. There are lots of dessert recipes but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. So I decided to just use the sauce recipe on the package, which calls for mascarpone cheese (which we just happened to have for the first time ever - my mom gave it to us), walnuts, garlic, milk and parmesan. We had all of those things so I just had to pick up the parsley and pine nuts.
It was… interesting. First of all, it looked gorgeous. Those pictures don’t do it justice. The pasta was almost black and looked so rich. The overall taste was rich, creamy and very earthy but sort of subtle (we are, however, non-tasters so “subtle” to us may be overpowering to you). We added salt and cracked pepper and that helped to bring out the flavors. It did leave that almost powdery feel to my mouth, like after eating a dark, 85% cocoa chocolate bar. We both thought that it needed something to liven it up, maybe orange zest or something. I would love to experiment with it some more. The package and several sites said it tastes good with game, but I’m still a recovering vegetarian and not quite ready for that.

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Loveable Links:: Design

Apple remote control by Sony:
Beauty in a remote? Now if only we had a TV…

EscHome - wearable office designed by Adam Kumpf:
Productivity meets Performance Art.

Mary Hale’s Monumental Helium Inflatable Wearable Floating Body Mass:
I just know you wanna wear it to your next gala.

Solio - solar charger for your Ipod or cell phone:
We could bring this to our party in the woods instead of the paper record player.

Toast Messenger:
If I had a breakfast restaurant, I would write a little note to each of my patrons.

Pock-It:
Post-It’s big brother.

Swiss Peace Knife:
Sans knife.

Smashing Magazine

TwentyIf

TechEBlog

Yanko Design

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Delicious Cucumber Alphabet

What can I say? Ryan is passionate about typography and I’m passionate about cucumbers. And yes, I totally ate every last piece after we took the pic.

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The Flora to My Fawn(a)

Someone needs to take this freezer paper away from me. Or else find me some new colors of fabric paint. In any case, I present this, my second freezer paper stencil project.

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Freezer Paper Fawn

Okay, so maybe I didn’t make that hoodie from scratch like I said I would. But I did buy this hoodie in the men’s department for $8 and then alter it a little. I took in a bit on the sides and under the arm so it wouldn’t look like I have massive shoulders. And last night we had a craft night. Theme: freezer paper stencils.

Favorite new thing: freezer paper. Up until just a couple days ago I didn’t even know what it was. It’s like wax paper but only waxy on one side. Which makes it perfect for using as a stencil - just cut out an image (cut out all the parts you want to be colored) and iron it on to your shirt (or, in my case, hoodie), waxy side down. You get clean crisp lines like a silkscreened image, but at a fraction of the cost and time. It works really well.
You can draw right on the paper side of the freezer paper, cut a sheet of it down and print right on it (I was scared it would wreck our printer), or print out an image in black and white and put it underneath and cut it out.
I want to order some fabric paint online because there is very little selection here. Actually, there is a huge selection of 3D puffy paint - who uses that anymore?! Apparently you can use regular paint, acrylic or something, but it won’t stand up to much washing.
We had Ryan’s little brother and his friend over last night to try this out. I found out that I am not very good at explaining things. I don’t like over-explaining things or repeating myself but that usually just means that I under-explain. So here are some good, thorough tutorials:
Craftster
Instructables
Neither Hip Nor Funk
Some warnings:
-don’t do anything too intricate
-if you have any inside pieces, make sure you keep them and mark the paper side with a pen or something because it is really hard to tell which side is waxy when the pieces are so small (for example, if I had wanted my deer on the back of my hoodie to have eyes and a nose, I would have kept the little pieces and ironed them on)
-iron straight down, don’t move it back and forth
-when painting, dab straight down along the edges or they will start to lift

I think I am going to rummage through my closet to see what else I can paint on. Hmm…

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Very Hush Hush

Last summer, an artist named Cathy Terepocki opened up shop here in Nelson with designer Tracy Fillion, in an airstream trailer in a back alley. Okay, it’s only sort of a back alley as it does have a name (Herridge Lane) and is also occupied by one of the best restaurants in Nelson, All Seasons Cafe. Anyway, in anticipation of the re-opening of Very Hush Hush this summer, I wanted to do a little tribute to Cathy and Tracy’s boutique.

Check out Cathy’s site: Horn of Plenty
Tracy’s shop: Dear Pony,

I have a wedding-related story for each of these, if you can bear it…
First of all, Ryan bought an adorable blue/gray argyle shirt by Dear Pony for me to wear to a bridal shower when I was feeling particularly lackluster. It has silkscreened crows on it and the words ‘a murder of crows’. I love it.
As for Horn of Plenty: I wanted to buy one of Cathy’s glass pendant necklaces for each of my bridesmaids (four of them) and she kindly offered to bring in the ones she had from home so I would have a greater selection, which I thought was really sweet.
Do I sound wistful? If I do, I can assure you it has much more to do with wishing it was summer than planning a wedding. Don’t get me wrong, the wedding was great (especially the food) but what with Ryan losing the pants to his wedding suit a week before and not hiring a DJ until the day before… I’ll just say that I’m happy to be married to Ryan and I really just want it to be summer so we can go to the beach and wander through Cottonwood Market again.

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Home

After spending the majority of 48 hours sleeping, I woke up on Monday morning feeling pretty good. Good, but with a keen awareness of the fact that I hadn’t been out of the house in several days. A moderate case of cabin fever set in. We haven’t gone anywhere all winter, I realized. Half an hour after telling Ryan of my predicament we were on the road. We ended up going to Spokane and spent a whole 24 hours there. But it felt like about four days. In a good way. In a cabin-fever-curing way.
It actually feels good to be home again.

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A Dream

I’ve been sick the last few days. Yesterday morning I forced myself to go out and on the way into town, Ryan had to pull over to the side of the road so I could throw up. Yes, it was in the morning. But no, it was not ‘morning sickness’.  Pretty much since then (except for couple hours last night) I have been sleeping.
Out of the depths of my sleep came this lovely dream: I was in the nicest grocery store where only one side of each aisle was food and the other was a plain wall painted a rich, chocolate brown so there would be less traffic in each aisle and you didn’t get product overload. Such a thoughtful market. There was an entire aisle dedicated to spices that I had never heard of that I was slowly making my way down. I came across these tiny test tubes with a little spray nozzle on the side and there was a sign that said “spray to make your food taste like the sea”. I knelt down to look and was surprised to find each of the little tubes to be filled with water and the tiniest sea creatures I had ever seen. There was a bright pink octopus the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil, a florescent yellow sea horse and miniature fish all the colors of the rainbow. Quickly, I bought up the entire stock of the test tubes to save the little guys. In my haste, one of the caps came off and out flew a miniscule blue and white  penguin. Gently, I asked him to go back into the tube and he did. My original idea was that they would look beautiful hanging up in a row somewhere, but when I got home I knew I had to give them a larger place to swim.
Then I woke up.

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Blue Dot Test

Have you ever wondered why some people like bland, unseasoned food? Ryan and I err on the side of overspicing. We love rich espresso, dark chocolate, kalamata olives, aged white cheddar, garlic, chili peppers, curry, and dry red wine. This, we just discovered, is because we are non-tasters.
The book Harmony on the Palate, which is primarily about wine pairings, has a test you can take to find out if you are a non-taster (25% of the population), a medium-taster (50%) or a super-taster (25%). Essentially, our perception of taste is based on how many taste buds we have. Super-tasters have more taste buds than medium- and non-tasters. To a super-taster, the things Ryan and I like to eat are too intense.
The test is simple: Place one of those ring stickers used to reinforce the holes in binder paper on your tongue, near the front but not on the tip. Then use a q-tip to put a drop of blue food coloring inside the circle. Then you need a magnifying mirror (or a mirror and a magnifying glass) and look at your tongue. Pink dots appear through the blue dye. These are the fungiform papillae that contain taste buds. So you just count up how many of the pink dots you can see inside the circle. More than 35 means you’re a super-taster, 15-35 means you’re a medium taster, and less than 15 makes you a non-taster. I had about 10 which makes me a non-taster. You get a nice blue dot on your tongue when you take the test, which is a nice bonus.
So I guess this means that we can’t call people wusses for not being able to handle spicy foods because genetically, they just have more taste buds. And besides, the name “super-taster” makes them kind of sound like a hero so I wouldn’t mess with them.
The book also explains the proper way to have a wine tasting - the science behind the swish, the spit and all the other pretentious wine snobbery. I really like the wine aroma wheel. Ryan is effortlessly descriptive (see his description of my raw sushi in this post) but I need some prompting and the wheel helps. “This wine is mushroomy with a little yoghurt and the essence of cut green grass” for example. Good recipes, too. Makes a great wedding gift (that’s how we got it).
Is it too early for a glass of the red now?

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Spicy

One on the many organizational accomplishments of the weekend is this new magnetic spice rack. I know, the whole magnetic spice tin thing isn’t news by any means. Maybe even a little played out. But it’s still genius. We put them up on the side of our fridge. I wasn’t going to label them because I always think I can tell the difference between oregano and basil (which, due to many years of not having a sense of smell, I always get mixed up). And of course there are times when I end up throwing curry into my greek salad. Well, one time anyway.
So I designed these little labels with some futura fontage (futura is currently my favorite font - I used it on my etsy banner too).
This reminds me - our new filing cabinet is in need of some file labels. Is it sad that I’m really excited about that? We cleaned out the office/guest room this weekend. Both of us had boxes and boxes of things that we have been storing at our parents’ houses and now that we’re settling down were forced to take back. Boxes and boxes. And Ryan has approximately one million canvases.
We had just collapsed from exhaustion and were sitting, enjoying the clean result, when Dan called and said he’s coming to visit. Good timing! We’ve got a functional guest room and, now, a guest for the room.
Last year Dan came at the end of March and we all ended up jumping in the lake. It’s still really cold so I’m hoping he doesn’t make us do that again.