and it's cool, and it's totally awesome!

For any of you who haven't yet seen the Harry Potter musical, you really should check it out.  I've had the first song stuck in my head all evening.  It is amazing and hilarious and, most importantly, people like me who were never into the books/movies can love it too!  Just a warning, though: this is a full-length show, so you may end up losing a lot of time.

Lately, I've been losing what little time I can find by making crazy upcycling plans.  What is upcycling?  I'm glad you asked.  It's basically the process of taking clothes you don't want and using the fabric to make something you do want.  I have several shirts that I can't wear anymore, some because they are worn out and some because they are too big, and so I've been trying to find interesting things to do with the ones I can't bear to throw away.  Well, that and trying to screw up some courage to resize my big stuff, now that I have a sewing machine.  A couple weeks ago I made a t-shirt quilt out of a bunch of my old Threadless shirts.  My next project is to make a little shrug.  Hopefully it'll be totally awesome ^.~

 116. Fig Bars
These cookies look a lot like the ones I made the week before, but they aren't the same!  The filling for these is made with figs, red wine, cinnamon, honey, and pepper.  I used a cheap cabernet for the wine, because I try to use up the things I buy and have never really liked merlot much.  The cookie part is a simple white flour dough with lemon zest in it.

These cookies were alright at first, although I think the cabernet was a bad choice - I guess the thing about red wines is that they are meant to go well with savory things like steak or pepper, but some go better than others - it probably would have been a good idea for me to think about what kind of wine to buy rather than to pick up something with a kangaroo on it.  The strange and cool thing, though, is that after a few days the cookies became a little softer and the flavors mellowed out, and all of a sudden these cookies were really delicious.

 117. Cassis Chambord Crisps
These are very simple cookies.  In short, they are low-butter sugar cookies with a hefty dose of Cassis, a blackberry liqueur, to give it flavor.  The recipe suggested Chambord, a raspberry liqueur, as a substitute, and since I love raspberry and couldn't find any creme de cassis on short notice, I made the suggested substitution.  Little did I expect, however, that I would end up having to buy a holy hand grenade filled with liqueur!  Or that it would set me back $30.

The holy hand grenade of raspberry liqueur.

These cookies just came out of the oven about half an hour ago, and I'm not entirely sure what I think about them yet.  They aren't particularly crisp, and I can't detect any raspberry flavor in them.  I'm hoping that they might taste better in the morning, but we'll see.  I suppose I'll have to update again then to let you know.

Edit: the raspberry shows up after about two bites, hooray!


I think that's it for now.  Perhaps in a future entry I'll post some of the products of my sewing adventures, but that will all depend on how they turn out.

Current Project Status: 1 Complete, 2 at ~50%

I have this problem that I'm always in the middle of some 100 different things at a time.  Okay, maybe 100 is a bit of hyperbole, but I have never done well with boredom, and so I always find new things to do.  As the semester draws to a close and the things I have to do demand more of my time, it's a good idea to finish projects without immediately starting new ones.  And since I'm excited about a couple that are currently going on or just finished, I'm going to talk about them here.

The first thing I want to talk about is a pair of socks I just finished knitting.  I started these in January, intending to give them to my dear friend Bonita for her birthday at the end of the month.  Unfortunately, I drastically underestimated the amount of time they would require, and overestimated my free time.  Four months later, I finally finished these, just in time to give them as a graduation present.

My halfway-done other project is not nearly so time-consuming, although it takes a long time to complete.  A month ago, I started making limoncello (lemon-infused vodka, basically), using this recipe.  Since Meyer lemons are expensive, I ended up substituting regular lemons in place of about half of them.  To make this, 100 proof vodka is poured over many lemon peels and set in an airtight jar in a closet somewhere for 40 days.  After 40 days (i.e. last night for me) a simple syrup and more vodka is added, and the whole concoction is once again left to sit in a cool, dark place for 40 days.  Word on the internet is that the longer you let this age, the smoother the taste gets. That said, the end of May should be pretty awesome.

93. Fig Pinwheels
My other halfway-complete project is my usual cookie baking, which I continued this week with an unusual take on Fig Newtons.  The dough for these consists of butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, salt, and egg, like any standard cookie recipe.  The filling was made by boiling dried figs and golden raisins in apple and orange juice for about 40 minutes, and then putting it through a food processor until it was spreadable.  Once the cookie dough was made, it had to be chilled until I could roll it out into long sheets.  After spreading the fig mixture on these sheets, I rolled them up and cooled them until I could slice them without the rolls deforming too much.  Although this was a very easy recipe, the duration of this recipe (that is, time from mixing dough to finishing baking) was quite long, so I ended up doing laundry at the same time.  At the end of the day, these cookies turned out to be chewy and a little sweet, with the fig filling introducing just a little bit of stickiness to the texture experience.  They also look pretty impressive, and it turns out that dried figs are a lot cheaper than many other dried fruit I've had to purchase.  All in all, if I need to do chores around the house all day, these may be a good selection to make again.