Christmas Meatballs

We boxed up the cookbook that has the traditional meatball recipe and haven't unpacked it. We looked online and put together four or five recipes with what we remembered of the traditional one. It has really hardly come out this good half the years, and of course the hybrid recipe exists nowhere, so here it is: 

Meatballs and sauce: 

2lbs 80/20 ground beef

48oz canned diced tomatoes

2 medium yellow onions

6oz tomato paste

1/2c milk made of half and half and water

1/2 c breadcrumbs

2oz parmesan 

1 egg

5 garlic cloves

1 tbsp rosemary

scant tablespoon basil and oregano

tsp red pepper flakes

Pasta:

Fusilli or spaghetti 

Chop onions somewhat finely. Hydrate breadcrumbs with milk (made of half and half and water). Combine onions, breadcrumb mixture, grated parmesan, and egg, then incorporate beef. Add seasonings. Form mixture into small handfuls (in between golf ball and tennis ball size) and place one layer in bottom of crockpot. Alternate layers of canned diced tomato with meatballs. Add tomato paste and garlic as you go. Set crockpot on "low" for 6 hours. Boil pasta to al dente. 

this is the bread crumbs to get. 

this is the noodles to get. We usually do spaghetti but this was better. 

These are the spices. Rosemary is kind of the star. 

Also, the tomatoes did not really cook down into a sauce, there was a ton of clearish liquid, but it did taste good. So one idea is to somehow know how to make a tomato sauce thick for next year. It is possible that we usually drain the tomatoes? 

Fresh Calendar

Well, you know how it is. I put all these images into Shutterfly, and they let you add a photo in every day of the year plus those empty boxes at the start and end of the month, plus add your own text. I spent an enjoyable few hours (I might check my computer history for how long this actually was) basically looking at my dog and was so enamoured that I would have liked to buy the calendar. It was not discounting very much. I think Christmas is the only time that Shutterfly is at capacity and doesn't have to give good deals. One calendar chock full of my dog was a little more than $40 altogether. This is comparable to the upper range price of the planners I would have already bought if their spiral hole spacing was correct, so very reasonable, but high enough that I would be willing to wait past January 1st to see if it would come down. 

While I was waiting I made a second calendar. This was making my Shutterfly cart show a price of $70+ but also a banner saying that I needed $16 more dollars to reach their free shipping threshold of $79. That is close to my whole planner budget for the year so there is no way I would spend it, even though they had a picture of my dog on his gotcha day. 

The planner budget is not really about money, but more of a limit on how much energy I am putting into procuring. I felt that leaving this open ended up until and past New Year's Eve was going to take too much mental energy. I started looking for when they went on sale the last couple years so I could set a reminder and stop thinking about it. Instead, I found that you can buy them on Groupon for the price of a regular drugstore calendar. (And I found that these really don't have a baseline price. Sometimes they are free with shipping. The lowest price besides free was $8.) This was not difficult but a little legwork with declining "offers" and entering info and going from site to site. So I paid $25 to groupon and $13 to shutterfly. This meant I spent almost the amount of the original price tag but for three calendars. 

They (Shutterfly specifically, but also online shops) make it so confusing. I had to ask myself what it was worth to me and stick to it. 

I also was inconsistent at using my wall calendar this year even when I really needed to, so I am hoping one that is so sweet will be helpful. My current job has been different locations and hours every day, and I am in a weekly filofax whereas I need monthly to keep everything in mind, so I had to draw a little chart of days and dates in my jotter so I'd have it. Actually I guess I still will but can transfer the info to a more permanent form when I get home each day. 

Who wouldn't look forward to California Statehood if they got to see 1 old chihuahua. 

 

Veg tan leather bag

Research 

Seaglass Green Wall Hanging

This little cotton rug from Dharma Trading  Company is brightening up our living room. Well, it’s little for a rug, not little to manipulate and boil. The initial shibori was a little more of a backdrop than a feature. 

I bundled it up with jute. I just used some rules of thumb for a pleasing design. 

Non symmetrical- automatically has more movement and interest. 

Pick up the same color in multiple parts of the piece- this might be the most used transferrable skill I learned from painting classes. This lets you do a LOT and still have a cohesive viewing experience. 

Gradient- I let the dye strike and boil for a little while on the topologically lowest parts of the bundled rug before using my laundry stick to push more of the piece in. I think this piece could use a little more of the lightest most exhausted dye bath but of course you can’t really tell through the steam. This gives depth and interest. 

Resist: keeping some parts of the fabric reserved is why it is visually interesting enough to be a hanging. I also enjoy the evidence of handwork. 

IKEA sheepskin dyed blue

I’ve been wanting to dye these little rugs for ages, but, I think natural colors and especially white are the perfect color for a sheepskin. A dilemma which was solved when I was using the rug as a trivet for another dye bath and some navy leaked onto it. Now, I stead of a gorgeous cream I had cream and blotchy navy to work with. Perfect. I mixed up true turquoise acid dye in the dye pot, took it off heat, and put the sheepskin in hair side down and gathered. I saw some gorgeous patterning as the wool wicked up the dye but, as I let it rest it became more uniform.

 Oh, well, it still got it out of my system and the piece kept its glossy glow. 

Bear does like sleeping on it but not at a time of day with good light. I had to coax him into this photo and now he is recuperating from doing one task by sleeping tucked under one of my shins. 

Sharing the Ice

Tuesday night intermediate adult learn to skate has a half NHL rink to ourselves. I think we were doing backwards crossovers around the perimeter for 20 minutes. We didn’t get our whole free time, which our instructor tells us she “doesn’t call playtime” for adults, I know that. I’m not sure how you normally explain crossovers but if you want to turn left you lean left on your left foot and then put your right foot on the left side of your left foot, next weight on the right foot, and then pick up the left to uncross back to the starting position. And it is easier said than done. 

Anyway, I have backwards crossovers normally after I have warmed up. Today I did zero. First the ice felt sticky and then staying out of everyone’s way took most of my focus. You would think that everyone careening around in a circle would really lend itself to some psychosomatic centripetal force. I am definitely not good enough at backward crossovers to purposely vary my speed and direction so as to overtake other skaters. Practicing on my own I like to do maybe one pump, one glide, two crossovers, then glide or stumble. So I go through a cycle of different speeds that wouldn’t have been reasonable to subject my classmates to. 

Tonight I just did backward pumps, sometimes bringing the working foot to my ankle as a baby step. 

Then we spread out in 4 rows of four to practice our edges. Edges is, if you lean your weight toward your inseam, your path along the ice curves toward yourself, whereas if you lean out, the path you travel curves away from the midline of your body. Which is crazy! 

We had a different spacing problem with edges than with crossovers. In theory I was supposed to describe a perfect semicircle, pause, and describe another. In practice I had a bunch of space to my sides so I could make the arc of my circle really exaggerated and then bring it in when I got close to the shared space of the line. But then I still had to do my second semicircle with my lane mate even closer and skating toward me. So I solved this by doing the smallest little lobe. 

I don’t have full control of the tracing my line makes down to the millimeter, but I can hold all my forward edges. I have perhaps never felt a backwards edge. During Not Playtime I was trying to hold either backward outside edge for any length of time. Once it turned out a semicircle was out of reach I tried just describing any curve. I told myself very girly that it is okay to fall, and I leaned further that I had before. But my fall started too slowly and I stabbed my toe pick in the ground automatically to stop it and I tweaked my knee. Oh. I didn’t know I would do that. Typically when I fall I find out afterward. 

Overall I am getting a lot out of this class. It was amazing to break a real sweat on the ice after passively sweating all day. And all the time to know that outside, the heat was breaking. 

Urban foraging rosemary

Grabbed some rosemary on my way out of the ice rink. This grows so well in our area but I haven’t seen any around recently. This was new growth that peaked up past where the plant was hedge trimmed so I know it is fresh and a little unwanted. 

It was resinous so the car smelled crazy and I’ll need to rinse the sprigs in vinegar water before drying them. 

That’s the thing about the grocery store spice aisle, it has almost no smell. Very antiseptic.