Strawberry Ice Cream

This weekend was the first weekend for strawberries at the farmers market! I picked up a quart so I could make some strawberry ice cream. I wanted to try a recipe I found from The New Vegetarian Epicure. I ran out to pick up all the ingredients and of course forgot to get buttermilk which the recipe called for, but because it isn't a typical ice cream ingredient I totally forgot and it's rather hard to find at my neighborhood bodega and it was raining heavily outside so I had to improvise! I had some strawberry kefir in my fridge so I cut the sugar in the recipe and added the kefir instead which I "watered" down a bit with milk and cream. Wow! It was amazing. I don't know if the kefir made a difference at all since this was the first time trying the recipe, but the ice cream was fantastic! Mike liked it so much he ate it for breakfast this morning.

Need some inspiration?

Check out these inspiration boards courtesy of flickr.









black_kat1; knack studios; quaint handmade; nikkipeterson

Happy Friday!

Urban Homesteading

Last week I was scrolling through Apartment Therapy and came across a post about the Dervaes Family. The Dervaes family grows all their own food on 1/5 of an acre of land in Southern California! Their story is fascinating and proof that you don't need a lot of land to sustain yourself and grow your own food! Here's a short video of their life as urban homesteaders.



They have more videos on youtube including an interesting 5 part lecture at UCLA about sustainable living and of course, a blog.

CSA Loot and window sill gardening

I have been meaning to post about the goodies we have been receiving in our CSA for the past couple of weeks but a) I'm usually to lazy to drag everything out on to the counter before putting it away so I can get a picture of it and b) this is the first week that we have received a decent amount of veggies. We had a cooler spring than usual so it has delayed the harvests a bit, blah, blah, blah. We've mainly been getting lettuce and radishes and basically eating like rabbits until this week. This week we hit the mother load! We received three heads of lettuce, cilantro, dill, red basil (yum!), two types of cabbage, squash, kale, and I'm sure some other things that I can't remember right now. My fridge is busting at the seams!



On a slightly different but related note...we have been growing beans in our window sill. We're also attempting cherry tomatoes and jalapenos but those results have been anti-climatic at best. Check out these little guys! All this from a couple of beans from a grocery store bag...an organic grocery store bag, of course!

I'm hooked...

A couple of weeks ago I found a blog, Lifetime Plastic Bag Abstainer. It's one of those blogs that hooks you right away and you find yourself reading every archived post! One of her posts had some very disturbing facts about chocolate and the importance of fair-trade chocolate. Apparently 70% of the world's chocolate comes from West African nations where forced child labor is common on cacoa farms.

So lately, to satisfy my sweet tooth, I have been on the lookout for chocolate that is fair trade and that contains as few synthetic ingredients as possible (i.e. no high fructose corn syrup!) I have heard a lot of talk about Scharffen Berger chocolate so I checked out the ingredients list and was pleased to find that the soy lecithin in it came from non-gmo sources and that it practiced sustainability in crop selection. Added bonus...the chocolate is AWESOME!!! Wow! It's so rich and smooth that I only needed to have one small piece to satisfy my craving. The chocolate is pricey, I paid $6.69 for 1 bar (Thank you Manhattan for your over inflated prices!) You can order directly online for $4.50 a bar but I guess you would have to pay shipping. It's worth it to know that I'm buying a high quality product that practices fair labor and sustainability. I'm hooked!

Brooklyn Flea

The Brooklyn Flea went well! I was happy with the results and would definitely do it again. Although I'm glad it's over because I need a break...I'm looking forward to enjoying a couple of days off from soap! It's so hard to work all day at a job and then come home and have to focus on being creative and making product. It can be very draining. At the same time, the show gave me the motivation to work on some new ideas I have had brewing in my head! I got such great feedback on everything so that was incredibly encouraging!!

My table was next to Kristy of Beacon Bookmarks. Her and her husband make these incredibly beautiful wooden bookmarks out of wood scraps from their cabinet-making business.

I'm here...

I am still here! I'm still totally swamped getting stuff done for my show on Sunday and I have a lot of projects in the works, I will be posting about them soon and getting back to a regular blog schedule next week. Bare with me for a few more days! I'll leave you with this precious little photo of my baby...

My little laundry helper

Brooklyn Flea

Last night I got House Beautiful in the mail and I was flipping through it and they featured the Brooklyn Flea, the flea market I am going to be selling at next weekend! I couldn't believe it!

Quiet

Sorry for not posting much, it's been crazy getting ready for this show next Sunday and we have a friend coming in town this weekend and we are in the middle of a nasty heat wave! I'll be back soon!

Update to the Update

Mike and I spent over an hour taking photos last night for the shop update today and none of them turned out good enough to use. We are going to try again tonight, hopefully with some natural light. Even with the new camera they just aren't coming out...we bought a better light than the one we were using before and still had problems. I am so frustrated. We shot over 200 photos last night and we didn't want to use any of them. I think we are going to start working outside with full natural light.

Turn down your i-pod!!

So I'm on the train today going to work and I sit down a few seats away from this older gentleman who was BLARING techno music in his i-pod. It was so loud that people would sit down next to him and then get up and move further down. And seriously, techno music before 9 am?! Wouldn't a cup of coffee be more effective then the same incessant beat blaring into your ear drums. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for techno music, in appropriate situations, like when I'm at a club in Miami and it's 3 a.m.

Here's a tip...if I can hear every word or beat of your music..it's TOO LOUD! Luckily he got the hint because he finally turned it down and the rest of us rode to work in peace.

Label Update

So you might remember a while back when I mentioned that I was going to be doing a revamp of my packaging. While I haven't mentioned it since, Mike and I have been working behind the scenes trying to get the Craft Robo to work with a Mac...this was more frustrating than you can imagine. We finally got it to kind of work after several installs and uninstalls of many different versions of Adobe Illustrator! After getting it up and running we quickly realized that it wouldn't work with the concept I had designed!

So I spent $300 on a machine that doesn't do what I need it to do! I had envisioned a cigar band style wrap for my soaps with a pink piece of card stock and then a smaller, brown piece of card stock over it with my logo cut out so you would see the pink paper through the brown where the logo had been cut out, similar to my baby soap wrapping



The first problem with the craft robo was that the flower in my logo was too intricate and the cutter couldn't cut the lines that fine...then somehow, it never occurred to me that the lettering would never look right after it had been cut out because of the o,p, and a in kopah.

After a brief panic, I got over it and realized that it wasn't going to work and there was nothing I could do about it. So ever since, Mike and I have been brainstorming other ideas. Finally this weekend I came up with something! I still have a few details to work out but I hope to have it all sorted out by next week along with a shop update (This time I promise, it's really going to happen!)

And if anyone wants to buy a Craft Robo, I have one for sale...

A weekend of food...

Wow! Where do I start...Mike and I did so much cooking over the weekend. I made homemade bread and some delicious herb egg salad, homemade semolina pasta, honey ice cream, and bison burgers. We went to the farmers market in Union Square to pick up some honey for the ice cream and see what other local goodies we could find. We came across a farmer who sold bison so we thought we would give it a try...I was not a fan. It had a very "meaty" taste which I don't like. I thought it might be a good alternative to red meat and it is supposed to be much better for you. The only thing I realized from eating it is that I can live without red meat or any variation of it! Aside from some nasty downpours on Saturday the weekend was beautiful...it seems as if Summer is here to stay!




P.S. Doesn't the new camera take great pictures?!