migrating

living in the bay area and NOT working in the tech industry sometimes leads to jealousy on my part. i see the perks of the tech jobs, and think... why doesn’t my industry have things like that? free gourmet meals, gadget and tech prizes (plasmas and digi cams aplenty!), HUGE bonuses... these things all seem standard in the world of technology. but every once in awhile i am reminded why i do what i do.


lots o' birds 3
Originally uploaded by itslynzee.

on the way home from my day in the field i came across the most wonderful sight. the sky and rice paddies were FILLED with migrating birds beautifully illuminated by the sunset. crazy me swerved off to the side of the freeway and whipped out my ever handy digi cam. i scared off the birds closest to me with the freeway swerving but was able to catch a quick shot.

nature is beautiful. =)

silver bows

silver bows
Originally uploaded by itslynzee.

it's the holidays! it's hard for me to resist pretty bows. especially when they're at the dollar store!

progress

butternut squash ravioli
Originally uploaded by itslynzee.

i haven't been cooking much lately. well i guess i have, but i haven't been taking many pictures. i made another batch of butternut squash ravioli the other day just to throw in the freezer. they photograph pretty well raw but when they're cooked they just look like blobby messes.

most of my focus though has been on redecorating and cleaning out my space. it's amazing the amount of clutter i have been able to accumulate over the past year. the cleaning project i have embarked on is so extensive that i actually pulled out my label maker! whoa. i'll post up pictures of that when i'm done. to bad i never took a before pic! the plan is to have everything up and organized before my aunt comes to visit in two weeks. hmmmm... i've never been good with deadlines... and there's also the ornament swap deadline looming! ack!

seriously?

I like to read food blogs, but maybe not as much as I like to read knitting blogs. Tonight, I was doing a bit of browsing and found this post on Becks and Posh about photographing everything that you eat for a week. Check out that picture! I guess that post is a proposal, so maybe the pictures aren't representative of everything eaten within a given time span. It seems a little unreal.

I'm imagining a photo of the things that I've eaten in the past week, including a bizarre set of gummy fangs that I picked up in the department copy room/kitchen/storage room. I think I have an extra gummy pizza in my backpack somewhere. I mean, I guess that people are hardcore food bloggers for a reason, but can you imagine that collage being a set of your ingestions for the past week? I can't help but wonder if there are some dirty eating secrets... like the plastic wrapped fake-cheese single that I ate before I cooked dinner. I would throw the rest of them away, but I can't stand to throw away food!

For dinner, I made an absorption pasta dish inspired by Chocolate and Zucchini's version. I used bowties and threw in shrimp, chard and king oyster mushrooms. It turned out ok, except for the mushrooms, which tasted sort of bitter and didn't go with the other things at all. I thought they would be innocuous mushrooms, but I was wrong. They kind of reminded me of straw mushrooms, which are not my favorites. Otherwise, it was tasty. I grated some parmesan on top, which oddly made the dish smell like cheetos, which didn't exactly detract from its appeal.

I had also squeezed in the juice of half of a sweet lemon that I picked up at the local grocery store that carries a lot of Middle Eastern foods. Somehow, I couldn't exactly get my head around the idea of a sweet lemon. I still thought it would be tangy, but guess what? It's actually sweet. I could eat that thing like an orange. Weird, right?

thanksgiving

it's a day early but tomorrow should be action packed and i might not get to it! thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. family get togethers with lots of eating and without the stress about what present to get everyone. plus i love turkey. i didn't have a picture of a pumpkin but i figured persimmons are orange and festive so they fit the bill. hope you and yours have a wonderful thanksgiving.

paint by letter

cool! you can spell with flickr!

david blane

so i admit it. last nite i was watching the bachelor on tv. in my defense i was actually baking a cake at the same time. but i know that is not much of an excuse. anyway... one of the commercials during the bachelor was for some stunt that david blane is going to be doing in a week or two and i couldn't help thinking... why the hell is this guy famous?

does anyone else find him as annoying as i do?

garden update - photos from 11/12

From the top left, back row: snow peas, regular peas, mizuna; second row: mizuna, green onions, bright lights chard; third row: garlic, lettuce, nasturtium; fourth row: chrysanthemum and violas, radishes used to be there, radicchio.



From the top left, back row: rosemary, violas, green onions from cuttings, leeks from cuttings; second row: chyrsanthemum, dutch iris bulbs, daikon; third row: cilantro, carrots, stock (this plant was eaten without a remaining trace); fourth row: garlic, broccoli (also gone), baby bok choy (only one made it).



From the top left, clockwise: catnip, lavender, nasturtium, tiny zinnia, lemon verbena bush, freesia in pot, thyme, sage in the middle, more nasturtium, garlic.

sushi burrito

when we were little and would go on family trips, my mom would always bring along a cooler of food and snacks. sometimes, if we were good, the food would be sushi! my mom however, being very practical, knew that if she gave us a plate of sushi that rice would end up sticking to everything. so instead, she would wrap up a whole sushi roll in plastic wrap, uncut. so we would eat the sushi burrito style. if my (Japanese) grandma grandma ever found out about this she would be horrified since Japanese food is all about the presentation. but to me, it didn’t make it taste any different. yum!

thanks for the spam musubi mom!

mob mentality

I've never really signed up for a knit-a-long, but lately I've signed up for two. Baaa. The first is Larissa Brown's Meathead Knitalong. It's a fairly simple pointy-headed hat and each knitter is encouraged to add some sort of embellishment in place of the eartags that were used in her original installation. I wish I could figure out a way to make a mini meat thermometer. If anyone has some ideas, let me know.

The other is a test knit for a new design by Stefanie Japel over at Glampyre Knits. I cast on last night with some chenille yarn that I got along time ago to knit a skirt. The skirt never happened, but it seems like the resulting sweater is going to be pretty plush.

P.S. I just previewed the blog post and realized, duh, I signed up for Socktoberfest. Whoops. I guess maybe I'll backtrack and say that I have never before signed up for a knitalong with a specific pattern.

cork trivets

man! our dad was WAAAAAAAY ahead of his time! danny seo is just now catching onto the whole wine cork trivet thing and our dad was doing 5 maybe even 10 years ago.

if you don't know who danny seo is, i'm not quite sure either. every time i've heard a reference to him though it's that he's the "green" martha stewart. that makes him cool in my book!

bread

for a long time now baking bread has been a hobby that i've been wanting to take up. unfortunately bread requires you to be in one place for an extended period of time. i'm not so good with that so i've been holding off on the bread making. i did find something cool on the king arthur flour website though. free bread making classes that are touring the nation! there's even a couple stops in california! but for some reason they only go to southern california. what is up with that people? why is northern california being neglected? we need to learn how to make bread too!

with the bread making idea still festering in my mind i came across this article from not martha. a recipe for no-knead bread. hmmmm... maybe i CAN get into bread making.

pear cran cupcakes

turns out that i forgot my boss's birthday! =p

so last night i whipped up a small batch of vanilla garlic's pear cranberry cupcakes. he has some very cool and unique cupcake recipes up on his site. i'm dying to try the butternut squash cupcakes with sage. i'm even thinking that i might be inspired to create my own combinations! (maybe) i didn't have enough time to mess with melted chocolate this morning so i just whipped up the old standy cream cheese frosting and topped them with a frozen cranberry. the recipe uses dried sweetened cranberries but i thought the round frozen cranberries would look nice on top. they do look kind of cute, but MAN are they SOUR! if you ever do this as a garnish i suggest removing it before you eat the garnished item. mouth puckery!

fall goodness

this past weekend was a quick one. i worked two corporate parties and then it was monday again! one of the good things about working with food is that occasionally there are leftovers (that they might let you take home) and this weekend i got to take home food AND flowers. i actually had a handfull of fall colored flowers but i ended up just using my favorite for the picture above.

on sunday nite i went into a small kitchen flurry when i should have been cleaning. hahaa... i’ve been in like with 101 cookbooks for a long time. A lot of my favorite recipes were discovered in this blog. if you were around for my homemade thin mint girl scout cookies phase, this is where the recipe is from! yum.



i decided to try out 101 cookbook’s thai spiced pumpkin soup with the kabocha that i picked up for halloween. i’m probably the only girl on my block that had a green pumpkin for halloween! (well that is before the mold set in on everyone elses) this recipe was super easy and made a delicious soup. i thinned it out with water rather than broth because it was already so rich and used the masamam curry paste that has been lounging in my fridge for longer than i care to remember. that stuff keeps forever, right? right?! ack! i garnished the soup with a little extra chili powder and a dallop of yogurt to balance out the sweetness.



with the seeds i used the sweet and spicy pumpkin seeds recipe. while tasty, pumpkin seeds are a lot of work to eat. lazy me doesn’t want to shell them or chew through the shells. Oh well.

definitely try out the soup recipe. you won’t be sorry!

undecided

I've been trying to use up this leek for awhile and this recipe for curried pumpkin soup has been a contender, but I can't decide whether I think it sounds good or gross. Feedback?

so I got this yarn

I wanted to make this, but can't really afford the $160 suggested yarn. I got this yarn off of ebay since I wanted my version to still have the same sheen. It was pink. I didn't really want pink yarn, so I decided to try Koolaid dyeing to see if I could get it to be more of a peach color and I was then going to accent it with peach beads lined with gold-toned foil. Anyway, I dyed it with lemonade flavored powder and it ended up... a slightly darker pink. That was a bust.

Undeterred, but still wanting to use a non-toxic dye so I wouldn't have to poison something or get new dye-only pots, I headed out to Smart and Final and came back with a jumbo-sized bottle of red food coloring. Armed with food coloring and apple cider vinegar, I attacked the yarn again. I mixed the red with some green and blue, in an attempt to get the yarn to be a deep red or burgundy. It seemed to work out in the pot. When I went to rinse the yarn, the red washed out and out and out. I thought I would never stop rinsing. My hands and nails turned pink. What was that about wearing rubber gloves? My hands became pink raisins.

I rinsed. I added more vinegar.I boiled the yarn again in hopes that it would set the dye a little bit more. The yarn started to resemble ground beef. I thought about what it would be like to wear a ground beef-colored sweater. After all, I do have a crush on this crochet bacon wrap, but somehow the idea of a ground beef sweater is just gross. Then I rationalized that maybe it really looked like a sort of brick color. I kept rinsing the yarn, until finally it ended up looking like... a darker pink.

After having dried it, it just looks like bright pink. It's not quite coral.

Next up: acid dye in the washing machine.

missing

lately it seems like there’s lots of things to do and not enough hours to do them in. never having been an all nighter type of person, i woke up extra early this morning to whip up a batch of cupcakes for the hostesses who will be feeding me for the next few days. don’t ask me what time i got up. you’ll freak out because it was pretty darned early. so don’t be bothering me when i bring you cupcakes but then poop out on you at 8 at night! hahaha...

i tried out a recipe that i’ve had on my todo list for a long time. ina garten’s coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. i wimped out and used the lowfat version of cream cheese and the frosting came out a little too watery for my taste. next time i’m going to go with the old standby... chockylit’s thick cream cheese frosting. that one is definitely my favorite.

anyhow. this was the morning for missing things.

• not enough eggs but enough to get by (4 of the required 5)

• not enough cupcake holders?! when you buy a pack of 200 ga-gillion you never expect to run out. until one day. YOU RUN OUT. oh well. half mini and half regular sized. not disastrous. but definitely not as cute as they could be.

• where is my pastry bag??!! ugh. next time remind me not to bake so early in the morning!

i tasted one before i left for work this morning. not bad. nice coconut flavor. probably would have been better with the extra egg and a thicker cream cheese frosting (and all in mini cups!) but this recipe will definitely will make its way into my recipe file.


this picture isn’t so much a cupcake pic as it is a pic of my pretty plate. =)

info dump

my brain is full of projects galore.
here’s a few snippets of what i’ve been working on lately.

recipe dump:

butternut squash ravioli - prepared with won ton skins to make simpler

alton brown’s ribs - made in the crockpot instead of braised (with minimal water) and broiled in the oven just before eating. mmmmm... crispy and tender!

chocolate volcano cakes – definitely use high quality chocolate. prepared minus the espresso ice cream but the recipe was easy and good!

sorry no pictures! definitely try these recipes though.


lf's condo decoration project:

been trying to figure out what to do with the ridiculously small space that i purchased. i’ve been buying all the cute miniature sized furniture and accessories off of craigslist and have come up with a few well priced treasures. a faux antique look has been selected and i am currently running with it.

my new dining room table...


and couch.


i’m currently looking for a few matching accent pieces and a nice tall bookcase. next up... painting!

aphids!

i looked closely at my lettuce plant yesterday and it was COVERED with aphids! just thinking about it is making me itchy!

ZZ plant in distress?

A couple of days ago, I noticed that this leaf was getting a little discolored.




Last night, I noticed that the discolored parts of the leaves were increasingly translucent and seemed to be pooling with brown fluid. Ew!




This is the leaf after the pooling liquid actually burst out of the leaf, dripped down the spine and dried. All the information that I've seen said that Zamioculcas zamiifolia are largely disease and pest resistant and the worst thing that can happen is that they get overwatered and turn yellow. I haven't seen anything about the leaves forming pustules or blisters that then burst and drip brown liquid. Argh. Help!

string ball lights

during a recent excursion to mitsuwa with grams, i discovered a set of string ball lights. so pretty! but the $25 price tag made me hesitate.

do i really need them? maybe i can make them! and so begins the hunt for perfectly round balloons and cheap cotton string.

next up

Curried Pumpkin Soup

netflix

anyone who knows me in real life knows that i'm sort of a netflix fiend. i watch a ton of movies and i hardly ever step foot in a movie theatre. in fact, i can't even remember the last movie i watched in the theatre! when i'm bored at work i browse around on the website and add random movies to my queue.

today, while browsing around picking some new movies, i realized that i have 122 movies in my queue! i guess i'd better stop adding and get to some serious movie watching. no more adding until i get my queue down around 50. =p