So scone me!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, I have one heck of a husband.  He is so willing to eat anything I put in front of him and at least pretend that he likes it.  Even when I've been feeding him vegetarian food for 3 days straight and making him eat millet muffins for breakfast.  I mean, he is a trooper.  A freakin' trooper I tell you.

So I felt like he deserved a little weekend treat.  Enter: vanilla-blueberry scone with vanilla icing.

Ok, so I did make them with whole wheat flour...but there's icing on top!

Thank you, Ryan, for putting up with all my cooking shenanigans.

Whole wheat vanilla-blueberry scones w/vanilla icing
adapted from the here

1  cups whole wheat flour

1 cup white flour

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 salt

5 Tbl butter

1/2 cup light sour cream

1/4 cup skim milk

1 egg

1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract*

1 cup blueberries

For icing:

about 2 tsp vanilla extract*

about 1/2 cup powdered sugar

Mix all dry ingredients together (except for icing ingredients).   Cut in butter.  Mix wet ingredients in a separate bowl then mix with the dry ingredients.  Fold in blueberries.  Make a disk with the dough and place in the center of a greased, baking sheet.  Cut into eighths. Bake at 375 for 20 - 25 minutes.  While baking, make icing.  Mix 2 ingredients until you reach your desired consistency.  I like mine a little thicker than most icings. Immediately remove from pan and drizzle icing on top.

*I finally started using the vanilla extract I made a few months back and FYI it works great!

Baby blanket

Despite the hot weather here in SoCal last week, I've been knitting up a storm.  I just started  knitting this baby blanket for my sister - woo!

I don't think I've shared the news yet here, but one of my sister's (I have 3) is expecting again! Wooooo! I love being an aunt!  It's like the best of both worlds.  You get to hang out and love a cute little kiddo but still get a full nights sleep.  I love my sleep. A lot.

That being said, I just started this chevron baby blanket pattern.  I'm using a pattern from Purl Bee (love their patterns and blog!) and it's coming along rather quickly.  It's knit on size 11 circular needles and is a relatively simple pattern if you're a beginner knitter.  I highly recommend it!  

It's going to be striped white, light gray, and light green.  I bought a skein of yellow too, but can't decide if I like it combined with the green...we'll see what happens there.  They aren't finding out the sex of the baby so I am trying to keep it to neutral colors.

In other news, Ryan just has 1 more month of school!!!!  Yay!!! : D

Scandinavian Festival 2012

Well folks, I have to say, the Cal Lutheran Scandinavian Festival was one of the best Scandinavian festivals I've been to in the States - so cute!  There were Swedish meatballs, Dala horse croquet, vikings, aebleskivers, and the ABBA Girlz.  It was pretty fantastic.

Look how excited Ryan is for the fun to begin!

This man was walking around playing this old, Swedish instrument - the key fiddle, it sounded really neat.

They had a viking area where kids could dress up as little vikings, it was precious.  I can't wait to take my nephew here next year, he would make one cute little viking!

And they had demonstrators all over the festival explaining different aspects of Scandinavia.  Along with different craft tents for kids to make all sorts of fun projects from viking whip cords (made from yarn) to Danish paper cutting.

And I had never seen Dala horse croquet before, too cute!  

The festival was complete with a Maypole and dancing!  We sang many songs in Swedish and a few in English too.  This was probably my favorite part of the festival. 

And there was food galore!  Ryan and I tried the meatballs, aebleskivers, and lefse.  All delish.

The ABBA Girlz were a definite highlite of the festival.  

Everyone loved dancing along...

And we found a tent dedicated to spinning!  These ladies were using various spindles to spin some yarn.  There was also a small craft fair area where you could find random Scandinavian crafts and goods.  It was a pretty darn fun day overall.  Success!

We will definitely be back next year!

Kale chips

These are Ryan's and my new favorite snack.  I know the kale chip trend was a few years ago and I can't believe I waited this long to try them! They are so gooooood! Seriously people, so good.  

For any trendy-health-food-scoffers out there, these will actually impress you.  They taste like chips.  Maybe not like a tortilla chip, sure, but like a little crunchy piece of heaven in your mouth.  Ryan even loves them.  He tolerates normal kale when I put it in stuff, but these kale chips he actually enjoyed eating (!). 

They go from bright green to this:

Want to try them?

Take 1-2 bunches of kale and cut into 2-inch pieces.  Take out any thick stems.  Lay on a cookie sheet and spray a little olive oil  over them and toss.  I used my Misto (I love this kitchen item!) spritzer for this and it was like it was made for this purpose.  Sprinkle salt over kale.  Some recipes out there even jazz them up with some cayenne pepper or chili powder - I will try that next time. 

Bake at 300 for 20 minutes or until crisp.  Eat up!

Reduce, Reuse, Organize

Let's be honest, it's quite comical that I'm about to share an idea about how to organize something.  Organization has never been my strong suite.  Don't get me wrong, I actually prefer to have things organized, it's just I have a lack of motivation to actually get whatever it is that needs to be organized, well, organized.

But when I can make something cutesy to organize stuff, I'm all over it.  And these chalkboard jars are the thing my cupboard needed.

I usually buy all my grains from the bulk section of the grocery store.  I can never quite remember the grain to water ratio needed to cook the grains.  I think I remember but always have doubts, "Wait, was it 1 cup quinoa to 2 cups water, or 1 cup?!" Then I always end up googling it to make sure I remember correctly (and good thing I check, half the time I'm way off).

That's why I love the chalkboard lids of these recycled glass jars.  I just write which grain is in it and the corresponding grain to water ratio.  And since I use my rice cooker to cook all my grains I didn't write a cooking time on mine. But if you use a stovetop to cook your rice and grains, you could easily add the cooking time to the lids as well.

These are super quick to make since you're just painting the lids.  It took me a couple months of saving up my glass jars (and my sister's - thank you!) until I had enough to fit all my grains.  

I picked up a little pint of chalkboard paint at my local DIY shop (there's a chain here in CA called the Do It Center) for $10.  And I have tons leftover that I am planning to use in an upcoming project - stay tuned!

Once all your jars and lids have been thoroughly washed and dried, lay them out on your work surface.  Get your paintbrush and chalkboard paint ready.

Paint all your lids.  Follow your specific paint's instructions for adding additional coats.  I ended up doing a total of 3 coats.  The yellow lids especially needed that third coating.

Once set for 48 hours, write on your lids with chalk.  Label and organize it up!

You could use these glass jars to store anything really, Ryan stores his whole, dried chili peppers in one of the smaller jars.  The options are endless, enjoy organizing!

New knits and a Scandinavian fest

If you live in the Los Angeles area and are interested in Scandinavian things (or even if you just like a good cup of cofffee), you should come check out the Scandinavian Festival taking place at Cal Lutheran University this upcoming weekend, April 14 and 15.  Ryan and I, along with a few fellow Scandinavians, will be checking it out Sunday afternoon.  And I think it's safe to say tha Ryan and I are equally excited to see the ABBA Girlz perform.  :)

I will post pictures sometime next week and let you non-LA folk know how it went.

Unrelated to the upcoming festival, I've been working on a new knitting project this week:

I'm trying out a new stitch I haven't used before, the zig zag.  I think it's pretty fun, but in retrospect wish I had used a solid color so you could see the design better.  Alas, next time.

I started knitting the swatch without a specific thing in mind and now that it's coming along I think I may make it into a pillow? Maybe...we'll see.  I used a yarn combo of the Vanna's Glamour and a gray rayon blend.  I really love grays and yellows together.

When I knit, I often listen to random music on Spotify.  Recently I've been a little obsessed with this band, the Ditty Bops, and this song, "Sister Kate".  It's fantastic! However, I don't believe the video does the song justice.  I highly recommend you give them a listen on Spotify.  And the title of their most recent album cracks me up: Jelly for President: Yes we Jam! (Ha!)

Well, that's about all I have for today.  Hope you all have a lovely weekend! 

Nut-butter trio

I have to admit, ever since I made that jazzy almond butter, I can't stop making nut-butters...I'm just so addicted!  I figure there are worse things to be addicted to so I'm going to go ahead and keep cranking out the jars of delicious PB, almond and sunflower butters until I am OD'd on nut-butters.

And to be honest, the sunflower butter isn't my favorite, but it's pretty good with a drizzle of honey on toast.  The spiced almond butter is definitely my favorite.  And the PB was more a novelty to make myself.  Definitely less sweet than your store-bought counterpart, naturally.  

I think I will continue to make the PB and spiced almond butter but perhaps forego another batch of sunbutter.  Even the color looks kinda gross in the photos. Haha.

Unrelated but just as fun, Ryan and I had a blast over at my sister and bro-in-laws' place over this past Easter weekend grilling, eating, gaming, and hanging out with the cutest nephew ever.

He just cracks me up, he's one funny kiddo.

Happy Monday?

Sprouting things

Good news, folks!  My little seedlings have sprouted! 

Welcome to the world little basil and chives.  And giant sunflower.  I completely forgot how sunflowers shoot right up.  I don't think I've grown one since kindergarten.  I even had to add a little popsicle-stick-support-system so they wouldn't fall over.  They are at least 6 inches tall already...after just a little over a week?! Wowzers. 

Also sprouting related, I attempted to sprout my own wheat berries to make some historical and nutritious Essene bread.  Major fail.  They were supposed to sprout within 48 hours and, after soaking them for a week, I'm certain they fermented instead of sprouting.  Bad wheat berries?  I don't really know what happened, but fear not, I will try it again!

Happy (early) Easter all!

Scandinavian love

Sorry I haven't been posting much this past week.  Ryan is on his spring break so we've been hanging out more than I've been crafting and blogging.  He's thoroughly enjoying having a week off to do non-school related things.  We've been fitting in a lot of games (Scrabble and Sequence seem to be the go-to games these days) and hanging out with friends - it's been grand. :)

  I just thought I'd share a few of my Pinterest Scandinavian inspirations until I can post something crafty.

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I would love to learn how to do intense paper cutting like the heart above.  I can't even imagine how much time that would take.  Crazy.

Happy Wednesday!