Valentine Making, Cooking Lessons and a Few Ruffles

     Happy Monday....I am not quite sure what happened to Friday? This weekend was a soulful weekend for me. I took time to do some visiting with my mom over tea--she is an avid knitter and she has a lovely home so I always love to go by and have a cuppa and a nice chat. I bought her a new book (she would never buy anything like this for herself) "Knitting Never Felt Better" by Nicky Epstein. It is a really beautiful hard cover book on knitting and the art of felting. My mom was so excited to get lost in it.
     We also stayed on our Valentine Making in the Middle of January path...the kids and I made some really cute mini valentine sugar cookies. They had lots of fun cutting them out and then decorating them. I loved that they were mini. We will probably make more closer to Valentines day itself. I think the secret to these was two things: one....we used pillsbury premade sugar dough as I was not up for the floury mess of making them from scratch and we used a deep, mini cupcake cutter; which created the perfect little cookie.

I also had a cooking lesson from my husband--I can not cook and find it is a shame fabric is NOT edible...Julian taught me how to make a French recipe he has made for us since college. It is really the dish that I believe made him fall in love with cooking. It is not actually very hard, there are just quite a few overlapping steps and you have to know how to make a roux...which is a new cooking technique for me. Anyway, I wanted to share the recipe and some shots of our cooking

you can even see the cooking splatters on the pages that have acumulated over the years. He has dragged this cook book around with us for over 15 years.

The ingredients are pretty simple and strait forward: ham, gruyer, mushrooms, flour, chicken broth and a few other basic ones.

The neat thing is once you prep it, cook it and get it in the oven...you are done. Julian has always made it for us with a salad and desert and it seems to be enough.

Anyway, I really enjoyed learning how to make it. It was really nice to spend time with Julian in the kitchen. He is such a great cook and we laugh a lot as we cook along...All in all, it was a nice, quiet weekend. I did manage to get a few more ruffles made and I am working on a new sewing project and pattern to incorporate them into.

This is a ruffle made with a 1 stitch--so gathered stitch by stitch...it is pretty, but probably not as useful.

This sweet little pink one is for the project I am currently working on and it is gathered ever 6 stitches which seems to be may favorite setting.

So this weekend was a soul filling gathering of cooking and crafting projects and a bit of stitching ruffles.

     

    Happy Hunting for what ever inspires you, Gathering with the ones you love and Stitching with whatever fiber allows you to find your bliss