Oh, my kitchen is a mess . . .

. . . but seeing the smiles on those little girls' faces makes it soooo worth it :D This morning I decided to (finally) bake another batch of those completely amazing almond butter cookies that were on Sugar (on the Food Network) one day. Very nutrient dense (only grassfed butter in this house ;) ). Here is my modified version of the recipe:

Almond Butter Cookies

• 10 tbsp unsalted butter at room temperature
• 1/4 cup sucanat
• 1/3 cup pure almond butter
• 1 x farm egg
  
• 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 1/3 cups whole grain spelt flour
• 1/4 tsp celtic sea salt
• 24 x whole almonds

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 °F.
2. Cream butter and sucanat together until smooth. Beat in almond butter and egg and stir in vanilla extract. Sift in spelt flour and sea salt and combine until dough is soft and smooth.
3. Roll cookies into 1-inch balls and place on a stoneware baking sheet. Press a whole almond into center of each cookie. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes on the center rack of the oven until cookies lightly brown around edges. Transfer cookies to a cooling rack.

While dd1 started the cookies, I set dd2 up to mix the solid ingredients for the playdough we were making. As soon as I set her up, dd1 decided she'd rather help her sister, so the girls happily and cooperatively (amazingly enough for a 1.5 and 3.5 year old!!) stirred their mixture of salt, flour and koolaid together while I got the cookie dough mixed. Dd2 decided she wanted to help me form the cookie balls, so I added the water and oil to the playdough mix for dd1 to stir in (she was enthralled by the color change - from a white powdery substance to green wherever the water touched it! How neat! Must be magic ;) ) We fried up the playdough while the cookies were in the oven. What a beautiful morning!
It does, I have to say, strike me as a touch ironic that we made sure to use unbleached organic flour with koolaid . . .

Playdough

• 1 tbsp salt
  
• 5 tbsp unbleached flour
• 1/2 pkg koolaid (~1/2 tsp)
• 3 tbsp water
• 2 tsp oil
  

Directions:

1. Mix salt, flour and koolaid.
   
2. Add boiling water and oil, and mix into a dough.
   
3. Fry dough in oil for a few minutes until it loses its stickiness.
   

Fall Sewing and Knitting - already?

Oh, the summer is going by too fast (it always does, doesn't it). I've had a chance to do quite a bit of work lately, as it's been so hot outside that we've been spending many of our afternoons in the basement. No pics again, though, I broke our camera - trying to take a pic of my oldest dd's "artwork", felt on flannel, she really had her colours and shapes aligned so beautifully, and as I was about to snap the pic, my younger dd went to grab the pieces off the board - as I reached down to stop her I slammed the camera on the table *sigh* Anyways, we did get a new camera, but I haven't yet played with it to figure out the software for uploading the pics onto the computer.

In the past couple of weeks, I've made boxer briefs for dh, panties for me, shorts for me, a skirt for me, and played with other miscellaneous little projects. I've also finished a panty order (5 pairs sewn, 1 pair unsewn + pattern & instructions), complete with a Morsbag, to be mailed tomorrow. When I open up my HyenaCart (coming in September!!), I have decided I will send a Morsbag as a gift with every order - I'll be looking for old sheets at value village, through freecycle, etc, to be able to make them :) Yeah, I [i]could[/i] advertise for myself on the bag - but I'm not going to. It defeats the purpose - they'll say Morsbag.com and that's it.

I want to learn: card weaving, naalbinden (this is a big one - I read in a book recently that centuries ago in Norway, a man was said to have a poorly skilled wife if his mitts were done with knitting as opposed to naalbinden - and like any strong minded (hard-headed?) woman of Scandinavian descent, I took it as a challenge, lol), wireworking, basketmaking, the list goes on

It will have to wait a bit, though, another MDC swap is coming up and I'm going on vacation next week :D I'll be taking some knitting along, as well as a couple pincushions to finish.