Thing-a-day.com

I made vanilla Meyer lemonade last night, loosely following a recipe I read on Vanilla Garlic. My Meyer lemons weren’t quite as mild as usual, but the flavor was still really nice and paired quite well with the rich complexity of fresh vanilla bean in the simple syrup. I poured it into an empty Italian soda bottle I’d saved. It’s also delicious mixed with limoncello lemon liquer — sweet, tart, handsome and alcoholicious!

Yesterday I forgot to post. Really I just needed to take a break. I feel drained from creating everyday and trying to create before the sun goes down so I can take decent photos. Yesterday I did do some creating really. I took my camera onto my balcony and took photos of my plants. That is rather normal for me since I keep a garden blog called New Sprout. It’s difficult to post gardening related things when I only have a balcony to garden on. My plants are few but that makes me notice changes better then if I had many plants.

This is my Lemon Balm plant. It smells like mosquito repellent and can be used for just that. You can make tea from the leaves and cook with it but the smell doesn’t make me really want to do that. I’m sure it probably doesn’t taste like it smells. I just need to get brave one day.

I have landscape design projects to do today so my crafting time is zilch. I’m a procrastinator and save my homework to the last day. Shame on me.

On Day 13…

 I fed myself (yet another salad, and an improvised blt using pancetta for bacon- which works pretty well):

I planned to feed others (lemony “sunshine cupcakes” from William Sonoma Deserts cookbook, frosting forthcoming):

and I did my laundry:

exciting, no?

So, I came up with this “great” idea to make stuffed heart pillows for the upcoming holiday, the twist being that they would have decidedly un-Valentine sayings cross-stitched onto them.

As I tried to figure out how to do this, I realized there’s a whole subculture of these kind of “subversive cross-stitch”-ers already out there: http://www.subversivecrossstitch.com/index.html.  Not only that- there’s a web-comic who is doing basically the same thing I was thinking of, only better http://www.subversivecrossstitch.com/valentines2008.htm

Motherfucker.

But I went ahead with it anyway.  To ensure my failure, I opted not to get the appropriate cross-stitch fabric (I used an old handkerchief), and I did basically no pre-planning for the layout of my sparse ”design” (I was too impatient).  Also, I drank as I stitched erratically.  Here’s what I came up with:

and

it’s the perfect hot drink aprés ski or snowboarding. it’s also the best “cold medicine”.

• fresh ginger
• dash or jigger of bourbon to your liking
• fresh lemon (i prefer meyer lemons)
• honey or raw sugar
• softly boiled h2o

drink it while it’s hot!