Small creations

I don't think I just talk for myself when I say that Pinterest is a great source for both inspiration and procrastination. "I'm just going to have a quick look on Pinterest" has a tendency of turning into a whole evening filled with pinning. Most of the time I just pin it and forget it, but there was something with this tutorial that I tumbled upon on Pinterest that I found especially appealing. Before I forgot it again...

...until I found a bag of something called "doll clay" in my local crafts store. It is very light and it doesn't require baking, it will just dry in room temperature. I don't have a picture of the clay because this happened long long time (a couple of months) ago.

I had a great time playing with the different kind of effects you can make. My favorites are these two bowls I use to store some of my jewelry in.

The pattern is made by a crocheted doily.
I painted the pattern in two different shades of purple.

In addition to the two bowls with the doily pattern, I also made some with a pattern from a little bush branch I found in the garden.

I just used a rolling pin to make the pattern. 

The bowls with the branch pattern has just been standing in a cabinet the last couple of months, waiting for me to do something with them. I finally got around to it here the other night.

I used the colors Green Light, Sap Green and Burnt Sienna.

The paint I used is a cheap acrylic paint that is mainly meant to be used on canvas, but it seems to have dried very well on the clay, and with a layer of lacquer over it I don't anticipate any problems.

I think the pattern is nice in itself, but the paint makes it really stand out. 

I don't think the clay is very strong, and the bowls are very thin and light. They work very well for my jewelry, but I wouldn't use them for anything heavy. And even with a layer of lacquer, I don't think they would survive much time in water. That being said, I think they are very decorative and I'm really happy with the result!

Meatless Monday #2: Spicy tomato soup

I have a notebook called "A random log of the things we eat"

No system at all in it. But I still like it! 

I like to make a note of it when I make something especially good, I have my staple grocery list in there, and I use it to keep track of what we actually manage to make during an "Eat-What-We-Have-In-Our-Fridge" week. Today's recipe is from this book.

This is how I like tomato soup; spicy and creamy without containing cream. This recipe is my own, which is not something I can say very often.The amount is fitting for 2 people.

I threw in a couple of tomatoes I had. 

Spicy tomato soup à la Marit 
1 big or 2 small onions
10 garlic cloves
2 tbsp olive oil                                          
2 tsp minced chili
2 tsp pesto rosso
4 tbsp ketchup
2 tsp soup bullion
400 g (1 can) crushed tomatoes (or the same amount in fresh tomatoes)
1 dl red wine
2 tbsp balsamico vinegar
water


Keep the dry skin on the garlic cloves, drizzle them with 1 tbsp olive oil and some salt, and bake them in the oven on 200C (ca. 400F) for 20 mins.

Chop the onion in big chunks (and the tomatoes if you use fresh ones). Sauté it in a big pot with 1 tbsp olive oil. When the onion is glaced, add the garlic (without skin), chili, pesto, and ketchup. When this is heated up, add the bullion, the tomatoes (if you use crushed tomatoes), the red wine, and the balsamic vinegar. Let this simmer for around 30 mins. If it gets too thick, add some water.

Some wine for the soup and some wine for the chef. 

Take the soup off the heat and run it smooth in the blender or with a hand mixer. Add as much water as you need to get the thickness you like. Put the soup back on the heat and let it boil for another few minutes.

We really like our soup thick. 

We had our soup with some bread and an egg.

This recipe is based on what I always have in my fridge and will be adopted to whatever I have available. 

What is your favorite soup?

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For other posts in this series, please look here.

Small work in progress

I am not a particularly creative person, but I do like to create. This manifests itself generally as an interest in cooking, a basic knowledge in how to use a sewing machine, and occasional waves of need for crocheting or knitting. This time the trigger was my husband's uttering of a wish for kind of a cardigan.

This is the jacket my husband wants. 

I love this greyish blue color and the softness of the wool-cotton mix. And I love how the bamboo needles don't make any sound when I knit!

The needles are so quiet, I just call them my ninja needles. 

The start of my knitting project coincided with a wonderful warm weekend, so most of my Saturday was spent relaxing with my ninja needles, the soft-as-baby's-butt-yarn, and a glass of wine. 

While knitting I could rest my eyes on the best view in the world - my husband! 

Since I don't know any vocabulary for knitting in English, I don't know what to call the pattern or style of knitting that this jacket calls for, but I like it because it feels very light and airy, not so dense as your standard wool sweater usually is. 

I might fight my husband for it after I've finished it. 

What are you creating at the moment?

Small blue marbles in a pie

Like I foresaw here, I did indeed meet a sweet blueberry pie after my little walk in the forest!

I'm not much of a baker. I like cooking, but baking has never really caught my interest. However, with the perfect amount of blueberries sitting on my kitchen counter, I had no choice but to make a blueberry pie. As we will see  later in this post - blueberry pie can never go wrong, even when the baker isn't really up to the task.

I love the look of blueberries. They shine like small marbles. 

I looked up pie crust recipes. They all contain butter, flour and water and it all has to be ice cold. Ain't nobody go time for that, so I decided on just mixing a cup of flour and 100 g (ca. 4 ounces) butter and threw it in the freezer for half an hour. I don't know what the water is for, but I suspect adding some of it might make the dough easier to work with. It is possible it could have improved the end result.

This is my dough. I think it looks good. 

The blueberry pies I've had before, has usually been just blueberries and a layer of pie crust also on top. For some reason I thought vanilla custard sounded good together with the blueberry pie, so I decided on adding that as a layer in the pie itself. I used this recipe, but decided to use a little over 1 cup of heavy cream and skip the milk since I wanted the custard to be really thick.

The brown sugar actually worked well with the custard. 

I think it was at this point I did my major mistake. I was beforehand a little worried about the amount of liquid in the filling of the pie (hence the skipping of milk in the custard), but this should also have made me realize that pre-baking the crust could be a good idea. Which I of course didn't do.

Dough, vanilla custard and blueberries. The dough should have been pre-baked before this. 

After 50 minutes in the oven, the crust seemed baked and the blueberries were cooked, but I could see through my glass cake pan that the crust at the bottom was not going to be crusty.

It looks like a mess, but at least a hot and delicious one. 

The blueberry pie with the vanilla custard was awesome, but very messy. I'm willing to give it a second try, but the pre-bake the crust before putting the vanilla custard and the blueberries in. An alternative is of course to make the blueberry pie and the vanilla custard separately, but what would the fun be in that?

Have you had any good ideas in the kitchen that in the end didn't turn out that great?

Meatless Monday #1: Chickpea casserole

There wasn't any special thought behind my choice of the first Meatless Monday dish. I looked in my cupboard and saw two cans of chickpeas I didn't know what to do with, and then did a quick search to see if I could find a recipe for them. This was the first one to pop up and looking through the recipe, I realized I basically had everything it called for already, so I decided to go for it. I did, however, lack the parsley and the yogurt. I opted for skipping the parsley and substituting the yogurt with low fat sour cream. 

The shallots turned into a red onion, the Parmesan is hiding and the two garlic cloves turned into three. 

The prep work was easy and fast. I used a slow cooking brown rice, so I had more than enough time to finish up everything else while waiting the 45 minutes it took the rice to finish.

Prep, mixing, the Parmesan came out of hiding and the casserole is ready for the oven. 

Reading the comments on the recipe, I knew beforehand that the dish has a tendency of being a little dry. I decided to follow the recipe this first time, and then find ways to tweak it to my liking later. I baked it on 175 Celcius (350 Fahrenheit) for 40 minutes. I then turned it up to 210 Celcius and put on the grill for a couple of minutes in order to get a crispier topping.

Trying to find a way to shot both topping and the casserole itself. 

It did turn out a little dry and the onions were a little under cooked. The topping was also not as crisp as I would have liked it. The next time I will sauté the garlic and onion lightly before mixing it with the chickpeas. I will also add 1/2 cup water, stock or white wine (depending on what I have on hand). To make the topping crispier, I will mix the bread crumbs and the Parmesan with an egg. Still we really enjoyed the taste of the dish and will try it again later.

Not only was this my first vegetarian meal (ok, not strictly vegetarian since the Parmesan probably was made with animal rennet), it was also the first time I've photographed my cooking. I have a lot to learn and I think I need a better light source for photography in my kitchen. 

PS. We had a lot of leftovers which we ate the next day. I decided to heat it in a pan together with more water and some sour cream. With all the breadcrumbs the consistency was something between porridge and stew. I think I will try to make a chickpea stew at some point. 

Not just a walk in the park

Even though I can already feel the fall in the air, it doesn't mean that it is getting cold and dark here up north quite yet. Yesterday turned up with blue skies and temperatures around 20C (70F), so I grabbed my camera and a small plastic bucket and went for the hills.

In Norway we have the freedom to roam, which means that we are allowed to access any uncultivated land on the countryside. This access also includes wild berry and mushroom foraging.

Hazelnuts that are not yet ripe, lingonberries that will be ready to be picked in a few days,
and tasty blueberries I brought with me home. 

I live in a neighborhood with several large apartment buildings mixed in between villas, duplexes and quadruplexes. And just behind this neighborhood there are large hills covered with forests.

A small creek just behind one of the large apartment buildings in my neighborhood. 

It has been a very dry summer, and one thing was completely missing in the forest: Mushrooms! At this time of years they are usually all over the place, but I didn't see a single one of them.

Instead of mushrooms I found this bench in a very unlikely location;
a spot where the sun never shines, and with no view.
What a sad place to put a bench! 

Even though several thousand people live close to this forest, the only other person I met was an old man on his daily hike.

I love how he walked in his steady pace, resting his arms on his back.
I might walk faster than him for a short while, but I'm convinced he would have
outlasted me and could have continued in that pace from here to eternity. 

The highlight of my walk was when I took a tiny, little path off of the main path and suddenly had this view in front of me.

Far down there you can see my house. 

When I got home my hands looked like this:

Blueberry hands! 

If I were to predict the future by reading my palms, I would say that I will soon meet a sweet blueberry pie!

Samsung NX1000

I'm a not at all an experienced photographer. Truth to be told, I bought my first non-compact camera this summer. My husband and I were debating what kind of camera to buy, but when we saw the Samsung NX1000 I fell in love. It is so light and so small it fits in all my handbags, and the reviews were favorable.

Our Samsung NX1000

I still don't have a clue about photography, but I love playing with my new camera.

Industrial building in Odda, Norway.
f/5.6, 1/205 sec, ISO 100, all colors but blue desaturated

All photos on my blog are taken by me, unless something else is stated. And most of them will be taken with my Samsung.

Convent garden at Westminster Abbey
f/5.6, 1/320 sec, ISO 200

I am starting to understand the aperture values and the shutter speed, but I'd like to get a better grip how to play with the depth of field.

Norwegian nature
f/5.6, 1/160 sec, ISO 800

So far I've only been using the lens that came with the camera (20-50 mm), but I'm thinking I will want at least two more lenses. I wish welcome any input on what lenses to buy, or how I otherwise can become a better photographer!