Recently during a rainy afternoon I challenged myself to find some interesting textures and details in our living room. The following gallery shows the result.
A while ago I posted some plant photographs. Since then, I have revisited our backyard and found some more interesting plant details.
The new stove is in and cooking is even more of a pleasure. I told you that I would share the recipe for the first meal that I cooked on the stove. I cooked stuffed shells and made a tomato sauce from scratch (but you can use a prepared sauce.)
Ingredients:
15 large pasta shells, 8 oz, ricotta cheese, 6 oz. mozzarella cheese, 1 egg, Italian seasoning, garlic, onion, olive oil, butter, 8 oz. mushrooms, 3 cups of cherry tomatoes, 1 small can of tomato paste, 1 tbsp sugar.
Here’s the recipe:
Sauce: Chop and saute 3 cloves of garlic, 1/4 onion in a tablespoon or so of olive oil with a teaspoon of butter until translucent. Add chopped mushrooms and whole cherry tomatoes. There will be a good amount of liquid from the mushrooms and tomatoes- don’t pour it out! Add tomato paste, sugar and a about a cup and 1/2 of water. Include salt, pepper and some of the dried herbs to taste. Simmer until tomatoes have broken down and sauce bubbles mildly. This usually takes about 45 minutes. Pour enough of the sauce to cover bottom of ovenproof dish.
If you decide to use prepared sauce, pour some in bottom of oven proof dish. You can enhance the flavor by sauteing some mushrooms and onions in olive oil and then add those to the sauce.
Shell filling:
Beat one egg into 8 oz. ricotta cheese. Add dried herbs to mixture. Fill shells. Place shells in sauce, cover with remaining sauce. Top with mozzarella. Heat in 350 degree oven until cheese melts- this takes approximately 20 minutes.
Enjoy!
stuffed shells
Recently, I spent a Saturday evening with my daughter. She made a wonderful dinner and then we watched one of my favorite movies, “To Sir, with love.” For those who do not know the story it is about an unemployed engineer who manages to get a job teaching at a lowly resourced school in England. It is the early 1960’s. He is single, handsome and black. All of these attributes are essential to the story and to me, the outcome of the story is inspirational. The teens start out hating him. They learn life lessons from him and eventually respect and love him. This movie has inspired many to become teachers.
I told my daughter that it seems that there are a number of movies that prove to be inspirational to people and make them want to work in the field that the star of the film is employed in. I could easily think of several of these:
To Sir with love- teacher
The Miracle Worker- teacher
To Kill a Mockingbird- lawyer
I get such wonderful feelings from movies like these and I have taught and worked in the legal field. How about you? Is there a movie that you enjoy that made you consider a field of employment even if you didn’t go into it?
File this musing under shared experiences…
Kim
Especially when food is involved!
Last week I was sad and alarmed that my stove had finally conked out. It’s not like you can just run out and buy a new one. I first had to attempt to revive it by calling in a professional. The service person was kind and told me the repairs would cost almost $300 (this is the same person who told me that I must cook a lot and was shocked to find that I cook dinner most days.)
After the $65 service call, Lars and I decided to look on-line and then visit a couple of stores to see for ourselves what is being offered out there. I wasn’t very impressed with what we saw and I was annoyed they were all so expensive. Fortunately our last stop was the winner because this is where I found my gift: A Bosch series 300.
I say gift because I was planning on a repeat of what I had before a basic white stove that is cheap, blends in, and does the job. I was totally surprised when my husband told me to pick the one I wanted! He said that my eyes lit up when I looked at the Bosch. They lit up alright (just like a Christmas tree) and probably stuck out too. I’m in love- with my husband and my stove. I know that I’m drooling and I promise to stop. In my next post I’ll show you what my first meal was. Thanks for putting up with me. That goes for my husband too!
Well friends, the new stove is in and here she is:
Ahh, my new baby- sorry Kimba !
Let’s keep moving on the Fall Crawl!
Thank you for visiting our site today. We hope that you explore it and find a lot to like about it. When you are finished here please visit our friends on the Fall Crawl at:
I want to thank everyone who visited this site as a result of the Fall Crawl. I am so proud and grateful that my husband was able to post his lovely photo card tutorial.
We host this site together so you may see posts from one or both of us at any time. Yesterday was one of those times when we were both going to post and I had planned to highlight one of the many baked goods that I create. Unfortunately for me, our oven broke down for the second time on Tuesday. The funniest part of the whole situation was when the repairman said, “oh, you must cook and bake a lot for this to have happened again.” It’s true that I use my stove and oven a lot but I’ve never heard that one before.
There is a good side to this sad story though, because I will be getting a new stove/oven next week. We can’t afford an industrial range but I’m pretty sure that the one I am getting is a keeper. I’ll be sure to post a photo of my new stove but keep your fingers crossed that I don’t wear it out!
The Fall Crawl continues so please be sure to stop by the next stop on it at http://loveandtangles.blogspot.com/
Today we are featured on the Fall Crawl and present this tutorial:
This tutorial describes how to make photo notecards out of regular letter size photo paper.
What do we need?
The final note-card size (folded) is 4.25″ x 5.5″, perfect for invitation envelopes. This envelope size is readily available in the office store that has a red logo and starts with S…
The idea
1. We will cut the letter size sheet of photo paper in the middle:
2. We will score the middle of the two half-letter size sheets and fold them in half:
3. We print on the sheet with a 1/4″ margin all around the photo:
For most programs it is easier to print when the photo is cropped to the right aspect ratio, although photos from some cameras already have the right aspect ratio. Images from digital SLR (DSLR) cameras have an aspect ratio of 1.5 and will require cropping.
The actual process
1. Marking the middle of the letter size matter photo paper sheet with a light pencil mark (5.5″ from edge to edge).
Cutting of the sheet in half, before and after successful cutting. (No fingers were harmed in the cutting of this sheet.)
Marking the half-sheet for the scoring in the middle (4.25″ from edge to edge.)
After scoring of the paper (a dull knife, letter opener, key, screwdriver, etc. may work fine)
The folded cards, ready for printing
Unfolding the cards and loading them into the printer
Preparing of the photos for printing
For the next steps, I will use the Faststone Image Viewer, a great freeware image viewer and simple editing program for Windows available at http://www.faststone.org. Of course other image editors will work fine, I just like to use freeware programs as much as possible.
For the example here, I am using a photo from a DSLR and need to crop it to the 4:3 aspect ratio first.
After clicking on the crop icon I can set the aspect ratio to 4:3 and decide how to crop my photo.
The next step is very important: we need to rotate the photo 180° to print in the correct orientation. Again, in Faststone Image Viewer it is very easy to do.
After saving the photo, we are ready to print it. For printing, I am using Corel Paint Shop Pro X3 (which is not freeware), because I had some problems with Faststone Image Viewer to accept my custom paper size.
We first need to define the custom paper size of the note-card, which is 5.5″ wide and 8.5″ tall.
To finalize the settings, I pick “Premium Enhanced Photo Paper” or something like that, and the highest quality setting. I also like to push saturation a little bit, and set a slight hue bias. Again these settings work fine for my particular E… printer, your setup may be different.
Now I am ready to (finally) print the photo. In the print setup screen, I select a custom margin of 1/4″ on the top and left, and then set a width of 5″ for the image size, because the aspect ratio has been cropped to the correct ratio, the height shows up correctly as 3.75″.
After I can finally click on the “Print” button, the printer is finally printing. One last check of the printer status message shows that the paper size has been recorded correctly.
After a minute or two, the printed notecard emerges from the printer.
Now we only need to fold it, and stick it into the envelope until it is used.
Now that you have made some notecards, you can give them away as gift, or use them as personal notecards instead of store-purchased notecards.
Of course you can also save yourself a lot of work and just purchase notecards from our store (http://larskim.com/?wpsc_product_category=photo).
I am so excited yet nervous about having our site focused on tomorrow during the Fall Crawl. Fortunately, so many of you experienced blogger and web hosts have been supportive and informative. The best part of the process for me has been being directed to all of you. You are all so different and interesting! Now there is the opportunity for people from all over the world to get to know each of us. That is fantastic!
Of course thanks are owed to Marilyn at the http://theartsygirlconnection.blogspot.com/ for the invitation to participate! After Marilyn, thanks go to fellow participants for learning about us. Now that we know about each other, I intend to visit you all more often. I hope you’ll do the same.
So continuing in the spirit of the crawl I remind any visitors that today is our day to visit Jillian at http://foodfolksandfun.blogspot.com/ . I’m heading over, see you there!
Ahhh, now I’m beginning to relax a little…
It’s time to come in and get busy with Autumn and Winter projects. I wanted to take a nap like my cat Jasper, but I decided to make some curtains for my living room instead. Jasper doesn’t know it but I am rearranging the furniture too.
Sewing is not my strength but I have reupholstered furniture, repaired clothing and completed simple things. I found some fantastic fabric on sale and will use it for the curtains. I will post photos of them later this week. Wish me luck!
The Fall Crawl continues today with a visit to http://mukweto.blogspot.com/ . Enjoy!