Christmas two-thousand eleven

Fog.

Tradition.

Peaceful.

Owl City.

Cookie.

Bracelet. My friend made this for me.

Picture. From my sister.

Necklace. My friend made this!

Flower. My friend crocheted this for me to wear in my hair :)

Garlic. For the mashed potatoes.

Necklace. My sister made this for me. Isn't it beautiful?

Gift.

Earrings. Given to me by my sister's sister-in-law, Keiki (Psst! She has a Facebook page where you can buy other treasures like this!)

Festive.

Necklace. We did a White Elephant gift exchange with my sister and her husband's family, and I got this necklace which is also from SO Keiki Jewelry.

Book. My sister gave to me.

Doughnut cutter. My sister gave to me.

That pretty much sums up my Christmas. I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas!

~  <3 ichelle

Christmas Baking and cooking...

  Last year, on the 1st of December, I went to my friend's house to bake and go sledding. This year my that same friend's sister and I decided to do this again this year. We tried for the 1st, but that didn't happen, so we ended up setting the date for the 5th.
  We made pesto swirl bread, pesto chicken pasta, and salad for dinner...
 

       

AUTUMN leaves

There is just something about this time of year that makes me  smile. Something about sweaters, scarves, tights, and boots that makes me feel like everyday is special.

Summer's slipping away...

You might be wondering by now if I have fallen off the face of the earth. Well, rest assured, I have not. My mom's computer has been broken for who knows how long, so I have had to be content with the not-so-regular library trips to use the internet. It is on one of the aforesaid trips that I now write this post.
   Here are some baking and cooking that I have been up to since I last wrote...

Last week

My SD card with the pictures from my graduation party are is still not working... Let me rephrase that. I haven't done anything about my SD card not working yet... It's a long story, but I'll probably end up formatting the card and then using a recovery program. I'm just scared to format the card... But, I'm going to talk to someone I know and ask if he thinks that's a good idea, or if he has any other ideas.

In the mean time, I have been looking for any opportunity for things to take pictures of, so I can blog about something.  I've gotten quite a conglomeration of pictures, but our computer is broken due to a virus, so I had to wait to use my brother-in-law and sister's computer.

I also just like taking pictures :)

 Lemon Lavender Cookies
 

1 ¼ cups whole wheat pastry flour
¼ teaspoon celtic sea salt
¼ teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons dried lavender, finely minced
¼ cup safflower oil
¼ cup sugar (I think that's how much I used. I can't remember exactly)
1 tablespoon lemon zest 

2-4 tablespoons of water (to make the dough more moist)

1. Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl
2. Stir together wet ingredients in a smaller bowl
3. Mix wet ingredients into dry
4. Form ½ inch balls and press onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet
5. Bake at 350° for 7-10 minutes
6. Cool and serve

Makes about a dozen cookies

 

Adapted from Elana's Pantry.

                                       ~ <3 ichelle ~

Hey Sugar....cookies

I made these last Thanksgiving, but didn't really love them because I used nutmeg instead of cinnamon. I made them again last week, using mostly cinnamon and a tiny bit of nutmeg, and liked them a lot. They are drop cookies, but both times I have made them, I rolled them out and then used cookie cutters and it went smoothly.

I originally got the recipe from The Joy of Cooking cookbook, but found it online. Here's the link:
http://www.johnpenaloza.com/recipes/JPsugarcookies.html

I also added some chopped almonds to half the batch and those were super good.

                If I could substitute something for the eggs, this would be a vegan recipe :)

                                                                                                                     Love.... <3 ichelle

Cookie, anyone?

These are some of --possibly the best--cookies ever...
  Here are some pictures of the Chocolate-Bottom Macaroon Cookies my sister and I made for our third Cookie Day:

 

 

  These were easy to make, and absolutely amazing!

You put the sugar in, right?

For the second Cookie Day, my sister and I decided to make Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies.  They were really good!  Most of the pictures didn't really turn out, but here's a decent one :)

They're great by themselves, or with a glass of milk (or in our case, rice milk, hehe).  Definitely a keeper!
                                                                                                                        <3    Michelle

Cookie Day Adventures

This Christmas I received the cookbook Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  Ever since I first heard about this book I have been wanting to get it, and so I asked for it for Christmas, and I got it!  Sometime after, I was showing the book to my sister, and we both thought about how fun it would be to go through the book and make each of the recipes.  Then we thought...Why not now?  And so it was decided that, starting in two weeks, every Thursday would be "Cookie Day".
  So, come two weeks later, my sister came over to my house at about 3:00 o'clock in the afternoon.  Plenty of time to make some cookies, right?...We had decided to make "Ooh La Las" (Oreos), and it started out easy enough; measuring and mixing everything up.  I even got to use my new Kitchen Aid hand mixer (which I also got for Christmas)!  We didn't have shortening, so we used Earth Balance; or black cocoa powder--where do you find this stuff anyway?--so we used dark cocoa powder. We also didn't have parchment paper (which we have since bought because, when a recipe calls for it, you can do without it, but it makes life so much easier to have it).  So, we refrigerated the dough, and set to work rolling it out...on wax paper(since we didn't have the parchment paper).  After cutting out little Oreo-size circles, we then tried to take those circles off the wax paper and place them neatly on the cookie sheet...and then found out why parchment paper is so amazing.  After maybe an hour we got all the cookies onto the cookie sheets, and baked (we also had to do them in batches because they didn't all fit on two cookie sheets). While they were cooling, I made the filling--after finding out we didn't have enough powdered sugar, and then making some powdered (more like super-fine) sugar--and then we filled the cookies.  And then...we finally got to try them, and...they were really good!  They were a little bit on the sugary side, in our opinion, so I will probably cut down on the sugar next time.  They did taste like Oreos, so I would say they were a success!
  So thus ends our first "Cookie Day Adventures".      Bye bye for now!                 
                                                                                                                             Michelle