New Year's Eve

I am hoping today will have a couple of update posts, including at least one just before midnight with the start of my Mystery Quilt! I had intended to try and sleep a little more last night so I wouldn't be so tired today, but since I couldn't sleep, I got up and started my cooking and baking for the day.

You can see from the Rusty photo that the sun is starting to really come out - this is about an hour into my baking. Dark mornings can be a mix of peaceful or lonely. This morning it felt like no one (except Rusty of course), not even the wildlife, was awake with me.

My first project was a chocolate vegan birthday cake! Today is a sister's birthday and fortunately while not vegan she doesn't mind my vegan baking. :) The recipe is from "The Joy of Vegan Baking" by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I have a lot of success with this book. This book also holds probably one of my most dangerous desserts as well. We all have things that when they are around we know we aren't going to be very restrained. Well her Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars are one of those things for me. I even half the recipe for my own safety.

Stay tuned for a frosted photo of the cake later.

While making the cake Rusty ran around the house and drove me nuts. Definitely not peaceful.

Then I put together my second black bean recipe. This Autumn Stew recipe comes from "Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews for All Seasons" by Nava Atlas. It is the first recipe I have tried from this book. I haven't tasted it yet, but the instructions were straight forward and it looks good. The major substitution I made is sweet potato for squash. This is because I buy sweet potato by the box from Costco and I didn't want to go buy squash. I probably should have used frozen bell pepper too because fresh is super expensive right now. I did use frozen corn.

This stew should be nice to have around while I am working on my Mystery Quilt. It is pretty fun how many of the people on the discussion boards are planning their snacks for the day. One even had a husband ready to provide snacks and tea on the hour! :)

Meanwhile, no working toilet in my main house still. I do however have some deep holes exposing the pipes and a backhoe in my yard while progress on the problem continues.

Stressed Cats and a Touch of Sun

It absolutely poured last night. Just poured. My yard slowly filled. But this morning we have just a touch of sun and I feel so much relief not to be getting soaked. I am wishing with everything that it can hold for the day until after the next repair person leaves. Not just for their sake since they have to dig in the yard, but the it would be great if I could even quickly get the dogs out.

The cats didn't come down from the rafters all night. Dogs are no picnic, but I am less and less of a cat person many days. Especially in a house that they can get away from me with no hope of capture. I got out the wet food early, lured them down, and actually caught them with no blood loss. Neither of them are small and you pretty much have one shot for both of them. For all of our sakes let's hope today is quick. The nice thing is, with them safely caught I can go about my day a little more normal than yesterday.

And since I know you are dying to know. Eventually I pulled the patties because the outsides were getting too well done. I will eat them and I think they are very good but I wouldn't serve them to others. :) Who knows what I did wrong...but it also won't stop me from trying again.

Black Bean Patties

Today marks day 4 of no working toilet in my main house. I have one in a detached office. Having burned out all "cheap" solutions and the extent of my knowledge (aka internet research) I had to call for repair.

Unfortunately I didn't catch the cats first. Now they could have stayed in my bedroom area, but in the panic they ran towards the noise and up the rafters not only spooking the repair person but placing them too close to the only door in the house, which was being opened and closed repeatedly.

I decided it was best I stay down and cook so I could keep an eye on the cat situation. I decided to try Vegan Black Bean Burgers from the Daily Garnish. However due to extreme laziness, I changed much of the recipe to reflect what was around the house and personal taste. As I write this, they are entering in double the cooking time because they will not firm up.

As you can see I substituted broccoli and mushrooms for two carrots. Does that look like the veggie equivalent of two carrots? Who knows. I substituted walnuts for pumpkin seeds. And I disregarded pretty much all the spices except for my own addition of garlic powder (1tsp), salt and pepper. And then, possibly the real problem, I added water to encourage the ingredients to combine. And possibly over-processed?

I will say the batter tastes wonderful! I would use it as a dip. Will they ever cook through enough to use? I don't know. They are vegan so it doesn't much matter if they are soft because there is nothing in them that you have to bake enough to kill bacteria. At least I don't think so. Basically, I will eat them anyway. And this is why I rarely cook for others. :)

In exciting Mystery Quilt news! Due to International participation she will be releasing instructions after midnight East Coast Time! This means if I am still up, and sometimes I am, I could at least look at the instructions a bit.

Off to check the burgers...

Another dark day

Last night as I finished off another box of Chez Gourmet Oregon Harvest patties I realized I really need to consider making my own. I love the brand and love supporting the company. It just goes to show that if a company makes it a priority to make healthy frozen food it actually can happen, but these are ranging between $5 - $7/box. And currently I am on the roughly a one a day habit. :)

Tammy's Recipes Blog has been reminding me of where some of my frugal eating options are which is good. Granted she is raising a lot of kids and has to deal with different meal goals and variety. However her site did remind me of The Everything Beans Book which I own and love using. So early this morning it was time to start the black beans soaking. My plan for them is hopefully some sort of vegan patty to off-set my Chez Gourmet addiction, possibly soup, and OK...I am totally attracted to the notion of black bean chocolate brownies. I suspect I will need more beans.

So many soup recipe options right now! For Christmas I received "Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews for All Seasons" by Nava Atlas which I look through pretty much every night. I haven't tried a recipe yet but I think I will back into making and freezing soups.

You might think Nim never leaves his pillow but trust me he does. Admittedly right now in the dark rotten weather he and I are driving each other nuts! It is absolutely pouring.

Despite my complaining about the Mystery Quilt 2012 discussion boards I am still using them. It has been fun to see what other people are selecting and the advice I got was just to leave fabric 1 and 2 in strips for now which I will. My friend Cindy is going to do the challenge too! So we will e-mail back and forth and compare progress and results which will be a lot of fun.

Fabric Selection - Mystery Quilt 2012

Above is my numbered fabric choices as closely as I understand the instructions.

Fabric 2 is going to give me a little problems because in order to make the correct amount of 2.5 * 16.5 bars I am going to have to piece some scraps together. Right now fabrics 1 and 2 are still just in long strips.

Everything else is cut into their proper sized squares. Fabric 3 and 4 were initially selected to make me a skirt. Since that was probably at least 6 years ago I think it is safe to say I won't make the skirt. :)

I really am lacking in "hot" color value fabrics. This isn't really surprising when you consider the color choices I tend towards. Fortunately I had some reds left from various projects. This about cleans me out on reds.

Selecting for 7 was fun. I just stayed dark for the most part and fabric that got along with others.

All my photos seem to make the fabric all look a little more dark and muted than they are. That is OK though. Should be interesting to see if these all work together in the end!

It is pouring rain and dark out. It was a good day to get caught up on work and then finalize for my Mystery Quilt!

Mystery Quilt

About three years ago I found a New Year's Day Mystery Quilt event but never tried it. I had been sent another one by a friend but it had a ton of applique in it which we all know I won't do. So I began my search from a mystery quilt that is more my style.

The biggest reason I have never done the New Year's Day challenge is because I knew I wasn't going to be home for a large portion of the day. This year is no exception but I am going to go for it anyway. I just will be starting hours behind (even worse since it is on east coast time).

On About.com is the 2012 New Year's Day Mystery Quilt challenge by Janet Wickell. So far my primary complaint is the About.com site. Despite a lot of really good discussion board technology out there they seem to have selected quite possibly the least usable format. I use a lot of discussion boards and I have never been on one so hard to use and navigate.

Today I started laying out my stash to see what I have to meet the requirements. My rules are I will not buy anything new for this quilt and it looks like I can make it work with what I have. I have even started doing some of the cutting.
Nim still doesn't show enough maturity for my sanity, but I was pretty impressed that he has stayed on his bed rather than walking all over my fabric. There is a mature dog in there yet!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from Molly and Myrtle in their new cat tree!

The day was properly lazy including Harry Potter watching and knitting. Now I think I will actually remember part 1 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows enough to watch part 2 later.
It has been nice to have college sister home and she was a very good sport about modeling with her new quilt so I could put it on the blog. :)