Fat and Crafty.com

Miss Bit loves fruit. Peaches, apples, plums, oranges. She’s been gifted with the nick name of fruit bat she loves it so much. While doing a little research for a class I’m teaching on grocery shopping I stopped at Lenny’s produce. We picked out a nectarine for her, and a couple of plums. I eyed the rest of the produce and noted the prices mentally, and headed home.

Friday on the way to the Aquarium we stopped at one of the Pike Place fruit stands and picked up a peach to go with her lunch.

Transaction cost for the fruit at Lenny’s? 1.07 for 4 pieces of fruit.
Transaction cost for the fruit at the market? 1.70 for 1 piece of fruit.

I’ll assume that the fruit market downtown has to pay a premium for rent, and they are able to market their fruit to tourists. Both stands are locally owned. Lenny’s is a family run business, and the people there care about serving their customers. The Pike Place Market stand has charismatic fruit sellers, always willing to chat and offer you a slice.

Food is a commodity. Where and what you buy dictate what you are going to pay. Prices fluctuate within the season, and within the region. Prices fluctuate based on the quality of the product as well. I didn’t ask the pedigree of the peaches at either location. I think Lenny’s might have looked at me askew had I asked them where their peaches came from. The market fruit stand would have likely told me that the peaches were local.

Is that worth price difference? For me, yes it is. It is worth it to get fresh fruit and vegetables at a lower price, knowing that they should be used in a timely manner. While I’d like to say I can afford $2.00 peaches every day, the food budget just doesn’t always have the room for it.

Photo by Zhoonie, Brown Sugar Ice Cream

I love ice cream. I love making ice cream. I love the creativity that is possible with a little cream, a little milk, and flavorings. The kind of sugar you use, the fruit you add in, the kind of milk you use. All of these things change your flavor.

I don’t always like taking the ice cream maker out though. It’s embedded itself into my mind as a hassle. So when Wendy mentioned a recipe from Howard McGee to make ice cream without a machine I was game. Turns out, it’s something that’s been done as a kids activity forever.

I opted for McGee’s recipe, where you take 3 quarts of water, mix in 1lb of salt, split between 2 gallon bags and freeze them. Then you sandwich another gallon bag of ice cream mix between them to freeze. This allows you to customize the amount of ice cream you want to make, and you reuse the bags of ice over and over. (Though in the future I’ll use my foodsaver to foodsaver bags of ice mix)

I’m much more into making ice cream then I am into eating it. That said, I’ve been giving the bags a workout making ice cream for folks at home.
I’ve made

Vanilla
Mint Chip – 2 batches
Vanilla Mint Chip
Nutella (using the recipe here, and yes the ice cream machine)
Coconut milk vanilla
Coconut milk vanilla with pineapple.

Yum.

It’s always risky trying to coordinate plans in downtown Seattle. Particularly when there are events going on, and you’re tied to a sailing time.

Sadly I had a missed connection today that landed me on Bainbridge solo. (Lesson learned? next time exchange phone numbers!)
Anyway, I took the opportunity to wander around into a few different shops looking for inspiration.

I love coming into Bainbridge, there were no less then 5 Ferries visible as we came in.

I wandered into Winslow, and enjoyed perusing a yarn shop, fabric shop, book store, and bead store. Want to see what I saw? Follow the jump.

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Coming off the Ferry, you are greeted by the Bike Barn. A place for locals to store their bikes and for tourists to rent a bike.
Bainbridge is very bike friendly. (But Redmond is the Bike Capital of the Northwest)

As you walk off the Ferry, you end up in a pack with other folks walking to their destination.

This area of Bainbridge, called Winslow, is cute. It’s a touristy old fashioned downtown area.

Walking along, on one side, there are apartments/condos that fringe the sidewalk, I saw this statute on someones patio and it made me smile.

As I continued walking i spotted a sign…

That signaled to me a fabric store!
Esther’s Fabric Store! It’s the oldest fabric store in Washington State.

Lots of fabric,

Lot’s of trim!

And they were friendly! it was a great experience, I regret that my budget didnt allow me to pick up a little fabric today.

From there it was Churchmouse Tea and Yarn. This was the hightlight of my trip out for the LYS Tour, and today it was just as fun to pop in.

I found more, but I didnt take pictures of everything. I also wandered my way through a Bookstore, a Bead Shop. i was looking for a little bit of lunch and opted to stop at Town and Country Market . A grocery store? Totally. It meant I could get a salad with everything I wanted on it, and a carton of milk for $5. They even had a deck on top of the store where I could sit and enjoy my lunch.

Then it was time to come home. A Ferry back and my day was complete.
(Next time hopefully I’ll make that connection though)

I think I would be a decent PTA mom. I think that i could be good at getting involved in organizing bake sales and fundraisers. To that end , I feel responsible for bringing an awesome well thought out item to the bake sales.

For Miss Thing Spring Musical of “The Music Man” This was Soft Pretzels.
I wanted to do something that would be tasty, low sugar and have some savor to it. I had envisioned something like an Auntie Annies pretzel, maybe with some mustard or cheese to dip it in.

I’ll have to work a little bit harder to get to that point. In the meantime, I did have chewy pretzels that sold fairly well.

I used a basic recipe off of Recipezaar and went to work, forming the dough , shaping, rising , boiling then baking.

The dough had a skin on it after boiling/baking and had a flavor similar to that of homemade bagels. i think I’m going to keep trying on pretzels, they could be a handy thing to know how to make.