Fat and Crafty.com

I’d like to invite you to two events. Or at least pick your brain to find out if you are interested as neither have set in stone dates yet.

Craft Swap
Take an evening out and bring out your unloved, unused or gently used craft supplies.  Similar to the clothing exchanges that are popular you’ll put these out and get the opportunity to swap your old scrapbooking supplies for a passle of yarn, or to trade your yarn for a set of cross stitch patterns. It’s only limited by what you bring and what you want to trade. (I’d hoped to do this before the holidays but think its just too soon, so probably in early January.)

Craft Reception/Salon

Tired of hiding your crafting in a corner? Want to show of the sweaters you’ve made, sell your lipbalm, gift away some of your soap? Show of your prints and talk about best online photo printers?  Want to talk to others who are crafty in the area? Trade horror storries of snobby yarn stores? Bond over  the difficulty of finding lye on the shelves anymore? Find someone to share an order placed with your favorite soap supplier? Want to find a mentor  for that craft you’ve been trying to learn?
 Well this is your event. I’d like to have this happen in early February  and am looking for a space. I’m thinking someplace comfortable on a Sunday afternoon.  There wont be actual crafting, just work displayed chatting and maybe a potluck of some sort to go with.

What do you think? Would  you want to come to either of these events?

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about Thanksgiving dinner here. Precooking will commence today, though I’m at a loss as to where I’m going store things that are done, as the fridge is more then a little full. Anyway, so here is the run down of what thanksgiving dinner will look like at our house.

Theme : A Midwestern Thanksgiving

Appetizers :
Beef Summer Sausage
Cheese ball
Ritz Crackers
Ranch dip
Carrot Sticks
Relish Tray (pickles and olives)

Dinner:
Turkey (smoked?)
Gravy
Mashed Potatoes
Cornbread sausage  stuffing
Green Bean Casserole
Brussels with peppered bacon
Cranberry sauce
Sweet potatoes with orange
Brown and Serve rolls

Dessert
Pumpkin Pie
Cheesecake bars
(Something else, maybe snicker doodles or brownies.)

Its a  lot of food for 6 isnt it? I assume we’ll be eating leftovers for ages.
One of the reasons we have so much is that we all have our show stoppers. It’s not Thanksgiving for me without  homemade cranberry sauce, For Leah its the Green bean casserole, for Jasmine its rolls, for Patrick it’s Brown and Serve rolls. For Aron, its the brussel sprouts.

So we will have lots of food and will indulge in lots of left overs. Yum.

What are your Thanksgiving showstoppers?

It wasn’t that I didn’t know about the food drive, it was that I wasnt paying much attention to it.  The Elementary school that Miss Bit goes too is doing a food drive right now and the classrooms are having a contest to drive up donations.

I’m not a great person at giving donations, and here is why.

1. I’m the steward of the grocery money for 6 people.

i don’t feel right taking  money from the communal fund and buying donations for it.  That’s not the point of the household grocery budget.

If we were more united as a household financially  perhaps we’d have  a fund for charitable donations. But we don’t. (an we value our personal independence to unite our funds in such a manner.

2. I’m fussy about what I’ll donate. Sure I could have pulled a can of coconut milk out of the pantry and some soba noodles, but do people really know what to do with those?

I have a hard time with the soba noodles myself sometimes.

3. I buy in packaging that makes it unsuitable for donating. I don’t buy bags of beans and rice for the most part. I buy bulk. Bulk flour, bulk sugar, bulk beans bulk grains.  I can’t just hand over a gallon bag of black beans and expect it to be accepted.

4. I wont donate weekend cereals.

I don’t like to donate over processed foods and foods that have less nutritional value then the cardboard they are packaged in. Sure we love Count Chokula as a treat, but  it’s not something that i feel is appropriate to donate to the foodbank.

So what did we donate?

2 boxes of rice a roni, 1 bag of rice, 1 can of chickpeas, 1 box of mac and cheese.  In the end it’s something, but i really wish i could donate things of substance without having to back packaged and processed goods.

It was a bad night in the kitchen. Everyone has them, I’m sure, but I  don’t have them often. See yesterday Miss Bit had requested pizza for dinner. My response was to make my pizza dough and gather all the ingrediants for pizza night.

I set the dough in a pot on the back burner of the stove to keep warm and rise, and turned the oven on to warm up. This was mistake 1, as the dough sat it was too warm and kind of cooked a bit. This left me with dough that took a lot of flour to roll out and was almost like a batter. I warned people that it was off, and warned that there would only be 1 round of pizzas out of the dough.  Patrick ran out and bought french bread to make french bread pizzas for seconds,.

*sigh*

I was also making black bean soup for lunches, and  decided I wanted to puree some of the soup to make it thicker overall. So I poured about 2 cups in the vitamix, into the wet container. The base had already been out from grinding wheat flour. I flipped it on …

and was immediatly drenched with steaming hot soup. I’d turned the dial back down to 1 but hadnt flipped the switch to low from high. The soup hit the cabinet, the floor, the cats food dish, water, the counter and… me.  The soup was hot, so hot that I immediatly stripped my shirt off in the middle of the kitchen to prevent the burns from being too bad.  Aron brought me a back up shirt, and leah helped me clean up the soup, which now looked like black bean barf splattered around the kitchen.

*sigh*

When pulling Patricks pizza out, I stumbled and dumped it on the floor, nearly dropping hot sauce onto my barefeet. Barefeet because i’d taken off my black bean barf soaked shoes.

Lastly I realized that i had cut the pizza on two of my Silpat mats and will need to replace them.

*sigh*

A good cry and a shower later I felt better, though  and kept repeating “It happens to everyone”

Right? You’ve done something stupid in the kitchen ? Share it with me and make me feel better.