Watercolors

I signed up for a monthly subscription art supply box, SketchBox, a few months ago.  It is really fun because it encourages me to try new mediums that I have either never tried before or been too afraid to really embrace before.  For example, my very first box was filled with watercolor paints and an awesome watercolor brush that holds water.   I have experimented with watercolors before, but only casually, and because I spent the money on the box, I felt motivated to give the paints a real try.  It took a lot of learning and fiddling to get it right, but I love them now.  I might even try a landscape some day soon. (But don't get too excited, I'm still pretty terrified of muddy watercolor horizon lines.)

As those of you who follow me on instagram (@griffindrygoods) know, I started out with my favorite subjects, vegetables!  What else?  The eggplant was the first veggie I experimented with.

When I was happy with the way they looked, I moved on to asparagus.

I jokingly called them the Hulk veggies because of the color palette. Next came carrots, and boy did they take a long time to do.  After the eggplant, I decided that the outlining with micron pens should come before the watercolors, so I spent hours drawing each individual leaf on the carrot tops before I got around to adding color.

And so, my Salad Series was born.  It snowballed from there, here are the rest of them without discussion.

How do you get yourself inspired to try new things?

Bright and Cheerful Apron

My mother brought me this beautiful plaid fabric at Christmas.  She got it in Saint Lucia.

I finally got around to figuring out something to make with it.  Paired with some green and blue fabric I had in my stash (which is entirely too large) I thought it would make a nice accent for an apron.  I wanted to highlight it without being overpowered by its brightness.  Here was my original plan:

I ended up switching the green and the blue from my original plan because I was a bit short on the green fabric.  Here it is finished:

Doesn't John make a lovely model?  I listed it on etsy as a men's apron because the shape is more pleasant on him than it is on me.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/125215633/green-yellow-and-blue-mens-apron

Embracing Autumn

Today, a friend and I went out to a farm in the area to get some fresh, local produce.  It was raining lightly but was really quite nice.  Nothing excites me quite like the colors of fall produce.

The pumpkins are numerous and big for this early in the season.

Photo Credit Camille Bevans

Local apples abound.
I picked up a whole bunch of fresh autumn produce, went home, and promptly made a frittata!  You can read about it here.
Thought I'd share the joy of the season!

The Hungry Griffin

Hello all,
Just wanted to let you know that I have started a new blog.  The purpose of this one is to share my crafts and love of crafting, the new one is all about food!  I love to cook, and the new blog will not neccessarily be about epic food journeys, but rather about the ones I take every day in an attempt to feed myself and my fiance.  I hope you will check it out, and I hope you will like it.

The Hungry Griffin

July Fourth

So much has been going on here, you can't even imagine.  We signed a lease on a new place last weekend, we are moving in three weeks, my last day at work is Wednesday (more on that later), and actually, it doesn't seem like so much when I try to list it off, but believe me it is overwhelming.  And the overwhelming nature of packing is amplified by the fact that John will be busy studying for and taking two bar exams up to two days before moving day.
Anyway, I feel like I haven't gotten anything done for weeks, so I'll share my fourth of July cake with you.

Chocolate of course.  I was struck by the idea of making a red, white, and blue cake, using strawberries, buttercream, and blueberries as the colors, respectively.
I layered the cake with fresh berry layers and topped it off with berries.

 I (as usual) used sweetapolita's recipes for chocolate cake and buttercream.  The difficulties I encountered were typical of me, I didn't have enough eggs or any white sugar.
The first shortage was solved by just not making much icing, which worked out as John and I have never been fans of too much icing.  The second left me making icing with raw sugar.  A delicious alternative, but not nearly as white, so the Fourth this year was celebrated with red, off-white and blue (a fact not well represented by my photos).

Time Lapse

Well, it's been a couple of months and I haven't gotten a post up.  So here is a quick recap of the last few months for me.

First, you all missed my Thanksgiving feast, so here's a quick peak:

 The whole spread.

 Homemade cranberry in a mason jar!  Yum!

 Chocolate chip pumpkin bread!!

So Thanksgiving was fun and full of delicious foods.  Christmas came up fast, and gingerbread houses were the extent of our Christmas crafts:

 My favorite part was the jolly rancher windows.

I found this cool tutorial for woven paper ball garlands, so I tried them out:

I made them out of recycled magazine pages, and I found that a glossy mag works much better than a cheap catalog.  The paper balls turned out really well and I had a great time making them.  You can bet that as soon as we have our own Christmas tree, these will have an integral place on it.

Most recently, I got myself a new camera.  I won't put a photo of it up because my old camera won't do the new one justice, but I can assure you my photos will improve in the future.

Well, that's my recap, hope you enjoyed.

Gingerbread

Happy Holidays all!

New Success

A few months ago I got the idea to try out making a sourdough starter.  My fiance loves sourdough and, being a bread baker, I thought it should be easy and fun to make my own.  I was wrong.  My starter blew up and smelled awful.  It made a huge mess and I know that every bread book I have read and every person I've talked to says that sourdough is tough and if your starter doesn't work, you should just keep trying.  Unfortunately, when an attempt fails to the extent this one did, I feel disinclined to try again.  Luckily, I have a friend who makes fantastic sourdough.  While I was visiting in Oregon recently, my friend Nat showed me how he makes sourdough, and it is good.  He suggested I use a technique to start my sourdough I had never heard of.  Instead of using water in the starter, you use pineapple juice and it adjusts the pH to the ideal conditions for wild yeast.  I did some internet research and found a recipe I liked.  I used rye flour to begin with in the starter, and changed over to white flour after about a week.  I've been baking sourdough for several weeks now and every loaf is better than the last.

So my advice to you is if there is something you've been wishing you could do, try again, you just might end up with a delicious success.

The cake is (not) a lie

So this weekend was Fathers' Day, maybe you noticed.  Anyway, in honor of my Dad (see previous post), I made a cake.

When I was about 12, I started discovering boxes of cake mix at my place at the table when my father wanted cake.  He thought it was subtle.  Anyway, I started with those mixes (powder, water, oil, eggs) and a pot of duncan hines icing.
Since then, my cakes have gotten more complicated.  I worked in a professional bakery for almost a year in Ohio, and that honed my decorating skills.  One thing I had never done was a genuine Swiss Meringue  Buttercream from scratch, and so, that became my project for the weekend.  I found a great tutorial on Sweetapolita.  It worked wonderfully.  I made mine chocolate buttercream by adding ghiardelli to it, and put it on a beautiful vanilla yellow cake.

I didn't have any vanilla extract (sign of an over-vigorous baker) having run out a few days ago making cookies, so I had to pull out the vanilla beans (of which I had two).  I scraped them and added them to the cake batter, making the richest, vanilla-y cake I had ever had.  It also makes for a nice color texture when I cut the cake.

Thanks Sweetapolita!