shop update

Fill your friend's and loved one's stockings! Many items are $10 or less. Great for a simple gift exchange. Combined shipping is available, just let me know! Check out the shop!

The December Bed

December is a bittersweet month for me. This year marks the ninth anniversary of my mother's death. She adored Christmas more than glitter and that lady loved her some glitter. Christmas growing up was always full of familiar things and music and baking so I try my best to recreate all that goodness but it just isn't the same without Mamos. Making the bed is a new tradition for me that only remotely reminds me of Mamos as she was always hollering at me to make my bed. So, in tribute to her, the wonderfully funny Penelope, I give you my December bed.

nifty needlebooks are in the shop

Find them here.

The Week in Review: November 24-30

It was an odd jumble of a week with the holiday, the moving of the mama & sister a-go-go, my doctor switching up my asthma meds and the jam packed reading and searching for my notes for my final class paper of the semester. Phew! So, here ya go, my week in pics.

I hope this coming week is less crowded but it won't be. I've got more doctor visits and that not so big but big enough paper to work on plus a day getting all sorts of x-rays and a squeeze of a visit with the ever funtabulous, SoMany and a Janet Klein concert with my partner in crime, Stacey. SO, here's to a smooth December. Please oh please let it be smooth, this year has been so tough already, I hope next year will be looking up.

not your average folk

We a-go-gos are not really your average folk. I suppose somewhere out there in blogland especially, we do indeed fit in but here in our wee pocket of this great city called Los Angeles we're not exactly keeping up with the Joneses. We're okay with that, really we are. I'm not complaining, he's not complaining. We like it here in our wee pocket of this big city and yet, change is a-comin'.

It is lonely here in the courtyard. Our good friends and neighbors here have all moved on. They're like, real grown-ups with mortgages and everything. Our slightly nutty landlord is hell-bent on making the empty units "nice" though his version of nice is nowhere near ours. His version of nice involves ripping out the floors of the kitchens and bathrooms to pour oodles of concrete in so he can lay nice marble tiles.

Ripping out the floors of the bathrooms and kitchens in these wee duplexes (duplex-is?) that were built ninety years ago. It is difficult to feel like tra-la-la-ing about the wee casa. There is much pounding going on. There is debris everywhere and mini dust storms brew willy-nilly. There are stray water bottles being left in our garden and the mad foraging of fruit from people who do not live here. There are five bathtubs in my courtyard. Five bathtubs floating about. There are toilets too, I know there are but a few months ago, the great and grand Nico and I pleaded with our landlord to hide them. We like looking out of our tiny windows. We like to view the birds and garden. We do not like to view stray toilets and mounds of construction debris. We do not like to view bathtubs. We do not really like ot find water bottles in our garden or footprints tramping through the garden. Yes my friends, change is a-comin' and with that, we need a plan.

There is a plan. It is a nifty and exciting and thoroughly terrifying plan. There are many parts to this plan. Too many in fact. My head spins with them all. One of them however involves cooking; cooking on our car engine to be exact. On our recent and most fabulous trip to Portland, we a-go-gos experimented with cooking on our car engine. There is an actual cookbook out there all about cooking on your car engine. Most of those recipes were all about meat. While we a-go-gos do actually eat meat, we weren't too keen on eating meat cooked on our car engine. We tried hotdogs wrapped in bacon, which sounds quite mouthwatering but when you cannot monitor your temperatures it is probably not a good idea.

 

We tried baking cakes in oranges. I already told you all about that. The oranges were too large and only the batter on the bottom, closest to the heat from the engine cooked. It was good but tricky to sample. Next time we will try smaller oranges or tangerines or something else.

 

Our favorite thing to do was heat water for tea. Heating water for tea was quite easy and took about 40 minutes of steady driving. We had an extra special nifty thermos with us to keep the tea hot afterwards. To heat water on our car engine involved a tiny camp pot, tinfoil and wire. It also involved planning and break taking to test temp. Taking breaks on a road trip is hardly difficult when you are in Northern California where the green makes you dizzy and you want to jump around and roll in all its mossiness.

After tea brewing, we discovered that potatoes steamed quite well in tinfoil packets wedged on top of the engine. Luckily, that Mr. A-go-go is a smart cookie and brought along salt & pepper. We had onions too and it was super tasty. It could have been even more tasty for the early morning, super cold air and giant statue of Paul Bunyan egging us on. Wither that or potatoes are just super tasty.

 

After we got the hang of it, we grew a teeny bit adventurous and added other vegetables. Mushrooms add more liquid and help carry around the salt & pepper to the other veggies. Broccoli makes it more purty to look at and we felt a little better about all those milkshakes from Burgerville.

Next time we head out on a trip, which will be in January on our way to Death Valley, we will add more fanciful seasonings and maybe even attempt rice, ooh or tofu! If you happen across an odd couple chopping vegetables at a rest top, one of them quite tall with a mean whistle and the other in striped socks with a camera attached to her face, that would be us a-go-gos.So that's it. Change is a-comin' and it may involve more car cooking, a little more traveling and perhaps some couch surfing if we can convince anyone we don't bite. We don't, I promise. But we sure can cook!

Holiday Baking

Awhile back on Bread and Honey I read about baking wee yellow cakes inside a hollowed out orange. Bread & Honey is one of my favorite reads especially with the weather finally turning here in Los Angeles. Gray skies? No worries, I'll bake! Booming thunder and a downpour? I'll bake! I don't really need an excuse to bake but there is a whole lot of inspiration to be found with the Bread and Honey gals.

Enough of the blog lurve though, When Alicia posted about the campfire cakes I immediately wanted to try it. There being no camp outs in our immediate future, I made plans to remember to make them once we were out in the wild. In the meantime, the mister and I experimented with car cooking (more about that later) and found that the campfire cakes are best made in a campfire.

Before we did the experimentation however, I had to prep the oranges and since we were only going to bake two of the cakes, I needed to put the remainder of the batter into the oven as I didn't wish to waste it. Never being one for doing anything quite normally, I had an idea. An idea to expand on the campfire cakes. I stood there in the tiny kitchen staring off into space when my eyes focused on a pair of tiny pumpkins. What would happen if I baked the cake in the pumpkins? People make soup in pumpkins all the time right? At least, Martha does.I retrieved the wee squash from the shelf in front of the kitchen window and did the best damage I could to their insides. Those little guys are tough. Super tough. I scraped and cleaned and cleaned and scraped out all the ooey bits until I had enough room to add the batter. Giddy with the idea of success I danced about the tiny kitchen as I poured the batter in. With a dash of cinnamon on top I whisked the dynamic duo into the oven with fingers crossed double time. When Stacey arrived for a wee coffee break she exclaimed over the sweet cakey scent. We flung ourselves onto the smooshy sofa to chat, chat, chat away until the ping of the chicken timer clucked that baking time was over. I held my breath as I opened the oven door and then groaned and giggled over the mess. The batter had oozed itself out all over the pumpkins and as it oozed it baked. With a shrug I removed the ooey bits and plopped the cakes onto their very own plates. With a dash of spice and a flourish I presented them to my guest and we dove in. It worked, they were baked and they were good. Stacey deemed her wee pumpkin tasty and scraped away at the spicey rind. Succcess!It worked and it was tasty but here is what I will do differently. I will pour less batter into the pumpkin, about a cupcake's worth and I will add a smidge of melted butter with a sprinkling of sugar and spice. Hopefully these tiny changes will make for an extra adorable, wee pumpkin baked cake. Happy Thanksgiving!