After The Rain

A colony of mushrooms sprung up after a rainy weekend in Stalowa Wola, Poland. 

Christmas!

It's taken a while, but I'm finally getting round to posting photos of my Christmas feast. We decided to have it at home this time, and celebrated it on Christmas Eve with the delightful Miss Kitty Valentine, my cushion-making partner in crime Aldona and her family.

In true over-the-top Polish tradition, our dinner consisted of at least 12 dishes (since I'm not actually Polish, I don't know if it is true that a Polish Christmas dinner has to include 12 dishes, it's just what I've been told.) 

The coffee table had an array of sweets - (from top), homemade panforte, a quince, ginger and walnut cake based on this recipe, and some untraditionally shaped gingerbread biscuits (gingerbread T-rex, anyone?). Aldona also brought along some makowiec (poppyseed cake) and more biscuits.

The star of the night, a perfectly roasted goose! Manbacon (who can be partially seen behind the bird) cooked the goose himself, following a great recipe by the Hairy Bikers. He also managed to rustle up succulent salt beef, as well as plenty of delicious apple and pork stuffing. 

£10 notes to wipe our greasy hands and lips on, because we're hedonists and filthy rich. You can't see it, but we also had a stack of £20 and £50 note-napkins. 

Wild mushroom dumplings in beetroot soup (above), as well as some bigos, plenty of cured pork products, some marinated herrings, and possibly some other stuff as well. 

The aftermath - empty vodka bottles, half-finished bowls of soups and stews, burnt-out candles, crumpled napkins and wrapping paper, plenty of half-eaten food, and one stained tablecloth. Our guests were sent away with boxes stuffed full of food. 

Eaten

Saltimbocca with mushroom sauce, and a side of cous cous. This was the first pretty meal I cooked in our new kitchen.

Prosciutto and Jarlsberg cheese sandwiches.

Possibly the worst cupcake ever! A complete waste of calories. It tasted very strongly of box-mix, and the frosting was curdled. It looks like scrambled eggs in this photo. I took a snap of it because it was so unusually horrible. Cupcake = Major Fail!

Easter Sunday brekkie: instant Polish fermented soup - Barszcz Biawy - sounds gross, but it's actually delicious. With hardboiled  eggs and tinned hotdogs because we didn't have any Polish sausages. It's supposed to be a Polish Easter tradition to eat this on Easter morning.

Fried patties of minced pork, buckwheat, capsicums, and onions, served with a mushroom and red wine sauce. The Mancreature made this.

Pear, walnut and ginger cake. Recipe coming very soon.

More Crochet Terrariums

Not the best photos, I'm afraid. The corner of the room that they're in never gets much sunlight. You can see a stand-alone one here too. I made that one about 3 weeks before these ones.

This is how I've arranged them so far, there should be a bunch of others going up in the next few weeks. The idea is to make a huge arrangement of them up on the walls so it feels like I'm living in a weird fungi-ifed cave-room.

More close-ups can be seen on my Flickr page. Anyone feel like getting me a pro account as a belated birthday gift?

Pooping Crochet

I got poo on my mind. Poo, and moss. But mainly poo. I think I just like saying it. It just rolls off the tongue so easily. Go on...say it -poooooooo...

So I made one. Well, actually, I've made more than one (of course!) but I've only made one so far that doesn't stink up a room and isn't messy. Behold the crocheted poop!It's really easy to make, single crochet all around, and if you've been crocheting for awhile, you'll be able to make it without any instructions. If you're a beginner and need to be told how to shit, then simply google it. The interweb is full of crap. Quite literally.

And while we're talking about nastiness, I thought I'd throw in some pictures of my bruises for you too. I acquired these while cycling down Victoria Road about 4 days before I left Sydney. A parting present, perhaps? I actually burst into tears after I got up, mainly because I was a little shocked at having found myself on the ground, just before unnnecessarily-large 4-wheel-drives started zooming past.

Anyway, besides making poo, I've been surprisingly productive this past week. Not having a job is great! It allows me to do all the things I never could while I was working. Not that having to sit in reception and check in grumpy Euro-touros every couple of hours was a particularly exhausting job.

I started and finished this bonnet, which I got from a Patons booklet from the op-shop. The pattern was actually for a doll's bonnet, but dolls are creepy and I don't intend on buying them, much less making clothes for them. So I simply used a bigger hook and made it human size.
(I look fairly sheepish in the photo because I just realised I looked like a giant baby. That's enough to make anyone look sheepish. Or maybe that's just how I look in all my photos anyway.)

I've also finished a couple more aprons, and two skirts made from big old-lady scarfs. These, and the bonnet, are going into the Etsy store that Googy and I have set up. And also some ear stretchers. I've only made three for now coz I ran out of Fimo. I'll include a link for the store at the side or something. There's nothing in it now anyway. Except for a picture of Nugget. Nugget is hot. It's our mascot.
And just for my own viewing pleasure, I've made a little moss terrarium. A mossarium? I found the perfect jar for it in one of the op-shops in Camberwell on Sunday, then dragged the poor, sick boy to the park with me so I could scoop up some lovely green moss.
Another op-shop find was the tiny little Ful-Vue camera - looks like a half-sized version of a medium format twin-lens reflex...but so cute and so little. It's supposed to take 620 film, so I'm gonna try and look for some medium format film and modify it/ squeeze it in.
Small things are awesome.