Hurricane Gourmet

Something about a hurricane brewing inspired me to do a lot of cooking activity yesterday. One of my accomplishments was the lovely peach creme fraiche pie that ABJ was going to make last week when she came over. It never got made but she left the recipe and I tried it out last night. Very delicious, but the lady who adapted it from Martha Steward, made a few mistakes and, very disappointingly I couldn't taste the fresh home-grown thyme I put into the crust at all. So next time I will amp that up and hope for the best. So this morning, my inspiration continued with Fluffy Eggs - my dad's unique Sunday breakfast dish.

And continued into the afternoon as I made Jalapeno Cheddar Cheese Cornbread Ebelskivers....

And made a huge discovery that two-pronged lobster picks are the perfect thing for turning the little pancake over. to brown on the other side. Great recipe - creamy light and cheesy in the middle. Kudos to the person who adapted these from the Williams Sonoma catalogue picture (they use their own cornmeal pancake mix).

Alessi Michael Graves Bird Whistle Tea Kettle

So some nice news after a rather stressful week at work and in the garden. The first is that this afternoon Dr Ost and I figured out which of the medications that the ER doc prescribed yesterday is making loose my short term memory and hallucinate - not really awful hallucinations, more like a wavy overlay of faded shapes over the rest of my visual field, but who needs this? And the really amazing news is that I found this Michael Graves tea kettle, which was commissioned by Alessi that I have been lusting over since it came out in the early 80's, in Ebay , for $45. It is still being made and the new one retails for $175 minimum. :)

I fought the Yellow Jacket and the Yellow Jacket won........

Yes, here I am again - just back from the emergency room with a painful swollen leg, swollen wrist, a finger that looks like a breakfast sausage and feeling woozy from an epinephrine shot and IV steriods. But at least I can now breathe ok and am not covered with itchy welts from head to toe. I mean what are the odds of never having been stung by anything in 62 years and then getting 3 episodes (one only a month ago) in one year.

But who said that life was fair?

Between these varmints and the deer ticks, my life as a gardner has become life-threatening. So I guess I am going to take my allergist's advice and start getting those once a week shots that just might make me immune after 5 years. Not a happy prospect but at this point I think I would rather be alive. than dead from anaphylactic shock. Guess I will go lie down since I am having a harder and harder time doing this typing. And I should be feeling this way for a week since I have been given prescriptions that all say that they make you drowsy and prohibit you from driving. Sure - so how am I going to get to work? And where is Carol - oh she is the one who is snoring in her office.

And all my gardening tools and wheelbarrel are lying randomly across the grass where I dropped them and ran for my life. :(

Kimono Fabric - My New Obsession

Sunday evening I was browsing Ebay trying to find the right color of purple wool (which I never did locate) and I stumbled upon some amazing Japanese Kimono wool. It runs about 12-14" wide and comes in an amazing variety of abstract patterns. I ended up finally ordering 10 meters of this one for about $30, shipped from Japan for a pretty reasonable price . I am having a lot of fun thinking about the kind of dress I would make given the narrow width. And then I got this lovely much smaller wool butterfly piece from a lady in New Zealand who only ships one day a week because she has 4 kids.

And this small one as well. She is a very poor photographer and puts the little origami's on the fabric to "help focus the camera" (??) so I am sort of wondering what the rest of this one looks like.

Then I wandered into Kimono fabrics in general and turned up these completely fantastic abstract Obi's. This one is called a Suminogashi dye and unfortunately I lost the bidding on it because all the darned auctions are on Japanese time and finish up at around 3AM.

This is a small panel of Obi silk that I completely love....

And then I got completely carried away and bid on this lovely silk kimono - which I lost because the auction finished at 3AM - and sold for $31. I have to admit I had mixed feelings on loosing it because I am not quite sure what I would have done with it.