It's Friday! #4

This week has been a quiet one for me. I've spent a lot of time making plans with S (like going to see the big Christmas tree in New York on his day off), thinking about packing my suitcase and playing video games.

Over the past few years, I've become something of a PC gamer. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those elitist PC only gamers who won't use consoles, but I find PC gaming to be so much more engrossing, so much closer.  When I have my headphones on, closed curtains and an adventure waiting,  it's a miracle if I surface for food and water once a day.

There are a few games that I've had my eye on for a while and if you're into games too, maybe you'd like to have a look and let me what you think - or better still, recommend a game to me that I can check out!

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I have been a huge fan of the Broken Sword series since forever.  There are so many funny lines, incredibly tense situations and completely absorbing plot lines.  The games are point-and-click adventures, with sarcastic protagonist George Stobbart leading the way!  They are so much fun to play and the voice acting is magnificent.

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I'm currently re-playing The Walking Dead - Season 1 as I played it last year and loved it.  I was so excited to hear that a second season was being released and that I'd get to continue the adventure with Clementine (the little girl you see in the picture).  This is also a kind of point-and-click, which encourages you to make decisions (you can choose to be honest or tell a lie, for example) and depending on your choices, the game changes with you.  I've never played a game quite like it, with tense, fast-paced action sequences and heart-wrenching cut scenes, it's an excellent all-rounder and I can't wait for the next lot!

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Can you tell I have a bit of a thing about zombie games at the moment?  State of Decay is a post-apocalyptic survival game in which your aim is to stay alive.  Simple, right?  Wrong!  Avoiding zombie hordes while searching for food, medicine and fuel isn't easy and trying to build a new home in an undead world proves very tricky.  I've played this a little before and I was really impressed by it, so I'm hoping I'll be able to get my own copy and see how this awesome game plays out!

I'd love to know if you play video games, which ones you enjoy and which console/s you play on.  I hope you've got a happy weekend ahead!

Love, K.

Give Thanks.

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in England and I admit, I'm a little bit miffed that I won't get to celebrate it in America this year.  Our big holiday in England is Christmas and, in the same way that Christmas is about being with family, sparkly lights and presents, Thanksgiving seems to be about food.  While I know that there is great history and tradition behind it, I love that it's a holiday dedicated to family and eating delicious things.

Since I can't be a proper part of a traditional Thanksgiving this year, I thought I'd give thanks in my own little way, by wishing everyone a wonderful day and jotting down a few things that I'm feeling very thankful for.

♥ Friends who make Christmas happen early and the wonderfully thoughtful gifts they give;

{I've been wanting drawing markers for ages!  Woo!}

♥ Endless snuggles from the cutest kitties;

♥ Having the patience to complete my little crocheted throw and being super pleased with how it turned out;

♥ Being able to put my headphones on and escape into a world full of all my favourite music;

♥ Knowing that soon, I'll be back with S and planning our very first Christmas together (I saved the best one for last!)

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving if you celebrate it, and a simply wonderful Thursday if you don't.

Love, K.

Polished.

I don't buy fashion magazines very often.  It's like they're from another world when I look through them; ladies wrapped in clothes I'd never dream of wearing, trends I'll never be able to pull off due to lack of funds/lack of correct body shape and make-up techniques I'll never master.  But sometimes, on a whim, I'll snare one and over a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits, I'll take a lazy half an hour to read through, some very indulgent me-time.

Sometimes, it isn't even the magazine itself that catches my eye; I am a sucker for a freebie.  Especially make-up freebies.  Because let's face it (no pun intended), make-up can be expensive.  So when I spotted November's 'Company' was giving away two nail polishes, I snapped it up.  And then I painted my nails.

Cara (coral-pink-y) and Alexa (mauve-y-grey)

I am not very good at painting my nails.  I once had someone mention how neat my nail polish was and had to confess, I usually get it all over my fingers and make a huge mess.  But thank goodness for cotton buds and nail polish remover!  Magic.

Since I usually just stick to one shade, I thought I'd go fancy and see how the two shades are supposed to compliment each other.  Because I have no technical nail art skills, the cool 'go faster stripe' I'd imagined didn't turn out quite as cool.  But the colours are pretty, so there's that!

Out of all the pamper-y, girly things, I really like painting my nails.  I don't wear a lot of make-up (or, more often than not, make a lot of effort) but jazzing up my nails cheers me up and makes me feel a bit more 'put together'.  And you can paint your nails any colour you like or change it every day if you want to, and I like that variety.  Choices make the world a prettier place!

Love, K.

Staying True.

Purple chucks for purple month

I've been blogging for several years now, on different platforms, trying really hard to find the little niche made for me to fit comfortably into.  Over and over, I fall into that horrible trap of conforming to other conventions, of writing a certain way or about certain things because that's what everyone else does.  I have the occasional twinge of envy when I read other blogs and see how pretty they are, how meaningful and fun their posts are and I can't help compare myself to it.

I read this post over on Elyse's blog and she hit the nail right on the head for me;  I am not those people. While I love looking at DIYs for floral headbands and beautiful pictures of walks through the wood, you're more likely to find me with my hair scruffed back into a ponytail, curled up on the sofa watching Adventure Time.  And that's okay.

I love to bake, even when it doesn't come out quite how I wanted it to.  I get urges to crochet like a madwoman but rarely complete a project.  Music is my first love, though creating with my hands is a close second.  If I'm not wearing my headphones, there's something sorely amiss.  I work hard to improve at crafting but I often feel stuck.  I love watching T.V. shows and films that are aimed at children, or anything animated.  I wear bright colours that don't tend to match but always make me smile.   If I could, I'd walk everywhere but at the same time, having a car is -so- convenient.  I could easily live in Michaels.  I find being inspired hard work.  I love hot tea and iced tea but not mint tea, blech.  I can be playful and whimsical with the best of them, but more often than not I'm the planner, the prepared one, absolutely sensible.  I'm cool with this.

This comparing, it needs to stop, for my own sanity more than anything.  Blogging is so much fun, an amazing way to share my interests and meet wonderful new people.  It's a chance for me to explore, to discover and to vocalise.  While I'm happy with my posts so far, I can feel myself leaning a certain way with what I should and shouldn't write, and I don't want that to be the case.  So here's to making my blog exactly what I want it to be.

Do you ever get that sort of feeling?  I'd love to know how you overcame it.

Love, K.

It's Friday! #3

I can't quite believe another week has rolled around already.  One less spent at home, one closer to being back in New Jersey.  I'm so excited to go back but I feel like there is so much I need to do first!  I really should make a list.

This week started off with an awesome visit to one of my best friends in Brighton.  I spent the night there and we just hung out, ate junk food and laughed for hours and hours.  I had my very first cocktail in a bar ever (a White Russian) and felt terribly fancy.

My drink on the right, my friend's apple concoction on the left

We had our own little Christmas celebration and looked at all the pretty lights that were up in the town centre (which I completely forgot to take a single picture of, d'oh!) and it really got me into the Christmas spirit.  Christmas is my absolute favourite holiday of the year, I love everything about it!  I haven't been feeling very Christmassy so far this year, but I got my first little taste of it this week and now I can't stop thinking about it.

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This will be the first Christmas S and I have spent together and we've talked about getting a real tree, which I've never had before.  I imagine it'll smell scrumptious, though I've heard they can be messy if they shed!

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I really love traditional Christmas colours and decorations.  I can't wait to have my apartment decked out in red and green with silvery tinsel and multi-coloured fairy lights!

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I don't wear a lot of jewellery most of the year, but I like to get a little dressed up and glitzy on Christmas day.  It would be especially nice to have something Christmassy to wear, like a gorgeous antler-style ring to remind me of Rudolph.

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There's something really cosy and festive about handmade decorations, like the lovely banner above.  I'm not getting back to NJ until December 10th so I'll be cutting it a bit fine to get all my decorations up, but I hope I'll have time to make something pretty for our home.

Are you feeling Christmassy yet?  Have you started decorating?  What makes you feel like Christmas is on the way?  I hope you've got a wonderful weekend ahead!

Love, K.

A Sweet Reveal.

When I try new recipes, I admit I like to look for the easiest, simplest one.  I like to make sure that, on my first attempt, things come out at least reasonably well (read: edible) and that I can master the easy steps before challenging myself with the more complicated ones.

I've wanted to make Turkish Delight for ages.  It always goes down well in my house when someone opens a box of gooey, sugary goodness, delicately flavoured with rose or lemon.  So I searched and searched for a recipe and my heart sank a little bit; they all seemed so awfully complicated, taking hours to complete and making boiling sugar syrup and all sorts of scary things.  I mean, I'd need a candy thermometer.  Ack.

But I decided to bite the bullet.  The promise of Turkish Delight was much too alluring to pass up, so I gathered my ingredients, crossed my fingers and got to it.

From left to right, I used sugar (4 cups), a few drops of red food colouring, cream of tartar (1 tsp), icing sugar (1 cup), lemon juice (2 tsp), cornflour (1 and a quarter cups), rose water (2 tbsp) and not pictured is cold water (4 and a half cups).

The first thing to do was to line a dish with tin foil; all the recipes specified different dish dimensions but I don't think that matters.  It needs to be lined with tin foil, with a little overlapping the edges, so that it doesn't stick while it's setting and so you can use the foil as handles when taking it out.  Clever.

Next, I prepared the sugar syrup.  I'd never made sugar syrup before, or even used a candy thermometer, so it certainly was a learning curve for me.  I put 1 and a half cups of water, the 4 cups of sugar and the lemon juice into a pan over a medium heat, stirring until the sugar had dissolved.  Then I put in my candy thermometer and let it boil away (quite scarily) until it reached about 240 degrees F.  All of the recipes told me not to stir the sugar syrup while it was boiling.  So I didn't.

Fear-induced blur from boiling sugar

When the sugar syrup had reached about 225, I started on my second mixture.  Since traditional Turkish Delight is made without gelatine, I put the rest of the water, the cornstarch and the cream of tartar into a larger saucepan and whisked it until it was all lovely and smooth.

I then turned on the heat and allowed the mixture to boil, at which point it became very thick and gluey, like wallpaper paste.

Yum

Once the sugar syrup was at 240, the moment came that I had really been dreading; I had to pour the boiling sugar syrup into my cornstarch glue.  I had visions of being burned alive by scalding liquid sugar.  But with a steady hand and a thumping heart, I managed to successfully pour and mix the two together.  Huzzah!

At this point, there was a lot of conflicting information regarding how long you're supposed to simmer the mixture for and how often you're meant to stir it.  On a low simmer, I decided to let it cook for about an hour, stirring every 8-10 minutes or so.  That was not a great idea.

The mixture caramelised very quickly and because I wasn't stirring it enough, it burned like crazy on the bottom.  Cooking it for an hour would've been perfect if I had been stirring it for the whole hour, too.  So a tip would be to make sure you're stirring it very, very frequently.  This might mean standing by the oven for an hour but trust me, it's better than the smell of burning sugar and having to soak a saucepan for two days.  Yikes.

 Since I'd come so far, I decided to try and save as much of the Turkish Delight as possible.  I let the mixture cool to about 150, then added the food colouring and the rosewater and poured it into my tin foiled dish.

Once it had set a little, I sprinkled it all over with cornflour to help 'cure' it.  It also helped it not be so massively sticky when I turned it out a bit later that day and did the other side.

After leaving it overnight and well into the next afternoon, it was time to chop my Turkish Delight into little yummy squares.

Remember this picture?

I oiled a sharp knife and first sliced it into strips.  It was hugely sticky on all the un-cornfloured sides, so I had to wash and oil my knife a couple of times to chop it all up.

I dunked all of my little cubes into a pot of icing sugar and made sure they were thoroughly covered to stop them from sticking to each other.  They did look lovely; they reminded me of the Turkish Delight from the animated 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' film.  Do you remember that?

It's not recommended to keep it in an air-tight container as it has a tendency to sweat, so I put mine in an old shortbread tin between layers of baking paper, sprinkled with a generous amount of icing sugar.

It ended up tasting like candyfloss rather than roses, which was a little disappointing but I think probably because the mixture burned, oops.  Nonetheless, it tasted very nice and everyone liked it!  The texture is softer than I anticipated, a little gooey and melt-in-your-mouth-y.  It's very sweet so one or two pieces is more than enough to satisfy.

I like to think my first venture into Turkish Delight was a success and I'll definitely be making it again, only I won't burn it the next time!  Have you ever made anything like Turkish Delight?  I'd love to hear about your candy-making experiences.

Love, K.

It's Friday! #2

It's no secret that I love food.  I love that it can provide so much cosy, delicious pleasure as well as being an essential to our health and wellbeing.  It keeps us alive and it's utterly scrumptious.  Food really is win win for me.  I like going out to eat, soaking up the atmosphere of a restaurant, relaxing while someone else prepares my meal, enjoying a good glass of wine while dining on something I might never consider cooking for myself at home.  I like staying in, too, carefully preparing ingredients to be mixed together, cooked just how I like them, creating comforting, hearty dishes that bring a smile to my face when I tuck in.  Yum.

Having completed my fourth fast day yesterday (and feeling awesome) I decided that this week I would dedicate to food.  To things I've eaten, to things I want to make and to people that have taken food as an awesome inspiration to create something just as amazing.

I have wanted to make this rainbow cheesecake for ages - isn't it pretty?

Fast day dinner - homemade tuna burgers with green peppers, onions and mushrooms.  So yummy!

I'm a little bit obsessed with Anna Olson, she always makes the most delicious looking pastries and cakes.

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Every time I watch her show I'm inspired to get cooking!  Hopefully I will be able to have a go at some of her recipes soon.

A freshly toasted teacake with butter - the perfect way to start the day!

Ten points if you can guess what this is!  I'll be posting about it next week.

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Finally, what a precious necklace to commemorate one of my favourite comfort foods - a toasted cheese sandwich!  Makes my tummy grumble just looking at it.

I hope I didn't make you hungry!  If I did, I'd love to know what your favourite foods are, and even the ones you really don't like!  For the record, I can't stand peas, yuck!  I hope you have a wonderful weekend planned, whatever it is that you're doing.

Love, K.

The Problem With Buttons.

I saw this dress in my local charity shop the other day and I couldn't resist it.  Despite it being a little shorter than I tend to go for (it stops just above my knee) it was love at first sight; the print is a teeny tiny leaf and berry affair, it's in remarkably good condition bar a few threads here and there and it has pockets. All for the grand price of £3.  I snapped it up straight away and raced it home to try it on.  Cue problems.

I am not an especially busty girl but this happens much more frequently than I'd like.  I find something pretty in my size and when I try it on, it strains at the chest and this weird, unsightly gap thing emerges.  Usually I have a bit of a sulk when this happens, vow to lose some weight so that it fits better and whatever I've bought tends to end up stuffed in the back of a drawer and forgotten about.  But not this time; not only do I really like this dress, I'd also planned to wear it for a little outing next week (yay cocktails!) so I needed to feel comfortable in it and address this 'gaping issue'.  Google searches told me that sewing the gap shut was the best option, so I got out a needle and thread and went for it.

The first thing I did was figure out how much of the join I'd have to stitch closed (which equated to about three buttons in length) and when it was buttoned, that I was able to put the dress on and take it off again.  There's no use stitching it closed if you can't then wear it!  Then I got to work.

I had a natural starting point as there was a seam just under the bust area, so I carefully lined up the two parts with the buttons done up, lining the edge of the 'buttonhole side' to where it meets the 'button side' and started sewing with little stitches in black thread (the base colour of my dress).  If you're a whizz with a sewing machine, you probably could do this in ten seconds, but as I am not it took me a good twenty minutes to hand sew it.  Well, twenty minutes, plus time getting Gizmo off of my dress and onto my lap, and then giving her lots of cuddles and pets.

Once I had meticulously (because I am slow at sewing) stitched it all together, up to the point it needed to be stitched, I messily knotted it off at the back and trimmed the excess thread.  This is what it looked like after I had sewn the two parts together:

So looking at this picture, the bottom line of stitches are the ones I did, sewing the right side of the dress over the left (and closing the gap) and as close to the edge of the material as I could.  Very basically, I sewed the gap in that earlier picture completely shut, as neatly as possible.  And then I tried it on again.

As you can see, the gap has been completely closed and the fabric now lies flat instead of it pulling where it was buttoned.  Yay!  Even for a novice like me, this sewing was pretty easy and the gratification of knowing I could now wear this without it gaping was immense.  I thought it might turn out feeling really tight and uncomfortable, and while it's a little trickier to get on now, it fits really comfortably.  I'm so pleased I managed to fix it, and unless you look really closely you can't even tell where the fix is.  Roll on cocktail outing and cute dress wearing!

Love, K.

Fasting.

The first time I heard about intermittent fasting, I was working in a bakery and one of the regulars told me about it.  She explained it in such a way that I immediately wrote it off as a ridiculous fad; 'Well, you don't eat two days a week and then you can eat whatever you like the rest of the time and you're guaranteed to lose weight!'.  Pfft.  Whatever.  It sounded like a crash diet gone wrong, where your body would enter the fabled 'starvation mode' and you'd end up gorging the rest of the week to compensate, putting on whatever weight you'd lost through deprivation, and then some.

It wasn't until a few months later, my Mum mentioned it to me.  She'd borrowed a book from my aunt, detailing this 'Fast Diet', and since my Mum had successfully been following it for a couple of weeks, I thought I'd give it a read.  And I was pleasantly surprised at what I found.

Without going into too much detail, it's an interesting read.  It cites studies into what fasting does to the body, potential medical benefits of the diet and the promise of a steady, manageable and long-lasting weight loss.  I was intrigued and since I'd been considering dropping a few pounds, I thought I'd give it a try.

For me, it works.  I've chosen two days per week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) on which I consume as close to 500 calories as possible.  On those days, I drink a lot of fruit teas and water, the occasional coffee with a splash of milk and I've found that eating one meal in the evening works best for me.  This means that I usually go from about 6pm the previous evening (or 9pm if I've had a biscuit with my cuppa) until 6pm on my fast day without eating anything.

20+ hours of fasting.  Sounds crazy, but it's actually alright.  I'm asleep for a lot of it (bonus!) and while I do get the occasional hunger rumble, I just have a drink or a little potter about or do some crocheting and it fades away.  That hungry feeling really doesn't stay; it doesn't get worse and worse until I dive head-first into a chocolate gateau, it just goes away and I get on with my day.  That was really my main concern, that scary feeling of hunger that I'm simply not used to.  But once you've felt that hungry feeling, taken a few breaths and let it pass, it really isn't scary any more.  It's just a feeling.  And when you do eat, it always tastes super delicious.

This isn't an endorsement to try this particular diet, though I can't really call it a 'diet' since it's more of an eating plan intended to last for the rest of your life!  I'm not suggesting you rush out and try it, I just wanted to mention it as it's really going well for me.  I like that there isn't a feeling of deprivation, like on diets I've dabbled with in the past; if you really want that cake, you can have it tomorrow.  There isn't any 'cheating', no 'falling off the wagon' or feeling guilty about eating something.  And since I plan my fast day meals in advance, it's a nice chance to not think about food at all until it's time to prepare it.

Do you follow any kind of healthy eating plan?  I'd love to hear what works for you.

Love, K.

It's Friday! #1

I really like it when blogs have weekly series, especially when it's one that grabs my attention.  I like seeing collections of pretty things, snazzy outfits and interesting pictures; these posts inspire me and, more often than not, give me a serious case of the lust-haves.

I think having a weekly feature here would keep me blogging regularly.  It gives me a reason to come back to this little space when I don't feel overly motivated and to pick up my camera and record the things that make me smile.  So, to celebrate the end of the week and the start to, hopefully, fantastic weekends, I'd like to begin my little feature.

This week, I thought I'd simply have a look back at some of the pictures that made me happy, and while my week wasn't completely thrilling and awesomely exciting, it was good and I wouldn't mind a few more just like it.

{Bizarre dinner combinations that were utterly delicious}

{If you look really close, it's definitely a double rainbow}

{Dark chocolate pudding...Yum}

{Curled up pretty kitty}

I hope that these weekly posts will evolve and encompass all different bits and bobs, but for now it's simply pictures that brightened my day.  I have some projects lined up for next week that I hope to share with you soon; keep your fingers crossed I don't totally bodge them!  Have a great weekend, whatever you're doing.

Love, K.

Quiet Times.

{A very teeny tiny snail}

I took an unscheduled blog-break for the last half of October.  Things have been pretty quiet around these parts lately and I felt like I had nothing to write about, nothing to contribute.  I know that my blog is my personal space to share whatever I like, but I feel like I should write posts that mean something.  Posts that I would want to read.  And I just wasn't feeling it.

I've been back in England for just over three weeks now and it almost feels like I never left.  My apartment feels like a holiday home, New Jersey like recent vacation destination.  Everything is so familiar here, and I was just getting settled there, it's like my brain has already settled back into the idea of England Home, America Holiday.  I look at the pictures I took while I was with S and I have to consciously remind myself that that is where I live now, that here is just temporary.  Weird feeling.

{The awesome house I live in}

It's also weird because I don't have anything to do here.  There wasn't a job to come back to, a routine to continue.  I arrived, I unpacked, I sat down and I stayed there.  My days have started to drift into one long lazy afternoon, curled up with a book and a cat or completing another crocheted round on my throw.  Not that I mind having the freedom to take it easy, to not have to worry about chores or bills or, well, anything at all.  It just doesn't really make for a very interesting story; it leaves me feeling uninspired to write, like I've nothing important or exciting or even valid to say.

I think a lot of bloggers have encountered this feeling, this need to write consistently thought-provoking, inspiring, interesting material.  It's a pressure we experience when we read the blogs of others, whose every post is an epiphany, a glance into a creative world we just can't quite reach, a myriad of awesome ideas and things.  It's easy to forget that they are regular people, that they too have no doubt struggled with what they want to communicate to the world.  It's a pressure we create for ourselves, an idea that we need to measure up to everyone else and that, for whatever reason, we can't, we never will.  It's one I find myself experiencing all too frequently and I forget that, actually, this is my space.  I can write whatever I desire here. It's okay if it isn't ground-breaking because it's mine, my place to keep a record of the things that excite and inspire me.

{So many pretty skies, the view from the deck}

I need to keep reminding myself of that.  The longer I go without the writing, the easier it is to keep putting it off and I know that, really, I'm just being lazy.  And I absolutely must remember that this is for me, not anyone else, that there is no pressure to be a certain way or say particular things.  It's bizarrely easy to forget that, don't you think?

I hope you're all having a truly wonderful weekend.

Love, K.