Rainy Saturday Sewing and Cooking Day

Hi Everyone, Happy Halloween! It is rather rainy and chilly here today. Hopefully it will clear off so the grandkids can go trick or treating this evening. I am spending my day working on some quilt projects and doing lots of baking and cooking.

I have my fabric cut out to start my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles quilt using the Giddy Gridlock pattern from the last ever issue of Quilty Magazine.

Ninja Turtles Gridlock

The white frame sashing strips are only 1.5 inch wide. Apparently some of mine are a tad wider as when I went to add the top and bottom strips after starting with the long side strips, the tops and bottoms were too long. Up to a 1/4 inch too long. There are 228 of  those type of strips. I am taking small piles of them and remeasuring and then trimming down to the 1.5 inches that is needed. It is amazing how much just the width of a rotary blade can throw off how a block goes together. I thought my seam allowance was off and took two blocks apart and resewed them. My seam allowance was dead on, it was the strip was wider than it was supposed to be. It appears that everything “should” go together after I finish trimming. This should be a really neat quilt, which needs to go up on a design wall as the table will not be large enough.

I am piecing the backing for my batik Flying Happy quilt top. I am going to make it simple for myself and just make a simple striped pieced backing. I found 2 batik prints that coordinate with my top fabrics. They were in clearance bin.

Flying Happy Batik backing fabrics

These are certainly some bright and wild fabrics. My daughter says the orange print looks like Amoebas. Kind of cute.

I managed to purchase off Ebay an additional set of Get A Clue, Nancy Drew charm squares. I looked all over online and everyplace was sold out and out of stock. One store had a great price but they were sold out, and I remembered that was where I purchased my original two charm packs. I think I had bought all they had left at that time. I had to pay four times the amount for this one pack that I paid for one of the original ones. I think it will be worth it as I really want to make a larger modernized disappearing nine patch quilt than what Thomas’ Lion’s Roar quilt ended up being (57 inches square.) I found a set of five mottled bright solids in the clearanced fabrics that I think might look pretty cool as accent colors to the Nancy Drew prints.

Get A Clue Nancy Drew ModD9Patch fabric pull

I hope to start cutting my background squares for this quilt project this weekend. I will finalize with my son’s girlfriend on what additional fabrics she might like added from my stash. I am thinking this is the best set of fabrics to start with.

Since my kids will all be home this weekend and the grandkids visiting as well, I thought I better get some extra baking and cooking done first. Everything from chocolate chip cookies, homemade applesauce, fresh pasta noodles for the freezer, chicken and pork potstickers for the freezer and Russian Tea mix to send home with the kids.

Lots of Chocolate in my Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am known across a two county area for my homemade chocolate chip cookies. I am kind of shocked to find how many wives my age do not bake. All the guys who work with my husband fight for my chocolate chip cookies. It is not a fancy recipe. It is just that I always use 3 to 4 different kinds of chocolate in them. This batch is using a new Espresso flavored chocolate chip that I found at Aldi’s. I love that grocery store chain. There is also the 60% Cacao Bittersweet chocolate which have to be one of my favorites with semi sweet chocolate chips and the mini semi sweet chips. You have to add mini chips to fill in all those crevices where there is no chocolate. LoL This batch should be extra tasty as I added coffee extract and hazelnut extract to enhance those espresso chips. I tripled my batch so hopefully we can actually have some cookies here at home. Not all of them are going to the boys at the coop.

Homemade chunky applesauce with cranberries

Last weekend I made up a batch of homemade applesauce from Gala apples and added some of these fun julienne dried cranberries that I found over at the Amish community at their smash and dent discount grocery stores. I am sure they are sold out on the East Coast somewhere as I have not found them at our stores here in Iowa yet. Many fun items I have found there in the last year have later been found at our Walmarts. I used half of the sauce last week to make baked applesauce egg rolls (from Pinterest) by adding a line of the chunky fruit to a egg roll wrapper and rolling it up and baking it. Spray it with Pam cooking spray and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar half way through. They were wonderful. The rest of the cooked apples mix became an apple crisp that my husband loved and had for a couple of meals in his dinner pail. I am making more today but adding Granny Smith apples to the mix. No egg rolls this week, but will likely eat some as sauce and make more apple crisp. Yum!

Fresh Made Cavatelli Pasta Ready for the Freezer

Last weekend I made up fresh Cavatelli pasta for the freezer. It is a very easy recipe basically just flour and water with a tablespoon of oil and some salt. This batch was actually made from a dough that we found the recipe on Pinterest to make your own potstickers from. It was 4 cups of flour and 1.5 cups of hot water stirred in til it makes a ball. You knead the dough until a smooth texture. I had a bag of self rising flour from the Amish store that needed to be used. It was too good of deal to pass up even though I usually do not use self rising flour. It was the good stuff King Arthur flour and only 75 cents for a 5 pound bag. I would find a use for it. Anyway I mixed up the said amount and used half of it for pot stickers. The other ball of dough I kneaded a bit more flour in to stiffen it up and rolled it out and cut it into 1.5 inch strips and ran it through my vintage cavatelli maker that I bought years ago on Ebay. I love to make my own pasta. What does this good German daughter-in-law serve her in-laws for Christmas dinner? Fresh made Cavatelli and meat balls. My father in-law really liked it. I even got my husband to help me roll the noodles, which can be hard to do in my kitchen as the only place that was narrow enough to clamp the machine to was the kitchen chair. I can not do that right now with the puppy and cat lurking in the kitchen so I figured out I can hold it in one hand and crank it with the other and drop the noodles on the kitchen counter. I plan on making a full batch of dough just for noodles this afternoon so I can get some more put away in the freezer. We ate all the ones in the photo this week.

Vintage Cavatelli Pasta Roller

I love my pasta rollers. I have two Atlas fresh pasta rolling machines with the cutters for fettuccine and spaghetti noodles. I thought this Cavatelli maker would be a fun addition. You run your strips of dough through the two wood pins and it cranks it around the metal roller cutter. The cavatelli are produced with a nice ridged pattern. It depends on how firm the dough is on how ridged they are.

Frying Chicken Potstickers

Here are some of the chicken pot stickers frying in the skillet from last weekend. These were made with the flour and water recipe we found on Pinterest (4 cups flour and 1.5 cups water). You knead dough, roll out thin and cut out like 3 inch circles. We made two batches last week with chicken breasts that I put through the meat grinder (what a mess) and the other my daughter diced very fine. The finely diced chicken did not have the same texture of course. They both tasted good though. We seasoned with soy sauce, onion and garlic. My daughter does not care for all the green onion and cabbage you might find in restaurant prepared pot stickers or the frozen ones from the grocery store.

Homemade Chicken Pot stickers ready to eat

Here is a plate of chicken pot stickers all pretty and ready to eat. I added a garnish of a drizzle of teriyaki sauce and some sesame seeds.  We do not use chop sticks at our house.

Chicken and Pork Pot Stickers

Not every store has Won Ton wrappers for sale. We do prefer the pot stickers made with the won tons as they are a bit lighter and do get crispier when you fry them and then steam them. We are going to attempt a double batch and make pork and chicken. We managed to find ground chicken this week. Yeah, less mess.  I am getting really hungry so I hope we can start assembling these in the next few minutes. 🙂

Last but not least, on today’s list of things to make in the kitchen is a big batch of Russian spiced tea mix. It is one thing that all my kids enjoy. I got a deal on the ingredients at the Amish store, and will divide it up amongst the cute little mason type jars and send some home with each kid this weekend.

Russian Spiced Tea Mix Ingredients

I hope everyone has a safe Halloween weekend. Thanks for stopping by my blog. The kitchen and stomach are calling me and then it’s  off to cut more fabric.

Happy Sewing,

Shelley