Friday, February 26, 2010

Flying Geese Flub

Quilting for Beginners has a great no waste method for making flying geese units.

From experience, I recommend following ALL of the instructions. I mistakenly forgot to press the seams toward fabric B before attaching the next square. As a result, I ended up making 62 pieces incorrectly because I sewed the inner sky piece down at the wrong point.

Nevertheless, after fixing all of the wrong pieces, I just have a few more squares to cut and sew before I have all of the pieces I need. This is what it looks like thus far.




Sunday, February 21, 2010

Pasta Hot Off Of The Press

I have always wanted to make pasta from scratch and finally decided to give it a go. After all, if Food Network's 'Worst Cooks in America' can do it, so can I.

Inspired by the pasta at Flour + Water, MH and I added pureed pea shoots and arugula to the egg mixture that combines with the flour to make our own rendition of pasta verde. In the picture it looks like we are mixing this on top of the counter, but don't worry, we put a clear cutting board down first.


The puree made the pasta dough a vibrant green and gave it a fresh vegetable aroma. However, the puree also gave the pasta dough an extra sticky texture and we had difficulty finding the right combination of flour and water to get the right consistency. We struggled with the pasta maker shooting out little chunks of pasta instead of rolling out long sheets of dough but eventually got the hang of it. Hours later, we had our pasta sheets but couldn't figure out how to easily switch the pasta maker attachments from the sheeter to the cutter. Nevertheless, MH held the cutter attachment while I fed the sheets through and voila!


The cutter attachment can cut the pasta into fettuccine and linguine so we made both kinds just for fun. We paired the linguine pasta with Italian sausage, pea shoots, a beurre blanc sauce prepared by MH, and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese and it was delish!


Shout out to Kumquat and P for lending us their pasta maker!

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Welcome To "And Then I Found A Cookie"!

When I'm not working to pay the bills, I occupy my time with random things (although most things relate to baking or cooking). This blog is about those activities and adventures, for better or worse. Please feel free to leave me your thoughts and suggestions.



The cookie in the picture above was baked following Shelly Yard's "Quintessential Chocolate Chip Cookie" recipe in Desserts by the Yard using chocolate chips instead of chocolate chunks.