Bun, seen here all bein' a Rockette, wants you to go to my art website, kellyeddington.com, and check out its new, cleaner, prettier, easier-to-navigate design. I wanted to do a screen shot and add it to this blog, but Bun was like, Then they'd never go to the site.
The new design comes courtesy of Jeff, who noodled around with it on WordPress for about a month. And by "noodled" I mean "squinted at code, bashed his head against his desk, did fast and complicated cut-and-pastes, looked up answers on WP help sites, resized and inserted dozens of images, found widgets, and did many other things that I will never completely understand."
Thank you very much, Jeff!
And thanks also to Bun, who nailed the above photo in one shot today. She is easily the most photogenic cat ever. Observe.
Tomorrow is my sister Emily's birthday, and due to travel and scheduling issues, I had to give her this painting on Christmas. Emily (a.k.a. Poof) is used to this kind of thing, as is anyone born on or around December 25, but I felt bad about not being with her on her actual birthday. So to make up for it, I decided to give her something extra special.
I took the reference photo about a year and a half ago when Poof and I traveled to New York City together (she met Mally Roncal, one of her makeup heroes, and you can read all about that here, and there's even a video). In the photo, Poof is saying goodbye to Cupcake, her goofy and adorable little cat. When she's not asleep, Cupcake has that hyper-alert expression at all times. I thought about using the entire photo for the painting, but I loved my sister's face so much that I wanted it to be the focus.
Unfortunately for this blog, I accidentally deleted the three in-progress photos I took of the painting. I painted Poof's face, arms, and part of Cupcake's face on the first day, finished Cupcake on the second day, and completed Poof's hair and dress on the third. The painting is smallish at 11x14 inches, so I knew it would go quickly. I found a terrific half-price frame that I bought with an additional 40% discount--always great when something like that happens. Here's a photo of the framed painting (Poof quickly Instagrammed it).
Poof had no idea I was painting her, so when I presented her with the painting yesterday, she was surprised and quickly became teary-eyed. As usual, no one tops my sister when it comes to reacting to my paintings, or any gift, really. You want to have this kid at your Christmas party, bottom line. Here's a short video of part of her reaction--the first 15 seconds or so were cut off when Jeff realized he was shooting it vertically.
Happy birthday, Poof! <3
PS I turned this painting into some products on my CafePress store, including cups, bags, cards, and a 2013 one-page calendar print. You can find it along with my multi-page calendars, including the one with Mabel (above) here. Make sure you indicate that you want a 2013 calendar, not 2012. This new painting will be on my 2014 calendar.
And you can also buy art prints on paper or canvas (above) by going here. Thanks as always for your support this year!
Here is a 10-minute recipe that will rock your holiday party to its very foundations. It's a take on the popular teacher-gift that my former students called "puppy chow," a term that always made me wince as I ate the chocolatey stuff hand over fist.
Jeff found the recipe last week, and, similarly dissatisfied with its name ("sandy buddies"), he came up with the abomination you see above, Specul-YUMs!, so named because its key ingredient is Speculoos. Also known as Biscoff spread or simply cookie butter, Speculoos changed our lives when we were killing time in Los Angeles a few months ago. You may remember this photo:
We went through a phase where this was all we wanted to eat, but since then we've scaled back on our Speculoos consumption, conceding that when all is said and done, Nutella is our nutritionally-bankrupt spread of choice.
But then along came Specul-YUMs!. We have been enduring a brutal, three-day diet that ends later this afternoon, a diet so strict that our heads have become heavier than the rest of our bodies and this is happening:
Not really. We lost a few pounds but were hating life.
So when we made this recipe today and sampled a few weeee bites in the name of quality control, we lost our dang minds. This stuff not just some gimmicky snack. It is a savior that has delivered us from eating a cup of cottage cheese studded with five saltines and a hard-boiled egg and calling that some kind of lunch.
The recipe is from here. This is our doubled and slightly altered version (it's for a party).
INGREDIENTS
4 1/2 cups rice Chex cereal
4 tablespoons white chocolate chips
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup Biscoff Spread/Speculoos
4 tablespoons butter
powdered sugar for coating, something like 1 cup
DIRECTIONS
Place cereal into a large bowl. In a separate small bowl, microwave chips, Biscoff spread, cinnamon and butter for 1 minute. Stir. Heat for
30 second intervals, stirring between each, until mixture is smooth.
Spoon mixture into cereal and gently mix to combine all ingredients.
Place powdered sugar into a gallon
resealable bag. Spoon in half of the cereal mixture and shake to coat. Then spread this on wax paper to cool. Repeat with the rest of the cereal mixture. Place in a festive bowl to serve!
Here are a couple of easy ideas for those of you who think that Christmas just doesn't feel right without some homemade gifts. Both are recipes by Nigella "Queen of Christmas" Lawson, and their sunny color and zingy flavors will brighten up the dark, horrible days of January. Each takes around a half hour (or less!) to throw together. Let's do it!
But Kelly, why chow-chow? you might ask. Quite simply, it's because of this picture:
It's on page 243 of Nigella Christmas, and I've wondered about it for three years as I've made other recipes in this marvelous cookbook. Look at it, all pretty and bright and so cutely packaged. It looks like fun things are happening inside those jars, right?
I've seen chow-chow occasionally in grocery stores but have never tried it. Nigella says that it is a sugary, vinegary Pennsylvania Dutch/Southern U.S. condiment, but she has put her own British spin on it by cutting the sweetness with hot mustard. I'm not much of a mustard or pickle fan, but I love this. It's like eating sunshine. You can use it as you would any other relish--I'm thinking it would be fantastic on a hot dog--or just eat it as is.
Some of these measurements were in metric in the book, and I'm keeping them there with some notes.
900g frozen sweetcorn, thawed <--a big bag; just check the weight on the package
8 teaspoons hot English mustard, from a jar <--I used half English mustard and half Dijon
300g honey
500ml apple cider vinegar
3 teaspoons celery salt
50g sugar
8 scallions, sliced into 5mm rounds
3 red bell peppers, deseeded and cut into 1cm dice
DIRECTIONS
Sterilize your jars. Here's how. Nigella recommends simply washing the jars, lids, and rings in the dishwasher and filling the jars while they are still warm, taking care not to touch the rims or interiors. Treat the rings and lids with similar care. I've done this before and am happy to report that no one has died from eating my canned goods.
Take the sweetcorn out of the freezer and let it begin to thaw in a sieve over a bowl. If you need to speed the process, pour hot water over it.
Put the mustard, honey, vinegar, salt and sugar into a saucepan and place it on a low heat, stirring with a wooden spoon to help everything dissolve.
Stop stirring, and turn up the heat so that the mixture comes to a boil, the let it boil for 5 minutes. For me this was just a gentle, merrily bubbly boil.
Check that the corn is thawed and drained, tip it into a large bowl, and add the scallions and diced peppers.
Once your liquid has boiled for 5 minutes, take it off the heat and pour through a sieve (so you get a smooth syrup) onto the corn, scallion, and pepper mixture. Stir.
Ladle equal amounts of corn mixture and liquid into your warm, prepared jars. The syrup should cover the chow-chow; or rather, no corn should sit above the syrup but it doesn't matter if the syrup comes up over the corn a bit.
Seal the jars or screw on the lids, and store in the fridge. Once opened, use within one month.
Note: this produced 8 cups of chow-chow with enough liquid to cover it as specified above. I also had 2 cups of corn mixture left over with nowhere near enough liquid to cover it. So I am keeping that around for us to snack on. It's just as tasty as the rest of the batch, but I'm not sure if it will keep as long in the refrigerator with less liquid.
GOLDEN HONEY MUSTARD DRESSING
Jeff and I have been eating a lot of salads lately, and this is my favorite dressing to make. It's so delicious and easy that I refuse to buy salad dressing from the store again. This recipe makes around 1.75 cups, and I recommend that you try the recipe first and see if you like it before making vast quantities for your friends. For my gifts, I multipied all of these measurements by six and produced enough dressing to fill the four pint-and-a-half jars you see in the top photo (with a little left over).
INGREDIENTS
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons honey
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt (or 1/2 teaspoon table salt)
DIRECTIONS
Put all the ingredients into a jam jar, make sure the lid's on firmly, and shake like mad.
Or, if you're making a lot of this, put everything into a large bowl and whisk like mad.
Taste to check for salt and/or honey. I always use way more honey than is necessary, but I've got one hell of a sweet tooth. You might want to add a note to your dressing recipient telling them to shake it before using.
Nigella says, "I don't keep [the dressing] in the fridge, but no doubt the health and safety police would tell me I have to." But when you refrigerate this, the olive oil rises and solidifies into a disturbing cap atop the rest of the dressing, and if you want to use it you'll have to thaw it first, and this is annoying. Once again, I've had zero casualties by doing things Nigella's way.
Jeff and I finally broke down and put up our Christmas tree. I've been busy with some U2 lunacy and a difficult portrait commission over the past couple of weeks. Those tasks completed, I engaged in a bit of therapeutic ornament-making, this time with salt dough. In the past I've made gingerbread ornaments, but this year I thought the tree needed something more colorful, and salt dough is so much easier and less expensive. I used to make salt dough ornaments with Mom to give to my teachers as Christmas presents, so the smell and texture of this dough transported me back to my pre-teen years.
INGREDIENTS
1 cup salt
2 cups flour
1 cup water
DIRECTIONS
In a large bowl mix salt and flour. Gradually stir in water. Mix well until it forms a doughy consistency.
With your hands form a ball with your dough and kneed
it for at least 5 minutes.
Store your salt dough in a air tight container and you will be able to use it for days.
You can paint our creations with acrylic paints and seal with varnish or polyurethane spray.
You can let your salt dough creations air dry; however, salt dough can also be dried in the oven. Bake at 200 degrees F until your creation is dry. The amount of time needed to bake
your creations depends on size and thickness; thin flat ornaments may
only take 45-60 minutes, thicker creations can take 2-3 hours or more.
You can increase your oven temperature to 350 F, your dough will dry
faster but it may also brown, which won't matter if you are painting
your entire creation.
-----
My ornaments, which were between 1/8 and 1/4 inch thick, took around an hour and a half to bake at 200 degrees. I used the entire cup of water in making the dough, so it may have been a little on the damp side. I let them continue to air-dry overnight before I painted them the next day. I used cookie cutters shaped like Christmas ornaments--an early present from Jeff--and, when I dipped them in a little flour, they cut through the dough beautifully, and those complicated, delicate shapes were no problem.
This recipe produced over 40 ornaments, each about 3 inches tall. I took them up to my work table and busted out some sequins and extra-cheap acrylic paint. I had no real plan, but I found myself painting each ornament with tints of a single color accented with coordinating sequins. Then I varnished them with a clear acrylic glitter paint. A couple of hours later, I had these:
I found a half-box of ornament hooks (or whatever you call them) leftover from last year, and I was ready to hang them!
Earlier this year, Jeff and I rearranged our living room furniture. We love the new setup, but it messed up our usual tree-area, so we moved the tree to our library, which you might remember from this painting:
The tree is small, so to give it some height, we set it on the table between the two wicker chairs. We also had to move the middle bookshelf away from the wall to access the outlet behind it. But soon enough we were decorating the tree, and Jeff used some gargoyle bookends to hang stockings behind it.
And here are some of the ornaments, which we paired with our usual birds.
They're prettier at night.
Two weeks ago, I transformed my studio into a GLOW CHAMBER.
As I sat on the floor, trying to arrange the lights in a way that made a tiny bit sense, I'm pretty sure a spider bit my foot through my sock. I felt an instant, mild itch and watched a small light yellow spider crawl beneath my bookshelves on the left. The bite swelled up immediately and turned pink. Fearing a week of pain, I popped an antihistamine, applied some antibiotic cream and anti-itch gel, elevated my foot, and put the sucker on ice. Over the following week I watched the formerly-swollen-but-now-just-bruisey area, which was about the size of a Chips Ahoy! cookie, turn a rainbow of colors: dusty plum, cadet blue, zombie green. But it never really hurt or itched, and then it went away. I suppose I'm writing about this so that if one day my skin splits and billions of small light yellow spiders come streaming out, well, here's how that happened.
And what holiday season would be complete without Christmas Marvin Gaye? I've always thought his What's Going On album seemed Christmasy, and for years I have made a point of displaying it next to something festive. First known example:
So that was great, but this year I really topped myself by placing him in the GLOW CHAMBER. I urge you to make Christmas Marvin Gaye a tradition in your house.
One last time: I have to plug my online merchandise store. Thanks to all who have ordered items with my paintings on them--I just put together some new compacts featuring details from Ruby Liberty Dragonfly. I appreciate each and every sale I make. Please go there and get a little something for yourself!
And it's not too late to pick up a print of mine from Imagekind. Prints are 25% off this weekend, and how about that free shipping? Framed and canvas prints tend to take about a week to ten days for them to produce, but unframed prints usually get shipped out a couple of days after you order. Thanks again, everyone!
Last weekend Jeff and I hosted our family's Thanksgiving for the second year in a row. My parents, my brother Ryan, my sister Emily/Poof and her husband Tyler, Jeff's parents, and his daughter Melissa were all there, and everyone on my side of the family stayed overnight.
We had a great time with lots of laughs, and Poof put together a video for her second YouTube channel, Beauty Vlogcast. Since I was too busy cooking to take lots of photos, some of what you'll see here are screen-grabs from that video. Jeff also took some photos of the food moments before we destroyed it. So thank you, Jeff and Poof!
Mom, Dad, Poof, Tyler, and Ryan arrived in the morning, and I made sure they had plenty to snack on. We planned to eat the big meal at around 5:00, so the above spread, along with a massive pot of chili, kept everyone happy until then.
I've already blogged about everything you see above. It's great to have some recipes that I know people will like, and they included pumpkin cookies, seasonally spiced nuts, li'l smokies, a roasted red pepper cheesecake, the heavyset cheeseball, various crackers, cheese, and vegetables, and tiny peach and raspberry star-topped pies (I changed that recipe, using the same crust but filling the pies with peach preserves and raspberry jam). Mom kindly made one of her spectacular apple pies.
I loved seeing my family, and we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon laughing, snacking, and telling stories.
Ryan, Tyler, Poof, and Dad entertained our cats in the living room. Tyler's holding one of the festive mimosas that he and Poof made for everyone.
Mom helped Jeff and me while we puttered around the kitchen. Jeff wanted try something different with the turkey this year, and he did a great job preparing Tom Colicchio's butter-and-herb recipe here. He started working on it at around noon, taking it out of the oven to baste it every half-hour or so.
A couple of hours before the turkey was supposed to be finished, Jeff took its temperature just for the heck of it, and to our great alarm we discovered that our turkey was done! Upon further examination of the recipe, we learned that Tom had called for a 14 to 16 pound turkey, and ours was only 12 pounds. So that made a big difference, and suddenly I was scrambling to get the sides together for our meal, which had just been moved up two hours.
I made Parmesan smashed potatoes, which usually take about 45 minutes from start to finish, and put the stuffing and sweet potatoes into the oven. Luckily I had prepared those ahead of time, along with cranberry sauce, and the rolls were a heat-and-eat situation. Meanwhile, Jeff carved the turkey breast and Mom got as much meat as she could from the rest of the bird. Jeff's folks arrived with their extra table, and soon all we were waiting for was Melissa and her ratatouille. And Melissa was running pretty late, so we stuffed almost the entire feast into our oven's warming drawer and hoped for the best. When she arrived, I hope I didn't appear too exasperated.
Me: [I can't remember if I even said hi to her, sorry Mel!] What temperature?
Mel: I don't know.
Me: How long?
Mel: Until it's done?
I popped it in the already-hot oven, set it for 20 minutes, and figured that would work (it did). The warming drawer did its job too, and I relaxed and got the buffet organized.
That turkey was so good, by the way! We were lucky to have caught it at just the right time.
That's Melissa's ratatouille in the foreground. It was nice and light, and it contrasted nicely with the carb- and butter-tastic dishes that made up the rest of the meal.
Everyone was stuffed to the gills, as we say in Illinois, but certain people who were in New York City last month demanded dessert immediately after the meal, so Jeff and I broke out a couple of our lethal candy bar pies (pictured above with our creepy sumo gnome) along with Mom's apple pie. Readers of this blog may recall our trip to the Momofuku Milk Bar in New York and the little dessert we began referring to as the meth pie. Melissa bought the Milk Bar's cookbook for me a few weeks ago--and it is just the greatest thing--so Jeff and I could make the meth pie for Thanksgiving.
Which we did! This pie was INSANE. Even the pie's creator Christina Tosi describes her pie version of a Take 5 candy bar as "a little bit of a bitch to make," and indeed it was. It's four recipes in one, and one of those recipes contains a sub-recipe. The instructions go on for eight pages. It took two people two days to make these pies, and the recipes involved four dangerous experiences with boiling sugar water. You guys, we made nougat. Nougat is apparently something people can make!
Just to break it down for you: it's a chocolate cookie crust topped with a thick layer of not-runny-but-not-solid caramel that is a little bit of a bitch to make, peanut butter nougat made with crushed peanut brittle that you of course have to create yourself, and a toasted pretzel trapped between a mixture of white and dark chocolate (melted together to form a super-chocolate).
I'm not going to copy eight pages of recipe for you. As far as I can tell, only a few people on the Internet have attempted to make this pie. If you want to give it a try, you're just going to have to buy the book, and I wish you good luck in your baking endeavors.
And make no mistake: we're totally making this pie again sometime. I'm thinking this would be a fine activity for when we're snowed in and bored out of our minds. The next time a blizzard hits, I'll be the one in the store stocking up on butter, chocolate, and peanuts while everyone else is buying flashlights and snow shovels and salt and stuff.
BACK TO THANKSGIVING.
The next morning I had apple dumplings for everyone. My family had made it through the night with our cats afoot. Poof had a migraine headache before she went to bed, and she said she had trouble sleeping, but luckily she felt better by morning.
Poof loves these apple dumplings, and I received the best reaction of my cooking life when she tried them for the first time last year, so I had to make them again. You can find the recipe here. They're a teeny tiny bit of a bitch to make, but they're worth the hassle because things like this happen:
SHE IS SO CUTE. And the following is my favorite frame from Poof's video:
I love when Poof gets that glimmer of ramping-up-craziness in her eyes. You want Poof at every meal you serve, trust me.
And here is Poof's video of Thanksgiving! Look at my family moving around doing things and talking to you!
I seriously do not know why I do that thing with my mouth when I talk or how I can ever stop. It disturbs me as much as it disturbs you, it's all I can see, and I apologize for any emotional distress it may have caused you and your family.
Thanks to you, my dear readers, for getting all the way down here to the bottom of this post, and I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, too.
