Yeah, so it’s been three months since I posted. I have pulled myself into a cocoon, trying to hide from the hot Oklahoma summer. My creativity has gone dormant for a while and I haven’t been doing much creating. It scares me a bit when it disappears, but I know it will come back when it’s ready. So, to fill my time, I’ve been doing a lot of visiting with my family, sitting on the couch (this is a favorite activity) and a LOT of cooking. Some has been successful, some not so much.
My sister re-arranged her ‘family unit’ and now she is sans one husband and has never been happier. She bought a beautiful home and I gave her a house warming party. The party pictures were crappy, but here’s a pretty good shot of her bedroom. I picked out the painting above the bed – it’s it gorgeous? She deserves this sanctuary (and that mattress is to die for! I got to take a nap on it.)
I went back and forth to Texas three times during her moving and for the party, then I talked her into coming up here for a sister’s weekend. The kids were with their daddy in Colorado, so it was just us. We went gambling a couple of times and both of us came out ahead. Then, I dragged her to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. I wanted to see their Turner to Cezanne exhibit before it ended. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t compare to the Impressionist exhibit I saw at the Kimbell in Fort Worth last year. My sister’s favorite part of the OKCMOA was the Chihuly glass. They have the largest Chihuly exhibit in the US. It’s pretty impressive. Here’s the 3-story glass sculpture that greets you at the entrance:
Here’s a hallway that is topped with a glass ceiling and Chihuly pieces. Check out the light filtering down through the colored glass:
I have a bunch more pictures of the glass, but I’m a crap-ass photographer and they are blurry. I need a camera that has picture stabilization…or something.
And then there was the food of the summer. I’ve made several of the Chinese recipes from Blog Chef blog. I made Mongolian Beef (really good recipe, but I marinated my meat in entirely too much meat tenderizer and made it so salty), Kung Pao Chicken (good, but a lot of work if you don’t have a wok and are substituting a skillet), and Chinese fried rice (scorched the garlic the first time and it was inedible, added too much sesame oil the second time and really didn’t like it either). As I was looking up the url’s for the these links, I found an Egg Foo Yung recipe – I love egg foo yung! I will definitely be trying this soon!
Another thing I discovered this summer was Sour Cherry Slab Pie from the Smitten Kitchen blog. Dear God this was fabulous! Here are the cherries defrosting (had to use frozen, fresh are out of season). These were so flippin’ tart – makes my mouth water just seeing them!
I had a horrible time with the crust. I used Jeff’s mom’s recipe and supposedly it makes 5 single crusts with 4 cups of flour. Well, I should have used the entire recipe for the slab pie, instead of 3 single crusts like the pie recipe said. Her crusts were much bigger than mine – I had to roll my dough paper thin and it drove me crazy! It looked like shit, but it tasted like heaven and that’s all that really matters now, isn’t it?
I also did something I haven’t done in a long time, I read some wonderful fiction novels. I’m usually a non-fiction kinda gal, but I ran across an ad for The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and I was intrigued. It’s about mothers and daughters and history and witches. I really enjoyed it a lot.
And then I found another novel to lose myself in – The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This came from Alicia Paulson’s blog, Posie Gets Cozy (I want her to adopt me and surround me with homemade goodness and patchwork quilts!) She asked for recommendations and this one was one of the ones she chose. I haven’t read much of it, but I will be spending a lot of time with it tomorrow afternoon. It’s really cool that both of these books are by first-time authors.
So you see, I am still here. And I have been creating, just not jewelry and such. We’ve eaten most of my creations. I’m loving the fact that I’ve been reading, I really miss it. I used to read all the time, but with computers and blogs and working too much, I find it harder to sit down with a good book. If nothing else, I remedied that. What have you been doing this summer?
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