So, my theme word for 2012 is focus. I set it toward the end of last year, and things like these, goals, theme words, and such tend to evolve as time goes on.

Though I claim not to set New Year’s Resolutions, I did resolve not to eat anything out of the vending machine at work in 2012. 1 month down, 11 to go! However, this in combination with a book I just read: Make the Bread, Buy the Butter inspired me to take this goal a bit further for the month of February.

This February, I will not eat mass-manufactured snacks at all. No crackers, pretzels, goldfish, granola bars. None of that stuff.

My intention isn’t to be ridiculous and annoying about it. I will not be rude for a project. However, I suspect that this will make me a tad more mindful of what the heck I’m eating.

For example, this morning, yesterday I was packing my lunch and I had decided to take this lentil salad I made recently. Another day I might have grabbed some crackers to go  with that, but not today. Instead (in my morning rush) I grabbed a couple stalks of celery instead. Yay!

I am not saying that I am going all anti-sweets. If I bake cookies or a cake or something, I promise that I am going to eat (some of) it and enjoy the heck out of it. In fact, right now, four cookies are cooling on the pan from a batch that I mixed up a couple weeks ago, scooped into cookie shapes and froze for an evening like this.

We’ll see how this goes!

These days I find myself improvising recipes more and more. Not because of a lack of planning, but because sometimes when I am hungry and ready to eat, I don’t even want to be bothered with following a recipe. As a result, I wind up shopping for some recipe I found, and cooking something altogether (or in this case, somewhat) different than what I had planned.

This weekend, for example, I had planned on making Eggplant, Green Olive and Provolone Pizza. This time, my deviance began early. I didn’t buy pizza dough at the store because I know how easy it is to make. I didn’t buy any olives because I knew I had some kalamata olives in the cupboard.

I get home after work today ravenous. With February, I set a goal not to eat any snack food that I don’t make for myself. So, the handful of pretzels or goldfish crackers I might normally inhale while cooking dinner was out of the question. I had some dough in the fridge (with basil and red chili flakes)  and decided that it would be a good enough crust. I threw a cast iron skillet in the oven and preheated it. While waiting for that to happen, I sauteed some garlic, my eggplant, a handful of cherry tomatoes, some mild pepper rings, some parsley, and some sliced “salad” olives. Then I pulled the hot pan out of the oven, sprinkled the pan with grits, and spread the dough into the pan, covered the bread with pre-sliced provolone, and put my sauteed mix on the dough and baked it until it was done. It turned out to be one thick pizza, hence the Mamma Jamma name. And it was good.

http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/4026-pasta-with-greens-carbonara-recipe

Recipes:

http://smittenkitchen.com/2012/01/carrot-soup-with-miso-and-sesame/

http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/4026-pasta-with-greens-carbonara-recipe

http://www.theyummylife.com/blog/2011/12/261/Dulce+de+Leche+–+2+easy+methods+in+the+slow+cooker+or+oven

http://www.thevintagemixer.com/2011/12/baked-pasta-with-butternut-squash.html

http://www.theyummylife.com/blog/2011/12/261/Dulce+de+Leche+–+2+easy+methods+in+the+slow+cooker+or+oven

http://ohjoy.blogs.com/my_weblog/2011/12/flavor-stories-icy-peppermint-stack-cake.html

http://www.thekitchn.com/heres-a-simple-curry-that-130340

Organization:

http://heartofwisdom.com/images/folgers/flogerslabelscrayons.pdf

When I decided to start putting together this bread, it would not have been out of line to question my priorities.

Let’s just say that there were a number of other things that need to be done. But, I have been on a bit of a roll with the BBA Challenge as of late and don’t want to let the building momentum lapse.

That said, I have been trying to cut back on bread a bit. I love the stuff. Though it doesn’t need to belong on my list of things that I’m not allowed to have at home, I have to exercise deliberate self control. I thought about making a goal to only eat bread that I make at home, but I think that is a bit unrealistic for me at this point. I have been the queen of the sandwich as of late, well particularly in December. And when I’m watching calories there are a number of chains from which I know what to order to be full and to also stay within my intended lunchtime allotment.

Not that any of that is the point of this blog post. The bread is the point of  this blog post.

The recipe basically involved mixing the dry ingredients, then the wet ones. Then letting the dough ferment. Low maintenance!
Though anyone who bakes bread will talk about the precision that bread-baking requires, (While on some other occasion talk about how environmental factors can affect your bread-making….) sometimes I feel a little lazy when I’m baking bread. The instructions said that I should do the windowpane test, but I did not. Instead, I took it’s temperature and said…eh, good enough.

Then, I was lazy when it got to the point where my dough had fermented. I was working on some other things and I simply didn’t want to 1) peel myself from my other tasks and 2) clean a patch of counter in order to shape the bread. Trifling!

However, all’s well that ends well. Funny thing is is that I’ve been trying to write about this bread for six days now. That is how long it is taking me to get to things on the home front. It’s all good though.

Next up = marbled rye bread. Looking forward to it!

When I put up a website a while ago, I didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted it to be. I knew that I was going to start a blog, but knowing myself, I was pretty sure that I would not want to lock the sherlonya.net to a specific blog. I love having a name for which I actually had the chance to purchase the domain! I was right about that. As I have this blog, Open Letters and Presidential Poems that I am using regularly.

So, sherlonya.net, became the catch-all homepage. And I let it get out of date. It was pretty ugly and it didn’t share anything (colors, mood) any of  my blogs. The point of this goal was to make me do something to the page to at least have it tie together most of my web presence. And now I have. It’s no award-winner, but it fulfills my needs.

As everyone who knows me knows, I have become intensely interested in the US Presidents in the last couple of years. Primarily, I am interested in these people as men. You know, people who have favorite foods, and love their pets. I am thinking about these dudes quite a bit.

A different interest that I have is making thing with my hands. It was only a matter of time before these two things married (or at least got on a path of intermittent passionate trysts). So describes the above painting.

How did I do it? I found a picture of one of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Then I played around with it in Photoshop Elements until I wound up with an image that I liked. I printed that out and then transferred the main lines onto a canvas (with the help of some carbon paper) and painted it in. I decided that the canvas itself would be a television set. So, I looked around for images of TVs from the appropriate era to figure out where various knobs, buttons, or dials should go.

For those who don’t know, the Nixon-Kennedy debates were the first televised presidential candidate debates. They were  significant to the outcome of this particular election, and really “changed the game” so-to-speak in presidential campaigning. Interestingly, at the end of the first televised debate, television audiences thought that Kennedy had won. Radio audiences, however, thought that Nixon had won. Here, I cannot resist adding that these debates helped Kennedy build up his image as a fresh, youthful, vigorous leader, when, in fact,  he was very ill. Kennedy had suffered poor health his entire life.

But, being off for a week makes for perfect circumstances for doing those things you’ve been meaning to do.

Here they are, right after shaping. I found the whole tie them in a knot business to be a bit tricky, but was not about to buy an additional kitchen gadget to stamp the rolls to give them the kaiser roll shape. Like much else, this got easier as I went along.

This is what they looked like straight out of the oven.

Here you see them as a part of a ham and swiss sandwich. On the side is a fantastic kale salad based on this one. I have but one more serving of this salad left. I am torn between wanting to save it for a bit and wanting to devour it right now.

This is the second way that I enjoyed these rolls. Pulled pork. If you like pork, you should make this right away. I’m not even the biggest pork fan, but I loved this recipe.

While I wasn’t looking forward to making these, I sure did enjoy them. In fact, I find myself wishing that I had doubled the recipe. There is just one roll left. I have big plans to make curry turkey burgers for dinner tomorrow, and these would have been the perfect bread for them. This recipe will be repeated.

Earlier this week, however, I was looking around at different photographs of the Presidents. Actually, after watching a documentary on Jimmy Carter, I thought that I wanted to do a pixelated portrait of him doing Habitat for Humanity work. However, the pictures that I came across weren’t great for the task. Then I thought, who is a nice recognizable President with strong lines. Yes, it’s true, I have thoughts like that one. None other than the original Rough Rider himself came to mind.

So, this is the picture that I decided to work with:

The first step was to pixelate the image.

So, then I counted the pixels to figure out what kind of canvas would work best. I wound up working with a 22X28 canvas.

Then I drew the grid on the canvas. The long metal ruler that I purchased for sewing-related projects came in handy  here!

Then I decided that I was going to use 6 shades of gray to created the image. I hadn’t read the article that went with the Abe image that inspired me, so I hadn’t realized that I could have told Photoshop Elements how many “colors” I wanted to use. I did the next best thing. Basically I assigned each color of gray that I would be using a number and then numbered the squares appropriately essentially creating a paint-by-numbers.

Then, I mixed the paint (gotta love empty yogurt containers) and started filling in the portrait color-by-color.

It was pretty exciting to see it take shape. By this point, I had to erase the gridlines from the parts of the portrait that were to remain white. Luckily I had a virgin white eraser (that sounds so, so very wrong, but not quite wrong enough to make me edit out that line) and carefully erased the grids. I got rid of the eraser shavings using a can of compressed air. Finally, I painted over the hitherto unpainted squares. I debated between using white and using a very light gray. I went with the gray which will give the finished painting a bit of contrast against even a white wall.

There he is!

And for the sake of comparison:

I came across this idea on one of the blogs that I look at sometimes, Oh Happy Day. My project turned out a bit differently than hers, but that’s the point, making something that fits into my home. I chose to buy a canvas on which stamp circles upon in a variety of shades of blue. I stamped in a somewhat random pattern, the guiding rules being that I didn’t want the same color directly next to each other and that I wanted the colors to be fairly evenly distributed across the canvas.

I used craft foam marshmallows as stamps and cheap craft paint to get this done. Sometimes, the circles printed sort of patchy, so I used Q-tips to fill in the white spaces where I wanted color. I used freezer paper to hold the paint I was using–mess-prevention.

Originally, I thought that I would do something really big like 24X36, but when I was in the store, I just chickened out. I wasn’t sure whether I would like the way that it turned out. It turns out that I do like it quite a bit. However, it isn’t right for the wall that I had in mind; it’s too small for that. But I did find the perfect spot for it.