Colcannon

I decided to make a traditional Irish meal for St. Patrick's Day.  I have a Irish Soda Bread recipe elsewhere on this blog. All I needed was a recipe with cabbage and potatoes.  This recipe started with the one on Bon Appetit, but I made some changes.  

You can add ham or bacon with this recipe, but we chose to go meatless.

Colcannon

5 Yukon Gold potatoes, about 2 pounds

6 Tablespoons butter

2 leeks

2 teaspoons minced garlic

2 cups shredded Savoy cabbage

1 1/4 cups milk

1/2 cup heavy cream 

pepper

salt

1 green onion, thinly sliced

Peel and cut the potatoes into a rough dice. place them in a medium saucepan and cover them with salted water.  

Bring to a boil and then reduce to a simmer until you can piece the potatoes with a sharp knife, about 15 or 20 minutes. Drain and set aside.

While the potatoes are cooking, trim off the roots and the dark green leaves of the leeks.  

Cut them in half lengthwise and rinse them under running water.  This is important as dirt gets in there and you need to get it out!

Thinly slice the leeks.  Melt the butter in a large sauce pan over medium heat.  Add the leeks, stirring frequently. Thinly slice the cabbage.  Avoid the tough core. 

After the leeks are very soft add the garlic. Cook for about three minutes, stirring and then add the cabbage.  Continue stirring frequently until they are wilted. Add the milk and cream and bring to a simmer.

Add the potatoes and mash with a potato masher. Season with salt and pepper.

Transfer to a serving dish and top with the remaining butter and the thinly sliced green onions. 

Serve with Irish soda bread dotted with currants for the full experience.

White Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

Lee mentioned that we did not have any cookies in the house.  I think that was a subtle hint he would like some cookies in the house.  I happened to have a bag of chocolate chips and a bag of white chocolate chips. I asked him which I should use and he chose the white ones.  I thought a chocolate cookie would be a good base.

I found a recipe on the Two Sisters Crafting site.  I made a minor change and made them mostly as I found there.

Chocolate White Chocolate Chip Cookies.

1 cup butter, softened. (two sticks)

3/4 cup sugar

2/3 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla 

2 1/4 cups flour

2/3 cup cocoa powder

1/3 baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 bag white chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 °.  Prepare baking sheets. I use Silpat.

I like creaming butter in a Kitchen Aid. You can let it run while you get the rest of the ingredients ready.   The lightest cookies need light and fluffy butter.  Scrape down the sides and keep beating. It will take about 5 minutes.

Add the two sugars and beat for a few more minutes. When fully mixed add the eggs and vanilla. Mix until fully incorporated.  

Add the cocoa powder, baking soda, and salt.  Mix very slowly or you will be covered in cocoa.

Mix in 1 1/4 cup flour and then the remaining cup of flour, just until incorporated.

Lastly, pour in a bag of your favorite white chocolate chips. mix briefly or they will all get smashed.

I used a medium cookie scoop to make even balls on the prepared baking sheets.

Bake for 9-11 minutes.  Let the baking sheets cool for two minutes and then transfer the cookies to a cooling rack. 

These cookies did not flatten and were soft and quite delicious. 

 I would make them again.

Top Of The Transportation Quilt

 I used a pattern for first six construction vehicles on the transportation quilt I'm making for my grandson. I cut out shapes on my Cricut to use as a template for the next three vehicles.  I found designs for a train, a school bus and a fire truck.  I played around with them a bit to make them a bit more simple so they would fit in with the first six.

I wanted to add three more shapes.  I didn't find three that I liked in the Cricut catalog, so I looked at online free images.  I picked out the ones I wanted.  I tried to trace them from my iPad. My iPad screen is not big enough. I enlarged the design so that the whole thing didn't fit on the screen. I taped tracing paper on my counter and tried very hard not to touch the screen with anything but my pencil, because caused the whole thing to move. Then I shifted the design on the screen to get the whole thing traced. I managed to get the designs I wanted in the size I wanted after a LOT of crumbled up tracing paper.

I used the tracings to make a page of shapes to trace on Steam A Seam.  I ironed it on the back side of the fabric, then appliquéd them on the precut white squares.

I made a garbage truck using two different designs for inspiration.  Getting the recycling design drawn and appliquéd was a bit tricky, but fun.

The helicopter I traced and appliquéd as I found it.  It fit in really well with the flavor of the original designs, kind of cartoonish.

 

Airplanes are a favorite of Wesley's. He stops what he is doing and runs to the window to try and find one when he hears one flying by.  

This is the shape I chose.

When I cut out the final shape, it was too big to go horizontal, so I angled it down, like a strafing run.  I didn't really want to have it horizontal as it would fill more of the square rising or falling. I sent a text of the picture to my daughters.  Trista asked why the plane was crashing.

Oh. That was not the impression I wanted to convey.  So I used the same design and aimed it up as though it was climbing. After all, the plane has windows, so it must be a passenger plane.  They don't do strafing runs!

I saved the diving plane and I may use it as a pillow to go with the quilt.

The top is finished and I'm waiting for the fabric for the back to be delivered.

One More Room

 When we bought our house there was one unfinished room on the second floor.  It's kind of a strange room as you have to go through the guest room to access it. This means it can't be listed as a bedroom, even if finished.  There is an exit through the large window, but you need two exits for a legal bedroom. The other exit would be through the guest bedroom, but the theory is someone could lock or block the bedroom door, making it impassable.

My younger brother's room was behind my older brother's room in our very old house when I was a child.  So people do have these but it can't be listed as a bedroom on a real estate listing and can be unsafe in an emergency.  Finishing this room can't make it an additional bedroom, but it can be a playroom or a game room. It could even be used as a future homeschooling room.  It is above the laundry room so someone, other than us, could make a fabulous en suite bathroom at some future date.

We first got a quote from a contractor tor.  In typical Loudoun County fashion, the quote was ridiculously high.  We have done a lot of construction work in the past, so we decided to do the stuff that was the easiest and hire the rest, being our own contractor.

The first thing was to finish the subfloor. It was dangerous to walk around the the open spaces.  Before we could do that we aded the flooring insulation before we closed off the floor.  The room is above the garage so we had to insulate the floor, unlike a traditional second story.

We had to add to the existing framing for the future drywall installation.  We found where the A/C ducting ended.  We cut into it and added new ducting with two vents into the new room.

 

Next we added insulation to the walls and ceiling.  This is a yucky job.  You have to wear long sleeves, gloves and masks.  The fiberglass is itchy and not something you want on your skin.  It was amazing how the room warmed as more insulation was added.

Drywall is a skill we don't have.  We can repair drywall, but hanging it is better done by the experts.  Also that stuff is heavy and no way did we want to carry it upstairs.  We went ahead and paid the drywall crew to paint the room. Raw drywall needs a primer coat and then two coats of paint.  I can paint and I'm pretty fast.  But this had a lot of ceiling work and that is hard on my neck.

We picked luxury plank vinyl that looks similar to wood flooring to finish off the room.  

We bought a few pieces of playroom items, a table and chairs, an easel, and a bookcase with toy bins. We moved in an extra chair from another room.  I'll bring up more furniture from elsewhere in the house and I want to get a rug for when Wesley is playing around on the floor. 

It looks like it's turning into a fun room!

After doing a lot of the work ourselves, we managed to save $20,000.  So that makes us pretty happy. 

Adding To The Transportation Quilt

 After I made all the designs for a construction quilt, I thought that the six shapes were insufficient.  I found this pattern on Etsy,

so I looked there for more shapes. 

I changed the sizes and did some minor tweaks to suit me

There were other patterns on Etsy that I liked, but they included things like covered wagons and bicycles. I didn't want to do that.  

It was important to match the simplistic style of the previous patterns. The biggest obstacle to adding designs is my absolute inability to draw any recognizable shape.  My stick figures are pretty sad, too. 

I wanted to add a school bus, train and fire engine.  These are all things that Wesley finds fascinating. 

I found some simple designs on my Cricut Design Space. I also Googled some cartoon images. These are the ones I used to make a ladder truck/fire engine.

I cut out the shapes from Cricut and then played with the shapes until I was happy with the finished shapes.

Once again I traced the designs on a sheet of Steam A Seam.  I roughly cut out the shapes and ironed them onto the back side of the chosen fabric.  Then I cut out the shapes and assembled them to finish the design.  

Along the way I made small artistic changes. And when I say artistic, I do not in any way claim to be an artist.  I don't even identify as an artist.  But I do seem to be able to play around with someone else's design to suit my ideas. But you can decide how successful I am.

The train is a bit smaller than the other designs and less cartoon like.But I wanted to get the second car included.  After all, is an engine alone a train??  It may not match the feeling of the other designs, but I'm happy with it.

Now, my problem is that I think I may want to add some more designs. After all, our grandson, Wesley, really likes garbage trucks.  He also loves airplanes and helicopters.  I'm not sure when this madness will end. 

Transportation Quilt

Our 18 month old grandson loves trucks and other large construction equipment.  Is it because he is a boy, or are we unconsciously leading him in that direction?  Who knows?  But he loves all large vehicles

I looked online to find a pattern to make him a quilt. I found a few good ones on Etsy. I started making projects using Steam A Seam to appliqué shapes on fabric as part of the design. I used it extensively for the horse quilt I wrote about previously. This pattern uses a lot of appliqué. 

The one I bought had six different designs. But they were two different sizes. Three of each size. I didn't want to do that. I discovered that if I used my copier and reduced the larger designs (the three on the left) to 75%, they would be similar sizes.

I made some minor changes. Then I traced the patterns on the Steam a Seam, cut out roughly around the tracing and then ironed onto the back of the chosen fabric.  Using the pictures, I assembled the vehicle and ironed them in place. 

After I made the six designs, I laid them out to see how the quilt would look.  Now I think I need to make it a bit bigger. 

I need to decide which three vehicles to add.  My current plan is a train, a fire engine and a yellow school bus, because the wheels go round and round.