Friday, December 26, 2014

The day after

Quiet holiday, which suits me just fine. Reading, sewing, cooking, eating.

That chicken recipe I mentioned in the last post? Oh my gosh, is it good. I'll admit, when I slid the pan into the oven - the twelve inch cast iron pan with the foil-covered chicken, topped with an eight inch cast iron pan, and, for good measure, the enamel-over-cast-iron lid to the french oven for extra weight - I wondered if it would really work.

Silly me. Dark, crispy but not dry skin. Moist, flavorful meat. I'll make this again in a heartbeat.

Though next time, I'm not going to mess around with spatchcocking a whole chicken. This would work equally as well - with considerably less work - with bone-in parts.

Potatoes baked in the oven with the chicken, to be joined by steamed green beans and carrots. A glass of chardonnay and cheddar for afters.

Leftovers of all for the weekend.

The sewing?

Working on the embroidery portions of the t-shirt quilt. this eventually will be the center of the quilt. Each t-shirt was also embroidered with the location of the various family holidays, along with the year if it wasn't already on the shirt. As of today, those are all done and I've started assembling the top into component rows. The pieced sections of the quilt are primarily blues, with some whites and a bit of grey for variety. Each t-shirt section has a tiny narrow flange of orange around it (classic blue jeans have orange stitching - the idea is that the backdrop to the shirts reminds you of jeans), thus the colors for this embroidery.

Quiet day today, too. Sewing, watching the first Hobbit movie while the pork I'd rubbed and thrown in the refrigerator to marinate Wednesday night slow roasted in the crock pot. Took it out about half an hour ago; it was difficult to get it out of the pot as it was falling to pieces. One of tomorrow's jobs is to do a quick rearranging of the freezer so I can parcel the pork out and freeze it for lunches, dinners and nibbling.

Honestly, while my"fun" list for this couple weeks has some running around on it, being home is very soothing. I'm making progress on the quilt, doing some organizing, reading, napping and generally enjoying the slower pace. There are still lots of things I need to do, but the important stuff is mostly done, leaving me time to do the homey fun stuff - sewing, spending an afternoon going through the pile of quilt magazines, sorting through the linen closet for donations, ditto for the bedroom closet. A quieter pace, a much quieter mind.

It's been unseasonably warm this past week; next week,however, it will be unseasonably cold, with highs south of twenty degrees for most of the week. I'm pretty sure I can arrange it so I don't have to leave the house at all that week...and that will be a good thing.

1 comment:

melissa said...

Oh my. Bliss at your house. Rest well, sweets.