I'M GONNA GET MY JULIA ON!

Right after my love of stitching (at least in the "Things I Like To Do Because I'm A Lonely Old Spinster" category), is my love of cooking. I'm not a particularly good cook, and I most certainly am NOT a good baker (please refer to the cupcake incident of 2010 for reference), but I have decided to try a few things this weekend. Aunt Chrissy and I will hit the Panera for a tuna sam and then it's off to the grocery for fixin's.

First up is Ina's Irish Soda Bread. I've never baked bread in my entire life, but Ina says this is really simple to make, and I listen to absolutely everything Ina tells me. (Good thing she's never been compelled to tell me to jump off a bridge....or it would be bye bye Spinster.) Anywhoose...I'm going to make a loaf or two of this for toast in the mornings.

And then, because I've been riveted to all of the baking escapades on some fellow stitchy bloggy buddies blogs (say THAT three times fast), I am going to make the now world famous Sullivan Street Bakery "no knead" artisanal bread. For those of you in the know...this is the one that you bake inside your dutch oven. I watched a YouTube video of a guy making the bread just moments ago, and I said to myself "If you can't put flour, water, yeast, and salt in a pot and cook it, you should probably just head on over to the Wonder Bread aisle immediately". We'll see how this goes, but if it turns out as well as I think it will...no more $4 loaves of artisanal bread for me! This, of course, will be used for sandwiches at lunch time, most particularly since I am all about the sandwiches.

Lastly, I am going to make Alton Brown's pickled beets. Now stop that retching. I happen to love pickled beets and go through jars and jars of them. Aunt Chrissy loves them too, and seeing how we're coming up on the Easter Season and all, I figure I'll make these so that we can add the hard boiled eggs to the jar just like Mom used to make. (Were we a totally weird family, or did you do that too? Hard boiled eggs and pickled beets in a big jar at Easter time?)

I don't usually transition into Summer eating mode until much later, but methinks the "something on the grill and a lovely salad" menu will commence toot sweet. Now that I have a big girl grill, I'm not afraid to do stuff like planked salmon. Or cheeseburgers.

So my stitchy confession for the day is that I secretly envy y'all and your ability to pull charts and then re-colorize them to your heart's delight. I see how you are able to take a design and convert it all to silk, or change the colors around to suit your taste. I, unfortunately, have never been able to do this. Whenever I need new and/or different colors for something I either copy you shamelessly (like I did Margie on that Bent Creek Big Zipper thingie), or I pout enough that Aunt Chrissy comes over and does it for me. (What can I say? She's the stitchy genius in the family...I'm just happy to be here.)

But! Yesterday I marched myself upstairs and re-threaded LePrintemps all by my very self! Woo Hoo, me! The original colors kind of made my eyes twitch, so I decided to go a little softer. I also decided that WDW Hibiscus was a little too bright pink for skin tone, so I went with WDW Cherub instead. A few other changes, and I think I've come up with a palette that will work:

I did finish all of my lessons for Cirque de Fleur, but I realized that some of the colors didn't match the design picture. I probably could have gotten away with leaving everything as was, but I like the design so much that I decided to duplicate it as per the picture. So a lot of frogging commenced and I am almost back to square one:

Stewey re-appeared from his little fort just in time to commandeer the remote. He watched all of the episodes of "Be Good Johnny Weir", and I have to say that after the third or fourth hour I was a little in love with the guy too. I know absolutely nothing about figure skating, but I now have a much deeper appreciation of what it means to dedicate yourself to a sport. My God, the practicing! (And, in Johnny's case...the vacuuming!). In any event, Stewey was so happy that he got to watch the TeeVee and have a little popcorn before bed that he's behaving himself beautifully today, thank you very much.

Have a wonderful weekend! If you hear a primal scream come from the general vicinity of Hoosierville, you'll know that mine went awry at some point. Never fear, though. Monday will be here before we know it.