Sowing and Sewing and Muffins and More.

Or "More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about What I am Doing"

In order to waste less time during the week, my new goal is to only check blogs on weekends. It's actually been working, and I have been feeling immensely productive of late. Unfortunately, that also means I'm only going to post once a week, so you get to hear all about my life at once - say yay.

Here's What I've Been Doing:

Sowing.



I planted some very small Basil seeds yesterday (thanks for the pot Joseph & Maren!). They are supposed to sprout in 1-2 weeks, which is exiting.

Note the cute little trowel (I've been waiting for a good excuse to use it).

Sewing.


If you haven't heard the funny story about my "skinny jeans" well . . . don't ask. But anyway, the situation is now remedied and I have some sweet new shorts. I learned that altering jeans is really easy and that taking flattering pictures of yourself wearing them is really not (as evidenced here).

Light box.

I made my first attempt at light box photography recently in order to photograph some stuffed pears I have. I think I need brighter lights . . . or more of them, but it was fun to experiment. My purple bunny helped prop up one of the lamps.

Here's one of the pictures:


And, finally,

Cooking.

My dear departed roommate Natalie left us this box of butter with the instructions: "This can only be used to make cookies/muffins etc. to be shared with everyone."

To honor her wishes (and because I know she would make these if she were here) I made brown sugar muffins!

Natalie really likes these muffins, so we ate a lot of them around here. I found out that my mother got the recipe for Brown Sugar Muffins from one of her college roommates, and now I've passed it on to one of mine. I wonder how long we can trace this mother-to-daughter-to-roommate line?

If you have never had Brown Sugar Muffins, you should consider yourself deprived and remedy the situation as soon as possible. It's a beautifully simple recipe, and you really can't mess them up (although sometimes we come up with what I'll call "variations", but all of them have been good :).

Here's the recipe:

Brown Sugar Muffins

1/2 c. butter or margarine
1 c. brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/s tsp. salt
1 cup milk
1/2 nuts (optional)

Mix all ingredients and bake in greased muffin tins at 375 degrees for 15 minutes.

At home, we never made them with nuts that I ever remember, but we tried it a few times here at college and the nut-muffins are good! Plus, when I ran out of white flour, I used wheat and when I ran out of vanilla I just omitted it, and they were always delicious anyway.

Well, there you have it: my life, pretty much.

I'll post again next Friday, hopefully. In the mean time, have a good week and eat some muffins!