Your Input Please!

It's that time again..February! That means..V-Day! Whee~!

Some carbs in carbs for your Friday? (Yummy spaghetti pan from Clover Bakery!)

Anyway, readers (lurkers included!), a few things I'm hoping you can help me with..

1) May I link to your blog?

For a while now I've been meaning to make a link page.  I get a bit of traffic from the link pages of others so I want to return the favor - but I don't want to leave anyone out on accident! So how does opt-in sound?  Just let me know if I may link your blog, don't be shy or modest (seriously, I will poke at you through email if you don't respond)! I want to promote you (the very little I am able to anyway)!

2) May I please send you a V-Day card?

3) If you answered yes to #2 (and I hope you do!), please help me by choosing between "fun and froofy" or "pretty and practical".  I have no idea what V-Day cards are going to entail yet so I'd like to know your gut-reaction preference!

Thanks much all! Happy Friday!

I love you, spaghetti pan <3

DIY Felt Zelda Headband

I prefer using a sewing machine for sewing.  Let's face it - the stitches just come out better that way for me.  But there is something so peaceful about hand stitching, and you can do it on the train or bus (unless there's a crazy driver - you might stab yourself with a needle if so).

Let's give my nemesis, cheap-felt, another try, minus the hot glue and plus the hand-stitchery.

Though my blue wasn't quite light enough, the goal was to make a Zelda style heart container.

(source)

I cut out one red heart and two slightly larger blue hearts.

Then took one of the blue hearts and cut out the middle to make a border for depth.

I used a blanket stitch around the blue heart.  Blanket stitch is a lot of fun! You can find a good tutorial here.

Lastly, I used a simple straight stitch to sew the red heart in place.

On the back I hot-glued a small piece of felt so that I could slip the heart onto a headband!

Fun!

Please excuse the bathroom picture.  I craft late at night and it has the best lighting. :(  Toliet drops in the background! Haha!

The next day I made one with Navi the annoying fairy!

(source) Hey! Listen!

I like the Navi fairy better I think.  The best part about this is you can slip the felty off the headband and interchange them as much as you want! I got that idea from Cousin T when she made me a steampunk headband, so clever!

With felt so cheap and the blanket stitch so fun to do, I think we should make more fun felty headbands! For Valentine's day maybe?  We can wear them to the grocery store on weekends or something, haha!

Shabu-shabu

Every so often, our local Japanese grocer (Nijiya) has a meat day.

We usually miss it because we forget, but this time we had a handy reminder flyer.  We bought some thinly sliced marbled beef and decided to make shabu-shabu!

Shabu-shabu is a hot pot dish where you dip your food in boiling water, and then eat it with some sauce.  We'd never made it before, so we used this recipe as a guide.  The name shabu-shabu is the sound the chopsticks make while fishing food around in the water! Swish swish!

I'm going to note here that our food presentation (an important part of any Japanese cooking) is sorely lacking.  We ate this while standing in the kitchen over the stove.  No judging.

First, some vegetables!

We used some green onion (cut into 2 inch pieces), tofu (bad idea), shiitake mushrooms (cut into quarters), chrysanthemum leaves (also called shungiku, delicious!) and napa cabbage.

While cutting up the veggies, we placed some plain water in a pot along with some konbu (kelp) knots.

 Bring to a boil!

Next we put out some sauces, ponzu (citrus-soy sauce) and goma-dare (sesame sauce).

We also grated a bit of daikon.

Daikon is also great pickled, which I'll probably do with the rest of it!

Veggies set!

Here's our beautiful meat-day sliced shabu shabu beef!

Missing from the veggie picture is the wheat gluten.  You buy it dried and then soak it til it's soft in some warm water.

Neither of us were a big fan of the wheat gluten, so next time I think we'll leave the carbs out.

Then we stood over the stove with our dippy sauce, dippy ingredients, and pot of kelp-water, ready to eat!

Take your chopsticks and get to work! So good!

We found it easiest to cook a few of the veggies at a time, and then eat them.  I'd skip the tofu next time since it was impossible to pick up from the pot, and even started disintegrating.  Maybe I need super-extra-firm tofu.  Also, we'd cut the cabbage down smaller next time, as it was a bit unwieldy.  And don't try to eat the konbu (kelp) knots unless you really like the taste of the ocean.  Just sayin'!

But overall it was delicious!  Though standing around the stove was kind of lame. Maybe I'll buy a table-top hot pot someday.

Have you had shabu-shabu before?