Christmas, New Year and Cooking

Christmas Trees Christmas Card 2010

     This is is the second Christmas card I made this year, which I said I would post at a later date. Again, created with visual journal techniques. The Santa card is my favorite, but my husband liked this one too, so we sent both styles out this year. I really love the freedom of creating these types of images using so many layers and mediums until I'm happy. It is pure play, and I'm so joyful when I have all my art supplies out and can just create with intuition, doing whatever makes me happy in that moment, I highly recommend it.
     Moving onto the new year. I made a list of resolutions in my last post, but later realized I left one out that I have to include. So resolution #14 is to have three meatless dinners a week. My intention is not to eventually become a vegetarian, I am a professed meat lover. However, considering the latest research about red meat (which is my favorite kind of meat), which is less than favorable, and considering that I don't think I get enough veggies in my weekly diet, I want to try this idea out and see what happens. Will I feel better? Lose weight? Save money? Lower my cholesterol? Thrill my family? Try new veggies? Create new recipes? Turn into a vegetable? Who knows, but I can't help feeling that this is a good thing, so on the list it goes! I'll keep you posted. And by meatless, I mean nothing with a face, no fish, no fowl no animals.

"Sorta-Bubby's" blueberry muffins

     And now for my baking fiasco. I made muffins. Blueberry muffins. All wrong. I got this wonderful new cookbook from my friend Jo in New York, "Bubby's Brunch Cookbook." It has a wonderful blueberry muffin recipe that I couldn't wait to try. Soooo, a couple nights ago, I woke up at 4:30 a.m., which I rarely do, and decided to whip up some muffins and surprise my kids at breakfast. I gathered the ingredients, preheated the oven, and began. I decided that the muffins would be better if I used my new demerara sugar instead of the white granulated sugar the recipe called for. Sigh, first mistake. Since I had to cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy first, I realized almost immediately my mistake, but too late. The demerara sugar is much coarser than the white sugar and would not completely dissolve and create that light and fluffy mix, and I beat it f-o-r-e-v-e-r! Oh well, I thought, just add the rest of the ingredients and pray that they are still edible. So I finished up and as I was scooping the thick batter into the muffin tin liners, I thought, "this batter is really thick, too thick." I finished filling the tin with batter and placed it into the oven. Then I sat down with the book and reread the recipe. It called for 12 Tbls of butter, which I believe is = 1 stick of butter, at 4:30 a.m. At 5:15 a.m., 12 Tbls is = 1 1/2 sticks of butter, because that is when my brain is fully engaged! And I still had another batch to bake, lol, and since the blueberries were already folded in, there was no way to add more butter, oil or anything. The muffins did turn out well enough. Out of the 24 I made yesterday morning, there are none left this morning, a good sign. But I now know that I should not be near an oven before 5:30 or 6 a.m. So, what I made were "sorta-Bubby's" blueberry muffins, and they were "sorta" good.