Cooking & Crafting !

Just to prove that women are SO capable of multi-tasking, today has been a blend of cooking & crafting - oh and swimming 60 lengths, doing the washing & planting out lettuces !

I tried a new chicken recipe - chicken thighs with pineapple & chipotle chilli. It was supposed to be mango but I'm not fond - so pineapple it was !

I made the marinade this morning & left it to seep into the meat in the fridge all day.

It came out really quite tasty & I would make it again but maybe would crisp off the skin a bit.

Then I had decided to make Chutney to try to use up the Rhubarb that is going mad in the garden - I found a recipe in my new Preserves book which suggested adding shredded tangerine skin - have you ever tried to de-pith a tangerine ? - well the tangerine may have been orange but the air was blue !!

I decide to go with a 50/50 mix of dark brown & golden caster sugars to get a nice balance of sweetness & a deeper colour. Oh & I thought that spicy would be good - so added a couple of chopped red chillies & a couple of inches of fresh chopped ginger.

So it's now made & successfully bottled - Lakeland's Jam Funnel's are the real deal !!

Now I just have to wait 3 months to see how it matures up - so come back in September !!

Whilst the chutney was cooking, I was nipping back & forward to my craft desk to make up the perpetual calender & wooden bird I had bought at the Artsy Crafty weekend.

I had decided to base the colour scheme on the Wisteria & Pistachio Kaiser paints, added in a bit of Distress Inking, a spray of the new Crafty Notions matte white paint spray (a little goes a long way - all over the desk & everything on it from a couple of tiny squirts !!)

Then I used the Ding Dong Paperartsy stamps to get the Time theme & numbers - Pro-markers proved very effective to colour things in !

I also got to finish my Scrap Club challenge.

We each had to draw a template on the theme of "A Day in the Life" which had 1) 5 photos, or more, 2) 3 different papers, 3) a pocket & 4) a fabric flower .

Then we swopped all the designs & were given someone elses to make up as a page.

I decided to do the Day as the Saturday from my Artsycrafty weekend - I took photos on the day, asked a couple of the other girls to take some of me & then used a lot of the scraps & leftovers from the weekend to make the page - plus a new stamp and a grunge flower adaptation !

All in all I am quite pleased how it turned out !