Wishful Wednesday: Poppy Chair

While helping my mom search for a new couch, we stumbled across this oh-so-cute chair at Macy's. The pattern is so bright and cheerful and I love the dark pink-reddish color of the flowers. It's much comfier than it looks and looking at it even now gives me the urge to grab a book and curl up for the afternoon. Alas, it costs as much as the couch my mom would like to purchase.

Handmade Birthday Card

Today is one of my very dearest friend's birthday, and instead of purchasing a card from the store, I decided to make one for her.

I've been very inspired by the current trend of using birds on cards and stationery. I also thought it would be cute to forgo the usual "Happy Birthday" and use another image to convey that sentiment.

I have lots of craft paper and card stock around from other projects, and I knew that would be a great place to start. 

To make things easier on myself, I traced patterns for the speech bubble and bird, traced them onto the paper, and then cut out the shapes.

On the back, I cut out white card stock with paper edger scissors with a scalloped pattern.

Family Recipe: Italian Sausage Soup

For those that cook regularly, soup is the perfect easy meal. With one pot and about an hour, you can create a satisfying and (usually) healthy meal. This recipe is very popular in my house because it has really great flavor without being high in fat, salt, or carbs.

It's been adapted from a very good Cooking Light recipe. To try and manage the carbs and sodium we eat, I've taken out the pasta and canned Italian-seasoned tomatoes from the original recipe and substituted fresh tomatoes and white beans.

Italian sausage provides plenty of flavor and if you use the hot style, a nice hit of spiciness. As a result, the only other seasoning we add is Italian seasoning blend.

Italian Sausage Soup Revised  (6-8 servings)

16 ounces hot or sweet turkey Italian sausage*
1 teaspoon minced garlic, fresh or jarred
2 pints grape tomatoes, cut into eighths
1 can Great Northern beans, drained
1 Tablespoon Italian Seasoning
4 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
1/2 bag of baby spinach leaves (you can add the whole bag if you like)
1 cup loosley packed fresh basil (you can put in whole or roughly chop the basil)
Olive oil
Garnish: shredded Parmesan or Romano cheese
*You can also do half sweet sausage and half hot sausage. For the batch I photographed, I used Publix brand hot Italian sausage and Johnsonville brand Sweet Italian Sausage with Sweet Basil.

1. Heat a soup pot over med-high heat. Add about a tablespoon of olive oil to the pot. Using a small knife, open the casing on the sausage links and remove the filling. Brown sausage in the soup pot, breaking it into crumbles as it cooks.

2. Drain fat from the meat. Tip: I find that a lot of fat still remains on the sausage even when you let it drain for a while. Rinse the meat with cold water and you will remove even more.

3. Saute the garlic for one minute in the soup pot. Add the tomatoes. Let them cook down for about 6 minutes until they start to soften.

4. Add the meat, chicken broth, beans, and Italian Seasoning. Stir to blend.

5. Bring soup to a boil and then lower heat to a simmer. Simmer for 20-30 minutes to let tomatoes break down a little more and let the flavors blend.

6. A few minutes before serving, add the spinach and basil. Mix into the soup and let the greens wilt for a minute or two and serve with Parmesan or Romano cheese, if desired.

Bookshelf Bookstore: The Final Solution

Today's review is of the short novel The Final Solution by Michael Chabon.
According to Chabon's page on HarperCollins, this novel is an homage to 19th century detective novels, particularly the Holmes stories. You'll soon see why even if, like myself, you've never read such a story.

The story opens in southern England, 1944. A boy is walking along a set of train tracks and upon his shoulder sits an African gray parrot. This amazing sight catches the attention of an elderly man of 89, who is known in the village as an eccentric beekeeper and a formerly world-famous detective.

The boy is Linus Steinman, a Jewish refugee recently arrived from Germany. He doesn't speak and he seems afflicted by both a physical and emotional illness. The old man notes upon their first meeting that he has "a face as wan and empty as the bottom of a beggar's tin cup." 

But even more amazing is that his parrot, Bruno, almost constantly recites a string of jumbled numbers in German, among other bits of poetry and mimicry. There is no clue as to what these numbers mean -- are they a secret Nazi code? Bank account numbers? Or, considering Linus's situation, something more horrifying?

W is for...Wire Wrapping

In learning about jewelry, you realize that sometimes the best way to create a piece is to use a technique called wire wrapping. It's exactly what it sounds like -- instead of using pre-made findings like jump rings, you make your own loops with wire and wrap it to finish it off. It can be used simply, like with these abalone feather earrings, or in intricate designs like these.

Family Recipe: Stuffed Cabbage

I came across this recipe in my Haverly Family Recipes cookbook (my paternal grandma's family) and immediately my stomach growled! What a perfect meal for a cold winter day -- seasoned meat rolled in cabbage, baked and covered in a cream sauce.

Okay, I skipped the cream sauce for tomato basil, but I kept the rest of the recipe close to the original. 

Thinking about this recipe also brought back memories of my time in Romania. When we stayed with some families in a small village, my first meal with my host family was Hungarian-style stuffed cabbage in a pink sauce. 

I can't help but remember how satisfying and delicious that meal was, so I had high hopes for my own version of the dish. Since there were only four rolls left out of fourteen, I would call this one a success. 

Bookshelf Bookstore: The Tenderness of Wolves

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney is a novel that I originally read last fall, but I enjoyed it so much I wanted to share with you here.  

In 1867, Canada is a sparsely populated wilderness. Immigrants from the United Kingdom and France fight the elements to survive, and the Hudson Bay Company (know as "the Company") controls all trade in region.

In Dove River, a small town on the northern edge of Georgian Bay, Laurent Jammet, an independent trapper and Frenchman, lies dead in his cabin, his throat cut. Mrs. Ross, his neighbor, discovers him while looking for her son Francis and is the one who alerts the town elders of the horrible act.

She will soon regret this because she realizes that her son, Francis, has disappeared around the time of Jammet's murder. This suspicious timing convinces some in the town that Francis must in fact be the murderer.

Determined to bring Francis home and learn whether he did kill Jammet, Mrs. Ross sets out with William Parker, a trapper and another suspect in Jammet's murder, to find him and learn the truth. Talk about gutsy!

Meanwhile, news of  Jammet's death spreads and attracts all types of folks like Thomas Sturrock, a con man with ties to another Dove River tragedy, and representatives of the Hudson Bay Company. Whether they are interested in solving Jammet's murder is uncertain.

As Mrs. Ross and Parker march further into the wilderness, their discoveries reveal that Jammet's death was just one tiny piece in very large puzzle. It's as this point I do feel that the plot could have used a little more editing -- at my last count there are four major mysteries introduced during the course of the book. Thankfully I didn't find it that hard to follow and amazingly, they do all intersect and finally emerge as one crazy truth in the last twenty pages of the novel.

Though the plot could use some edits, the language Penney uses to shape the people and places is lovely. When Mrs. Ross arrives at Jammet's cabin just before the fateful discovery, she sees "walls [that] have faded over the years until the whole thing looks gray and woolly, more like a living growth than a building." 

Despite some plot issues, this is a beautifully detailed story I couldn't wait to finish. 

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