Creative set of mind..

I am in a creative mood lately. I finished a pullover that I have been knitting for my daughter. I am nearly finishing a pullover & hat set for a newborn and am planning to sell it :-) I started and nearly finished a sleeveless sweater for my son and made even a hat with the yarn that was left over :-) I have already bought the yarn for making a baby blanket for the baby of a friend that will be born in February. Soon you will find here pictures and maybe also recipes for some of these projects.

On the sewing front: I have to make a dress for my daughter for their annual school theater performance. The paper model and the fabric is ready. I need to buy some ribbon only. There is also a nearly finished skirt for my daughter that is waiting for me to find some free time to do the hem.

But I have other ideas as well. I have a lot of felt at home. Yesterday I found a book that I had bought some time ago, on stuff made using felt. I think soon I will make some felt bags :-) If/when I do realize these projects, I will post here.

So: keep checking this blog for updates and new posts ;-)

PS: Did you notice that I have new pages now? Look up. There is a menu bar. It wasn't there yesterday ;-)

The first quinoa experience

I believe that what we eat everyday should be varied. I also love trying new ingredients in cooking all the time. Last Saturday when I was in the supermarket, I noticed something new, something that I had never tried before: quinoa, so I took a confection. I had no idea how to prepare it. On the package it was written that quinoa could be used as a substitute for rice or pasta in soups, or could be prepared alone to serve next to meat and vegetables. This evening I decided to cook quinoa and I decided to treat it like bulgur or rice, namely I wanted to make a pilaf with it.... with vegetables.

Quinoa pilaf with vegetables
Sauté a small yellow onion, one carrot and one celery stalk (mirepoix in French and soffritto in Italian) in extra virgin olive oil and add some dried garlic flakes to this sauté. (You can also use fresh garlic, I had the dried one and not much time, so just used that.)
Pour 300 grams of quinoa on the mirepoix and turn two-three times. Add 600 cc warm water.
Add on any dried vegetable you have (or fresh ones, but cut in small pieces/cubes or grated). I had a package of dried squash and spring onions mix and used half of that package (about 50 grams of dried vegetables).
Mix a vegetable bouillon cube. I use the biological one. If you have any kind of stock at home, you can use that instead of water & bouillon.
Add one teaspoon of tomato concentrate. Mix well making sure that the bouillon cube melts. Close the lid of the pan, turn down the stove to medium and leave for about 15 minutes. When you turn off the fire, leave the pan closed for some more minutes before opening the lid to serve.

I served my quinoa pilaf with boiled cannellini beans with some extra virgin olive oil over. It was right on! The mild taste of cannellini beans match very well with the rather sharp taste of quinoa and dried vegetable combination. You should absolutely try this pair.

Cabbage sauté
Tonight I had a very fresh little cabbage right from the garden of my father-in-law and wanted to use it as well. Here is how I cooked it:

Sauté a small yellow onion cut in cubes and a boat of garlic (minced) in extra virgin olive oil.
Cut the cabbage in very fine stripes. You can grate it if you want, but that would give short stripes, I prefer long and thin stripes.
Add the cabbage over the onions while mixing all the time. When you notice that it has lost nearly half of its volume season with salt (and if you like add a pinch of chili pepper flakes/powder) and a dash of white wine. Close the lid of the pan and turn off the fire. Leave the pan closed until serving time.

That ultimate addition to the cabbage, the dash of wine, makes it exquisite. If you don't believe me, take a look at this blog post about the addition of wine while cooking and the difference that it makes ;-)

Croissant with Nutella

This weekend I baked croissant with Nutella twice, once for breakfast and once as an afternoon snack. It is so easy to prepare these delicious snacks that I wanted to share it here with you. All you need is a piece of round butter dough (here in Italy you find it in every supermarket fresh or frozen, I prefer the fresh one) and a bottle of Nutella.

Cut the dough in 12 equal slices and place a small amount of Nutella at the base of each piece with the help of two coffee spoons.

Roll each piece gently.

Close the ends of each croissant so that Nutella does not run out during baking.

 

Bake in a preheated oven at 180°C for about 12/15 minutes.

Let the mini croissants cool down for about 10 minutes. Then  cover with powder sugar. Buon appetito!

Octopus..

This week seems to be very promising on the 'work' front.. I was busy preparing the answers to the exercises that I will be doing with the engineering kids at the university next week when I found an email from my former boss asking whether I would be interested in something new and exciting. I would love that, but right now I cannot work full-time programming.. Especially writing programs in something that I don't really have a grip on. Yes, I can always sit down and get my hands dirty, but I am already doing that in a totally different area, for a totally different architecture. Namely I am learning iOS programming lately and I am really enjoying it. Plus I have the Matlab course at the university that I am assisting.. Plus I am organizing a knitting course.. On the top of everything, yesterday someone asked me whether I would be interested in helping in a project between Italians & Turks as an interpreter, which I would definitely evaluate... And today I found some messages from a dear friend of mine in Skype asking whether I would consider helping her & a friend in putting their web site in shape. Sure I would do that, too! Of course we should not forget about my duties as the mother of two little kids, driving them back and forth, cooking, organizing, cleaning, washing... Nowadays I feel like an octopus, yes that is what I am, a multi-processing octopus :-)

My new knitting course flyer :-)

Knitting course

I am hungry. I am foolish. iSad...

We woke up to the news of Steve Jobs' death this morning. I felt like I have lost someone from the family. Such a brain, such a character......

❤❤❤❤

I remember the first time I had touched an Apple product. I was studying at the university in Istanbul, in late 80s and we were given programming assignments, each assignment on a different type of computer. After an assignment on the CDC Cyber, and one on an 8086 PC the next assignment was to be done on the original Macintosh. It looked like a little rectangular box, with a small screen on it. We were all so excited about using a Macintosh...

That summer while I was doing my stage at the computer center of a major Turkish newspaper I was lucky enough to work on a Macintosh II. It was the desktop publishing era and we were using Apple specific programs like QuarkXpress. Great graphics, lots of colors, working on the Macintosh was fun.

Some years later when I was in Norway I had met newer Apple Macintosh products through one of my boy friends who loved graphics and music, and used Macintosh computers and their specific software in his projects.

I had always seen Apple computers as nice, sweet toys with their limited software bundle, but never thought that they would be appropriate for me to use them. I loved Unix, later Linux. I didn't even use Windows operating system, it was for people that had no idea about computers, just were users. For me Apple computers were also for users only, not for us computer scientists that new the hardware, and the programming and the 1s and 0s of computers... Until (nearly) 5 years ago when I got my first MacBook Pro. It was love at first sight! The operating system, software, design, capacity... everything was perfect. I can do my work, do creative stuff, anything I want. Right now I am writing this post on my new MacBook Pro that I got this spring, and there is no way back, it will be Mac forever for me.

Not only Mac, but I own an iPod nano (must be either the 2nd or 3rd generation), iPod touch and an iPad. I love Apple products so much that I am studying iOS programming lately. I would love to write my own apps. Needless to say our kids are Apple product freaks as well ;-)

❤❤❤❤

Steve Jobs left us too early. May he rest in peace.... And we should all "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Knitting course

I am organizing a knitting course for beginners! If you are in/around Florence, Italy, in October, don't miss it ;-)

Enter to Win DropBox Pro For Life!

I don't know about you but I am a fan and user of DropBox. Now here is your chance to win DropBox Pro free for life! Just click HERE! Good luck ;-)

Help needed

I am helping my husband in organizing a Christmas market. We are supposed to get stuff that can be easily sold like small Christmas ornaments for the house, gifts for family and friends. We would like to get most of these things free since the earnings from the market will go wholly to support Dynamo Camp. I am planning to knit some small things like scarves and hats for kids, and make ornaments for Christmas. I am open to ideas of things that can be made (easy and not very time-consuming stuff; probably with patterns/models/explanations) and sold at such a market. We are also looking for volunteers that would contribute with materials (yarn, buttons, tissues etc) and most important of all time. Would YOU help me realize this project by giving me something that you have made? Would you knit/sew for this market? Or would you have some other things that you produce/sell and give us free for our market? 

Old blog in limbo, soon to fly off blogosphere

Dear friends,
I decided to close my old blog Yasemin's corner, but I didn't want to lose all my former posts so I transferred all of them here. For some days that blog will still be available, but soon I will erase it for good.

2nd Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week

I just found out on Eskimimi Knit that next week is the 2nd Annual Knitting and Crochet Blog Week. It means that the bloggers that would like to join this initiative will all have to write on a given topic. You can join the week with your blog in any language. I just gazed at the topic of each day.. Interesting... If I could find time, maybe I could also join... Will see....

Carnival costume: Pippi Longstocking

Yesterday, fat Tuesday, the kids were supposed to go to school in costumes to celebrate the carnival together. This year I didn't want to buy some fancy costume paying a lot of money just to put in the storage room after using it only once. I decided to dress my daughter as Pippi Longstocking and checked all the clothes she had to see if we had everything we needed. We had colorful stockings, a skirt and a matching T-shirt. The only thing that was missing was a sleeveless dress to wear over. So I set down to work. I found some old linen curtain that we had that could do the work. I went through all the sewing magazines I had, but didn't find a model of a sleeveless dress. I transformed a long casual dress paper model instead. I completed it with a huge frontal pocket and some patches here and there, using only left-over tissues I had at home. I do enjoy recycling ;-) Look at the result of an afternoon's sewing project:

And this is how my daughter was all dressed-up and her freckles made darker with a face-coloring pencil :-)

She (and me) got a lot of compliments yesterday. People were especially wondering how I made her hair stand like this. Well, here is the trick:

A piece of wire/cable that is hard enough to keep the shape that you give it. I put it over the head of my daughter, covered the middle part with her hair and braided her hair all around it. Then cut the part that was sticking out at the end of the braids. It was unseen, totally covered with her hair, which made everybody think "how did she do that??" ;-)