Making Stockings from Sweaters and Curly Willow Love...

Ooo, the holidays are so close. I like this part best—the before time. My house smells so wonderful right now. Between the Christmas tree and cinnamon essential oil I've been heating over a candle, it literally smells like Christmas.

I like the cold weather and the cozy feeling of preparing. I bought some curly willow cuttings that have added a burst of festivity to the room. I wonder how long they can live indoors. The lady at the floral shop where I found them said to plant them come spring, but I would love to keep a potted curly willow in my house.

Lately I've been working on making stockings from sweaters. I have only completed one, but a second is near the finish line. My goal is to make five. Imagine one stocking for each person in the family? All the same size with the same essence? Somehow, my youngest never got a stocking made for him, this year I plan to remedy that. Our first born was lucky enough to have great aunts who knitted a stocking with his name and snowman to boot. I made our daughter one, though it didn't come out how I envisioned. Each year I intend to fix this imbalance, but it's taken until now to make it happen. Oh well, that's the way things go...

Hope everyone is having fun preparing for the celebrations to come. 

 

                              Cheers ~

                                          Marica

Vegan Sweet Potato and Lime Soup Recipe

BLOG OVERLAP FROM DEAR COUNTRY MOUSE

Dear Country Mouse,

Oh my gosh it is so dark and rainy up here. I do love it, but seriously it is rain, rain, rain right now. I'm trying to send some of this dripping, wet, goodness southward, but I have yet to succeed.

Your succulents are so wonderful! How fun to find the old pieces of ceramic-ware to turn into pots. Come spring, I think I will do that with a couple of my cracked tea pots I've been holding on to.

I made a nice sweet potato and lime soup today. Just note, I kept it vegan for the sake of some of my regular customers that I was expecting, though it would be lovely with chicken stock instead. You'd think my food truck was vegan as lately all the recipes I send you tend to be vegan. But truth is, as you know, we are far from it.

Vegan Cream of Sweet Potato Soup

Bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes or until soft:

2 lbs sweet potatoes

In a decent size pot sauté for several minutes:

1 teaspoon safflower oil

1 large sweet yellow onion chopped

Add and continue to sauté for several more minutes:

2 cloves garlic chopped

Add and simmer for 20 minutes:

4 cups vegetable stock

Once the sweet potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel and blend with:

1 14-ounce can coconut milk

Continue to blend adding the soup stock and add:

2 limes zest and juice

3 tablespoons molasses

1/2 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon salt or more to taste

1/4 teaspoon allspice
1/4 teaspoon black pepper 

Return to the pot and bring to a desired temperature.

Also, I liked it with tabasco and  fresh parsley or cilantro on top. 

Anyway, I love you to pieces! Thanks for the cool idea on plant pots, I will be on that soon.

Hugs and hugs again,

City Mouse

Autumn Projects...

Something about the fall, the change of temperature, the leaves, the moister in the air. It's all so good and such a hearty invitation to sit down and get to work. Thread and needles, sewing machines and felting. I want it all, and I want a wealth of quiet mornings with mild sunlight or dripping rain and tea, and hopefully a friend to sit with. These are special days, not as easy to come by as I'd like, but I'll take what I can get.

 

                                                                 Cheers ~

                                                                               Marica

P.S. Please add links to your projects, I would love to see them!

Vegan Banana Muffins Recipe

I have a real soft spot for banana muffins. These particular muffins are yummy and yet still a tiny bit healthy. I often make a batch at the pie truck and then bring them home at the end of the day for my kiddos—They love when I bring treats. These days it's hard to keep my fifteen-year-old from eating us out of house and home. Seriously! As an added piece—so you can get in the mind of a crazy pie-maker/mother/obsesser-of-story-books—I have an old love affair with the Betsy Tacy and Tib books. I read each and every one multiple times as a child, and to be truthful, I even read some of her later books not so very long ago. Either way, in the stories the house keeper/cook always makes the family muffins on their first day back to school. I found this tradition so romantic. Every time I make my children muffins I think of Betsy and her family and the simple tradition that somehow has made a lasting impression on me. Silly as it sounds, I feel like these are the things that matter. These bits and pieces are what keeps us inspired, warm and decent people in a very complicated world.

VEGAN BANANA MUFFINS

In a large bowl mix:

3 ripe bananas 

1 cup orange juice 

1/2 cup grape seed oil

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon cardamom

3/4 cup dark brown sugar

1 cup ground walnuts

In a separate bowl sift together:

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup white flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

Mix both sets of ingredients together. Pour into an oiled muffin pan and bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes and then rotate the the pan and bake for another 12 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean.


                                                                    Cheers ~
                                                                                Marica

A short visit...

And a very special one. The kids and I snuck a few days away from our usual hubbub and spent some time with some very missed grandparents.* It is so funny to watch the kids rediscover the property where they used to live. To them it is now a distant memory. Sometimes it feels that way to me too.

 

      

                                                Cheers ~

                                                         Marica

*Unfortunately I am missing pictures of the other set of very dear grandparents who we also got to visit.

From an experience while visiting my parents. Today, I decided to put it into words.

Sitting on the hard ground, more rocks than actual dirt, I watch the water in the river, except—oh wait—there is no water there is a drought. I look out to the dry riverbed, birds a fluttering in every which way, I wonder where they fill their drinks and I smell the strong shrubs of the canyon hills. 

I see a long irrigation pipe scroll across from bank to bank and beyond. I feel the words blow through my head, they sound like something my dad would say “unfortunate that has to be there.” It’s not bad that a pipe lies across the ground, just unfortunate because it would be so nice if it were only willow shrubs, packed dry earth, grey and white river stones and the vibrancies of birds.

A realization sets in motion and I feel the truth, the real truths that emit their essence only when there is a moment like this. I feel it. I hold the sensation, I hold it and flow it across my very face and body and inner piece that so often is diluted and submerged in disillusion of where and what is clear.

Philosophy is for the one in the wilderness, impossible to be seen surrounded by concrete roads and brick buildings. You can still analyze in the vivid culture of modern world, but no philosophy can be extreme enough to be true unless you are in the open scape of no human.

I look carefully, I know my eyes can see, just for a brief segment of time, I want to know, I trust I will pull what I need out from this moment and I will carry it with me to the typical world I mostly toil in. I see clearly, we are not all one. That common misconception is so close that it can be muddled and stated as a truth. I wait for more; I know it is on the tip of showing. We are each a square or a perfect small piece of a giant whole. I feel that small piece that I hold up, if I clean my piece and make with it what I can, I will affect this giant one. I am not responsible for the other pieces.

I gather myself, I walk the fifty yards to a fresh sage plant and collect a bouquet for my good friend who had requested such. I feel my brother in my heart. I pick each twigy branch and feel the tie, the gift, the thankfulness, the complete of him, then my sister and myself.

Sage has an intensity, fresh off its rugged stems, that wafts and penetrates more than any other plant I can bring to mind. I carry that powerful smell with me as I climb into an outdoor shower not far from where my kids are sleeping. As the water pours directly down—not at an angle but straight from above, like a waterfall from the heavens—I shut my eyes and sustain the beauty of what I have witnessed. 

                                           

                                                                                      ~  Marica  

Lazy relaxing + yogurt and ice cream...

I am terrible at relaxing. I run my mind too far and wide even as I sit thinking—don't do anything. I like the idea of relaxing, and I do manage to lay on the sofa to watch some terrible something when my day has been too long and there is nothing else left in me to stay upright. But even that gets to me. 

I just sat down with this exciting plate of vanilla ice cream, plain yogurt, sliced banana and toaster waffle. I took out the book I am supposedly reading and started alternating between sweet and sour bites and detangling the words that make up a page of the story I am trying to feel enthralled in. I'm not caught. My thoughts drift away to the pretty plate, the perfection of ice cream and yogurt —something I learned from my great aunts in Utica New York—and the fact my computer is only ten feet away, fully charged and I could even write a silly post about nothing. 

A silly post wins.

 Right now the little ones are at some national women's soccer league game with their godfather. My fifteen-year-old is in his room doing his own version of nothing and my husband is still working. 

A quiet house to my self. Remarkable!

I think I will get out my knitting and try to find some cold, wet, British movie that captures my imagination. Any suggestions?

    

                                                                                     ~ Marica