dubliner apricot scones

luffy, sweet, and savory scones.  Breakfast of champions.  Or carb-lovers.  You pick.  I've only made scones once or twice before, but every time I do I think, "Damn, I should do this more often."  I try to keep my breakfasts more healthy, but it can definitely be nice to just grab a scone, toast it up, slather on some butter and jam and shove it in my mouth.  In the interest of healthy eating I had planned on bringing most of these to work and letting my coworkers have at them, but alas, Dan and I annihilated them.

When it comes to breakfast pastries, I like the intersection of savory and sweet.  I wanted to try making a scone that had a balance of sweet and savory, and I remembered how amazing the baked brie with apricot was that I made a couple years ago, so I decided to pair cheese and apricot again for these babies.  I'd say that it was a great success.  If anything, if I made them again I'd add more cheese and more apricot.  ALL OF THE THINGS.  

INGREDIENTS (Yield: 8 scones):

2-1/4 cups All Purpose Flour

1 tablespoon Sugar

1 tablespoon Baking Powder

1/2 teaspoon Kosher Salt

1-1/2 sticks Cold Unsalted Kerrygold Butter

1/2 cup Whole Milk

2 whole Eggs

1/4 heaping cup diced Dried Apricot

1/2 cup grated Kerrygold Dubliner Cheese

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and line a rimmed baking sheet.

1/  Combine the two eggs and the 1/2 cup of milk in a small bowl or measuring cup and keep cold in the fridge.

2/  In a large bowl combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Drop in the cold butter and using a pastry cutter (or two knives), cut the butter into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse, wet sand.

3/  Add the egg/milk mixture, apricots, and Dubliner into the flour mixture and stir just until combined.

4/  Lightly flour a clean surface and drop the dough down on to the floured surface and knead into a ball. Use your hands to flatten the dough out to an inch thick. Use a knife and cut the dough into eighths and place onto the prepared pan.

5/  Bake the scones for 15-18 minutes or until the tops are golden, rotate the pan halfway through baking. Remove the scones immediately to a wire rack and let cool.

Serve warm (with butter and jam!) and enjoy!

corn chowder

I'm making a pact not to make anymore sweets for a while.  As tempting as it is to try out all the amazing recipes on pinterest, I'd like to lay of the sweet stuff for a bit and try making some more filling, hot meals.  I made this soup a couple weeks ago and I've made different versions of it since then. I really like how easy it is to play around with soup.  I subbed in carrots for onions the second time I made it and it still tasted really great!  Chowders are just the best for warming up my insides during the colder months.  So thick and filling and radiates the warmth from your insides out.  I think I might try to make clam chowder next, maybe with an Alaskan vibe to it.  I absolutely love clam chowder and I've always liked it best when it has a bit of an Alaskan spin to it.  A little taste of home.

Maybe I'll do a bunch of my favorite Alaskan-y recipes.  I have a bunch of recipes from my Mom and Grandma that remind me so much of home... halibut, salmon, crab, lox and bagels, etc, etc.  A couple years ago for Christmas my Grandma and Grampa gave me a recipe box, which was carved by my grampa and filled with my Grandmas recipes!  I'm ashamed to say that I haven't made a single one of the recipes yet, but I'm going to change that, effective immediately.  I really love my Grandma's take on sort of homestead Alaskan cooking.  She's allergic to fish, so she couldn't make any of the Alaskan fish dishes (a shame, since my Grampa, Dad, and Uncle were all commercial fishermen!).  Alaska back in the mid 1900's didn't have a lot of fresh produce options and stuff, so she made do with whatever they had available.  It's so neat to see how creative she was, working with whatever she had (awesome stuff like slim jim chili, pioneer mac and cheese, and beans and wieners).  As a kid I remember looking so forward to getting some of her amazing

Scotch-a-roos

in the mail, and just the other day my mom mailed us a care package with a tupperware full of scotch-a-roos in it!  I felt an overwhelming sense that someday I'd be sending my kids and grandkids care packages filled with scotch-a-roos...

(adapted from 

Suzie the Foodie

)

1 (15.4 oz) can of corn, drained

4 strips of bacon

1 onion, finely chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup flour

3 cups chicken broth

1 large potato, diced

2 bay leaves

2 tsp sriracha

1. Crisp 4 slices of bacon in a large soup pot and remove. Throw your onion in the bacon grease and saute for a minute, then add the garlic and season with a bit of salt and pepper to your liking.

2. Add the flour and stir it around for about a minute, then add the chicken stock and your diced potato. Let this simmer for about 10 minutes.

3. Add the corn and your bay leaves, and two teaspoons of sriracha. Don't be afraid, it won't make it super spicy, just give it a bit of a zing. Let this simmer for another 15 minutes.

4. Remove the bay leaves and blend about 1/2 - 2/3 of the soup in a blender (or you can use an immersion blender if you have one), and stir the pureed soup back into the pot with the rest of the soup.

Crunch up the bacon you crisped at the beginning to use as a garnish along with some grated cheddar and some chopped green onion, or if you're like me and only have cilantro, that works too.  Tastes amazing with some crunch bread to it soak up!

consume less, create more

Well, the weather outside is frightful and I'm curled up on the couch with a cup of lukewarm tea listening to the wind whipping against the house.  It's late and I'm waiting for sleep to sound enticing.  I was scrolling facebook, clicked a link that took me to a video of a ballet routine and then at the bottom of the article they posted the ballet video that went viral earlier this year to Hozier's Take Me To Church, which I'd seen months ago, and I watched it again.  It struck me how that song was played over and over and over again on the radio back when it came out.  I liked the song.  I felt it was moving.  I enjoyed when it came on the radio.  But the forces of consumption require new things to take the place of older things and that song was eventually taken out of the regular play cycle, relegated to who knows where.  I haven't heard it on the radio once in months.

Perhaps it's the time of year.  Consumerism runs rampant during the holidays.  I can barely listen to ads they're so obnoxiously pushy about selling me All The Things.  Events like Black Friday and the general climate anywhere near a shopping center this past week make me disheartened.  I don't get the need to buy things for people that they don't need, just because it's a thing we do.  I understand that giving gifts communicates love.  I'm not a gift love language person, so gift giving is relatively unnecessary in my world anyway, but I understand the concept of showing love through giving, whether it's items or time or acts of service, etc.  But that being said, Christmas these days seems like an extension of our fast fashion, fast food, made-to-break (so you can upgrade), cultural obsession with consuming more more more.  Kids want the new toy from the super popular kids movie that came out that year, marketed to them during their cartoons, plastered on their cereal boxes, blasted in their eyes and eardrums at every possible moment.  You have to have this movie and all associated toys.

Christmas makes it super obvious, and it gets a bad reputation for it's transparent consumerism here in the states, but really, it's just a symptom of the culture we've created that devalues everything so that we feel like we must buy more.  Clothes aren't designed to last more than a year or two because, well, they won't be in style after that, and because it's easier to sell you ten cute dresses that are cheap than one nicely made dress that costs more.  And the goal?  Sell you things.  Lots of them.  So businesses create a system in which things are designed to break or become obsolete.  Why do we need a new phone every year when the old one is perfectly functional.  Waste from our discarded tech toys is filling up landfills all over the world.  3rd world countries don't even want our old second hand clothes anymore.  There are simply too many of them and they are too poor of quality.

Dan and I haven't done much in the way of Christmas gift giving in the four years we've been married.  Neither of us are gift giving love language people, and we feel a bit silly giving each other things neither of us need.  That might change when we have kids.  Christmas morning is a pretty magical experience as a kid, I will admit.  But I'd rather foster my kid's sense of creativity and wonder through their presents, by getting them things like art supplies, building sets, and books, rather than toys from a movie that will go out of fashion in 6 months.  I know, I'll be singing a different tune when my kid is dying for THE toy from THE movie in 2020.  The most noble parent is the one with no kids.

Still, I want to opt out of the consumption madness.  I want life to revolve around making things and being content with what we have (which is so so so much).  I want memories of times spent together, not silly gadgets unwrapped around a gussied up fir tree.  I want to hear music on the radio that came out last year, or even 6 months ago. I want to create a world where musicians don't get chewed up and spit out after their big hit starts to fade from the charts because the next viral song is amping up.  A world where fads in fashion don't change every few weeks because someone in a factory in Bangladesh that's one tremor away from collapse can pump out H&M's new trend capsule in a week flat.  A world where kids aren't targeted by ads telling them to want want want need need need.  I want that world.  I need that world.  I'm not sure how to create it, but for now I know I can opt out of the consumption as best as I can.  Consume less.  Create more.

(gr)attitude

I hope you guys, whether you're celebrating the holiday or not, are cozied up with your loved one(s) today.  While Thanksgiving itself has a troublesome history, giving thanks and expressing gratitude is always a wonderful idea and that's what I'm spending this day doing.  There is so much to be thankful for.  I'm most thankful for my sweet love and our little floof.  They bring me so much joy and happiness on a daily, hourly basis, I can't imagine life without these two

Living in the Pacific Northwest and being a part of a creative community puts me into contact with so many incredible artists, entrepreneurs, and makers.  One of those people is Tiarra Sorte and last Saturday we met up here in Tacoma for an in-home photo session.  Dan and I hadn't had photos of us together (other than tripod photos that I took of us) since our wedding, and I wanted to have photos of just us together before we decide to make a tiny human.  We've also been talking about moving to Seattle sometime next year for a new adventure, and so I wanted to have photos in our very first (owned) home.  

The session was so fun and I'm totally in love with the images Tiarra created for us.  I didn't realize how special it would be to have photos in our home and around our little neighborhood for us to look back on and remember our time in this house forever.  It will be so fun to show our kids what our first house looked, and a peek at our neighborhood.  Whenever I'm in Sacramento with my parents we usually do a drive-by of their first homes.  One I don't remember because I was a baby, and one I just barely remember living in before we moved up to Anchorage.  I imagine driving through Tacoma with our kids showing them our first super tiny house, and then this house just a few blocks away.

I hope you are with people who love you today.  If you aren't, or if the holidays are stressful and your family situation isn't awesome, just know that you are loved and that you are so worth loving.  And I am thankful for those of you who come take the time to read my little blog and comment, or follow on instagram or facebook.  Blogging and social media can be weird, but it's so nice to have connections with other humans, even if it's just over the web.  So here's a big internet hug to you guys. 

What are you grateful for this season?

OUR HOME // living room update

Mid-summer I got the idea stuck in my head that we were gonna split once Dan got home from Alaska, move out of our house into the Winne and sell all our stuff.  After my trip up to Alaska to visit him I came home and started selling our furniture.  I sold and donated quite a bit of stuff, including our couch, but then after Dan came home he got a new job, I got invited to join the Gritty City Sirens and staying in Tacoma started to sound appealing again.  Our house was still in a bit of a jumble from my purge fest and our living room always felt like it was in a state of being unfinished.  

We're still thinking of moving, but that won't be happening until at least after I return from the Wildbride Retreat west coast tour.  So for now, it made sense to make our home feel homey again.  We got a couch again, and I set up the living room into an arrangement that I've never had it in before!  I've always liked the idea of the couch being on the black wall, but I wasn't sure how that'd work with the front door being right there.  I figured I'd try it out anyway and I really love how it feels!  Plus, there's a perfect spot for our Christmas Tree!

See the other ways I've arranged our living room here.

Almost everything is Ikea, thrifted, or Target.