Made Marian: Oozing Crafty Goodness

I’ve been referring to the wedding as a DIY wedding because we had organised every element of the day ourselves.  We had to hire furniture, cutlery, crockery, glassware.  We had to arrange for a local pub to move get a license to serve alcohol in the venue.  We hired the services of caterer and two dj’s.  We also had to set up the venue entirely.  It took 20 of our family and friends 6 hours to create the wedding venue of our dreams! Mike mentioned in his speech that it was a DIYFF wedding….Do it with Your Family & Friends.  We couldn’t have done it without them!  It was an amazing day, everything went very smoothly and we had a ball.  Here are some pictures……

3pm Thursday

3pm Friday

Just after the Civil Ceremony

The Wedding Cake and the Barbie Cake

The “logo” from our wedding invitations displayed on Daghdha’s projector screen.

The details of our menu is here if you’re interested.  I will post more pictures at a later stage, these are just a selection from our own camera which was in the hands of my new Brother in Law for the day.  Cheers Padraig!

Sometimes things become stale and you lose interest in something you were previously passionate about.  That happened to me (a little bit) with blogging and social media.  I suppose if I’m honest, I just didn’t have room in my head for the past 6-12 months for anything other than the wedding and trust me I know how sad that sounds.  There was a point in April where I started to think that I had early onset alzheimers as I kept forgetting everything.    There was an ‘incident’ where I rang Eircom to give out that I had not received my phone bill and when the copy arrived, I paid it and went to file it only to find the original tucked away exactly where it should be……I had no memory of ever receiving it.   My resident medical expert (my friend Mairead) assured me that I was preoccupied not sick and she totally forgave me when I nearly forgot her birthday and had to buy her a very impersonal voucher instead of actually putting any thought into it!   Anyway, after a recent bloggers meet up I have been completely re-inspired to blog.  It’s like I’ve found my voice again.  The word ‘Woohoo’ comes to mind

So with my renewed interest in blogging and my recent defection from the rest of the social media world I present my latest project……mademarian’s posterous.  That’s not as rude as it sounds, posterous is a new (to me) blogging platform which I was introduced to by Elly.  It’s rediculously easy to post to it and it’s perfect for what I call ‘non-wordy blog posts’.  I’m going to use this platform to post a photo a day in a  Photo 365 project to document my first year as a Mrs.  I’m also changing job/career so despite my best intentions now I may not have as much time for blogging as I’d like so this is a nice and simple way to make sure this year gets documented in some way. Hope you enjoy it.

Day 1 was yesterday 24th July and we had a barbeque at Mike’s parents house, however I didn’t get to take any photos myself so I will post Day 1 retrospectively.

I have such a blog crush on Oh Joy Eats at the moment, I came across the original blog Oh Joy years ago but for whatever reason I stopped checking it regularly.  I recently rediscovered it and it’s stunning sister blog Oh Joy Eats and I am obsessed….I really shouldn’t have developed a food blog crush with a week to go to the wedding since looking at this blog makes me oh so hungry.  In fairness though, Joy makes the fruit look as good as the desserts and since I’m a sweet tooth person anyway I’ll probably be ok.  Look at this…

Source

Whatever about sweets, I cannot resist savoury food and this blog post made my mouth water so bad!!!

It seems I’m not the only one with a button themed wedding, you’ll find some buttony weddings here and here. Our wedding has button napkin rings, button invitations, button name cards, button and candle decorations, button menus and I’m sure there are more but I can’t think of any!

Now onto the point of this post, I often have a look at Martha Stewart’s website for craft ideas so I was inspired by this project to make holders for the dessert labels.  (All our desserts are going to be homemade for us by family members so I wanted to make labels to acknowledge the people who will have put so much effort in.)

Here’s my version.

We plan on having a special area for the kids that are coming to the wedding, there will be jigsaws and colouring books and possibly even a TV and DVD player for them.  Mike’s Mom has a friend who looks after kids professionally so she will be helping us out, one of the activities we have planned for them is to decorate their own gingerbread people.

It would have been much easier if I had the puncher that they mention in the instructions but my alternative was to use Microsoft Word Clip Art and insert an oval into a Document, then just printed that and used it as a template.

I’m going to stay with my parents for the weekend so I wont be doing any cooking Friday, Saturday or Sunday.  My friend Mairead (the fountain of medical knowledge) came to visit on Thursday night so I was cooking for two.  However I also wanted to try to be organised for Monday and have something ready for lunch.  On top of that I wanted to make good use of the last of the fresh veg I had gotten from my friend’s garden.  So, I made a bolognese, veered slightly from the recipe to use everything and there was just enough left for a lunch portion which I popped in the freezer to be defrosted on Sunday night when I get back.

Soon after Lorraine started blogging I requested a spaghetti bolognese recipe as I had been kind of making it up as I went along before that.  I have used this recipe since and it is a fantastic dinner to cook for guests, especially if there’s a chance that they wont be on time as you can leave this simmer away for as long as you like as long as you keep adding some liquid.

I started as per the recipe and fried the celery, carrot and shallots (I didn’t have an onion) with a bay leaf and two rashers (I didn’t have any pancetta either).  Then I fried the mince and when that was done I added in the courgette, mushrooms and the peas.  From that point I followed the recipe again. Except for a slight adjustment, I couldn’t bare the thought of putting on dried pasta when I had gorgeous freshly dug potatoes just sitting there so I steamed them and we mashed them into the Bolegnese.  It was delicious but obviously not authentic at all!

All in all this week was a good exercise in cooking efficiently and planning meals that made the best use of the ingredients you buy or acquire. You need to plan quite well but also you need to be flexible with your recipes to a certain extent so that you’re not throwing out perfectly good food.

Actually, I didn’t cook anything today.  I did do a lot of chopping, grating and shredding though.  I was staring into the fridge this morning wondering what to have for lunch and pondering how cooking for one means that you have lots of bits of veg and other ingredients left over but nothing that seemed to go together.  Then I spotted the remainder of a head of cabbage and a sad looking carrot.  I also had some onions so I quickly grated the cabbage and carrot and made a coleslaw.  It wasn’t the nicest coleslaw I’ve ever made as I used too much mayo but it was a good way of using up stuff.

Breakfast: The Usual

Lunch: Wholemeal Pitta with lettuce, tomato, cucumber and homemade coleslaw.

Dinner: Smoked salmon salad with a brown scone and more of the homemade coleslaw!

Some days you really just have to go with the flow, today was one such day.  I had my meals carefully planned out but in the end I had to move lunch to dinner as we were taken out for lunch to celebrate a colleague’s birthday.  The birthday also meant I was “forced” into eating a slice of cake

In my defence I shared the slice with one of the girls!

Breakfast: The usual

Lunch: Local Chinese Restaurant, I opted for the duck salad which I was pleasantly surprised to find was more salad than duck, even still this was big enough to be a dinner portion.

Dinner: I took my packed lunch (leftovers from last night) back home with me and enjoyed it there.

I lightly toasted a wholemeal pitta bread and filled it with the contents of my lunchbox.  This is a great example of getting two meals out of one cooking session!

I’m on my tod this week as my “soon to be husband” is off on a work trip for ten days. I have to admit that although I am a self professed foodie I don’t cook that much because Mike is even more of a foodie than I am and he does 99% of the cooking, meal planning and shopping.  If you read my old blog you might remember that I used to post up my weekly meal plans but since that time we’ve developed a more, shall we say, even distribution of household chores.  We play to our strengths so I concentrate on the cleaning, laundry etc and Mike sticks to the food related things.

This is a bit of an experiment as I know that some people find cooking for one a challenge and having been encouraged to write more about food I decided to do a few posts this week on the topic. So, what did I eat on day one of the ‘all on my own’ cooking challenge?

Breakfast: Branflakes, my usual.

Lunch: Small ciabatta filled with rocket, cherry tomatoes, cucumber and Laughing Cow Light cheese.  (I absolutely adore cheese so I don’t really consider Laughing Cow to be “real” cheese at all but it adds a bit of creamyness without the calories of mayonaise and I presume despite being processed to within an inch of it’s life there is probably some benefit to be gained from the calcium)

Snack: I was peckish when I came in from work and I wanted to get out for a walk before dinner so I had a little snack of Finn Crisp crackers and cucumber.

Dinner: Grilled Chicken with Stir Fried Veg

Recipe serves 1 and a half (as in I’ll get one dinner and one lunch out of this)

Ingredients (these are what I had, this is by no means a strict recipe)

• 1 Chicken Fillet
• Seasoning
• 1 Carrot
• 1 stick of Celery
• 1 Onion
• 4 large Mushrooms
• 1/2 a Courgette
• 1/2 an Orange Pepper
• shredded cabbage
• 1 teaspoon of olive oil

Chop up the veg in whatever way you prefer.

Prepare your chicken breast by brushing it with a small amount of oil, add some seasoning to it.  I used garam masala and a little bit of sea salt but you could use chinese five spice,cajun, curry powder or whatever you have really. Pop the chicken under the gril.

In the meantime, go back to your veg.  Start by frying the carrot, celery and onion for a few minutes to give them a head start.  You might want to check your chicken at this stage, I use a digital thermometer to be 100% accurate about chicken as I want it to be cooked through but I don’t want it to dry out.  I turned the fillet over at this point. Then add the mushrooms, courgette, cabbage and pepper and cook for a few minutes until they are done to your liking.

At this stage  the chicken will probably be done, I sliced it and plated up about 2/3 of the veg and about 3/4 of the chicken. The rest I’m leaving for lunch tomorrow. You could serve this with rice but to be honest I used so much veg that I couldn’t fit any rice in!

Please excuse the bad photography, the chef has taken the camera with him on his work trip so I’m limited to the camera on my phone.

So I managed to do some kind of a job on my craft supplies, I bought some milky white boxes from Muji and put them to great use to corral things that are related.  For example, I sorted through all my card making stuff and edited my stash to get rid of stuff I knew I’d never use.  I put the most used things into one of the Muji boxes and put my most used glues, glue dots and tape into a Muji tray.  This means that when I want to make something, I only need to bring a one box and one tray out to the Kitchen with me.

And the tray

Spare blank cards and other things that I don’t use all that often are staying in the plastic drawers

I used more Muji boxes to hold paper for the printer, plastic pockets and other office type stuff like staplers, punchers, label maker (yes I am that sad, I love my label maker).  This is what the book case looks like now. I think it’s somewhat of an improvement anyway.

PS I had an absolute ball yesterday at the bloggers meet up in Portlaoise, with Lily, Marie, Lorna, Cathy, Susan, Grannymar, Steph and Elly.  The food at Jim’s kitchen was amazing, I had the goats cheese bruschetta wit a selection of salads.  Similar in style to Avoca but I’d prefer Jim’s, the staff were lovely to us and seemed to love the fact that we arrived at 1pm and had to be kicked out as they were cleaning up around us well after 5pm.  Massive thanks to Lily for organising and for the nibbles and drinks which she very kindly laid on for us.

It was such a lovely and inspiring day, I have gotten so many tips and ideas on all kinds of things.  Elly had some great words of wisdom on backing up honeymoon photos and tools to help with seating arrangements at the wedding.  Elly’s post on how to plan a wedding for 120 people for under 10K was the first thing I read (re-read) when we got engaged.  It’s a post I plan to write myself at some stage after the wedding.  I’ve also been encouraged to write more about food since I think I may have scared everyone there with my obsession with the subject.  I really want to get more into baking so I’d love to post that journey here.  I was thinking I could call it The Made in the Kitchen Series  At some stage yesterday we were discussing photo blogs and people doing the 365 project where they take a photo every day for a year.  I’ve been keen to do that for ages but had this strange thing in my head that you HAD to start on January 1st.  I decided to go against convention and I’m going to start on July 23rd and document my first year as a ‘married woman’.  I have no idea why I put ‘married woman’ in quotation marks, I think the phrase is still just a bit strange in my head.  Anyway, lots to be going on with but unfortunately our book for the BBC wasn’t one of them, I failed to get past page 50 and have put the book aside for the time being so unfortunately I’m sitting this one out.

We are heading off to Bordeaux for our honeymoon and although the focus of the honeymoon will be on food and wine I hope to get some time to visit craft shops or at least go to see some local arts and crafts.  However I’m having some difficulty, so far I’ve manged to find this fabric shop and a few art and craft supplies shops but my french is so bad that I have no idea what the shops actually sell, I’m guessing that Papeterie Guilbaud might sell paper and that La Maison du Collectionneur must sell something collectable but what that something might be is a mystery.  The third one I found is Groupe Castet but I haven’t a notion what they might actually sell.

Has anyone been to Bordeaux?  Any suggestions where I might look?