Amber Dusick

fiddlehead ferns make your pee smell funny

No really, they do.  I couldn't find anything online about this, unlike how well known asparagus pee is so I figured I'd better use it to title my post.  Chances are, someone, someday will try fiddlehead ferns and have this same experience and look for answers to see if they are just imagining it.  

I hadn't ever eaten them until last week.  Apparently they are hard to come by and only available a couple weeks a year.  I felt a little weird about it too, and asked my husband, "Isn't it a bit like eating fairy fingers or something magical that you should leave alone?"  I mean, look at them!  

They tasted a bit like bitter asparagus I'd say.  They were very tasty with bacon and garlic...but hey, what isn't?  

 

 

dining outside season is here! German feast

We love eating dinner outside on our patio (which is still on my to do list to revamp) and last night we had our first official one of summer.  Yeah, it is spring technically, but with a temp of 87 degrees today I think we've skipped straight to summer as usual.  

My table cloth is a vintage twin, fitted bed sheet that I thrifted last year in Wisconsin.  It fits perfectly on my patio table and the fitted corners keep it from blowing off.  I'm going to keep my eye out for more twin fitted sheets just for this purpose.  

We recently discovered a little German deli and shop just a few miles from our front door and we love this place!  Mostly hard to find German goodies but there were some other scattered European delights in there as well.  So we headed there to gather yummy things.

A little of this and a little of that.  We even pulled out beer steins that my husband brought back from Germany two years ago.  Full disclosure: the spready, soft cheese is Italian, not German. 

As is the orange soda that we got for the boys to toast with.  

For dessert we had a spiced wine on ice, which is apparently (according to the label) the way you drink it in summer.  In winter you serve it hot in a mug, which we've tried before during the holidays but honestly I think I prefer the iced version!

The boys dessert was some special German chocolates of course.  Oh, the packaging!!!  And so delicious! The store has a whole aisle of European candies, including incredible German chocolate bunnies for Easter.  I think I know where the bunny will be shopping this year.  

In case you are local, the place I'm talking about is this little hole in the wall, called German Cold Cuts International.  Like so many great LA area places, you would have no idea what a gem it is on the inside unless you go in.  We drove by for a year, making fun of the name before venturing inside.   

Cheers!  And have a great weekend!  Ours will include more outdoors dining and hopefully digging our toes into the and at the beach.  I love it here.  So much.    

 

 

welcoming spring!

Hey, spring is here!  To celebrate, we made a batch of tulip and sun cookies using my favorite sugar cookie recipe.  I added lemon zest from our own lemons to the frosting to make them more "spring" flavored. 

I also used 2 cups of whole wheat flour in place of regular flour and they still were great.  They didn't get too "cardboardized" as some healthy versions of cookies tend to.  

We welcomed spring here in Los Angeles with a rainy day so cookie baking was pretty much the perfect activity.  Picnic plans are delayed for now.

I have a few spring goodies coming to my very neglected Etsy shop very soon.  They are all finished, I'm just waiting for the rain to stop so I can photograph them!  Some goodies for Japan (oh, dear Japan...in my thoughts so often) and a few new Easter and spring things.  

How did you guys welcome spring?         

one for health and one for beauty

Water.  I've been drinking more of it and damn, it feels good.  I use this quart jar that I hijacked from my pantry.  It used to have quinoa in it but we ate it all and I changed the label so it is all mine now. Anyway, a quart holds 32 ounces of water, thus my mantra "one for health and one for beauty" as I try to drink roughly two of these jars each day.  

So it has been my little experiment over the last two weeks and I have some conclusions about what drinking the proper amount of water does for me.  In short, I feel better.  I look better.  So my "one for health and one for beauty" saying is pretty accurate. 

It helps that we have a water filter we love.  After using countless faucet filters and pitcher filters that would need to be replaced completely within just a few months we finally broke down and invested in the real deal.  We got a beautiful stainless steel Berkey filter over a year ago now and I still love that thing.  Along with my DSLR camera, it is one of my most continually fulfilling purchases.

So water.  Drink more.  Just over half of you is made of water so it might be nice to top yourself off.  If you don't normally drink enough it is the cheapest, quickest and easiest thing you can do to improve your health and beauty.

You can consider this my first public service announcement post of the year.  You are welcome.  

 

a day of celebrating hearts (love)

What is better than making heart shaped cookies for the people you love?

Sharing heart shaped cookies with the people you love...in a place you love.

Family.  Beach.  Cookies.  

Feeling full of love.

Valentine's Day is what you make of it.  

Hope your day is full of love!  

a little of this, a little of that

 

I can't help but love Valentine's Day for the color.  Of all the holidays it really has the best thing going in that sense plus chocolate in heart shaped boxes.  I love chocolates in heart shaped boxes.  Big red ones. Preferably See's Candies or something like that, none of that Godiva truffle crap.  I want the old school stuff.  The mixed candies with the raspberry cremes and caramels and the coconut that everyone hates but I'll eat.  I too once eschewed the coconut but now I don't even bother to make a hole with my finger in the bottom of each chocolate to see what it is.  It all goes in the mouth.  (That's what she said)  I've gotten less picky as I've aged apparently.  Plus, they sell them with keys now, mapping out what each chocolate hides inside.  That is cheating, I throw those out.      

Oh and some hot cinnamon hearts would be good too.

Okay /end Valentine's Day order to my husband.  

 Much card making has been going on this week.  I think some people are even getting multiples.  We found a pack of strawberry scratch n sniff stickers.  Wow, now there is a smell that brings me back to Valentine's Days of years long ago.  This site is a fun look if you collected scratch n sniffs in the 80s like I did.  And in case you haven't noticed how hard scratch n sniffs are to find these days Smell Stickers has a decent selection and smell most like the ones I remember.  I miss my sticker books.  Daily.  Okay, that is a lie but I miss them right now.  

 A white truffle in my hand.  We ate it shaved over scallop pasta with a bottle of Domaine Tempier.  Enough said.

Also, I've been sewing.  A lot.  These were my latest pair of pants for the wee one and you may recognize the house fabric from when I designed it and made a quilt out of it.  I still have extra that I'm slowly snipping away at.  Feels good to use it.        

So that is what I've been up to.  A little of this and a little of that.    

Happy (early) Valentine's Day!  

newest food obsession

Coconut Manna spread on homemade whole grain bread, still warm.  I've been baking bread weekly and eating this combo probably more than I should.  I'm completely addicted to this melt in your mouth, sweet coconut treat.  We add it to smoothies too.  

(That tea towel peeking out is one I gocco'd a few years back.  I regret selling my Gocco.  Note to self: never, ever let go of artsy crafty stuff, you will want to use it again.)

What treat or new food are you enjoying lately? 

Candy Cane Ice Cream

The last of our homemade candy canes (I'll post about that eventually) were used up in another batch of candy cane ice cream which is also now eaten.  The holidays are officially over, as no remnant (edible or otherwise) is left in our house.  We repurposed the tree and tucked everything else away for next year.  

This candy cane ice cream recipe was made in my new ice cream maker my mom sent me for Christmas.  It is actually just an attachment for my mixer which is perfect since I don't have to store a whole separate appliance, just the small drum that lives in the freezer.  Ice cream with a side of hot cocoa is my current favorite food combo.  

And I have to thank Amber Strocel and her many posts on homemade ice cream for inspiring me to give it another go.  I had an ice cream maker a few years ago and ditched it in a major de-cluttering binge.  I'm glad I picked it up again, though this time with a more simple set up.  Heck, I even collect ice cream scoops and make art about ice cream trucks.  I am a serious ice cream addict so not making my own was kind of a missing piece.  

 

On Being Wasteful

Did somebody say zero waste about wrapping gifts for the holidays?  

This was this year.

Gulp.  It made me a little nauseated honestly.  Yes, much of it was reused already, nearly all could be recycled and this trash involved gifts to and from our extended family, for a total of 11 people but still.  Some people go a whole year without accumulating this much waste and we knocked it out in a matter of hours.  Seeing it in my pantry made me feel ashamed, like a stereotypical wasteful American...

And then!  In a quiet moment after the holiday whirlwind I sat down and flipped through the most recent issue of Sunset Magazine that our realtor sends us.  And turned to this article on the zero waste home family.  While my pantry looked still like this.  Isn't that hilarious?  Oy.  A clear message to say the least

Truth is, the rest of the year we do pretty well.  Really well actually.  With one exception.  Food.  Gosh, we waste so much food.  Yes we compost our veggie scraps and all that good stuff, I'm talking about the mystery leftovers that rot in the back of the fridge only to be pulled out and greeted with a confused, "What IS this?"  Followed by "Oh yeah, that was really good...I meant to eat that" as I toss it in the trash. 

When we were at our worst, someone spray painted the word "FOOD" on our trash bin that gets picked up by the city.  I'm pretty sure it was a less artful and less romantic modern hobo code that homeless people were using to mark our bins so that they remembered that ours were often full of food.  I won't go into the homeless topic too much more other than to remind you that I live in Los Angeles and it is a sadness we live with like in any large city.  While I haven't seen people go through our bins since we moved to our new house up here in the hills we "knew" some of the ones when we lived in the city...my husband gave the homeless guys all of our Thanksgiving leftovers one year.  As in, before they went bad in our fridge.  Sigh.

Anyway, I've been doing a weekly menu plan for over a year now and it has helped a lot but I still think we could do better.  I just threw out some moldy homemade mac & cheese this morning.  And it was good!  I meant to eat that!  Yeah, we're working on it.  

What do you waste the most of?

 

Free Baby Bib Sewing Patterns

I drafted two free baby bib sewing patterns this week.  My little guy has just started showing an interest in solid food at 12 months.  And by interest I mean he puts food into his mouth, explores the flavor and them promptly spits out 90% of it.  Holy cow, this is messy!  I had forgotten.  So.  Bibs.  

Birdie Baby Bib Pattern is a simple, reversible design.  I love it because it is cute and it is great for catching drips but it isn't great for chunks that land in his lap, so...

 

One Piece Pocket Baby Bib Pattern is a full-coverage, serious bib for super messy eating.  I made it with some laminated cotton fabric I got from Laminated. 

Anyway, they are both free.  There are PDFs of the pattern you can download and print for your handmade bib sewing pleasure. 

I'm on a pattern making sewing kick it seems and I'm going to take advantage of it!  Enough of those darn babies though, next up I'll make something for me for once.  I'm thinking of designing a shirt.  I never make shirts for myself - they seem harder because of the boob factor.  But I'm going to try.  Will let you know if I come up with anything. 

Am I the only one who is in full denial about the holidays coming up?  I haven't even thought about it yet.