My husband and I have returned from a wonderful vacation in Boston and Maine. We spent a week on the east coast visiting with my husbands family and then just the two of us drove up the coast through Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine for a couple days during the week.

I will get more into detail about the trip a little later this week but right now I wanted to talk about my new project.

I have been trying to encourage myself to be more creative and recently I pledged to do something “out-of-the-box” creative once a year. Last year, I worked on a really neat avocation called The Sketchbook Project. This year I didn’t have anything quite like The Sketchbook Project (I did start this blog which has been quite a creative endeavor) but then Laura from Lolalina posted about Design Star Emily Henderson’s I’m…a…Giant…Blog Challenge and I knew that this was what my “creative out-of-the-box project” would be for this year. I was and am so excited about this! I’ve always wanted to work on a doll house of my own but always felt too old to do so. I thought that when I had kids I would be all over something like this, but kids have not yet happened  and after reading Emily’s reasons why one should take on this challenge I thought these reasons were the perfect excuse for someone like me to do this. So today I woke up early and headed out to the Long Beach Antique Market in hopes of finding my dollhouse so that I could begin this fantastic project. Lo and Behold, there sitting in the first little stall was a pretty basic, perfectly priced dollhouse. It was in fact fate and I snatched it up quickly, took it home and started immediately dreaming up how I would fashion and furnish this doll house of my very own.

I’m hoping to make as much as I can for the furniture and details as well as scouring next month’s flea markets for additions to my doll house. I will post my progress as often as I can (shooting for weekly, but we will see) but as for tonight, I will be using last years creative project ideas with this project and start sketching out my plans for the dollhouse. A good quote to encourage work on my project (that I have hanging in my preschool classroom) is ” Play keeps us vital and alive. It gives us an enthusiasm for life that is irreplaceable. Without it, life just doesn’t taste good.” – Lucia Cappocchione

So here I go… let’s play!

My husband and I only have five days before we leave for our trip so I’ve been checking out all sorts of restaurants and other fun things to see and do in Maine and along the way. Anything we should put on our list?

Here are some things that I’ve been musing over…

Making sure we have reservations for next week.

I wanted to start on my anniversary gift for Jeff. It’s actually a collaboration between us. Since it’s our Second Anniversary I thought an anniversary quilt was in order. He’s picking the fabric out and I will put it together for us.

Loving this book. It’s making me want to learn all I can about preserving food!

I love this idea of capturing your garden in its different phases. I’ve taken lots of pictures of my own garden, but I will for sure try this idea next spring.

Someone posted this on Facebook and I can not get enough of it. People are so clever!

I love this screen printed fabric and I am loving these towels too!

I’m hoping we get a chance to go here next week and here for some good eats.

Happy Monday! (the photo is one from my container garden… I love it’s fairy like qualities)

Today my husband and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. I guess you could say we’re still newlyweds, although we celebrated like we’ve been married for fifty years. It was lovely and simple and just like any other sunday… just the way we wanted it.

There was some major worm bin renovating. (More on this later).

There was some chicken stock brewing on the stove filling the house with soupy smelling goodness…

I used up the last tomatoes as well as the last mini yellow bell peppers from my garden and some tomatoes from my mom’s garden (thanks Mom!) and made for the first time, some Ripe Tomato Chutney from a great book that I received in the mail this past week – Well Preserved: Small Batch Preserving For The New Cook By Mary Anne Dragan. Since my tomato supply was so limited I ended up cutting the recipe down A LOT to make one cute little jar of chutney. But, it turned out pretty delicious and I am excited to try more preserving recipes in the future.

Here is the easy to make Ripe Tomato Chutney adapted from Mary Anne Dragan’s Well Preserved :

8 cups chopped tomatoes

6 cups chopped apples

1 cup chopped onion (I did not have an onion so I left this one out)

1 cup chopped bell pepper (the recipe calls for red but I used yellow)

2 cloves garlic peeled and minced

1 cup red wine vinegar

2 cups brown sugar

1 Tblsp ground mustard

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp coriander

1 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp chili powder

Prepare the preserving jars. Combine the tomatoes, apples, onion, red pepper, garlic, and vinegar in your preserving pot. Bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in the remaining ingredients and simmer for another 30 to 40 minutes, or until thickened, stirring often. Remove from heat. Ladle the chutney into hot sterilized jars, leaving a 1/2 inch head space. Wipe the rims clean. Seal according to manufacturers directions. Process the jars in a boiling bath for 10 minutes. Makes about 7 to 8 8oz. jars.

After making chutney I moved on to the remaining apples from the apple farm. I still had so many and didn’t want them going bad on me. So I thought since I did so well with the chutney, I would try my hand at some Apple Mint Jelly.

This one is a two day process… after cooking the apples, lemon and mint together all day, the mushy mixture has to settle through some cheese cloth over night until I have enough liquid to cook into jelly. I will be getting up early tomorrow to finish this one and will let you know how it turns out.

So with all this cooking and worm bin renovating you may be wondering what happened to those anniversary plans… Jeff and I were busy all day with our respective cooking and cleaning projects but we spent a lovely morning together at the farmers market and then spent the evening planning next weeks vacation to Boston and Maine. We plan to celebrate a little more romantically by driving from Boston (where Jeff’s family resides) up the coast to Maine and staying in several bed and breakfasts. It will not only be a welcome break from work and every day life but it will be wonderful to visit with Jeff’s family and to spend some quality time with my husband in a state I’ve always wanted to visit. Whether we are relaxing on the east coast or working diligently on household projects, I know I chose right. This man I married is something special and I am so happy to be sharing my life with him.

                                     (photo by Maria McCarthy)

Hope you have a lovely week and Happy October!!!

It was a busy weekend of visiting apple farms and working on worm bins and cooking ourselves silly. So to get us through this week, here are a few inspiring and playful things…

I am reading this and picked up a copy of this at the antique market in hopes to get me excited about Halloween and to work my way through the classics (I’ve read Jane Eyre and East of Eden so far this year).

I am thanking Lolalina for the wonderful online magazines she’s blogged about. They have been fun and inspiring evening reads!

I’m starting to plan one of these for the coming months.

and I am looking forward to getting together with friends for this in Hollywood.

Happy Monday and have a pleasant weekend!

I can not believe I made Apple Butter today. I’ve been wanting to work up to canning and I heard making apple butter is  a pretty easy way to start. Where ever I heard this from, they were wrong. Making apple butter was intimidating! I followed this recipe and started cooking around two in the afternoon and didn’t stop until nine! I used only a small handful of apples from our day at the farm.

I bought new canning jars for the occasion, washed them and sterilized them.

and proceded on with making the apple butter. It lifted the house with an amazing fall-like smell, apples, cinnamon and spice. But it sure did take quite awhile to get it all done. I’m eager to spread some on a slice of my husbands hand baked bread. I’ll let you know if it indeed turned out.

The weather around here is changing. It’s getting darker earlier, the air is drier and we are having cooler days, even a thunder storm rumbled quickly through the area a few days ago. I wanted to do something to round out the end of summer and joyfully bring in the fall. So my husband and I decided to go apple picking for the first time.

We decided to drive out to Riley’s Farm a few hours away. It was like stepping into another time and into another state for that matter. The farm was lovely and picturesque, lush and green.

We had fresh pressed cider, raspberries and plenty of apple samplings. We wandered through the orchards, discovering all sorts of different types of apples. While we were picking apples off of the trees, I kept thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy gets apples thrown at her by the apple trees.

We loaded up our “half bushel” and wandered around to the farthest reaches of the farm, finding rows of corn and growing pumpkins readying themselves for the following month when they would be the headliner.

We ended our day stocked with apples galore and happy hearts, eager to delve into our cookbooks for apple recipes and ready for what fall may bring.

Wishing you a lovely weekend!

While watering my garden this weekend, I came upon an old friend.

A couple months ago I had released a bunch of teeny tiny praying mantis‘ into my garden to help with an abundance of aphids. They stuck around for a few weeks, some disappearing into the wild of the apartment complex and others finding  a few more bugs in my garden to munch on. However, after about a month, I no longer saw any of them.

It’s been a little over three months now and while walking the dogs this past weekend, my husband and I came across a rather large green bug that our dog Charlotte was fascinated with catching. We realized what is was, yanked our determined frenchie away from it and I helped it out of the street and into a grassier, praying mantis friendlier area. It was neat to see one so large and I thought maybe it just might be one of my own mantis babies all grown up. The following day while watering my plants is when I was visited by this guy pictured above. They are fascinating little creatures. I do hope he stays for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I had a lovely weekend! I hope you did too! I got a lot of much needed household cleaning done as well as made some fantastic chocolate chip cookies for a neighbors going away party. Jeff spent the weekend working on my worm bin which I will hopefully share more about this week.

For now I have been thumbing through some library books I picked up this past weekend…

I have been listening to this continuously…

This book gave me the inspiration to make some handmade books to store recipes in… and is also making me want to make something like this...

I am wanting to make something like this for my own bike basket…

and next weekend I am looking forward to going here in search of some vintage fabrics and a chair for my patio.

(the lovely napkins pictured above are from here… I think they are so summery and cheerful- love them!)

Here is to a fantastic week! Happy Monday!

Many of the blogs I subscribe to have been busy talking about their plentiful tomatoes and all the fantastic things they are doing with them. My little balcony garden has not given me the bounty that others have received but I have been getting a steady stream of two and even three tomatoes in different sizes and shapes just about every week. My mother on the other hand has had the miracle upon miracle tomato garden. Each plant of hers is producing more than she knows what to do with and that’s a lot because my mom doesn’t eat tomatoes. Why she grows them is beyond me but I am thrilled she does because the other day she brought me over a basketful of tomatoes to do with what I pleased. I had come across this recipe which was perfect for our meatless monday meal (we used kale instead of arugula) but I still had plenty of leftover tomatoes. Well, then I stumbled across Amanda Soule’s recipe for Soule-Sa  while reading her new book. I’m always a bit trepidacious when making anything like this but this recipe seemed pretty quick, easy and straightforward  and so I decided to try it. To my amazement (and my husband’s) the Soule-Sa came out wonderful and delicious. I halved the recipe because I didn’t have quite the 5 cups of tomatoes it called for but after boiling up a batch, I lovingly poured it into a mason jar, let it refrigerate overnight and then me and husband enjoyed homemade salsa and chips (the chips courtesy of Homeboy Bakery, a local organization that helps at risk Los Angeles youth  find an alternative to gang-related lifestyles. They come to our local farmers market every week and sell the most wonderful array of breads and baked goods, including tortilla chips).  I feel as if I have just begun when it comes to tomatoes!

After a busy and not-as-relaxing-as-I-thought-it-would-be weekend… I give you a few things that are going to to get me through this week…

I found this inspirational piece whilst catching up on my foodie blogs.

I bought some more of these for the bulk bin section at Whole Foods. The other ones worked very well but I wanted to try a different fabric. (I really should just find the time and make some myself).

I love this print and I’m debating whether to make it mine! It’s been quite awhile since I have purchased any Etsy art and this artists work would look absolutly lovely in my home.

I am finally enjoying this book like most of the women in the world.

and I had a pretty good harvest this week from my balcony garden which seems to be coming back to life after many invading caterpillars, a powdery mildew outbreak and some very hot and dry afternoons.

 Happy Monday! I like this poster and will use it’s wisdom in the week ahead!