I dreamed a dream.....

Now, here's a coincidence. Last night I dreamed that I made a card, and I remembered it so clearly that when I woke up, I set to and made it. And then I looked at Less is More and saw that this week's challenge is "Spiders or Insects". And there was my insect themed card, sitting on my craft table, waiting for the Stickles to dry!

The "honeycomb" is made by using peel-off waste from a sheet of hexagons as a stencil and sponging orange and yellow inks  through it. The bee is a very old unmounted stamp which I think came from Raindrops on Roses, coloured with Promarkers and with the wings highlighted with Stickles, and the sentiment is from a Clearly Besotted set of bug-themed stamps.

I am sharing this with
Less is More - Spiders or Insects
Alphabet Challenge - Quick and Simple

A tag for a change

I very rarely make tags - mainly because I'm rubbish and wrapping presents and tend to just scrawl the recipient's name on a sticky label, a lovely tag is wasted on my gist wrapping.

However this stamp, from the Papermania Folk Christmas set, just screams to be made into a tag, doesn't it? So, a tag it has become.

I am sharing this with
Use Your Stuff - Orange, black and one neutral
Christmas Cards All Year round - use some orange (I was worried that a tag might not be acceptable, since the challenge is a card challenge, but I see one of the DT has made  one - phew, I'm safe!)
Mod Squad - Anything But a Card
Crafty Creations Challenges - Not a card

Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers #70 - Day of the Dead

November 2nd is known in some cultures as "The Day of the Dead" and Edna, while nibbling on a sugar skull, has decided we should celebrate it with a challenge at the Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers.

If you've ever visited Mexico, you'll have seen that practically every souvenir shop, from the high end to the tackiest of tacky, is crammed with pottery replicas of the ornate sugar skulls traditionally eaten on the Day of the Dead,  and that's what my card, too, is based on.

The main skull image is stamped and decorated with stamps from the Sheena Douglass "Sugar Skull" set, and the ribbon and buttons came from a Facebook seller called Its Sew Gorgeous. The floral background is made by randomly sponging distress inks over white card, then Versmark resist embossing  with a small floral stamp that was a magazine freebie a few years back. The sentiment is computer generated. As we don't celebrate Day of The Dead here in the UK, I chose a sentiment that would work for a birthday, as long as your friend is close enough to be happy for you to make fun of their age!

I am sharing this with

Classic Design Team Open Challenge - October 
Country View Challenges - All things spooky

RECIPE - Harissa chicken with roast veg sauce

If you read Mark's blog, you may have noticed that earlier this week he posted a recipe for the home made harissa that he made.

One of our favourite ways to use harissa is in this chicken dish of mine. Rubbing the chicken flesh underneath the skin with the harissa allows the spice flavour to penetrate the meat and - unlike slashing it as you would with chicken tikka - leaves the skin intact to stop the meat from drying out. In this picture you can just see the red colour of the harissa peeping through the skin of the raw chicken.

After cooking, the skin becomes crisp and brown, with the delicious spices tucked away underneath:

Here's how to make it:

one 1.5 kg  chicken                            
2 tsp Harissa paste                        
2 lemons                                                                    
2 tbs olive oil
1 large carrot                                                             
1 orange-fleshed sweet potato
½ butternut squash                                                    
1 large onion
1 tin chopped tomatoes                                           
salt and pepper
cous cous prepared as directed on pack to serve

 Set oven at 190ºC, 170 fan, gas mark 5.

Loosen the neck flap of the chicken, ease the skin away from the breast , spread the Harissa paste over the breast and press the skin back in place. Put chicken in a large baking dish. Halve one of the lemons and squeeze over the chicken, putting the empty shells inside the cavity. Cut carrot, squash and sweet potato into 3 cm cubes and the onion into 8 wedges. Place prepared vegetables around chicken with the other lemon, cut into 8 wedges. Drizzle the olive oil over everything  and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 1¼ hours or until chicken is cooked, stirring vegetables occasionally.

Remove chicken from roasting tin, stand for 10 minutes and carve. Meanwhile remove the lemon wedges from the vegetables and spoon off as much fat as possible leaving the juices behind. Tip the tomatoes into the baking dish, mixing well with a wooden spoon and crushing any large lumps of vegetables into the sauce. Return to the oven to heat through while resting and carving the chicken.

Serve the chicken and vegetables with cous cous

 

Spiced Fruit Loaf in the Bread Machine

One of my favourite lunches on a cold day is to top a slice of fruit loaf with a sliced pear and some blue cheese and then toast it. However having bought a jar of pear, date and walnut chutney at a recent chilli festival, I really fancied having a "ploughman's" style lunch but still using fruit loaf, blue cheese ant toasted fruit loaf. As well as the chutney, I added a handful of crunchy walnuts to complement it.

Note my lovely retro "Palissy" plate - one of the last few items left from the set we bought when we got engaged in 1975!

If you have a bread machine, a spiced fruit loaf is the easiest thing in the world to make - and the house smells wonderful while it is cooking.

Place the following ingredients in the machine in the order suggested by your machine's handbook:

1½ cups of water
4 tbs oil - sunflower, rapeseed or light olive
4 tbs dried milk powder
2 tbs caster sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground mixed spice
½ tsp ground cinnamon
½ tsp grated nutmeg
4 cups strong white flour
1½ tsp dried yeast

Either fill the hopper with 1 cup dried mixed fruit (or mix your own from whatever you have in the cupboard) if you have a fancy machine that adds the fruit at the right time for you, or have the fruit ready by the machine to add when the "add ingredients" beeper sounds.
Switch on to the normal loaf setting and sit back and enjoy the lovely cooking smells!

And now a much more muted Christmas Card

Eyeballs hurting from looking at the card in my previous post? Well you can let them relax now as for this card I've used a much more restful set of neutral brown and kraft shades, using papeers from the Tonic Studios Winter Wonderland pad.

The sentiment topper is die cut from one of the papers from the pad.
Can you imagine the angst that one little button caused me? I have a "thing" about buttons, I always like the holes to be horizontal. But I also have a "thing" about snowflakes (apart from the obvious one that this only has 5 points when all snowflakes have 6) - I always position them with either a point going straight up or a point evenly each side of vertical. But with this button, the holes are slightly skew compared to the points so I couldn't have both. I must have repositioned it about 20 times before I committed it to glue!

I am sharing this with
Winter Wonderland - Kraft and/or plaid
Perfectly Created Chaos - All about 3 (3 papers, 3 shapes, each shape 3 layers - a trio of threes!)

Bright Christmas

I've been making another card from the Papermania Folk Christmas set. It's a useful set for quick, bright cards but the colours in it aren't really me.

I think I might pass the remainder of the set on to the grandchildren as I'm sure they will be making lots of cards in the run up to Christmas.

In the meantime, this card, which is so lurid it made me go "gah" is going to be shared with:

Jingle Belles - Pink Christmas (Gah!)
Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas Challenge - Turquoise -a little or a lot
Glitter and Sparkle - Think Pink