My Faerie Tale Wardrobe

I first read the Narnia chronicles in the early 1980s, and have read them every winter since. I have peeked in hundreds of wardrobes, and daydreamed about having tea with Reepicheep for decades. I have always said that if I was ever lucky enough to own a wardrobe, I would paint the interior to look like Narnia. 

About a year ago I picked up a secondhand IKEA children's wardrobe. It's small, but deep enough for standard adult hangers. It holds my clothes, my outerwear, my shoes and purses, my makeup and jewelry... absolutely everything I wear fits in here, and I love how easy it is to get to my things when a drawer would be too much for my arthritic fingers to maneuver. It was more functional than "fun," but it suited my needs perfectly. But that pea-soup green? Oh my, YUCK!

 Knowing that I planned to remove the back anyway it was easy to decide to paint the exterior, but a simple coat of paint would never do for the doors to Narnia. I wanted something special. After months of contemplating, Pinterest surfing, window-shopping online stores, and waiting for sale prices I finally had everything I needed to transform my "blah" little wardrobe into a fulfilled childhood fantasy. I would paint the outside to be a meadow before the distant Misty Mountains of Middle Earth from my other favorite childhood books;  also in tatters from being read every autumn since my girlhood days.  

I began by emptying the wardrobe and removing the back, the hanging bar, the shelves, and all shelf-supports. By the end of the first day I had a single coat of paint on the wardrobe frame.

It took "FOREVER" to finish the painting with all five colors, but after a week I had finally finished adding ombre cubbyhole and shoe shelves, and 7 layers of the Misty Mountains of Middle Earth to the doors. FINALLY it was time to add my stickers. 

On the doors, I added a set of flower wall stickers found on Amazon to simulate the meadows of Middle Earth. I love how they turned out, and how peaceful the closet now looked. 

The flower stickers came with a few extras, which I put on the right-hand side since that side of the wardrobe doubles as my headboard. It's a small touch, but it looks oh so sweet.

When I removed the back for painting, it evaporated. I discovered later that the original finishing-nails had been replaced by 1" ring-shank nails, but had planned from the beginning on replacing it with panelboard for strength and durability. Once the doors and shelves were reattached, I picked up a panel of Eucaboard from Home Depot, then cut a door-mural found on Etsy down to size, and added still more paint to finish the back.

It took me two weeks from start to finish since I worked on this as a side-project. But the finished wardrobe is absolutely everything I could have possibly imagined. The soft purples, the mountains, the flowers, the forest... absolutely everything was exactly like I'd pictured it. 

Now that everything is put back, my tiny corner is officially my cozy little happy place. From my tiny comfy slipper chair with the birch tree ambient light and my little art nouveau wall planter full of wildflowers, to the soft delicate colors, baskets, and spinning organizer for my jewelry and makeup... everything here is perfect for my needs, and looks like I stepped into my two favorite faerie tales. 

It was absolutely worth 37 years of waiting for this dream to come true.

 

 

 

 

Garden 2020: Harvest Begins

The nights are getting longer, the evening air is beginning to chill, and it's time to begin contemplating whether we have enough fat fluffy socks for winter. I's harvest season in our itty bitty garden.

 

We have had more salad greens and herbs than we've needed all season long, but now it is tomato time.

Earlier this week we harvested and ate a pint of fresh tomatoes and the three biggest purple carrots. We now know that purple carrots will stain your mouth DARK purple for over an hour and are waiting to harvest the rest for a spectacular purple-carrot cake for my son's birthday. 

 

This morning I picked a second pint. of tomatoes, and found a softball-size melon in our melon patch. The peppers are full-size and ready to begin changing color, and the bees are happily pollinating the tomato blossoms that are still emerging every day. 

 

It is my favorite time of year... when the garden begins to show the fruits of our labor, when the summer heat begins to dissolves into sweater-weather, and when the air starts to smell of changing leaves and bonfires. It's time for the crockpot to begin simmering bedtime cider, and pumpkin waffles on lazy day-off mornings.

 Every spring we plant hope.

Every fall we harvest blessings.

It's time to enjoy the fruits of our labor,

as we enter a season of change.

 

Garden 2020: Waiting for Memorial Day

Tomatoes

Peppers

This is the point in our gardening when we begin the transition from indoor to outdoor with the seedlings. There are still 3 weeks until our last frost-day so the garden itself is still fairly empty, but our seedlings are enjoying hardening-off and catching breezes during the day.

Peas

The tomatoes will be moved to larger pots for the second time this week, and the peppers are finally starting to look promising. Our peas are up and about 6" tall, and the few herbs that we have are looking great.

This week, we will be planting our frost-hardy carrots and Tom Thumb lettuce. Our beans, cucumbers, purslane, spinach, and melons will be
waiting until Memorial Day.

 The beautiful, insanely fragrant stars of our garden right now are the lemon trees. Lem dropped all his leaves in shipping and has been making his comeback all winter long. There are no blooms yet, but he looks so much healthier than he did 8 months ago! Ada, on the other hand, has been flowering prolifically for 3 weeks now. She is perfuming the entire dining room, and just now when I was taking photographs there was a fat bumblebee loitering sleepily as he pollinated her for me. I tried to catch him, but apparently, he's camera-shy.

There is plenty to do in the garden already; daily bringing the seedlings in and out, watering, pinching, feeding the worms... What we love most however is the fact that it never takes more than 20 minutes to "putter" everything into perfect order in our tiny oasis. Would you like to take a peek? 

Family Date Day: Quarantine Arcade

With a pandemic outside our doors, our monthly family date days have become a challenge. This is inarguably the LEAST of our concerns right now. BUT with a son who is working long, physically demanding hours and a daughter who works even longer, mentally draining hours - we take our downtime very seriously. When the shelter-in-place order went through, the SECOND thing I asked my kids was, "What would you like to do about date-days?" And the answer after a few minutes of blank stares and shoulder shrugs was, "What about having an over-the-top game day?"

Family Game Day is a weekly event in our house. It's the first thing that gets added to the calendar each week, once we know what my son's work schedule will be. Every other week we flip-flop between "unplugged" when we play board and card games, and "plugged" when we compete in PS4 and Wii games. How do we change that into an event? The only thing I could think of was turning the living room into an arcade.

I was 4-14 during the '80s. Arcades and arcade games were absolutely everywhere. But I didn't set foot in an arcade until I was 22, and I was in a Chuck E Cheese ONCE during the whole of the 1980s. Likewise, we never owned a gaming system when I was growing up. The closest I got to arcade games was the occasional game of Frogger on my cousin's Atari, and watching my Mummy play Mission Impossible on the Commodore 64 and purposefully running the agent down the shafts just to hear him scream again... and again... and again... So when my son developed a passion for vintage arcade games, I had extremely little experience with these blip-blip 8-bit noisemakers.

In my quest to transform the living room, I began with a pair of gift cards from MyPoints I'd been saving "for a rainy day." With these, I hunted about on Amazon and purchased teeny tiny tabletop versions of Skee Ball and Whack-A-Mole. These were for a new surprise and to help set the proper mood. A PS4 retro game (since I was informed that the one I THOUGHT we owned was for a console we got rid of years ago) and a new book of Mad Libs (for when mama's decrepit eyeballs can't stare at screens any longer) were added to the cart as well, along with some popcorn seasoning and a box each of movie-theater candies. All that needs to be purchased now is a pair of pizzas from our favorite pizza take-and-bake that happens to still be open and offers online ordering and contact-free pickup... AND just sent me a coupon!

Because I am a strong believer in ambiance when setting up these family fun events, I then pulled out the printer and got to work creating decorations... cheesy homemade 80's style. With the help of three vintage arcade-y free fonts from FontSpace I soon had enough printed goodies to color and cut, to fill an entire wall in the living room. Several hours and more than a little bit of cramped-hand later I was able to transform this...

into THIS!!!

 My son already owned a few things that made perfect decorations next to the TV, and I set up scoreboards for four different games along with a few movie suggestions that are theme and period-appropriate.

So this weekend, while we stay safe inside our home, we will be "at the arcade" - playing games, snacking on all sorts of goodies, laughing 'til our sides hurt at how terribly BAD mama truly is at arcade games, and watching retro movies.

It's not a trip to the zoo... but it's something to look forward to. Which is all we need for right now.

Scottish Fare: Irn Bru Recipe #2

Today I thought I'd try something naturally sweet with another bottle of our Scottish Irn Bru. I wanted to try cupcakes.

Due to pandemic-shortages at the store, it ended up being more prudent to make a poundcake. So Irn Bru poundcake, with Irn Bru icing it was.

Now to be fair, I have to admit that while I LOVE cake... I don't tend to prefer poundcake. It's a bit too sweet and far too rich for my everyday tastes. But in working with what I had on hand, I figured that cake was cake... and if I didn't end up liking it, there's a 24-year-old starveling in the house that will happily gobble up any baked goodie he sees lying around.

To keep things simple, I used a very simple recipe:
1 1/2 c gluten-free all-purpose flour
1 1/2 c raw sugar
 3/4 c softened butter
3 eggs
and 1/4 cup Irn Bru

Preheat oven to 310F and grease a bread pan (in hindsight, I should have also floured it!) then set aside.
Cream the butter and sugar, then slowly add the flour in thirds.
Add the eggs one a time, then pour in the Irn Bru and mix just until combined.
Pour into pan, and bake for 80 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

For the glaze, I mixed 2 Tbsp Irn Bru with 1 cup powdered sugar. (and only used half of it)

The cake did not rise quite as much as I wanted, but with gluten-free baking that's always a possibility. It had a beautiful buttery crispy crust on the top, but the minute I went to release it from the pan... the crust evaporated. (I did try a crumb, and yes it tastes positively divine!) And I didn't need nearly as much glaze as I'd made, but I am a frosting girl so that may be personal preference.

How did it taste? The cake itself was far more buttery than I wanted, and honestly, I couldn't taste the Irn Bru - it just tasted of sugar and butter. The texture was lovely, however; with a delicate melt-in-your-mouth crumb. The glaze itself DID taste of Irn Bru and was quite good - but when you mix a too-sweet drink with straight sugar, you get something that's painfully sweet. I paired the tiniest of slices with an extra-strong cup of Edinburgh tea and enjoyed it as a sugary sweet, rich buttery treat.


Would someone else like this? Absolutely! If you like rich, buttery sweet cake and soda-flavored glaze, this would be amazing. For me, I will stick to the occasional cupcake.

But it was a fun adventure. The color is a beautiful pale orange and the texture is divine... and while I personally would not choose to eat this, I am sure that my son will love it once he gets home from work. Because just between you and me... I made this for him. Unlike my daughter and me, HE likes poundcake... and his waistline will not suffer from eating an entire cake!

Garden 2020: When crisis inspires gardening

In times of crisis, people return to gardening. It happened in WWI and WWII with Victory Gardens, and it's happening this year with the current pandemic. Seed stores are selling out, and potting soil can't be found anywhere. The uncertainty of not knowing if the grocery store will have what we need when we visit, coupled with an urge to do SOMETHING when we feel as if the whole world is falling apart, seems to whisper to us the memories of our grandparents' yards - with their raspberry hedge bursting with juicy treasure, and neat rows of squash just waiting for the Thanksgiving table.

Gardening is known to be therapeutic. It has been proven to help reduce anxiety and depression, reduces stress, and can lower blood pressure. When special tools and care is taken, it can help keep fingers and wrists limber to slow the progression of arthritis, and it counts as low-impact exercise. Even if you yielded nothing else... wouldn't that be enough incentive to start a garden this year?

This is our 14th year of urban container gardening. Because I'm being asked a LOT of questions right now from people on multiple continents about our garden and how we do what we do... I wanted to start this year's gardening posts by sharing where we began. Because yes, our garden may look like we know what we're doing NOW... but it took us a LOOOONG time, and years of trials and errors to get here. Please, ask away. If I can help even one person avoid some of the mistakes we learned the hard way... that would absolutely make my day!


This is what our garden looked like near the end of the season, in 2007. The first photo is the "south half" and you can see: tomatoes that aren't planted deep enough and barely produced, pumpkins that never fruited, (though they did make a beautiful arbor!) and carrots that were tinier than a baby's pinkie and bitter when we finally picked them.

The second photo is the "north half" and here are: pumpkins that didn't get enough light and never grew, herbs that produced too MUCH and bolted before we could use them, and - honestly I've forgotten what we tried in the orange and black pots... it might have been peppers, or possibly salad greens. *shrugs* Whatever it was, however, you can clearly see that by August they had barely done a thing.

I want to share this because I've heard a few friends say that they lost interest in gardening when their first year didn't look like our 10th... 12th... 13th...

Please, don't compare and DON'T give up! This is where we started. This is what our first year looked like, and it has taken us 14 years of learning, failure, and slowly saving up to acquire some of the more pricey tools that we now have in our little oasis. Small space gardening IS worth it... but it takes time and patience. Two tomato plants in 5-gallon buckets and a pair of favorite herbs would be better than where we began. Start small. Learn slowly. And add one or two things each year.

For our garden this year, we are needing to make allowances as we may not be able to purchase our precious herbs. Life will go on, and we will plant what we can. We might have extra salad greens where the herbs would normally grow. Adaptations will be made, or we'll do without. But our 2020 oasis has begun.

Here is a quick sneak-peek at our 8'x16" deck garden as it sits mostly dormant, awaiting our Memorial Day planting this morning.

Scottish Fare: Imported Tea and Marmalade

This week we are continuing our adventure with imported goodies. Because we like tea so much, we chose Edinburgh looseleaf tea to try. And to go with the tea, some marmalade.

Why marmalade when I make my own? Because while marmalade has been made with quince fruit since Ancient Roman times... ORANGE marmalade, as it turns out, is legendarily Scottish!

This week I prepared breakfast for dinner. We love breakfast foods, but when your son works retail and a pandemic forces him to work overtime - breakfast looks like whatever I can bake with my eyes half-opened at 5am. So every few weeks or so, we have a full breakfast... at dinnertime.

For dinner, I made a broccoli and Dubliner cheese crustless quiche and our favorite oatmeal scones.

The scones are my own recipe. Years ago, when gluten-free foods were still more of a novelty and recipes were few and far between, I wanted a hearty breakfast scone rather than a cakelike dessert scone. But I couldn't find a single recipe! It took several tries, but here is our recipe:

1 1/2 c gluten-free oat flour
1 1/2 c gluten-free rolled oats
1/2 c potato starch
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 c applesauce (for extra protein, substitute 2 eggs)
2/3 c almond milk soured with
1/2 Tbsp lemon juice (for extra protein and probiotics, substitute 2/3 c buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 400F
Mix together dry ingredients, then add wet ingredients and mix just until blended.
Turn out onto a silpat or parchment-paper covered baking sheet and with greased hands, pat into a circle 3/4" thick. It WILL be wet!!!
Using a greased knife or pastry cutter, slice into 8 wedges - separating slightly.
Bake for 15-18 minutes, or until edges just begin to brown.
Serve hot or cold... but we think hot is best!

We found the tea to be much milder than we expected. Being used to Irish Breakfast tea we were expecting a powerfully bold tea and instead, this was a very nice "basic" tea that would go with anything.

The marmalade was wonderful! I make my own jellies, jams, and preserves because American condiments tend to be too sweet for my liking. This was NOT too sweet; it was nice and tangy, with a good dose of the bitterness left intact from the orange peel. If I had made it myself, this is what I would have made... and now I'm inspired to try adding honey to my own marmalade recipes!

These were foods that we eat all the time, and we really only tried the imported versions out of curiosity. While I might not buy them again simply because of their higher prices, they were both quite delicious and we enjoyed them very much!