Wednesday morning at last. The crescent moon is shining down in a medium blue sky. Teapot and Daughter #2 are getting ready for school and the other Daughter is lying abed with stomach ills. I am surrounded in chocolate. The living room looks like a chocolate bomb and flower bomb hit at some point recently. Valentine's seems to have been better than it started yesterday. I spent the day cooking and baking. I made a Curry Pork and Beef Shepherd's pie and cheese biscuits, and Birdseed bread buns and white and millet bread buns. Today I will be baking once again and trying my hand at salmon aspic.
I've made jello molds before but I have never made aspic. Aspic is slightly different from Jello molds because you are usually using clarified meat or fish broth to make your mold. Aspics are generally hard to make because traditionally they did not use gelatin. The meat was simmered until it formed a gelatinous substance and then other things were added so that the mold would look nice and taste even better. Now-a-days gelatin is used to help form the jelly substance and the sky is the limit for what you can put in it. Have a look at some of the pictures I found of pretty aspics.
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| This one has macaroni and wieners. |
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| This one is ham and olives. |
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| This is my favorite one for just shear prettiness with tomatoes and mint leaves. |
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| This one has peas and asparagus and some kind of fish I think |
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| Not sure what's in these but they are so pretty. |
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| Carrots and asparagus and inside there is a meat substance I think. |
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| This one I think would be really tasty... love mushrooms in beef broth... |
I think they just look amazingly pretty. Clarified broth with anything that your heart desires for ingredients... think of the amazing combinations you could put together.
Anyway, I packed mostly what I am taking to the Blueberry, yesterday afternoon. I am taking a variety of wool and fibre for spinning. I am taking silk cocoons and my mawata frame and washing soda. I am taking my weaving frame pin loom in the 14 inch size and I am taking my weight scales and the bamboo and cotton for the level 5 50 hour project. I am taking the mittens that I started for Teapot as his Valentine's gift... the one's I started about four years ago and never finished. I am not taking the silk socks to knit... I am leaving those at home. I am not taking my rigid heddle loom and I am not taking the logwood dye and stuff. I am leaving all of that at home. I have one more lot of Tea buns to make today that have to have no dairy in them... this will be difficult since flavouring them will take a little stretch of the imagination and I can't use baking powder and I can't use anything with cornstarch... this leaves very little to bake with... I will use oil instead of butter or margarine since both have dairy in them.... I will use baking soda and cream of tartar instead of baking powder because baking soda has corn in it. I will use water instead of milk. But what to flavour it with I don't know. I thought about garlic and onion powder since they are both ok ingredients and I thought about
jalapeno and ham.... that should make it tasty eh!
I still have personal packing to do... but that won't get done till later since I have to do some shopping before I go and I have to dig out my sleeping bag and foamy. There are beds but they are institutional beds so I always bring my foamy... and we have to provide our own bedding. It's a lot of work getting ready for the Blueberry but I love going and once you get there it is so worth it. Four days... four full days of relaxing and spinning and most importantly laughing and gabbing...
The day is getting on... Teapot and Daughter #2 have been gone for over an half an hour. Daughter #1 is stirring and I had better get to it if I am going to be ready to go at 3:30 this afternoon. I'll be posting from the Blueberry so stay tuned...
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