Meal Upgrade: Bread and Eggs

Hello friends, How are you all doing? I am great :D

Now lets talk about breakfast. And specifically the all time classic; Bread and Eggs! I don't know about you but I find the basic omelette with tomatoes and peppers quite boring. So at every installment, I try to switch things up a bit.

So without further ado, Bread and eggs: my way.

For the Bread, I toasted them same way I did Here and cut them in half into triangles.

And now for the eggs; You'll need the following ingredients 

Ingredients:

• 3 Large Eggs (Cant have an omelette without eggs now can we? :D)
• One Small white Onion sliced
• Celery: About two sticks sliced
• I medium carrot, peeled and cut into half inch cubes
• About a quarter of a stick of Leeks, thinly sliced
• One Sausage, diced
• One Clove of Garlic finely chopped
• I Tablespoon Extra Virgin Olive Oil
• I Teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce
• Salt and Pepper to Taste 

Cooking Instructions

Start with a nonstick pan on medium heat. (also turn on your oven as you will be needing it shortly) Add your vegetable oil and when hot, add the sausages and allow to brown for a few minutes. Add the Worcestershire sauce and a pinch of freshly ground black pepper for some flavor. Once browned, remove the sausages and set aside. Add the sliced onions to the pan and allow to soften, add the rest of the vegetables leaving the garlic for last. Stir continuously and season. Remove from the pan.

Reduce the heat to the lowest and pour your beaten eggs into the pan and top with your vegetables and sausages making sure to spread evenly. Optional: Top with about a table spoon of chopped parsley.

Pop into the preheated oven at medium heat for about 5 minutes and you've got yourself an omelette.

I like to cut min up into pizza style wedges. This recipe serves two and the serving in the picture is actually half of the prepared omelette.

Give this a try, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Until next time, remain blessed.

Love, Preye

Brooch Marathon

Hi everyone, I know its been a gazillion days since I last posted. Activity level has been high and I kept waiting for things to slow down a bit so I could update the blog...Alas that never happened...or is yet to happen; so I'll just take it one day at a time and maybe one day in the not too far future I'll catch up with my line-up of posts.

So first post for today...brooches! Lots of brooches.

Brooches glam up an outfit, add a splash of color to an otherwise dull ensemble and in some cases can serve as an identifier when worn by a group of people. They are cute and bright...but after making over 100 of them over a cumulative three day period, I can think of some other words to describe them...words I will desist from speaking out loud. lols

Anyways, here are a few pictures I took of the brooches before delivering them.

A Rose with leafs

Lace Bow

Kind of a Bow

A Flower

And More 

All packaged and ready for delivery.

Apologies for the sideways pictures. My laptop seems to have a mind of its own today.

I hope I don't get to use my glue gun anytime too soon because my fingers need some time to recover from the burns. whew!

Nonetheless this was an interesting experience, I learnt a bit more patience, and got a sneak preview into the world of "manufacturing" (term used lightly) and assembly line processing.

Until next time, stay blessed.

Love, Preye

The Christmas Meal

Hi All,

I just realized I never got around to posting what we had for Christmas...so here goes.

Asian Glazed Roast Pork. Garnished with chopped Parsley

Roasted Irish Potatoes with Mint and Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Roast Fish Fillet...With Peppers, Cherry Tomatoes, Parsley and Butter. Yum!!!

Ice Cubes made out of freshly juiced pineapples and lemons

Cocktail: Pineapple, Pineapple Punch and Red Grapes

Ready to Serve

 

Seafood Gratin: Fish, Shrimps, Carrots, Spring Onions, Dark Soy, Garlic, Heavy Cream...etc.

Apple and Cucumber Salad dressed with freshly squeezed lemon juice, chopped mint,  salt and black pepper

Roasted Honey Glazed Chicken

Beef Sauce: Minced Beef, Bacon, Chipolatas, Capsicum, Dark soy, etc

Beet root and Feta Salad. Dressed with Pineapple chutney, Balsamic Vinegar and Mayonnaise

And Garnished with parsley and toasted peanuts

Oh and there was some cous cous (Far Left) for some added starch.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, I guess this will be one of my longest posts :D.

After the chaos of Christmas cooking I decided to lay low on New Years and didn't entertain any guests. I also did minimal cooking...only roasted a chicken. I should have a picture or two somewhere...will update when I locate em.

Until next time, God bless you.

Love, Preye.

Sewing Update: Pillows

Hi People!

A couple of weeks to Christmas a friend commissioned some throw pillows and after a few days of back and forth pinging (via Blackberry Messenger) we finally settled on the fabric and styles she wanted for her pillows (Well she picked just one style and I just flowed with the rest).

And here are the results (Pictures were taken at night so apologies for the less than stellar quality)

Pillow One: I call this one The butterfly pillow.

I worked with a black fabric for the base and used her chosen fabric for the butterfly effect with the aid of a big black belt buckle...I like the sound of that :D...The Big Black Belt Buckle Butterfly Pillow.

Ok moving on. Next is The Ruffle Pillow with button accents.

This one kind of reminds me of Cultural Dances in Secondary School...we'd tie little wrappers around our waists and shake our bums to beautiful traditional lyrics. Yeah, Beyonce copied that booty shake from moi :P

Zipper

Next up, The Cool Dude. After the dancing lady above, I wanted something a bit more masculine to balance things up and The Cool Dude was born.

Bow-tie effect with a silver buckle

And last but not least, the most time consuming of them all (And the only style she chose herself), The Pinwheel Pillow...

If you recall I made this for my home sometime last year and blogged about it in this post. And if you also recall, we had a little incident with over-stuffing. Well, lesson learnt and applied :D.

I used an invisible zipper for this one as well

Here are the pillows together.

And here are a few construction pictures.

Prior to stuffing

Fully Interfaced

I used a regular zipper for this one since the ruffles covered it completely

And that brings us to the end of project "Throw-pillows"

Until next time, Stay Strong and be blessed.

Love, Preye

Sewing Update: Checkered

Happy New Year!

And welcome to 2014...Our year of unusual strength.

I am not much into resolutions but as far as targets go, I have loads of them and I'll get into them in a bit.

But before that; a proper wrap up of 2013. I have quite a line up of projects I haven't posted from last year so I'll get right into them.

First off, The checkered dress!

I made this dress the week of Christmas..the Saturday before Christmas I think. I actually started out the day with a project for myself but the client (who was very persistent) wanted her dress and wanted it NOW. Since she was a first time customer I decided to oblige and leave the twenty-something other pending projects originally scheduled before hers. 

She is pretty conservative so the target for this project was to create a style out of the two fabrics she provided that would still stay true to her tastes. We had the basics down as she wanted pleats...so I decided to play around a bit and eventually ended up with the checkered details...and I knew I had struck gold :D

I started out with the belt detail then had a little glitch with the original sleeve I inserted which resulted in my having to redo the sleeves. So I figured the patchwork could make it to the sleeves as well. At the last minute, I decided on the Tulip variation for some added pizzazz.

I also piped the bottom of the dress with the black fabric...all in the little details people.

Here is a close up of the belt.

This project took a lot longer than expected but turned out great. And save a slight issue with depth of the back neckline; the client loved the dress.

Sadly, my dress which I had planned on making that faithful Saturday lies there unfinished and awaiting the day I'll have a break from sewing for others :D

Until next time, God bless you.

Love, Preye.

What I Ate: Dirty Rice and Beetroot Sauce

Hello People,

I had never had wild rice and had been itching to give it a try for quite a while. So when I saw a shelve full of different varieties of rice at one of my old hunts (Onime's Food Basket), I quickly grabbed some and started planning a rustic meal; and some weeks later I finally cooked up the meal.

One thing I didn't know before I started cooking was that wild rice takes a long, looonngg time to cook.

The pack specified cooking the rice for about 50 minutes but I ended up cooking for the better part of two and a half hours. Although to be fair some part of that time was spent preparing  ingredients and making the sauce.

Anyways, back the the meal.

For the rice I used:

Brown Rice and Wild Rice Mix, about 3 Cups
Chipolata Sausages...6pieces
Streaky Bacon...4 strips
Shrimps...about half kg
Unsalted Butter
Dark Soy Sauce
Worcestershire Sauce
Onion
Garlic
Seasoning and Spices
Juice of one orange

I started off with the rice, using the packet instructions and left it to cook.

Then chopped up the sausages, bacon, onions and garlic.

I browned the sausages and bacon in the butter to get some caramelized flavor. Next I took out the sausages and bacon, and added the chopped onions and sauteed them for a bit. Threw in the sausages and bacon again, added the shrimps and the rest of the ingredients and seasonings and finished off with the juice of one orange.

When the rice was almost cooked, I mixed in the rest of the cooked ingredients and allowed it simmer for about 10 minutes to infuse the flavors and the dirty rice was ready.

For the sauce I chopped up some carrots, onions and beetroots and sauteed them in some butter then added some chicken stock, seasonings and some chopped mint. Finished it off with some heavy cream and the sauce was ready.

For the chicken, I had some boiled chicken in the freezer so I just browned them a little bit in some olive oil in keeping with the rustic theme of the meal and voila, the meal was ready!

Though this meal took a long time to make, the taste was totally worth it. I got five stars from my numero uno taste tester :D

I'll definitely be adding this to my list of staples and you should give this a try.

Until next time, God bless you.

Love, Preye.

What I Ate: Watermelon Hearts

Hi Everyone,

A couple of weeks back I saw a picture of some watermelon hearts on a friends profile so next time we were having watermelons, I dug out my cookie cutters and proceeded to make a fun presentation of watermelons :D

 

 I started out with this.

Then played around a bit

Decided to garnish with some chopped mint.

And then for the man who inspires me (DH), a special edible message :D

I think the watermelons tasted better with all the love in the air ;)

Until next time, God bless and complements of the season.


Love, Preye.