Todzi Loves You!

Todzi = Turkish  Godzilla

The birds take flight!

Last week I finally finished this little project. I wanted to use different stones or crystals, but I just had this blue stone around.

SVU moment: clay head

Tonight when Emrah saw the clay head I'm working in the car, it was quite dark and the staring head startled him, like the generally sinister beginning of an SVU episode.  We have a model, and it's my first clay head ever.  I haven't smoothed out the clay, but here is my creepy head. . .

Baklava

After buying phyllo dough from the Greek market nearby, I modified a recipe from "Sultan's Kitchen" so that the baklava contained unsweetened walnuts, pistachios, and dried apricots (my addition).  I also more than halved the sugar, so that the syrup's sugar to water ratio was roughly 1 to 2, and added more lemon, so that the syrup contained the juice of one lemon.

Hair Flowers

My first ever attempt at flower pins and hair flowers. . . . For a friend's bachelorette party in Vegas a while ago, I had wired together 30 flower pins for each of the girls: 10 each in magenta (below), cream (below), and fuschia (no picture).  For each day, we wore a different colored pin, though the magenta one was the most popular.  I thought it was a subtle way to signify that we were a group.  The two pink pins (below) were for the bride and maid of honor, to distinguish them from the other pink pins the rest of us were wearing.

Additionally, I made a large cream hair pin with pink fire-polished centers for my engaged friend, and she surprised me by using it on her wedding day. Recently her maid of honor also used the same hair pin for her own wedding hair. Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of the hair pin, though my old computer had a few.

My Heart (Felt-Covered & Blue)

First concession to Valentine's Day since I was 8 yrs old or so. . . .

More Fast Food: Creamy Pasta with Smoked Oysters and Veggies

Originally, I had hoped to deconstruct the CPK tequila chicken fettucine using spinach & chive linguine pasta from TJ's, because E and I love that dish. However, I haven't finished collecting the ingredients, so instead I assembled (not much actual cooking involved here) this dish with a sauce of tahini and non-fat Greek yogurt (lately, my default), canned smoked oysters, fire-roasted red and yellow bell peppers, and marinated artichoke hearts. Today, I used more tahini than yesterday, as I'm a huge fan of tahini.

Later, I topped my dish with some smoked Norwegian salmon I picked up at Costco with Jaime. It's about the same price as TJ's and much less salty. The only problem is that there's so much of it for me to finish. . . .