Just Like Nana Does it: Homemade Fettuccine

With the end of summer not all that far off, I find myself thinking of tomato sauce making day at my Nana's. Every year we crush and cook about 800 jars of tomatoes for sauce, and on the day of eat it fresh with fresh made Fettuccine pasta.

How to make Fresh Fettuccine

Start with 3 cups of flour and 3 eggs in a bowl (I always make too big a mess when I start my pasta right on the counter). Begin mixing with a fork, then get right in there with your hands.

The eggs alone wont be enough to hold the dough together, once you get to the above state (the dough all in little bits and pieces) begin to add a dash of olive oil, followed by a dash of water. Just until the dough begins to hold together when you are kneading it. Remember, this is pasta, the dough will be tough, and should never feel wet or sticky.

You know it is ready when a small piece pinched off can be sheeted in the pasta machine as shown above. As the dough should always be dry to the touch, you will need no additional flour on the rollers. Also, don't worry about kneading it to too smooth a consistency, as you work it one by one down the sizes on your pasta machine, it will do this work for you.

Cut your dough into eighths, and begin sheeting pasta! You'll need to pound it out into a flattish piece before starting the dough on the widest setting. Pass the dough through, fold it in half and pass it through again a couple times on each size until you get it to the thinnest setting.

Then pop over to the fettuccine side and cut your pasta!

I also ran some through on the spaghetti setting.

The pasta should be let to dry a bit before cooking, you can do this by hanging it over a wooden spoon weighted under a stack of dishes. Or if you plan to store the pasta (or freeze it!) nesting the fettuccine may be a better option.

To cook, throw the pasta into salted boiling water, and cook only until it comes to float. I promise it will taste a thousand times better than any pasta out of a box!

Note: it is theoretically possible to make this pasta without the machine, rolling the dough thin with a rolling pin and cutting strips with a knife. But a pasta machine like mine can be picked up fairly inexpensively (mine was about $40) and every kitchen should have one!

Dyeing my Lululemon Define Jacket to Hide a Stain

You might have noticed that I have a love affair...with lululemon that is. There's something just magical about being swaddled in Luon, and I've spent enough of my hard earned money there to have a drawer full of the stuff.

One of my all time favourite lulu products is the Define Jacket. I have three, a grey/black one, a red one and a blue one.

I love this jacket for casual wear and running, it's the perfect length, it doesn't ride up, it keeps you warm but not hot and you can stash things in the pockets. In fact I ran 2 10km races this year in my blue one.

Only my blue one isn't blue anymore. Remember the pink pants I wore to the Calgary Taste the Trucks food truck thing (here) well turns out they bled in the wash... and managed to leave an huge pink/purple stain on the back of my favourite blue define jacket.

So I figured, well I've had this sweater for over 2 years now, but I love it (and it represents $100 so I don't want to get rid of it unless I have to) so why not try to salvage it (I mean it can't get any more ruined).

A step-by-step guide on Dyeing your Stained Lululemon

1. Buy your dye, remember you are overdying so the colour you will get will be a combination of the old colour and the new, plus you want to cover the stain. Since my stain was pink and my lulu was blue, I bought a single package of Rit dye in Fushia, hoping for a purple final colour. You can get Rit online, or at most crafty type stores, I picked mine up at Micheals and it cost about $3.

2. Put your lulu into a bucket of hot (but not boiling water) I heated about 4litres of water in a kettle until just before it got to boiling. You want enough water that your lulu is just covered.

3. Premix the dye with half a litre of hot water, this way when you add it to the bucket you get a more even dye. Add it into the bucket by pushing your lulu out of the way and pouring it into the water (do not pour directly onto lulu).

4.Using your hands (in gloves) or a stirring apparatus, you want to mix/swirl/agitate the lulu in the dye for ~15minutes. If you keep it moving you will get a more even dye, if you don't you will get splotches.

5. Add half a cup of salt to half a litre of hot water, dissolve, then add into bucket. This will help set the dye. Again mix/swirl/agitate for about 15min.

6. Add a tbsp of laundry detergent to the bucket. This will also help set the dye. Again mix/swirl/agitate for about 5min.

7.Dump the bucket and lulu into your kitchen sink (or laundry sink, caution the dye can stain sinks and tubs, so that's why you want to go with your stainless steel one in the kitchen). Rinse lulu under warm water until the water begins to run clear (this took many many rinses, that thing held a lot of dye).

8. Hang to dry over the sink overnight.

Now I am going to wash my lulu in a regulalar old fashioned washing machine, by itself, before I wear it, as I don't want to risk having residual dye turn my skin/clothes pink. But I tried it on just to see how it looked!

Now this picture lighting fades the colour, it's actual a bit brighter purple. As you can see the dye won't change the zippers, it also doesn't take on the stitching they use (something to keep in mind when selecting colours). Interestingly the elastic loop on the back dyed much darker, and it has no effect on the reflective lulu logo either.

Overall I'd call this project a success, and I feel like I can wear this sweater again. This is a great thing to try if you've ruined any of your lulu in the wash (or if you've had issues with colours bleeding in general). I'll update this post once I've washed it a few times, and once I've run in it to see if it still preforms like it should.

Tea....Tea....Tea Cozy?

So I've been on the tea wagon a bit lately... and as my collection grows, I decided I needed a pretty, cozy place for them to live. I decided a shoe box would do. But I thought I'd glue gun makeover that shoe box first.

What I used?

Extra fabric squares, left over from making the quilt from this Sparked My Pinterest. The shoe box which my new nike runners came in (featured here). And the glue gun that my brother got me for Christmas a few years ago (I maintain that a house is not a home without a glue gun, and that if duct tape is the handy man's secret weapon, then hot glue is the handy woman's).

Three minor finger burns later and voila!

Are you on the tea band wagon? Do you think it's here to stay? I don't drink coffee, so tea's an awesome alternative!

How to Add Social Networking Icons to My Blog

Ok, I know I use a plain old simple blogger template for my blog, but that's because 1) it's clean and I like it. and 2) I can't justify spending money for someone to do a blog design for me right now and 3)I just don't want to learn myself to do things like serious HTML myself.

But seriously.... the Twitter, Pinterest, RSS and whatever buttons that come standard from their sites just sort of make my eyes hurt....so finally I did something about it.

This post here gave me the tips I needed to start.

And here's what I went and did about it.

• First I searched around for some free icon sets.

 

Icon Archive has tonnes of sets that you can browse through, and links back to the designer's site where you can download them. I ultimately however picked my set, found while googling for a free pink set (ooh yeah girly girl here) from WebStuffShare.com. They look like this:

• Next up opened the files (they usually come as a zip) and thru them all into powerpoint so I could pick what ones I wanted and play with arangement... Well this set, I soon realized didn't come with a pinterest icon....so I was back to searching (a less than matched set would be less than ideal).

• Once I knew which ones I wanted and in what order, I uploaded them all to photobucket... since this would generate HTML code. This new set came from position : relative.

  

• Then I had to add the HTML Gadget to your blogger template, and copy the HTML code in for each image, use the code <br/> to break them up into two rows (or more). When I copied in the code from photobucket, the code is automatically set up to link back to photobucket. All I had to do was to change the url here to where I wanted to link to. Easy as pie!

This image shows what all that looks like. I just replaced the photobucket url within the quotations with the url of  I wanted to link to. I also got rid of the bit 'target="_blank" all that seems to do is take your browser to a blank page on its was to your new link.

• Once I did these few simple steps, I was good to go. As it was the size icons I chose were a bit to wide to go 5 across. I could have go back and repeated the process with smaller icons that had come with the set. As it was, I just made my side bar a tiny bit wider to fit 5 of these in a row. 

 

 

 

Don't all those pretty icons look nice up there. If you have any questions about how I put my social networking icons on my blog,  don't hesitate to ask either in the comments, or by clicking the brand new email icon!