announcement:

i was completely uninspired by the camp theme.

i tried, i really did. but i sucked it up Big Time. also, can we negotiate an every OTHER week theme? i don't have that much time for crafting. :(

sad story.

kittens and sunshine,
j.me

beets are scary and lino is bliss

Kitchen Ninja is on a mission. While, actually, Kitchen Ninja has many missions. I believe I can become excited and passionate when it comes to just about anything. It's an affliction.

This current mission was one of block printing. I needed a handmade way to reproduce a logo, and I didn't want it to look flawless in ANY way. I quite like the buy local one, partially because the text in it is a bit dodge.

And then we have BEETS. I must have subconciously known that there was an alarming side effect to eating straight-up beets for dinner, but 8 hours later, I was mildly alarmed nonetheless.

Eat 6 beets and there are consequences my friends.

But first, my recipe for:

If You Can't Beat 'Em, Eat 'Em Beets

6 fresh beets, scrubbed, not peeled and halved

kosher salt

pink peppercorns

balsamic vinegar

olive oil

you'll also need a muffin pan and some foil.

1. roll halved beets in olive oil, then season with salt and pepper.

2. foil the muffin pan and place each 1/2 into it's own muffin section.

3. bake at 350 degrees for 20 mins.

4. test to see if they're done, if so, cube or slice, then drizzle with balsamic vinegar.

They're good with a bit of goat cheese if you have it, or cold as a beet salad.

The theme this week is camp, and I will post my camp project as soon as I get to a sewing machine. but, there'll be a template! Yay! Templates!

Also, this post could be sort of "Camp" if you imagine Bette Midler or a Drag Queen reading the title of the recipe.

but really, as Susan Sontag once put it,
“ You can't do camp on purpose."

Campity camp camp camp!

Summer camp, that is.

As we craft ninjas are somewhat infrequent with our blog posts, Kitchen Ninja suggested that we pick a weekly theme and make something to fit that theme and post it to the blog. So, to kick things off, we have the theme of "camp." I have a feeling, we will all interpret the theme differently, but that's part of the fun.

I have the good fortune to be working with a Shakespeare camp as a part of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival this summer. I worked with them last year as an education intern, but this year I get to be a "teaching artist." How pretentious does that sound? It's pretty much the best summer job I can ask for. I get to spend the summer playing games and talking to high school kids about theatre. Love, love, love it!

Anyway, I have a bunch of shiz I need to haul back and forth from the classroom every day, so I thought to myself: "Self. You should make a bag to put all that shiz in." And so I did.

Here it is. Hanging on the bathroom door.

The inside.

The inside pocket. It's very difficult to photograph a cloth bag and make it look nice. Any pointers would be lovely.

I carried it all of the first week of camp and it is lovely and quite durable, which are great things to look for in a camp bag.

But wait! There's more!

This afternoon, I was feeling like I wanted to make something food-wise. It rained all morning and on into the early afternoon, but by one o'clock it had pretty much dried out. Unfortunately, since this is the midwest, that meant soul-crushing humidity rolled in to take the place of the rain. Ergo, it was way too hot to cook anything in my tiny apartment with only a window unit A.C.

So I made a metric ton of salsa.

I tried to make it as mild as possible, since the heat of my salsa seems to grow the longer it sits. Now I need to find some salsa-lovers to eat some of it. If I ate it all, garlic would start seeping out my pores.

Lovely.