Today's crafting wasn't cross stitch but only half stitches. On plastic canvas. It's supposed to become a little 3D Christmas train and wagon. It looks simple but it is actually a bit more challenging than cross stitch, as the back will be visible so needs to look presentable as well. 😅 🪡 🧶 🧵

Took it easy with the cooking today. ☺️Mealprep number 5 was also dinner: Hutspot. ☺️ And number six is just a bunch of half-boiled (they will become more boiled when heating again) vegetables, as a base for gado gado. 🍽️ 🍜

Mealprep number three is started. A chicken-apple curry. With as many vegetables as the slowcooker can hold.🍽️ 🍜

Second bit of mealprep: honey garlic glazed salmon. Great when hot, also great cold in a salad, so I often keep a few of these ready in the freezer. Got the recipe from @thisgrilllife.bsky.social a year ago and it has definitely become staple now! 🍜 🍽️

The first pan of food prep, one of many to come these next weeks: apple sauce. 🍽️🍜 Now the whole kitchen is sticky with apple juice and splatter 😅 But also, the whole room smells like apples, vanilla, cinnamon and star anise. 🥰

Keeping the momentum going. Pens with ink that can be erased with heat arrived today, so I decided to try them out on a biscornu kit I still had to do. The grid really helps a lot, I got quite a bit done already.

Turned out I needed 2,5 hours. But it is done. The red pot and green leaves make this feel a bit Christmassy! I almost forgot how nice it is to spend long stretches of time crafting, like I did tonight. 😌 🪡 🧶 🧵

Finished this weekend. Two cheap crochet kits, enough material to make a third. Never again though, the yarn sometimes just fell apart and the written pattern was very unclear, forcing me to use the much slower tutorial videos. I did write my own notes, so I can make proper ones to gift. 🧶

"...I am a hater, which is a kind of integrity." "...I am more than a critic: I am a hater." "I am here to be rude, because this is a rude technology, and it deserves a rude response." EVERY LINE IS A GEM. 1/

Finally tried the last of my birthday gifts: a pin loom. I love it! Less than 30 minutes to make this square, and that is while reading the instructions too. I thought I needed thicker yarn, but the look and feel of this single square make me think more of them will make an awesome light scarf! 🪡 🧶

Figured I hadn't eaten anything with potato in ages, so meal prepped some potato things. A sauerkraut oven dish, and two stamppotten: one with carrot and onion and the other with leek and bell pepper. Also sharing my failures and not just succeses: the first batch of sauerkraut burned. 🍽️🍜

Wanted to try a stamped cross stitch, to see what it is like to not have to count. It's fast! This is just 2 hours of progress, almost done with a single color. Daylight is fading fast though, so the rest will have to wait.. 🧶🪡

Wedding party tomorrow, so it was time to make a gift. The crochet lovebirds are sitting on a "nest" of "branches", made of rolled up money bills and wrapped in brown thread. Background is a cutout of the invitation card. 🪡🧶🧵

Back to work after four weeks of vacation. Immediately stuck in a boring meeting, so here is a thread with some vacation pictures ;-) First off: Birthday baking!

Party today, so two kinds of cakes baked. Apple crumble on the left, lemoncurd and passion fruit on the right. 🍜🍽️

Baked my first bread this morning. Just a plain white bread from a box mix, there's some room for improvement but it tasted like warm, fresh bread so I'm happy! 😃🍽️🍜

Besides weeds, there's also quite a few things growing/blooming in the garden right now. The ones below are the result of a flower mix I have sown. The orange flowers are so bright that my camera had a hard time focusing! The flowers seem to be popular with the local insect population as well. 🌱

Such a small garden, such a ridiculous amount of weeds despite the ground covering plants... They just keep growing straight through! 🌱

There's some spare room in the freezer after two weeks of eating meal-prepped dinners. I'll fill it with Dutch babi pangang this weekend, which means I also need a Dutch 'version' of acar to go with it. So, I made a lot of acar today, it's pickling in the fridge right now. 🍽️ 🍜

I grew some food!🌱 🍽️ They're 'pink blueberries' and the picture doesn't do the brightness of the pink (or their awesome sweet taste) justice. It's not much, but there's a bunch more on the plant that aren't ripe yet. I guess I have a few more snacks to look forward to 🍜😀

Fridge and freezer are empty, and clean..ready for a new round of groceries tomorrow and cooking🍽️/meal prepping🍜 this weekend. Looking forward to it, it's always a bit more satisfying to put things in a clean fridge/freezer somehow.

Really content with the flowers in the garden so far this year. The Centaurea that I planted last year is flowering for the first time this year, and the Scabiosa is doing great again too. But I'm especially happy with the Coreopsis, which is growing so well and having so many flowers/buds! 🌱

Made some spareribs in the slowcooker today. They were really nice, super soft meat that just fell of the bones. I put the meat (without bones) in the oven (on broiler setting) for a bit just to make a bit of a crust. I'll call this a success! 🍽️🍜

Not my cooking this time, but my brother's: salmon, smoked on the barbecue. With some kind of stuff on top with walnuts and lemon juice. It was delicious! 🍜🍽️

Made the little tarts from last week again, for Mother's Day this time. Did switch to a plain bottom (chocolate on chocolate was a bit much) and also made half with a white chocolate ganache instead because mom loves white chocolate. 🍽️🍜

I got a random kilogram (which turned out to be closer to 1,5 kg) of chicken breast a while back. So, meal prep today was 4 dishes with extra chicken breast! Chicken tonight, bami, chicken pilav and a chicken-mango sandwich/toast salad with most of the extra chicken. 🍜🍽️

Hosted a party last weekend. Made some little cakes, chocolate dough for the outside "basket" with a chocolate ganache filling and strawberry roses on top. Learned a lot of lessons. 🍽️🍜

A few more plants are blooming! The lily of the valley, and (what I think are) some spanish bluebells/wood hyacinths. It's been rainy for the past few days (with a few dry, sunny moments in between) and the garden is also soooo green! 🌱

Blooms, buds, baby leaves and ... bugs. The garden is coming to life again, and I'm loving every bit of it! I found at least 15 of these bugs in the Euonymus though. Can anyone tell me what these are? I don't mind if they eat some leaves, but they won't eat the whole plant to death, will they? 🌱

It's been quite a while, but I've continued working on SkyWays, a reimagination of the classic DOS game Skyroads for the #Philips #CD-i Going through tunnels now works from a visual perspective! Devlog: twburn.itch.io/skyways/devl...

Time to cook and fill the freezer again this weekend. Dish 1/12: slowcooker hachee (a dutch beef and onion stew). Added a carrot to have a bit more vegetable in the stew instead of having to prepare some as a side dish. 🍜🍽️

Crocuses and a Narcissus flower have joined the ones blooming in my garden. 🌱 I think I may need to start pulling weeds soon. 😄

It seems the flowers aren't the only things slowly coming alive in the garden. Ants are coming out of hibernation as well!🌱

There's definitely life in the garden again! I posted the snowdrops a while back, but they're now actually blooming and not just buds. And to my surprise, I also saw some irises and scilla blooming today, I didn't even see the buds before. 🌱 I can't wait for more green and blooming things! 😀

"Tomb of mysterious missing pharaoh is biggest archaeological find in a century" Phenomenal news...worst Photoshop cut and paste to illustrate said news ever! www.independent.co.uk/news/science...

When I said no more cooking for the month, I forgot about visitors. So, I made passionfruit-lemon "bars" again, but instead of one big square to cut into bars, I made little tartelettes using 7cm diameter baking rings. Worked out great, looking fancy! 🍽️🍜😃

And with a traybake, noodles with shrimp, slowcooker meatballs, chocolate dessert and jug of pureed fruit for smoothies (will be frozen into big cubes), all meal prep is finished! I'm not cooking for the next month, and some stuff will last me even longer, like the meatballs. 🍜🍽️😃

One more new trial this week: a recipe called singapore noodles with ground mushroom. 🍽️🍜 Actually really tasty, there will be a next time where I will keep the mushrooms slightly coarser though. Now I'll also prepare some old favorites over the weekend, and the freezer is filled for the next month 😃

Today's trial: something called japchae. Easy ingredients, but a lot more flavor than yesterday's debacle 🍽️🍜. Didn't stick exactly to the recipe (more meat, pork instead of beef, and half an extra onion, short on noodles because I ran out, and double the garlic in the sauce), but still great!

Today's trial recipe was for a quick (cheap, so chicken) pho. It quickly went into the "never making this again" trashcan. 🍜🍽️ These things look so tasty on all images, and then turn out to be no better than the vegetable soups I was forced to eat as a kid 😭

This was probably one of the most difficult photos I have ever taken... but what a revelation... using a little mirror... makes the pictures in #crochet books make sense to #Lefthanded people... Thank you so much @markroseboom.com for the tip (via Crochet Journey book) 🧶

I made a BBQ chicken pizza for the first time, in an attempt to mimic the pizza I used to order at a pizza shop. There's definitely room for improvement, but it's good enough that I'm also never going to have to pay to get one made for me ever again. Money saving, here I come! 😄🍽️🍜

Look, the garden is almost starting to have (a) flower(s) again! 🌱

Since I'm going to be "social" for the rest of the evening and then straight to shower/bed after: happy new year to everyone that changes years today/tomorrow!

While it seems every single one of my friends and acquaintances is prepping for tomorrow's Christmas dinners today... I prepped for after-Christmas dinners today. It was time, my freezer was empty. 🍽️🍜

Tonight's dinner: traybake! 🍽️🍜 Mushrooms, potatoes, bacon, brie, garlic, pepper and a bit of olive oil. Delicious!

Tomorrow I'll be celebrating Sinterklaas, so today I made kruidnoten. Bit bigger than usual, but just as tasty! Next year I'm asking Sinterklaas for a bigger oven though, so I don't have to bake three times but can fit everything onto two sheets and bake those in one go. 🤣🍜🍽️

Dinner tonight was slow cooked meat in a honey-thyme sauce, mixed freezer vegetables and some potato. I loved how the meat turned out! Definitely better than my previous attempts at doing the same, but in an oven. 🍽️🍜

Time for my version of lazy dinner this evening! Pasta, chicken, cheese, and currygewürzketchup. Quick to make, quick to finish, tastes good, leaves extra time for hobbies in the evenings. Just remember to snack on vegetables later. 🍜🍽️🙂

Lately, I keep finding boring stuff to do (including mindless (doom)scrolling) and I am not taking enough time for the fun things. So, before the year is up, I'm going to do fun things again and finish these four: a microplastic painting, a blanket repair, Stardew Valley, and a crochet cardigan.