Clafouti! Say it with me. Cla-fou-ti. I also sometimes resorted to calling it Cloud-footie. For those of your who don't know what this is--I certainly didn't before I saw Alton Brown make it on "Good Eats"--this is a really simple French dish. Here's the recipe...



Clafouti

Ingredients

• 12 ounces fresh or frozen cherries
• 2 large eggs
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup whole milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• Butter, for the Dutch oven

Place 18 to 19 coals on a Dutch oven table. Place a cooling rack, or other wire rack, that is at least 2-inches high, directly over the coals. Place the Dutch oven on the rack directly over the coals. Cover with the lid and place 22 to 23 coals on top. Cook with the lid on for 25 minutes. Remove the lid and cook for another 5 minutes or until golden on top and a knife comes out clean when inserted into the middle.
Allow to cool for 30 minutes before removing from the Dutch oven, slicing and serving.
I had frozen cherries leftover from something else, so I just thawed them under running water and pitted them with my fingers. Works much better than a cherry pitter.

Ah, the cast iron skillet. Now that's a real woman's tool!

Mmmm, fruity!

Voila! Simple and so delicious! This can be a dessert, breakfast, or a snack.

I love that this is a multi-method recipe. I'm way more of an oven girl than a grill girl. You can also use a whole bunch of other types of fruit. Oddly enough, the day after I made this, my friend Jennifer at work started talking about Clafouti and mentioned that she likes it with apples. You can also top it with powdered sugar or honey, which is what I did.

Seriously, this is the easiest recipe and so tasty. I will spare you the annoyance my husband had to endure, though, as I said the name about 5,963 times while I made it and ate the leftovers.

As the weekend approaches, I know some of you are going to go off to parties and such, but if you're in the DC Metro area and you don't mind hightailing it out to Fauquier County then you definitely should stop and visit at Buckland Farm Market.



No, this is not a paid endorsement, but we've been twice this last week and I gotta tell ya....Its going to be dangerous for me whenever I go down to visit my mom.

Mom has been singing its praises for a little while now, and then Bet started singing them. She found steel-cut oats for the best price she's ever seen. She drives up from down near Charlottesville to get these oats.

So I finally stopped by last week with Mom. We were going to meet up there before heading on to her house, and I'm so glad that we stopped. We ended up with 5 pumpkins, a bag of homemade animal crackers, a jar of apple salsa, some local honey (poor boys are suffering from allergies). The next visit ended up with another pumpkin, more animal crackers (the boys are crazy about them!), some fig jam, and party mix. All of this is locally grown (most of it on their farm), but they also provide baked goods from a local bakery.

This is the back part of the store, where the dry goods are stored, along with some of the produce and baked goods.

For Halloween and pumpkin season there is also a Maize Maze and a small playground for the older guys. They have chickens and rabbits out for the kids to look at and pet, altho the chickens like to peck. :)

The playground is back there, and these are just a few of the pumpkins they have set out in front of the maze, which is behind it all. There are more pumpkins around the side of the building.

Well I hope guys, if you're in the area, will take the field trip out to Buckland Farm Market, if you need more incentive....Well there are several nice vineyards in the area including The Winery at La Grange and Pearmund Cellars.

I hope you guys have a great Halloween, and I'll see you Monday! I can't wait to see the desert that Dana whips up tomorrow. Yea, I know its a desert...I cheated  :)

Have a great day!

Have you ever had an itch that you scratched, and then you had to scratch it some more? I fear I have this itch. I thought it would go away with this craft. It didn't. It got worse. Much worse. More on that later.

My itch began over the summer and it resided in the locale of  my laundry room. I thought I could make my laundry room a smudge more tolerable by adding this window art.

Its pretty, but it didn't help.



So then I thought - I know I'll make my own laundry detergent and put it in something pretty! Well I did make my own laundry detergent and it didn't help, even if I did triple the recipe. I did a google search and forgive me I can't remember where I got this recipe, but here's the super simple recipe.

• 1 bar shaved bar of soap, I used Ivory
• 1 cup of borax
• 1 cup of washing soda

Mix all of the above ingredients together for 5 minutes and voila!

So then after that, I decided to pretty up the cannister, which I got from Target for about $7.50. I cut a stencil from some repositionable contact paper and then just painted away with some enamel paint on my pretty container. 

I had to put the entire stencil on and then remove the pieces I didn't want so that everything lined up. Can you say PITA? I can, but I still did it because I'm persnickety like that.

So here's the outline of what I wanted. I had to remember not to pull on the vinyl because it will stretch.  Nothing like making it even more difficult. :)

I think I should have left it like this...what do you guys think? No, yea well you might be right. :)

The paint stuck a little to the contact paper, so my lines aren't as neat as they could be, but I'm still happy with the chippy result. The paint job looks a little more loved and vintage this way. :)

She does look better, and I'm loving how simple and sophisticated she is, buuuuuut there is still that itch. So hopefully this weekend I will be able to scratch that itch and then come next week show off a super-duper improved laundry room. :)  Here's what she looks like on my lone laundry shelf right now.

Not the greatest set up, is it? And yes that is a bottle of regular laundry detergent. I still have to use that up, but it's almost gone. :)

Let's keep our fingers crossed, that I can get this space ship-shape because I still have to finish my costume, and start making a bajillion pillows for the gift fair.

sigh. I need a clone.

Have a great day guys!

So its nothing new for a crafter hoarder to have paint lying around. Its not even odd that they'd have several dozen shades of latex paint around along with a slew of acrylics, possibly some oil-based and fabric paint along with all sorts of mediums and glazes. I know I do. You do to. Admit it. I'm glad I'm not alone in the raising of hands for our hoarding crafting tendencies.

So what do you get when you mix paint, stippling brush, lampshade, and a homemade stencil? You get paint on your pants, or your kitchen floor after the brush leaps to its death from your hands. Pfffft, a slightly suicidal brush is not going to stop me from updating a part of my family room that has been bugging me for a few weeks now.

As I sit and type out this post, as I do with every other post, I am sitting in my chair. Not a chair. Not the chair, but my chair. It has my butt-print all over it. Well, it might have the dog's too, as Carrie likes to steal my chair and its warm spot, but mostly my butt-print on the cushion of this chair. As I sit in this chair I have a direct line view to this.

This has a twin across the room, also in my view, and I stare at these plain, boring lampshades thinking to myself that I am really growing weary of how plain and uninspiring boring they are. The green is a nice lightener to the orange of the family room, and I like green. I like it a lot, but these shades are blah. Very blah.

So enter the previous ditty about the paint. What is a hoarder crafter supposed to do with all of that paint, which is just waiting for inspiration to strike so that it can make something a bit more playful and beautiful. Something that says, "Look at me! Here I am! Loooooooove me!" You bust it out and you slap it onto your lampshade over your homemade stencil. That's what.

Now you maybe wondering about this stencil. I found a flower (detailed_flower_1_C00170_24282) in the silhouette online store that I liked, but it didn't quite work with the stencil job it needed to fulfill, so I ungrouped the image and removed the very outer curves, so that the petals would be the only things being removed from the stencil. I am not a neat pouncer so I need a lot of space around the edges. :)  I did find out that I had to set my cutter to basically cutting out a magnet sheet to get through the stencil and even then I had to punch out the petals and be careful about the corners. That stencil blank was an ornery fellow, but he eventually saw some reason.

So here's what my pretties look like now, and I tell you what.... I am LOOOOOOOOOOOVING them. :)





Have a great day guys and get out there and craft something!

This little guy is from PB. He's cute.

I don't know if you guys have noticed, but this little blog of mine has reached 250 followers! Yay! I can't believe that back at the end of February the only followers I had were family and friends, and now....well just wow. So I think I will need to think of something to celebrate. Maybe you guys can help. What would you like in order to celebrate reaching 250 followers? Another giveaway? A theme week? A monkey jumping up and down on my head? Sorry, the last was just to see if you were paying attention. :) So anyways, while you guys mull over that...Here's what the front porch, dining room and mantle look like now. They're not over the top crazy for Halloween. I only go over the top for Christmas {which I can't wait for!!!!}, but this is what I've done. :)


Hope you guys enjoy. I think for Christmas I may have to give you guys a full house tour, but for now lets commence with this nickel tour. BTW....this will be a photo intensive post.




Now on to the dining room!

I kept it pretty simple for Halloween.

This topiary I made a few years ago. Its just sunflowers, moss and something. I do love a good kissing ball. :)

This tablecloth was made by Bet, and she embroidered it with all of the spooky shapes after she got her first embroidery machine.

Halloween decor is just not the same without a jack-o-lantern. :)

The pumpkin is sitting in the center of a maple leaf ring. Look Harrison is reaching for it.

The pumpkin was painted in gold glitter and then each cut-out was painted with copper paint. Its not so Halloween specific that I have to put it away. This will stay out until Thanksgiving. :) Yay for multi-tasking decor!

These skulls were picked up on whim yesterday. A quick coat of chrome spray paint and voila! Instant blingy spookiness. :)

Here are the skulls hanging out with the Monster Vases from this post!

There's the full mantel! Like I said not over the top, but just a touch. :)

Well I hope you guys enjoyed this little tour. I'm still sorting through all the windows I bought a while ago, but I am definitely going to be moving that piece of art and moving in some of the gorgeousness of those windows, once I find the right ones. I've got the two oldest of the set already picked out, but they need some hefty companions because they're small. More on that later.....Probably a while later, because I've got to get my costume done and then get the pillows churned out!

Have a great day everyone and go craft something!