Soup with a built-in bread bowl

A couple nights ago I made this delicious tomato soup at home with my mommy. I found the recipe online a while ago, and it tastes just like the end of tomato soup in a bread bowl. Even better? It's really easy and really quick to make!

Start by chopping up an onion and cooking it in olive oil until it's almost translucent. Add some chili powder, salt, pepper, basil, and three cloves of garlic.

Stir it all together and cook until the garlic is slightly browned. When it's looking tasty, add a splash of vegetable or chicken stock and a splash of red wine and stir. Drink the rest of the red wine while you're waiting. (Or just add some extra stock instead of the wine.)

While the onion and stock are simmering, dice about half a loaf of Italian bread into about half inch cubes. Don't stress too much about the size; it's all going to be cooked down a bit anyway.

After the onion and stock mix has reached a box, stir it, add two cans of diced tomatoes and stir.

Yum! We let this cook for a bit, then we added in the bread, but it can all be poured in at once.

Bring this to a simmer, and add more spices as needed. Serve in a bowl with mozzarella and fresh torn basil if you have it. (We didn't and it was still absolutely delicious.)

Before I give you the recipe, I should disclose that all the pictures are of a one and a halfing of the recipe, and we had enough for four people and an extra serving for leftovers.

I love this recipe. It's great for a snuggly winter soup — it's quite hearty and very rich.

Ingredients:
1 onion, diced
3 cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped
dash of chili paste (we used chili powder)
splash of chicken stock
splash of red wine
2 cans chopped tomatoes (30 oz total)
leftover bread chunks
sugar to taste
salt and black pepper
fresh basil and grated mozzarella (to garnish)

To make:
1. Heat a small pot; add onion and some oil.
2. Let it soften and cook for a few minutes before adding garlic, chili, and a good helping of salt and pepper.
3. Stir it for a few minutes, until the onions are soft and the garlic is beginning to brown.
4. Add the stock, wine, tomatoes, and bread and keep stirring, letting everything mix thoroughly.
5. Once it's simmered for a couple of minutes, taste and add some sugar if it's too sour or more salt if it's necessary.
6. Serve in a bowl with a good coating of black pepper, mozzarella, and torn basil leaves.

The Hobbit has landed

I've been waiting 4 years for this. Without further ado, the official trailer for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey:

Watched this first thing today at work. There was nothing more important in my life at the time, and luckily for me, my boss agreed that it was the best use of 2 minutes and 32 seconds.

I expect to watch this movie at least 15 more times by the end of the work day today. Now the long wait for December 14, 2012 begins.

Christmas, please!

This is the fourth straight year in a row that "more college" is at the top of my Christmas wish list. Now that my brother's in college, he's asking for the same thing. But education isn't the only thing on our lists, because you're simply un-American if you don't want some material goods!

My brother sent my parents a hilarious list, along with reasons why he wants them. Here are a few selections (and yes, I have his permission, no matter how weird he thinks I am):

• Rain pants. In the old days, when it was raining I could go riding, go back home, and change.  This dynamic changed dramatically with my entry into college.  Now my bike rides frequently end at my place of employment, where there is both a lack of clothes to change into and a negative opinion of employee wearing wet clothing.  Quality is of little importance, as more than likely any pants will have a short life and replacement is likely.
• Backpack. I have a multitude of containers for the purpose of carrying items from one place to another.  However, as is the case with most things, I don't have the one I want.  I'm not too terribly sure which one I want anyways but I can present two that seem sufficient.
• Chrome Midway Shoe. I tend to prefer the color green when I choose clothing and this doesn't change when it comes to footwear.  I enjoy a green shoe and would like to continue the habit of wearing them. These shoes are incredibly durable, comfortable, and awesome.  Also, they're green.

My list? I already know I'm getting an iPod Touch — I'm splitting the cost with my parents because I need one for my internship. (Also, the new ones have a camera on them, and the quality is much better than my cell phone camera — look forward to decent-quality pictures on the blog soon!) After all that expensive stuff, all I really want is a new large liquid measure for baking, and a multitude of socks. I love warm, tall socks that keep my entire leg warm, not just my feet.

I need these in my life.

Even if we know we're not getting a lot (other than college, which is a helluva gift), the most important thing is that we all try so hard to come up with something. Some people think it's a copout to say "it's the thought that counts," but I really think it is — even if you're giving socks or a backpack, a gift becomes a tangible way of showing you're thinking of someone.

One last note: Does anyone have any suggestions on what to get a dad for Christmas? Every year I wrack my brain trying to come up with something for my dad and every year I'm stumped. Last year he got truffles (which went over extremely well. Pro-tip: Use cayenne pepper instead of salt). This year he might just get a hug and some beer unless I'm struck by brilliance.

Oh snap, it's scherenschnitte

(I know, I know, I really need to get better at naming my blog posts. Have mercy.)

A family friend introduced the idea of scherenschnitte to my mom, and now I'm in love with these lacy, delicate patterns. We've had a scherenschnitte-style ornament hanging from our Christmas tree for years, and the design always led me to believe they were Scandanavian in origin, but according to our friend and Wikipedia, it's German.

In any case, I thought they would make a brilliant (and cheap) present for my boyfriend's parents, so I worked some Google magic and found templates from an old magazine on a blog, identical to the patterns our friend has used. I redrew some to fit them onto a 4.4 by 5.8 inch card.

To start, I folded a piece of computer paper in half. Schereschnitte designs are half the full pattern — each side is the mirror image of the other — so I aligned the crease with the edge of the pattern and traced it. I have a clear clipboard that I could hold up to the light to make tracing easier, but you can kick it old school and use carbon copying or a window. I cut out the patterns using embroidery scissors and used an Xacto knife for the tiny details.

I put a dark red background on the cards using construction paper, then glued the designs to the background. I used a Q-tip to very, very carefully apply glue to the back of the design, then pressed it down — the design is so delicate I was afraid it would rip. Here's how they turned out:

I'm incredibly pleased with myself. So incredibly pleased with myself, in fact, that I went ahead and made 3D versions for ornaments. I started out the same way I did with the cards, tracing the pattern then cutting it out. I did this twice, then, with a very thin line of glue, glued the two together along the crease with a loop of thread.

I could've done a better job cutting out the little fiddly garland bits, but it turned out fairly well:

If you want to be fancy too, check out the link up above, or you can use the Christmas tree template I drew up for the ornament.

I'm pretty in love with the whole idea of scherenschnitte, so I'll probably try and design more. In the meantime, I'll be getting inspiration from this beautiful papercutting blog and this design I found in the Googles, a great design to riff on.

The time for sloths is nigh

Ladies and gentlemen, my gentle readers, I present to you my favorite video on the internet: Meet the Sloths.

I watch this whenever I get stressed or unhappy and it never fails to make me smile. When people are having a bad day I force them to watch it too, with mixed results. Some people agree with me that baby sloths are the most adorable things on the planet, but some people think that sloths look creepy. One housemate that I'm never going to speak to again thinks sloths look fake, like some sort of Star Wars creature. (Okay, they kind of do. But they're still cute!)

Apparently a television producer somewhere agrees with me, because now there is a new baby sloth video. I've been hugging myself on the couch and squealing like an idiot for the better part of 10 minutes. More importantly, there's going to be an entire television special on baby sloths. I will soon have an entirely new set of clips to gush over.

Until that day — and afterward — we can squeal over baby sloth profiles at Slothville.com, and on an endorphin high, we can donate to the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica, which is officially recognized by the government of Costa Rica.

Guys, this might be the best day ever.

Christmas tree for college kids

We're on the quarter system at UC Davis, so there are only 10 weeks of classes followed by a week of finals. It's actually a pretty great system (for me, at least — I burn out right as finals are ending), but the downside is that there's only a week between Thanksgiving break and finals week, and then everyone goes home as quickly as they can to start enjoying their break. This gives very little time to celebrate Christmas, and Christmas is my favorite holiday.

Since the roommates and I have so little time in Davis in December, it doesn't make sense to spend a bunch of money and buy a real Christmas tree. I found a great idea online to make a "tree" from a tomato cage, so I grabbed a nasty one from my parents while I was home over break. I wiped as much of the dirt and rust off as I could, then spray-painted it.

I let it dry for a few hours. You have to look up-close to see the shininess, but it does cover up a lot of the rust and dirt I wasn't able to scrub away.

Once the paint was dry, I took it inside and wired together the top spires to create a cone. Starting at the top, I wrapped a strand of Christmas lights around, securing it to the tomato cage at intervals with twist ties. Then I added some ornaments, et voilà, a tree!

One of my housemates and I went to the store to get food and picked up an angel ornament as well, which I wired to the top of the "tree" in a not-so-elegant fashion.

It hasn't fallen down yet, though, so I suppose my haphazard job worked well. Hooray!

The bottom looked a little empty, so I took some silk brocade we weren't using in our apartment and wrapped it around the bottom. With some presents around it, our "tree" looked quite festive!

Even if it doesn't have that enchanting smell of a pine tree, it does add a little bit of Christmas magic to our apartment. I spent $5 on the spray paint and $2.50 on the lights — much better than $40 for a real tree! My roommates and I swapped presents after finals, and it was really fun to pull the presents out from under/next to the tree.

Plus, come April one lucky tomato plant is going to have the prettiest cage in my parents' garden.

Now trending: goldfish

Today at work I was catching up on one of my favorite radio shows -- NPR's Morning Edition, of course -- when a story on Twitter's trending algorithm came up. The controversy comes from the fact that the Occupy movement has never shown up on Twitter's list of trending topics, despite the fact that #OccupyWallStreet had at least 1'000 tweets per hour from mid-September to mid-October. Why not? It's clearly an important and widely-covered movement. Twitter had to be censoring its trending list, right?

The answer, sadly (I think), is no. According to Twitter, the algorithm doesn't look for popular topics over time, but instead prefers what's popular now. So no matter how funny it is to jokingly say, "That's soooo five minutes ago," Twitter is making it true.

People have already argued since the beginning of mass media, from the radio to the television to the internet that it is killing the attention span of each new generation of technology natives. The length of a sound bite in news reports began falling as early as the 1970s, and media watchdogs have bemoaned the death of investigative journalism for decades now because it requires long-term attention from both journalists and audiences. And when you're finished reading this post, you can spend hours and hours reading jokes, playing games, and generally bouncing from site to site.

For a blog post about short attention span, I've sure jumped around a lot, so here's my point: Our culture is becoming more vapid, and it has nothing to do with "Jersey Shore." We are no longer expected to have the attention span to delve deep into why one political opinion is more truthful than another or why one computer brand is more suitable for some people than others. We rely on name-calling, catch phrases, and hashtags to tell us what to think. We need to slow down, explore positions, and plan for the future. When we think of Twitter trends, we ought to think of long-term effects of deep social issues, not something silly that we'll all forget about in three days.

Twitter is a helpful tool, and it's a lot of fun. But we have to expect more of ourselves if we want our future to be filled with novels, trips to the moon, and deep political discourse instead of hashtags about what we ate for lunch.

What you have laying around

My number two pet peeve with crafting is Mason jars. (My number one pet peeve is useless crafts, but that's a discussion for another time.) There are dozens of adorable and artsy craft ideas that involve mason jars and I would love to make them... but I neither have Mason jars, nor can I seem to find them in any store I've been to.

These craft ideas start out the same way. They describe how cutesy and classic Mason jars are, how they remind people of summer, and I'm totally sold. And then, they tell you, "Using Mason jars you have at home" — and it all falls apart. Another craft is relegated to my browser bookmarks instead of to my craft planning.

I suppose there's just a culture difference between my experience and the majority of craft bloggers' — even though I'm in an extremely rural part of California, my town's population is literally half college students, and in between protesting and getting pepper-sprayed, we just don't have the time nor the interest to get into jam making. Mason jars simply aren't a household good here. Going out and buying them in order to make crafts seems to be the antithesis of the whole idea of Mason jars crafting. I don't think it's a coincidence that Google searches for "Mason jar" has continued to climb ever since the phrase "upcycle" spiked out of nowhere in the middle of 2010.

Perhaps the entire Mason-jar-craft-movement is a clever marketing ploy by the Mason jar-industrial complex: People see clever Mason jar craft ideas, then have to go out and buy them to make their homes look homey. If this is the case, I'm totally falling victim. Maybe I'll just start saving the jars from my store-bought jams to keep in touch with the roots of the idea. (Also, Christmas has made me broke.)

In the meantime... where can I find Mason jars? Because I need some.

Good food begins with good ingredients

I read a lot of food blogs when I'm procrastinating, and between those, my mom's cookbook collection, and her mom's cookbooks, the number one tip I always hear for better food is to start with good ingredients.

This can be a tall order when you're on a student budget. I almost always buy off-brand products, and despite my mom's constant admonitions, I almost never buy organic (unless it's cheaper than normally farmed goods!). No matter how much I would love to support local businesses and family farmers, I can't always afford to do so. So I buy at Costco and Safeway and try and assuage my guilt by buying food at the student-run CoHo on campus — at least that's nonprofit!

Today reminded me of how important good ingredients can be. One of my housemates had a birthday yesterday, and a friend bought her some delicious strawberry white peach jam from the Davis Farmers' Market. She's a caring person, so she let me coerce her into using it to make cookies.

I used a basic sugar cookie recipe, rolled tablespoon-sized balls of dough, stuck my thumb in them, and dropped some of the jam in. When they were golden brown I pulled them out of the over and my roommates and I devoured them while watching "Dexter."

Dear sweet Lord these are delicious. Even Roomie, who doesn't, as a rule, like sweet sugary things (and is therefore immune to my baking powers), was nibbling on these beauties. And they are, in fact, beautiful — the jam is very juicy and just bursting with flavor. As usual, my cell phone camera doesn't do these any justice!

Our farmers' market is held twice a week, and I know I'll be taking advantage of that to go get more jam very soon. The Davis Farmers' Market has all sorts of goodies, since it's located smack dab in the middle of an agricultural heartland. It's 35 years old and has been voted best large farmers' market in the U.S.!

Maybe while I'm there I'll pick up some tasty vegetables and bread for finals-week chow. Some people eat when they're stressed; I bake when I'm stressed. As long as I keep making sweet, succulent little cookies like these babies, I'm sure no one can have a problem — at least, until we run out.