Get twisted

I made this today, for no reason other than everything was in reach of my bed, and I get lazy in necklace selection when I can't see them all:

Made with copper and galvanised wires, it's pretty obvious how to do it... just get twisting! 

I thought the hearts on the base were a cute touch, but not really my usual style.  I'm quite happy with the end result, but it did take ages!

Tuesday nights are for making

You know your life's going strange places when you go out all night on a Monday.  The joy that comes after that however, in the depths of a sleepless hangover after a day at work, is that you feel the need to do something productive. I did this:

It's really not difficult to do, I picked up a little box of watch parts off Ebay for a few quid, some tiny jewellery pliers, cutters and er... rollers? I don't know, the round ended pliers, off Amazon for very little money too.  I then cut up a couple of old bracelets and put it all back together again using the watch parts as chain links. It takes some serious fiddling and a LOT of patience, but luckily when your brain is mush you really don't want to be doing anything more stimulating!

Make sure you use a bracelet with nice big links, or invest in some copper wire and tighten it all up yourself. Just experiment, is all I can suggest, and you'll probably end up with something way more interesting than mine.

One thing to note is that you should make sure the links are very firmly closed when you're in the making stage, the watch parts are really slim and flimsy, and if it gets the lightest bit of tension and you've not closed the links up properly, it will fall apart. Which would be really upsetting, especially if you've spent many hours making.

There you go, enjoy making your own if you so choose, I'll probably keep adding little bits and pieces I make out of these watch parts for a while. I also have a set of old fashioned skeleton keys I don't really know what to do with... Well I do. But I need a drill. Which costs... Oh sod it. I'm getting a drill.

The next mission

A couple of weeks ago I saw this thing on the Anthropologie website:

I very much like this. I'd like to have it on my wall and hang all the nice delicate jewellery and scarves I don't have from it, and admire it. Twice. Daily.
But I do not like that it's about 80/90 quid, possibly more. So I've invested in some modelling clay and such items, as well as some lovely vintage type papers... so wish me luck, if it goes well I'll be taking you on an arts and crafts adventure-safari.

I hope I'm not approaching this completely wrong... I've never done actual sculpture before, but I am the queen of decoupage.
These are the items and papers I've gone for (I'm sticking with monochrome so that they go with everything but got excited by the nicer papers):

Guilt is everywhere.

It was quiet in the office today. So I procrastinated from staring at Buzzfeed, for a while, and did this. I'm bored of everything making me feel guilty. It's exhausting.

Shower. Drought. Pick up a free paper. You’re killing paid publishing. You’re killing trees. Seat on the tube. Is that woman old enough to justify the seat? Is first come first serve the basis for our evolution? Stand on the escalator. You should be more healthy. Skip breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. There are people starving in the world. Coffee. Is it fairtrade? Do you care? Power me through. Headphones on. Antisocial. Procrastinate. Spend five quid on a gluten free, lactose free, sugar free lunch. That used to be an hour’s wage. You’ve become everything you didn’t want to be. Headphones on. Procrastinate more. Laugh with colleagues. Stop being annoying. You’re not being paid to enjoy yourself. They might see. Headphones on. Stare at your screen. Afternoon coffee. It’s definitely not fairtrade. Shouldn’t you be boycotting Nestle? Mutter a sentence to someone. Should you have talked for longer? You should make more effort with people. Go home. Ignore a homeless man. Makes you feel too good about your own life. Feel sad about how much better he made you feel. Worry where he’ll sleep tonight. It’s not your problem, you donate to Shelter. Seat on tube. Same thought process. Leave your free paper on the seat. Worry that it might be littering. It definitely is.  Make yourself dinner. Make too much. Throw away a half portion. Worry about wasting food. People are starving. Wonder if you should recycle. Don’t. There’s not enough space in your little flat for more bins. Don’t empty the bin. Go to the loo. Empty the bin. Don’t take out the bag. Watch telly until you fall asleep. Wake up at 3am with all the lights, and your clothes on. Must stop burning so much energy. So much energy.

Meals for under 3 quid! (A 15 quid meal that lasted for six meals)

Recently I am struggling to find cheap meals that are easy to make for myself. This is the story of one particularly tasty pasta bake that was used, abused and transformed over a series of days to make an extensive amount of dishes.
There will be no photos of my own food, but I will but the occasional cat photo in to keep you entertained through my writing. I have found in life, that if food is good, you shouldn't take photos of it. You should eat it. Don't eat this though:

Recipe 1. (2 meals) Saturday night, I was entertaining a friend, and as my coeliac housemate wasn't home I decided to make a gluten packed, dairy filled extravaganza of a pasta bake.
This wasn't any old pasta bake though.  It contained the following:

Ingredients
(Change these for anything you have in your fridge. Really.)
1 courgette
1 pepper
1 carrot
3 onions
2 cloves garlic
150g chorizo
4 pork sausages (Chopped up and seasoned with cumin seeds)
1 butternut squash
200g penne pasta
1 pack mozzarella (Torn up)
100g cheddar (grated)
400g chopped tomatoes
Oil
Sage
Mixed herbs

As we all know pasta bakes are dead easy to make, but this one was quite long in the preparation, but totally worth it.

Method
1. Chop your butternut squash in half and rub in oil, sage, salt and pepper.  Whack it in the oven at 180 degrees C for 20 minutes.

2. Whilst your butternut squash is in the oven, chop up your other veg and the chorizo into roughly 2cm cubes, and when that first 20 minutes is up season them in the same way as the butternut squash, and put them in the oven all together for a further 20 minutes.  The butternut squash should stay in the oven for this time, just to clarify.

3. When there's 10 minutes left, you need to do two things, this is when you need to keep your eyes open 'cause there'll be loads on the go at once.  You need to put your pasta on, in boiling water (only cook it till it's half cooked), as well as heating a frying pan for the sausages and garlic.  Start cooking these whenever, you can probably get away with doing them one at a time, as it doesn't really matter if everything's hot at the same time in a pasta bake.

4. Once everything's ready, take it all off the heat, drain your pasta, and take your veg out of the oven.  You'll need to give the veg a couple of minutes to cool down, then skin and cube your butternut squash.  I did mine in quite nice big chunks as it's my favourite part!

5. Throw it all together in a nice big perspex dish.  Mix all the elements together thoroughly, then stir in the chopped tomatoes and the torn up chunks of mozzarella.  This gives nice stretchy nuggets of cheese throughout your bake, it's very exciting.

6. Put the grated cheddar on top and put it in the oven at 180 for half an hour. If you only half cooked the pasta then all the liquid should get soaked up nicely and it'll be great, unfortunately I overcooked mine a little and it came out slightly watery, but still tasted good.

Done! So that's 2 meals (me and a friend), but you still have 2/3 of the dish left... refrigerate!!

This is not what it looked like:

Day 2: 1 meal
Refry it.  It's that simple.  Make sure it goes into a hot pan, preferably with chilli oil for a little extra kick, and wait til it's crispy and hot all the way through.  Delicious.

Day 3: Meal 1: Unfortunately, just took it to work and microwaved it, but we all know food tastes better a day or two later...

Day 3: Meal 2: Spanish omelette time! Or frittata to those educated folks out there.  It went a little like this:

Ingredients
Leftover pasta bake
4 eggs
20g Parmesan
Dash of milk
Salt&pepper
Mixed herbs

Method
1. Mix together the eggs, herbs, salt and pepper, parmesan and milk in a bowl with a fork, whisk them up good and proper.  Have your grill ready on a medium heat too.

2. Fry up your leftover pasta bake on a medium heat, in a smallish frying pan, make sure it's not too hot or you'll burn your omelette, but not too cold that it won't cook through.

3. Throw your eggs in on top of the pasta, giving it a very quick stir. Let it all cook for a while (4-6 minutes) but keep an eye on it, it's so easy to burn (speaking from experience).  At this point it's quite nice to grate some cheddar on top... just a suggestion.

4. Once you can move the pan and there's limited movement in the egg that's on top of the pan, as in it's clearly solid under that top layer of egg, put it under the grill for 3/4 minutes - again, keep an eye, you might have a better grill than mine and it could be done a lot faster.

Easy!  Once that's done, loosen the edges and flip it out on to a plate. In this situation it can be easier to just put a plate over the top of the pan and turn it upside down, like you would a sandcastle.

Here's another picture of not my food:

This should be enough to make you a decent size frittata - as long as you have self control, you can have half for dinner tonight, and the other half for lunch tomorrow. Which brings me on to day 4...

Day 4: 6th meal - Have the  other half of your frittata for lunch! Easy.

So there we go. What originally started as a surprisingly expensive meal to entertain a friend has turned into days of dinners and lunches.  Although you might find it dull to repeat a meal, this one was actually really tasty and easily changeable, and I highly recommend giving it a bash.

What's the longest you've ever made a meal last for?  If you have one that's changeable enough I'd really like to hear about it.  Another of my favourite things to do is to turn a curry into a pasta sauce... but that's a story for another day.

Gluten free Reese's cup cookies (Recipe)

These were made in an attempt to please my newly-diagnosed-coeliac-housemate's sweet tooth.  And boy does she have a sweet tooth!  

I looked up a few gluten free biscuit recipes, and they all seemed to have the same mix up of wet/dry ingredients, so I made my own attempt at a mix of a few different recipes.  Also, with the fact that all recipes on Pinterest contain about a million wheat replacement ingredients, and  that these only have about four, very easily available ingredients in, is great.  Also it's not in cups.  You're welcome UK.

This recipe makes the amount on the plate above, give or take a few casualties from me being too eager to get them off the tray.

Ingredients (Easily changeable for just nutella or just peanut butter)

100g Nutella

100g Peanut butter (Crunchy is best! Good texture.)

200g Caster sugar

1 egg

Method

1.Preheat your oven to 180 degrees C. Shove the ingredients all together in a bowl and give it a strong mix.

2.Spoon it out onto a FLAT tray (I made the error of making half of mine in a dipped muffin tray, don't do that.) in reallllly little spoonfuls,  I'm talking like 3cm in diameter. Small.  Give them some space though, they spread out.

3. Fork them flat, it'll make them spread better.

4. Oven, 10 minutes is a good amount of time, but keep an eye.  If they rise a little, it's a good thing, and also really impressive from a flourless recipe. Recipe continues after this little in-oven shot.

5. Take them out after 10 minutes, and LET THEM COOL ON THE TRAY.  I tried to take them off whilst they were still warm and they disintegrated. It was a mess. 

6. Enjoy!  Don't try eat them before they're cold, they're not that good warm. When they're cold though... delish.

They come out pretty flat, but also tasty, I'm thinking about putting nutella icing on them but I'm unsure if that's overkill.  You can definitely taste the peanut more than the nutella.  If anybody makes these and changes the recipe or improves it in any way, drop a comment below, I'm always looking to improve. 

Willpower - There's an app for that?

Every now and then I start to strongly believe that I could be an athlete if I wanted to be.
Unfortunately, I don't want to be, or at least not enough, so over the last couple of years I've dabbled in a few different apps to motivate me on my runs - which, I'm not going to lie, are hardly ever over five kilometres and commonly involve a lot of walking.


The first one I used was MapMyRun.

I won't give images for this, because it was the least effective one I've used yet.  It's all okay up until you realise that once you've switched from imperial to metric, instead of it telling you when you've gone one kilometre... it tells you you've gone 1.6 miles.  What?!
One thing I will give it is that it's dead simple to use. And it interacts with MyFitnessPal. Okay, so it's pretty good really once you get over it shouting at you in the wrong unit.  Didn't love it... but didn't particularly hate it.  And it's free.  2.5/5






The next one I used was RunKeeper, another free one, and this was my favourite

whilst I was training for the Inter-Advertising 5k earlier this year. We won't talk about that.  What we will talk about is the fact that this one shouts at you every kilometre, and tracks your runs with great accuracy.  This one also uploads all your runs to Google Drive for you, so you don't lose your record if you lose your phone, which is a disturbingly common occurrence for me.  It also has quite a nice feature in that, if you take a photo out on your run, it'll pin it to where you are on the map so you can find it again.  I think MapMyRun did this too though, so I can't exactly love it more based on that, but the interface was all round more interesting and felt more professional.  And didn't update me very 1.6 miles... Look.  Even the logo is musclier.  Again, it works with MyFitnessPal too, which is a massive bonus for me, so I'm going to give this one a 4/5... It would've been a 5 if it weren't for the last two.


The one I've been using most recently and I think is the most

effective based on 'peer influence' (Or just friend pressure, fear of failure, whatever you want to call it) is Strava.  It's free, and tracks both cycling and running, on a really social, easy to track level.  It's beautifully designed and lays out everything you want to know about your run.  On one screen it shows you where you went, how long you took, your average pace, there's another screen that shows you the speed of each of your split kilometres or miles.  It's super detailed, whilst remaining incredibly simple to use.  It gives you rewards against your personal best as well as friends (as you can see I have only done one run on this and am yet to score any rewards.  Don't judge) which is great to set yourself a challenge with.  I also really like the fact that it weighed up your entire week, so if you have a bad run it doesn't feel so bad, as long as you can balance it out with a good run later in the week.  As you can see, really simple interface, and it's super-easy to find friends as you just use Facebook to sign up to it, I've only started using it this morning and found two friends using it already.  It is really annoying in other apps to have to go in and find your username and accept a link... with this, as you're already Facebook friends, I think it just assumes it's totally okay to share your running route with people... Okay.  So it's a bit creepy.  It also taunts you with all the cool features you could get if you paid £4 a month for it.  No thanks... (But progress goals would probably totally help...) 4.5/5

The next one, is my favourite running app of all time, because I

love zombies.  What does that have to do with anything?  It's Zombies Run 3, the immersive run tracking app that interacts with your music and lets you run through a different 25 minute story every time you run, along the way you collect resources to build up your base in the built in mini-game.  It is actually that brilliant.  Before each run you download a podcast, obviously you have to have your headphones for this one, and each podcast puts you in a different situation as 'runner 5'.  Throughout your journey you're told that you're being chased by zombies, to try new routes, to run faster, slow down, take a detour... you can get as involved in it as you like, and the app even pauses your music whilst it talks so you don't mis a moment of your most motivational running tracks.  I really loved this, as somebody that finds a standard run pretty boring, this app made it infinitely more exciting.  Oh yeah - it tracks your runs and tells you the speed of your latest kilometre every time it tells you your distance too, so you can tell if you're slowing down.  This is the only app I've used that tells me that, so that's a feature I massively like.  If this app had the same slick design and peer review and tracking system as Strava, this would be my perfect running app, and at just under £2.50, it's a valuable investment.  Massively recommend this one for the fun. 4.5/5

In conclusion:
For serious runners, the slick design and easy tracking of Strava is ideal, it's easy to use and every part of it is customisable to your preferences, whether you want metric or imperial, do you want it to shout progress at you or not... it's brilliant.
For those less in need of motivation, and just trying to get themselves into running, the zombie apps have great training apps as well as their running apps, and getting that damned base built in the side game is a good amount of motivation for anyone to get running.  I had lots of fun with this one.
And, for running music, I highly recommend Spotify's Air Punch playlist.  Running to 'Pour some sugar on me' is actually the best feeling in the world.