Comfort Food

There's something about a rainy weekend (It's actully flooding here right now!) that just begs you to make pot pies.

Sadly my usual pot pie recipe is boxed up in storage, but I found a decent substitute. As it goes with pot pies, you don't really follow a recipe anyways.

This time I had a lot vegetable broth and soymilk mixture left over from the filling, and not enough regular soymilk for the topping. I decided to just use up the veg/milk instead of popping out to the corner market.

I think it worked.

I still had veg/milk left over so I baked it into a loaf of herb bread yesterday. Not too bad.

Bread Abroad

Now that I'm finally settling in to my new apartment (and new life) here in Abu Dhabi, I thought I'd take advantage of my last few days off of work. What better way to spend the day at home than by baking bread?

I looked to my usual basic bread recipe because I knew I had all the ingredients on hand (subbing soymilk for dairy, olive oil for butter). Then I added 3 cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil and various shakes of thyme, oregano, and sage. As a fan of savory breads, I was pretty happy with what popped out of my oven. The flavor is mild but present and the texture is on the course side. A nice country styled loaf in this big new city of mine.

Practical Crafting

When packing up my crafting supplies, I tried to include crafts that would be useful to me over here in Abu Dhabi. I packed up two skeins of cotton yarn with the idea of making dishcloths in mind.

Finally during a quiet weekend in the desert, I quickly knit up this one. The pattern is Chinese Waves from Ravelry. I like it fine enough, but don't know that I'd knit it again.

Sorry for the hasty post and photos. I'm off on a plane this afternoon but didn't like the idea of a solitary post for November! I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Insh'Allah

Every Western expat's least favorite word. It means "God willing" and if you're living in the Middle East, you will hear it a lot.

It's definitely an adjustment to hear Insh'Allah in reference to anything future tense. It's like how we'd say "Hopefully" before something we want to happen, except Insh'Allah is all the time. It's especially annoying when you get the impression that it really means, "Yeah yeah, I'll get to it when I get to it." You can let it drive you crazy, or you can add it to your own vocabulary.

In an effort to fully embrace the Insh'Allah expat lifestyle, I embroidered a friend a little bit of Insh'Allah to keep nearby in her kitchen.

Hello, World.

My ClustrMap is resetting soon. It's fun to see where all the hits come from.


Thanks for stopping by, World.

Tokens

I needed some sanity time the other day so I finally started a craft project I meant to start on Day One in Abu Dhabi.

It's a little garland made of tokens... one for each day spent in this new life overseas. Considering that I'm slated for more than 700 days... it's probably going to be quite long. I'll have to figure something out.

The felt is a mix of wool felt and Eco felt I brought from the states. I wish I liked the Eco stuff a bit better... it's difficult to cut crisply without super sharp scissors.

The idea came from the lovely Anna Maria Horner.

New Bits

I'm still settling into life in Abu Dhabi. Not much time for crafting yet as I've been living in a hotel for the past month. I'm finding a few supplies around town, but mostly of the glitter and feathers variety. Soon I can dip into the supplies I brought from home. In the meantime, check out this lovely new masthead from Julia.