Sarah Whittle Arty Threads: Lumbutts and Mankinholes

Sarah Whittle Arty Threads: Lumbutts and Mankinholes.

I’m embarking on a new embroidery today another of my Victorian inspired tinted embroideries you can read all about it on my embroidery blog Arty Threads.

Melted cheese and milk with a slice of bread

Today, I dont know why but I thought I would try an old simple dinner I used to have as a kid, Sarah was skeptical about it but thought I would show her a dinner I vividly remember growing up, melted cheese in milk with a slice (or 3) of buttered bread. All you do is slice some cheese, place it on a plate and pour some milk over the top, place it under the grill and let if cook for a while until the cheese melts and starts to brown. Let it stand for a few minutes to cool as the plate gets really hot and the cheese thickens as it cools. Add a few slices of buttered bread and your done. Sorry, no picture with this one as it lasted all of about 5 mins and the cats were roaming ready to grab some!

Never buy frozen Chicken Kievs again!

Since Sarah and I started on our journey to live a healthier lifestyle since leaving Manchester and moving to Bacup, its been ages since we eat a frozen chicken kiev, anything that resembles a frozen meal in fact. They used to be consumed by us at least once a week, usually the ASDA or TESCO’s own brand and we use to love them, even as kids we used to get served kievs by our parents as they were so tasty.

The other day we were a little low on supplies and was a little late in the day to go shopping so we decided to make home made chicken kievs. We were amazed at how easy they were to make and just how great they tasted, served with some rice and peas, they went down a storm. Unlike mass made kiev’s which taste like cardboard, these were 100% chicken and the difference between home made and frozen kievs were miles apart, we would never eat a frozen kiev ever again. Here is a piccy of how they turned out.

Home made chicken kievs

OK so how do you make these little treasures.

What you will need:

• Chicken breasts
• 1 clove of garlic (or as many as you like depending on your preference to garlic)
• Butter
• Lemon juice
• Fresh chopped parsley
• Couple of eggs
• Plain flour
• Bread crumbs

Step 1)
Start by cutting a slit in your chicken breasts to form a pocket, be careful not to cut all the way through.

Step 2
In a mixing bowl, mix some butter with finely sliced garlic, parsley and fresh lemon juice. Mix just enough to fill your chicken breasts (if you make too much, dont worry, you could always spread some on some bread to make garlic bread). Pop the mixture into the fridge for a few minutes to chill, this makes it easier to fill the breasts.

Step 3
Prepare 3 bowls, one for your beaten eggs, one for your flour and one for your breadcrumbs. The amounts of these three ingredients will vary depending on how many chicken breasts you have to coat.

Step 4
Fill each of your chicken breasts with your mixture and then dip each one into the flour, then the egg, then the bread crumbs and place each one on a baking tray. Any leftover bread crumbs can be sprinkled over each of the chicken breasts in the tray, pop them in the oven on a medium heat and watch them beauties sizzle.

Ilustrated List: Vegetables for patio containers and raised beds

Just been checking out what vegetable varieties we can grow this year if we can not find a house with a big enough garden. Thompson & Morgan the seed company have a great selection here Ilustrated List: Vegetables for patio containers and raised beds.

Would  love to grow the dwarf runner bean and also the climbing courgette plant. I use a lot of courgettes in soups and casseroles as well as veggie risotto so would be cool to be able to grow our own this year. Also fancy a go at growing leeks too. We have quite a few raised planters and also large containers so we can always get things going in these to will find our dream house.

New Painting Website Launched

Andrew finished my new painting website yesterday and he has done a great job it looks wonderful! So big kisses for that babes.

The new website will be focusing purely on my paintings in oils, acrylics and watercolours and will also include an online shop using PayPal. The new site is easy for me to update myself as and when I have done a new painting which is great as my embroidery site is quite complicated to update.

I am finding it so much easier to paint these days as my hands and wrists, especially my right one which is the one I write, paint and sew with is extremely painful at the moment and bandaged up. I hope though that my painting skills will develop as I am finding more time now to focus on this area of my creative practice.

The new website can be found here, http://www.sarahwhittle.co.uk/paintings/ do drop by and have a look if you get the chance.

Yay, it’s raining!

Finally it’s raining and all the snow is washing away! The big melt is now on and the weather has said to expect flash floods. Luckily living on a steep hill everything should just wash on down the road! Everything is getting back to normal today thank goodness lots of new projects on the way. I have a painting I want to complete and a knitted jacket as well for Pippa which I am in the middle of and I’m also going to be starting another Victorian inspired embroidered postcard too so I will put photos up soon of that. Andrew is just completing my new painting website which will be on line soon as I want to keep embroidery and painting separate so that it doesn’t get too confusing on my website. Each website will also include a shop to purchase paintings or embroidery.

Andrew made some fantastic homemade chicken kievs the other night for him and Oscar and he is going to do a post on how easy it is to make your own version instead of buying frozen. We are also going to be sitting down this weekend and planning our veg growing for this year and hopefully get over to the garden centre to pick up some seeds.

Pippa’s Injections

Today we had to take Pippa for her MMR and Men C injections, its always a worry when you take babies for injections whether they will have a reaction or not. When we got to the doctors Pippa was enjoying trotting around the surgery as happy as larry until we had to take her in! Andrew was having the day off  today to take us, so he opted for holding her on his knee so I could be the good guy and comfort her. Everything was going well, two nurses did the two injections in either leg and Pippa kind of stopped, looked around and then let out a scream and then started sobbing but mum was there to give her a big cuddle and comfort her.

When we got back in the car Pippa went fast asleep so we decided to nip over to Todmorden to see my parents as we haven’t seen them for awhile with all the snow. It’s been really difficult to even get our car off the hill we live on lately, yesterday was ridiculous as the entire road was a skating rink and all the exit roots on the estate we live on were blocked with cars stuck trying to get off the hill. My mum and dads road was relatively clear as was the Bacup road so it was a nice trip over with everything covered in such a thick blanket of snow. Mum and dad have been really unwell with the flu lately so it was really good to see them and that they were looking and feeling a lot better. I do worry about them as they live on a really big hill in Tod and couldn’t even get out for shopping last week. I do hope this snow goes soon and everything is back to normal. I am really looking forward to Spring, it seems to have been a really hard winter so far.

New Paintings

I have been relaxing over the past day or so working on some new paintings and photographing some I did in 2009. The first painting is of Pendle Hill I did last year. Myself and Andrew love Pendle Hill and the history of the witches. There is a great website that tells you all about the witches http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/ the Pendle Hill heritage centre at Barrowford has some great walks or even a car tour of all the hot spots which is great for the kids. The second painting is of sunlit trees, I loved working on this painting because I remember the day that I did the sketch and reference photos for it. We were at a local nature reserve where we used to live in Salford and it is the only bit of green land in the midst of a concrete jungle, so it was just really nice to see the sunlight on the trees and the blue sky poking through. The third and final picture I did this year and is of Paris Mountain, in Wales the sketches and reference photos were taken on our camping trip last year and I have been wanting to do a painting of the copper mines for a while because the hills just sparkle and are different colours it is really beautiful.

Pendle Hill - Acrylics on canvas

Sunlight through the trees - Acrylics on canvas

Paris Mountain – Acrylics on canvas

Off to pastures new!

We are hoping in the next few months to be moving on to pastures new! Somewhere where we can still live the lifestyle that we have invested so much of our times and our efforts in over the last year. What we have realised is that what is important is our family unit and last year I suffered a health scare and then also found out I was suffering from psoriatic arthritis and fibromyalgia which made us realise that we had to start to change the way we lived and also what we ate. This year we made a New Year’s resolution that we would concentrate on getting healthy and find a balance between work and home. So with this in mind we have decided to move somewhere new and make a fresh start and leave behind egotistical power hungry nutters!

Right enough said on that rubbish! We will still be doing and blogging about the things we love doing from art and crafts to home beer brewing to home baking because that is who we are! So on that note I have been concentrating on painting as I am going to enter a few exhibitions / competitions this year and together myself and Andrew have been planning what we are going to grow this year. We are going to start off some seeds in windowsill propagators in the next week or so. Last year we were really successful in growing our own red onions and shallots so will do so again and the beetroot Andrew grew (something I don’t like) was brilliant and Andrew assures me the taste was so much better.

I found a couple of links on line that are great to get us growing a bigger variety of veg this year and living more self-sufficient and the house we are hoping to move to will have more room to do this.

http://www.gardenersworld.com/ – the BBC Garderners’ World website has a great section on what to be doing now in the garden.

http://www.vegetableexpert.co.uk/ – the Vegetable Expert is a great website for everything to do with vegetables and has a brilliant section on vegetables and health! This is definitely going on our link list.

http://www.self-sufficient.co.uk – a great website for finding out about how to be self-sufficient they also have a section on growing veg in containers if you have limited growing space.

Brisk Walk in Snowy Bacup

Had dinner and decided to go out with the children for a brisk walk near where we live. It was snowing all morning and the snow is quite thick. Just wondering if it will start again tonight, if it does we may not be able to get the car off the hill. Oscar made a rather natty snowman, a three ball one none the less and Pippa ended up with bright red cheeks. She thought it was really funny when daddy and Oscar were playing snowball fights. We came back in from our brief walk to make gingerbread men for after tea! Pippa has now started saying a few more words which is very funny as one of them is George and has definitely got to be George off Peppa Pig as we don’t know anyone else called George. She trots around the front room saying Geooorge over and over again lol

Andrew, Pippa and Oscar (hiding as usual)

Oscar's snowman