10 radish recipes I want to try

Radishes are really wonderful. They grow easily and quickly which make them a great starter vegetable for kids to grow. Since a lot of types are ready in 3 weeks planting every 2 weeks ensures a regular supply over the summer. The whole plant is edible. Radish greens can be cooked like most greens or put into salads or pickled. I'm planting organic cherry belle radishes, while they do well in poor soil, I also worked organic plant food into the soil before planting.
My daughter loves that they are coming up so quickly compared to carrots. I'm collecting radish recipes for the bounty that's growing now.

So here's my list of 10 radish recipes I'm really looking forward to trying:
The Root:

Out to Lunch with @MadameHuang has Sichuan's gorgeous radish pickles, the recipe is written for icicle radishes but will work with Western radishes as well. Spicy-sweet, these would be wonderful with summer salads.

Just Bento has Sweet/sour/salty "instant" pickles flavored with ume vinegar and strawberries. My daughter loves sour flavors, and this will probably be her favorite recipe. There are also furikake recipes available on this site.

Gourmet.com's Quick Radish Pickles are super simple with a ginger sweet flavor that's perfect for summer. It's also a very small recipe, using only 7 radishes.

Bon Appetit has Shaved-Radish Sandwiches which pair thin slices of radish with an herbed butter for a crunchy  sandwich perfect for tea.

Sarah's Cucina Bella has a Grilled Radish Packet recipe which promise to tame the peppery flavor. She's a recovering radish hater, so this may be the recipe to convert people who don't know how wonderful radishes are.

PopArtichoke's Ravishing Radishes Part 1 is a recipe for Sautéed Radishes with Thyme-Garlic Bread

Rak's Kitchen offers this Mooli Paratha recipe for an Indian flatbread cooked with radishes. This is a bit more work than the above recipes, but it's the one I'm most looking forward to making.

Greens:
Radish greens are a natural for furikake, my recipe is in the organic plant food link above. I'd also like to try

PopArtichoke's Ravishing Radishes Part 2: Radish Leaf Furikake, very spicy and simple to make. I think my son will love this.

Kalyn's Kitchen's Spicy Stir-fry Radish Greens look like a great quick, vegan lunch option.

Vegan Visitor has a Radish greens soup perfect for rainy summer days.

I'll be making printable radish recipe cards using the art above soon. The link for the seeds is an Amazon. affiliate link. I *always* recommend natural fertilizers and organic seeds. Organic fertilizers jump starts your seeds, then compost for feeding the rest of the growing season.

Today it's finally raining, so we don't have to water our plants.

Flowered headband link love

A lot of my crafting is binge crafting, I'll see an inspiring project and think of variations that would fit my personality or that of my daughter.

Headbands and hair clips are a regular favorite for near instant gratification. For headbands, rather than plastic ones that get uncomfortable after a while, I prefer elastic. The satiny kind that is used in a lot of baby headbands but in more adult colors. It's nice, smooth and doesn't damage my hair or give me headaches like plastic or metal bands can.

So checking out The Ribbon Retreat's blog, I saw this project for how to make a flower headband, as shown, it's meant for a little girl. But they have lots of colors available for the flowers, ribbon and elastic. All the supplies are inexpensive enough that they make a nice quick gift. They have enough colors you could do them for some sports teams. If you like the idea but not the flowers used, check out some of the other tutorials. There are instructions for other types of flowers made from ribbons.

I've been sort of obsessed with birdcage veils and putting it on an elastic headband seems a good option for bridal showers. Since they have the favorite colors of a friend of mine who is getting married soon, I think a mini-veil would a nice gift. Especially if I use the little rhinestone crown on it. 

They have lots of other tutorials for bows, sewing projects for babies, and other great gift ideas and they carry all the supplies so you don't have to search for the exact right thing to finish the project. Really cute projects that will work for teens and adults as well as babies. 

Take a look around, as well as learning how to make flower headbands, there are also great projects like this burned petal flower clip.

Really cute stuff that's easy to make more elegant.


Corrected link- How to make a flower headband

Things I'm Loving Right Now

The Illustrated Hassle-Free Make Your Own Clothes Book  -I love this book, and it's currently 1.99 in Kindle format. Don't be fooled by the cover, with it's clean cut young lady from the late 60s- early 70s sewing. This is a non-fussy, completely groovy, peace, love, happiness and a pair of scissors hippie sewing book. It's instructions on how to make caftan patterns and tells you that you can sew yourself outfits completely by hand. The text reminds me a lot of my mother and her friends sitting on big floor pillows, with incense burning and a mix of fondue pots. My daughter loves this book as well. For 1.99, it's worth the risk to see if you'd like a physical copy.

Marian Call's Something Fierce- I woke up this morning with one of the songs from this album stuck in my head. The name of the song is Dear Mr. Darcy, over 1000 words long, it's the song which inspired the title of the album. "If you peel back the polite, there might be something fierce inside." - Marian's music has cross-generational appeal, it's a bit of coffee house, a bit of jazz, a bit of folk, and always intelligent. At times it's laugh out loud funny. She's a favorite singer of my family, and we go to as many all ages shows as we can. Check her website to see if she'll be in your area, she tours extensively.

Jerry Lawson and the Talk of the Town- The Persuasions were part of the soundtrack of my youth, but to be completely honest, I think I like the Talk of the Town better. This is another one of those groups that my whole family likes, a Capella with a  strong gospel influence.
(all of the above are Amazon.com affiliate links)


Garden planning! We are .5 inch away from the snowiest winter on record since Alaska became a state. But it's starting to thaw, and things are showing back up in my yard which gives me hope. I'm planning to put in more perennial herbs that are zone 3 hardy this year. Any suggestions?

Mod Podge!

Apple green with the shade of pink I use for so much of this site. I'm currently making a friendship bracelet using those colors.

Hair toys! The peacock feathers were a gift from a friend. She's considering making more for sale, and I'll let you know if she does. The colored shells on hemp I made, and they click and clack against each other.

AND.. last but not least-
Monday Peeps will be on sale for roasting to make Peep S'mores, and so will Easter egg dye for coloring your natural fibers and feathers.

Some nifty links I'm loving right now

Festisite has this nifty tool to place text on a path as a spiral and creates a PDF from it. If you want it as a graphic as above, just hit the print screen button on your keyboard, then paste it in a graphics application. It will also put the text in waves or around a heart. 

BentoTV is an old favorite site that I thought of again this morning. Fantastic ideas for very cute lunches that are quick and easy to do. 

Slotted Building Discs which are also in Joel's new book which comes out tomorrow! 

Jehanna's Birthday Knot

Today is my friend Jehanna's birthday. Since I know she likes knots for embroidery, I thought that I would try drawing her one. Click on the images for larger versions to be used for coloring, embroidery, and hopefully making my friend smile on her birthday. One with a border, one without.

Jehanna has an Etsy shop, specializing in jewelry. It's called Avalon Dreaming.

Some links to a couple online graphics applications

Online browser based apps are becoming the future, and some of them are really great and completely free.
Here are some favorite online browser based graphics applications. All of these work in Chrome.
This is the photo I used to show some of the filters.

Pixlr - flash based, nice set of tools and fairly intuitive. You can save in PNG, JPG, GIF and TIFF as well as the native format which allows you to save in layers if you're working on something that way. It has undo, redo, and lots of filters to modify photos with. Allows saving to your own computer without being logged in. Draw original art or modify photos. In order, the filters applied are Art Poster, Heat Map, Hope and Kaleidescope.

SumoPaint - also flash based, takes a few minutes to load, but when it's loaded there are a lot of great tools in this one.  Also allows easy saving on your own computer in JPG, PNG and Sumo format. It's got a lot of filters and brush options. It's a pretty impressive online graphics application.The filters used here are Crystallize, Dithered Poster (which does allow color setting, I just used the colors that are the default) and Detect Edges- grey scaled which I can see being very handy to make embroidery patterns or coloring pages from photographs. Click open Sumo Paint and it opens in a new window.

My daughter's favorite online application is Aviary . Aviary offers a complete suite of graphic applications. Occasionally it does go offline, but usually comes back fairly soon. Free and saves and several formats. Vectors and painting both. 

For pure drawing fun, Harmony by Mr. Doob has some very fun brushes to play with. You can save images in png format.

Speaking of the Turnip Girl, she is using a sewing machine now. She was nervous about them. Black Friday 2009 I bought a very simple zig zag and straight stitch machine. I got it because it's light weight enough for me to set up myself and I can use it on a tv tray so I can sit where ever is most comfortable and will do most basic sewing. Because it's not as powerful or as big and scary as my other machines, Turnip Girl is very comfortable using it. So I asked her if she would be willing to write tutorials for some of her sewing projects. She agreed, so hopefully soon I'll be able to start posting those! 

Links I'm loving right now

Some recent things I'm loving!
Amy Echo clothing- specializing in larger sizes with a great goth influence, she will custom size to fit. I really seriously want the pixie hankie skirt. She also has an Etsy store.

Thistlewood Manor- I have a thing about soap, especially about good handmade soap. Deb makes wonderful hot processed soaps, and she sent me some samples and a shampoo bar to try out. The pumpkin lager soap smells like pumpkin butter while it's cooking and my son loves that scent. My daughter was wild for the raspberry. The shampoo bar! On my hip length very straight hair, it got it so clean and shiny my husband thought it looked like a lighter color because the silver in my hair was shining so. On my son's curls, well, they were manageable. This is a big thing. Usually his hair attempts to eat any combs or brushes that come near it.  She also has an Etsy shop, and sews as well.

Trash My Stash posted a list of  5 Resolutions You Can Make, including my make-up pads!

Creative Warcraft posted this traveling game project that reminded me of something similar that my mom used to make. She would get beat up cookie sheets from thrift stores and cover them with contact paper to make traveling checkerboards that could also be used as lapdesks by my brother and I.

Tessellations and Butterflies

I posted a tutorial for designing tessellating bead patterns on Beadwork at BellaOnline today.

Lady Helen posted a picture of how she decorated her bathroom using my butterfly outlines in black Contact paper. I love how striking it looks.

New computer- getting caught up

Sorry I haven't answered comments over the last week. My computer decided suddenly it didn't much like having USB ports and started spitting out anything I put in them. After hours and hours of working on the problem, I finally decided it wasn't worth the time and frustration for a computer I was planning to replace anyway. So Mike and I discussed the budget, figured out what we could spend and got me a shiny new Windows 7 computer.
I should be back to my regular posting schedule starting tomorrow.
I did post a pattern for a cute ring yesterday on Beadwork at BellaOnline-

One of my daughter's favorite musicians is a lady who does a lot of video game covers and writes songs for snails. She plays several instruments and mixes her music herself. She also has a whole bunch of completely free songs available. Auriplane's Music

Affiliates and links

I decided to switch out the ads I had in my sidebar for affiliate links. The ones I chose were based on how much I liked the companies and products offered and how well I think they fit the content of my blog instead of what I was using for advertising on here.

The Container Store, as crafters we all know the importance of containers, boxes, bottles, etc. I like the Container Store quite a bit for the wide range of containers they have and the fact you can narrow down your choices to just made in the USA containers. This is important to me because if it's made in the US I can be pretty sure that the people who made them were paid a fair wage for their work.

Sizzix die cutters are a great and reasonably inexpensive system for die cutting shapes out of card stock and decorative paper. Very handy for scrapbookers and other paper artists.

Okay.. I haven't tried any of their sprouting systems YET. I will absolutely. I love fresh sprouts with my family and recommend sprouting to friends with small children who don't like to eat vegetables because sometimes you can get children to eat veggies if they grow half their salad in a sprouting jar or similar sprouting system. Sprouting is very easy, and we use sprouts in place of lettuce on tacos and sandwiches. I plan to buy the 3 tray sprouter and see what I think of it. They have inexpensive sprouting jars and seed for beginner sprouting.
If you go down a bit further on the sidebar, I put in a favorites Amazon list. It only has a few things on it, one of my favorite singers, my favorite origami book, my favorite beading book. That sort of thing. Everything on it is something I own, use and recommend.

Links- I only have a few links up on my sidebar and all of them are my favorites, most of them you probably already know because they referred you here or because I've referenced them in a past post. One of the ones I don't think I've really mentioned is Amy's Rag Bag. The lady who runs this single person owner/operator business makes re-usable menstrual pads out of recycled materials. When my daughter made the switch to cloth we probably tried a half dozen different styles. This is hands down her favorite system. I wrote a tutorial on her system you can find here.
The coffee and soap I linked to in my side bar are both local Alaskan owned small businesses. Gladheart Acres makes the soap my family uses for every day stuff like hand washing and makes the only shampoo bars I really love. Blue Bonsai coffee makes my absolute favorite dark roasted coffees. I really recommend the Empress Blend and the Copper Tiger if you like dark roasted coffee.
I do have a links page that's linked from my main website, and I'm always willing to look at links and do reciprocal links from there.

Links I love

Abigail just recently started a craft blog, and it's a really great one. She has instructions for making a periodic table table out of card board, various knit projects, various beading projects and she's planning some origami and other projects in the near future. Very worth checking out.
Abigail's Craft How To

American Science and Surplus! I just received my most recent order from them. The catalog full of things you never knew you needed until you found out it existed. I ordered the push drill from them, as well as some googly safety eyes, buttons, bottles and other neat crafting things.
American Science and Surplus

Cold Porcelain is a lot of fun. My daughter and I recently made some Tardis pendants in a Tardis ice tray using cp. Great instructions here.

Between the Folds DVD, a mathy look at origami. We watched the show on PBS and if it comes up on your local listings, it's well worth watching for people into origami or math. Or you can buy the DVD here.

Given Moments Bonnet Tutorial
Because everyone needs bonnets

Links and stuff

Rachel at One Pretty Thing keeps finding the best of the best links. Really truly. Like miniature caramel and chocolate apples. We got apples and caramels and we are using cut down skewers  instead of lollipop sticks. (My Homespun Threads- includes a printable bag topper)
Or Edible eyeball eggs which just thrill me on so many levels. (A Bit of This and A Bit of That blog)
And this free pattern for a bat is so cute it's just irresistible. (Whosies)

Speaking of bat patterns, I have one here for this crocheted bat. Works up super fast and also works well in thread. My son has a tiny thread bat on his keyring.

We are planning to make dry ice ice cream this weekend, and possibly frozen hot cocoa using the same method.

Still working on a collection of shortbread recipes that will be available as an e-book in the next couple of weeks. My family is starting to get sick of shortbread I think.

Ideas, links and thoughts

I finally made up an Amazon.com Listmania list of some of my favorite cooking and craft related free books for the Kindle, they are all in public domain and all available on Project Gutenbergas well. Here's my list.

I was reading KissThisGuy.com this weekend, actually I was singing it to my family, looking up favorite songs. I realized, that would make the BEST party game. Go there, find songs, and make little slips of paper with the misheard lyric, the actual lyric, song and artist. Fold slips in half and put them into a bowl and let your guests take turns taking out slips and singing the misheard lyric. Prizes for the people who guess the most right songs and artists, and for the people who perform the best so the songs are recognized.
*singing to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody* Scare a Moose, Scare a Moose, Will you do the fan tango?
Dr. Kiki used to do a podcast called Food Science that was one of our favorites. We would hook up the iPod to the tv and watch it together. The episode with nitrogen frozen ice cream was one of E's favorites. We've made ice cream using the two canister method before, and I actually do have an ice cream maker. But I think next time we are going to try this dry ice method. It looks like a lot of fun. Dry ice can also be used to carbonate soft drinks using this method. We usually use yeast. It does create a slight alcohol  content in the beverage, but not enough to worry about.

Also Spoonflower is selling people's designs if they wish now, which means I can make some of my patterns there available for sale if there is any interest. You can see the designs here. I have them in vector format so I can resize and recolor fairly easily. What do you think?

Links

First, if you haven't already heard of it elsewhere, Yasmine Surovec from the brilliant A Print a Day blog has a new magazine especially for crafters called Parasol Craft. It's only 2.50 USD, and full of gorgeous things, interviews with artists and pictures of the beautiful things they create, it also comes with some things for scrapbooking, a darling doll project, instructions for creating and using Illustrator brushes with vector files to practice with, and some really lovely embroidery designs. 111 pages of goodness.

Rachel at Instructables has great step by step instructions for making your own panties and bra. Since you make the pattern by using one you have that you kind of like the fit of, you can adjust the fit to be perfect, and unlike some bra projects I've seen on the net, it WILL work for something more than a B cup. Oh how we envy you ladies with the high and perkys! (perkies?)(Umm.. *blushes and waves to the guy in Canada and the guy in Japan* you can ignore that whole last paragraph!)
If you can draft patterns, The Canton of Gleann nam Feòrag Dhuibhe has instructions for making all sorts of garb.
I reposted my pirate eye patch pattern here

This bat mask is a costume all in itself with a gorgeous little black dress. For this? I'd start wearing contact lenses again.
If you are more the Winter Queen type, check out this necklace.

Maple sugar and stocking stuffers

I don't have brown sugar because I buy it as needed. So yesterday when I spur of the moment decided William and I would have butternut squash and apples for lunch, I couldn't find any brown sugar. So I baked it with maple sugar, butter, cinnamon and just a bit of white sugar to stretch out the maple sugar since it's so expensive.

Yum yum!!! Even E ate a couple chunks and said "I don't think I like the squash, but the stuff on it is so good!" so I asked "Do you want to do apples in phyllo that way?" "Oh yes!"

I keep maple sugar on hand for bread baking because even as expensive as it is, I only need to add a bit for a great flavor using whole wheat or spelt flours.

Check out Amy's Stocking Stuffers. Aside from a really nice write up about me, she's got a ton of great ideas for stocking stuffers that would also work well as lunch box treats on special days. Lots of little gift ideas with links, size, and price. She writes them nicely with a fair amount of detail. I added it to my feed list. With my teens I'm always looking for inexpensive stocking stuffer and non-food treat ideas for them.

One Pretty Thing

Check out One Pretty Thing for some great craft round ups. I'm going to spend a couple hours checking all the pretties out!

Food Links

A few from Not Martha.
Homemade Maraschino Cherries, I must do this soon. Really soon. Yum yum!
3D Sheep Crackers at Design*Sponge
A No-Knead Bread Recipe at Kiss My Spatula that looks fantastic

A current favorite of mine:
Food for the Boiler: A Steampunk Cookbook

A couple mochi recipes
Welsh Cakes, perfect for the guy in your life who's decided he's Welsh and wants to replace your shed with a police call box. Unless of course that only happens to me.
You can also download a pdf scanned version of Brown Bag's new idea book with lots of recipes here, you'll want to go to view-rotate clockwise to read it.
On that note.. I really really want the British Isles shortbread pan