Monday, February 28, 2011

Daily Dose of My Art

 Close ups of various abstract flowers I've created.



When deadlines and project due dates coincide...

Tonight and tomorrow are going to be....fun....I have to complete a final project for my Building Sustainably Built Environments class for tomorrow, and the building that I originally was doing the project on, is woefully lacking in available diagrams that illustrate a sustainable building strategy that was used in the building. So I am most likely going to have to choose a different building, and throw out all the research I already did. Not a happy camper right now. Oh and the earlier transfer application deadline to UMD is tomorrow as well. Long night ahead of me....

Edit: I just remembered, the last day to submit a graduation application for this semester is tomorrow as well. At least that only takes a couple of minutes though.

Sunday, February 27, 2011

A Little Daily Dose of My Art

 I have most of my artwork uploaded here on my DeviantArt account, but I will be sharing some of my favorites in this blog as well. This drawing is titled Under The Sea
I worked on this for most of the month of august (2010) with the mindset of trying to use organic shapes reminiscent of what you could find in the ocean, while still remaining abstract in my drawings. I love how it turned out. if i ever realllly learn how to paint, i would love to do this large scale.

Twisted Vine Designs Jewlery!

Here are some examples of the jewelry I make:
To see the full photo album of my jewelry, check out the Facebook fan page for The Twisted Vine Designs or if you are interested in purchasing some jewelry, I have some of it listed for sale on my Etsy Page.





 



Saturday, February 26, 2011

Gluten Free Spicy Peanut Satay Sauce

Here is the recipie for a gluten free Spicy Satay Peanut Sauce that my mom and I came up with after being unable to find a pre-made sauce that was gluten free.

Here is the Gluten Free Spicy Peanut Satay Sauce all mixed in with the pieces of chicken. normally the sauce is a bit darker but I used a little bit too much peanut butter in the batch pictured :)


Gluten Free (GF) Spicy Satay Peanut Sauce

Ingredients:
Extra light olive oil with a dash of sesame oil OR peanut oil (to coat the pan)
1 Medium onion chopped fine-ish
1-2 cloves garlic minced
10.5 oz (~1-1/3 cup) GF chicken broth (low sodium) or Vegetable broth for the vegetarians
½ TSP ground ginger
1 TBSP white wine vinegar
2-3 TBSP (to taste) GF Tamari (or soy sauce for those that are not gluten free)
    (I tend to use 2 TBSP’s regular GF tamari and 1 TBSP low sodium GF tamari)
2 TSP Brown sugar
½ TBSP Lemon Juice
¼ - 1/3 cup Chunky (or smooth) Peanut butter
Red pepper flakes (to taste)
*1 TBSP Cornstarch (mix with water) (to thicken sauce if needed)

Directions:
1.      Coat pan with oil, on MED/HIGH heat
2.      Saute onion and garlic until they cook down
3.      Add chicken broth, stir occasionally and let it simmer for a couple minutes, (don’t let the broth cook down too much though or else you will have to add more broth later because the sauce will be too thick)
4.      Add ginger, white wine vinegar, tamari, brown sugar, and lemon juice. Stir.
5.      Add peanut butter. Stir until it melts in.
6.      *If the sauce is not quite thick enough at this point (you don’t want it runny), mix cornstarch with water and add as needed to thicken the sauce. The peanut butter does a pretty good job of thickening the sauce up so you probably will be able to skip this step.
7.      Taste, add red pepper flakes (to taste) to spice it up
8.      Keep sauce on low heat until you add the chicken

Mix Sauce with chicken (makes enough sauce for 3 chicken breast cut in bite size pieces, chicken prep directions below) and serve over pasta. While I havn’t made a vegetarian version of this, I think that the sauce would be a good compliment to some stir fried sugar snap peas and water chestnuts.

Chicken Prep:
1.      Cut 3 chicken breasts into bite size pieces, marinate for at least 8-12 hours in marinade of your choice, I used Goya Mojo Criollo Marinade for chicken.
2.      Coat pan with extra light olive oil and some butter
3.      Cook chicken until it is pretty much done. Remove from pan.[EDIT: to clarify the chicken should be done cooking when you remove it from the pan, because when you add the chicken to the sauce pan there will be some heat coming from it and you don't want the chicken to over cook and become dry]
4.      Add Chicken to sauce (which is on low heat on the stove), mix
5.      Serve over pasta, ENJOY!