Hi there! Welcome to my blog where I'll be posting various things from and for Pinterest, projects and recipes I try and what I think, as well as give a home to my own flights of Pinteresting fancy. Many women in my family use Pinterest where we have a few shared boards that are added to on a daily basis. I figure that it would be easiest to share what I'm doing and what recipes I'm playing with through Pinterest, rather than having to give Mom the same recipes all over again after they have been misplaced.
This blog is part craft room, part kitchen laboratory, part photo bombing paradise for Dollfie Dream (1/3 and 1/4 scale vinyl dolls) and some American Girls that my husband and I collect. Most of the crafts I do are doll related, but I also have projects to work on around the house as a full-time Stay-At-Home Wife (we have 2 cats but no flesh kids.)
I hope my cooking experiments will be of value to someone other than me since my husband is diabetic, we are both vegetarian (although I lean more towards vegan recipes when I can to reduce dairy and eggs), and just recently my non-vegetarian Mom and one of my sisters decided to get serious about going gluten free. I've been a vegetarian for about a decade, something that might not have believed when I was born and mostly raised in a cattle ranching town. I was twelve the first time I voiced my opinion that I might not want to eat meat, and my family looked at me like I had lost my mind. I may not have been a vegetarian but I had the most fortunate luck that my mother-in-law happens to be one, giving me a first hand example. Many years later, after I quit eating meat, I began to realize that being a vegetarian was not a single label. I was surprised to discover that one of my MIL's reasons for being a vegetarian was because she didn't like the texture of meat. I had never heard that before. For me, I still love meat-like textures and flavors, but I just can't force myself to eat something that could have been my pet or has the capacity to express emotions. Even between my husband and I aren't the same kind of vegetarians because he LOVES cheese of any kind, but my body doesn't tolerate dairy very well so I spend a decent amount of time trying out vegan alternatives that I love just the same as regular dairy (often a lot more.)
You will never find recipes with pineapple or honey on my blog for the simple fact that I'm highly allergic to both. I drank some orange juice on my birthday one year that I didn't realize was processed on the same equipment as pineapple and had the worse case of hives ever. I was covered head to foot (except for below my knee on my left leg) and my hives literally had hives. The worst one was about three inches across, and that was the most miserable week I've ever spent.
So, with all of that down it isn't hard to see that cooking can be a challenge, but it also makes it a lot of fun! Living in a large city for more than half my life hasn't managed to kick the country girl out of my heart, and I delight so much in simple thing. Happiness is a pantry shelf filled with multi-colored canning jars. I'm the youngest of four, and the only one who cares about things having to do with 'country living'.
I also have a huge passion for Japan and everything Japanese. I make no claims about being a perfect vegetarian, because I'm not. I like to think of myself as a realistic vegetarian, otherwise my obsessive personality will freak out at the tiniest ingredient and make my life nothing but misery. Trust me, it happened before and it wasn't a pretty sight. I have been vegetarian for a long time, but even when I began I knew I'd only do it while I felt that it was beneficial to my current outlook. I am realistic in the fact that my husband and I dream of visiting and hopefully living in Japan someday. I don't want to be that foreigner who assumes that being in a foreign country means that they have to adapt to my way of eating. That is just stupid and highly uneducated. I want to go to a foreign country to learn about the culture and history on their terms. This makes me a bad vegetarian, I know. So be it. If I choose to become a pescatarian or no longer vegetarian at all once I'm in Japan, that is entirely up to me.
I spend a lot of my limited free time researching what 'secret' vegetarian food might be hiding in Japan. If nothing else I know I can easily survive on tofu, veggies, rice, azuki beans, and soy sauce! I also find a lot of meat recipes and think how I'd make them myself while replacing the meat ingredients with veg friendly ones. I am so entirely enchanted by the Land of the Rising Sun that I want to learn everything I can about it while I still have a breath to breathe. Creativity and knowledge is what fuels my heart and keeps it beating. As for my Japanese, it is a very slow work in progress, not made any easier by the fact that I'm dyslexic.
In the meantime, I can't wait to share recipes for low-sugar jam & jelly, vegan meatballs, pumpkin rolls, homemade baking mixes, "un-turkey" enchiladas, my grandmother's chiffon cake, Pinterest pins I love, pins that fail, new projects of my own that I think other pinners might enjoy or find useful, and so much more.
I hope you can find some entertainment in my creatively scatterbrained blog dedicated to Pinterest, a site I never imagined I'd be addicted to! (Frankly all the pictures is just heaven to visually adept dyslexics.)
