Taking The Long Way Home

Most of the time, my dreams are just mental chatter, with no usable content worth remembering, and certainly nothing prophetic. Sometimes I'll wake up humming a song I've never heard before, but I'm not a musician, so I don't try to hold onto those. Sometimes I'll wake up with a phrase or sentence that seems ever-so-sage in the moment, but when I write it down and look at it an hour later, it's just plain silly. So when I dreamed a few nights ago that my friend Paul had cooked a beautiful meal, and placed it before a group of old friends, with the mental recipe attached, I woke up thinking, Yum! I have to cook this! Then I wrote it all down... and waited. For a couple of days I kept going back to it, half expecting it to become a silly mess that would never hold up in a real kitchen. But amazingly, after two days, it still looked like a good idea, so last night I got to work and tried it out. Work is the wrong word. It was more like play. It was fun. It was e...

When I don't know what to do, I usually figure it's best to do nothing. I've been in that stuck spot for a few weeks now, just sort of standing around, scratching my head, and going, What??? Tell me what to do already! I've made a little jewelry, and sold a few pieces. I'm focusing that part of my time on the show I'll do in November. I've had a bunch of email recently, from nice people telling me they miss my beads, and wish I'd go back to making them. Well... that's probably not going to happen. I've been fooled by this ploy before. Oh Kim, oh Kim, we love those beads. We need them. We want them. We will buy them...  HA, says me. I've spent the last 3 years doing what those well meaning folks have asked, only to find that they disappear when it comes time to pull out their wallets. Let me put it this way, how long would you go to work if you didn't get paid? Hmmm? Thanks to "the economy", or global warming, or Mercury in re...

I've been cooking a lot lately, and making a little bit of jewelry. The Bead Muse seems to have left me, and I don't think she'll be back any time soon, if ever. C'est la vie . I really don't mind. Maybe it's just Spring Fever, but I feel like I'm in one of those limbo-places again, where nothing's really wrong, but I know something is trying to shift. As always, I wait for Further Instructions, and wonder what I'm supposed to "be" when I grow up. Can't just Be. That doesn't pay the bills. And besides, it would drive me crazy. So I wait, and I cook, and I ponder the idea of writing some sort of cooking book. I'm getting encouragement, and that helps. I'm making notes and tentatively listing possible chapters. And cooking. Did I mention cooking? My Mom was a great cook, in a meat-n-potatoes sort of way. I learned a lot from her, and then wandered off to try some tricks of my own. I think I do pretty well, and I know that wh...

I'm back from a great little trip to Las Vegas. Family, friends, sun, and fun. A few tasty beverages, a little shopping, a lot of fountain watching, and no gambling. I'm too smart for that silliness. I choose my silliness elsewhere, thanks. My youngest sister, Jill, rounded us all up to celebrate her 50th birthday, and we did a great job. It was also the first time our Dad had been to Vegas since 1939. Things had changed a bit, and it was fun to watch him take it all in. As Official Photographer for this trip, I took way too many pictures to post them all here, so if you want to see them, follow this link to Facebook , where you should be able to see the whole album. My biggest "fear" about going to Vegas was the food. I knew I was traveling with total meat-and-white-food eaters, and thought I'd be stuck with bowls of lettuce the whole time. I brought along some staples of my own to make in our hotel kitchen, and that was a good idea. But one great surprise w...

I've been busy, busy, busy, cooking up a storm, flirting with the idea of writing a book, and prepping to go to Las Vegas this week for my baby sister's Big 5-Oh! I'm sort of a Nevada Girl at heart, having spent 13 or so years there in the Reno/Tahoe area. I worked at Harrah's Tahoe for most of that time... as a cocktail waitress... had two babies in Carson City, and eventually met Rick in Minden. Nevada was good to me. It's always fun to go back to that oddly electrified state, even though I'm a little intimidated by Vegas. At least I won't have to drive in that crazy place! I think I'll leave my computer at home, and just enjoy the freedom of traveling light, and being out of touch for a few days. I'm taking everything from the Alchemy Shop with me, in case anyone is short of proper Vegas Bling, but there's still my Etsy Shop for your retail therapy pleasure. See you next week, with a full report on my Vegan Adventures in Las Vegas!

Here's one for the "meat heads" among us. As a girl who was raised by a hunter dad, and a mom who loved to cook, I totally understand the yearning for a good old fashioned meat-n-potatoes meal now and then. I began to see the subtle wish for this in Rick the other night, when I made Bean-Wah Burgers, and mused out loud about how I though the burger-stuff would also make a good meat loaf. His little eyes lit up, and I heard him mumble, through a mouth full of bean-burger, something that sounded like... graaaaavy... mashed potaaaaaaay-tos... mmmmm... I got the hint, and the very next night set out to make a big ol' plate of comfort food for my man. The Bean-Wah mix this time was a little different from the one I shared here back on February 22nd. This time I used pinto beans instead of black beans, mixed quinoa and rice, and added grated carrot and chopped walnuts. Here's the whole list of ingredients: 1 can pinto beans -- mashed 1 "blop" refried b...

This week I'm holding a Spring Cleaning Sale in my Etsy Shop ! Use the Coupon Code "SPRING" to get 25% off everything in the shop! Here are a few samples...