April 2010 – Page 4 – Craft With May

cherry peach crisp

We have crisp vs cobbler wars here in the Flaum house. I’m HARDCORE for crisps, which by my definition are fruit (baked) with some kind of crumbly topping. No “dough” or flour heavy junk. Brown sugar, butter, and oats are my staples! Jason, on the flip side, is hard core for cobblers which I almost never make because I don’t like most. More on that some other day. Today I’ve got a recipe!

In cleaning out my old computer I found these pictures and realized I’d not shared a truly DELICIOUS recipe. The photos? Taken on a dark stormy day just don’t do it justice. But trust me on this. So the back story: I was wanting some warm fruity dessert and all I had was a frozen bag ‘o peaches and one of black cherries. I decided to see what would happen if I made them into crisp!

3 tbsp butter + 3tbsp flour into pan until combined

Add some sugar (1/2cup?) and apple juice (1 1/2 cups-ish) until the goo is consistency of runny dough. Then dump the fruit in, stir, keep on medium heat, and wait.

I won’t lie. I darn near threw it out when I saw how GROSS it looked at first. But I kept stirring and eventually the water from the frozen fruit melted and became one with my roux (the flour/butter) and I got to a happy place of thick but ‘gravy ish’ consistency in the liquid. Then I poured into a pan.

Topping is 3 part oats, 1 part brown sugar, 1 part flour, and sprinkling of butter bits all over the top. Be generous! Oh, and since I was winter cupboard cleaning I added in a handful or two of sliced almonds. YUM!

edited to add: bake in oven at 375 until browned and bubbly. About 30min – not an exact science.

It’s AWESOME. Without the whipped cream (didn’t much care for that part – but again I was trying to clear out kitchen!) was best. Warm was heaven. Seriously SO easy to make cobblers and they are so good. You can sub out the flour if needed, and so many fruits work. The flour/butter (roux) that I started with is KEY to have a nice fruity gravy vs just watery stuff. The thing is – crisps

Ok, mouth officially watering now. I wish I had some!!

I feel itchy.

I got a new computer. Long story short – all the freezing up and maxed out hard drive and keyboard that didn’t work finally got to me. Thank goodness for tax refund checks coming in nick of time.

The good news? Well the old laptop hasn’t actually “died” so I am able to take my time sorting, saving, moving, and otherwise transferring my computer life to “La Tigra” (name of a Zoolander pose + name of this computer- I like to name my stuff)

The bad news? Guess who has to do all the tech stuff? This girl. I’m thankful for my awesome husband who did all the research and homework on figuring out what computer I should get, but now it’s on me.

Software. Files. External Harddrives. Storage. transferring Itunes.

Somebody pass some paint & stickers & fabric. All this technology is making my skin itchy. I appreciate and love all technology does for me, I just don’t like to have to deal with it on this level, to get to know the ins & outs of what I need to make it work like my old computer. The hours spent staring at this screen of files and data. *shudder*

Off to workout before I break out in hives.

Then more computer time that should result in much better blog post.

Happy Monday all.

my kind of taxes.

We got this from the accountant last month when they finished our taxes…

I ate it and rejoiced in the good milk chocolate + being done with taxes early.

Hybrid on a Friday

It’s been nearly a month since I saw (and downloaded) this free quickpage template made by Ali Edwards. (See it HERE) I paired it with three photos from a sick day on March 29th…

The great thing about page templates like this is that they’re .png files and so you can just insert your pics right in there (in Word or PSE!) no fuss, nice and quick. I used Word for this…

I inserted the template + my three photos (see above – just insert >picture >from file for each) and move the photos around until it fits just right. I loved how simple this template was and how much possibility for customization there is.

If you took my Hybrid class (that ended this week, how I’ll miss it!) then you know the key to working with stuff in Word is to change the orientation to “tight” so that you can move the images (ANY image that’s .jpg, .png, etc) as desired.

It only took me about 10 minutes to get this sized & printed. Gotta love cutting down on my computer time.

My trick for getting the photos sized & cropped and fitting behind the template is to actually keep the photos in FRONT of the template, and line them up (see above how I’ve got them lined up along the lines) and then go in and move the template to front (as shown above – this menu pulls up by right clicking on the template).

Then, of course I printed out (8×8) on photo paper and added my paper fun + journaling. I’m *CRAZY IN LOVE* with the Glitz stamps I used here. I’ll have to do a post about them… they’re cool background/pattern designs and my brain has been buzzing like crazy with ideas for them.

I loved doing a page about the silver lining of a sick day. Focusing on the cuddle time, and capturing the girls in the moment.

Supplies used: Girls’ Paperie patterned paper, Pink Paislee tape, Jenni Bowlin button and butterfly, Ranger Distress Ink (bundled sage), Smooch Ink (pink – o flowers on template), Prima flowers, Tattered Angels glimmer glam in Mermaid, Prism cardstock

Ella article!

I was SO excited when Ella publishing asked me to write an article for the April e-zine and the topic (I’ve submitted a bunch) would be finding treasure outside the scrapbook isle in a craft store. You can read the article here: http://www.ellapublishing.com/ezine/2010-apr/oh-so-crafty and if you click on the layouts (in the Ella article) the image will enlarge so you can get a closer look.