Fab Pastry Cookbook!

I have purchased Gluten-Free Baking by Rebecca Reilly, and I recommend it. She is a pastry chef whose son has celiac disease, so she has adapted recipes using actual pastry-chef techniques. She also is good at looking for more nutritious flours. This collection to my library is already adding inches to my waistline.

Bean there

I have a very good Persian cookbook which helps me with most of my Persian cooking needs. One of my favorite treats is a shortbread cookie made of chickpea flour and flavoured with cardamom. Unfortunately, every time I try to make the little devils, they taste like raw bean. No amount of baking/overbaking seems to take care of this problem. So the take-home message from me is that some things are just better purchased than handmade. Yes, it hurts me to say that. And it also gives me a good reason to go lurking in my local Pars Mart.

First embroidery

Since I needed to learn yet another craft, I have taken up the needle and have begun to learn embroidery. Here is my first completed project. The pattern is an iron-on transfer from Sublime Stitching: www.sublimestitching.com . I got the inspiration for the colours from a photo of a temple in Kathmandu. I embroidered the project on the wrong side (woops) of a white hanky that my dad gave me.

This is a very addictive craft. I am now enthusiastically embroidering nigiri sushi onto a teatowel.