One pan dinner- Chicken with Butternut Squash

I like food. A lot. But like most people, I don't like washing up. So any meal that uses the least number of pans is a good meal in my opinion.  Today I had a butternut squash and some chicken to use up, so I made this:

Chicken with butternut squash, roasted in the oven, with boiled rice and broccoli on the side. It took just 2 pans- an oven tray and a small saucepan- and about 35-40 minutes to make, including all prep and roasting time. I'm calling it a One Pan Dinner because the rice is optional, you could choose a side dish that doesn't involve cooking, like bagged salad.


Ingredients:

• Chicken breast- 1 small one per person
• Butternut squash- 1/2 will serve 2 people
• Red onion- 1/4 per 2 people
• Fresh rosemary (I got mine from my mother's herb garden)
• Salt and Pepper
• Garlic (fresh or puréed)
• Olive oil

1. Turn on your oven to 200°C and get out an oven tray.
2. Cut your chicken breast into 1 inch strips and put on the oven tray.
3. Cleave your butternut squash in half with the biggest, sharpest, weightiest knife you've got, and scoop out the seeds with a spoon. Peel off the tough outer skin, and cube into chunks about of about 1inch and put on the oven tray.
4. Dice up your onion and sprinkle it over your squash and chicken.
5. Tear up your rosemary and add.
6. Season with salt and pepper. Add your garlic. I used puréed stuff out of a jar because we were out of fresh, but you could use fresh and crush it, finely dice it, or add whole cloves depending on how you feel.
7. Generously drizzle over olive oil and get stuck in with your hands, spreading it all over everything.

At this point your tray of goodies should look like the picture above. Shove in your lovely hot oven and roast for ~25 minutes. I have a fan oven so you may need to roast yours for a little longer. It's a good idea to open up the oven couple of times during roasting and move things around so everything stays covered in oil.

During this time you can also prepare a side dish- carbs or more vegetables. The boiled rice and broccoli I made took about 15 minutes to cook.

Serve:

Obviously it tastes disgusting, as evidenced by this photo of how much was ignored and pushed around our plates.

Another year at uni finished (sort of)

On Friday I had my end of year assessment and

it

went

really

well!

Hooray! I was the last student to be assessed so by that point my tutors were probably thinking more about having a pint or a nap, but we had a lovely talk about my work and its themes and what direction I might be headed/where I'm going next, and how I felt the year had gone. To be honest I am really very pleased with myself for sticking through this year, despite having spent the first term commuting every day, then having to move at short notice on New Years and lastly being evicted a couple of weeks ago. I told my tutors the truth: that if I had a tenner for every time I'd thought about dropping out then I'd have enough money to buy a kiln, a wheel, and change left over to go to Mashiko in Japan.

But none of that matters because it's all over, woo! I've got a few more weeks of term left to tie up odd ends- glazing unglazed work, casting more stuff if I want to (of course I want to!), maybe making some logo transfers. My tutor also wanted me to finish a graphic novel I had an idea for way back in the first term, the steampunk bullshit thing. I might have a go at that over the summer.

Anyway here are some photos of my final piece, without the finished glaze (I don't have glaze yet)

And here are some illustrations I did in Adobe Illustrator. I am still really bad at Illustrator and these were done in a hurry.

So, goals for the summer? Well now I have Photoshop and Illustrator, I think I should try digital drawing a little more. There are loads of online tutorials, not to mention books in the uni library that could give me some help getting started (I don't have a clue where to begin and I don't want to take forever learning just by playing around, because I find the lack of progress frustrating).

I've got 2 jobs lined up for summer- one is only for a month, but the other is ongoing bar work so I should be able to save up lots of lovely rent money to carry me over into the new year. Other than that, I've got friends in Yorkshire to visit. And I really feel like having an adventure, damn that Wes Anderson film putting ideas in my head of camping and frolicking through woods in a cute mini-dress.

Logo-agogo

Today I threw together what may become my long term design logo for putting on the bottom of tableware, on clothes labels, and anywhere else I feel like plastering it (drawing watermark?). I made it in Photoshop- finally got around to installing the CS5 master collection on Monday. I still suck at Photoshop and Illustrator so I think I'm going to set myself a challenge in addition to my daily doodle to do a weekly digital drawing. 


Well anyway, logo.

The font is Rockwell. I like it a lot.


Feedback is appreciated! I am no graphic designer.

Flip-flop socks

Last year, while rummaging through the bargain bin that is The Book Warehouse, I stumbled across a book called "Learn to Knit Socks" and snapped it up. It's where I got the pattern for the socks I made for my granddad last year. Anyway, one of the weirder patterns in that book was one for flip-flop socks.

Yeah, flip-flop socks. Socks with a separate toe that you can wear with flip-flops. As one of my closest friends is moving further north, to Belfast, and has a habit of wearing flip-flops in December, I just had to have a go at making them. I also just fancied a challenge, and had some yarn to use up. It was salvaged from a cream jumper that was horrendously unflattering.

The cast-on was a weird technique called Turkish cast on which I only got right after watching this video repeatedly. But by far the hardest bit for me was attaching the big toe to the main section after knitting them separately. For both socks, I somehow knitted them on upside down.

Uh-oh. And even when I reattached the toe on the second sock, I purled or knitted wrong and ended up with a weird bumpy bit. But I didn't care and kept going.

The great thing about toe-up socks is that you can try them on as you go along. And the great thing about flip-flop socks is that you can put them on your hands and woop like Dr Zoidberg.

And here they are finally, ready to be sent off. I don't have any action shots of them with flip-flops because at the time of making my pair were under a snake's tank in Aberystwyth (they still are, but now I have another pair).

I wrapped them in sheets of newspaper supplement with naked feminists on, added a note instructing that my friend dye them, and popped them in the post. And that was the last I saw of them, although I did get a text along the lines of "OHMYGOD I love them!", which is the exact response I was hoping for.

And that's that. Flip-flop socks.

Just a quick update...

I actually have a fair few things to show you, including the wonder that is flip-flop socks but right now my internet access is restricted as I have been forced to move home again.


At very short notice. Again.


I'm starting to think that there's a part of me that just wants to make trouble and be nomadic. It's the part that reached out and slapped my landlord's brother.

Have a Heart

Right now our final project for second year (ohmygodwheredidthetimego) is to do whatever the hell you want. Well, I wanted to practice throwing, but we only have 1 shimpo wheel (being used by a 3rd year all the time) and I hate throwing on the others because you can't brace your arms on your thighs. I tried and I failed miserably.

So then I thought about making a juggling set. A juggling set comprised of a brain (head), a heart (heart, duh), and some intestines (gut feeling). And then I just thought about making a heart, a lovely detailed heart that would be a great jumping off point for figurine design next year. Et voilà.

Hand sculpted in solid clay. It was about 12cm across and felt very good in the hand. I worked from a photocopy from an anatomy book and tried to include all the important bits, but the photos just showed from the front and back, not the top so it was hard to position all the veins.

Hazel pointed out that the veins looked a bit like the face of a really weird bug:

It reminds me of the Ohmu from the Ghibli film/manga "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind", haha. Watch that film if you get the chance, it's really good (the books are even better).

Anyway the idea was that you could use the heart as a bud vase, with the aorta as the opening, sort of like this incredibly bad MSPaint mock up shows:

Screw you, that's totally a flower. It's an allium.

It's hard to mould from clay because it's so delicate and easier warped/cracked/damaged, so I had to make a waste mould and make a plaster copy (which involved cutting everything in half with a band saw, a heart wrenching moment). Here's the result, all cleaned up and finished:

And here's my hand for size comparison:

So it's actually a little bit bigger than my heart (the one in my chest). Everyone says that the human heart is about the size of your fist. I don't know whether it's because I have small hands, but I've always thought that the heart seemed so very small in comparison to what it's powering. But then I guess if I think about the size of my ribcage and everything that's got to cram in there, it wouldn't fit very well if it was much bigger.

Anatomy tangents aside, I'm really happy with this. This week I managed to mould it. It was a SEVEN PART MOULD. I've never done anything so technically difficult in my life. For some comparison, a teapot mould generally has 5 parts. Most objects are 2 or 3 part moulds. 

I'll post the casts when I make my first one. The mould has to dry out first. What a week- yesterday I got into the studio around 10:30 and left at 21:00. That was after a night spent chatting to a Canadian friend and getting into bed at 4:30am. Never have I embraced a weekend so happily!

City Growing

One of the reasons I went for this flat was the small terrace we have. It's west facing and catches the afternoon sun wonderfully. Well, me being me, I wanted to see whether it was even possible to grow food with just a small container garden, so I stole some flowerpots from my mum, bought some compost and seeds, and got planting. And here's where I am now.

1 seed tray with tiny leek seedlings on the left and sugarsnap peas on the right. Obviously with the leeks I'm not going to get massive broom-handle thick white stems, but I think it might be possible to harvest some slim pencil leeks at the end of summer.

Today I moved some of my larger pea plants to a hanging basket. I'm a bit worried because the basket is tiny, so it will dry out really fast if summer ever gets in gear and actually arrives (we've had week after week of much needed, but vaguely apocalyptic, rain). I'm also not sure if the plants will trail down over the sides, or climb up the chains.

Carrot seedings! These need thinning out, obviously. I'm going to try and transplant a few to a rectangular container too. Hopefully I'll end up with a fist-full of baby carrots, but who knows? I've never been able to grow carrots, so this would be a first.

Mixed salad leaves, ready to be harvested (which is a good thing because I'm out of food and cash this weekend). I'm looking forward to munching on this and seeing if my first city harvest is a success.


I don't know what's happening at the end of summer. Next year is my final year and I don't think I could write a dissertation living in a flat with a band. On the other hand, I don't really care about my degree grade, and I'm just starting to really like my flatmates and feel accepted by them, plus this place is really cheap and now I've got a garden going...


Not to mention my little garden helper: