Making home, playing homemaker.

Making home.
As was inevitable, the squares have turned to boxes which have turned into pieces of furniture which have turned into vignettes. Next blink and they will be entire rooms... Maria is a sneaky one! This class is living up to my expectation of being the bane of my existence - particularly with the curvilinear lines. Give me right angles and I'm a happy gal. Throw some curves (particularly ellipses instead of circles) at me and I'm left scratching my head. Case in point...nice angular couch: makes sense!

Chair with the funky curvilinear arms...eek!

Some people are really great at drawing. They just see the world and can instantly reproduce it on a 2-d surface. Me...I require all of the steps of making a cube and plotting the furniture

and eventually doing a final overlay with the piece.

Next she handed us a few pieces of furniture to begin a little corner of a room. This is only on overlay # 2, so it requires a good deal of squinting and filling in the blanks :)

...and we started the layout of another vignette with a circular table and a tulip chair in a 1-point perspective.

and playing homemaker.
What better to do at the end of a 8 hour workday + 7 hour schoolday but go grocery shopping and cook? Brilliant! Years ago my mom would get frustrated with my complete disinterest in anything cooking or baking related. "How are you ever going to know how to cook?" (I think that translates to: "you need to be able to cook to be the good wife and mother.") Coming from a family of chefs, my indifference was pretty much a blasphemy. To this point, when an old flame and I played house together in Florida, I insisted that he inserted as many compliments to my cooking into family conversations as possible.

But that little voice in the back of a girl's head (the one we profusely deny to be that of our mother) reminds me every once in a while that I should make sure I can still put together an edible dish. Living on the run, I have no real reason to cook for myself, so I decided that I would commit myself to cooking for all of the Board meetings. (This was month one, so I'm still keeping to that resolution.)

That was a pretty long intro to talk about a new dish.

I got it stuck in my mind to make mini chicken pot pies.

You will need:
2 pie crusts
4 thin chicken breasts
1 can of low-fat chicken gravy
peas and carrots (or other assorted veggies)
1 onion

First I scrounged around to find objects with the appropriate circumference. It just so happened to be a martini shaker and a shot glass :) So I cut out 22 big and 22 little circles. (you could probably cut out the full two dozen, but I ate too much of the pie crust before I started cutting). I greased the mini-muffin tins with olive oil and stuffed in the big circles:

Then I pan-fried the chicken with drop of olive oil, salt, pepper, and some assorted seasonings. I diced them into itty-bitty pieces and piled them into the cups along with my veggies. Then I spooned in some of the gravy:

Then I took the little circles and attached them to the bottom crust, pinching the edges as best as I could (they're so little!), poking two holes in the tops to prevent explosions.

I think the oven was on about 350 - 375. I baked them for as long as it took me to do the dishes and cook some lunches...maybe about 20 minutes? (** I made one last night with some leftover ingredients in a regular muffin tin and it took about half an hour). Just look for the crusty/flakiness to appear :)

Yum! For a dinner I would probably do them in the regular muffin tins, but these were for a meeting setting so they can be eaten with fingers like a mini-quiche.