Procrastination

John pointed out to me yesterday that by procrastinating what you are supposed to be doing, you get a lot of other things done in the process. I have been experiencing those symptoms this week. My thesis is not going as well as I would have hoped at this point. I can’t get past a snag in some of the wet lab work. Along with that, I feel somewhat unimportant in the eyes of those around me. I have felt overlooked and that has lead me to feeling a little bit down about my work and how it is going. To compensate, these last two days have been full of gardening, cooking, and crafting.

I don’t have any pictures of the garden right now. It’s raining today, but hopefully tomorrow we will remember to take the camera out there. But this week, we pushed through and finally dug out the last and largest garden bed. I’ve been sore for two days now. Mostly rom the constant squatting of pulling weeds an planting seeds, but my shoulder are also sore from hoeing the very rocky soil. We planted corn, beans, watermelon, and cucumbers. Next week, we should be planting one of my most exciting seeds: gem squash. I ate gem squash all the time while I was on my mission and I loved them. I have never seen them here in the states. I went online to find some seeds and found out that while the plant is native to the America’s for some reason, we don’t grow or sell them here anymore. An online forum gave me the information of somebody in Michigan that said they had some seeds to give away. I contacted this person and he mailed me so seeds! I’m excited to try them out.

Here’s what I made for dinner yesterday. Since the weather has been so warm, I wanted a lite refreshing dinner. I found a homemade pita recipeand gave it a try.

Proofing the yeast – I’ve read online somewhere that proofing yeast these days is unnecessary because commercial yeast is so reliable especially if you’ve bought it recently. I still do it though because I like to watch it grow and I LOVE the way it smells.

Pita – Here’s what they looked like after the second rise.

The recipe said it makes 8 pitas. I got 9 decent sized pitas out of the dough. Because they were so small I didn’t put them straight on the oven rack. Luckily, I do have some cookie drying racks that I used instead and they worked perfectly. After they are taken out of the oven the recipe said to wrap them in a damp cloth to moisten them.

Pitas- wrapped in a wet towel

At first, I thought this seemed like it wasn’t necessary, but after I was done, I can see that you really did need to do this. After cooling in the moist towel, the texture was really great.

Final pita product

I wish I had left some of them in a oven just a little bit longer. I tend to be extra paranoid about leaving things in our oven too long because it’s a gas oven and tends to be a little unreliable as far as the temperature goes. I got some really nice olives for the olive bar at the grocery store. We sort of used this recipe, except we didn’t use feta. We used our homemade queso fresco. Feta would have been better but queso fresco was also good. I also made some homemade hummus and added more garlic (John and I eat way too much garlic) and paprika. We had a nice pita sandwich for dinner!

We also put in some spinach, but I didn’t have any on it in this picture. I also made some chocolate crinkle cookies for desert.

That was all my cooking procrastination. Now, I had a couple of craft projects to distract me too. I decided to wrap my headphone cords after seeing the idea on Pinterest. I was hoping it would make them tangle less, and so far it has! Although, I don’t think it looks all that good.

Wrapped headphone cords with embroidery floss

My final major creative project of the week was to teach myself how to crochet. After learning some of the basic stitches I decided to move on and make a real project. My choice was a water bottle holder.

Crocheted water bottle holder

I must say that I am rather proud of myself for making this one. For some reason, I always thought that crochet was for people who couldn’t knit, but I have since changed my mind. It was quite challenging to figure this out. If you could see this up close you would realize that many of my stitches look really stupid, but the pattern is visible and it’s not falling apart. Hurray! Here is the pattern in case anyone is interested.