Lizerati Handmade

If you make jewelry, you know headpins come in to play a lot. Simply put, a headpin is a piece of wire with a “head” or stop to keep a bead from sliding off. Any time you want to make a bead dangle, you generally need a headpin. For example:

The flowers are held on by headpins

Headpins can be expensive - usually anywhere from 5 to 50 cents per headpin, depending on how fancy you want to be, the length of the headpin, and the thickness of the wire. If you’re on a budget or abhor waste, buying tons of headpins can seem absurd. However, all is not lost! They are easy to make and you end up with less waste. It’s also a good way to recycle scraps of wire.

Materials

First, you want to assemble your materials. You’ll need sterling silver wire (quick lesson: sterling silver is an alloy of 92.5% silver and the rest is other materials. Pure, or fine silver is usually too soft to stand up to consistent wear so it’s not generally a good idea to use it for jewelry making), wire cutters (frankly, nail clippers also work) a butane torch, and something to hold the wire that isn’t your fingers. Metal conducts heat and you don’t want a wire-shaped scar along your fingers. Or the swearing, hopping up and down, and rushing to jam your hands under running water that will come along with using your hands as a clamp.

Cut wire

Cut yourself a length of wire. When you first start out, give yourself some extra wire to work with as you get used to things. It will take almost no time at all before you’re a good judge of how much wire you’ll need. This is also a good way to use scraps of wire, reclaimed wire, etc.

Fire! Yay! I mean… melting the wire

Secure the wire to your non-flammable method of holding it (that little magnifying glass clippy thing you see? One of the best tools I have. Get yourself one), light your torch, and then hold the flame on the end of the wire for about 5 seconds or until the wire is glowing and a little ball of silver forms. Turn torch off. That’s it! You’re done!

Bead on a wire

Slide your bead on to the wire and voila, headpin! For my purposes, this organic look is perfect. If you’re fast, you can mash the still-hot wire on to something flat to create a more uniform look if you prefer.

Yesterday I watched the Tomato Envy episode of Good Eats and I got in the mood for a good sandwich. Of course I can’t leave well enough alone, so I futzed around and made a BOAAT. That’s a bacon, onion, arugula, avocado, tomato sandwich if you’re not familiar with the acronym that I made up 20 minutes ago. Remove the bacon and you’ve got a damn tasty vegan sandwich too.

So what are YOU doing with your saturday afternoon?

(ps. I saw Alton Brown on the Lucky Yates show a while back and he’s a riot. If you get a chance to hear him speak, do it!)

Over at Just Bento, the most recent entry is about pancakes. Not the normal breakfast kind, oh no. These are awesome pancakes filled with delicious and savory items, designed for dinner. Last night I decided to give it a shot. I opted for a scallion pancake since I already had some dinner items lined up and I just wanted something to go with them. (Technically, I made Pajon or Pajeon. The internet seemed conflicted on spelling and I don’t speak korean.)

All the recipes that I found seem to agree that the batter is close to pancake or crepe batter, minus sugar. I even found a raw recipe that looks interesting as well.

So basically what you want is

*1 cup savory pancake or crepe batter. This should be pretty thin so you don’t get a thick gluey pancake. Use more batter if you want more pancakes. (I’m a culinary genius.)
*Scallions - at least half to a whole cup, either sliced thin or julienned. Add these to the batter - you want it to be thick with scallions!
*Oil - possibly sesame, or veggie with a little sesame in it.

After you have all that, heat the oil in a nonstick pan and… make pancakes. You know how this goes - ladle out some batter and when it seems crispy and mostly cooked, flip it over to cook and crisp the other side. Take off the heat, cut in to wedges or strips and dip in a mixture of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar and a little sugar or honey. Play with the proportions to get the sauce that tastes best to you.

Just so you know, I am about to dive in to my lunch and it features a scallion pancake.

My interest in making cute bentos is resurfacing! I’ve been obsessed with Onigiri lately, partially because I have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to rice in my pantry. I won’t go on too much about Onigiri because there’s an excellent onigiri FAQ on Just Bento. It’s an excellent resource for all things bento and all things onigiri.



So what am I doing here on this blog talking about my lunch then? Fillings, of course! You can put all kinds of things in onigiri from traditional to whatever you like. Here are a couple of the fillings I used last time:

1) Grilled shrimp and green onions
This one was super easy. I took one medium sized grilled shrimp (I already had some on hand), chopped it up, chopped a little green onion, mixed them together with a little salt, and voila.

2) Soybean sprouts and peanuts
I learned a real lesson here - the first time I did this, I sauteed the soybean sprouts whole and used the whole mixture as a stuffing. Bad news. Soybean sprouts (any sprouts) are long and stringy… it’s hard to eat them neatly even when they are tucked away in a ball of rice.

Solution? Chop them up! I chopped up the sprouts and some roasted unsalted peanuts and sauteed them in a small bit of peanut oil with a little salt and some chili garlic sauce. Sesame oil actually loses some flavor when you cook with it, so you do just as well using another oil for the heat cooking and then sprinkling a little sesame on top when you’re done.

3) Clove of roasted garlic
This was REALLY easy because I cheated and bought some roasted garlic from the farmer’s market and just used a clove of that. If you’re not lazy like me, cut the top off of a head of garlic, drizzle some oil, salt, and pepper on and then cook at a low temperature for a long time in the oven.

4) Turnip greens and garlic
Chop the turnip greens very fine and mince some fresh garlic. Saute until the greens are cooked and the garlic is too (Specifics. That’s why you come to lizerati.com. For the painstaking attention to detail.). Season and then stuff in to some rice.

Decorating!

This part is the best. Using a knife or paper punch, cut shapes from some nori. I happened to have some snack seaweed (roasted and salted) on hand, so I used that, but any old nori will do. Go crazy! It’s your lunch and you want it to make you happy!

Animal Review!

This site reviews animal species objectively.

This almost makes up for the disappearance of the Universal Review.

I’m at work and I am waiting for this report to export. It’s currently at 76mb and counting. It’s taken over an hour. So… time to distract myself.

I was thinking about new years resolutions and I remembered that I had this bookmarked. It’s a bento planner from Just Bento. And someone made an excel version too! So, if you’re thinking that weight loss is a goal for 2009, bento boxes are an ADORABLE way to make that happen. Enjoy!

Thank god the New York Times got in on the mustache action. Irony everywhere is validated!

(This is Joe. He took this picture.)

(Creative commons image from Biskuit’s flickr)
Atlanta’s own Dynamic Dish has been named the 3rd best modern vegetarian restaurant in the country!

It’s a cute little place and they offer food made of natural and organic ingredients, obtained from local and multi-cultural, natural resources, and create tasty, imaginative meals that have a positive result on the well being of all ages. Check it out!

(For directions go here)

Wash’s Sweater. I’ll let the link speak for itself but this is about knitting the sweater Wash wears in two different Firefly episodes.