Thursday, March 22, 2012

Fantasea

A couple of weeks ago I picked up Orly's Fantasea, a really lovely plum-mauve-gold duochrome that's part of their permanent line, I believe.

Orly Fantasea



It's awesome to see a beautiful, unique color like this that isn't limited and hard to find. So, I don't know what took me so long to finally grab it! >,>;;


And as if it weren't amazing enough on its own, I also decided to adorn it with a multichromatic flakie, Essie's Shine of the Times.

Orly Fantasea + Essie Shine of the Times


Aside from playing with polish, another thing I love to do is cook. Some of my favorite foods I just can't find in restaurants or stores here, so I learn to make them. One of my favorite Japanese snacks is pickles; salty cucumbers, umeboshi, pickled daikon. And recently I noticed that I could buy little pickling cucumbers at the grocery store, so I took some home and decided to make my own tsukemono.

Kyuri Asazuke


I searched online and found many great recipes, and first decided to try a simple kyuri asazuke from La Fuji Mama. This one has a nice, light vinegar flavor and was very tasty and refreshing. However, my favorite pickle is salty cucumbers, a type of shiozuke. So the next time I made pickled cucumbers I used a recipe from The Black Moon:

3 Kyuri (Japanese cucumbers), unpeeled and cut into 1/2 inch rounds,
three teaspoons of salt.

Place the cucumber slices into the pickle press (or jar) and add one teaspoon of salt, mix well by stirring with your hands. Add the second teaspoon of salt and mix again. Add the final teaspoon of salt and mix well. Clamp on the top of the pickle press and screw down the lid until it pushes down tightly on the top layer of vegetables to be pickled. Leave under pressure overnight or for at least 10 hours. Remove the pickles from the press and place in a colander, wash well to remove salt, pat dry and serve. Salt pickles like these should last a week or more when refrigerated, but they're so delicious you'll probably eat them all before you have any left to store!


Yeah, they've never lasted a whole week. Or day. Next I'll have to try and get a hold of some daikon radishes! Oh and another cool thing I've recently discovered, http://pixlr.com/o-matic-- a site with AMAZING retro photo effects that you can see I've used on the above pictures. This has totally squashed my lemming for an iPhone, aka Instagram.