Used or Surplus White Coats

Friends – I am collecting surplus or used old lab coats or white coats for an art project in honor of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Why lab coats?  Because they are symbolic of the health professions movement and the many intersections that the health care delivery system as well as racism has impacted the lives and deaths of Black and Brown people in our community.  Many people are killed simply because they have a mental illness or are in the midst of a mental health episode or crisis.  Health providers aren’t immune from causing the deaths of Black and Brown people.  The history of medicine was built on the pain and suffering of Black bodies for hundreds of years.  In 2008 my husband Matthew died of liver cancer – he asked his physician – I’m not getting a liver because I’m Black, right?  In 2012, my friend Victor Duffy died after being tazered by the Tukwila Police in the midst of a mental health episode.  Like Freddie Gray, he entered the ambulance alive and came out dead.  Like Freddie Gray, Victor was Black.  Matthew and Victor changed my life.  I miss both of them greatly.

Please comment or message me at junquecouture@gmail.com if you have any questions.  Thank you!

Beaded earrings

So i love football and most especially my Seahawks. I have been working on 12th man earrings for two seasons now and my design has evolved over time. I love all of them please dont get me wrong. I just had never found the right look and accepting the fact that if i want some 12 earrings i’m gonna have to make them myself. So guess what, i taught myself how to square stitch thanks to youtube and voila here are ny latest creations. Each 12 earring pair takes me 4 to 6 hours to make. FOR REAL.  I’m not lyin! Check out my etsy store Junquecouture to see more!

Ube French Macaron recipe!

Victoria Gardner’s
Ube French Macarons

Behind the scenes I have continued to study and practice my French Macaron baking skills and am happy to say that I have made some revisions to my previous recipe that was posted here a few weeks ago.  Yes I still used the Laduree Recipe as my base but changed the baking times and tweaked the recipe.  Why?  I love my gas oven because it gives me such great heat for baking my famous carrot cake.  But my 300F may be different from yours, or an electric oven.  Also I don’t add the 1/2 egg white their recipe calls for. So I needed to make some allowances.  I was wondering why my macarons were too soft, meaning, if they weren’t stuck to the parchment paper, they were so soft that they broke apart.  Sometimes.  I figured out that I needed to cook them longer.  And here is some information on this  delicious root aka purple yam- yes it really is purple!

Here’s my revised UBE French Mac recipe:

UBE (PURPLE YAM) FRENCH MACARONS

Ube Filling

I pack dried ube powder (try Giron brand)

1 can nonfat or lowfat evaporated milk

1 can lowfat or nonfat condensed milk

1/4 cup sugar

4 cups water

Prepare according to package directions.  This will require about an hour of constant stirring over low heat.  The filling is done when it begins to separate from the bottom of the pan while stirring.  Let it cool.

French Macaron

138 g almond flour (I use Trader Joe’s)

124 g powdered sugar

105 gm regular sugar

3 egg whites (room temperature

a timer or stopwatch

purple food color

Heat oven to 300F.  Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper or silicon baking mat. Sift almond flour and powdered sugar together.  Set aside. Put kitchenaid stand mixer (mine is 475 watts) on 6.  Beat egg whites for about a minute. Add 1/3 of the regular sugar after about a minute.  Keep beating and add another 1/3 after of the sugar after 1 minute.  Add the rest of the sugar and beat for another minute or so.  Try to stop at around the 4 minute mark.  Longer than this, and I overbeat.  Add the flour/sugar mixture and food coloring by hand.  Try not to stir more than 30 times or so.  Put the batter in your pastry bag and pipe on around 1-1/2 inch circles on your baking sheet. Tap to release air.  Let sit for about an hour.  This is so the tiny feet develop.  The longer the better.  Prepare your filling while you let the macarons rest.  After an hour or so, bake the sheets one a time for 18 – 19 minutes on the baking rack.  Rotate the rack at the 9 m.  I use a stop watch.  After baking, let the cookies cool before releasing from the pan.  Fill with ube filling or your favorite jam.

Makes about 40 macarons.

Ube Coconut French macarons

Ube (oo-beh) aka Purple Yam is a tuber root (like sweet potato) that is commonly eaten in the Philippines as dessert or added to coconut dishes. It’s naturally colored purple. I love how it tastes and one of my favorite dishes is a sweetened UBE paste made with coconut milk and sweet milk.

I’m still learning how to make French macs myself but combining the two sure is motivation for me to keep practicing. First of all, I have to say that I knew NOTHING about these yummy little treats a month or so ago. My friends were sharing pictures on viber and a recent trip to Vancouver BC let me see for myself how pretty these macarons were!

I was too broke to buy one, but I said to me self, “Self, you know you can figure out how to make one, right”?

Then came the Renton Farmers Market and there was a stall there selling french macarons. I bought one and couldn’t wait to get more. I found some recipes through Pinterest which I love (my Pinterest name is junquecouture) and tested, or I should say ruined five batches before I ended up with the batch you see below. I also watched Zumbo videos online like this oneZumbo italian method french macarons

Lessons learned: Use a silicone sheet to line your pans. Ditch the wax paper. The egg white batter is the most critical part. I weighed my ingredients, and my kitchenaid is a 475 watt, so I found I needed to go a notch higher if someone says their kitchenaid is 500 watts or more.

How I made it:
I used the Laduree recipe I found on A Bit of Bees Knees Laduree French macarons . In this batch, I did not add the 1/2 egg white. I found it deflates my batter. I used Trader Joes brand almond flour and added 3 drops of purple food color to the egg batter.

For the ube coconut filling, I mixed my own ube paste using Giron Brand dehydrated Ube powder found in most Filipino stores. I followed the package direction, but substitued 1 can coconut milk plus 1 can water for the 4 cups water the package calls for. This part takes a couple hours, if you want the ube paste done right :). You can prep the macarons while you’re stirring the ube.

The traditional way to make ube paste is to grind the purple yam by hand and mix with coconut milk and natural sugar. Fortunately, we have access to the dehydrated version in Seattle.

An easier method might be to buy a premade bottle of ube paste. This dessert is found in Asian stores but those don’t taste the same imho.

Let the paste cool and you can use this as filling just like it is. I have to control myself that I dont eat it all before filling the cookies. Take 2 TB of ube paste and mix with 2 TB store bought whipped cream. You can add a tiny drop of purple food color to the cream if you like more purple. Mix well by hand and voila! Yummy, ube heaven.

The middle macaron above has the ube filling straight up. The rest have the added whipped cream. Lip or not, i love these things. There is no such thing as a bad macaron!

It’s been so much fun discovering these yummy treats. See my blog for my entry on Trader Joe’s French Macarons, so yummy and only 40 calories per treat!

frida Junque

Frida Kahlo Mi amor.

What can i say, i idolize Frida Kahlo.  I love her style, her art, her story, her sexuality, her character.   I want to go visit her house in Mexico someday.  I bet you didn’t know that not only was Frida a great artist, she was also bisexual and smoked pot when she painted.  She called it her “special cigarette” in her diaries.  It was such a privilege to see some of her work up close and in person when it came to the Seattle Art Museum a few years ago.   On the regular free admission thursday, the line snaked twice around the block to get in!  This is a piece I created in her honor.   PS I don’t know what that row of bling is doing on the bottom, but it’s there!  Thanks for looking!

Breathe!

I think gold is big this year, at least for me, as I begin to move towards fall/winter colors.  With this in mind, I was able to find this paper mache deer and some old Making Memories letters from way, way back.  Finally found some good use for it, and the gold Krylon 24K spray paint is perfect for it!  Don’t forget to breathe!

French macaroons for a 40 calorie treat!

I found these $4.99 beauties at Trader Joes in the process of trying to find almond flour so I could make some! After two failed attempts at making my own macaroons, these little beauties satisfy the urge nonetheless.

Felt calaveras

i saw a few of these at Michaels and they were $10 each.  I decided to make my own using some felt i already had and a few extra .39 cent sheets.  I was watching the news and between the Ebola crisis and the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, I felt compelled to sew these two issues close to my heart into the skulls somehow in honor of day of the dead.  It was difficult to photograph the curve around the top but i hope you can see the message clearly.  Just because.

 

Ebola no mas. Such a horrible disease.  Praying for victims and their families daily as well as the people caring for them.

Thinking about the 4,000  lives this horrible disease has already taken.  No cure in sight.  Not for most people.

No justice no peace.
I lost a good friend to the police two years ago. He was tasered by the Tukwila Police (I wrote about it in my old blog, itsjunquecouture.blogspot.com). I hope justice reigns in Ferguson.

Crochet skulls

If you know me, you will know that I love skulls, Day of the dead, calaveras, Frida Kahlo and loteria stuff. I made these crochet skull placemats for the dining table. It’s not necessarily “halloween”, but i would put this on my table for year round display.

This particular design is a hack of a smaller version i found in a bead shop in Fremont, WA. I don’t know the name of the store or the artist but I will add it later when I find out. (If you know, please comment!) This is a bigger version, about 24″ x 18″ for the big white one, and 12″x 10″ for the smaller ones.  I used tshirt material yarn for the smaller white skulls and quadrupled up yarn for the really big one.  I used a 10 mm crochet hook.  I  would love to make a giant rug of this, it’s on the list!

I start by crocheting 20 single chain stitches, and join them together to make the left eye.  Cover each stitch with a single crochet and close.  Without cutting the yarn, chain 23 single crochet and join to stitch #3 of your single chain forming the second eye.   Cover this with single crochet all around (20 in all).  It’ll be tight at first but really get in there!

Now you have to make a joint between the two eyes to form the forehead.  Insert a triple crochet stitch into stitch#1 of your chain stitch.  Then using another triple crochet stitch into the next loop.  This is the beginning of the forehead. Then I use triple and double crochet to cover the area around the eyes and the jaws. Use increases where the skull goes around the sides.

In my version I create the complete teeth and jaw before going back around the side of the skull.  I think these would be great gifts as potholders, placemats, coasters, or embellishments for coats, throw pillows or better yet, a giant wall hanging!

Easy LoMein recipe

I’ve been trying to fix dishes that are tasty, spicy, inexpensive and inspired rather than the usual go to dishes like burgers, spaghetti and mac n cheese.  I found this website http://www.damndelicious.net through my friend Namura.  This site is “Da bomb” for easy Asian inspired entrees.  I made this Easy LoMein recipe (I am Asian and had never ever purchased lo mein before) but i am pleasantly surprised! I did a couple small changes – one 10 oz pack of lomein is enough for this dish AND i doubled the sauce to sufficiently coat all the noodles. This dish fed 4 hungry men and me. Must do again!

 

 

Easy LoMein recipe from http://www.DamnDelicious.net.