Holiday Countdown Day 7

December 7 - Make paper garlands.

We've made paper garlands before. But not like this. I've actually been planning this project for about three years, which is when I saw garlands like these in an Anthropology. So I ripped it off, but it's still super cool and whatever artist created these is amazing and deserves credit. I bought books to destroy just for this project at a garage sale at about that time as well. They were super overpriced for being something no one would read, if I remember correctly. One is some lame self-help book.

I guess the kids didn't really much participate in this activity, come to think of it. Bastian sat with me and plugged the hot glue in and watched and played on his iPod. Aleks was sleeping. Whatever, they're cool. Aleks is currently writing his letter to Santa for yesterday's activity and Bastian is whining about being hungry.

Once we'd started these, I had to take a break to get a chicken to roast in the oven. Before I could do that, I had an idea that I'd like to rub the breast down with some butter and that I'd like to make butter from scratch using the Snowville whipping cream I bought a half gallon of having only needed a cup or so for pumpkin soup earlier in the week. So I poured some cream in a jar, screwed on the lid and handed it to Bastian.

It took us a bit longer than the standard ten minutes to create butter, but we did do it. Then I rubbed it with thyme from our garden on one of the pastured chickens my friend Lynn raised and slaughtered. I put more butter and bay leaves under the skin and crushed several cloves of garlic that we planted last December, a pear I'd sliced that no one was eating, and more butter inside the carcass. Then I chopped some of the wilting vegetables left from our holiday share of City Fresh with more butter and some drizzled olive oil in the bottom of our doufeu and placed the bird on top. It's now roasting on its bed of turnips, carrots, daikon radishes, and Princess Buttercup squash. I feel very fancy having said all that. Now I'm running downtown to deliver roasted root vegetables to Occupy Cleveland.

Quite the productive day given my intense puttering earlier today.