SummerChilde

The New (and almost final) SummerChilde.com

Justin — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 02:57:15 +0000

I‘ve been so busy lately building websites for others that I’ve been neglecting my own. So I thought I’d spend the day restyling my site and updating some of the content and layout. The biggest change is the site name and address. As most of you know, SummerChilde is my real middle name and since I’ve had the domain name for a while I decided to make it my primary for the site. No need to update bookmarks or anything since I still have justinslewis.com pointing here as well.

For a while now, I’ve been wanting to focus the site toward the creative projects that I’m working on and things I find online and in the world that get me inspired to create. On SummerChilde.com I’ll primarily be posting how-to articles about paper journaling and book arts as well as selected poems and essays of I’ve written. For more personal posts I’ll be using Facebook, Twitter, and my paper journal. I’ll also be contributing to the Soupy Sunday blog and the web design blog at Keri Marion Design.

First Soup of the Year

Justin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:06 +0000

Spinach Lentil Soup

Recipe: Spinach Lentil Soup

Ingredients

10 cups of water
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 cup of dried lentils
2 carrots, chopped
1 cup of chopped spinach
1/2 cup rice
3 dashes of Hungarian paprika
1 tablespoon of mixed dried herbs (parsley, chives, tarragon, and chervil)
1 tablespoon of salt

Instructions

In a large pot, combine onion, garlic, lentils, carrots, salt, and herbs/spices. Bring to boil and let it cook for 45 minutes.
In a separate pot, cook the rice until tender.
Once rice is cooked add it to the soup along with the chopped spinach. Bring the soup back to a boil and let it cook for another 20 minutes or so.
Serve with fresh baked bread.

Cooking time (duration): 90

Diet type: Vegan

Dietary restriction: Buddhist

Number of servings (yield): 12

Meal type: dinner

My rating:5 stars: ★★★★★

6th Anniversary!

Justin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:25:32 +0000

Today is the sixth anniversary of the day Keri and I met! It has been six wonderful years full of grand adventures and amazing experiences. We won’t get a chance to celebrate until Keri gets back from her Vipassana retreat in Shelburne Falls in 12 days. We both signed up for the retreat but unfortunately they weren’t able to accommodate my deafness (most of the meditation instruction is on audiotape) so I’ve decided to stay home and have a retreat of my own here in East Providence. I plan to spend most of my time reading, writing, and meditating. I will be limiting my time on the computer to blogging, email, and work related use.

Soupy Sunday 2!

Justin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:12:29 +0000

We hosted Soupy Sunday once again and everyone had a blast! Good company combined with puppet shows, live music, and soup makes for a great time. The first Soupy Sunday soup was totally random with everyone bringing at least one ingredient for the soup. This time around we decided on sticking more or less to one of our favorite recipes.

The soup du jour was White Trash Taco Soup. Keri and I first got hooked on this soup about 3 or 4 years ago when her brother, Thompson, made it at his house. Let me tell you, it is DELICIOUS. Why do we call it “White Trash Taco Soup”? It’s the “secret” ingredient… one can of cheap beer. Preferably, Pabst. Last night’s version was a bit more upscaled with some Sam Adam’s Oktoberfest which works just fine.

Recipe: White Trash Taco Soup

Ingredients

1 can of cheap beer
1 large can of chopped tomatoes
1 can of olives
1 can of sweet corn
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
3 packages of Taco Seasoning
3 cups of water
1 1/2 cup of dried beans (red, kidney, black) or 4 cans of – beans

Instructions

First, boil the beans until tender and strain. Put aside.
Second, sautee the onion and garlic. Add to the pot with 3 cups of water.
Add everything else including the beans you’ve cooked or canned beans if you do it that way.
Additional spices can be used: paprika, cumin, pepper, etc. This is all up to you here.
Add that beer in there.
This soup really doesn’t take long to cook. As long as the beans aren’t hard, it’s good to eat.
Serve in a bowl topped with Fritos and grated cheddar. One dollop of sour cream.

Diet type: Vegetarian

Number of servings (yield): 12

My rating:5 stars: ★★★★★

The entertainment for this Soupy Sunday consisted of impromptu jam sessions on the guitars and drums and several improvised puppet shows with puppets we made during the day. If you haven’t watched the video above what are you waiting for?!

Keri has set us up with a blog on Wordpress.com here so you can subscribe to the email notifications about upcoming Soupy Sunday events. We’ll be using that in conjunction with Facebook Events to help coordinate the soup ingredients etc et al.

Pease Porridge

One theme, two stylesheets: A Wordpress Tutorial

Justin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:43:13 +0000

Suppose you want your Wordpress installation to have one layout and CSS styling for some pages be completely different from the layout and styling for other pages. For example, you might like to have a members only section have a completely different style than the public side of your site. Some Wordpress users suggest using multiple installations of Wordpress. Another way to do it would be to have two different headers and two different css files used in conjunction with page templates. Another advantage to this technique is there is no need to edit any of the HTML or add any additional CSS classes or IDs.

For more information and how to do it go here.

Crows: A Free Wordpress Theme

Justin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:02:05 +0000

Screenshot of Crows theme.

Today I decided to create a free theme for Wordpress based on my current blog theme. The design and customized CSS is all mine but the theme coding is from the Cutline theme by Chris Pearson. The Cutline theme is my favorite Wordpress theme to customize since I’ve been using it for so long and know the code inside and out. For this design, I’ve added a few customizations: a favicon, drop cap styling, and a wrapper for a more organic “outside of the box” header design.

The Crows theme is FREE. Visit Keri Marion Design to preview the theme or download for your Wordpress blog. If you decide to use the theme, feel free to comment on this post or drop me a line with your blog url.

Special Instructions:

Drop Caps:

To use the drop cap styling, start your post in HTML view in the post editor. Before the first letter of the first sentence add (without the outside quotes) “” and immediately after that first letter add (without quotes) “”. It should look like the letter “T” in the first paragraph of this post.

Favicon:

I included a favicon with this theme. To use it you will need to copy the file “favicon.ico” from the images folder and paste it into your root directory then upload it.

Soupy Sunday

Justin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:15:47 +0000

A few days ago Keri and I had an idea inspired by our friend Melissa. She had told Keri about her college days and how on Sundays she and her friends would gather together to make soup and while the soup cooked they would perform a play. What a cool thing to do! We just had to do something like that. And so, Soupy Sunday was born.

What we did was have each person attending the party bring one ingredient to add to the soup. It didn’t take long for our huge cast iron Jambalaya pot to fill up. So many ingredients, in fact, that we had to start a second (non-vegetarian) soup in our cast iron wok. While the soup cooked and Keri’s bread baked in the oven a bunch of us formed an impromptu jug band in the living room. The sounds of spoons, conga, steel drum, guitars, and castenets filled the air. Ah! Fun!

The soup turned out to be delicious even though we didn’t follow a set recipe. The two soups both had a vegetarian base made with sauteed onion and garlic, tomato, herbs, dandelion and other greens, macaroni, celery, and cauliflower. The vegetarian one had vegan “Italian sausage” added to it and the non-vegetarian had chicken and hot peppers. I had the vegetarian, of course. Click on the pictures below to see the larger version.

The vegetarian Soupy Sunday soup.

I’d like to thank everyone again for coming and for the clean up help. Much appreciated! Keri and I plan to host another one soon and the soup will most likely be our famous taco soup. Yum!

Happy Halloween!

Justin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:56:47 +0000

For your viewing pleasure…

Tons more free Halloween appropriate movies on Hulu.

Andrew Bird: Live at Lupo’s in Providence

Justin — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:50:44 +0000

Last night Keri and I went to see Andrew Bird perform at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in downtown Providence. The videos here were taken by various people in the audience and I snagged them off youtube for your viewing pleasure! The concert was awesome. *note for facebook readers* If you can’t see the videos then visit the blog here.

Focaccia Bread

Justin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:40:07 +0000

Focaccia bread about to go in the oven.

I asked Keri last night to teach me how to make Focaccia bread today. This is the result of my first attempt. Lately, she had been baking this bread a lot since it’s very easy to do and tastes delicious. The bread is half devoured already with a bowl of homemade potato leek soup.

After making and kneading the dough, I mixed up a quarter cup of olive oil, fresh thyme, herbs de provence, and Italian seasoning. I brushed this atop the dough and sprinkled freshly grated parmesan cheese over that before putting it in the oven.

Click on the pictures to see them full size.

Recipe: Focaccia Bread

Ingredients

for the dough:

tablespoon of sugar
1 1/2 tablespoon of yeast
1/2 cup of warm water
about 1 1/2 cup of flour
1 teaspoon salt

for the topping:

1/4 cup of olive oil
tablespoon of thyme
tablespoon of herbs de provence
tablespoon of Italian seasoning
grated parmesan

Instructions

First get a large bowl and combine the water,sugar, and yeast. Mix well and let the yeast rise for about ten minutes. Next you’ll want to add flour about 1/2 cup at a time until all the liquid is absorbed. 1 1/2 cups is approximate. Start kneading the dough and as you knead add salt. Once the dough feels like it’s all mixed well you’ll need to shape it into a ball and then on a flour dusted countertop flatten the dough into a pizza shape and transfer to an oiled baking sheet.

Focaccia up close.

At this point use your fingertips and poke “wells” into the top of dough. Place this in the oven and make sure the oven is OFF. Let the dough rise for 10 minutes. Repeat the “wells”. Let rise again for another 10 minutes and repeat the “wells”. This time let it rise on countertop and turn on your oven to 350 degrees. While the oven is warming up you can now baste on your herb/oil topping and sprinkle the cheese on top. Bake it! It won’t take much longer than 15 minutes or so. Bake until top is golden.

Fresh baked!

Cooking time (duration): 45

Diet type: Vegetarian

Number of servings (yield): 4

Meal type: hors d’oerves

Culinary tradition: Italian

My rating:5.0 stars

Recipe by Keri Marion.

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