A puzzling week or so

We've been doing puzzles lately! Thanks to an informal puzzle exchange at yoga (gotta love yoga), I swapped out a couple puzzles. Everyone's been working on them on our big dining table. I love how it becomes this mini-obsession for all of us as we walk by. ^_^

This one was FANTASTIC because we could all claim a little box section to do, put it together, then slowly join them. For once, I didn't mandate that the edge had to be done first. ;)

More happenings after the jump!

I've been cooking and baking a lot lately. I wanted something savory and bready-snack-y, so I got out this cookbook, Prashad, that Caron gave me long ago (hi, Caron!) and made these pancakes! I didn't make them exactly by the recipe (I was short a couple ingredients) and I added shredded carrot as it mentions for a variation. They were super tasty!

The recipe says to eat them with jaggery/brown sugar, as they're a bit sour from the yogurt, which I did and I enjoyed them a lot. A and E thought they were a bit on the sour side and didn't like the sugar aspect, and C rejected them flat out (as she does these days, it's OK, she'll get there). I tried to make it easy for her by only putting in ONE JALAPENO with the SEEDS REMOVED instead of the, like, 5 chili peppers it called for . . . but she still said it was too spicy. I mean, they were not spicy AT ALL, but whatever. She does eat one of the truly spicy crispy snacks I sometimes get, so that's a start. Why that and not this? I will never know.

I made a couple other deep fried things from this book with . . . not much success, but I have a few more things bookmarked to try.

In other news, I just had a meeting about the squirrels book, so now Jan and I are on the same page. (See what I did there? Ha ha!) It's going to be so cute! I want to try to work on it alongside my second Toasty and Snowy book, which has been sadly sitting off to the side of my desk since late January, even though I've drawn over half of the pictures! So let's get both these books up and running, shall we? Yes! Right after I pop in this little sewing pattern project I'm designing.

There are just too many ideas! How do people tolerate not working on all the extra ideas they have in their heads?! This is a huge challenge for me. I know, I know, prioritize . . . but I want to do them all; they're all important! Ugh, time. Not enough. Sigh!