Supermeow!

Happy New Year! I spent most of the month of December feeling thoroughly overwhelmed and anxious. I am genuinely pleased that 2011 is over, and I’ve got a lot of optimism for 2012 to not suck so hard. Still, I worked myself into a bit of a tizzy in December. Without going into details, there was a lot on my mind.

As such, I decided to take it easy about some of the things I’d usually fret over a lot more. Like, uh, making presents for people. I really have come to like making presents for people a lot more than I like buying stuff at the store (for the most part – there are some things that come from a store that are going to genuinely make a person happy, too). I also didn’t really know what I wanted to do for my coworkers. I decided to keep it simple and make mini loaves of banana bread using the recipe from the Flour Bakery cookbook.

However, even that seemed really overwhelming, and I didn’t get to do this before the Christmas holiday. I decided to use Ukrainian Christmas as my excuse for getting these out after the New Year. Hopefully, all of my coworkers aren’t going to plead “diet” when I dole these out. The banana bread’s got some virtue: I added flaxseed meal to the batter. Also, bananas have HELL OF potassium, and all of the fatty stuff in the bread is good fatty stuff: walnuts, canola oil, eggs to a certain degree, etc. So… maybe just don’t eat the whole loaf at once. How about that?

I also made some granola because I didn’t have enough banana bread to go around. ;_; Surely someone’s going to hate bananas but love granola.

For my sweetie pie Gen, I made fresh pesto. I was at her house last month and had some pesto and was telling her how easy it is to make it at home (when you’ve got a food processor). Soooo, I made some for her and her honey.

Pesto really is easy to make, and very versatile in terms of what kind of stuff you can put into it. I thought using toasted flaxseeds along with the pine nuts would be nice – got the idea from a Martha Stewart recipe. This tasted nice and bright!

I’m looking forward to gettin’ hell of creative in 2012. I just traded up my Silhouette SD for a Silhouette Cameo, and I’ve already had some fun cutting adventures with it. I’ve got a bunch of laser-cut acrylic stuff to add to my Etsy shop (I’m still mulling over packaging for stuff, plus I also need to straight-up make some other stuff on my agenda). There’s a collage project that I want to work on for Anime Boston (I’m hoping to be in the artists’ alley again). I have a lot of plans, and hopefully with careful planning, I can execute all of them. I’d like to turn a decent profit this year. Since I had to go through the trouble of registering for a dang federal employer identification number, I’d like to at least make a couple of supplemental bucks. We’ll see how it goes this year!

To a bright future! 2012, begin!