{"id":3744,"date":"2016-04-05T21:10:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T04:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/?p=3744"},"modified":"2016-04-05T22:02:14","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T05:02:14","slug":"recent-developments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/?p=3744","title":{"rendered":"recent developments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"future strawberries\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/25655164124\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1648\/25655164124_5ccdceba97_z.jpg\" alt=\"future strawberries\" width=\"640\" height=\"446\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"kombucha flavors\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/26259942005\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1678\/26259942005_73186d7304_z.jpg\" alt=\"kombucha flavors\" width=\"640\" height=\"431\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"chocolate\/matcha bundt\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/26193688721\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1613\/26193688721_1e37c99199_z.jpg\" alt=\"chocolate\/matcha bundt\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"yellow silk moth\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/26259940555\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1442\/26259940555_361dc32e86_z.jpg\" alt=\"yellow silk moth\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"cat buds\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/26234010056\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/farm2.staticflickr.com\/1688\/26234010056_4e229e3e11_z.jpg\" alt=\"cat buds\" width=\"640\" height=\"427\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the fall, my mom gifted me several pots of strawberry plants, and because they do okay with little to no intervention, I have managed to keep them alive. They have started to produce tiny white blossoms, and if all goes well, in a month or so, they&#8217;ll be laden with strawberries. Apart from some herbs and a sad looking fennel plant, this will be the first edible thing I&#8217;ve grown, and a suitable test of my green thumb. I&#8217;m a halfway-decent plant caretaker, but I still do best with the ones that thrive on neglect, like succulents and peace lilies.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, Nick and I have started brewing kombucha. It&#8217;s much less involved than I imagined, and all it requires is sweetened tea, a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SCOBY\" target=\"_blank\">scoby<\/a>, and a little time. A friend gave us our scoby and we it named Eunice, because that seemed fitting for something so languid and strange. We still need to tweak our recipe a bit, but our first few batches have been pretty close to perfect. I&#8217;ve been experimenting with the addition of different fruit purees, and I think the winner (by a slim margin) is raspberry.<\/p>\n<p>Last week I made what was supposed to be a marbled chocolate and matcha bundt cake. In my haste to get it in the oven, I forgot to drag a butter knife through the batter&#8211; which meant it turned out more like a color-block bundt cake. I followed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.joyofbaking.com\/MarbleCake.html\" target=\"_blank\">this recipe<\/a>, stirring a few tablespoons of matcha into the white cake batter before spooning it into the pan. It&#8217;s not super sweet, which made the leftovers excellent for breakfast. If I were to make it again, it would definitely benefit from a drizzle of chocolate ganache.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve started a new project which involves the use of butterflies, beetles, and moths. It turns out dead bugs are relatively inexpensive, which has made me pretty regretful about all the time I&#8217;ve wasted not having a collection of cool insects. The guy above is a yellow silk moth&#8211; and can you believe those antennae?! This project will be the closest to art-making I&#8217;ve come since graduating from college and I am really excited about it!<\/p>\n<p>Lately I&#8217;ve been trying to come to terms with the fact that my beautiful green sofa is on its last leg. The corners are worn and frayed (no thanks to a certain orange cat), its striped velvet cushions have borne the brunt of several spills, and certain spots have become faded and discolored by years of sunlight. I&#8217;ll always remember how ecstatic I was to find it, and how lucky it seemed that it <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/childerhouseblog\/2829197950\/in\/album-72157624609841370\/\" target=\"_blank\">fit perfectly<\/a> in the impossibly small living room of our second apartment. Because it&#8217;s handmade and likely one of a kind, there is little hope of finding a similar replacement (although I&#8217;ve spent a lot of time fruitlessly googling &#8220;green striped velvet upholstery fabric&#8221;). The plan is to dismantle it and refashion the usable pieces of fabric into some chair cushions, but I&#8217;ll always miss its first iteration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; In the fall, my mom gifted me several pots of strawberry plants, and because they do okay with little to no intervention, I have managed to keep them alive. They have started to produce tiny white &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/?p=3744\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-home","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3744\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/childerhouseblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}