Megpoid Gumi: Skyrocket!

She´s my favorite Vocaloid.

This is today´s themesong for me; I´m going to tackle the day with lots and lots of energy!

How Tagled should have ended...

This seriously made me laugh. I wondered the exact same thing during the movie. Poor Flynn. XD

Summer nails!!

This weekend, I went out with some friends to buy a bit of cloth for some cosplays and just making a plain old skirt (in my case). I wore a nice little flowery MILK JSK, and I wanted my nails to match, at least a little bit.

The blue and green nailpolish were both a bit sparkly.

Since the JSK was printed with small blue and pinkish-red flowers, I decided that that´s the way my nails had to go. Spring-to-summer-like.

My left hand flowers didn´t end up looking that bad....

It´s the first time that I tried to draw flowers on my nails, so I think that a few of them look a bit like failures as flowers....but I can´t deny that I had fun! Well, fun except for when I had to patiently wait for one hand to dry so I could paint my other nails without damaging them.....

Thumb closeup.

Thursday is my last day of work before summer--I´m really looking forward to it. I found these really cute nail art stickers recently, and I´ve decided that I´m going to use ones that I bought to make myself some panda-themed nails for the last day of class. I can´t wait! Now I just have to decide on the background color.....

Summer has started!!

Summer has officially started for me: I ate my first cherries!

This is an absolute tradition in my family; there´s no way summer has started until the first bowl (or kilogram, hahahaha--we love ´em) of cherries is eaten.

I sacrificed myself valiantly for my family and had the first bowl around dinnertime last night.

Yep, delicious cherries in my really-darned-old Mickey Mouse bowl.

 I also had a sign that my luck is going to improve soon: I found a triple-cherry mixed with the others in my bowl.

And all three were delicous.

I don´t know if it´s just my family or if the idea is more widespread, but like I said--triple cherries are considered lucky. Is that the same in your family or country?

That´s all for today!!

Cooking with Laia: Chicken Parmesan

Hello there again!

If there is one thing that I really enjoy eating, it´s cheese. I´m a fan of a lot of different varieties, but if I had to pick a top three for cheese, I´d choose Cured Manchego Cheese, Red Cheddar Cheese and Parmesan Cheese. As you can see, I´m a fan of stongly-flavored, aged cheese.

I also like chicken much more than any kind of meat (or fish).

This weekend, I wanted to make breaded chicken, one of my favorite dishes. I always accompany it with salad or french fries (depending on whether I´m feeling healthy or naughty).

Then I thought......"We have a wedge of Parmesan Cheese in our fridge. Why not use it to combine two things you like best?" So, I did.

Behold, Breaded Parmesan Chicken!

It´s quite easy, you just have to mix the grated cheese with the breadcrumbs and that´s it. You should put in enough cheese that it tastes like cheese, but taking into account your own personal proportion--just how cheesy do you want it to be? (My answer was: Very cheesy!)

I also cut the chicken thinner than usual, to make sure that the cheese didn´t burn or melt too much while the chicken was cooking in the fryer. 

Oh, and a recommended ingredient when breading: I´ve discovered Japanese "Panko"! It´s very cool, it´s normal breadcrumbs but treated somehow so that they´re still crunchy even after frying! You can absolutely tell the difference, and it´s also a different texture and crunchiness than when using corn flakes or regular breadcrumbs in the breading process. It was a very interesting change from my usual "breaded chicken".

Would you like to eat this? Are you also a "cheese fan"?

Crafts and fun: Letter Bookmarks

Hello  there everyone!

I´m writing from my father´s computer, since my poor laptop´s power cord died on me.....and I have to wait for the new one I ordered to come. It´s actually quite strange, not having a laptop to use whenever I feel like it. Thank goodness for my smartphone: I can actually check my email.

I thought blogging was definitely out of the question until my father brought his work laptop home, though. A big thank you for him, since he was nice enough to lend it to me for awhile----

Now, these past few days I´ve been feeling "crafty". I´ve seen what wonderful things some of my friends have made, and decided that I wanted to do something creative (that doesn´t involve cosplay in any shape or form, hahaha). However, it´s not like I usually have many materials on hand--quite the opposite. Ask me for a gajillion sewing supplies, and I´ll probably have them and shove my surplus in your direction. Craft supplies? Not so much.

That´s when I saw my pride and joy--my letterbox. I had the greatest idea flash!! Being the lengthy letter-writer that I am, I am forever buying letterpaper. However, most writing paper brands seem to think that the acceptable length for a letter is 2 pages--when I write a 5-page minimum amount on principle. Not to mention those writing paper brands (Western, all of ´em) that for some strange reason make envelopes in which the paper doesn´t fit because they´re too effing small. The result should be quite obvious: I have a lot of leftover unused envelopes lying around, doing absolutely nothing. Well, nothing but existing and being there and completely useless and taking up valuable space..

Besides being a letterwiter, I´m also a reader. I read a lot. Most of the time, one or two books at the same time (not literally!). I use lots of bookmarks. But.....I am a complete disaster and always end up losing one or twobookmarks for every six or seven books I read. That´s just not fun! I like cute ones, but end up using pieces of paper because I don´t want them to disappear randomly.

Combine these two situations?

Yes, that´s it! I decided to use the extra envelopes I had to make bookmarks. After all, it´s not like I was going to use those too-small envelopes, really. As an experimental procedure, I decided to use two differnt kinds: one bunch of envelopes with a flower (daisy) theme, and another with a Tinkerbell theme, since those are the ones I had the most of.

Here are the original daisy envelopes (no pictures of the Tinkerbell ones alone, sorry!):

And here is my "Daisy bookmark", compared to the envelope. I made each side of the bookmark "different", trying for an "opposite" look, to make it more interesting and use the envelope material in the most thrifty way:

Side 1, the "front"

Side 2, the "back"

I used three envelopes to make it, as well as half of a soft thin cardboard card that came as "support" in the pack of writing paper.

The Tinkerbell envelopes had a lot less decoration on the original envelope, so they had less "creative possibility". I ended up making a cute Tinkerbell "character bookmark".  I also switched where her name was from one side to the other, because I thought that it´d be boring otherwise.

Side 2, the "back"

Side 1, the "front"

I used two envelopes for this bookmark, since there weren´t any particular designs that I could "thrift" as it were. Also, the other half of the soft cardboard "backing".

I wanted to add tassels to the bookmarks too, but I thought that it might be a bit too much.







What do you think about these designs? Do you like them? Which one do you like better?











Which sides do you like best? Have you ever done anything like this? I´d love to know! I really enjoy getting comments! <3

Baking materpieces: Banana-chocolate chip muffins

Hello everyone!!

I´m in the middle of correcting my kiddies´ third term exams at the moment, and calculating their final grades, but everybody has the right to take a moment to rest, right?

In my moment this weekend, I took the time to make some delicious banana-chocolate-chip muffins.It was a bit of a celabration for me when I actually found some chocolate chips--for some reason, they´re not easy to find here in Spain. I guess because it´s not really traditional to use them in our cakes and cookies and such.

The muffins!!

The kind I found was semi-sweet dark chocolate chips. I like milk chocolate better, but--beggars can´t be choosers. In the end, the semi-sweet dark flavor worked out best with the natural sweetness of the ripe bananas I used. They were Canary island bananas, by the way--they´re smaller and sweeter than the average bananas (so I had to use 5 instead of the 2 that the recipe indicated).

They looked good; quite professional!

Biting into them when they were hot and the chocolate chips were gooey was bliss.

The batter made 12 normal-sized muffins. With what I had left over, I made 12 mini-muffins. I could have made 6 more normal ones, but I really wanted to try out the mini muffin cups I bought at IKEA way back in February.

So tiny and cute!

The design on the small ones--the larger muffin cups were plain.

I had lots of fun with this quick project; it also enabled me to use up the overripe bananas that none of us really wanted to eat! I´m definitely going to repeat this recipe again; it´s been more popular than the banana-blueberry ones.

What´s you favorite kind of muffins?

Book fair weekend plans

This weekend is the Annual Book Fair in Madrid. I´m going to be going down to "The City" on Saturday or Sunday--probably Sunday, since there´ll be less people, but it really depends on the weather--to check it out.

Who knows, I might go ahead and buy a few books while I´m at it, if there are any good deals. I´m keeping my fingers crossed; it´s been awhile since I bought a physical book, and I´m really looking forward to feeling that weight in my hands, reading an unread adventure and smelling that unique "new book" smell.

Am I a bit of a book geek? Yep. Definitely and without a doubt.