Food Time: Crab Nachos

These are pretty tasty and cheap for those of us who sometimes get seafood cravings but can't afford a lot. ($2 a can for crab meat from Walmart if you buy their brand, so, yeah, just because it's seafood doesn't mean you need to spend a lot on it.)

Normally my family uses a Mexican cheese blend or a queso cheese on the nachos, but I opted to try Italian cheese blend on my latest ones. It also works really well.

Oven - 400

1 can crab meat
Sour cream (I like using Darigold's Mexican style sour cream)
Tortilla chips (I usually opt for a big bag of On of the Border chips since they last me for lots of meals)
1 bag shredded cheese (I suggest either a non-spicy Mexican blend, a simple queso, or an Italian blend)

- Arrange chips on baking trays; I highly recommend putting down parchment paper under the chips since it will help cut down clean up time. Trying to clean potentially burned cheese off the baking tray is not so fun.
- Put about half a spoonful of sour cream on each chip, spreading the dollop out a little.
- Place small amount of crab on top of the sour cream (how much is up to you, I usually put just enough to cover the sour cream but not much more)
- Sprinkle cheese over chips
- Bake for roughly 5 minutes. I tend to keep an eye on them and just remove them when the cheese is melted on the chips themselves.

Crafty: Steampunk inspired jewelry box

So, as some of you may know I love the Steampunk aesthetic. I fully admit it's taken me a lot longer than I wanted to get my steampunk costumes finished (because I keep changing my mind lol), but I do fiddle around with small things here and there.

I've been wanting something else to hold my jewelry in rather than the book box that it's all been in, at least until I get my jewelry box from home. After keeping my eye out at Goodwill for options, I stumbled upon this box (for $1.25):

It's handy enough to keep what little jewelry I have in, but it was definitely not the colors I wanted lol. So I set about making it a bit more like something I'd want using what I had on hand. First step was painting a gloss black over the outside. It took a lot of coats, and the embossed parts were still kind of visible if you tilted it right. Next I sponged on a metallic ruby paint I had:

Then sponged the antique gold I had on over that (since I've got a ton of that stuff and have no need for it since I sold my slave leia):

The final steps involved gluing some old gears I had made up for other outfits on top, plus one of the little acrylic gems I had for my twi'lek's old headband. I got some flowers from the dollar store and cut the flower parts off to glue them on top since I felt it was a bit lacking with just the gears and gem. So, here are some final series of pictures:

I don't have any pictures of the inside, but I went more punk and less steam for that. lol Put down some Pactra racing pink then sponged some black on over that. But, it's a nice box for my stuff for now, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

Food Time: (The Best) Chocolate Chip Cookies

I do not feel any shame in calling these the best chocolate chip cookies I have ever had. Seriously, they are that good. Over the years I've tried a good many number of recipes trying to find one that was just right. According to the recipe book I got this recipe out of these are supposedly the Mrs. Field's recipe cookies. I can't vouch for that, nor can I even say if they actually taste like Mrs. Field's cookies. They are, however, awesome.

Oven: 350

1 cup softened butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 package Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chips

- cream together the butter, sugars, egg and vanilla
- sift together flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder
- combine the wet and dry ingredients then mix in the chocolate chips
- spoon the dough onto a prepared baking sheet (I use one covered with parchment paper to cut down on the mess)
- bake for 9 minutes (yes, exactly 9 minutes even if they don't look cooked; as long as you didn't heap the dough too much they will be cooked)

These come out wonderfully crispy on the edges and deliciously soft in the middle.