Envy Booklet

My daughter attended Creative Escape in Arizona a few weeks ago and took a class one day from Tim Holtz and they made the absolutest cutest books ever. I was so envious I decided I had to build one of my own. Because I thought I was leaving tomorrow for an extended trip to visit family, I didn't think I had time to place an order and receive it from Scraplovers
So I went downtown to a local scrapbooking store that I won't name and even though the owner claimed she had some of the elements for the book, she just didn't want to look for them. She had recently moved her store and the items I wanted were in the back room. I totally get that she was really, really tired after the move and all, but even when I said I could come back this week for the items, she then changed her story and said she used to have them and didn't think she had them anymore. All righty, then.
Anyway, here is my version of Tim's Holtz's book and if you are interested in doing one, email me and I'll send you a list of stuff you need and dimensions. I had everything I needed here in my studio already.

I have a thing about doors....

We took a few days out of our two week vacation in Kosovo to drive north into Serbia and visit Novi Sad. What a place! We had been told many times by friends how beautiful it is and how the architecture is so different from Kosovo and southern Serbia where everything has a Turkish influence. They were right. The Vojvodina area is very much of the Austro-Hungarian elements.
This is just one of the doors I photographed in Novi Sad the day we were leaving. I don't know how I almost missed it as it was only about a half block down the street from our hotel. But I didn't see it until we were driving away.
I just have a thing about doors and windows. I don't know why.

Does this make me a Foodie?

Every now and then I have to post something about a new dish I made, some wildly exotic ingredient I just discovered, or a new restaurant. But nothing compares to the food I enjoyed in the Balkans.
Last month The Husby and I went back to Kosovo to visit old friends and discovered upon going into downtown Pristina that our favorite restaurant, Bella Vista, had closed sometime in the last two years. We were so unhappy! We decided to go to Agora which is only a couple of doors down from where Bella Vista used to be. Turns out their Shop Salad was just as good.
Allow me to tell you about a surprisingly simple salad that is so delicious it makes your heart melt. It is only chopped up tomatoes and cucumbers and some kind of white goat cheese that is a little salty. I spent a considerable amount of time while I lived in Kosovo trying to exactly replicate that salad at home. It was only a short time before I left the country that I found out what kind of cheese to buy. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what it is but I could find out. Even more unfortunate is the fact that that cheese does not exist in America. Even if it did, there isn't a garden grown tomato that comes close to the taste of the ones in Kosovo. I have no idea where these tomatoes came from as I never saw fields of tomatoes being grown there for commercial use. Many local people had a few tomato plants in their gardens for their own use. So I believe the tomatoes were trucked in from Macedonia or Montenegro. At any rate, the taste was heavenly. It is no coincidence, I believe, that the Serbian word for tomato is "paradajz" (pronounced like paradise). Think of the best all time tomato you ever tasted and then take that times a thousand. Then you get an idea.
Notice the pizza, too. Again, the best! The only suggestion I could make on the pizzas there is to throw on a few more olives. The olives there are killer. We used to buy packages of some really wonderful black olives that came from Turkey. Never mind the fabulous green olives we used to get from Serbia and Greece.
I have to stop now. I'm working up a little tear in my eye.