A Beautiful Day at Home! Decorating, Playing Piano & Cooking a Fireside Dinner!

[Music] happy New Year everyone I am so happy to see you again we have a lot of fun jobs to tackle today here's the list we need to visit the flower shop and arrange flowers for the Parlor all of my Christmas decorations are down so I think a Vasa flowers will introduce some beauty and life to the room I want to organize all of my gift wrapping paper after the Christmas holidays all of that paper and ribbon and whatnot is total chaos now I want to polish my silver tea and coffee pots and I need to practice piano but before we do anything I need to prep tonight's dinner we're doing mashed potatoes and cream spinach and some of those wonderful chicken meatballs that you and I made together in the previous episode the meatballs are solidly frozen so I need to thaw them these meatball balls will th very quickly in a bowl of water and in you go these will thaw in the refrigerator in a matter of hours now in the comments let me know if you have some great system for storing your gift wrapping items I do not and in fact we were going to film the part of my Pantry where I keep all my wrapping paper and ribbons and whatnot but frankly I'm too embarrassed to show it to [Music] you I'm bringing all of my gift wrapping paper to my workstation here now I went online the other day to try to discover how other people store their wrapping paper and it turned out there is a gift wrapping tote bag and here it is Christmas wrapping paper storage bag let's have a look I bought this on Amazon and if it looks like it works then I will link it in the description below I guess this part is the bottom of the tote let's open this up okay maybe this goes at the bottom then it has these pockets let me turn this around it has pockets in the upper part I suppose for storing ribbons and whatnot so let's see if we can fit all of this wrapping paper in here [Music] I think that's 12 rolls of wrapping paper already in here and then I always save my Christmas tissue paper so we can tuck this we'll fold it tuck it in here and there's a lot more room for additional tissue paper we can put this ribbon over here ditto for this ribbon and I can put my Christmas tags over here as well I guess this is a divider but I don't think I need a divider right now now I have lots of rolls of leftover wallpaper so I may actually buy another one of these totes just to hold all of the wallpaper found another roll that had dropped on the floor so this tote does hold a lot of paper I love it and then I can store this in the same closet where I keep my Christmas tree stand and Christmas lights and other things so we went from utter chaos to sheer control and now that our gift wrapping paper is taken care of going to finish my coffee and then we can head to the local flower shop yesterday there was sun and there was rain Beauty in the m and as the light startled [Music] we are home again and my flowers are over here just want to put this landscape fabric to protect my work surface and here is some upright U from the garden and here are the flowers from the flower shop [Applause] my vase flour [Music] preservative when I arrange flowers I like to start with greens [Music] so this will be a spring type arrangement with a little touch of winter this is [Music] Cedar ustr area [Music] [Music] so this is what we have so far this is the front and then we can keep playing around until we come up with a fairly respectable Arrangement Snap Dragon here's another another [Music] update these chrysanthemums are dropping their petals that's not a good sign blue delphinium [Music] white spray [Music] roses and blue thistle I may have to replace the Lilac colored chrysanthemums because they are dropping their petals but I think this Arrangement looks pretty respectable we will bring this into the Parlor later today for now I want to enjoy it right here in the [Music] kitchen I'm going to clean up my work station and then I want to bake off some of the cookies that you and I made together in a previous episode and we can enjoy those cookies for an early afternoon tea I need to preheat my oven to 35° F or about 160° C and we're going to bake these Ginger Snaps so these are cookies that we froze unbaked they're very convenient to have there's no work Beyond putting the little biscuits on a baking tray I think nine cookies will be [Music] enough and while the cookies are baking we can go ahead and polish this silver Sil now many of you have asked uh where you can buy a silver service like this one and in truth this was a gift to me from my spouse a year ago this silver is Sheffield silver sterling silver and it was manufactured in 1901 so you cannot go to Amazon to buy this but if you are interested in finding antique silver my best advice is to look at auctions online or to go to an antique store they very often have shuffield and other types of silver of course if you are looking for new silver then you probably can find it on Amazon I'm running very low on this jar of right silver cream but fortunately I have another jar start with the coffee [Music] pot polishing silver is a zen-like activity for me it's an easy job to do and one that brings instant gratification I can link the silver polish I'm using in the description below if you are interested [Music] [Music] I don't think this pierced Sugar Bowl needs any polishing I don't think my tray requires polishing either it's still very shiny so I'm going to rinse all of these in very hot water we are all rinsed here so now all I have to do is dry and buff everything with a soft cloth [Music] [Music] now should you find and an antique silver tea and coffee service it's a good idea to look inside each item some of them are very worn so you would have to have them resilvered or reined whatever they do but if they look really bad inside odds are you will not want to use the items mine were in very good shape both inside and out we are all polished and dried so now we can Brew some tea to go with our cookies these cookies smell just incredible I'm going to use this daring atnel tea that I buy from Tiara Farm I can have milk with this tea but I'm not going to have any sugar with it because there's plenty of sugar in these Ginger Snaps I think nine cookies is enough for one person they will give me the energy I need to practice piano later on let's head into the music room [Music] as you can see I recently moved my two pianos into a new position so that they are essentially nesting each other I did that because my friend Victoria and I are working on two piano literature and we wanted to be able to see each other when we practice this is such wonderful tea biscuit time I baked these cookies from Frozen for exactly 20 minutes which gave me a very crisp edge and a nice soft chewy interior these are absolutely perfection one more cookie and then I need to practice I have a dog at my side would you like a cookie she likes Ginger Snaps would you like a little tea to go with that [Music] here we go [Music] a [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] that was a great practice session thank you for listening and now it's time to start dinner so again we're doing mashed potatoes cream spinach and the wonderful chicken meatballs and for the mashed potatoes I need 1 and 34 cups or about 414 MLS of water and I need 1 cup or 240 Ms of whole milk 34 tpoon of salt 3 tbspoon of butter and two cups or about 110 G of my potato flakes now I buy these flakes at a menite general store there's no brand name on them I think the package just says potato flakes and cover these are the kind of mashed potatoes you can make well ahead of time and just put them in the refrigerator till you're ready to cook them and I make no apologies whatsoever for using potato flakes they are my favorite mashed potatoes my spouse's favorite and our guests love them too these only need 6 minutes in the microwave so I'm going to pop them into the refrigerator until we're ready to cook them and here are the meatballs all Al fod and I need to preheat my oven to 325° F or 170° [Music] Celsius set these aside and then we can get started on the cream spinach so I have one pound or 16 oz or 454 gram of Frozen chopped spinach here and I need to thaw this very quickly in the microwave that won't take B 3 minutes and while the spinach is thy I need to dice up an onion I need to drain this spinach to get rid of the liquid and then I want to further squeeze out the liquid a lot of liquid you need to release the liquid from the spinach so that you don't end up with a watery cream spinach and here's our Clump a perfectly good spinach it's really chilly in this house so I'm going to pop the chicken meatballs into the oven they will only need maybe 15 maybe 20 minutes to just warm them all the way through then I want to light a fire in The Parlor because it's very chilly in there and then we will cook the cream spinach and pop the mashed potato mixture into the microwave fire is lit let's cook our cream spinach so I have my saucepan over medium low heat I've added 2 tbspoon of butter now we can add the onion and I will let the onion cook oh for about 7 minutes until it softens now that the onions are tender I'm going to add one of my garlic pucks from homemade garlic you could add two minced cloves of garlic here now I'm adding 34 cup or about 150 Ms of heavy cream and about 3 tablespoon of cream cheese and I will bring this to a boil and let the mixture boil until the cream begins to thicken that will take about 4 minutes oh also I want to add a pinch of salt and a whisper of ground nutmeg smells wonderful already and now that our cream has thickened I'm going to add the spinach and just stir this together at this point we can cut off the heat now I happen to love my cream spinach just like this but if you want you can add some Parmesan cheese some recipes say one cup of Parmesan cheese I'm going to say however much parmesan cheese you want which for me was less than half a cup this looks gorgeous and I know this is absolutely wonderful because I made it last night and my spouse and I absolutely loved it I'm going to cover the cream spinach just to keep it warm and then we can put the mashed potatoes in the microwave 6 minutes [Music] our meatballs are staying warm in the oven the cream spinach is made so now all I have to do is Thoroughly stir the mashed potato mixture make sure all of that butter is well Incorporated and let me show you how I like to Plate this dinner now keep in mind that these chicken meatballs were already cooked so I only had to warm them through mashed potatoes right in the center of the plate maybe a little more mashed potatoes then I put the cream spinach directly on top of the potatoes followed by three meatballs and there we have it and these meatballs are so moist and delicious they don't require a sauce of any [Music] kind and there we have it a Chic little supper that we can enjoy in front of the fire let's head into the Parlor [Music] this is the kind of dinner for which coat Jone was invented now my spouse will be joining me shortly but my spouse does not wish to appear on camera going to have a perfect bite with a little mashed potato a little cream spinach and a nice piece of the chicken meatball for something that is so easy to make this is an Exquisite dish I give it five stars out of five stars the mashed potatoes have that perfect creamy consistency the cream spinach is perfectly seasoned with the nutmeg and the garlic and the onion and of course the chicken meatballs that you and I made together in the previous episode are moist tender Savory and I think just perfection well we certainly had a productive day today today thank you so much for spending time with me as we shopped for and arranged these flowers we organized all of the gift wrapping paper and again I will link that wrapping paper tote in the description below if you were interested what else did we do oh we polished the silver tea set we practiced piano and we made this Exquisite simple supper if you enjoyed today's video I can put a couple of my other videos at the end of this one that you can watch between now and my next upload thank you again for spending time with me today I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your company until the next episode please take great care of yourself and I will see you very soon bye for now friends [Music]