Wanderlust

Wanderlust: strong longing for or impulse toward wandering
www.merrium-webster.com

Wanderlust, in its purest form is the desire to travel. But I also think it is the desire to escape. Escape the normalcy of the Monday through Friday schedule. With that in mind, I begin my journey into Wanderlust and will document the weekend journeys, adventures and new experiences. Even if I don't even have to leave my kitchen. The first adventure into the unknown is with a new experience. I am going to make handmade finger paint this afternoon. Little One just went to bed for a nap. She's excited to wake up to a wide world of color. Here's the recipe from fun-stuff-to-do.com:

Basic Heated Fingerpaint

• 1 cup flour
• 2 tablespoons salt
• 1 1/2 cups cold water
• 1 1/2 cups hot water
• 2 tablespoons food colouring

Directions:

Mix 1 cup of flour and 2 tablespoons of salt

Add the cold water and stir until there are no lumps

Add the hot water and bring to a boil while stirring

Remove from heat once thickened

Continue to whisk until all lumps are gone

Add food colouring and stir well

Pour into desired containers

Allow time to cool down or refrigerate

Shake before use and refrigerate after use

Sounds easy, right? It is! I realized about half way through that it's just like making a gravy, a thick gravy, but a gravy nonetheless.


I gathered all of the ingredients on the counter since I wasn't sure how quickly it would all come together. I recommend this because it's a pretty quick process. In the medium pan I whisked the flour and salt together, in the small pan I added the 1 1/2 cups of water and put it on the stove on high to heat it up for the third step. I put the cold water in a cup so that I could add it slowly to the flour mixture. With everything in place, I was ready to start.


If you have never made a roux for gravy, this part might be tricky. Don't go adding all of the water at once. This would make for lumpy paint (and gravy). Add a little at a time, forming a paste. As you go, you can add a little more but be sure to whisk the entire time. Once I had the milky consistency you see above, the other water was hot and ready to add. Again, add the hot water slowly. I think this is called tempering in the cooking world. You do this so that the hot water doesn't "cook" the flour mixture before it is incorporated. Once that was added, I turned the burner on med-high and kept whisking. This is to prevent the bottom layer from cooking and making the mixture all lumpy.


The recipe doesn't give times and I think that is because you can make this paint whatever texture you want. The longer you heat the mixture, the thicker it will be. I may have over done mine, making it very thick.


In any event, now you are ready to add your food coloring. The recipe calls for one BIG batch of one color. Unless you have a kindergarten class you are prepping for, I would suggest splitting it and making a variety of colors. If I had prepped better, I would have gotten small mason jars, Tupperware or something like that. But I didn't so I added about a tablespoon to each of the divots in a container for deviled eggs. A Muffin tin would have also worked.


My daughter's only request was that there be pink and black. So I gave her a rainbow, knowing at some point all of those colors are going to mix and she is going to make her own black paint. I used a four pack of neon food colors that I had bought for a tye-dye cupcake recipe on her birthday. They served very nicely, but any colors will work.


I added one drop of each to the rows of white goop and stirred it in with wooden barbeque skewers. In the last row I added an extra drop and made random color combinations.

And there you have it. I had a lot of the original mixture left over, so I put it in a Tupperware and will probably do this again next weekend. Little One is still napping so I put the mixture in the fridge to cool. Once we have our art projects done, I will post an update. I'm looking forward to it!