Mug shot

Showing off the mug Q made specifically so he could drink hot chocolate from it.  

We had a blast at Art! Attack painting this.   

House cocktail - Cherry Lime Cooler

I really enjoy drinking from stemware, so I've been trying to find new and interesting beverages that are suitable to using it, without necessarily having to pop open a bottle of wine.  This was a simple non-alcoholic cooler that was very refreshing on a late spring day...

1 cup of Cherry Cider
Juice from 2 limes
Dash of lemon juice
sugar to taste  (I used a single splenda packet.  You may want to add a cup of sugar.  Who knows?)
Add 1 bottle of mineral water, serve iced.

#64 Bowls of Brown

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Ahhhhhhhhh. Bowls of Brown, meant to be the peasant stew, filled with whatever meat happens to be on hand, whether it moo'd, squeaked, brayed, or pled for mercy before you knocked it on the head and picked its pockets.  The only way to do this justice was to mix as exotic a blend of meats as I could.

Five pounds of mixed meat in my 4 gallon stewpot means I needed to recruit a lot of friends to help me eat this.  Thankfully, a bunch of people were happy to bring their own bowl and head on over!

The Runaway Quincenera made an appearance too!

Green Eggs and Ham

Q! Breakfast is ready!

What is it?

Biscuits and [Canadian] Bacon.

Yum!  But actually, I want a Peanut Butter and Jelly biscuit.

Sure.

No, actually, I want green eggs and ham.

Really? [Looking at my skinny kiddo] you'll eat green eggs and ham?

Oh yes! I want green eggs and ham!

You will eat them in a house?

I will eat them in a car. And OOOH! in a tree!

Hmm.. OK why not?  [rustle/bustle/cook/cook/cook] TA DA!

Actually, mom, I _don't_ like green eggs and ham.

*sigh* [to no one in particular] Some days, I sympathize with you, Grinchie.

What?

Eat your biscuit, kid.

Meanwhislt, at Peter Piper Pizza

Sometimes you just have to pump a bunch of tokens in machines that give rides or spit out tickets.

Another English major, putting an expesive education to good use by entertaining me:

Garden: Starting the Veggies

This is my garden buddha, keeping vigil over the serenity of the back yard.

I managed to get a few things in the ground just in time for Spring Frost! :/

Actually, I think everything survived it, but I do have a knack for planting before the final frost hits...

Plenty of room to add more plants, but here is what is in the ground do far

Tomatoes planted near some volunteer onions

Eggplant 

White and red potatoes in the smaller raised bed.
More for greenery than produce, but if the harvest is fruitful, we will feast!

#63: Traditional Buttered Beets

Roasting beets in aluminum foil is the first step for a number of recipes involving beets.  This recipe is slightly different in that it calls for brushing the exterior of the beets with olive oil before wrapping them.  

It's hard to say if this added anything to the flavor, but I may try it again.

Secret ingredient here is a little vinegar.  Yum!!

Garden/Painting: Yellow Calla Lilly

 It's that time of year again where I spend a little money and time each week to create the garden.  In my front courtyard, I have a small area dedicated to flowers.  In my back yard, a raised veggie garden.

This year, I couldn't resist the siren's call of the calla lilly.  Naturally, I chose yellow, it being Q's favorite color of the moment.

Once I got the plant home and in the container* I found that it kept drawing my eye every time I went into or through the courtyard.

The next logical step was to paint some!

I stepped away from my untrained style of painting layers upon layers to give a try to the more professional method of drawing sections of tones out on a grid.  No underpainting this time, as much this subject needs the whiteness to come through.

So this is where I am at with it, and I suspect I will relabel all of this progress as "underpainting", create a new but similar palette and color it anew.  

* Self watering

#62 Modern Cheese and Onion Pie

This recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire is a quite tasty dish!

Don't let the name fool you, though.  The main player in this show is the potato, not the onion.  

Think of this as a creamy Potato Au Gratin Pie.

Having proven that I can make a crust from scratch in earlier recipes, I no longer feel the need to do it from scratch for every remaining pie.  Plus, premade crusts are a real time saver, and are a fine substitute.

The filling is largely premade before baking, and the flavors blend together wonderfully. Coupled with the flaky crust, this dish has a lovely creamy texture.

House Cocktail

Like Buttah

By Ewan Munro from London, UK
(Bob Bob Ricard, Soho, London  Uploaded by tm)
[CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Today I am making a recipe from A Feast of Ice and Fire that calls for not one, but two sticks of butter.

For giggles, I looked up the nutritional value of that, and the butter alone is well over 1600 calories.

Sixteen hundred calories. Seriously.

Gearing up for Bowls of Brown

Five pounds of mixed meat in this stew.

By Wilfredor (Own work) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

Five freaking pounds of meat.  Do you know how many people that will serve?  20 or better, for real.   I'm inviting a slew of people over to help me eat this one.  The final list of mostly uncommon meats includes:

* Beef Bones (large marrow for soup)
* Chopped Goat
* Chopped Lamb
* Duck Giblets
* Ground Kangaroo
* Turkey Gizzards

I may need to save just a little kangaroo, so I can taste it outside of this meat medley.  I've never had it before...

Garden: Morning Glories

 

I's April in New Mexico, which means getting the garden ready.  I'll be posting some of the things I've been doing to get my green on.

I'm gearing up to plant a bunch of morning glories so they decorate the walls of my courtyard.

I wanted to mix up the colors randomly so I mixed all the seeds together in a glass before soaking them overnight.

(Soaking the seeds overnight helps germination.)

 

Don't eat these. 

Veggie Brush

If you have a brush that you use to clean veggies, make absolutely sure that you mark it in such a way that you never accidentally use it to clean dishes or cookware.  You don't want that nastiness on your crisp veggies.  Srsly.

Scrub-thulu. A mild-mannered distant cousin on the -Thulu family tree.
The idea of touching anything but veggies makes me... bristle.

*sigh* Yeah, I know.

 

Broth of Seaweed and Clams Revisited

Awww, shucks!

Two days on the same recipe. I had been really looking forward to this recipe, and I admit I was a little disappointed.  I don't fault the lovely authors of A Feast of Ice and Fire, but rather my tendency to project expectations on how a dish will taste.

Still, I opted to dress this up a bit but adding:
1 tbsp kosher salt
Parmesan Cheese.

That made things much better.  Next time I may add soy sauce, and use the string seaweed instead of the Nori sheets.

#61 Broth of Seaweed and Clams

 

This recipe called for fresh clams.  Being in landlocked New Mexico seafood in general and fresh molluscs in particular are at a premium.  I used frozen clams.

I also rehydrated seaweed, and learned a valuable lesson: Don't get distracted while dehydrating seaweed, or else you are likely to end up with a slushy mess when you try to cut it into strips, like so:

So this came out ok.  It's a very light broth, mild in flavor.  I expected it to be much more salty than it turned out.

Bonus Recipe: Parmesan Chard

 “The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly  serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens
when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn
moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat
stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to
the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.”

― Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

There are a lot of recipes in A Feast of Ice and Fire involving beets. The bonus here is that beet greens (a type of chard) are damn near the most delicious of the green leafies, imho.  They are just lovely juiced or boiled with onion.  Today I did something a little different:

 

 

Heat 2-3 tbsp Olive Oil and 2-3 cloves minced garlic in your pan, toss in the beet greens, includin those lurid pink stems!  Cook until all is wilted and some is blackened.  Add 1 tbsp lemon juice and Parmesan cheese.

Wine Cork Trivet

Some people say to me, Marianne.... 

I like to save all the corks from all those crazy bottles of wine I drink, 

but I just don't know what to DO with them!

Ok, no one actually says that to me.  *I* say that to me. 

 Turns out, Corks make GREAT trivets.  

You may have seen these make an appearance once or twice in previous posts.

 This was the first one I made.  I gathered the corks together into a round shape and measured the copper tubing to coil around it.  I then tightened the coil and soldered the ends as shown.  Each cork is loose within the coil an held in by pressure alone.  The copper band has patina'd [sic] nicely over the years, and the corks have never come loose.

This one is a bit larger made some years later.  I glued the corks together and held them in place with a copper foil tape. However, the foil tape did not hold up well to even light use, and the glue does not hold all of the corks as well as I hoped.  I added a thin velcro band as a temporary measure and then ended up keeping it as-is.  It works just fine!

#60 Medieval Creme Bastard

Iced blueberries.  Sweet cream custard.  Simple, fresh and delicious.

Juice Fast

The title of this post is misleading.  It should just say Juice.  And by that I mean that I had a sandwich today - an Einstein Brother's veggie sandwich on a bagel.  And chips.  And a big cookie.  So there.

But that's ok.  I'm getting a barrage of nutrients through the juicing, which is the point.  And also, I will not have a sammich each time.  Or a cookie.

One of the byproducts of using a juicer is the aftermath of fibrous waste.  I don't have a composter and putting this every week in my garden would quickly overwhelm the worms and result in some unsavory side effects like mold and buggies.

So, I create a bird bag each week.  Bird bag is the term used by the teachers at Q's preschool for all the scraps and leftovers that can be fed to chickens.  A few of the teachers there keep chickens, as I may have previously mentioned.