Thanksgiving 2011

Eh, I'm only two weeks late with my Thanksgiving post. Truth is, I'm enjoying relaxing. This season I'm determined not to run around like a crazed maniac just because society and the retailers say I should. I did not, nor do I ever plan to participate in Black Friday. I did however,

Eat. A. TON.

Most of my pictures from Thanksgiving either show us cooking food or eating food.

Sounds about right.

Here's me and my mom racing around the kitchen doing last minute prep.

And Ralph giving some fatherly advice on making gravy.

And carving The Bird.
(Which only took two hours longer to cook than originally planned. Sweet.)

The next day I felt bad for having starved my parents the day before, so we decided to have Ralph's mom and fiancé over for more food.

Yes, there was more food than this.

I love men in the kitchen.

I did finally decide to extricate myself from the table and my parents and I waddled around The Getty museum for a day. Its architecture, gardens, and views are just as impressive as the art.

We also forced the boys into some mandatory physical activity.

The rest of the time was spent mostly doing this:

Relaxing, sleeping, lavishing attention on the mutts.


All in all, a lot less stressful than I thought it would be.
I hope Christmas is the same.

Presidents' Day Celebration ~ With Cupcakes

Some of us have to work today.

Some of us even had to drive 60 miles to get to said work.

In the pouring rain.

Without our carpool partner.

And tons of people are out sick, so some of us have extra work to do.

But I digress.

From now on, whenever I'm thinking of whining about my workload, I will just look at this gigantic mosaic made from 5,900 cupcakes:



It kind of puts everything in perspective.

And it also makes me realize that I have absolutely no patience for this kind of work.

Meaning I should get back to my own job.

And quit complaining.

Good thing Zilly Rosen at Zillycakes has the patience, desire, and skills to think up and execute this huge undertaking. You can see her with her team in the picture above, putting the finishing touches on the cupcake creation, which was made in the Smithsonian on Friday. She even had a live webcam set up so you could watch the progress.

Here's the finished product:


For more pictures of the making of the mosaic, as well as other amazing, and sometimes downright-awful cake creations, go to Cake Wrecks. (Click here for the original post.)

Happy Presidents' Day everyone!

New Year's Wish Basket

Image source

Okay, do you have a friend or neighbor that you didn't get a gift for Christmas, but now you think it might have been a good idea to do so? Or are you just in the mood to give something to someone as a little token of celebrating the New Year? Here is an idea I came up with at the 11th hour when I realized I had 10 extra people to buy gifts for on Christmas Eve. Yikes!

I decided to give them a Wish Basket for the New Year. This includes a handful of little things that I either bought (inexpensively) or made, and attached creative little notes to.

First off, I totally stole Crunchy Chicken's idea for a candy cane sugar scrub. Basically, you take a few candy canes (about six per scrub) and crush them up to a fine powder. I don't have a rolling pin, so I used a jar of molasses.


Mix with a cup of sugar and about half a cup of olive oil (Crunchy also recommends almond oil) and about 5-10 drops of peppermint oil. (This helps mask the smell of the olive oil.) I put a bit of vitamin E in too, although it's not necessary, and it's a pain if you only have it in gel capsules!

I then put them in small mason jars and used Scrapblog to create cool little labels for them:


On top of the jar I put this label:

I also put a bottle of wine or champagne in the basket with this label:


And some cookies in a jar or bag with this label:


For the religiously inclined, I included an angel:



You can see I lined the baskets with kitchen towels that read Peace. (Got those at the dollar store, along with the angels and jars, wine bags, etc.)

Even though it was tough having all those extra people to buy for, it ended up fairly easy once I got the idea. I just had to buy in multiples.



I ended up giving a basket to each of my next door neighbors yesterday, as a show of good will on New Year's Day. Obviously, the possibilities are endless as to what you can put into the baskets, and you can tailor them for any holiday, birthday, or other occasion.

Great, I Can't Even Eat Chocolate Anymore

I was perusing MSN.com this morning, and found this article about eco-guilt-free chocolate.

The article states that most of the people creating the non-fair-trade version of the delicious food are mainly

"West African tikes who fritter away their days in the hot sun extracting seeds (not beans) from gooey cacao fruit. The Ivory Coast supplies almost half of the world’s cocoa, and it is estimated that up to 6 percent of its child workers are victims of human trafficking or slavery."

With the amount of chocolate I eat, I probably keep hundreds of child slaves busy in the hot sun.


The article does go on to list some fair trade cocoa companies, as well as telling us to check chocolate's packaging for the TransFair USA’s Fair Trade logo. Unfortunately, when I went to their site and entered my zip code to find stores near me that sell fair trade products, the search produced zero results.

I'm really going to have to do some more research on this. And maybe look into carob as an alternative. A life without chocolate? The future's looking bleak.

Mourning the Death of Postum

I've been trying to cut down on my caffeine intake for the Discretionary Eating Challenge, and I thought I'd stock up on Postum to ease the pain of separation. It's a delicious, coffee-like beverage that tastes great with cream and sugar. It's enough to fool my taste buds, and I couldn't wait to get some.


I checked all the usual stores, and I couldn't find it anywhere! I asked store clerks, and they thought they still had it, but couldn't find it either.

Imagine my distress when I looked it up to buy it online, only to find that it's been discontinued! I found an article about Kraft Foods discontinuing it here, and then went on eBay to see if anyone was selling leftovers. They are. For $35 a bottle. Too steep for me, even though I do so love it.



Some people are actually petitioning Kraft to bring Postum back, like in this message board, and many people are writing articles about reviving this old favorite. I'm hoping that Kraft will reconsider and bring back this delicious treat.

But what do I do in the meantime?

There are other drinks similar to Postum, like Roma and Pero. I will probably try those in time, but they are pretty expensive. So for now, I ordered an old standby, Celestial Seasonings Roastaroma.




While I usually find tea too weak and watery for my liking, Roastaroma tends to be more robust and does have a bit of a coffee flavor. I put cream and sugar in it and I can then fool myself into thinking I have some kind of coffee-like beverage.

It definitely doesn't replace Postum, but at least it's something to keep me warm while I'm holding my torch.

Fried Green Tomatillos

I just finished reading Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. It's one of my favorite movies and I can't believe I had never read the book. There are recipes at the back of the book, and I decided to try my hand at the main dish.

The book itself says just to use green tomatoes and corn meal, with enough bacon drippings to fry them with. I also found another recipe online that says to use milk, flour, and eggs as well. I tried them both ways, and I think I like the plain corn meal best, as it lets the flavor of the tomatoes come through better.

I got tomatillos, since those are the only kind of "green" tomatoes I could find. I'm not sure if those are what people in the South use or if they use unripe tomatoes (as I saw mentioned on one site).


Tomatillos come in little pods, which is why I couldn't find them at first, since they don't look at all like tomatoes. Mine above look pretty filthy because they had been sitting in the fridge for awhile, and the papery outside got a little soggy. Here's what they looked like "unwrapped":




They look a bit different than regular tomatoes on the inside:


They are nice and tangy, and even a bit tart.

Here's my station where I dipped them in milk, then flour, then egg, then corn meal. (Again, just dipping them in corn meal is the best, I think.) Then it was into the frying pan with some good ol' bacon grease. Hey, I wanted to be authentic, y'all.



While they're not much to look at when they are done, they are quite delicious!


If you want to be healthier, you can cook them in olive oil, and I'm sure they will taste just as good. And while the bacon grease didn't exactly make for the healthiest meal, this was good for my Discretionary Eating Challenge, since they weren't made with processed or refined foods and they didn't have any sugar or caffeine :) (I was also happy that the tomatillos were grown locally.) I did cheat, however, on the Seconds Only When Hungry, since I pretty much stuffed myself.

Super Simple Shortbread

(Mine didn't come out nearly this pretty)

I am the first to admit that I don't cook. At all. When I was living by myself, canned soup and a basket of cherry tomatoes were often the dinner fare, and I never cooked with anything that required more than say, two ingredients. I'm still lucky in that most of the time, I'm not called upon to cook for the family, as Ralph takes that on himself (thank God). But now with this Discretionary Eating Challenge underway, I've had to rethink a lot of my eating habits and do some cooking for myself instead of relying on processed foods to get me by.

The funny thing is, I'm actually enjoying it. Not that I'm doing all that much; mostly just cooking brown rice and edamame and finding more interesting veggies to eat (radish, anyone?). But I do like to bake and found a recipe for shortbread on this site, along with a cool bread recipe, too.

All it requires is flour, sugar, and butter. With ingredients like that, how could it not be good?


I converted the recipe from ounces to cups:
3/4 cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter

Doesn't sound all that healthy, but considering what I usually eat, this is pretty good. Plus, I used unrefined, raw sugar, which is at least a bit better than the refined stuff.

Just mix the ingredients together and roll it out as flat as you'd like. I don't have a rolling pin so I just used a leftover salsa bottle:


Cut it into squares and put on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with sugar.


It was WAY too hot to heat up the oven, so I just used the toaster oven. Had to divide the recipe into 3 shifts, but it was much better than heating up the house above its already 90 or so degrees. (Yeah, summer in the desert with no A.C. is so much fun.)


I left 'em in there for about 15 minutes or so.

They came out pretty durned good if I do say so myself.


Next time I'll probably roll them thinner, as I like them nice and crunchy. But the boys liked the soft, chewy ones, so it all turned out alright. Super easy and yummy to boot. Maybe I'll just make these instead of Christmas cookies this year...

Grilled Plantains

After the day before's lovely discussion about chores, I was happy to see the boys take an interest in cooking with Dad. (I think they probably felt guilty about being such pains in the *** the other day, and then sicking Mom onto Dad.) Regardless of what prompted them, they were outside grilling carne asada and broccoli, onions, zucchini, and green peppers. (Finally I figured out how to get them to eat their veggies!)

When I had been shopping for the veggies, I came across some plantains and remembered how much I loved with an unholy passion the fried plantains in Colombia. Called tostones, they are usually mashed, deep fried, and served with a cream sauce. [Must...wipe...up...drool.]



Seeing as how I'm trying to eat a little more healthy now, especially for the Discretionary Eating Challenge this month, I thought I might try grilling them instead.

Success!

All I did was slice them on a bias and put a tiny bit of oil on them before having Ralph and the boys (who thought I was crazy for doing it) throw them on the fire.

They look pretty ugly in this picture, seeing as how the skins are pretty black. (You can also grill them without the skins.)


I was too impatient to wait for them to cool, so I burned my digits while removing the skins.


I had looked up some recipes for grilled plantains online, and whipped up a sauce of brown sugar, butter, and a bit of rum and microwaved it for a minute. I then poured it over the little bits of heaven and it became a kind of glaze.


I'm afraid I'm the only one who appreciated my masterpiece, as the rest of the clan hates bananas. Only Peez eats them, and even he took one bite and decided against dessert. Oh well, more for me. And I even have some left over for lunch today. Yum!

You can also do this with regular bananas. Here's a recipe for a bananas foster-type dessert.

So the next time you want a super-quick dessert but don't want to cook, and especially if the grill is already going, just throw those on.

And then invite me over.

A Little Scrape of Heaven

I don't know about you, but I think sno cones (or shaved ice for those of you worried about trademark infringement) are one of the most delicious summer treats ever invented. I rarely have them, though, because I can only find them at fairs or carnivals or things like that. Ralph mentioned that he and his dad made sno cones for the boys one year, and he wanted to do it again. He happened to see sno-cone syrup on sale one day, and picked some up. (You don't need these though, you can use any old thing to flavor them with. Taste testing = FUN!)

Originally, we didn't have a machine or scraper, so we just experimented. Our first attempt was pretty unsuccessful. We tried to just put ice in a blender. When that didn't work, we put it in a bag and banged it with a hammer. Smaller chunks, but not uniform at all and definitely not like the smooth little ice crystals in a regular sno cone.

Then, while out grocery shopping one day, we happened upon an ice shaver for $4.99. (I think I actually squealed right there in the store.) It's a small, metal contraption with an edge on the bottom side that, while not actually sharp, slices off the top layer of a block of ice.

(Sorry this action shot is a little blurry.)

As for the block of ice, I did need to try three other stores before I found one that sold blocks instead of just crushed ice. Go figure. Still, it was only 99¢, so I wasn't too put out.

The ice scraper keeps the ice in it's little holding cell until you open it and dump it out.



We found that it's best to tamp down the ice when you put it in the glass, otherwise once you put the syrup on it, it melts too fast.



Once you have the desired amount of ice, you can pour in the syrup (or juice, or whatever you want to flavor it with).


I did a LOT of experimenting with different flavors to add to my "cones." I found that pretty much anything tastes good on a pile of cold, feathery ice. I tried Gatorade, vanilla extract, even some old peach-schnapps-type liquid that's been in the fridge for I-don't-know-how long (not all together, of course!). If we'd had any juice made at the time, I'd have tried that too. If I'm hot enough, just having the ice plain with maybe a little water is absolute heaven on a hot day. (And since I'm doing the Discretionary Eating Challenge in August, that's probably all I'll put on the sno cones.)

I'm sure mixing some fresh fruit or other healthy ingredients would be ab-fab as well. I think I'll try putting in some lemon and mint next time for extra refreshment.

The block of ice has lasted for over 20-some odd sno cones so far, and it's only about half-way gone. The ice scraper has more than paid for itself. Definitely a great frugal find!

For more great frugal ideas, click this link.