What's Happening

Saturday, January 14, 2012 

Just a quick note on this lovely (chilly) Saturday.

The first discussion for the Happy Homeys Book Club is up.  There is still plenty of time for you to catch up and start commenting anytime.  The book is wonderful so far!

Also if you are in the Hudson Valley, stop by Millstreet Loft's Riverside Gallery to for the Preview Reception for The Big Draw from 4-6 PM.  You can see hundreds of small works by local and national artists, including mine (I submitted two so hunt them down)!  

A Keeper: Beef Burgundy

Friday, January 13, 2012 


It is safe to say that I love pretty much anything that contains wine and mushrooms. For my next cooking adventure I decided to try a stew that contained just that, Beef Burgundy. I again used a recipe from the Soups, Stews, and Chilis cookbook.

My husband and I joke because I'm actually not that great at being a chef. It's really not my calling. You have to be clean and tidy and keep your workspace workable... have a great palate and taste things... know what you are doing. I am a slob. I hate tasting hot things. I like salt. I do not know what I am doing.

So, I've been trying to go against my inner being and clean up the kitchen as I go and leave things looking not like a bomb went off but as though it took me only minutes to create dinner and not five hours. There is a problem with doing this... the husband comes home to a tidy kitchen... nothing to see here, eats Beef Burgundy and tells you to put it in the "keeper recipes" log in your brain. This keeper recipe log is really small at the moment. It contains tacos, meatballs, white bean chili, and fried chicken. To add Beef Burgundy to it would be, well, not very practical. I could see pulling it out maybe once a month (or maybe twice a year) but either way it was tasty.

There were a few things I had never done before in this recipe. Buy salt pork? Cut salt pork! It look like a hunk of bacon and my arms hurt after trying to cut it into 1/4" matchsticks. While I was cutting I unfortunately came across a surprise that let me know just what part of the piggy was going on here. That was not cool.

Make an aromatic bouquet. Well that sounds lovely! I liked this part. I really like cheesecloth and I like that these things weren't going to be floating in my beef burgundy. I didn't feel like picking the carrot out from my son's stew this night.

Buy burgundy wine. Bless his heart (I like when I say things like that it makes me sound like a great grandma), the boy at the wine store who had to give me a lecture that burgundy was just a region of France and assured me that this bordeaux wine was the same as burgundy and would be fine. Why couldn't he have just given me a bottle of wine that read Burgundy in big black letters on the front?  That's what I wanted.  And I really didn't want to argue with him but I knew it was not the same. If it were why wouldn't my trusted Cooks Illustrated say bordeaux? They would have... boy. 

I tried out my new rice maker that I received as a gift from my Uncle whose time in Japan left him as a rice junkie.

Anywho, it turned out deliciously and it will be tagged as a keeper recipe.

Et Voila:

Imagine the Impossibilities

Thursday, January 12, 2012

So, I have to be honest, the first thing that came to mind when I heard about the Impossibilities Challenge was wallpaper. I have a hallway that I believe was once wallpapered before.  I think it is a plaster wall and it has a very strange texture. I painted it a lovely shade of gray (my favorite color). I painted right up the stairs meeting up to a nice buttery yellow. It's been a few years now and the paint is chipping all over the place. It's disturbing and upsetting mainly because I do not like house painting even a tiny bit and the thought of picking up a roller again is heartbreaking. I'm also not a big fan of wallpaper, I should actually say that I'm not a big fan of wallpaper that has fruits and eggplants and strange vines on it. That is what I was faced with in the house when I first moved in. Miles and miles of wallpaper. I fought with it so much it made me cry.

The fact that I would even consider hanging wallpaper back up is mind boggling, but I've decided it's the best decision. I went to the wallpaper store and informed the woman that I wanted something simple and gray. The first thing I picked I guess had glass beads involved and she basically told me no. We came up with this textured paper that has a checkerboard pattern on it.

I know I'm not taking any big risks with this one, but I really just wanted a gray wall so I think this will look nice.  She raised her eyebrows at me numerous times when I told her I would be going up the stairs with it and doing it myself. So, after much debate with my husband I have decided to already abandon this impossibility and make it a very possible goal by hiring someone to do it for me and making all the bad dreams of cutting angles and wallpaper paste disappear for good.  With all of the painting I have done in this house I will enjoy having someone else do it for me this time.

So, what's next? Finish Gone With the Wind? Maybe sometime in my thirties.

What I really really want to accomplish is sewing. It's been my life dream to know how to sew. Sure, I can make my sons their Halloween costumes but I struggle. I have a grandmother that is an expert, why do I not know? So, I have been sneaking away to get a few lessons from her, we are making a button down shirt. She assures me that once I'm done with that I will have a lot of useful knowledge under my belt. But she lives a couple of hours away and we haven't even gotten to the arms yet.

I need to do something now to keep this dream alive. So, by the end of January, I will be sewing myself a dress... no sleeves... little aggravation... just a little jumper. That's it. I will have to escape up to my "craft hole" (that's what I call because of the slanted ceilings I bump my head on and this crazy dark blue carpet). If I can pick up just an ounce of confidence I think it will be the start of something great!

My stack of vintage patterns I buy on Ebay and my fabric

So Cheers to conquering the Impossible!  Let's Go 2012!

Green Striped Men's Hat

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

I think my husband was getting a little jealous with all this hat making (before The Little Man Hat I had made two for my sister and sister-in-law).  He requested a gray hat and a green stripe using the green from Little Man's (Aslan Alpaca Basil).  So while in Saratoga over winter break I stopped byCommon Thread on Beekman Street.  I bought some gray Invernal yarn and it ended up having kind of a green cast to it so it was pretty perfect.  It's a very cozy, warm and modern and he actually likes it (which is kind of amazing)!

This one I did totally by measuring not row counting. I still used the size 5 circular needles and a set of double sided needles as well.

I cast on 100 stitches and k1, p1 the ribbing for 2 inches (I wanted it a thicker ribbing just because of the shape of his head)
I measured his head like I did here so I knew how long the hat needed to be before I started rounding it off (about six inches).

Then I just knit(in the knit stitch) for 3 inches until I wanted to make the green stripe. I made the stripe about 1/2inch long, five rows.

Then I changed back to my gray yarn and knit 1 1/2 inches before I began my spiral decreasing in the same manner as here. Where I *(ktog2 k23),repeat from *. Next row *(ktog2 k22), repeat from *. and continued to decrease in that manner

Et voila:

Wouldn't you know it, but after all this hat making I actually lost my own hat.  I guess I have my next knitting project!  

Avocado and Bacon 'Chos

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

I have an overwhelming love for nachos.  I think one of my favorite inventions might be the scoop tortilla chip.   Really, I mean it, it's just so little and bite size and you can fill it with anything.  I think there should be a restaurant with a menu filled with nachos... the possibilities are endless.  I'm going to try my best to figure out all the different things you can put on a chip and make it taste yummy.

For this recipe I modified my taco night avocado mixture (which I will be posting soon).  The only thing I left out here is the onion mainly because I didn't want to chop one.

I began the avocado filling by slicing up a tomato into little chunks. Then I sliced my avocado into little pieces as well and added them to a bowl.  Then I added a dash of pepper, a generous pinch of salt, a 3-4 teaspoons of coriander (one of my favorite spices which I use constantly because I can never use cilantro fast enough before it goes bad).  And a few shakes of garlic powder.  Gently mix it up so that you don't completely crush the avocado.  Then you just place a spoonful in each chip.

This was going to be my complete filling for my chip (and probably would have been tasty) until my husband was making a BLT and I decided I too must have bacon!  Why not throw some on these little guys?  Sounds good to me!  I had him make me a few slices and just chopped it into bits.  Drizzled the pieces on top of the avocado mixture.

Then came the cheese.  I piled a generous amount of cheese on each chip like a little nest of grated up goodness.

Popped them in the oven for five minutes at 350F and out they came.  But wait they needed something... sour cream!  Yes, yes, that was perfect!
Et Voila:

These were scrumptious! (yeah I'm not losing any weight)!

I added this recipe here:

But the Dough Was Pretty

Monday, January 9, 2012

I don't know where I went wrong here... I don't know how I could have possibly messed up blueberry muffins but I think I did somehow. Any suggestions...gentle now gentle... on why these didn't brown?

My obvious thought was that I didn't cook them long enough. When I did the toothpick test they were perfect, but I threw them back in anyway. After five minutes they still weren't turning brown. So, maybe they are meant to be whitish? They are pretty, but actually aren't that appetizing without that brownness to them...you know what I mean? They look more like biscuits with blueberries!  They offered some additional recipes for glazes and a cinnamon sugar topping that I think you would have to use if making these again.

On top of it all the blueberries were really tart (which of course the editors of Cooks Illustrated warned me of but I didn't read thoroughly... they said for sure in the winter to use frozen wild blueberries), Whoops! Bust!

What did go right was that the dough was really lovely looking and my ice cream scooper was amazing at filling the cups which is usually a big mess. The muffin was really moist and tasted delicious beyond the tart blueberries.  Most of all the house smelled lovely. So that's something to take away!  I will try them again for sure.

Sneakster Dinners: Spaghetti and Magic Meatballs

Friday, January 6, 2012

By Golly I easily found another delicious way to use kale!  I hate seeing things go to waste in my fridge so when I used half a bunch of kale in the hearty tuscan soup, I was thinking about other ways to use it.  Last night was meatball night and I always like to sneak "good" things into mix meats.  Usually I grate some carrots into my meatball mix so why not chop some kale up like parsley and use that too?  I only used about 4 or 5 leaves because if things get to crazy it will instantly be rejected by Little Man.  So, I removed the stems, chopped it up and threw it in!

My pretty much no fail meatball mix is so easy it hurts me to write it:

1pound ground sirloin (I buy two pounds at the beginning of the week and use half for taco night and half for meatball night)

1 egg

A pour of Worchester Sauce (Count to Three)

3 or so handfulls of Italian Style dried bread crumbs

1/4 to 1/2 cup low fat grated parmesan (that's what I keep in the house but sometimes treat us to a chunk of the real stuff and just microplane a 1/4 cup in)

1 Carrot washed, peeled, and microplaned(grated)

three shakes of garlic powder

pinch of salt & pepper

and the new addition 4-5 stemmed and finely finely chopped kale!

Ball them and brown them in the frying pan using olive oil and roll with your tongs (a new way I tried to ball them this time was to use the ice cream scooper my mother in-law got me from a pampered chef party.  I usually use it for cookies but thought it was worth a try.  They were all pretty much the same size this way).

Pop 'em in a baking dish or on a cookie sheet and into the oven at 350F for about 30 minute or longer... you cant really hurt them to much.

I really wanted to make a quick spaghetti sauce to go with them and it is certainly hard for me to pass up Smitten Kitchen's Tomato Sauce recipe that we probably all know by now.  She suggests using San Marzano tomatoes but we prefer Tuttorosso.  It's pretty much all the effort and time that I had at the moment and I think it's delicious.

The Smitten Tomato Sauce is so yummy (and by the way delicious on chicken parm)

onion tomatoes butter that's it!

Cook on stovetop for 45 minutes squishing the tomatoes and stirring every once in a while.

My husband does not like chunky sauce so I always whip it a little for him to get the chunks out.  

Cook the meatballs for a bit in the pot

 Et Voila:

The response was, well, amazing.  Little Man ate THREE meatballs and the Baby ate TWO!  Really!  They are decent sized!  My husband and I really enjoyed them as well.  Dare I say that kale will be added to the grocery list?  At $1.05 for the bunch I don't see why not!

I'm thinking the butter and parmesan pretty much counter-acted the kale and carrots... but OH WELL it was TASTY!