Scenes from Halloween 2014

Posted on November 3, 2014 by chatty

It’s late. I’m tired. You won’t know that it’s late because I schedule my posts out sometimes. And you probably won’t even see this when I post it anyway, and is anyone actually seeing this at all? But, I digress.

While the kiddo’s costume was secured way back in July, everything else came together kinda late, with our last pumpkin being carved a day or two before the big day. I usually try to have it together earlier than that.

On top of that, I didn’t have the energy to make up some story about how the Halloween fairy will come in at night and take away all of the candy and in exchange leave a gift. I just told the girl, “hey, you’re not eating all that candy, so why do’nt you give me most of it, keep a few pieces, and in exchange I’ll buy you a toy”

“Okay.” Wow. that was easy.

Snacks from the kid’s class party. I didn’t do these. A very cool hip mama of a cool hip kid in class did these. But, aren’t they clever?

The kiddo asked if we could make zombie cookies. As it turned out, earlier that week I was at Cost Plus and saw a box of, you guessed it. So, I bought them when they went on sale and we did these, actually finally frosting them the day after Halloween. Fun times.

Jack, from “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. I had considered the logo from “Ghostbusters” but decided it was too complicated.

Max, photobombing Jack

Monster creature.

She’s wearing a hoodie underneath that Elsa costume, because, actually the cold does bother her. Her mother, too

Fun times.

Kiss me, though, I’m not Irish

Posted on March 17, 2014 by chatty

I’m not Irish, but I married into the Irish, and suddenly I’m all into making this St. Patrick’s day meal. Last year was my first attempt as corned beef and cabbage, so I did pretty much a repeat of last year’s dinner. The downside for me is that it’s in the middle of my nutrition challenge (really?!). That just means, a low-point day for me. I couldn’t NOT add Guinness into the crock pot. Just had to use a little brown sugar for the corned beef. I couldn’t not make Irish Soda Bread. I mean, I could have, but this is a once-a-year meal, so I indulged.

Corned Beef & Cabbage, with root vegetables and Irish soda bread

The corned beef was a pacakged deal from Met Market, Wagyu Beef that included seasonings. The recipe from NYMSCC was quite similar to the other ones I found online. I placed red potatoes, quartered, a couple of small carrots and a parsnip on the bottom of the slow cooker then added the beef on top with additional spices. Poured in a can of Guinness then added additional water, so that the beef was just covered (per the recipe), though it seemed to me like a lot of liquid, I went with it.

Turned the SC on low for 9 hours, I took out the beef and vegetables and put them on a platter. Then added the cabbage, cut into wedges and held together by some kitchen twine. On high for 15-20 more minutes while the meat rested. Soup’s On.

The entire family enjoyed the meat and potatoes and not so much the bread. I will have to find a different version that doesn’t have raisins next time (I like the raisins, no one else does. I brought it to work for the crew to finish up and it disappeared from the kitchen pretty quickly, i suspect).

This was last night’s work. Tonight, the actual day, we had leftovers (which means no cooking for the husband three days in a row. That must be a record). As the finale the kid and I made a Green Smoothie. Recipe below:

Green Smoothie

Blend together a cup of chopped kale with a cup of coconut water. Based on what was in my kitchen 1/2 large banana, 1 small apple (peeled and chopped), a handful of frozen grapes. Blend until mixed. This made enough for two 8-oz glasses or so (see above).

This recipe idea courtesy of Pinterest! Woot.

Erin Go Bragh, as the Irish say.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day

Posted on December 26, 2013 by chatty

A post in 3 parts …

Hope everyone had a great holiday! This year we spent it home in Seattle. On Christmas Eve day the kid and I found ourselves still shopping. Sheesh. Once that was over there was still so much to do. I made baked eggs for lunch, leftover ham & swiss cheese to flavor. It was good and bad. No worries, just an experiment.

Next it was the dough for our cookies for Santa. In our tour of local store shopping, we purchased a couple of CHristmas books at Ravenna Third Place Books, including Gingerbread Pirates.The child was pretty insistent that we leave Santa some of our own gingerbread pirates overnight. “Make it so!” I said (not really), but indeed we did. I used Eileen’s Spice Gingerbread Men recipe from AllRecipes.com, to a tee (well, replacing the margarine with butter) and they came out really nice.

As the dough chilled, onto the next project, Christmas Eve wontons. Is this a tradition? Not really, but it could be. I wanted to do something for dinner, didn’t want to do the SC. Wanted Chinese food, but didn’t want to order takeout. Wontons is the one recipe I know from scratch, so that was that. Once the wontons were made, we rolled out the gingerbread dough and cutout some cookies. Our skull-and-crossbones cutter acted as the hat to our Gingerbread boy cutout, and voila! A gingerbread pirate. We also had a few candy canes (aka the Christmas J), snowmen, stars and elves.

Cookies cooling, back to wontons! Wow, busy day in the kitchen. I still haven’t figured out the skin – filling ratio, so we had quite a bit of filling left. (Filling: gound pork, turkey and some chopped spinach with a little ginger root and soy sauce). Solution? Some pork/turkey meatballs to add to the protein of this dish.

Kid was the “skin hander-over” (didn’t want to her touching raw meat). An excellent helper, and she tends to eat the stuff she helps with. Sometimes. Maybe I was just lucky as she devoured these. Yay! Maybe just some pre-Christmas excitement.

Dinner complete, we were ready to frost our gingerbread cookies. Rather than making frosting from scratch, this year I let Duncan Hines help me out. Thanks, Duncan!

Arrr! This was the plate we left out for Santa. Lily added a carrot for the reindeer, a small glass of milk and a letter so that it was clear to Santa that he was welcome to these delicious cookies.

Phew! Santa enjoyed the cookies quite a bit. He might have thrown a few away because they were a bit heavy on the frosting, and he’s really not into artificial frosting flavor. Maybe that happened.

Christmas morning! Was a blast. Husband got me a sweet new DSLR. I’ll have to show off its talent in another post, as yesterday’s photos were just for fun, like this one, kiddo singing with her new Singalong Microphone:

Kiddo couldn’t wait to head to her grandparent’s house (translation: more presents!). On the dinner menu: Prime Rib (yum!), Yorkshire Pudding (YUM!), green beans (still delicious) and marionberry pie with french vanilla ice cream (tasty!). Not a great pic, but the lighting conditions were not ideal. This photographer is still learning how to use her camera, too.

A long last few days with a lot of food in the house. For some reason, this morning, I couldn’t help myself, and decided to test out a pumpkin pancake recipe (see this post for my previous history with the pumpkin pancake). This time I used Chef John’s recipe on AR (I used his banana bread recipe earlier. I found it ok, though I probably shouldn’t have tweaked it). One word: Success. Woot! Kiddo ate many of them. Maybe too many of them. I was pleased with the results, too.

Next up, some more baking! It never ends. Well, it will end at the end of the year. Then I’ll be off bread & grains again. For a while. After a month of totally unnecessary treats and sweets, all good things much come to an end.

Hope you enjoyed a fun and delicious holiday.

Chatty Cha

dessert first

Tag Archives: holiday

Scenes from Halloween 2014

Kiss me, though, I’m not Irish

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day