On gardens, gifts, and cookies

This Christmas I received a wonderful gift from my darling and exceedingly handy boyfriend- a handmade, cedar garden bed! It's absolutely perfect for my new urban-ish home. A few weeks ago I put in my first winter crop: collards, arugula, spinach, red leaf lettuce, romaine, spinach beet chard, and rainbow chard. Here are a few photos for your viewing pleasure! The arugula and spinach beet chard are just asking to be eaten!

Now to change gears entirely! This Christmas I tried to make the majority of gifts I gave family and friends. Mom got a terrarium and cranberry compote, Dad got gravlax (recipe below) and dilly beans, and boyfriend got a bloody mary gift set and homemade sketch book. Across the board I'd say homemade gifts were a huge success! I plan on doing the same next year....only starting a month earlier.  Here are some of the recipes and instructions from my gifts. I hope you enjoy them! 

Gravlax 
Gravlax is a traditional Scandanvian dish and translates to "grave salmon". The internet tells me that this refers to the ancient practice of burying fish in the sand, above the high tide line, to preserve it. Okay, try to get past the name, because it is darn delicious! 

Here's a totally solid gravlax recipe on which I based mine. A few important notes: I am a absolute salt freak, and this was still too salty for me unless you rinse it off before eating. I also recommend letting this marinate for at least 36 hours. Slice it thin and serve or crackers, bagels, or open faced sandwiches (smorrebrod).  I served mine with bagel chips and a dill cream sauce (fresh dill, cream cheese, sour cream, salt, black pepper). Delish!

Bloody Mary Gift Set
For all you bloody mary connoisseurs out there, get ready to have your mind blown. The gift set I created contained: one bottle of Zing Zang Mix (if you haven't tried it yet your quality of life is severely diminished), homemade pickled dilly beans, and a bottle of homemade pepper/bacon infused vodka.

I followed this recipe for my vodka and holy moly, is it good! I used jalapenos, habaneros, and thick-cut smokey bacon. Mine only marinated for about six days and that was plenty. Any more than a week would render this vodka too peppery for human consumption. I also recommend straining the mixture through cheese cloth a couple of times when you remove the bacon/peppers. Several reviews online complained that bacon liquor can be very greasy. While I didn't find that to be the case, I did make sure to blot my bacon very well after cooking and strained the mixture three times.

Here's my go-to dilly beans recipe.  I added some extra red pepper flakes for heat. Any type of pickle would be a great accompnament for this gift. Next time I'm going to try pickled asparagus!

PS- Now that I know how to infuse vodka, expect a lot of posts on the subject!   

Vegan Molasses Cookies! 
Here's a cookie recipe I came up with today. They're chewy, tasty, and vegan!

3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup vegetable spread or butter (I used Earth Balance since these are vegan) 
1/2 cup molasses
1 tbs flax seed (ground)
3 tbs water
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
2 1/2 cups Bisquick mix
1/2 cup golden raisins 

Combine sugar and vegetable spread with a hand mixer, add flax and water. Blend well. Add molasses and spices (cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg). Once well incorporated, add Bisquick and mix well. Finally, stir in the raisins. Let dough rest in the fridge for 20 minutes or so. Roll into balls and coat with white sugar (I used and ice cream scoop and made quick work of these cookies). Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Chewy, spicy, tasty, yum! Enjoy!

Halloweenies!

Hey there!
Gosh, I sure have been gone for a long time! Sorry about that! For my triumphant return to blogging please enjoy my Halloween party. Here are an assortment of crafts, food and costumes. Hope you enjoy!


Joe and I were "Fall" and "Winter". Joe put together his costume very quickly and easily (PJs, fake snow, blue face paint, blue and white hair, a Christmas mug and a pipe). Isn't he handsome! Trick or treaters thought he was a little scary...


My costume began with a plain white dress purchased from Goodwill. First, I dyed the dress in tea overnight, to give it a nice aged look. Then, I hot glued fall leaves to the dress. The head piece is made of floral wire, lots of hot glue, fall leaves, small pine cones and gold ribbon.


The wings were made from two wire coat hangers, floral wire, hot glue and lots of leaves. Just shape the hangers to look like wings, wrap your floral wire across the wings so your have something to glue your leaves to. Glue, glue, glue until you run out of leaves. I wired the hangers together and attached two pieces of gold ribbon used to tie them on. You could use this basic formula to make all sorts of wings (flower petals, feathers, ivy, etc.).


I used a bat template from Martha Stewart and taped them inside this lampshade. Very cute and very easy.


I also got this idea from Martha Stewart (because I love her). Take plain tortillas and use Halloween cookie cutters to make fun chip shapes! Brush with oil, sprinkle with salt, garlic powder and cumin (or whatever you want) and bake at 350 degrees until lightly brown. Be careful, these go from done to overdone very quickly. I've made these for Halloween two years in a row and they're always a hit.


Okay this is my last Martha Stewart rip off. These are delicious puff pastry pumpkins. Take a piece of thawed puff pastry and cover in dijon mustard and parmesan cheese. Take a second sheet of puff pastry and lay it on top of the first. Use a rolling pin to mold the sheets together. Use a cookie cutter to make pumpkins, score lightly with a pearing knife and bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes. Oh, one more thing. Brush the pumpkins with a mixture of melted butter and paprika before you bake, it gives them a nice color. Keep an eye on them, they also can become overdone very quickly.


Ginger spice cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and orange sprinkles. It's nice to have a dessert that's not too sweet after a night of candy bingeing.

I hope you enjoy these ideas!

(Imitation) Crabby Patties

Hi there and happy three day weekend!
I made these dudes last night and they were delish! I have to admit these were an experiment so I wasn't particularly precise with the measurements. So here's my best guess, just play around and I'm sure they'll come out delicious!

Imitation Crab Cakes
1 package imitation crab, finely flaked or chopped
1 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1/2 onion, finely chopped
2 eggs
3ish TBS mayo (you might need more, just eyeball it)
5-6 saltine crackers, crumbled
2ish TBS course ground mustard
1 TSP dry mustard
1 TSP garlic seasoning
1 1/2ish cups italian bread crumbs

Run your crab, onions and bell pepper through a food processor until finely chopped. Combine rest of ingredients except for your bread crumbs. Once everything is good and mixed up, shape the mixture into patties. This made about ten large cakes. If your cakes are a little liquidy just add some of the bread crumbs to firm things up. Dredge the patties in the bread crumbs and fry in vegetable oil until nice and brown on both sides. If you're making several batches you can keep them warm in your oven on low. Oh, and when I got them out of the oil, I gave them a dusting of old bay and sea salt. Hope you enjoy!

Phyllo Rollups!

Hi there!
On Friday I had a silly moment at the grocery store and brought home phyllo dough instead of puff pastry! Eek! So today I started messing around with the (sort of) finicky sheets of dough. Here's what I came up with this evening, stay tuned later in the week because I still have about a million more sheets to use up!

Spinach Phyllo Rollups
(Think of them like lazy spanakopita!)
Five sheets of phyllo dough
1 cup chopped frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese (or more, just as much as you like!)
Pinch of salt
Olive oil, about 1/4 cup

Delicately brush each sheet with olive oil and stack on top of each other. Combine the cheese, spinach and salt. Spread the mixture about an inch from the edge (these sheets came 11x13, so you'll be rolling them up the "long" way). Roll it up, doesn't have to be super tight, but it should be firm. Pinch the edges shut and bake a 425 degrees for about seven minutes.*

*Okay, I actually didn't time this tonight, I just took it out when it looked brown and flaky so seven minutes is my best guess but it might be a little high


Eat them dudes up!

Joe's Jellyfish (Spring) Rolls

Hi hi hi!

Poor husband Joe has been grading speeches for 72 hours straight so I made him an afternoon snack to keep his head from exploding. Tasty spring rolls with green tea. I call them jellyfish rolls because Joe says the rice paper looks like, well, a jellyfish. Here's a quick how to for spring rolls.

You'll need:

Spring roll wrappers (the dry kind)

Pork/tofu/shrimp/whatever

Cabbage

Carrots

Green onions

Garlic

Ginger

Soy sauce

Sesame oil

You want all your ingredients to be slivered. Saute your meat/non-meat in a pan coated in sesame oil. Add your soy sauce (I don't measure this, but I guess it's about 2 tbs) veggies, garlic and ginger. I like the cabbage to be a little crunchy so I leave this for last. While your filling is getting nice and tasty, fill a bowl with hot water. You'll need to soak the wrappers in the hot water for about 30 seconds or until they're nice and easy to work with. Take the wrappers one at a time and add about 2 tbs of filling. I've taken pics of the wrapping process, but to summarize: your filling should be in a line near the bottom of the wrapper, fold over twice before folding in the sides. Fold over one (or two) more times. That's it! I served these with a nice cup of green tea and a little duck sauce. By the way, these are great for parties because you can make them way before hand.