Sparklers

I made Fourth of July Sparklers for a treat at the symphony orchestra outdoor concert tonight. Easy, easy treat to make. You will need:

A 10-oz bag of pretzel rods (I used Snyder's of Hanover)

A tub of white icing

3 bottles of patriotic sprinkles (1.75 oz)

Cover a rimmed baking sheet with waxed paper or parchment paper. Break the pretzel rods in half, if desired. Empty a bottle of sprinkles onto a plate. Open the icing tub, remove the seal, and nuke icing about 15-20 seconds. Stir well. 

Dip the broken end of each pretzel in the tub down to the bottom, remove, and allow to drip back in the container. Roll the icing portion in the sprinkles. Place on the waxed paper. Repeat with remaining pretzel halves. When complete, chill in the refrigerator an hour or so.

You can do all the little broken pieces in the bag too. 

You can keep the pretzels whole if you want, but they don't have the same sweet/salty balance. We liked them better broken in half.

Holiday Weekend Deals

I got some great grocery deals today, combining sales or BOGO and coupons. This is what I snagged:

Mueller's pasta, BOGO and 55c/2 coupons: 52c each box
Dial soap pumps, $1 each and 35c coupons doubled: 30c each
Chinet plates 72 ct, BOGO: $3.20
Kraft shredded cheese, $2 each and 55c coupons: $1.45 each pkg
Reynolds Wrap non stick foil: $2.99 and 75c coupon: $2.24
Al Fresco sausages, $5.49 (regular price), $1/2 store Q and $1 mfr Qs: $3.99 each
Coleslaw BOGO: 65C

The Chinet plates are for our three away-from-home picnics this weekend; the cheese is for the freezer; the pasta is for hot-day salads; and I'm glad to finally get a good deal on non-stick foil. I've been wanting to try it.

Basic 7 Smoothie

Some time ago I read online that there are seven foods we need to eat every day. I don't know if it's true or not, but the article seemed to have good reasons for each food. And they weren't trying to sell anything. So I wrote them down and sometimes I read through the list and plan to eat them all in one day.

What are the seven? 

Yogurt

Tomatoes (or papaya, guava, pink gr.fruit, watermelon)

Walnuts (or almonds, peanuts, macadamias)

Spinach (or romaine)

Oats (or flax seed, wild rice)

Carrots (or sweet potato, butternut squash, mango)

Blueberries 

It's hard to keep up with making sure I actually eat all of them in one day. And then the other day I wondered if I could make a tasty smoothie using all seven ingredients. I thought that would be an easy way to eat them each day. Using my Vitamix, here is what I came up with. 

Seven Things Smoothie

1/2 c yogurt

1/2 c watermelon cubes

8 raw almonds

One handful fresh spinach leaves

5 small kale pieces, optional

1 T flax seed (or 1/4 c oats)

2 slices mango (or 1/2 carrot)

1/4 c fresh or frozen blueberries

1/2 banana, for thickening

6-8 ice cubes

Start on low speed, work up to full speed and blend for 2 minutes. YUMMY!

Strawberries

Today's deal: fresh strawberries at Aldi.

I bought three big flats, holding eight boxes each, or 24 boxes total. Each box contains one pound of berries. My cost? $6 for 24 pounds. 25c a pound. That's not a joke.

Most are going in the freezer for smoothies.

A Valentine Dinner

I always try to make a heart-themed dinner for Valentine's Day, but the day almost escaped me this year. Somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00 this afternoon I realized what day it was, and that I needed to get busy.

My usual approach is to make a heart-shaped meatloaf, but we were all out of raw ground beef. So I thought a bit and came up with this menu:

Shepherd's Pie
Tossed Salad
Berry Cobbler a la Mode

The Shepherd's Pie is made with leftover beef roast, leftover potatoes (turned into mashed potatoes for the top "crust"), carrots, peas, and gravy from leftover stock. At the last minute I sprinkled paprika through a heart cookie cutter to garnish the top.

For the tossed salad, I added artichoke hearts and sliced beets cut into hearts with a tiny cookie cutter.

The berry cobbler was made with raspberries, the only fruit I had in the freezer. I baked it in my heart pan, and then we used up the last few tablespoons of vanilla ice cream in the freezer.

I also dropped a few drops of red food coloring into our water pitcher to make every bit of our meal festive.

I decorated the other family members' place settings with a red heart topped with a Reece's Peanut Butter Cup (their favorite).

Vitamix

Just after Christmas we bought a new Vitamix blender.

I first saw the Vitamix while I was in high school many decades ago. We watched a demo at the county fair, and I was very impressed. What I remember most was that he threw in whole eggs, shell included. The Vitamix ground it up so finely that when he passed around samples of the smoothies, we couldn't detect even the tiniest bit of egg shell in there.

Ever since then, I have wanted my own machine, but the price always made it out of reach for us. I have been saving extra grocery money for a long time now, and when we saw them at Costco (the Costco discount makes it more affordable) just before Christmas, we knew the time had come.

I've been playing around with it for a week now and I love it!

Cookie Tree

We celebrate the Professor's Swedish heritage every year at Christmastime by having a Santa Lucia dinner. This year we celebrated the feast on Christmas Eve. Our menu always includes Swedish meatballs, a seafood dish, lingonberries, and flatbread. The other many dishes vary from year to year. This year, I set out trays of assorted cookies for dessert, and the showpiece was a towering cookie tree.

Sometime during this past summer in my garage sale ramblings I had found a set of graduated cookie cutters for making the tree, and I thought Santa Lucia was a great time to try it out. It worked beautifully: the recipes for the sugar cookie dough and the glaze used for icing the layers were very tasty.

Yule Log Cake

I have wanted to make one of these Yule Log Cakes for many years and finally, last night, I had the event to make it for. We were invited to a dinner party with a group of friends and I was asked to bring a dessert. What better time than this to try my hand at making the cake? It turned out well; I just forgot to take a photo after it was decorated. I simply poked silk poinsettias into the cake across the top.

My Brilliant Idea

I had an "Ah-Ha!" moment today as I was making lunch. I wanted to grind up some chicken meat for a sandwich, but it's always such a chore to clean out the blender after doing a little blending job. I don't like digging the tiny bit out of the bottom. Then I noticed that the screw-on blender base looked very similar in size to the top of a canning jar. I wondered....

I grabbed an empty canning jar and set the blade unit on the mouth. It fit perfectly. Then I tried the base piece of the blender (the part that screws into the machine), and it screwed on smoothly. Perfect!

Next I set the jar into the blender and turned it on. It whirled away!

So I was in business. First I ground up that chicken meat in a quart size jar. That's the jar I grabbed in the beginning so I just went with it.

Then I moved on to nuts in a pint size jar. I like to store ground nuts in the freezer, and a pint size jar is just perfect. Now I can chop them up and stick them in the freezer, all in one container.

The Last of the Turkey

Using up the last scraps of turkey, and assorted veggies, I made this turkey pot pie for supper tonight. Very comforting for a cold autumn night.

Homemade Applesauce

It's been almost a month since I last posted; I guess I haven't been "making" or "doing" all that much recently. But today I broke that lazy streak - I made 6 pints of applesauce with the rest of our fall apples. They were getting rather mushy and not all that enjoyable to eat whole. I'm sure we will enjoy them now that they are sauced!

Coca Cola Cake

Having a partial bottle of classic Coke left over from our Labor Day family gathering, I decided to use it up by baking a Coca Cola Cake. Instead of baking it in the 9x13 pan the recipe calls for, I baked it in three 8" layers. And then I glazed and stacked and glazed and stacked. And topped it with the final thick layer of glaze. Freezing the cake between glazings helped it to stick instead of run.

Now, I wonder, who is going to eat this cake? Would you like a piece?

Old Canning Notes

As I made my fourth batch of pickle relish this summer, I came across a thin binder pushed deeply back on my recipe book shelf. I vaguely remembered it; it's where I started keeping my canning information many years ago. I flipped through the pages and found this page:It's my hand written record of what I canned and froze every year, beginning in 1980. I read that in 1980, I canned 30 pounds of cherries that cost me 60 cents a pound!

In 1990, I canned approximately 220 pounds of fruit, plus 50 pounds of tomatoes. I wonder how I did that, since I had a 6 month old baby, a not-yet-two-year old, and a six-year old. And we started homeschooling. I must have been incredibly busy. Or dumb. For sure, I had more energy than I do now!

I skip a year here and there in the records, but for the most part, I canned at least something most years. And then there is a gap of 11 years. It looks like I canned nothing from 1999 to 2010. But I know that's not true; I still canned but I did less of it. In the busy-ness of life, I guess I forgot about keeping canning records, because in that 11-year spread, we lived overseas, we finished high school for all three children, they all started college, two graduated from college, and we had two weddings.

Now I'm happy to say that 2011 is filled in: I canned 6 half-pints of sweet pickle relish, 10 pints of dill relish, and 9 pints of bread and butter pickles. I also froze 9 pounds of blueberries that I picked. The pantry's looking good!

More Cucumbers

Our prolific cucumber plants keep cranking out the fruit and I keep picking: 10 fat cucumbers yesterday and 11 more today. That's too many to eat fresh, so I made relish. Yesterday was dill relish, and today I decided on sweet pickle relish.

First, I cut the fruit into chunks and then cranked it through my grinder.

I picked up this "Universal" food mill at an antique mall some years ago and I have used it many times. Some people use a food processor because it's quick, but I don't like how a food processor mashes the food to pieces. I wanted tiny chunks.

After the cucumber, I ground up an onion and some bell peppers.

Into a bowl it all goes, along with salt. I covered it with water and left it to soak for two hours.

Rinse and drain several times, cook with sugar, spices and vinegar (sugar for sweet relish only), then ladle into clean, hot jars. I didn't photograph this part because I had sudden company.

Process in a water bath for 15 minutes, lift out, and cool the jars. There you have it! Seven jars of relish for the year to come.

I find that the recipes and instructions in The Ball Blue Book are consistently good. Walmart carries the book in housewares with the canning supplies.

Cucumbers to Pickles

Freshly-picked this afternoon, 14 cucumbers from our garden:
Lead to this tonight:6 pints home-canned bread and butter pickles. Yum!

Birthday Dessert

I created this chocolate mousse tort out of my desire to use up some of my freezer stash. I had an angel food cake loaf, purchased on clearance last fall, that really needed to be used up. With a birthday party tonight, I thought it was a perfect time.

I used my old stand-by chocolate mousse recipe and spread it between thin layers of cake. More mousse slathered on the sides and top, and it was done. The cake softened a bit in the refrigerator.

I always have trouble getting the melted chocolate to be smooth once I mix it with the beaten egg whites. That's what the dark lumps are in the mousse. But it still tastes good!

Homemade Doughnuts

These are yummy! (Even though they aren't doughnuts.)

We started out with doughnuts today, but we gobbled them up before I could get a picture. That was at 5:00 this afternoon, right before dinner. You can't believe it? Neither can I; we NEVER do something like that. But there's a story behind it...

This afternoon I was in a baking mood so I decided to make doughnuts. I mixed the dough and put it aside to raise. But it just sat there doing nothing for, like, an hour and a half. I thought maybe the yeast had gone bad, so I mixed a little in some water to see if it would bubble.

Meantime, we had assorted messes made all over the kitchen. I cleaned and mopped and then I saw my yeast bubbling away. I was about to mix that yeast into my stubborn dough, but it had cheered up when I wasn't looking and the dough was puffing up just fine all on its own. So I proceeded with the doughnuts. After I finished frying them and shaking them in cinnamon sugar, I called the family to come and eat hot doughnuts (wishing we had cider too). Then I noticed the time - oh well, dessert before dinner isn't going to kill anyone.

After the dinner dishes were done, I saw my cup of yeast again. I didn't want to waste it, so I added flour and all that stuff to it. It got puffy really fast so I had to quickly decide what to do with it. Browsing my bread cookbook, I saw a recipe for "Lemon Puff Pillow Buns". Odd name but yummy ingredients: they are filled with a sweetened cream cheese filling.

The fam wasn't too excited about the PINK sugar sprinkled on top. I wanted yellow, but there is no yellow in my pantry.

Apple Picking

The Professor and I drove up to the mountains on Saturday to check out the "Apple Highway", and perhaps buy a bag of apples. We hadn't been up there for over 10 years, so we really didn't know what to expect.

It was a beautiful, warm and sunny fall day. At the first orchard, we bought a half-bushel of Rome Beauty apples so I could make applesauce. At the second orchard we bought a bag of Stayman Winesap apples, just for eating. After that, we decided to stop at every orchard along the highway, and buy something different at each one. Soon we had tried apple cider doughnuts, fried apple pies, dried cinnamon apples, and many varieties of fresh pressed cider.

At BJ Reece Orchards we saw a sign for picking apples. How fun! Soon we were roaming the hillsides, picking a few of one variety here and a few of another variety there, until we had our full weight of 10 pounds.On Sunday I baked an apple pie, and on Monday I turned the Rome Beauty apples into 10 pints of unsweetened applesauce.

Easy Dill Pickles

We have a bumper crop of cucumbers this year, all from three little seeds my neighbor gave me a few months ago. I poked them into the soil at my feet when he gave them to me, and then I forgot all about them. They were truly ignored. I was busy with a wedding and guests and renovating two bedrooms. I didn't have time to think about struggling little cucumber seeds by the garage.

Then one day I happened to see a large jumble of leaves crawling across the remains of the woodpile. Weeds...big weeds. I need to pull them, I thought. Was I ever surprised to see little cucumbers peaking through the leaves! Soon they ripened, and their brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and 12th cousins have been ripening ever since. We have too many!

Last week I tried making refrigerator dill pickles. That used up a tiny portion of our supply, which was a good thing. We allowed them to marinade for a week, then we tasted them. They are good, but the spices need a bit of adjusting. Today I made more. They are sitting in a crock until tomorrow, when I will get them into jars and in the refrigerator. Refrigerator dill pickles are very simple to make and a good way to use up lots of cucumbers.

David Cooks

because it is just the two of us for dinner tonight and I don't want to spread my cold germs all over his food. The simple menu:

rotisserie chicken (leftover from last night)
romaine salad with ranch dressing
mashed potatoes (from a pouch) garnished with cheese
garden blend veggies (left over from last night)