Have You Seen This?

Have you seen this? It makes me want to scrap my plans for making chicken noodle soup on this rainy night and go out some place exotic instead! I so want to try the apple covered in popcorn! What looks good to you?

I originally saw this and his two other videos here.

Eye Candy

Have you ever tasted heaven? Check out this eye (and taste bud) candy.

 Welcome to maple whipped cream on pound cake. 

 

A cup of cream. 

A teaspoon of sugar and a half teaspoon of vanilla extract.

A heavy-handed tablespoon, ahem...or two of Maple Syrup. This is from our Vermont trip.


Whip it with a whisk (luckily I have a whisk attachment on my hand-held mixer) until the cream begins to form stiff peaks. Finally, sprinkle with cinnamon.

Indulge.

Comfort Food

 I made some chicken tenders last night that you won't find at any fast food joint. They are so scrumptious that I wanted to share my simple recipe with you.

 First I season the chicken with salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper.

Then I roll the pieces in bread crumbs and season them again with a bit more salt, pepper, and cayenne pepper.

 While I am seasoning the chicken, I heat about an inch of canola oil in a pan. I keep it on medium heat so it only spits if I drop some batter in, but it's not boiling or hissing yet.

 I gently place the pieces in and wait for about 2-3 minutes. In the picture you can kind of see that it's still pink on top, but the bottom and sides are pretty well cooked.

 I check the bottom a few times to make sure they're not getting too dark, and then I flip them. I let the chicken cook for another 2-3 minutes on the other side.

 I pat the chicken with a paper towel to blot off some of the oil and serve them crispy and hot. 

Meanwhile, I cook my quartered potatoes in the toaster oven. (There are just two of us, so the portions are small enough that I don't need to turn on the big oven).

 On my potatoes, I always use about a teaspoon of canola oil, and a few shakes of the following herbs/spices:
Basil
Parsley
Rosemerry
Salt
Pepper
Thyme

P.S. Even though there is oil on the potatoes, they will still stick to tin foil or a baking sheet. Make sure you spray some kind of non-stick spray like Pam before spreading out your potatoes. I bake them for about 20 minutes on high (400-425) in the toaster oven. You may need to cook them for longer (30-40 minutes) if you're using the regular oven, or if you have larger chunks of potato. 

Add your favorite dipping sauce (we like barbecue sauce and honey mustard) and eat with a fork and knife or just dig in with your fingers! Enjoy!

Thanks for reading my thoughts about food!

Blogiversary Part 2

Hello again! I thought I'd share a few household changes, if you want to see! In June I had a Kermit-inspired room that only inspired me to get a quick-onset headache.  The carpet was grody no matter how many times a week I vacuumed. The "lame jungle" theme was just not our style. We both like neutrals, and this is definitely not neutral.

I think, in the future, adding curtains, and a rug, will make the room even more inviting. But it's definitely a step in the right direction.

The candle holder was a gift to me from my Dad and Stepmom. They got it at a fair trade shop in Baltimore called 10,000 Villages. I picked up the rock in a stream on our trip to Vermont this summer. The flowerpot is good-ole Ikea. The plant is...as is expected with me...dying.

Door before

Door After

This is an old Christmas picture of the main wall in our front room. It's the only one I could find of this wall at the moment. Behind us to the left is the rest of the house. This is the first wall you see when you come into our house and it just wasn't setting a warm and serene mood when we entered. The wire that our stockings are hung on usually have postcards and pictures stuck into those little rings. It was too small and spindly and made a weak first impression.

Main entryway wall before

Here is the entryway now. The artwork is much more substantial and sets a much better mood. Plus, I'm a tree hugger at heart and I can't wait to sit in my huge chair and read a book surrounded by trees. (Out the window and on the wall).

Wall after

The next point of interest on our house tour is our guest bathroom, or in other words, the only bathroom other than the one in our bedroom, so everyone uses it. I owe this remodel to my grandmother. She came over the other day to see some of my progress. She ooed and ahhhed at every room. Then, I opened the bathroom door to show her and her face fell. She looked repulsed and she said something that sounded like eghk! Never one to mince words, she said it was horrible looking and that I had to get rid of that paint color and hideous shower curtain (which I thought was room's main redeeming quality). There's nothing like a no-nonsense grandmother to knock your head on straight! The next day, Greg came home to a surprise. I had ripped the mirror off the wall, thrown away the shower curtain and primed the whole room. This time he didn't freak out quite so much. I think he's catching on to this, "she never has a plan, so just let her figure it out as she goes" thing.

Before

Before

FYI: This transformation cost only $49. I only bought the shower curtain ($24), rug ($20) and white towel ($5). The rest was stuff that I already had, including the paint.

After

After thinking about it, this might not be the best advertisement for our bathroom. (But I do love how the bold colors break up the neutral on neutral effect).

 Lastly, here's an update to the main living room. All we did was add the chair! (It's from target...on sale with free shipping!)

Before

After

 
I'm still finalizing some finishing details like wall art, shelving, and rugs. Since we got the floors on the spur of the moment, we hadn't picked any area rugs out yet and we're still scouring overstock.com for the perfect little budget-friendly ones to grab our attention.

Again, thanks for reading my thoughts about stuff other than food, otherwise known as my ramblings.

My First Blogiversary

Today is my last day of summer vacation and also one year since I started recording my thoughts about food and other ramblings. So, because after today I'll be busy getting back into the swing of things at work, I have a couple of posts that I'd love to share. I've been cooking, baking, and decorating up a storm, snapping pictures along the way. I hope you find some of the stuff cool, cute, or maybe even mildly inspirational.

The first thing I'd like to share is the cake (and other fun stuff) I made for my sister's going away to college party.  She's the baby (9 years younger than me) and is the one that keeps things lively around here. So when she decided to go to college 10 hours way, I thought she definitely deserved a special sendoff. I used some things I'd seen on Pinterest as inspiration. (It's awesome and totally addictive btw).

 I started two days before the party by making an 8" round chocolate layer, which I wrapped in plastic and put in the fridge. With the remaining batter, I made chocolate cupcakes. The next day I used vanilla cake batter to make one vanilla and one strawberry layer. I added a tiny bit of pink food coloring gel and some pureed strawberries to make the last layer pink and add some strawberry flavor and texture. I skinned the strawberries first, so the cake wasn't full of seeds.

Then, I had to level and stack all of the layers. This was really nerve racking, because for two days,  I'd been preparing three cake layers with only one 8" pan, so I had to keep juggling the cakes, swapping out, cleaning, and re-greasing the pan once each layer had cooled. The last thing I wanted to do was repeat that whole process again.

By the way, here's where I get the depth and breadth of my baking knowledge. It's cutting edge.

Google says there is a contraption out there that levels cakes easily, but I of course don't have that equipment. So after clicking the next clink, I used the advice from a very smart sounding person (in the ways of cake leveling), which was sliding the knife around the circumference of the cake cutting out even rings until you got to the center. But it didn't come out perfectly.  Finally, I just went for it, (a la what I've seen on the cake boss) sticking my bread knife in the cake horizontally and sawing across the diameter hoping that it turned out even. That worked just as well. Better actually, much easier than the ring method.  I guess I didn't need Chef Google after all.

The top

Oh, and before I forget, before the leveling, there was this small snafu. Come on, you didn't think I'd get away accident-free on my first time, did you?

I (while subduing my inner freak-out-attack) mixed up a "patch" icing and used my finger to coat the inside of the hole and then slid the missing chunk back in (luckily it was already cool and not too crumbly). Then I cement it shut with the patch icing.

After all of that, here are the three layers together ready to be iced and put on my new cake platter $14 at Home Goods. Whoop whoop!

I crumb coated each layer with my homemade strawberry icing, again flavored with juice from pulverized fresh strawberries. No artificial flavor comes close.  I also added just a hint of pink food coloring gel. Insert super smiley proud moment below.

Then, I refrigerated it overnight. I imagined that I was going to do something super cool when I frosted up the final layer, but I just couldn't bring myself to mess with it too much. The super cool (in my world)  surprise was on the inside.

The day of the party, I topped the leftover-batter cupcakes with raspberries and stuck them on my Home Goods platter ($6!). I also set out the cake and a few other sparkly and pink decorations.

 I twisted glimmery silver ribbon around some candles that I had leftover from my wedding and plucked a couple rosebuds from the garden out back. The mini-vase was also left over from my wedding.

 I made these for Sarah's dorm room out of some flat canvases that she can probably hang with command strips. To make them, I placed painters tape in a diagonal pattern and mixed up a shade of pink I thought she might like using acrylic paint.Then I just painted away and pulled off the tape after the two layers were just beginning to dry.

Towards the end of her party, we cut the cake so fast that I didn't get time to snap a good-lighting/crumb-free picture. That's ok, I was just happy it turned out just as I planned. We served up some Neapolitan ice cream on the side. Yummy!

 It was so...darn...good.  I had to use every ounce of decorum in my soul not to grab this slab with my hands and eat it like a ravenous wolf. So moist and melt in your mouth with all of the different flavors. Uh! - Sorry, I just needed a little satisfaction-grunt. 

Anyways, all grunting aside, I hope you like the cake idea. I wish it was mine, but it was something that I tagged on Pinterest a few weeks ago. It did work out well though (besides the small snafu) and I'm notorious for royally messing stuff up the first time. (I confess I deleted the pictures of the first homemade brownies I made from my camera earlier this summer. It was just too humiliating to have to re-live).

I'm not yet ready to start my fall pie-making just yet. I'm still clinging on to the last few weeks of summer! I'm making hamburgers and slicing up watermelon to the very end!! Thanks for still reading my thoughts about food- even one whole year later!

Stay tuned for some before and after pictures of the house in a bit!