Let's play catch-up

Last you heard from me, I was preparing to fork over a few good holiday recipes and get a little housework done. And then my hard drive crashed. Fatal, nothing spinning, dead as a doornail hard drive crash. So yeah. It's up and running now, and I took lots of pictures in the meantime...

Baking Day
I had such high hopes for delivering these great recipes with step by step pictures. And I started out in the right vein.

Here's the sifted flour and butter/sugar for pecan butter balls-- those melt in your mouth powdered sugar covered cookies:



Here's the butter for 4 recipes worth of almond English toffee:


And the melting sugar and milk for candied pecans:


But then, before I knew it...Oops! All done!

Bagged, canned and ready to go.

But I will still give you one recipe...

Orange-Candied Pecans and Cranberries

1 cup packed brown sugar
3 Tbs condensed milk
1 Tbs butter
1 tsp orange zest
2 cups of pecans
1 cup dried cranberries

Combine brown sugar and condensed milk in saucepan over medium-high heat (see pic above). Bring to 234ºF (softball stage).


Once you've reached 234, turn off heat and stir in butter and orange zest. Add pecans and cranberries until coated. Pour out on wax paper.


Once cooled, break pecan halves apart and bag. I ended up adding a little more than 2 cups of pecans and however many cranberries looked good. You can see that the above is more than one recipe. That's maybe 4? Anyway, easiest thing in the world and magical.

Holiday Business
The kiddo finally got to paint the ornaments I mentioned in the last post:


We hosted Christmas Eve dinner and munched on ham for several days of leftovers. For Christmas, Adam's folks got us a new toaster/convection oven. I'm loving it so far. And my mother got us an espresso machine. It's a much nicer one than I'd have ever bought for myself, and being a former Starbucks employee/Kool-Aid drinker, I've been having a great time fiddling with it and making fancy beverages. It's a wonder that with the DAILY whole milk lattes since Christmas morning I haven't gained 20 pounds. It was lovely.

For New Year we went to friend's house. She has a passel of kids so there was much Rock Band being played and much rum punch being imbibed. By the grownups, of course. Fizzy grape juice for the little ones and ummy yummy Ro-tel dip.

House Business
We did actually get a little done. I got a couple of coats of poly on the countertop trim and made a little progress on the remaining kitchen crown (one little fussy corner is giving me hell). I also started painting that hellish green window in the kitchen, at which point we made some decisions. The kitchen is being finished in alkyd paint. If we lived in a perfect world, I would do the trim throughout the house the same way. But there's circumstances beyond my control. First, I was told by two POs ago that they stripped most of the trim. It now only has one or two layers of paint on it. This was less than ten years ago, and they were living in the house. It's not a high gloss. I'm betting it's latex to begin with. Also, WE live in the house and alkyd is stinky and toxic. And finally, I would have to confine the cats for DAYS depending on the weather and I'm just not interested. We've already given the baseshoe a thin coat of alkyd, so I'll probably want to sand and prime with Zinsser 123 to make sure the latex will stick. Eh. I'm ok with it.

Adam got the garage cleaned and fairly organized, which was a feat of mega proportions and we got the basic box of the gable vent built:



The slats are one more recycling of the garage door boards. And the 2X4s were salvaged from another project. We'll get it permanently set and then trim around it. First I want to paint it. This thing was a monster-- 42" across, and nobody makes a stock size that's horizontal like that.

That's the main stuff. Mostly, we sat on our butts or cleaned or baked. And going back to work is tough now. Really tough.

This better bring some beautiful damn May flowers

Ugh. The rain is apparently never ending these day. Ok, maybe that's not entirely true. The weekend's supposed to be perfect, beautiful, warm and dry, but it's sure been the wettest and most tedious of weeks leading up.

The days when I have to pick up the kiddo include a ton of driving, and the addition of rain made yesterday's trip a particularly long one. The dictionary definition of torrential rain came down, to the point where it was impossible to see the car in front of me, and the fog added an entirely separate dimension of blindness. All in all, we didn't get home until after 6:30, where my mother had been waiting with Adam for me to get home; she locked herself out of her house, and I had the spare keys with me.

So it was another quick, easy, tastes-better-than-it-looks dinner from Diet for a Small Planet.

Fettuccine al Marco, otherwise known as "Whatever Pasta Ya Got" al Marco

This was an excuse for me to finally use our brand new fancy food processor. Adam makes hummus in it all the time, and salsa...But before the move, the al Marco was a weekly staple at the house.

First, start boiling your water. When it's just the 2 or 3 of us, we use maybe 8 oz of pasta. The recipe will feed 5 or 6 with more pasta and some bread. If you use less, the leftover makes a nice dipping sauce/schmear for French bread.

Next, in the blender or food processor, combine

1 lb of cottage cheese (~2 cups)
4 oz of plain unsweetened yogurt (~1/2 cup)
1/2 c parsley
1/4 c Parmesan (or more, if you fancy)
Spinach-- the original recipe suggests 2 cups of leaves optional; I've used, fresh, frozen, more, less, whatever I have, and none. I think we've settled on using a 10 oz block of frozen (Thawed and drained, obviously). It's cheap, it's easy, and doesn't require the spinach to be "seasonal."

Whiz it until it's smooth and salt and pepper to taste.



Ta- da! Sauce is done. Less spinach= less green color, by the way. When the pasta is out and drained, you can either combine it all together (if you used 1 lb of noodles) or dish it up individually. The heat of the noodles warms up the sauce, but it's never piping hot-- it's great for sticky summer days when you don't want to turn on an oven or get a facial from the steam off your meal. The recipe suggests garnishing it with black olives, more parsley or fresh basil. I prefer sliced black olives for a little salty, tangy kick.



It's super easy and good for you-- especially if you can get decent non-fat yogurts and cottage cheese; since there's no flavorings or sweeteners, they don't have the preservatives or artificial junk that most low-fat items have. It's even better with homemade, hand-cut wheat fettuccine, but I haven't had much time for that these days. And we ALWAYS have most of the ingredients for this. Sam's Club keeps us up to our eyeballs in pasta, Parmesan, black olives and French loaves, and the rest is cheap and easy enough. We were eating 10 minutes after I got home.

Love it.

Notes from the Lutheran Women's League Fundraiser Cookbook, in pictures.

Actually, this is the best recipe from the original edition of Diet for a Small Planet, but which was left out of the 20th Anniversary Edition.

I'm not sure what it's called-- my pages from the original are crumbled to the point where I can't read the name. No worries! I have the recipe memorized. It's a cross between a spinach pie and a quiche...It's cheap, it's quick and it all gets dumped into one bowl.

Here's the players:

2 or 3 eggs (I use 3)
6 Tbsp flour (no particular kind-- th recipe says whole wheat, but I use whatever's in the cabinet. )
1/2 tsp salt
16 oz spinach; fresh is obviously tastier, but c'mon. Sometimes you gotta go frozen.
8 oz shredded cheddar
16 oz cottage cheese
Some wheat germ-- a couple of tablespoons. I've also used breadcrumbs in a pinch.

First things first, start thawing the spinach and put the oven on 350. Crack the eggs, and beat in the flour and salt with a fork. It looks pretty gross.


Now add the cheddar and the cottage cheese:

Now it looks lumpy and kind of gross. Trust me that it gets better-- I promise. And how much do you love the pink cracked formica, eh? Clearly the pink follows us.

Anyway, Now your spinach should be thawed. Add it to mix.


Now spread it into a greased (or Pam'd in my case) 9X13 pan. You can use a pie pan, but it has to cook a lot longer. Sprinkle some wheat germ on top. We finally emptied our jar tonight-- keep it in the freezer, and it will last years. A little goes a long way...


Into the oven:

Klassy, right? You see now what we're moving up from...

And wait.


When it's a little bubbly on the side, it's ready. Dish up.


Ok. So it's not particularly pretty. But it's pretty yum!

Adam prefers it on Day 2 cold. I like it hot, though. And how can you go wrong? It's got your greens, your perfect proteins (eggs) and your combined proteins (dairy and wheat germ and flour). A vegetarian's dream. Not that I am one, but sometimes, a one dish meal that doesn't involve meat and requires minimal clean-up is what I need at the end of a long day spent mattress shopping.