Love in the Kitchen - making fast, healthy, homegrown meals you'll enjoy

Monday, April 29, 2013

Tuesday's Table for April 30, 2013 - And a *Giveaway*!!








Time to fill Tuesday's Table!

Thanks to everyone who linked up last week - we had a great week!  I chose Lisa at Home to 4 Kiddos' Snickerdoodles as my feature this week.  I've been kind of obsessing over old-fashioned cookies lately, and these totally caught my eye.  Not to mention, they were baked by Lisa's 9 year old daughter! Fantastic! Stop by and visit her - I know you'll love her blog as much as I do!




Please grab a button  Lisa - and thanks so much (and a big "Thanks!" to your daughter!) for sharing!


We also had a giveaway last week.  Picked randomly, the winner is <drumroll>




#51- Evelyn from My Turn for Us!</drumroll>  Please send me your mailing address and I'll get that out to you right away.


Here's what I'll be giving away this week:

Wilton Dessert Decorator Plus



To enter, link up your recipes, crafts and ideas. And for each link you add, you will get one entry. And if you send over a friend who follows me and adds a comment telling me who sent them, you get an extra entry!

Only a few guidelines:
  • Please share as many links as you like, but only if you haven't shared them here before.  
  • Add a link back to Tuesday's Table (or grab a button above!) so others can join in the fun.  
  • Sign up for my email reminder here.
No other requirements, but visit the other links here, and I'd love for you to follow me too!

And now, for this week's link party!




zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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In the Garden - Week of April 28, 2013

I call this post Hope. We've amended the soil. We've grown the seedlings. We've acclimatized them. We planted them. We've checked the irrigation schedule.

Now what we've got left is hope. Hope that that these guys {Super Sauce} grow as advertised.


Hope that we get the beautiful tomatoes that everyone says to expect.


Hope that we can keep the consarned pests away.  {Oh how I hate those pests...}


Hope that we get more strawberries like these beauties!



ItemWeight lbs.
Broccoli
0.18
Carrots
4.07
Cayenne Peppers
0.23
Ghost Peppers
0.18
Habaneros
0.04
Jalapeno Pepper
0.23
Lemons
5.48
Peas
5.01
Potatoes
7.34
Scorpion Peppers
0.21
Serrano Chiles
0.05
Strawberries
0.46
Sweet Bell Peppers
0.51
Tomatoes
1.38
Grand Total
25.34

With Spring springing up everywhere now, what are you doing in the garden?  Let me know what's top on your list this week!  In the meantime, I've linked up with Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday and An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party ... hop on over and see what else is being picked this week.

zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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Sunday, April 28, 2013

Strawberry Pie with Lattice Top


Our strawberries are starting to turn red.  We even got to eat a few of them today!  And when it is strawberry season, I love strawberry pie.  {Hey, I love strawberry pie even when it isn't strawberry season!}

I made this pie from fresh strawberries we found at the market.  I love making this crust - it looks fancy, but it is really quite easy.  Let me show you how:


Strawberry Pie


Ingredients:

  • 2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts
  • 1 1/4 cups white sugar
  • 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 4 cups fresh strawberries
  • 2 tablespoons butter



Directions:

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Place one crust in a nine inch pie pan.

Mix together sugar, flour, and cinnamon. Mix lightly through the berries.





Pour filling into pastry lined pan, and dot fruit with butter or margarine.


Now comes the fun part.  Take the other pie crust and lay it out on a lightly floured piece of parchment paper.


Slice it in even slices.  I chose a fairly wide slice for this pie.


Remove every other slice, leaving the spaces as I did below.



Fold every other strip back half way, and insert a new strip across (perpendicular to) the flat, parallel bars. Drop the folded strips back over the inserted strip.


Next, fold back the alternate strips and add another cross strip, then lay the folded strips flat again. Continue from the center out until you reach the edge of the pie. Then turn the crust and repeat the process on the other half, working again from the center out.






Leave some space between each slat for the filling to show through and vent. You'll end up with something like this.  You may want to slide the slices together a bit more, depending on how you want the pie to look when it is done.





Finally, slide the woven crust on top of the pie to cover your filling.  {I would have had a picture of that, but I didn't have enough hands!}



Now crimp the edges.


Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the crust is slightly browned.


You'll want to wait until the pie is mostly cooled to slice it - otherwise it will be a juicy mess.  Still tasty though!


Tasty, beautiful, and people will think it took ages.  Only you need to know how easy it is to make a lattice crust!





zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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Saturday, April 27, 2013

Thai Chicken Curry in the Slow Cookier



I seem to be posting a lot of dessert recipes lately.  I have a lot of fun making interesting desserts, but we eat dinner too.  Every day in fact!  We had this the other night - and everyone loved it.  It is one of my favorite kinds of recipes - a few minutes of work in the morning, spend all day doing fun things and come home to a tasty and (nearly) ready dinner.  Here's how to do it:



Thai Chicken Curry

Ingredients:

  • 1 13 1/2 ounce can coconut milk
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon Thai red or green chili paste, or more to taste
  • 1 teaspoon fish sauce
  • 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
  • 1 yellow onion, chopped
  • 2-3 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 1 red bell pepper
  • 1 green bell pepper
  • 2 potatoes
  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs
  • 1-inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and grated


Directions:

Combine the sauce ingredients: coconut milk, brown sugar, chili paste, fish sauce, and balsamic vinegar in the bottom of your crockpot. {You may want to taste the sauce here - this is a good place to add some additional heat if you like it hot!}

Add the chicken pieces to the sauce, turning to cover with the sauce.

Wash and cut the vegetables, and add to the crockpot.



Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours, or on high for 4-6. Shred the chicken roughly and stir to combine with the juices and vegetables.  Serve with warm pita bread.


This was a delicious meal!  I didn't use much chili paste as I was making it for the whole family, but next time, I'll add a lot more.  Tasty, healthy and made with vegetables from the garden - who could ask for more?!





zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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Friday, April 26, 2013

Grandma's Molasses Cookies


My Grandma had this great cookie jar.  It was shaped like a chef.  He had a striped shirt and blue pants.  He sat on a counter between the kitchen and the back room.  I haven't been to that house in many many years, but I can still see it perfectly in my mind's eye.



The best part of the cookie jar was the cookies.  She always had cookies.  Usually cookies that she had baked.  {It only occurred to me as I was writing this post that she probably baked them in anticipation of visiting grandchildren...}  We would grab some cookies on our way through the kitchen and go play on the piano in the back room, or maybe go visit her neighbor Jenny (who once had a Christmas party for my Sis and I in the middle of the summer!)  or head down the the basement with all the great toys from my Dad's childhood and tons of comic books and the scary cat clock.

After a while, we'd go back for another cookie.  You can do that at Grandma's house.  My two favorite cookies were sour cream drop cookies and these amazing molasses cookies.



I felt the need to make them the other day.  I couldn't find the recipe (!!) but my Sis came to the rescue.  She sent me a picture of her recipe card and I was set!  Here's how I made them (and they were just as good as the ones in my memory!):


Molasses Cookies

Ingredients:
  • 3/4 cup shortening (butter also works, or a combination)
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 cup molasses
  • 2 1/2 cups sifted flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ginger
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves


Directions:

Sift together dry ingredients and set aside.  Cream shortening (and/or butter) and sugar together until light and fluffy.




Add the eggs and molasses.  {Quick tip for measuring molasses:  spray the inside of your measuring cup with cooking spray before you pour in the molasses - it will slide right out!}


Stir in the dry ingredients.  Form into walnut-sized balls and roll in sugar.  {In order to make mine uniform, I weigh each ball.  You don't have to do this.  It is a little obsessive.}


Flatten to the desired thickness with the bottom of a glass.


Bake at 350F for 10 minutes.


Perfection!  I served these with my Rum Ice Cream and they were the perfect compliment to those flavors.


These cookies bring back memories of sitting at Grandma's table, eating these cookies and drinking cold milk from a brightly colored aluminum cup.   They taste like childhood.



zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen



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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

In the Garden - Week of April 21, 2013

Right now we are kind of between garden seasons - just planted the summer garden, fall/winter garden is winding down.  We had some strawberries this week, and a couple of carrots and some peas.  So I've had some time to think about planning a garden.

When it comes to garden planning, you've got three important factors to take into consideration.   Sun, water and heat.  These three important factors and a bunch of others.




Sun



Cats aren't the only things that like sun.  Garden plants like sun too – and in varying amounts.  I live in San Diego, San Diego has on average 146 sunny days and 117 partly cloudy days a year.  Lots of opportunity for sun.  But we also need to make sure that we plant things in the sun - not under a tree.  Take a look around your yard and watch how the sun changes in each spot throughout the day.  Then check what the plants you want to use need for sunlight.  If you don't get enough sun, perhaps you can try a different spot in your yard, or a different variety of the same plant, or even try a different plant.  Trimming back your hedges or trees is another way to control the light coming into your yard.

Water

Plants also like water.  And also in varying amounts.  Maybe you get rain regularly.  San Diego’s  average annual precipitation is less than 12 inches.  We don’t get rain regularly, so we need to make sure our plants get water through our irrigation system.  The Mr wrote about how to set up a simple irrigation system here.  I like having a timed system – that way I can’t forget to water the plants.

Heat

Some plants like warm weather, some plants like cool weather, some plants like hot weather.  Probably most of you intuitively know that not many plants like to grow in snow.   Peas and lettuce like cooler weather, tomatoes and hot peppers like the heat.  Trying to grow sweet peas when the temperature is regularly in the 80s won’t yield you very many sweet peas.  But those hot peppers soak that heat right up.  Picking the right plants for the temperature profile in your area will make you a more successful gardener!
You've got a number of great resources to determine what grows in your area:

  • Find your growing zone - http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/
  • Check out what your neighbors are growing.  Do you hear them talking about how they’ve tried about every kind of zucchini recipe out there?  Do they always offer to give you a bag of tomatoes?  These can be great clues.
  • Visit your local nursery.  They’ve got great resources – and you can get seeds or plants while you are there!


Taste

Maybe this is an obvious one, but grow what you like!  One year, we grew radishes.  They grew really well.  They were beautiful:



But we don’t really like radishes.  Didn't make much sense to grow them after we figured that out.  We do like corn and peppers and peas and tomatoes.  Lemons too.  So we do keep growing  those.

Space

Space is another consideration.  We don’t have a lot of space – southern California backyards are notoriously small.  We make great use of vertical space, using a lot of hanging pots for our herbs and hot peppers.  We have citrus trees in oak barrels – and they share space with strawberries.  This book is a great resource for getting more out of your space - Vertical Gardening by Derek Fell.



It is important to know how much your plant will grow to make sure you've got the right space allotted.  We tried watermelon one year.  And we learned they take a lot of space.  A lot.  They filled the bed we had for them, and spilled over into the roses, and grew onto the patio.  Everywhere they could find a space, they grew.  Good heavens.  Probably we should have done some research on that one!


Maintenance

Finally, and perhaps most importantly in retrospect - how much time do you have and how much work do you want to do?  Gardening can take a lot of time.  Planting, weeding, spraying, fertilizing.  And then more weeding.  Protecting from the blasted squirrels and rats.  Spraying.  Weeding.  Eventually harvesting!  Best advice for a new gardener?  Start small!  It's easy to get out of hand quickly, and then you end up working for your garden.






And after all that, this is our harvest totals for the year:


ItemWeight lbs.
Broccoli
0.18
Carrots
4.07
Cayenne Peppers
0.23
Ghost Peppers
0.18
Habaneros
0.04
Jalapeno Pepper
0.19
Lemons
5.48
Peas
5.01
Potatoes
7.34
Scorpion Peppers
0.21
Serrano Chiles
0.05
Strawberries
0.23
Sweet Bell Peppers
0.51
Tomatoes
1.38
Grand Total
25.1

What are you planting this year?  I know a lot of folks are still under snow (ugh - it's April already!) so dreaming about gardening is all you can do for now.... but leave a comment about this year's garden dream. In the meantime, I've linked up with Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday and An Oregon Cottage's Tuesday Garden Party ... hop on over and see what else is being picked this week.




zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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Monday, April 22, 2013

Tuesday's Table for April 23, 2013 - And a *Giveaway*!!

As you can see, I'm in the process of doing some redecorating around here - please pardon the dust!








Time to fill Tuesday's Table!

Thanks to everyone who linked up last week!  I chose Holly at Tasty Travel's Spring Garden Frittata as my feature this week.  I think we all need a taste of Spring right now, and this looks like it is the perfect recipe for that!  Pop over and visit her - I know you'll love her blog as much as I do!




Please grab a button  Holly- and thanks so much for sharing!


We also had a giveaway last week.  Picked randomly, the winner is <drumroll>




#35 - Erin from A Crafty Cook!</drumroll>  Please send me your mailing address and I'll get that out to you right away.


Here's what I'll be giving away this week:


Le Creuset Silicone Prep Bowls, Set of 4




To enter, link up your recipes, crafts and ideas. And for each link you add, you will get one entry. And if you send over a friend who follows me and adds a comment telling me who sent them, you get an extra entry!

Only a few guidelines:
  • Please share as many links as you like, but only if you haven't shared them here before.  
  • Add a link back to Tuesday's Table (or grab a button above!) so others can join in the fun.  
  • Sign up for my email reminder here.
No other requirements, but visit the other links here, and I'd love for you to follow me too!

And now, for this week's link party!



zentMRS - Love in the Kitchen
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