Cake!

This weekend we got a few more details worked out for Daphne’s birthday. Yesterday we drove down to Sugar Land to a cake decorating mega store. Seriously, they had everything. We are planning on doing a three tier white butter cake with pink buttercream frosting, and pink, orange and hot pink flowers and butterflies (in gum paste? fondant? melted chocolate? we haven’t decided). Today we did a trial run of just the bottom 9 in. tier so we could decide what cake recipe we wanted to use. We might rethink our tiers, otherwise we’ll have enough cake to feed the neighborhood! And if you take the amount of money mom and I have spent on cake stuff just to make this one cake I’m sure we could have flown to Baltimore and had those Charm City cake people make one for us. Ok, I exaggerate. Let’s just say no one is getting a store bought cake anytime soon so we can get our money’s worth of all these pans.

Today I had every intention of getting some more pictures of Daphne to use in her invitations. Then I realized my husband took all the cameras to a photo shoot and the media cards. I just used the Radio Flyer pic from Saturday. Those of you that are listed as my Friends or Family Contacts on Flickr can see the finished product here. Don’t look too closely because I think the dots aren’t completely even. I wish I knew a way to make the grid smaller in Photoshop. Those dots were almost the death of me.

Oh yes, and another reason I couldn’t get pics today… Daphne has Angelina Jolie lips after falling at church onto the tile floor. Poor baby. She was walking and kept pulling her hand back as I was trying to hold it, then she fell over my shoe, face down. I hate it when she hurts herself.

This week will be a short one for us. We are traveling to Missouri to see my brother and celebrate my niece’s 2nd birthday. August is going to be a busy month!

Crock Pot Recipes

I need to use my Crock Pot more, I think. Currently I have a roast and veggies slow cooking, and rosemary bread in the bread machine. I have been struggling this week to cook a decent dinner and keep Daphne entertained and out of my hair while I’m in the kitchen. I’m not sure if it’s the move, or her growing independence now that she can almost run all over the house, but she is not content to stay in the Pack ‘n Play anymore while I cook. Today’s meal prep was simple- dump everything into the Crock Pot while Daphne was eating breakfast and don’t mess with it. Then throw everything into the bread machine while she was eating lunch. And as a bonus, the house smells great.

My problem? I only use my Crock Pot for a few things and need ideas. I spent some time on A Year of CrockPotting. If you haven’t heard about it, the blogger made a New Year’s resolution to use her Crock Pot everyday. Today’s recipe was for Crock Pot Chex Mix (huh, never would have thought to do that). And I guess I need to look on allrecipes.com as well. Any readers out there with a great Crock Pot recipe? Please send it to me.

More Birthday Plans

The move has really put me behind in terms of planning for Daphne’s 1st birthday party. Normal people probably just buy some plates and streamers at a party supply store, get a cake from their local grocery store bakery and blow up some balloons. Not me. I’m completely not normal.

This week we need to get a good picture with her birthday hat so I can create invitations, have them printed and get them mailed out to the family. Now that I have a partner in crime (Mom) I’ve decided to try and decorate Daphne’s birthday cake and cupcakes, instead of going to a bakery. My mom usually decorated our birthday cakes growing up and that’s a tradition I’d like to keep going. Her color scheme is hot pink, light pink and orange and theme is a butterfly/flower thing (which coordinates with her hat and the print of her birthday dress). We’ve been inspired by a few cakes and cupcakes, like these:

This is from Butterfly Sweets. It’s a little over the top, but we wouldn’t have to put so many colors or designs on it (I mean, I’d like it for me, but since her hat and dress are so busy I think a super busy cake design would just take over the pictures.)

Another from the same blog. But I don’t love the taste of fondant and neither of us have ever worked with it before.

Cute cupcakes from Flickr:

As far as decor, I’m thinking paper lanterns or flowers. I love these from Lunabazaar.

But we probably don’t need those, since I plan on doing these flower balloon bouquets from Martha Stewart:

She loves balloons.

I picked up a few books today to help with the cake thing. The Whimsical Bakehouse and Hello, Cupcake! Both books are incredible, but I just love the cupcake book. Seriously, if you have kids or ever need to make cupcakes for any holiday or special occasion you must get this book. The Shark Attack cupcake instructions are worth the $10 you’ll pay for the book on Amazon. See what I mean?:

Now I just need a little boy so I can plan a shark themed birthday. Alright, back to Daphne. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please send them my way! I’d love the input.

Search for Good Brisket

Today Chris, Daphne & I went in search of Texas BBQ. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know that we are big BBQ fans. In fact, we have been known to hop in the car and drive a couple of hours in search of good ‘que. For the last 5 years that meant SE & Memphis style pork BBQ, which is not my favorite. I do like Memphis style pulled pork and ribs. But, don’t even get me started on Carolina or Georgia style BBQ, blech. All that vinegar and mustard, *shudder* I can also remember watching Paula Deen’s show on BBQ and her family recipe for BBQ chicken involved vinegar and peanut butter. Oh heck no! That’s right up there with the abomination that is Alabama white BBQ sauce. To me, the perfect BBQ meal is a tender smoky brisket and a side of handmade BBQ sausage and just a touch of a tomato based sweet sauce.

Based on Chowhounds Houston BBQ Smackdown, we went to Pierson & Company. It was good, a tad too smoky for me, but I’d rather have too smoky than no smoke taste at all. I tried a sample of their sausage. It was a little dry, but had a good flavor. The ladies behind the counter were very friendly and we will definitely be back.

Tex-Mex and Ghetto Margaritas

As soon as we get to Texas I need either a fabulous Tex-Mex meal and frozen margarita, or a Fall Off the Porch tea from Babin’s (it’s basically a Long Island iced tea). It’s been a long week and it’s only Wednesday. After a hard day it would have been really nice to just get dressed up, head over to our favorite cheapo Mexican place and have dinner. But we are just too busy for that. In fact, tomorrow will be my last full day here in Birmingham and the house is only about 70% packed. Ack!!! So I had to settle for Whole Foods frozen burritos and a lime popsicle dipped in tequila and triple sec. I know, pathetic right? My blender and smoothie makers are both packed away in the basement, my organic frozen strawberries were given to a friend and I just can’t stand Jose Cuervo margarita mix by itself. Yuck. Oh well, the move will be over soon and we can get back to normal. Whatever normal is these days.

Farmer’s Market

Today we woke up early and headed out to the Farmer’s Market over on Findley Ave.

Normally we go to the Pepper Place farmer’s market, but I kept reading comments on Chowhound about how only yuppies go to Pepper Place and how the one on Findley is SO much better. Well, I certainly don’t consider myself a yuppie, but I happen to like the music, cooking demonstrations, and artisanal bread selections at Pepper Place. And it’s much closer. Anyway, we didn’t end up buying anything at the market. We might try it again later this summer, but for now there was very little to choose from. And I didn’t notice anything specifically labeled organic. Later in the day we just went to Whole Foods.

The main reason we went produce shopping was so I could start making baby food for Daphne. I had every intention of making all her baby food, but since she had no interest in solids for the first 7 1/2 months I just bought Earth’s Best organic jarred baby food. She must be going through a growth spurt now because she has been HUNGRY this week. Like finishing off several jars of baby food (with a little rice cereal), a teething biscuit and some sweet potato puffs at one meal. So hopefully she’ll enjoy my homemade stuff.

And since I’m on the topic of making baby food, if I had a huge kitchen with tons of space for frivolous small appliances I would totally get this Beaba Babycook from Williams-Sonoma.

It steams your food, then blends it to the desired consistency. It’s the lazy way to make your own baby food.

Tortillas

Where my parents live in TX you can go to your local grocery store and pick up fresh tortillas in the bakery.  That would be awesome.  I really prefer fresh tortillas and miss being able to get good Mexican food.

This weekend I planned on making Cast Sugar’s Baja fish tacos so I picked up some panko crusted tilapia at Costco, corn tortillas, shredded cabbage, and everything I needed to make the sauce.  As I was taking the corn tortillas apart and setting some aside to be wrapped up and frozen (we never eat a whole package of tortillas) I noticed they really smelled bad.  Like old tires mixed with enclosed zoo pen smell.  You know, that smell that hits you when you walk into an exhibit building.  Rancid.  After I threw them away I decided to just pull out my electric tortilla press and bag of Maseca and make my own.  The whole process took maybe 10 minutes.  Why don’t I make my own tortillas all the time?? We are so ready for Cinco de Mayo now.  I just need to convince Chris to actually try the fish tacos.  He can be rather picky.  Since I have so much Maseca left I might make him tamales.  Anyone have a good recipe?

Recipe PSA

Just in case any of you were planning to make the Orange Peel Chicken recipe I linked to a few days ago… do not get lazy and just microplane grate the orange peel onto the chicken.  I didn’t want to take the time to julienne the orange peel so I just grated a bit on top of the chicken.  All you could taste was orange.  Blech.  I tried to compensate with more chili-garlic and soy sauce, but then it just tasted like spicy, salty oranges.  Chris is still trying to get the orange taste out of his mouth.  He he.

Summer Eats

About three times a year I get completely sick of our normal menus and start looking for new recipes to try. Usually it works out to January (when we are burned out on heavy holiday food), March (when we switch on the A/C) and November (when it gets cool enough to bake again). I’m really weird about turning on my oven. If it’s hot out and the A/C is on, I just don’t want the additional heat in my small kitchen. So we grill out on the back deck and I use my stove top and little toaster oven. Sometimes I’ll pull out my portable roaster oven if we want a ham or something. That way I can set it outside, or in the utility room. In the summer we eat a lot of grilled chicken, salmon, shrimp, tilapia, pork tenderloin, kabobs. After eating salmon every week for 2 years I’m so burned out. Just thinking of salmon makes me ill. We need a change.

So, this past weekend I tried out a few new recipes:

A PF Chang’s knock-off recipe, Mongolian Beef. Tasty, but there was too much cornstarch on the beef, which made the sauce kinda gloppy.

Italian flank steak with rosemary mashed cannellini beans. This recipe came from one of Chris’ Men’s Health magazines. I really liked the mashed cannellini beans. We took a can of Progresso beans, a little bit of olive oil, rosemary, salt, pepper, minced garlic, heated for a few minutes and mashed it up.

Rosemary bread. This recipe was perfect and super easy since it was from the bread machine.

Here are a few more I want to try in the next week or so:  Orange Peel Chicken, Baja Fish Tacos,  and probably chicken or pork tacos using Penzey’s Rojo seasoning.   If you have any great summer recipes, send them my way.

Gnocchi

When Chris was at Costco a few weeks ago I asked him to pick up a bag of potatoes. My family was coming to town and I wanted a good size bag. I was thinking 10 lbs. Chris brought home a 20 lb bag. Ack!

I feel a little bit like Bubba Blue from Forrest Gump trying to figure out how to use up the bag… mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, fried potatoes, potato casserole, potato soup, potato bread. I realized a few days ago they were starting to go bad and I needed to cook them up asap. So I peeled, boiled and mashed them, stored them in the fridge and waited for inspiration to hit. Last night I decided to make gnocchi.

Why have I not made gnocchi before? Tasty and ridiculously easy. After reviewing several recipes I just decided to wing it. I took a very Close Encounters style mountain of cold mashed potatoes (mine were already seasoned with salt and pepper), made a well in the center, threw in an egg, some flour and mixed it up, adding flour until it was no longer sticky. I portioned the dough into 6 parts, rolled little snakes and cut them into bite size pieces. On the first batch I rolled them against the tines of a fork to get the distinctive ridges, on the following batches I just said, “screw it” and threw them straight into boiling, salted water. As soon as they started to float I pulled them out and tossed them with a little butter, Parmesan cheese and Penzey’s Tuscan Sunset seasoning (I didn’t have any fresh herbs). Yum! Chris actually liked them so much he stole the bowl and even took the rest as leftovers to work today. That never happens. When I make them again I might try an actual sauce, maybe like Trader Joe’s Gnocchi with Gorgonzola sauce.

Today, if I feel up to it, I might try to make potato rolls. We had a friend in Missouri who made amazing potato rolls, but since I am incapable of not killing yeast I’ve never been able to get the recipe to turn out. Wish me luck!