A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Last Minute Food Gifts: Cookie Dippin'

I'm down to the wire. After making two huge batches of Ghirardelli/French vanilla cocoa mix and pomegranate winter comfort tea and I-forget-how-many batches of chai-spiced pretzels and curried almonds and cashews....I'm almost out of goodies and there are still so many people I wanted to share with! Sigh.  But since I have to work the next three nights, sleep during the days, and take the nieces and nephew's presents over to my sister's house Friday afternoon but wanted to take goodies there too... What's a girl to do?  Improvise! 

This blog's not called "A Fridge Full of Food...and nothing to eat" for naught. I grew up at my mother's side in the kitchen and she was the Queen of pulling something good to eat out of her....cupboards!  I had some Wilton candy chips, a few dark chocolate chips, and a bag of leftover caramel chips (from Halloween for caramel apples).  Gene found a box of 'Nilla wafers in the back of the pantry and ran to the store for a few packages of sandwich cookies.

Halloween Food: Eyeball Rice Cereal Treats, Devil's Eye Eggs, Blood Clot Cranberry Dip, and I See You Meatballs

Bwahahahaha! Halloween--my very favorite holiday!  And a family favorite as well. No matter how old "our" kids get, this will always be our tradition: get together at Aunt Gonnie and Uncle Gene's house, eat great creepy food, dress up or dress down, take any little ones trick-or-treating the neighborhood and just hang out..

This year our creepy food was all eyeball in theme. We didn't really plan it that way but as the eyeballs piled up we just kept running with them it:  Gummy Eyeball Rice Cereal Treats,  Devil's Eye Eggs,  Blood Clot Cranberry Dip, I See You Meatballs, and just for fun, the un-eye-ball Mexican Villa Cheese Dip and Chips. There was also two crockpots full of chili and a few others goodies on the table like spinach dip, witch's pretzel/candy fingers, etc.    

 

 And now for recipes....

Good & Good For You: Blood Orange & Lavender Olive Oil Muffins

 

My sweet tooth has been acting up a bit lately. No matter how much I try to feed it broccoli, it screams for sugar. I hate it when it gets cranky, but I will persevere. I'm a firm believer that I can eat healthy AND still satisfy my sugar cravings. My sweet tooth demanded orange: Orange martinis?  Orange jelly candies?  Orange Cake?  What we compromised on, my sweet tooth and I, was a batch of these delicious and good-for-you blood orange and lavender olive oil muffins.  Sweet, but not too sweet, and a treat without being empty calories.  With the addition of the whole wheat pastry flour, these muffins are a little heavier, a little more toothsome than so-called muffins that are really fluffly cupcakes masquerading as breakfast food.  More than breakfast, these are a fruity, flower-scented snack, that also contain a serving of good daily fat, for tea time or any time of the day I need a pretty little pick-me-up. 

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Easter (or Anytime): Apple Crostata

 

After the Easter egg bread fiasco, I still wanted to make a dessert for Gene's and my Easter dinner so I decided to make something so easy, so uncomplicated that surely I couldn't screw it up.  At least that's what I kept praying. 

This apple crostata fit the bill perfectly.  Simple and quick, it was the perfect ending for the richness of our roasted duck.  You can use a sprinkling of cinnamon, cardamon, or allspice if you like, but as I've said a few times here on the blog my personal preference for fruit desserts is to keep the spicing simple so the clear flavor of the fruit shines through. This recipe only contains three ingredients besides the apple and the pie crust:  lemon juice, butter, and sugar. It doesn't get much more simple than that.

Happy Valentine's Day: Banana Crepes with Chocolate Sauce

 

                           
 

Perfect for Valentine's at home:  pretty enough to have come from a restaurant and easy enough for anyone to do at home.  Although we'll be eating out tomorrow night with friends Jenn and Corbin, had we stayed home I might have made this.  As it happened, I created it for one of our Dexter dinners this past fall when Aunti and James gathered with us to eat dinner and watch the "D" man every Sunday night.

Later this week I'll be blogging about all the wonderful cooking Gene's been doing for me this week--sooooooo yummy!

Happy 50th Birthday, Gene! Nannie's Banana Pudding Just For Gene

 
  
Happy 50th Birthday to my wonderful hubby, Gene! 

On the other hand, I can't believe I'm married to an official old man, AARP candidate, self-proclaimed "cranky old bastard".  How do these things happen in life?  They just sneak up on you with a baseball bat in the night.  :-)

Had a great party for old bastard (hey, his words!) last night with a few old friends to help usher him along into this over the hillishness and of course I have a few stories to tell.

Let's start with Friday, the day I was prepping food for this little shindig but in the middle of the afternoon I needed to go get my allergy and asthma shots. I'd just put on a pot of water to hardboil eggs for deviled eggs and, standing in the kitchen, told Gene "Just let them boil hard for 10 minutes and then turn them off and let them be."  His response was to scowl and bang his hand on the counter, yelling at me "I'm so damn tired of you starting crap and leaving me to finish it and take care of everything!"  My eyebrows were somewhere in the fifth dimension, I believe. While THINKING "You. Are. A. Dead Man." I SAID quietly "Are you kidding me?"  He immediately laughed and said "Yes! I am! You should see the look on your face. That was hilarious."  Yeah. Hilarious.  He almost didn't make it to that Big Five Oh.

But of course it was funny and I've been telling everyone.

He's been so ornery the last few days--it's been really fun and funny around our house. He also bacame his own birthday chronicler from time to time as he photographed the birthday prep.  After uploading this one, I asked "Why did you take a picture of me picking egg shell pieces out of the eggs?" He said "You were doing something with your hands?" 

Cute little dirty old man! :-)

 

I put up the fall and part of the Halloween decorations for last night and then added a few spiffy old man party things including this caution tape across the door and wound some of it around the pillars on the porch. We also made him wear a ribbon/button that said "OH NO THE BIG 5-0" and he stuck a little caution sign I'd bought for the dessert table into his shirt pocket that said "Caution: 50 year old having a senior moment" so I guess he was as decorated as the house.  He also had a baseball hat that read "50:  Been there, done that, can't remember it."

 
The Motley Bday Crue--Front Row:  Dee McKeel and Birthday Boy, Middle Row:  Debbie Henderson, Barb Schurke, Tammy Jahnke, and Jenn Garrison (Campbell).  Back row:  Jeff McKeel, John Henderson, John Schurke, Corbin Campbell, and Dave Jahnke. And not in the photo,  Darrel and Leigh Hasty, friends through Corbin and Jenn.

The connections are:  Jeff and Gene grew up together in Marshfield...John H. and Corbin and Gene were all in the radio game together for the last two and a half decades...Barb and John work with me but Gene loves them too... and Dave and Tammy have been neighbors and friends for over 15 years. 

We ate tons, told lots of fun stories, played a little poker... 

What a wonderful evening--thank you all for joining us and celebrating Geno's transition officially into old-man-hood!

And now for the recipe.  Gene's favorite dessert is my Nannie's (grandmother's) old-fashioned banana pudding, the truly southern version using 'Nilla Wafers.  She used to make a big bowl of it for him every year for his birthday and as a special treat whenever she thought he needed a little Nannie pick me up or whenever he did something extra special nice for her which was often. They were pretty tight. I love that they loved each other so much. The bittersweet part of that is that Nannie is no longer with us. So in memory of her and her love for Gene I get to make the banana pudding for him.

For Gene: Quick Rhubarb Cobbler

Every year I try to make at least one rhubarb cobbler for Gene.  Not strawberry/rhubarb, just the 'barb itself which is his preference. This year's was tasty (made a couple of changes) and even looked pretty, although the pie crust discs I cut out look like biscuits in the picture. Hmmm...didn't think about that at the time.  Oh well.  Either way, this is one of Gene's all time favorite pies.

Life on the Pop Culture Edge: Snack Cake Birthday Cake

For as long as we can all remember Gene and I have hosted a couple of summer family parties as birthday parties for the nieces and nephews.  At the end of May we celebrate Jordan and Isaac's May birthdays. In August we celebrate Sydney's July and Kaylee's September birthdays. 

I try to do something different and fun for cakes each time. One year it was a sculpted cake big rig, one year rice krispie treats molded into a car cake pan, one time a Twilight themed cake, and this year it was their favorite snack cakes built into a tower.



Even though Isaac will turn 11 this week and Jordan is 18 today, they (we all) still l love indulging our inner kid at birthday parties so the theme of decorations this year was both G.I. Joe Camo and Sponge Bob.  Hey, you're never too old for a little Sponge Bob.  As I often say: why did my siblings have children? To give me someone my own age to play with.

Happy Birthday to Me: Banana Walnut Baked Doughnuts with Cream Cheese Glaze

 

As a kid, I always asked for banana bread for my birthday, much to my cake decorating Mother's horror "But I'll decorate any kind of over the top cake you want, any theme!"  "Nah, we have cake all the time. I just want banana bread."

What an ungrateful child I was.  :-)

Most birthdays now I bake my own cakes and they're still never cake per se. Not that I don't like cake, I love store bought white cake and any kind of country-type cake, it's just that I learned cake decorating from my mom so a fancy decorated cake is fun for me to make for others but I still personally want to make myself banana bread or these doughnuts (was craving them yesterday)  or Almond Croissants  like three years ago.  Not that I'd turn down traditional birthday cake. Most people are intimidated to bake for me so I was genuinely thrilled and touched when my friend Barb, who will tell you up front she doesn't bake much, surprised me with a Home-made Carrot Cake for my birthday two years ago. 

Even though these are doughnuts, I did manage to sneak some health into them.  Seriously.  The flour is 50/50 white/wheat, honey instead of sugar, olive oil as the fat, walnuts and they're baked instead of fried.  And yet with all that, amazingly they're really yummy! Seriously.,

Christmas Bread/Cake/Fruit Cake...the rest of the story

And how did the fruitcake from this October post turn out? Quite well, thank you! Not only is it moist and delicious from its two months of feedings of (alternating) Michael Collins Irish Whiskey and Southern Comfort, it is now decorated prettily with a swipe of white sugar glaze and a fondant wreath, and nestled each into its only little Christmas-themed goody box waiting to go home with family members following our party on Saturday. (Yes, I did leave a few out to slice up for the party.)

For anyone who was intimidated by the 20 mini loaves this recipe made, go ahead and consider it for next year.  Next year I think I will probably only get about 15 loaves because I'll fill the mini loaf containers higher with batter before baking AND I've found that having given a few away early this year and having sampled one or two along the process, I'm left with only 12 for the final count including the ones I set aside to cut/serve at the party. The batch size wasn't as overwhelming as it might have seemed at first. Trust me.

Link to the recipe/original photos and my diatribe about bad fruitcake :-) :   http://afridgefulloffood.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/fruit-cake-is-goodif-you-do-it-right.html