In the Kitchen and the Sewing Room

Meatloaf, baked potatoes and sweet potatoes are in the oven and it smells so good here!  I'm a simple eater: soups, casseroles, meatloaf--love them!  I'm so thankful Dan does, too.  And that he's always willing to eat leftovers.  :-)

Down in the sewing room, those triangles have all been sewn together and piled in stacks . . .

. . . and are being put together in blocks to form pinwheels.  

It's been rather slow going because I have to be careful to put each set of triangles in the right position and then be careful not to muff them up as I stitch.  I haven't figured out how many blocks I'm going to end up with yet, but I'll surround each one with brown sashing, and maybe a cornerstone, color to be determined.  

I've also gotten back to knitting, so I'll have a post about what's on my needles later this week.  

Meanwhile, I have the sniffles, or allergies.  The quilt shop where I work is also a flower shop and the florist was working with lilies last Friday (the day I work each week). Lilies are my greatest floral nemesis!  But the sniffles have also been going around, so it may be that, or a combination.  I don't feel really bad, but energetic I'm not.  That meatloaf is going to taste mighty good; nothing like comfort food when you feel a little sniffly.   

A Pointed Post

A year ago I made this quilt for the shop.

See all those star points?  When each point was made, the method used left me with a pair of triangles, one of brown and one of the appropriate print.  The other day, I was sorting through my sewing room closet and I found a bag of fabric scraps.  I peeked in and there were all those triangles.  I started to throw them away, but then I thought it seemed wasteful (I'm sure my great-grandmothers would have shuddered at the thought) and so I reached in and pulled out a handful.  And then another, and another.  Hmm, there they were, in matching pairs, almost like they'd just come out of my GO! cutter (except the points were not blunted...).  

I laid them out and stared at them for a while and then began to stitch them together.

A little math for you.  There are thirty blocks in that quilt, each with eight points to the star.  That's eight times thirty, which according to my calculations equals two-hundred-forty sets of triangles.  Yikes!  At this point, I'm thinking of putting them together to make pinwheels.

I'm such a ditherer.  Do I want to make the print triangles all the same in a block, or use two prints as in the picture above, or totally mix them up.  Right now I'm leaning toward two prints, but tomorrow, who knows? Meanwhile, I'm still stitching those two-hundred-forty sets of triangles together.  And cutting off the points.  

The Pizza

Oh my goodness!  My new food processor is AWESOME! I did make pizza Saturday night and used the new Cuisinart to make the dough.  It has an extra button for dough, and after adding the dry ingredients, you push it first and then the On button as you pour the liquid down the chute.  The accompanying CD said to process for forty-five seconds.  Wow!  It was quiet but effective, because when I stopped it, there was a perfect mass of dough.  I took it out, put in on the flour-dusted counter, gave it a couple of kneads for good measure, and covered it with plastic wrap and left it for about twenty minutes.  When I came back, it has risen quite a bit and was ready to spread on my pizza pan.

I used 1/2 cup of Newman's Own Mushroom Marinara for my sauce and then added a few pieces of quartered Canadian Bacon, some sliced black olives, chopped green pepper and shredded mozarella.  Here's how it looked when it was ready to go in the oven:

Notice that well used pizza pan?  Dan got it for me for Christmas about thirty-five years ago.  He bought it from a restaurant supply house and it's seen a lot of pizzas, most homemade.  

Here's a picture of it hot out of the oven:

It was soooo good!  We had a big salad with it and we enjoyed every bite.  I could make another one right now!  

Here's the recipe I use:

Pizza Dough

1 package dry yeast

1 cup warm water

1 tsp sugar

1/4 tsp salt 

1 T oil

2 1/2 cups flour

Add yeast to warm water and set aside for a few minutes. Add dry ingredients to bowl of food processor and pulse to mix.  Add oil to yeast water and with the processor running, pour down the chute and process for 45 seconds to a minute, depending on your food processor. Take dough out of bowl and shape into a ball on a floured surface.  Cover and let rest for at least twenty minutes. Punch down and roll out on a lightly greased pizza pan that has been sprinked with cornmeal.  Top with favorite pizza ingredients and bake at 425 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes.  

The orginial recipe is pretty standard and comes from an old Betty Crocker cookbook.  I reduced the salt from one teaspoon to 1/4 teaspoon and the oil from two tablespoons to one.  I've even left out the oil and it's been fine.  

I always used my old food processor to make pizza dough and had no complaints although it could be a pain to get the sticky dough out of the bowl due to the design of the old GE.  It was also very loud, so the quietness of my new one was a surprise.  A pleasant one. 

Oh, and a note about the yeast.  A few years ago I discovered a new yeast and I swear by it.  It's saf-instant, the red label (as in red behind the little baker on the front; apparently they make at least one other that's gold behind the baker and I haven't tried that).  I get it at Winco and it can also be ordered from King Arthur Flour.

A Lazy Saturday

It's been a cozy winter day here at the resort.  We got up yesterday to four inches of new snow, which made for a gorgeous fairyland outside!

I worked all day at the shop and then we went out to dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant.   Mmmm, it was delicious and the really special part was that it was a gift from our nephew JR as a thank you for some help we extended after he had vehicle woes earlier this week.  

After a great night's sleep (unless you count the part where Dan had a dream that he was being chased by a bear and woke me up with his yelps), and sleeping in, I have enjoyed a thoroughly lazy day.  There were new magazines and catalogs in the mail and I actually looked through all of them, I had leftover burrito for lunch (and it was so huge, there is still some for tomorrow's lunch!), and I've played on the computer (lost my game of Spider Solitaire).  

The snow has melted some, but the trees against the sky have been lovely to see.

It's been such a great winter!  Some years it's dark and dreary, but we've had enough snow, interspersed with sunny days, that we truly can't complain.  And spring is not far away.  Which reminds me.  The moose is back.  I said to Dan that I suppose that means no tulips again this year, but he said that if it continues to hang around, he's thinking of calling the Fish and Game and asking that they relocate it.  I'm thinking that's not a bad idea, especially since there are kids around here and moose can be so unpredictable.   

Oh, and in a kitchen update, the brussel sprouts were delish.  We'll definitely have them again.  Here's a picture of them just out of the oven (link to the recipe is in my last post):

I'm pondering tonight's menu as I type.  We have leftover meatloaf, but I haven't used my new food processor yet, so perhaps the meatloaf will wait and I'll try pizza.  Hmmm...   :-)

In the Kitchen

For various reasons, I've been on a kitchen kick lately. I'm taking cookbooks to bed to read before lights out, I'm perusing lots of food blogs, and I'm actually spending quite a bit of time in the kitchen trying new things.  

Last night I tried a new recipe using broccoli and we found it quite tasty--and different.  I had the last of some fresh broccoli in the fridge that needed to be used, and a rundown of the recipe told me I had all the other ingredients.  We were having tacos for supper, so for a brief moment I pondered the addition of something so not Mexican (can tacos really be called Mexican?), but then I threw caution to the wind and went with it.  It was delicious and we ate every last morsel.  So what was it? Roasted Marinated Broccoli and you can find the recipe by clicking here.  

A few weeks ago I made chicken fajitas for supper and decided to make my own refried beans.  I checked my Pressure Perfect cookbook by Lorna Sass and found a recipe for Sub-limey Refried Beans and once again, I actually had all the ingredients.  (I've been more adventuresome at the store, too, and actually had limes in my fruit basket.)  I pressure cooked a pound of pinto beans and followed the recipe.  They were excellent in the fajitas, but then we love lime on them--it makes the flavors sing.  :-)  I froze the leftovers and used them in the tacos last night.  They froze well and the lime flavor was still evident.

Another recipe which met with great approval recently was for Cranberry Pork Loin.  The recipe comes from Judy over at Patchwork Times and is also a pressure cooker recipe.  I served it with a big bowl of homemade mashed potatoes and it was delicious!!  You can find that recipe here.  Judy has lots of good recipes so you might want to click on her Recipe link in the blog header and check out others.  

Right now I have a loaf of San Diego Sunshine Bread working in my bread machine.  It makes the most fabulous French toast, so that's what we'll be having for breakfast in the morning.  Yum!!  I'll use Eggbeaters and almond milk for the dipping mixture, so it'll be a healthy breakfast in spite of the syrup we'll use.  The recipe comes from the original Bread Machine Magic published in 1992 by Linda Rehberg and Lois Conway. It is my go-to bread machine cookbook and I've never been disappointed.  

And last, in kitchen news, a new food processor has come to live with us.  Back about 1980, Dan bought me an inexpensive GE food processor and in spite of it's low pedigree, it's been a trooper.  However, the last few times I used it, I noticed it didn't seal well anymore.  After almost thirty-three years, it was time to replace it.  I did some checking online and I had one picked out, on sale even.  Then yesterday we drove to Costco and lo and behold, there was one on the shelf.  With Dan's encouragement, into the cart it went.  I had fun setting it up and watching the accompanying video when we got home.  It's an 11-cup Cuisinart, not the biggest, but perfect for us.  

The old one had already been tossed in the garbage can, but I just dug it out for a commemorative photo with its replacment.  Quite the size difference!

I haven't used it the new one yet, but perhaps tomorrow I'll whip up some pizza dough and see how it does; it even has a special dough button.  Last year's garden was a bust, but I'm hoping I'll be running many zuchinni through this summer to replenish our relish supply.  And maybe make a few loaves of zuchinni bread.

Meanwhile, what's up in the kitchen tonight?  Roasted Brussel sprouts!  They're in the oven now, and here's where I got the recipe.