Tuesday, January 8, 2013

A Simple French Manicure, Two Fish Recipes, Cinnamon Rolls, & Custard Gone Wrong!

Bread Crumb with my own spices

Let's start with tonight's dinner. Our good friend Joe fishes often, and we were the recipients of one of his latest catches. Fresh trout. It might still be my favorite fish! I can't get enough of it. 
In my recipe binder, there is a stack of ShopRite grocer recipe cards, and this is where I went for tonight's fish supply.

The recipe called for Italian spiced crumbs, and since I have plain ones, I used my own herbs and spices to flavor the crumb coating.
Coated fish on olive oil
 This recipe was too easy. I recommend it to my family. :o) Throw the fillets into the crumbs, flip 'em to coat 'em, fry in olive oil about 5 minutes on medium high. Flip and do the same.

Illegible, but I basically told you what to do!

 In my opinion, the fish was tastier without the sandwich rolls and tartar sauce, but I didn't have enough food to fill my family's bellies, so we had to go with the sandwiches. It was a perfect match with Kettle brand sea salt potato chips.

Tori being the statue of liberty, which she does during any "countdown". Jesse in his playard, watching Tori run, jump and yell!
 It has been another one of those clingy days, so I had to take drastic measures with the kids to get things done. Boy in Pack N Play (thank God we have it!) in sister's room with a Red Box movie- Ice Age, Continental Drift. He hardly watched the movie at all, to my delight. He was too busy watching sister and all her antics. Boy, she really can keep him entertained, when she feels like it.

 So here's Rick's share of the fish. LOL. We ate the rest.
 And here's my plate of food.
 Tori, trying her first fish sandwich. Survey says: *shaking her head* NO. So I tell her to eat the fish without the bread. Yes, you have to. That's dinner. It's how we roll when you're five years old.





Using up the leftover drinks in the frig...Ginger ale and grape juice are a great pair!
 We made standard blueberry muffins with the remaining blueberries from baking coffeecake last week. They were okay, but I'm interested in re-vamping the recipe so that it is less like a corn bread.
 I have all this flour in the house since I stopped selling muffins at the farm. So, I got busy looking for ways to use it up. Using our bread machine, we made a dough and turned it into cinnamon rolls. Everyone seemed to enjoy them enough. I didn't think they were WONDERFUL, but I enjoyed the four I ate. LOL
Tori poses with our pre-baked cinnamon roll

 Tori has been taking a liking to baking AND cooking with me, especially since I let her help with more than dry ingredients. When I'm in the kitchen, she runs in, scrambles up onto her chair, and asks what we're making this time. Here, she greased the pan with butter (though this was the pan we used later that day to bake another Pumpkin Pecan Crunch Pie ha ha!)...
 Tori also poured and mixed the almonds, cinnamon, and sugar. She rolled the dough out into a big rectangle. She helped me pinch the rolled dough closed in the end and placed the cut pieces into the pan.
 ...then she helped me eat one! With tea, that is.


 Not bad for our first try.

 Apparently, the recipe photo didn't come through. If any one is interested, comment on this post and I will retry. Otherwise, I won't bother. LOL.
 For dinner last week, We had fresh steamed kale. And Tori was in charge of washing the kale. I turned from my task of preparing the fish and risotto to find her snacking on some. I thought, huh, okay. She'll just eat that one. Wrong! I turned a few times more and found her eating whole leaves of them. Now, I know already that she loves most raw vegetables. And I know she likes raw kale, because she ate some right from our friend Denise's garden last summer. But, I didn't know she liked it enough to eat HALF the kale I had asked her to wash!!! I made a deal with her- since she ate enough raw kale, she wouldn't need any steamed kale at dinner. She was thrilled to pieces at that idea.



 Here's another ShopRite grocer recipe card that I've cooked twice now. The family likes it a lot, and honestly, it isn't much work.
 My apologies for a lack of photos. I'm so out of practice that I cooked the whole thing without thinking of photos!

 My favorite risotto is creamy risotto. It's a labor of love, as my cousin Curtis would say, but it is so worthwhile when it is on the plate!

 Again, sorry for the lack of photos. Hence the short narratives.
 One recipe I tried on this day (last Friday) called for only egg whites. [That recipe failed miserably in my book, though it was done correctly and probably was fine to eat. Anything with the word "lite" in it should be a red flag, but I did it anyway)... It was a spinach and cheese souffle. I had hoped for a recreation of the Panera Bread souffles that I love soooooo much. Wrong. LOL. At any rate, that trial run went straight to the trash can. What you have here is a few photos of what I did with the egg yolks....
 My family (Rick and myself) looooooves custard. I used to buy the boxes of powder to make for us, but when we moved away from Arizona in 2008, they became increasingly hard to find. Now that we're on the other side of the continent, I've not found the boxed custard mixes at all. Sooo, I resorted (ha ha, yes, resorted) to making it from scratch, and to our delight, it tastes so much better! And really, it's not any less or more work than a mix. A labor of love, it is. A labor of love.
 So, typical egg yolks, sugar, vanilla, and milk recipe. Stir on the stove top for, like, forever. Of course, I forgot the vanilla. Boo hiss. AND it was one of those kind of days with the baby boy (clingy, off the routine, unpredictable, can't get a thing done right days), so OF COURSE, it cooked for too long and on too high a heat. The result? Curdled custard.
 HA! I "Ramekin'ed" them up anyway, and not surprisingly, Rick ate them without complaint. ROFL. He won't waste food. And he hardly doesn't like something. :o) Anyway, I will try again later. And I'll have to find something new to do with the egg whites.
...Meringue. Yuck. I don't even like meringue.

FRENCH MANICURE
My new year manicure lasted but two days before the tips chipped off completely, so I was forced to remove the whole paint job. Lacking time, as usual, I decided to forego the task of painting my nails. I quickly changed my mind and quickly painted just a base coat to protect them. 
In my wishy-washy state of mind, I grabbed the Pure Ice Super Star & speedily swiped tips on each nail. 

Since Jesse was sleeping extra long at the time, I chose to coat them with a layer of Sally Hansen Diamond Strength Diamonds, for a bit of shimmer. And in the end, I finished them off with a top coat to help the manicure last through the day of domestic chores.

My arsenal

I was pretty happy with my last minute manicure, as I always am when I chose a french tip manicure. Sadly, the tips of my index fingers didn't last through one hour of that day. In twenty four hours, I had to remove the whole paint job again.
But I have pictures! :o)

1 comment:

  1. Fun! My kids always liked to help cook when they were that age, too. Love this post :0)

    ReplyDelete