Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Ghoulish Dinner

In our excitement to finally live in a house where we might get trick-or-treaters we stayed home and invited friends over for Halloween this year. While we only had two knocks at the door all night, I had a wonderful time preparing a spooky dinner.


Ryan and I have long established Halloween as a gift-giving holiday (I think we just like excuses to get each other presents). This year, Ryan gave me my gift a little early so that I would have time to figure out how to prepare it. My gift was squid ink pasta. It looks and tastes like regular spaghetti, but it is made black using squid ink. Inspired by his gift, I gave myself the culinary challenge of creating an all-black meal. It was quite a success!

Here was our menu:
Appetizers (in the photo above): black grapes, porter soaked cheddar cheese with pumpernickel toasts, spiderweb eggs (below), and pumpkin seeds.


Dinner: Squid ink pasta with pesto, prosciutto, and mozarella-and-olive "eyeballs," salad, bread, and a blood-red black currant and brandy cocktail (I tried desperately to find black vodka for the occasion, but apparently it is on back order at the two stores in town that carry it).


Dessert: Pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (my first baking from scratch since before I was pregnant with Hattie), and Trader Joe's ice cream sandwiches rolled in mini-chocolate chips. I probably could have done better creating a black dessert, but I was more focused on the dinner foods.

The evening was rounded out by watching the original Night of the Living Dead, in black and white, of course!

Monday, October 29, 2007

8 Random Thoughts About My Kitchen

I have been tagged by Andrea to share about my kitchen.

1) My counters are pink and brown tile (my current favorite color combination for just about anything). They are probably the original tiles that were put in the house when it was built in the 50’s. So retro and totally feminine, I love it!

2) Like Flo, I wear an apron whenever I cook (and most of every day actually). In the summer of 2006 Ryan's mom created the “Apron of the Month Club” for me. At the beginning of each month a package would arrive in the mail containing a unique hand-made apron of her own design. I now have a different apron for every month. The apron I am currently using has jack-o-lanterns on it, a full skirt, and a pocket large enough to fill with candy for trick-or-treaters (she thinks of everything).

3) Our kitchen does not have a built in dishwasher. While I was in labor with Hattie, Ryan's parents bought and set up a stand alone dishwasher in our kitchen. It has been such a blessing!

4) I love washing dishes (even in my pre-dishwasher years), but I hate putting them away. On more than one occasion I have left clean dishes in the dishwasher until it “emptied itself” because we used all the dishes directly from the dishwasher.

5) I tend to be very ecologically minded and try not to create unnecessary waste. My one splurge is aluminum foil. I despise washing large baking sheets and big pans (especially if they are greasy); I always line them with aluminum foil so that I can just throw the mess away.

6) I have one drawer in my kitchen that has nothing in it. I am tempted occasionally to fill it, but it is kind of luxurious feeling just to know that it is there.

7) The house came with a vintage O’Keefe and Merritt oven. It is small and not very pretty, but it cooks food more efficiently than any other oven I have ever used. Unfortunately the door to the broiler fell off in my hand when I tried to use it for the first time a few weeks ago. Because replacement parts are so hard to find (and expensive) our property managers plan to replace it. I will be sad to see it go, but am also excited to have a new oven! It is probably for the best since Hattie will be crawling soon and the doors on the old oven get really hot.

8) While I recently switched to using my own home made cleaners in our house, I stumbled upon Method’s Cinnamon Bark all-purpose cleaner last week and had to try it. I have been using it to clean my kitchen counters and it makes the whole house smell like I have been baking all day, even though I have not baked a thing in over a year (unless you count Trader Joes pre-formed frozen cookie dough).

I tag Ryan, Jen , Jesse & Kelly