I’ll bake anything….with cheese

Cauliflower Cheese Bake

1 head cauliflower cut into florets

1/2 c corn kernels

1/2 c frozen peas

1 lg onion sliced

2 c milk heated

3 tbsp butter + 1 tbsp

3 tbsp flour

1 c parmesan cheese + 1/3 cup

1/2 c shredded mozzarella

2 cloves garlic minced

1 1/2 tsp mustard powder

1/2 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp nutmeg (if you can use freshly grated it is far superior than pre-ground)

salt & pepper

1/3 c breadcrumbs

Oven 375F

Blanche cauliflower, set aside in bowl with peas and corn (defrosted if frozen).  Saute onions, on medium heat, in 1 tbsp butter until golden brown about 15 mins, add to bowl.

In a saucepan melt 3 tbsp butter, add flour and stir until incorporated over medium heat, cook 3 mins until golden in color.  Add the heated milk and whisk together, cook over a low heat until mixture starts to thicken.  Add garlic, spices and cheeses (minus 1/3 c parmesan), big pinch salt and pepper and mix again.

Grease a baking dish (8 x 8 or similar) spread vegetable mixture in evenly then pour cheese sauce over. Sprinkle top of bake liberally with the breadcrumbs and the last of the parmesan (1/3 c). Bake 35 mins until golden brown and bubbling.

molten hot bubbling cheesy goodness, I served this with a simple side salad.

pizza post update 5.0

or something… I’ve talked about pizza here, here, here and yes here.

Okay more things to do with Trader Joes Pizza Dough, or any local equivalent you may have.  Hungry guests arriving? don’t wanna toil and slave? Grab ya dough, get rolling and crank out a couple of these….

divide your dough in have, roll, stretch or pull it to some amoebic shape and top with either…

thinly sliced red onions, potatoes and garlic slivers, top with fresh rosemary and sea salt AND again thinly sliced red onions, garlic slivers, homemade slow roasted tomatoes, fresh sage and grated parmesan cheese.  Bake at 450F for 20-25 mins, until the crust is crisp and golden brown.

cut into pieces and fight for every last crumb… and if that’s not enough, make sure you always have a stash of these ingredients on hand…. again slow roasted tomatoes, olive tapenade (store bought), local smoked trout, a selection of local cheeses, homemade pickled radishes, assorted olives (store bought) and crostini (store bought).

Mr Bird

Hi there Mister Bird… do you not know that you are far too big to be prancing around in this delicate tree? whose tiny limbs are bending under your body weight.  Hey Mister Bird, why don’tcha go pick on something your own size? Maybe you’re confused to what you are?  maybe you think you’re one of these... but bird, I’m here to assure you that, you most certainly are not… and you should act accordingly! You break my branch and I WILL be mad.

careful, careful, that branch ain’t that big…

oh whoops I’m wobblin, wobblin…

oh crap I think I’m loosin it…

cor that was close… look how cool I look… cool as a cucumber and whaddaya lookin at?

think I’ll just casually check out some branch over here, not because I HAVE to but because I WANT to…

see its a better view from over here anyway…

Dear Mr Dobson….

I had high hopes Saturday night when I hunkered down, with your cookbook in hand, to make a special birthday celebration using your recipes… yes high hopes indeed.  I could have picked any cookbook and any recipes to make, but I choose you, Mr Dobson.  Your book “Market Vegetarian” with its gorgeous photography which set the bar to expect spectacular results…. hmmm Mr Dobson what have you to say when my comments are, “I would have been better off pulling something from my own culinary repertoire” and “how could you write something that has NO SALT in it at all? Surely this is just an editing mistake?

All that effort, all those ingredients, all my concentration to actually follow the recipe! This did me no justice and I was excited to try these two out.  First up a “creamy vegetable and cashew curry”, yum right? I stockpiled the hard-to-find ingredients (well for the Catskills anyway) such as curry leaves, black mustard seeds, red chilies and scanned the rest of the list… looked good, the usual suspects going into a curry, garlic, ginger, turmeric etc. Okay, so the “vegetables” in this dish equate mainly to baby new potatoes, shallots and a small red pepper… I can always beef this up by adding chickpeas and cauliflower for more veggie content, no biggie… doo do do dah dah…  wow everything looked great…

I put on a pot of basmati rice to accompany my creamy delicious curry…and jazzed that up with a few cardamon pods and a couple of kaffir lime leaves… FANCY PANTS!  Okay now I’m really cookin this is just gonna knock their culinary socks off… doo do do doo do… and drum roll please…

ah drums have you started yet?  Hmmm needs SALT, yeah no kidding, like everything needs salt, salt brings out flavor…. did I miss something, oh god, did I not follow the recipe? Ah yes I did and there isn’t a granule to be found in this, oh well okay I’ll just throw some in now and give it a big stir, nevermind that it’s already on the table and everyone has started eating…

Sooooo well it’s okay, kinda mild, if you’ve never made a curry before you’d probably like it, I thought it could have used more of pretty much everything and was a bit disappointed because I make my regular Thai curry (recipe coming later) which socks more punch.   NEXT…

Now I was really beside myself excited to try out the second recipe.. seeing as I am considered somewhat of an expert on all things Pavlova, Mr Dobson taunted me with a “fresh fig and walnut meringue” hmmm, NOT Pavlova, but worth investigating no less… I was highly skeptical however,  knowing the inner workings of the mighty pav, it does NOT take kindly to be messed about with especially the addition of wet fruit into its delicate whipped egg whites and the change of dry sugar to a wetter “packed brown sugar”, BUT it’s NOT a pav and besides the picture looks GORGEOUS AND I found fresh figs…. so there!!

Yum, whipped up egg whites with brown sugar so it’s all melty, caramel colored and luscious looking, here I’m folding in the quartered fresh figs and toasted walnuts and it’s only the fact that this bowl is full of raw eggs that is stopping me from plunging my face straight into it.

HOWEVER…. 45 minutes later,  what came out of the oven was (as I secretly, okay and actually verbally predicted to my guests) a soggy, weeping, very unspectacular MESS with a crater the size of the Grand friggin Canyon running through it.  Maybe it will taste better than it looks… right?

err NOPE, wow far too sweet, I could feel me teeth rattling in protest with every bite, and the chunky walnuts were also way too much, hey Mr Dobson maybe you wanna run a knife through ‘em?

I didn’t take a shot of IT straight out of the oven, but I did however get the leftover mess of trying to pry these disintegrating pieces off the parchment.

attractive right? Yeah hardly.  So folks… what can I tell you… I wasn’t impressed.  Sometimes the best things made are the ones whipped up on a whim in the kitchen with nary a thought to an actual “RECIPE” and just because its “written” doesn’t make it good.

And on that note, with my “whipped up recipes” posted here, if any of mine disappoint you or you think they purely SUCK, please don’t hesitate to tell.  You know where to find me.  Hopefully not with me head in the oven! HAHA.

pumpkins and personalities…

I think I must have been the last person on the planet to pick up pumpkins before Halloween, coz this motley crew was all that was left.  A weekend pumpkin carving exercise clearly brought out the various personalities…

Exhibit A: “Big mouth” the chunky-heavy-handed-get-it-done-quick carved mess on the left. Personality type, without realizing it, everything is a competition, forgets to have fun, and jumps into full on “make it happen” mode.

Exhibit B: “Smiley” The happy-go-lucky jack o’ lantern.  Mr Well Adjusted, calmly going about his business, happily enjoying himself and look at the results… a smiling happy pumpkin and am I wrong but aren’t his eyes even smiling?

Exhibit C: “Crazy Face” and possibly a little angry looking? A carefully-planned-out-on-paper-first diagram of what  jack’s face was going to be.  Organized, methodical and slightly off kilter!

But wait… where’s the 4th pumpkin…  that personality wasn’t trifling with any of this, all-business-glued-to-a -computer-probably-accomplishing-several-things-at-one-time… the sad reject pumpkin was left faceless.

So here is a classic example of different types… clearly exposed by this weekend pumpkin carving exercise.  What type are you?

 

moving car photography

 

 

 

 

uh oh, the car seemed to be magically steering itself towards these…

pickled radishes

Since I’m still working my way through my radish stash I experimented pickling them sliced and whole, using my standard pickling method.  I know its exciting times in the “wee house”, and you’re just white knuckling it with anticipation….

The results…

this time I tried the whole radishes with rice wine vinegar instead of apple cider vinegar, I give a slight edge to the rice vinegar version.

recycle recycle recycle…

These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world’s most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Website source here.

Gut wrenching!!

shoveling shrimp

Yesiree Bob, and you will too, once you make this…

Shrimp Scampi (adapted from here)

1 1/2 pds large shrimp peel and deveined

1 stick butter (8 tbsp), softened

zest and juice 1 lemon

1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes

1/2 tsp salt and pepper

2 sprigs thyme (strip the leaves off one and keep the other whole)

2 tbsp chopped parsley

6 cloves garlic chopped (you can never have enough garlic in my book!)

Oven 450F.

Line the shrimp, in a single layer,  in a heavy oven proof dish (I used a 10 inch cast iron skillet).

Combine the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and dot over shrimp.

Place in oven and cook 10 mins, (depending on the size of your shrimp, they will be cooked at this stage) mine were quite large, I gave them a stir in the pan and cooked a further 4 mins. Perfect.

Serves 2 hungry shrimp lovers with a hunk of crusty hot bread and side salad. My new favorite dinner.

the last few… oh yeah since I’m a huge garlic fan,  I threw in a couple of whole cloves,  just because.

the hills are alive!

Holy Crap! look what was in the local paper last week….

what I would give to see a real live bear! okay this one’s dead, but a real live one… and this happened spittin distance from the “wee house”

and then get a load of this…

come to think of it, we have heard some pretty strange howling sounds echoing out of the mountains…

okay I am officially afraid of practically every living thing outside. Great.