(another) new blog!

i've decided that with all of my incredible cooking and gardening skills, i'd better start a new blog dedicated to my attempts with food! if nothing else, it should provide a good laugh...

http://plantstoplates.blogspot.com

read um and weep, martha stewart

i did it! i made an edible and even (semi) tasty smatterings of baked goods these past couple of weeks!

first up, check out this masterpiece

mmm. what a beaut. and so what that it's supposed to be a tart but looks much more like a pie? come on - who really knows the difference? this gal does. and in case you're too lazy to click onto that link (although you should, it's pretty funny), the answer is NOBODY KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE! so there. 

the key to this piece of art was, i didn't actually have to bake anything other than the crust. i'm always pretty good with crust. then, the strawbs just lie on top and a little jam mix goes over that for shiny value. i personally think that anything with shiny fruit = a tart. 

the boy loved it (for real this time. not even for fake)

the second baking gem was this petite patisserie: 

so, i'm not quite sure why one day i was sitting around and all of a sudden thought, "i can't bake worth beans (although i hear beans bake pretty well. or so says that talking dog in the commercials). i've got an idea! i'll start a business selling incredibly gorgeous and delicious cakes and all the biggest names in the world will want to buy my cakes."

go big or go home, man. so, i went and bought (this is how serious i was about this idea) a cake decorating book.

granted, i didn't even crack open the book to make this little cake-a-roo. nor did i crack open a recipe. i bought a box mix (you've got to start somewhere, right?) and i nearly screwed that up even... i'd rather not talk about it. let's just say you shouldn't fill the pan to the brim with batter to bake it. doesn't turn out like you think it will. 

and granted, i didn't even make the fondant, although i did learn what the word fondant means! (it's the smooth frosting on top). i bought that at hobby lobby because i could. i did, however, paint the flowers on using straight up food coloring. so, i'd also rather not talk about how nasty the flower part of the frosting tasted... and forget to look at the bottom of the cake. i didn't know the best way to fold the frosting under. 

BUT, i did it! and if you're a big celebrity and would like me to make a cake for your next big event, act now, my calendar's filling up fast. 

in other domestic goddess news, i gardened yesterday! i think the last time i gardened was when i was about 6 and my dad was weeding and i was playing with this little toy i had - a little plastic dog with moveable joints that looked just like lassie and i'm pretty sure i thought he could talk (he couldn't). for whatever reason in my playing, the lassie dog was being chased by bad guys and needed to go into hiding. so, i used the garden shovel and buried him in the garden dirt. never to be found again. see - you'd be hesitant to garden with that kind of sad story too. 

anyway, totally pulled out the tools and the gloves and planted some flowers (which mr. milo helped with the digging), an herb garden AND a vegetable garden!! how excited am i?!? (if you can't tell the answer based on the number of exclamation points, you're just gonna stay in the dark). 

check out how cute! granted, it's a little bit smaller than i wanted it to be because how was i supposed to know that i needed that much dirt?? we're trying a thing called "lasagna gardening" where you start with wet newspapers and stack a bunch of yummy dirt and compost and sod on top of the newspapers in layers and then plant plants in that. thus the newspapers. but not thus the spoons. we just added those for fun. so, since i thought it would be bigger, i figured i'd have tons of room for squash, cucumbers, eggplants and more squash. but instead, those will all have to grow peacefully in their little square. could be amazonicly interesting...

i had a great time gardening! loved it! and then something very tragic happened. probably the most tragic of all gardening tragedies. i got stung by a bee. can you tell which toe (how lucky that i have the opportunity to take a picture of my toes on the very rare occasion that they're so well manicured...pedicured?...groomed)

it was my first bee sting ever. in my entire life. i could have died. we've all seen "my girl." how was i to know if i was allergic or not? luckily, i'm still alive to tell the tale. and the best part is, i'm STILL excited to garden! next time i'll just wear shoes. how boring is that?

an ode to hot water

so maybe you live in an apartment complex where i’m pretty sure there’s some sort of rule about not drilling holes into your cabinets or cutting pipes under your sink or installing foreign objects into your kitchen (i don’t really know this…i’ve never actually looked at our contract…i can only assume).

and maybe you have a neighbor below you who hates you and bangs on her ceiling anytime you’re hanging a picture, practicing your flute, watching a movie or breathing. and maybe she bangs on the ceiling even if it’s 4 in the afternoon. and maybe you shouldn’t push your luck by drilling holes in your cabinets at 11 at night.

and maybe your parents are in town and they’ve just met your boyfriend over a nice dinner and they’re impressed with how accomplished and classy he is.

but then you remember that you want hot water. instant hot water. and your boyfriend brought his tools.

an hour later, a couple bangs on the floor from the neighbor, a lot of broken contract clauses, some clipped sink pipes and a few shots of some nice plumber’s crack for the parents, we enjoyed the best insta tea party ever!

deposit schmeposit – we have instant hot water.

take that, bunny

after our rockin’ easter eggs last year, we were a little disappointed that the best egg kit we could find this year was star wars. luckily, we also found a build-a-bunny-house kit, so at least there would be some variety during dye time.

we prepared everything just so – perfectly filled glasses of colored water, a pile of stacked bunny-house lumber ready for construction… the one factor we forgot to consider: boys.

bill was over for the easter party and our new friend saxon came over with his art skills. saxon coincidently also came with us on friday night to a flashlight easter egg hunt. what we didn’t know was that everyone there was under the age of 7… okay fine, maybe we did know that…

meghan and i were diligently creating the cutest bunny house known to man (minus the freaky bunny with red eyes and a gun meghan pasted on the roof) while the boys were working away with the star wars stickers. then it started. c3po made his way over to the bunny house to visit. then he climbed on the roof and attacked. he was soon followed by the whole star wars cast in egg version. the horror was unbearable. meghan and i excused ourselves to make dinner (cry). we’d check in every so often to scenes like this:

hard-boiled mice climbing up the roof

c3po, r2d2 and yoda (red eyes added for effect) watching guard from the roof (notice the insane amounts of frosting used to glue things down. that would be the workings of my craftsman boyfriend. yoda’s not going anywhere)

darth vadar decapitating a bunny (it shames me to admit that this was actually my idea)

once again notice the gobs of frosting

and saxon eating a frosting filled hardboiled egg (it also shames me to admit that i dared him to eat it)

we took a break for dinner with some happy stuffed artichokes.

and what’s easter if it doesn’t end with a friendly (?) game of monopoly. it’s very worth noting that meghan kicked bill’s trash, even though monopoly is the “game that defines” him.

easter rocks

st patrick's favorite color was actually blue

it’s funny because green is my favorite color and at least 80% (probably an underestimate) of my wardrobe is green, but every year i wake up on march 17 and something inside of me says “let’s wear not green today.” maybe my subconscious likes getting pinched. anyway, i caught myself yesterday. i was wearing pink and brown (and running late i’ll have you know). but i took the extra three minutes to throw on a green shirt instead. no pinches for me.

i have no problem eating green foods on march 17 though. nor does meghan. that’s why we decided to have a green dinner. in high school, i knew a couple of girls who decided to go on a color diet. every day they decided a color and throughout that day, they could only eat foods that were that color. not sure either of them lost weight or got healthier, but i’m sure their urine was interesting on blue day.

here’s the makeup of our deelish spread:

green juice. threw your tastebuds right off because it was actually mango juice. take that tastebuds!

veggie chips (we had to pick out the green ones) with what had potential to be the best green salsa ever. it sadly wasn’t.

green rolls with mint-apple jelly. we had to get the jelly. it was so slime looking. maybe you think it sounds like a good flavor combination but sorry to burst your bubble – it’s not.



we had bamboo rice (who knew that existed??) with the normal green veggies. oh yeah, and green sauce. another tastebud shocker – it was teriyaki. and dreamy.

we made pistachio pudding for dessert, but our stomachs and tongues were plenty green by the time we finished dinner. it’s still sitting in the fridge. sad lonely pudding.

i bet meghan $20 she wouldn’t eat all of the green jelly. (at least we weren’t in public, mom)



the best part was, i ate dinner in pink and brown and meghan was in black and brown. we’re so festive.

the cookie update

it's a christmas miracle! we did it! our second attempt at sugar cookies actually turned out! except for when meghan accidently put red food coloring in our dough instead of vanilla. eh - adds to the christmas spirit

c is for cooking cruddy cookies

so i consider myself to be a fairly decent cook. stir fry, pesto, spaghettios…i’m a master. but i will openly admit that my skills aren’t as polished when it comes to baking stuff. probably because i never had an easy bake oven. how’s a kid supposed to learn without an easy bake oven?? but i can at least still do the basics – cookies, brownies, playdoh molds…until recently. i’d like to say it has something to do with living with meghan because that’s when the problems started. before i share some examples, let me defend myself – we always (start out with the intention to) follow the directions but we’re busy people and baking takes a long time and plus sometimes we don’t have the right ingredients and the closest store is (approximately 0.2) miles away. to top it all off, we have plenty of perfectly good food already at our house that is going to waste so why wouldn’t we just use that as part of the recipe?

example #1: we’ve been getting super festive…iated(?)…this holiday season so we decided to bake the most wonderful sugar cookies known to man. we made a shopping trip specifically to pick up ingredients and gingerbread-man sprinkles (i know!) and christmasy cookie cutters (i think they’re stockings but they look an awfully lot like squatty crew-cut socks). so what if meghan can’t eat dairy so we have to use cant-believe-its-not-butter from a tub? so what if we don’t have a hand mixer so we blend using a rice spoon? so what if we were mysteriously out of vanilla (i’m talking not a drop in that little thing - and we’ve only used it once! (i think meghan’s been hitting the bottle hard after long days of work)) so we decide to use lime juice in its place? the point is this. none of those should be legitimate reasons for our cookies not to turn out. oh yeah and we also put a lot of extra flour in there because they were super sticky…and then we read the recipe fine print and discovered they’re supposed to sit for an hour to lose their stickiness… oh well. at least we could still decorate them up and nobody would know the difference. so then we followed the frosting recipe perfectly (except for lime juice instead of vanilla) and it was the grossest sugariest thing i’ve ever put in my mouth. meghan even violently kicked the fridge when she tried some, the sweet shot through her so hard. so we did what any logical chef would do. added peanut butter. and meghan somehow made a lovely shade of purple food coloring. wrong holiday sweetie. purple’s for…uh…err…another holiday. but don’t worry, we’re not quitters. we know what went wrong and are determined to justify buying all those cookie decorations! my coworkers agreed to be guinea pigs for this next batch. i made sure they like peanut butter.

example #2: when we were staying with dustin and riley awhile back, we decided to be nice and (not spend a dime of our own by using their ingredients to) bake them cookies. peanut butter cookies. it’s not a recurring theme. we just always have peanut butter. i prefer creamy. dustin and riley apparently prefer crunchy. once again, we followed that recipe exactly. except we couldn’t find brown sugar (who has peanut butter but not brown sugar?) so we used white sugar mixed with syrup instead. at least dustin ate the cookies (that’s not saying much…dustin eats things he finds on the floor). oh yeah and they did have brown sugar. it was hiding right in front of the white sugar. not quite sure why we didn’t check that canister. probably we subconsciously just wanted pancakes instead of cookies. peanut butter pancakes. hmm…that actually sounds kinda good.

example #3: let’s just say that when you write down a recipe using abbreviations, 1 c - b.s. doesn’t necessarily stand for baking soda..