Wedding season is in full swing and Zach and I feel as busy as a bride and groom. After making the pies, we had wedding duties the following weekend on July 3rd. Zach was the officiant and I was the cake decorator. We had a blast!
Coloring the fondant & assembling the cake:
The cake delivered and staged:
Me with Jenni, the baker:
You all know wedding cake, but our friends wanted pie. Who dares to tell a bride no, not us! Hence wedding pies. We made 20 of them for the wedding on June 26, 2011.
Flavors were strawberry, strawberry rhubarb, blueberry, apple rhubarb with carmel glaze and the wedding pie - mixed berry rhubarb. Our advice, bring pie to a wedding, it makes you an instant celebrity!
With the Volvo wagon transportation was a breeze.
A couple of weekends a go, my friend's daughter and I were discussing the great dim sum place we have here in town. I got a hankering for some pork buns and thought I'd see if I could make them myself. After searching for a recipe, I ended up combining elements of about three after reading various comments.
that's curry sauce, not cheese sauce
Zach & I were deciding what to have for dinner Sunday night at the Twister Creek in Talkeetna. I was envying the curry the guy at the next table had, but we were discussing getting the nachos since Zach is a kind of connoisseur of them. Zach decided we could have it all, nachos & curry. The waitress thought him a bit crazy when he ordered, but when she dropped the food said the two smelled good together. Good thing I had ordered just the beer to pair with this odd meal, Mohini's Amrita described as:a dark nut brown ale, is just as smooth, and features velvety chocolate malt up front; a nutty center palate with restrained additions of cumin, coriander, fennel, fenugreek and cardamom; and a slightly sweet lingering finish highlighted by cinnamon, cloves and cayenne. The curry nacho combination tasted even better than they smelled. I was worried about the beans and beef as nacho toppings combined with the curry, but it all melded well. This will be something we experiment more with in the future.
This past week I roasted my first leg of lamb and since we have tons of leftovers to eat, we decided gyros would be a tasty way to make use of some of the lamb. We didn't have pitas in the house, but I had some wheat rye bread mix in the fridge. I pinched off a couple of hunks of that and rolled it thin and luckily they puffed in the oven and made perfect pitas. The wheat rye mix made for a denser pita which held up well to all the tzatziki sauce we like to put on our gyros.
We decided to make this recipe, which called for 8 oz. of crab meat. What better way to get the needed crab meat than to buy a crab, cook it up and pull out the meat. While I've cooked crab legs, I don't think I've steamed and pulled apart a whole crab. It was fun, but kind of gross to see all the guts when I cracked open the body. I can't wait to figure out what to do with the other one we have in the freezer.
We've been on a popcorn kick lately, ever since we got a Whirley Pop. As part of our popcorn obsession we've discovered that the spice and tea shop we like to go to has popcorn seasonings, curry being one of them. We also purchased a cheesy southwest seasoning and a chocolate salt combination. Curry is my new favorite, next to just adding brewers or nutritional yeast, which sounds strange, but is seriously addictive. I start searching for the pieces with the yeast on them and scraping the bottom of the bowl for more, but I digress. So for Saturday's low key day of movie watching, I made a batch of popcorn, added the curry seasoning and then some craisins and golden raisins. It was the perfect combination of spicy, sweet and savory.
