It's like going from an apartment

To your new 3 bedroom 2 bathroom 1500 square foot house, you know what I mean? I bought my domain name and am moving on up! Change your bookmarks and be on the look out for some exciting new stuff to be on the way! I have things in mind and can't wait to get started.

www.cairnsmanor.com

Better get over there before all the food is gone!

Oh gin, how you suit citrus so well.

I hit a boon the other day. there is a market nearby me here called North Park Produce. Very cool place, lots of choices for your greek, middle eastern, etc. type of cuisine. I needed garbanzo beans to make hummus so I popped in to grab some. Given I can't just walk in, get the one thing I came for, check out and leave, I wandered through the produce section.

And there it was, a display of really reduced produce. Including several large bags of blood oranges...for only 99 cents each. I couldn't believe it. They didn't appear to be rotting, so I grabbed four big bags.

And I promptly came home and juiced them all. I was hoping they'd be ok for eating, but they were all a bit soft, not bad by any means, but if I was going to get any use out of them, I'd have to do it today. So about 45 minutes of juicing later, I had half a gallon of blood orange juice. And I decided to drink some.

Blood Orange Cocktail

1 cup blood orange juice

1-2 shots gin

2-3 teaspoons honey

Ice

Club soda or sparkling water

Combine the orange juice, gin and honey in a shaker with a handful of ice and shake well. Pour over additional ice into two tall, cooler type glasses. Top off with the club soda or sparkling water (I had Pelligrino on hand and used that).

This one is actually the virgin version, I added gin to the next one!

Yes, it's time for another soup!

Biggest pot I own, normally I use it for canning...

I enjoy making a good soup. Besides being delicious and what not, they are super for lunch at work the next day. Especially if you heat it up, have to run in and take care of a patient or two or three and then you come back, realize your soup is cold again, reheat it, and it amazingly still tastes great.

Not that I've ever had that happen to me at work. Not once.

Okay, it's happened a few times. Such is being a nurse and all.

I've got another confession to make.

Or two, or three. Actually, I'm not sure how much I'll be baring my soul today, but let's get started, shall we?

First, I'd like to acknowledge I have a thing for tablecloths:

I need a vacation from my staycation.

Child labor FTW, again!
Shredding radish for the slaw.

You know how it is, right? You go on vacation. You rest, relax, sight see, what not and end up still being tired at the end of it all once you get back home. I feel that way today, trouble is, I didn't go anywhere last week! Just spending a week running around town with my sister, niece and most times my brother in law on top of cooking dinner a few nights for the army of folks coming by to visit did me in. By Friday, I was done, with the cooking portion at least. We went to our local aquarium and then out to both lunch and dinner.

A pixie and her hummus.

This is Eva:

Child labor to clean lemons!

She's one of my little nieces. Eva, her mom and dad (my sister and brother in law) arrived from Oregon for a visit on Saturday. She just got a haircut yesterday, she wanted to have a pixie cut to skip that pesky hair brushing step in the morning.  Eva was super excited to be cooking with Auntie yesterday, we started with a dig-that-earth-day-hummus.

Greek for dinner

I swear I've been cooking, I just haven't been here blogging, more is the pity. Between work and life over all, I just haven't stopped to write about any of the cooking I've been doing. Good news is the recipes have been really good and completely worth repeating.

Tuesday night was Greek night here. True, it was Fat Tuesday, and Greek isn't the first thing one thinks of on Fat Tuesday, but I've been craving it for about a week or so now. Unfortunately, my nearby options for Greek food are all Daphne's. Daphne's isn't bad, but it isn't great. I've never liked their tzatziki sauce all that much.

Planning and plotting.

I have other food I've actually made to talk about, but stumbling around the internet I found this page: http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/howtocook/dishes/cakerecipes

I do love a good cake. And it just so happens I have a birthday coming around next month and I will likely need a cake for the celebrating. I've picked a few out, want to offer your thoughts?

Rocket pesto

I've got a lot of thing to talk about, I'll jump back to Tuesday though. I took the day to get some housework done and some cooking done before working the next two days. I whipped up another batch of broccoli soup to take for lunches and froze half of it for some dinner in the likely near future.

Arugula, also known as Rocket!

I also pulled a bag of arugula out of the fridge. It needed to be eaten, but we had a ton of lettuce cut up for salads for the week already, so I poked around for another way to use it up.

A public service announcement

I would like to preface this by saying I am not a fan of Hungry Girl, I think her "techniques" for cutting calories out are for the most part ridiculous and take any of the joy out of eating.

How ever, I agree with her on one thing and one thing alone: Shirataki noodles are a good thing.

Soul waffles

The other day, I emailed my husband at work, as we often do, asking if waffles sounded like a good idea for dinner. I am pretty sure I've mentioned before how much I like breakfast for dinner. My husband, slightly confused, asked if I wanted to go out or have homemade waffles. This somehow evolved further to me making waffles from my soul.

We have weird email conversations at times.

So ultimately, the next night, I made waffles for dinner. We have a really keen waffle iron, one of those wedding presents we don't use often. I should pull it out more though, it's not a huge one and it is easy to use. Plus, my husband loves waffles. Our favorite place to vacation is up in Big Sur, and the lodge we stay at has waffles every morning for breakfast, he eats waffles until he is stuffed.

A very fall type of soup.

Time for another soup! I am finding when I make soup that it makes the best lunch the next day. This one was no exception. I've been hoarding up a few squash, which really hasn't been too hard, planning on making this soup for a few weeks now. Bowing to my husband's request, this soup went to the back burner in honor of corn chowder and chicken tortilla soup. I didn't give him a choice this week, I was making the squash soup.

The Dayquil, it does nothing.

I've got some..thing. Viral and cruddy. I made it through work yesterday, wasn't able to make it farther than the couch today. The Dayquil I've taken isn't doing much, but between that and Rupaul's Drag Race I think I will survive.
Especially since I still have a few sliders in the fridge.

Menage a trois.

This chicken seems to like things in threes I found. I used three different sources to sort of cobble this recipe together. One was a Weight Watchers recipe, one was a Cooking Light recipe and the last source was my sister. None of the printed recipes remotely resemble my final product, so no links today, but I will thank my sister for the idea of using cornmeal for the crust on this oven baked chicken. It was one of those things I thought wouldn't work for some reason. I just figured the cornmeal wouldn't really cook all that well and stay too firm to be enjoyable.

Boy was I wrong about that.

Bigger than what you might expect.

I pulled together a new side dish for dinner the other night using one of the many grains in my pantry. I have some cool stuff in there; quinoa, amaranth, barley, wheat and the star of this side: Israeli couscous. I've recently learned it is also called Ptitim. There you go, a new factoid to file away.

Insert title here, which I forgot to do.

Hey, look at this onion that is not greens.

I haven't had to buy vegetables at the store for day to day use in weeks. Occasionally I grab onions, and other odd things I may need for a recipe and such, but our sides for dinner have almost all been from our CSA box. This is great! I love the veggies I am getting and we are eating so much more variety.

The only thing that gets me at times are all the greens we get. I tend to have a bunch or two of something like chard, kale or even dandelion greens. I've started to find the easiest thing to make with them is to make a pot of soup and dump them in.

I have been remiss in my pizza blogging.

I really thought I had posted this recipe before. I even came to my blog yesterday to pull it up. I was surprised I didn't have it posted, shocked even. It is likely I've made this dozens of times now.

We ate what was described as "grass clippings."

While at Costco today to pick up various needed things, I decided meat was in order for dinner. I picked up some New York steaks (my personal favorite) and realized I could try and hack one of my favorite steak house sides, creamed spinach.

Late night dinner.

I know this won't seem like the kind of dinner you'll want to make when coming home late, but after my last two shifts at work, some tasty, comforting food was truly in order.

So in the last hour of my work shift last night, I was checking Facebook. I am friends with Smitten Kitchen and there was her most recent update, Dijon Chicken. It sounded like exactly what my husband and I both needed for dinner. Trouble was, I only had frozen solid chicken. A trip to the store would be in order.

I booked it out of work and hit the Trader Joe's very near by for some chicken. I intended on skipping the butchering of my own whole chicken tonight, however, the price of the whole chicken wooed me in. Saving money beat my laziness out.

Purchases made, I headed home. I de-worked myself, got my comfy pants and slippers on, and got to it.

Oven preheated and potatoes go in.

Something a little different.

We like Chinese food. Chinese food however isn't often the best choice for healthy eating, at least if you go to say, Panda Express. I have nothing against the Panda, in fact I'd kill for their orange chicken. But, in the interest of continuing our pattern of healthier eating, I will skip killing someone and try some Chinese meatballs.

Just beets.

You know it's a good basalmic when it
 comes to you corked.

As I have gotten older, been on my own, furthered my cooking abilities and skills, I've found myself going back to foods I once considered yucky.

Yes, that's a very mature word I used there. Yucky. I will be 32 in a few months and I still find the word appropriate in many circumstances.

Take beets for example. They weren't something my mom cooked much at home when I was younger, so my run ins with them involved cold, slimy specimens at salad bars. In that state of existence they taste like cold, oddly textured dirt. Not very appetizing. I'd skip over them and their staining capabilities for something safer like blueberry muffins.

Now though, at a much more mature age, I've found (via my CSA) that beets aren't always yucky. Fresh and prepared in a different way, beets can be sweet and not taste like a mouthful of dirt.

Broccoli Cheese Soup.

I've had a lot of broccoli in the house as of late. It's been coming in my CSA box, it's been coming out of my garden. It's been delicious, I've discovered steamed with a bit of lemon juice on it is yummy. Thing is, I picked up my box last night and had more broccoli to add to last weeks broccoli we still had.

Time for soup!

I like to think I am better than Rachael Ray.

Periodically, when I sit down to write up a blog, I truly have little to no idea of what to say about it. Not even a title, which sometimes is the hardest part.

This is one of those nights.

I too, have kitchen fails.

Hello Miso.

When I planned out our meals for this week, I found a recipe that got me excited. It read like a take on fried rice with miso as a main ingredient. Awesome, I love fried  rice and I love miso. Use it as a chicken marinade? Why not!

I picked up miso paste (why I hadn't before now I don't know) and eagerly looked forward to Thursday when I'd be whipping this up for dinner.

Picture Wednesday.

Breakfast: Oatmeal, diced apple, cinnamon, small squeeze of agave and a *splash* of half and half. Nothing wrong with a little fat.

Lamb dinner for 2.

Need a special meal for a special someone? Would you like to not feel like a blimp afterwards? Me too.

Good thing I found this recipe.

One last Christmas related sort of posts.

This is a bragging sort of post, partly because the gift was so well received and also partly because I managed to have it together enough this year to finally follow through on something I wanted to do when I put my first garden in and started canning.

This year, under the tree, were 7 matching, bright red bags, tied with raffia with tags gifting them to our family. In the bags were the fruits of my labors, a combo of home grown and purchased fruits and vegetables canned by me, tagged by my husband, and put into the bags by the both of us.

Slowly easing back into normal life.

Today was my first days in a few weeks where I wasn't cooking for the holidays, entertaining family for the holidays, traveling for the holidays, eating for the holidays or otherwise dealing with the holidays. Despite the fact my Christmas decorations need to be on their way into boxes for storage until next winter and that my house could use a good straightening up and linens and what not washed from house guests; I took today to sit on my butt, on the couch, with my laptop, my TV and my kittens.

It was nice to do nothing.

Days of Christmas: A final sparkling addition

One last recipe from Christmas and then I think I am done. Whenever I start looking at recipes for anything, I tend to hunt down ones with lemon in them. I have a lemon tree in the back that 9 months out of the year is just kicking out tons of lemons. Meyer lemons to boot.

And I love it. I love the taste of lemons in food, sweets especially. I am the one who like the sweet and sour candy. These cookies aren't anywhere near a sweet and sour sort of taste; they have a light texture with a yummy lemon taste.