Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Buffalo Chicken Wing Pizza

I like pizza. I like chicken wings.  I like to put the two together.


My husband requested pizza the other night, as I hadn't made it in a while.  It's really very easy and takes about an hour and fifteen minutes start to finish, including bake time and the time it take to let the pizza dough rise.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Canning Peaches

I was very pleased to find the first of the local peaches when I went to my local farm market on Thursday.  Of course, the smallest amount I could find was an 8-quart box.

Oh well!


I set some aside for eating (because my husband loves peaches) and some aside for a pie, and the rest I decided to can!

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Disney World Dining Review

I just got home from a fantastic trip to Walt Disney World in sunny (hot) Florida, which was a Grand Gathering of 11 people from the maternal side of my family.  (Holy cow.)




It is indeed the "most magical place on Earth."  You can forget about work, the laundry, how many weeds are growing in your flowerbeds, and just be a kid again.


And you can eat!


I could fill three posts with details about everything we did at Disney World, but this is a food blog, so I'll stick to discussing where we ate.  Now, everyone has different tastes, of course, and by no means am I suggesting that you follow my reviews to the letter.  You have to make food choices that work for you and  your family.  But here are the ups (and downs) of my Disney World dining experience.




Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Collecting Recipes

About a year or so ago, I decided to change my main magazine subscription from Cosmopolitan to Woman's Day, not because I think there's anything particularly wrong with Cosmo, but rather because I found myself flipping through the majority of the magazine without actually reading it.  I didn't feel that was getting my money's worth, so I stopped my subscription and started a new one for Woman's Day.

I've been pretty happy ever since.  There are still some things I flip past (okay, I'll give them a cursory skim), but I'm in love with Woman's Day primarily because of the recipes.

Around 8:30 last night, I decided to go through my almost-year's worth of issues that I'd tucked away so I could "try those recipes later" and cut out what I actually thought I'd try.


It turned out to be quite a lot more recipes that I'd thought.

Still, I made a nice little folder for them, and after several hours of perusing and cutting and tearing, I had a lovely stack tucked away in my folder, and the spent issues are in the recycling bin.

I probably could've gone onto the Woman's Day website and printed the recipes off from there, but I figured that would be a further waste of paper and ink.  My thought is that, when I feel like trying a new recipe out, I'll just pull it from the folder and give it a whirl.  If it's a keeper, I'll transfer it to my recipe book.  If it flops, into the recycling bin it goes.  No harm, no foul.

The trick, of course, will be actually weeding through the keepers and the weepers in due course so I don't end up with a folder of recipes to try that's the size of War and Peace because I kept adding and never get around to cooking any of it.  I figure next week I can start trying a couple recipes here and there, and that should help me keep on top of things.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Freezing Fresh Sweet Peas

I went to my local farm market this morning in search of homegrown tomatoes and tart cherries (successful on both accounts) and ended up with several other homegrown veggies, one of which happened to be about half a pound (if that) of fresh sweet peas in the pod.

I'm weird in that I like every fresh vegetable known to man, almost, except peas.  I'm weirder in that I really only like canned peas.

But last summer I discovered how awesome fresh sweet peas are in garden vegetable minestrone soup, so I had to snatch some up.

Of course, I won't be making said minestrone for another couple weeks, as we're leaving for Disney World on Thursday. And I can't leave my sweet peas in the hydrator drawer, because then they will shrivel up and dry out in the meantime.  And while I'm sure a long simmer in a pot of minestrone would help things immensely, it's just not right to do that to these poor, innocent peas.

So they needed to be frozen.

Of course, you can't just throw the peas in the freezer and say, "See you in a couple weeks!"  I'm not actually sure what would happen if you do that, but I imagine it's not what you'd want to have happen.

It's actually really easy and quick to freeze fresh peas.  I originally found good step-by-step instructions here, but a really smart friend taught me an easy way to emulate a food-saver type vacuum seal, at least for short term storage, that works way better than the straw-and-ziploc-bag method.