Can I Have S'More, Sir?

Pie number four has officially been decided on for the wedding - s'more pie. 

Pouring in the chocolate

 

Agh - this pie is every camping fanatic/chocolate lovers dream dessert. It was made of all the sorts of deliciousness that you would hope would be in a pie that is all the amazing-ness of a s'more spread out into a full sized pie. And we are getting married at a campground so how could we not have a pie that embodies this tried and true camp staple.

I don't think that there is anything mysterious about what a s'more pie should include - graham crackers on the bottom with chocolate and marshmallows on top. And that is exactly what this pie had. A buttery graham cracker crust filled with rich chocolate ganache filling and topped with golden sugary marshmallows. 

Yum. Yum. Yum.

I loved this pie so much that I even made individual ones for all the lovely nurses I got to spend my day with on Mother's Day at work - delicious-ness in miniature form.

From A to Z

Or more accurately, apple pie to zucchini. I have been on a cooking marathon of sorts these past few days, literally six and half to seven hours in a row yesterday. And these are the end products of that insanity.

Finished Zucchini Dishes - Burger and 'Fries'

I am admittedly obsessed with the 'Oops! We bought too much' reduced price tray of the produce section at Meijers. I always check and see what sort of goodies are hiding out there and more often that not end up picking up a bag of some sort of vegetable on the brink of over-ripeness. This past week it was zucchini - probably eight medium sized ones for less than a dollar. Score. In the moment, its always exciting thinking how much money I just saved and how I'm sticking it to the man once more, but then reality sets in and I start thinking how the heck is one person going to consume all of this darn (insert any random fruit or vegetable here). Well friends, I was determined to not let any of this zucchini go to waste so I immediately went over to Skinnytaste to see what kind of delicious recipes I could find, and I was not disappointed.

First on the list, was a zucchini baked good of some sorts. I remembered having zucchini bread when I was younger so I knew that I wanted to attempt a lightened up version of that. I found a recipe for low fat chocolate chip zucchini bread which I decided to make into muffins so that they would already be in convenient single serving size. I don't own a hand grater currently so I was able to use the grating disc that came with my new food processor. It worked really well, but it only has one size for grating so the pieces were a bit bigger than they probably should have been which I was a tad nervous about and how that would affect the final product. Although the pieces of zucchini were a bit more apparent in the muffins, they were still so delicious! The taste was very similar to the zucchini bread I remember from growing up and with the added chocolatey goodness, the muffins are a wonderful breakfast treat. I froze most of the muffins so that they will last me a while and I can heat one up as I so desire.

All the Ingredients

Although, muffins were a great success, I was still left with several zucchinis to use up and so I was on to the next project - zucchini turkey burgers. This recipe had recently been highlighted on Skinnytaste as one that could be made and then frozen for future meals so I was doubly excited to try it out. The burgers were super easy to make, just take all the ingredients - grated onion, zucchini, and garlic, bread crumbs, lean ground turkey, and some seasonings - throw them in a bowl and mix together. The recipe says that it yields 5 burgers, but let me tell you these are good sized portions. In fact, I made one of them up for my dinner last night and ended up splitting it into two burgers and then only ate one. The rest of the burgers got individually wrapped up and then joined the muffins in my quickly filling up freezer.

The Finished Product - yum!

A little side note about freezing food - there is actually a method to this process that I just learned about which is making my life easier. Flash freezing. It makes the difference between opening your freezer bag and being faced with huge clump of food or nice single serving portions that you can pull out one at a time. It has literally changed my life. Okay that may be extreme, but it has saved me a lot of frustration and cursing and hacking at a small mound of frozen food with a butter knife trying to separate just enough for one meal. Flash freezing means you take whatever item you're working with and lay it out in a single layer on a cookie sheet (not touching) and then freeze it for a short time until it is starting to freeze and becoming a little hard to the touch. Then you can throw it all in the bag together and they don't freeze to one another. Its like magic. Maybe everyone else already knew this, but for me this little piece of information was revolutionary.

The Breading Process

As part of the cooking marathon/my new obsession with freezing food for future use, I was also making a bunch of healthy chicken nuggets so on days where I really don't feel like cooking I can just throw some of those in the oven and 10 minutes later have dinner in front of me. And since I already had all the breading all made up, I decided to throw one last zucchini recipe into the mix - baked zucchini sticks. Now, I honestly did not have all that much confidence in this recipe. It seems to me that people are always trying to make healthy alternatives to french fries with other not so loved vegetables and usually they are not that good. These zucchini sticks were actually quite delicious, not as a french fry substitute, because honestly zucchini is never going to replace a hot crispy oil drenched fried potato. But as their own separate entity, I thoroughly enjoyed them as a side with my zucchini turkey burger.

Now one would think from this post that all I do is cook healthy food and although that is true a good 95 - 99% of the time, I do allow myself to make full fat, delicious food every once in a great while. Enter the apple pie portion of this post. . I decided to tackle this traditional pie on my quest for the perfect wedding pies after I realized peach blackberry was out of the question when there was not one peach for sale at the grocery store. (My sister told me there was some sort of peaches contamination so I guess its a good thing.)

Halfway Done with the Lattice

Honestly, I just used some generic apple pie filling recipe I found online; it was nothing exciting - cinnamon, nutmeg, sugar, and flour mainly. Since the pie itself was nothing exciting, I decided to attempt my first lattice crust. I was preparing myself for something really complicated and time consuming, but I was pleasantly surprised. I Google-d how to make one and then I was off (seriously, what did people do before the Internet and search engines?).  Once the crust was done, I put the pie into the oven and began to clean up the kitchen from my day long cooking extravaganza.

Not twenty minutes later, I started to smell something burning and turned to see smoke making its way out of the vent in the top of my oven. And this is where I learned a valuable lesson about fruit pies. Fruit pies generally produce a lot of juice as they cook and as the pie gets hotter the juice starts to bubble. The juice often runs over the edge of your pie and down into the bottom of your oven where it will produce lots of smoke and force you to run around opening windows and praying that your smoke alarm doesn't go off. Well, live and learn I guess. And the apple pie came out unscathed.

Hung Up on Home-Made

I think I might have a serious craft addiction, or maybe more accurately, an addiction to anything home-made or do-it-yourself. On days I'm not at work, I'm either trying out a new recipe from Skinnytaste - potentially the most amazing healthy recipe blog ever -or trying to finish up one of the seemingly endless wedding projects I have taken on. And since the wedding is a mere twenty-five days away - agh! - I really have been buckling down on trying to start knocking things off the list, but it seems every time I cross one thing off, I see some other adorable project that I decide to add on. Its a never ending cycle at this point. In other exciting news, I convinced Kevin to entrust me with his camera so that I could post some higher quality pictures of my latest projects for you all. Therefore, the following is a random selection of some of my most recent escapades.



Asian Cabbage Mango Slaw

For some reason, Meijer has had what seems like a month long sale on mangoes and I have desperately been trying to think of ways to take advantage of this. I would buy one or two every week and end up cutting them up to put in my yogurt, but it seemed like there had to be a more exciting way to utilize mango. Then this recipe showed up on Skinnytaste and I decided to give it a go. It was the first time I have ever made slaw of any type and I think I might need to work on that particular dish a few more times before I get it quite right, but for a first attempt it wasn't too shabby. And it was a welcomed change of pace for my bagged lunch at work all week long.


Window Sill Garden


I saw a post online the other day about someone re-growing green onions in a glass jar on their kitchen window sill and I was instantly intrigued. I mean, who doesn't love the idea of food conveniently replenishing itself within arm's reach? In my mind, re-growing food = money saved. Sign me up. And then literally the next day, I saw another article about doing the same thing with celery and I knew I had to try. 

Day 1

I didn't have any glass jars that would work so I resorted to some short tin cans I had in my recycling. I cut off the bottom of a bunch of celery and the white part of a bundle of green onions, placed them in the cans, filled them with water, and set them out on the window sill and waited for the magic to begin. And surprise, surprise, the internet did not mislead me on this one. The center of the bunch of celery has started to sprout new leaves and I transplanted the entire bunch into a bigger can with soil today as suggested online. The green onions are starting to regrow new shoots and are about an inch tall now. 

The only thing I think I'll change in the future is the use of tin cans for growing in water, because the water is getting a rusty look to it after a day and so I've been having to change it a lot more than the recommended 2 - 3 days. Now that the celery is re-potted in the soil I won't have to worry about that; I'm going to keep my eye out for a small short glass jar the next time I go out thrift store hunting for the green onions and then I'll really be in business. And in even more exciting gardening news, the community garden at my apartment complex should be ready within the next week and I am getting my own plot - I cannot wait. Yay for free food! 

Today - starting to grow!

Costumes on a Stick


Today's big wedding project was making the props for the photobooth that will be at the reception. I originally thought I would just buy some fun accessories online from an Etsy shop, but then as has been the case multiple times throughout this whole wedding planning experience, I'll take a look at the listing and say to myself 'Holy crap, they want (insert dollar amount) for that?! I can totally make that by myself or I definitely know someone who I could convince to make that for us'. Thus far, I've gone through this exact process with the cake topper, my garter, the ring bearer 'pillow', and my veil to name a few. And this my friends is the key reason my wedding craft list doesn't seem to be getting any shorter. 

And so I found myself Google-ing 'Free Photobooth Printables' the other day while at Kevin's house. (Side note: I have told Kev numerous times how excited I am to get married so that I will finally be able to print things from the comfort of my own home since I don't own a printer. I think my exact words were, 'I can't wait for us to be married and you move into the apartment so that I can use your printer whenever I need to'. For some reason, he seems to take insult to this - strange.) I came across this post on Oh Happy Day - another fun blog I like to read and get inspiration/steal ideas from. The post included directions on how to make the props and a bunch of different cute hats, mustaches, and various other printables. 

Today, I Mod Podge-ed all the printouts from the website to card stock and then Mod Podge-ed the card stock to another sheet of card stock for increased durability - better safe than sorry was my reasoning. As the second round of Mod Podge-ing got underway and quickly became a huge pain, I did have the thought that it would have been a lot easier to just buy some thicker paper or use foam core board as was suggested. But I already had leftover card stock from our invitations and the whole point of doing this was to save money, and so I soldiered on. I then used a razor blade to carefully cut out all the images; amazingly I did this without one single injury. Once all the images were cut out, I used a hot glue gun to attach a dowel rod and voila - my very own, super inexpensive, but oh so adorable photobooth props on a stick.

Derby Pie Dilemma - An Update on the Pie Debate


I have, thanks to my dear friend Molly, a substantial and delicious sounding list of pies to still try and test out before the wedding. I brought Pie #1, to Kev at work the other night and it was a huge success with both him and his co-workers. Its really the perfect solution to bring it to the hockey rink for taste testing: 1) more people to survey as far as taste because Kevin isn't exactly known for having the most varied food preferences and 2) I don't have to worry about having the temptation of a homemade pie calling to me from the refrigerator. So when it came time to attempt a second pie, I felt a little more pressure to perform. I decided to attempt a version of Kentucky Derby Pie which apparently is a very highly copyright protected item and so is often referred to with many variations of that name to protect the innocent. Kentucky Derby Pie, Kentucky Bourbon Pie, Chocolate Bourbon Pie - they're all the same thing. This pie, as you have probably inferred from the name, consists of delicious Kentucky bourbon, walnuts, and semi-sweet chocolate - heavenly, no? I love all three of these things, so I was confident in this pie's chances. Until it came out of the oven. 

Kentucky Derby Bourbon Pie

Kentucky Bourbon Pie is not pretty. It looked bland and unappealing. I was crushed. But I decided to still bring it in for a taste testing, albeit nervously. I made Kev try it before we offered it to anyone else, but all my worries were in vain, because although it might not win in the looks department, Derby Pie is DELICIOUS. Oh my goodness, it is just as good as it sounds like it should be. So now I am faced with the dilemma - do I eliminate a delicious pie just because its not visually appealing? I'm just scared people won't give it a chance if they just see the uncut pie. Thoughts, ideas, and suggestions are appreciated as always.


En-Twined Hearts

Close-Up

This last craft project started off as a simple project for the reception, but after we finished putting it together I was so in love, it found a permanent home on my living room wall that very night. I first saw this project on another one of the endless wedding blogs that I like to browse. They used nails to outline the shape of a heart on what looked like a piece of plywood and then took hot pink string to fill the inside of the heart by running it back and forth between the nails. Then to really define the shape they went around the entire outline with the same string. 

Love it, Love it, Love it

For our heart, I used a piece of plywood about two by two and a half feet that I got for free from Home Depot. (I just asked if they had a 'remnant' bucket of sorts, which they didn't, but the employee gave me this leftover from another piece he had just cut.) I painted the plywood a dark, olive-y green to match our wedding colors. Then I made myself a heart template out of tissue paper and used small wire nails left over from another project to make the outline. Kevin took over at this point and used twine, also leftover from another wedding project, to fill in the heart. It came out more perfect than I had imagined and now I get to look at it ever day and it makes my heart so happy every time - doubly so, because we made it together. PS this sub-title is the clear winner for being the cheesiest ever, but I just couldn't help myself. 


Well, there you have it friends, a smattering of the crafts, plants, and dishes I've been working on, struggling with, and pulling off over the past weeks. And now it is way past my bedtime, gotta get to bed for another busy day of cooking, crafting, and creating tomorrow.