To work, for many of us. But for one of you, it’s the day you win some hot chocolate sticks to get you through the end of January.
And after collecting the comments and new Facebook likes, that someone is…
Natalie! Whose favorite winter recipe, it turns out, happens to be one of my own favorite seasonal treats with a simple twist:
“My absolute favorite recipe is actually a drink! And it’s super easy to do, I feel guilty accepting complements for it at parties. It’s a simple Spiced Apple Cider. You take a bottle of organic apple juice (or cider) and add a few packets of Martinelli’s Apple Cider tea bags. Put them all in a sauce pan over medium heat and let it stew! Put a ladle nearby and people can help themselves. Of course you can add a few cinnamon sticks for flavor and decoration. The reason I like this so much is that it’s simple and a great base to build up from!“
Thanks to everyone who participated in my little contest! And Natalie, make sure to check your e-mail so we can get you your hot chocolate ASAP.
The time has come to announce the winners of my Homemade Mulling Spices giveaway! After sifting through comments and Facebook likes and crunching numbers with Random.org, the winners (and their favorite holiday treats) are:
Monika (Russian Tea Cakes) Carrie (Caramel Apple Cider) Amy Z. (Vanilla Eggnog)
Congrats! Please check your e-mail so we can work out the details for mailing your mulling spices.
Thank you to everyone who participated and for sharing your favorite treats. I am currently exhausted from cooking up a storm over the weekend for a holiday party of my own, but it was filled with some old favorites as well as some new delights I’ve only just discovered. Which I will definitely be sharing with you here as soon as I reclaim my apartment and my horrifyingly messy fridge. Stay tuned, and thank you so much for reading! I’m so, so happy you’re here!
Not to add to the din, but I feel like I’ve seen a ton of smoothie recipes popping up in the food blog universe. Despite the typically chilly weather outside, I’d wager a guess that January is the number-one month for smoothies, juice cleanses, and salad-eating.
And even I have this conflict. The desire both for thick, warm soups that shut out the cold of January but also for light, fresh meals that taste like the spring and summer to come.
Plus, Santa brought me an immersion blender for Christmas, and what better way to break it in than by crushing the heck out of some frozen raspberries?
This is a little smoothie. I can never get through a full-size smoothie, so this recipe is for about a half-pint. You can easily double it if you are full-size smoothie drinker.
After the success of the 30 Pounds of Apples 2014 calendar, I’ve spent some time over the last couple of years trying to figure out the next step for pulling my photos out of the digital universe and into the printed one. So at long last, I’m pleased to announce the grand opening of the 30 Pounds of Apples Store!
I’ve been uploading, designing, and organizing for weeks a variety of products that I think you’re going to like. I ordered a few samples to check on print quality, and I am thrilled with the results! Check out the store to find your favorite 30 Pounds of Apples photos on a number of printed products, including:
TWO different calendars
note cards
canvas wraps
photo prints
posters
coasters
… and more!
You can sort by Product Category, by Collection (think seasons and type of product), and latest. I recommend the Product and Collection tabs!
So as you plan your holiday giving, please consider some yummy-looking photo art from 30 Pounds of Apples! And if you have a photo or product in mind from the blog that you don’t see in the store, send me an email and I’d be happy to create the product for you with a high-resolution image.
I spent the whole summer being amazed at the fervor with which tiny seeds sprang into sunflowers so tall I couldn’t reach the blooms, basil so prolific I’ll eat pesto all winter, and okra stalks so thick I had to saw through them to prepare the soil for something new.
That amazement has turned into a jaw-dropping situation this fall.
Is this what you’re like when you have your first kid? Utterly astonished and fishing for a camera every time it does anything?
A couple of months ago, I adopted an additional empty plot at my community garden, and on the advice from a North Carolina planting guide, I skeptically planted not one but two garden plots. In September. I repeat. September. Where I grew up we often get snow in September.
My skepticism, as usual, was complete lunacy. The freshly-planted plot…
Just to re-cap, I started the new year with a goal: I wanted to learn just how I spend my money on food. Do I trade it with local culinary artisans? National corporations?
After some debate over which delineations mattered, I made a list of categories into which I would divide my purchases — both for groceries and for restaurants — and began the semi-tedious task of tracking every single receipt. My first month of tracking gave me some results that were expected, and some that surprised me.
Here are the results for February:
On this front, the numbers are almost identical to January. I did have a few extra runs to the big box grocery store close to my apartment this month, and to be totally honest, I’m not exactly sure why. Other than I must have really planned meals poorly that week. My goal for this month is to only hit the grocery store once a week, which should save food dollars, gas dollars, and time dollars. Yes time dollars.
But look! Grocery dollars may have been the same, but restaurant dollars show major improvement! I had friends in town one weekend and my parents in town for almost a week, which gave me opportunities to go outside my normal restaurant box and show off Durham’s local flavor. We’ll see how it keeps up when I am not entertaining guests…
So on goes the tracking. And finally, as promised, if you want to track as well, I’ve uploaded the spreadsheet I’m using. You can download it at the link below… it’s pretty smart and makes all your numbers turn into graphs. Poof! Time to get excited.
I don’t have a rice cooker. I also don’t let that stop me from making fluffy mounds of rice. And since I appear to be in the mood for cooking dishes that work nicely with this versatile grain, I thought I’d tell you how I go about making a batch of rice quickly, easily, and without anything you don’t already have.
Rice, as you know, starts as solid grains with the potential to develop into light, airy morsels of goodness when cooked well. The internet seems to be full of horror stories about rice cooking that turn these grains into batches of starchy paste or edible kernels still solid in the middle and decidedly un-fluffy, and rice cookers are offered as the suggestion for remedying these problems. I learned to cook rice, from my mom, with nothing more than a pot and a lid, and I’ve always been pleased with the result. Plus, the method is really easy: in fact, the hardest part is leaving it alone so the rice can do its job.
So here’s the gods honest truth: I used to boil the ever-loving crap out of eggs. To be fair, Easter was about the only time we ever boiled them growing up. After we’d dyed them, peeled them to reveal the tie-dyed ellipses beneath, and mixed the yolks with a generous amount of mustard and Miracle Whip (an ingredient I’ll defend to the death when making Deviled Eggs), the gray-green, sulfury halo around the yolks didn’t really seem to matter much.
On the rare occasions that I ate straight-up, un-deviled hard boiled eggs, I only ate the whites. And small wonder! I was, however, flummoxed: how come the yolks in some store-bought eggs looked so, well, appetizing? I decided to actually look up a recipe, and what do you know: other people have already figured this out. But since I was TWENTY-NINE before I actually learned to do this right, I thought you guys might want some tips too. The big secret? Hard boiled eggs don’t actually need to boil for more than a moment.
There are so many magical things you can do with an egg. Having grown up with them almost exclusively scrambled, hard-boiled, or whipped into cake batter, I’ve recently worked on expanding my egg repertoire at breakfast. Sometimes I’ll roll them up in breakfast burritos, other mornings I’ll toss them on an English muffin, and some mornings I’ll make one of these beauties.
But on super-special mornings, I’ll buy a precious avocado and smear it across toast to a beautiful, green canvas for a gently fried egg.
I’ve loved avocados for a long time, but I was previously skeptical of their ability to translate to breakfast. Lord, I was so wrong. The flavor and texture of the avocado and the egg together are fantastic. The avocado needs no additions, though admittedly, I did try mixing in salsa one day, and while it was delightful, I still preferred it all by itself.
The eggs, while you’re smashing avocado, fry gently with their yolks unbroken. If you’re not a fan of runny eggs, don’t worry, just break the yolks with a fork and cook them a bit longer on the second side for a firm yellow center.
This simple breakfast is super-quick for rushed weekday mornings when you want to pretend, just for a minute, that it’s already the weekend. And it’s fancy enough even for the weekend. Why go out for breakfast when you can stay in your pajamas and have this?
Egg & Avocado on Toast
Makes 2 servings
1/2 an avocado
1/2 T butter
2 eggs
seasoned salt
black pepper
2 slices of bread
Scoop the avocado out of the skin into a bowl. Crush the avocado with the back of a fork until it is mostly crushed. Heat a frying pan over medium heat. Once warm, add the butter to the pan and coat the bottom of the pan as it melts. Crack the eggs into the pan without breaking the yolks, keeping the eggs separate. Sprinkle lightly with seasoned salt and black pepper.
While the eggs cook, toast the bread and smear avocado evenly over both pieces. After eggs have cooked for about two minutes, flip carefully with a spatula and sprinkle the opposite side lightly with black pepper. After about 30 seconds, gently lift the eggs onto the toasts, placing them on the avocado.
It must be a curious sight indeed to drivers passing by to see me leaning against my car, swapping my flip-flops for gross-o rubber boots (which pair fabulously with my work clothes, I might add), spritzing every square inch of exposed skin with bug spray to ward off mosquitoes, and marching into the garden with a basket and some wrinkled gardening gloves.
My plot has grown and blossomed, but it’s not all sun beams and elegant arcs of water pouring from a brushed steel watering can. There’s been a tragedy.
During my week of vacation, an army of squash bugs infiltrated plot B2 and launched an aggressive assault on my thriving zucchini plant. I returned from Colorado with hopes of zucchinis to last me through the next several weeks, but unfortunately, the damage was done.
Sadly, the whole plant had to come up, leaving me with one, last, giant zucchini to remember it by. I know that everyone, human and bug alike, needs food, but I’m still annoyed. How did they multiply so fast?! Urg.
Natalie! Whose favorite winter recipe, it turns out, happens to be one of my own favorite seasonal treats with a simple twist:
