The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Typing in my Tiara

We had Julia's birthday party yesterday.  Family and some friends, food, cake and ice cream, and - best of all - nice weather, so people could spend some of their time outside.

Today...the cleanup.  I didn't do much more than pack up the leftover food and stick it in the fridge (not that there was much of it) last night. 

And that tiara I mentioned?  Yes, I've been sitting here checking email and other peoples' blogs this morning wearing one of the tiaras I'd bought as favors for the other little princesses that were invited to the party.  Julia told me to.  So I did.  Not much fight in me this morning.  Thing is, none of the invitees from her daycare came, so I'm left with a lovely selection of sequined tiaras in assorted colors.  And bags of assorted necklaces and rings and bracelets, too. 

Right at this very moment, Julia is traipsing through the house in her underwear, adorned with a necklace, three rings, and a bejewelled barrette in her hair.  She is stunning.

The party was fun - really, a nice number of people.  I'm actually glad the daycare chicks didn't come, though it would have been nice if their parents had RSVP'd so I wouldn't have planned for their attendance, just in case they showed.

But anyway...Julia had fun, and that was the main thing.

The birthday cake I made is going to be the focus of my Tuesdays With Dorie post tomorrow, so I'm afraid I won't be sharing pictures of it today.  I can share this with you, however:  I had asked Julia several times (just to make sure she didn't change her mind) what she wanted for a cake.  She wanted a "strawberry cake" with purple on the outside and pink flowers.  So that's what she got, with a bit of artistic license on my part.

(Update:  Julia now has 4 necklaces, 2 barrettes, one hair clip, and no rings.  I think the rings were a bit cumbersome.  She can only handle so much bling.

Sigh.

I'm just looking around.  You know, I had the house looking so nice...but whatever.  The debris is proof of a good party, I guess.

Gotta go get Alex moving along for school...and then it's time to tackle the kitchen.

Talk to you later...

Happy Birthday, Beth!

My daughter was born close to but not on the same date as Beth's birthday.

Beth and my sister, Meredith, have been friends since the first grade, and Beth has also become my friend, too.

Of course, the fact that Julia was NOT born on Beth's birthday had caused a bit of friction between us, but I think Julia's antics over the years have softened that somewhat.

That, and the fact that in personality, Julia is very much a mini-Beth. 

Not 100% though - there is that whole eyeball eating thing....

Anyway, in honor of Beth, here are a few Julia anecdotes.

~~~~~

Last week, when we had Bill's guitar students over after their juries, and we served them lots of food, part of the spread included cheese, and one of the cheeses was brie.

Julia loves brie.  She doesn't always remember the name, but when she refers to "The Squishy Cheese,"  brie is what she means.

Well, we had some brie left over.  As well as the three other cheeses served that night.

Alex doesn't like brie.  He likes cheddar.  So one afternoon Alex was hungry and wanted some cheese and crackers.  Cheddar and crackers.  I cut up some slices of cheddar and put them on crackers, and he was happy. 

Julia wanted cheese and crackers, too, but not cheddar.  She wanted the squishy cheese.  So I got that out, sliced some up, put it on some crackers, and gave it to her.  And she was happy.

I went upstairs to put laundry away or something...and a bit later, I heard some sort of scraping noise coming from below.  I went downstairs, because, having known my daughter for a while now, I had a feeling I knew what she was doing.

And sure enough, when I got downstairs and rounded the corner on the way to the kitchen, there she was:  standing on a chair in the middle of the kitchen, surveying the counters.  She was looking for the brie.  The scraping sound I'd heard was Julia bringing that chair from the dining room to the kitchen. 

Unfortunately for her, I'd put the cheeses back in the fridge.  But she probably would have figured that out, given enough time.

~~~~~

Another brie story...

(And yes, in case you were wondering, we DO live on brie.  It goes so well with the caviar and champagne.)

Anyway, this may have been the same wedge of brie...we only had a little of it left, and I'd put it out on the counter one evening, before dinner, for us to pick at while the meal was cooking.

At some point, Julia and Alex had gone downstairs, Bill was in the music/computer room practicing, and I had gone in to look up something on the computer.  I had a great view of the hall, and the doorway to the basement, and part of the kitchen.

Julia came upstairs and wanted another piece of brie, so I cut her a little bit and off she went.

That sentence I just wrote?  Repeat it.

Then she decided she didn't need me, so she managed, probably on tippy-toes, to cut herself a little more cheese.  Fine.  I'm all for self-sufficiency.

And she did that once or twice more. 

And then I saw her edging from the kitchen toward the stairs...hands behind her back, smiley "nothing to see here" face shining at me.

"Julia, did you take the rest of the cheese?"

Still smiling, she nodded...and held out her left hand, which was clutching the last hunk of brie.

~~~~~

Last week, before the dinner for Bill's students, (well, his and the other guitar teacher's students, really), Bill had been fighting off a case of bronchitis.  He stayed home from work a couple of days, and his only comfort came from watching the original three Star Wars movies.  Julia would join him sometimes, but Alex didn't like the movies at all.  He is my Ferdinand the Bull, preferring peace and beauty to light sabres and blasters.

Anyway, Julia loved the movies.  I don't know if it was because she got to hang out with Daddy all by herself and that made it special, or if it's just her nature.  I think a bit of both.

She's seen bits and pieces of the movies a few times now, especially Empire Strikes Back.  I think that's her favorite.  (She's also her mother's daughter.) 

Got all that background stuff?  Good.

Last night at dinner, out of the blue, Julia said "I love Star Wars."

Alex, who doesn't, asked "Which is your favorite part?"

And Julia didn't even have to think.  "When the tauntaun dies."  She ate some more spaghetti.

Alex asked "What's a tauntaun?"

Julia, laughing:  "It's a big animal with FUNNY HORNS!"  And she made twirly motions with her hands at the sides of her head.  She could also have been referring to Leia's coif in the first movie.

We ate in silence for a moment, and then Julia got a dreamy look on her face.  She was still thinking about Empire Strikes Back.

"I love Yoga," she sighed.

~~~~~

And so,

A very Happy Birthday to you, Beth!

Love,

Jayne, Bill, Alex...

and especially,

Julia

Okra and Tempeh, Indian Style

I was reading through all the Tuesdays With Dorie blogs these last several days, and I found a recipe on one that sounded perfect for dinner. 

It's Madhur Jaffrey's Sweet and Sour Okra, and it was posted by Shirlie of Stop and Smell the Basil (which, by the way, is good advice).

Anyway, it sounded good, I love Indian food, and, amazingly, I happened to have a package of okra in the freezer.  It was meant to be.

To get the recipe, please click on the link for it above. 

I added a package of tempeh to the recipe, because I didn't have the full amount of okra the recipe called for, but I did have a package of tempeh in the freezer, too, and I figured it would work nicely.

Tempeh, by the way, is fermented, cooked soybeans combined with the Rhizopus mold to form a whitish, chewy cake.  You can use it as a meat substitute if you wish - I've used it for tacos or fajitas, for example - or you can slice it up and fry it in some oil and make french fries out of it.  My kids like it that way.

Anyway, in addition to the okra and the tempeh, the recipe is full of plenty of intense flavor, including garlic, red pepper flakes, coriander and cumin, and turmeric, which mainly adds color, and has a faintly metalic taste (at least to me), and lemon juice. 

The dish came together really quickly, and while I was getting that ready, I cooked up some rice to serve with the okra/tempeh mixture.

Here's a small bowl of the final product:

I halved the amount of red pepper flakes called for, only because sometimes the kids don't like the heat.  Next time, I'll use the full amount.

Bill and I loved it.  The okra and the tempeh soaked in all the flavor of the spices, and the "sour" of the lemon juice was not overpowering.  It had a nice balance of warmth and faint tartness. 

Julia liked it, though she didn't eat a lot of it and mostly just ate her rice.

Alex...well, Alex took one look and didn't think he was going to like it.  The thing is, he does this with a lot of new things now, and once he tries them, he doesn't always dislike them.  So the rule is, he has to TRY it.  Just one piece, and if he doesn't like it, okay.  Just eat the rest of the food on the plate.

But he really, really didn't want to try it.  And we really, really (nicely) told him it wasn't going to hurt him, and he really really didn't know if he didn't like it because he'd never had it (okra) before.

So we found the smallest piece of okra on his plate, checked it to make sure no red pepper bits were hiding on it anywhere, and told him to just try it.

And, finally, he did. 

New Neighbors...and Pictures of My Kids

I was getting dinner ready last night and Bill was outside when the new neighbors started to move into their house.

Bill called to me from outside, quietly, so as not to be rude.

And behind our house, we could see the Mister surveying the neighborhood from his front window.

A bit later, the Missus came back from curtain-shopping...

Alex, in particular, was very excited about this.  I think I wrote about getting these birdhouses a month or so ago (Julia's is the smaller abode to the left).  To be honest, I thought it was too late in the season; that all the birds had already built their nests and were waiting for their offspring to hatch.

But I was wrong.  So hopefully in the near future we will get to see little baby sparrows poke their heads out that front door/window and learn to fly across our back yard.

~~~~~

While I sat outside snapping distant pictures of birds, Alex looked for bugs and worms and things,

and Julia flung dirt with a shovel for no particular reason other than she is Julia.

 

And while I'm at it, here are more pictures of my kids from last evening.  Just because.

You can just tell where the picture above is going...and you're right.

Below, Alex is telling me the difference between butterfly antennae and moth antennae...

 

 

And here are some of Julia...being Julia.

She's nearly four.  My baby girl.  And nearly ready to rule the world.  She just needs to fix the tag on her shirt, and I think she'll be all set.

First Harvest, Two Ways

All of our gardens this year seem, at this point, to be more lush and productive than they were at this time last year.  Maybe it's the weather.  Maybe it's the super awesome compost we put down.  Maybe my husband's green thumb grew THREE SIZES that day.  I don't know.  But we've got a lot of green stuff out there.

We've been picking asparagus for several weeks now, and here and there a leaf of something, but yesterday, we actually harvested some things.  In a collander (so you know we mean business).

Here's the take:

Four pak choi, two more asparagus, and about 6 broccoli rabe plants.  Part of the reason we pulled these (except the asparagus) was because they had grown so tall they were blocking light from some smaller plants behind them.  The broccoli rabe can really go a bit longer, but, again, they were blocking light, and I was hungry.

My initial plan was to cook all the greens together, probably in some kind of pasta dish.  But something in me resisted that plan and so I figured, okay, I'll make two dishes.  I thought it would be fun to make these two dishes kind of similar, but with different ethnic influences.

No real recipe - I didn't measure things - but here's what I did:

Spaghetti with Broccoli Rabe and Asparagus

I poured some olive oil in a pan, added two crushed, sliced cloves of garlic, and about two tablespoons of tomato paste.

To that I added a good slug of Blueberry Wine (yes, blueberry) from Cellardoor Vineyard in Lincolnville, ME (not far from Camden).  Why Blueberry Wine?  The bottle was already uncorked.  And it's red.

I whisked all that together and let it simmer for a bit, and sprinkled some oregano in there, too.  While all that was going on, I also had a big pot of water on the stove, coming to a boil, for the spaghetti.

I rinsed the rabe (and trimmed off the roots) and the asparagus...

I also thawed some shrimp and sliced them in half, lengthwise.

Once the spaghetti was cooking, I sliced the rabe, broke the asparagus into pieces, and added them to the tomato paste and garlic mixture.  When that had cooked down, I added the shrimp pieces, and then, when the spaghetti was cooked, I combined the spaghetti with the sauce/shrimp/greens mixture and served.

A little freshly grated parmesan on top, and my kids were both quite happy to eat this for dinner.

While I was doing all that, I was also concocting this:

Thai Style Rice Noodles with Baby Pac Choi

 

First up, I trimmed the roots from the pak choi leaves.

And then I rinsed the dirt off...

And sliced the leaves cross-wise, about an inch wide, and set them aside while I assembled some other ingredients...

And they are:  ban pho (rice noodles about half an ince wide), zest and eventually juice of one lime, 3 dried thai chilis (sliced later), sliced fresh ginger, two cloves of garlic, and some shrimp. 

I also had on hand some fish sauce (nuoc mam) and soy sauce.  I think that was everything.

I immersed the noodles in a large bowl of boiling water to soak for about ten minutes.

Once the spaghetti had been added to the sauce in the first recipe, I had my power burner free and set the wok above that.  I poured some vegetable oil in the wok and heated it until it started to smoke.

To that I added the garlic and ginger, sauteed them briefly, then added the chopped chilis, and the lime zest, and the fish and soy sauces.  I'd say to taste, but it was more to see and to smell.

Next in went the shrimp, and on top of that, the sliced pak choi, and the lime juice.

After the pak choi was wilted, I drained the rice noodles and added them into the wok and tossed the mixture together. 

Because of the heat from the thai chilis, Bill and I ate this and didn't give any to the kids.

Both dishes were good, though there is certainly room for improvement.  But for a quick, impromptu pair of noodle and fresh greens dishes, they were pretty tasty.

I love spring.

   

Browsing

I want to make these cupcakes for dinner.  Maybe tonight.

Lemon Sugar Bites

I needed to make some sort of desserty thing to bring to the party on Saturday, and I was going to do something fancy but ran out of time.  I'd made a big batch of short dough, some of which I used for last Thursday night to make little guitars and musical notes.

But I still had a lot of it left.  I was going to make other cut-out cookies and decorate some and let the kids decorate others, but like I said, I ran out of time.

So here's what we did.

I took the zest of one lemon, and about a cup of granulated sugar...put them in the food processor and buzzed them around til the zest was chopped up pretty fine and incorporated into the sugar.

Then I took pieces of the dough, rolled it into little balls (about the size of...hmm...smaller than a ping pong ball), then rolled the dough balls in the lemon zest/sugar mixture, put them on a parchment lined baking sheet, and pressed down to flatten somewhat.  Maybe to about a third of an inch thick or so.  I baked them in a 350 degree oven until just starting to turn golden around the edges.  Once cooled, the outsides were sugary-crisp with the tang of lemon, and the insides were buttery and ever so slightly soft. 

Nothing fancy about them at all. 

They just taste good.

 

A Closer Look at Meringue

Just because.

Cakes - Over the Hill 50 - 2008

I made this cake last week for a surprise (I think) party for the husband of a friend of a friend.  Inside, the cake was lemon, and the frosting in between the layers was just a plain frosting blended with seedless raspberry jam.  Over the whole thing was chocolate frosting, and then the fondant covered all of that.

This has become my "Over the Hill" cake.  A hill with little mile-markers representing the person's age, meandering up the cake, until the marker for the person's milestone birthday- that one points down to the rocks.  I made one a while ago for my friend (same friend as above) for her boyfriend's 40th birthday, and that one led to this one.

I don't know what my problem is, but I stress out about these cakes until I'm in the process of decorating them (in this particular case, rolling the "rocks" out of colored fondant and building the stone side of the mountain.  Or hill, I guess.)  Then - once I'm doing the fun stuff...the grown-up version of playing with Play-Doh, THEN it's fun and I remember why I still do these from time to time.

A friend of the wife picked the cake up at my house on Friday - and a very rainy Friday it was.  She held the umbrella while I carried the cake out to her SUV, and I told her that the raindrops would leave little shiny spots on the fondant.  Couldn't do anything about that.

Then she got in her vehicle, and I went in my house, and woo-hoo!  Stress-B-Gone!  Until the next time.

And Me Without A Speech Prepared

A week ago, Donna, of Spatulas, Corkscrews & Suitcases, sent me an email to let me know she'd given me (and 4 other bloggers) the "You Make My Day Award." 

Now, I'm really not someone who does well with praise, positive feedback, kudos, applause, or friendly smiles.  So I sort of gaped at the email and then quickly closed it and pretended it hadn't really happened.  Help!  What am I supposed to do with THIS?? 

So I emailed Donna and asked.  She likened it to girl scout badges, kind of.  It was longer than that, but I'm getting tired and it's late.  But clearly, it's a NICE THING, and I am kind of expected to continue along this PATH OF KINDNESS and pass this award along to some bloggers who - as suggested - MAKE MY DAY.  Oh, and by the way, I think I only made it through one year as a girl scout.  So I think I lack famililarity with badges as well.

Anyway. 

True to form, I stalled and procrastinated and "forgot" all about it because not only do I feel majorly uncomfortable with kind words and smiles and all directed at me, but I'm equally lacking in adeptness (is that a word?) in passing such things along to others - no matter how much they are deserving of kind words and smiles.  And chocolate.

I always figure either a) when I say it (the NICE THING), it will come out sounding stupid, or schmoozy, or stupid.  Or stupid.  Or, b) the person will scoff at my piddly gesture and I won't officially know about it because I can't see them, but I'll just assume that this is the case and so I will automatically cringe and wish I could hide somewhere.  Like Antarctica.  And c) the person will notice my eyebrows need waxing.  (Stop staring.)

Armed with this confidence, I now bravely step up to the mike and name my awardees.  (Is that a word?  I just keep making them up.  I'm going to need to write my own dictionary now.)

Oh - and I should say this - I was going to give the award to my sister and her blog, but she is a black belt in karate, and when I casually mentioned it, she threatened to hurt me.  And I sort of believed her.  She only has nine and a half toes, you know.  That's a person you don't mess with.  (Hi Mere!)

Okay, so here I go.

OH - wait - the rules.  (Donna?  I just copied them from your blog.  That's okay, right?  They won't revoke my award, will they?) 

The award rules are: give the award to people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and make you feel happy about blogland. Let them know by posting a comment on their blog so they can pass it on. So I am passing the award on to:

Jen of Alien Spouse - because she cracks me up in just about every post, and because I have just learned that she, too, suffers from HORRIBLE HANDWRITING, which makes me feel just a little less alone in the world. 

KT of Zenslaw because she IS inspiring.  And a marvelous photographer.

Tracey of Beyond the Pale because she is capable of shooting red lasers out of her eyes.  And that impresses the hell out of me.   And she's marvelously creative and talented and funny.

Rebekka of Maple Sugar - for the beauty and elegance of her blog - and the gorgeous baking, too. 

Now I am going to email these folk and let them know about the award.  I hope they don't point and laugh at me.  But they probably will.

And all sarcasm aside - Thank you, Donna, for the award - I sincerely appreciate it.  :)