Halloween Time

This year’s gingerbread house looked (and SMELLED) fantastic.

Even though it is officially Halloween Time, there were no special seasonal eats yet.

Go away, summer.

Oh, kale no*

Sometime last year I ate an entire bag of “cheesy kale crunch” – dried kale with flavoring. The kale part was crispy and delicious, but the vegan "cheese crunch” was disappointing. Not surprisingly, it didn’t taste like cheese, and it was loaded with salt. To quote Homer, the cheesy kale crunch was not undelicious, I just hated the salty fake flavoring.  I ate the whole bag, drank a gallon of water, and swore to never eat kale chips again.

…which means, of course, that I would soon eat kale chips again. I saw this kale post, and set off to make my own, non-cheez kale chips.

Someday I’ll stop taking pictures with my phone.

The light texture makes kale chips fun to eat. I couldn’t get enough. My Mister was suspicious of dried kale as a snack food, but after he tasted them I had to share. Next time I’ll make two bunches (or I won’t share).

It’s so easy:

Ingredients
1 bunch kale
Oil
Seasoning
Parchment paper

Method
Pre-heat oven to 250

Wash and thoroughly dry the kale
Cut the thick center stalk out of each leaf (or it’s stringy and gross)
Cut each leaf into cracker-sized pieces

In a bowl, mix kale and a small amount of oil (I used olive).
(Lots of recipes say to brush each leaf with a pastry brush dipped in oil. I used my hands)
Make sure each side of each leaf is coated in oil

Spread kale on parchment-lined cookie sheet
Sprinkle with salt, pepper, and garlic powder (or whatever you like)
Bake for about 35 minutes

It’s a bit like eating seaweed, only I think kale tastes better.

There’s a malanga in the fridge, patiently waiting to be turned into chips. Every time I open the refrigerator door, I try to remember when I bought a tiny ham.

*Alternate title: Oh, here go kale come

Mini pies

I’m generally really happy with Breville products, but I don’t know how to feel about the Personal Pie cooker.

The positives:
It makes adorable pies

The negatives:
Forced to store a uni-tasker
The edges of the crust always burn
More work than making normal-sized pies

The first thing I did was whip up 5 (FIVE!) batches of Martha Stewart’s Pate Brisee – the easiest pie crust ever. The dough was rolled and cut with the special tool that is included with the Personal Pie. It’s a round cutter that makes the “perfect” size pie crust for the Personal Pie.

I let the piemaker heat up for 3-4 cycles before pressing each mini pie crust into the machine’s cavity.

First, it was a stressful procedure. While the piemaker was cooking the bottoms of the placed crusts, I had to quickly and carefully press the next raw crust circle into the cavity. Even when I was being extremely gentle, I tore most of the crusts. The Personal Pie does include a pusher to get the crust in, but I found it to be useless until I’d mostly pushed each crust into place by hand.

I filled each pie crust with about 1/3 c quiche mixture (1oz milk for each egg, lots of herbs, bacon, shredded cheese, and some green veg), closed the piemaker, and waited…

While you wait, my favorite piemaker.

I heard sizzling and saw steam and I could not wait to see my adorable pies.

After about 12 minutes, I opened the lid and carefully extracted each pie with this specialty tool (another point against the piemaker – specialty tools are needed)

This thing. Obviously, this is not my photo.

 

It was really disappointing to see that the edge of each crust was burned. If I’d cooked for less time, the filling would have been runny. Many comments on the Breville site also complain of the edges burning. I really couldn’t see a way around it. Even with the silly pie tool, I broke a lot of pie crusts as I was lifting them out of the Personal Pie.

It tasted good, and it was adorable, but also burned.

 

When I make pies in the oven, I usually wrap foil around the edges. With the Personal Pie, there’s no way to wrap foil around the edges because the unit presses the dough at the edges, and cooks it from both sides.

 

I tried my hand at cooking some plain shells for a pudding-style pie, and those didn’t look very nice either. (lazy recipe: chocolate pudding mix, cream cheese, and cool whip. don’t judge me)

 

Chocolate pudding pies

Another annoying element of the piemaker is that the template cutter makes pie crusts that are too big. Look how much crust flash there is (outside the sculpted part of the crust).

I like double crust pies a lot, but you can’t make them in the normal way with the Personal Pie. The manual says that puff pastry should be used on top instead of regular pie crust dough, or else the pie won’t cook properly.

I still have about 14 mini pie crusts in the freezer, but I’m not in any rush to make more mini pies. It is kind of fun, and they are cute, but one big pie is a lot less work and a lot more satisfying.

You can eat mini pies with a knife and fork, but I found it to be easier to just pick it up the pie and eat it. One mini quiche with a salad was enough for a full meal.

Additionally, and I’m not trying to bash the piemaker anymore than I already have, the Personal Pie manual says that large bread can be substituted for pie crust. I call bullshit. I tried it, and it was a waste of time. Large slices of Oroweat wheat bread wouldn’t quite fill the circle template, and when I attempted to push the bread into the cavity with the pusher, it was clear that there would be no room for filling. I ended up making Mr. Crispys* the old fashioned way.

*In my house, we call Croque Monsieur sandwiches Mister Crispy. Because we’re dorks, and because I can’t spell monsieur without looking it up.

Screen Novelties

I just discovered Screen Novelties, and they are awesome.

Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose from Screen Novelties on Vimeo.

 

The Old Man & the Goblins from Screen Novelties on Vimeo.

Polish attempt

Craft buddy Spooky Little Girl and I made nail polish a while back. It was fun, messy, and mostly a failure.

I thought I could just dump glitter into nail polish to get amazing, custom colors. It doesn’t work that way. The colors look great in the bottle, but they make fingernails look like gunk spackled on dirt. The glitter makes polish thick and unusable. After a few days, the colored glitters that were added to clear varnish turned silver. The clear polish took on the color of the glitter, but the glitter lost its color.

Making and naming them was fun

From left to right, the polish I made:

Pumpkin juice – multi-sized orange glitter in clear polish. an homage to that hideous pumpkin juice I made
Pumpkin guts – steel gray polish with orange micro glitter, and orange hex glitter
Orc – steel gray polish with flecks of olive, orange, and black glitter
Absinthe – clear polish with “tinkerbell” green, emerald, and grass green glitter
Green Apple – green polish with all the abovementioned green glitters
Nameless purple polish – the only one that looks good. violet polish with orange micro glitter

A blurry close up of my nails. Lumpy, with little evidence of glitter. But the bottle color looks great.

 
This is Orc. In my head, it was the best one. In execution, it makes me sad.

If you etsy search “indie nail polish” you can find some beautiful, creative colors. I totally thought I could easily make that. So did some of the etsy sellers – there’s some dreck for sale. Some are sincerely amazing.

Pumpkin failure, berry success

In March I started Fairytale Pumpkin seeds. So far, I have lengthy vines, lots of flowers, but no fruit set. Boohoo.

Thankfully, the berries have been incredibly productive. The two blueberry plants have given me about 2 pints of delicious berries, and the second harvest is coming in now. Check out these radioactively large berries:

 
Giant berries, dwarfing normal-sized berries

Here’s a pic from really early in the season. Strawberries, a few cherry tomatoes, blackberries, a lone boysenberry, and blueberries.

The boysenberry plant’s second set of blossoms are fading now. Hopefully the second harvest will be more prolific. I had never eaten a fresh boysenberry before – they’re delicious. I love boysenberry treats during my annual trips to Knott’s Haunt (link), but fresh are so much better. Fresh boysenberries are so fragile that the few berries that have matured have broken in my fingers as I attempted to pull them off of the prickly vines. So far they’re delicious and worth the effort.

Recovery and Reruns

For the last month, I've been recovering from surgery. That means that I've logged more time sitting on my ass than is probably healthy, even for someone recovering from surgery.

Pic from my brief post-surgery hospital stay

I watched a lot of TV, and there are few current shows that I enjoy more than Community. I had a birthday recently, and I considered getting a cake like Troy’s non-birthday birthday cake (the character is a Jehovah's Witness):

 
The cake presented to Troy on his 21st birthday

In the vein of meme-y Community, I asked the lady at the bakery to pipe a picture of my favorite food on top of my favorite food. She did a nice job.

 
An oddly angled picture of my 2012 birthday cake

The cake was moist tres leches filled with peach and strawberry and finished with the best whipped cream frosting I’ve ever had from a bakery. Possibly my favorite birthday cake ever (and birthday cake is a Really Big Deal to me).