All Rileyed Up

Continuing on with MomDot blog party with the hopes that the police haven’t been called in to ruin all the fun…

Today, MomDot wants to know what my favorite holiday recipe, what my holiday table looks like, and what my biggest holiday disaster was. Let’s start with the easy ones: fave recipes are my crumb topping apple pie and sweet potato soufflé. I also like my mother’s lumpia, even though I haven’t been able to eat it lately and mine just doesn’t taste quite as good. Of late, one of my favorite recipes has been gluten free, rice free pizza dough, but that doesn’t scream holiday fun the way a nice bowl of red-coated Christmas caramels does. Just look at how much fun Little No Limit was having at her second Christmas with those babies:

I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

On to my holiday table. Given the above picture, I considered posting a picture of an exam table from Gross Anatomy 101. But, no. Here is what my holiday table looks like:

Kneel before Zod!

As for my biggest holiday disaster was, I recently posted on my first Thanksgiving Day dinner. I’d say that was probably the silliest dinner every, but disastrous? Not sure I’ve got anything disastrous, for Christmas or any holiday. At Little No Limit’s first birthday party, my mother dropped the cake icing side down on our pool table. This was bad both for the cake and the felt on my pool table. There was also the Valentine’s Day dance where my date stood me up. Does that count as a holiday disaster? When you’re in high school, it does. (fyi, it turned out to be a misunderstanding, like in Three’s Company, but still…).

There was also a particularly memorable Christmas when I went into labor and got rushed to the hospital, oh wait… that never happened. Nope. I was due on December 21st and then the doctor suggested we might have the baby early, say, closer to the 15th, but when I passed that date with nary a change to my special lady places, we started thinking I might have a Christmas baby, and come Christmas day, we were all on edge that maybe, just maybe, I was going to have a baby. But lo and behold, The Boy held out until December 30th at which point I had a planned C-section because I hadn’t even effaced and he was a behemoth child. No mistakes with the date, btw, just a little boy who found his Mommy’s internal world the right place to chillax. Of course, I might still call that Christmas a disaster because I had just been informed that the Little No Limit I was expecting was actually The Boy. Yes, I am one of those moms who was told the wrong sex of her child. Disastrous, I say. Disastrous. (not anymore, of course - just at the time).

So anyways, thank you MomDot for these pressing questions that forced my stumble down memory lane, and thank you to Bottlewise and Glow Mama for sponsoring the MomDot Blog Party Day.

My food sampling week in review:

We tried out a new fruit this week, the horned melon. I’ve been calling it a horny melon because I have a dirty mind and can’t help myself. It kind of looks like a puffer fish on the outside and here is a slightly blurry photo of it cut open:

Wonderful to behold, but I’m not impressed with the taste. It has the consistency of Jell-O with lots of seeds. I think it might be better as a topping squirted/squeezed over a fruit platter. if anyone has any ideas on what to do with this fruit, I’m all ears.

This week I also found a popsicle mold.

I bought it at Linens n Things many moons ago and then stuck in the cupboard above the fridge and promptly forgot about it. I’m thrilled to have this now, because so many of the in-store popsicles have either soy, which The Boy can’t have or high fructose corn syrup, which no one should, or quite simply, a really high sugar content, also which no one should have.

I make pretty low-key popsicles - half juice, half water (and I’m hoping to change that to one part juice, three parts water). Today’s batch was with 100 percent not-from-concentrate orange juice, and enjoyed, no less, with a foot soak, because that’s how we roll:

Check out Little No Limit double fisting it…

Here’s an easy vegan, gluten-free, casein-free treat that the kids really enjoyed making.

Ingredients:
1 banana per two people
3 oz. vegan chocolate (not as hard to get as you might think)
Dessert topping of your choice, eg: cookie crumbs, chopped nuts, crushed cereal. As for amount, I just pour out enough to cover a plate:

Step One: Cut a banana in half, impale (stronger word than ’stick’, no?) on a popsicle stick, then freeze:

Step Two: Melt chocolate on the stove top (note my snazzy double boiler). I added a little bit of almond milk because I found the chocolate melted quicker and more smoothly than when I tried it with just chocolate alone. I might have been imagining such things, but that’s nothing new.

Step Three: Dip the bananas in the chocolate until coated on all sides

Step Four: Roll the bananas around in the topping of your choice. I attempted a batch of snowball cookies the other day with corn flour that came out too crumbly, so I crushed them up and used them as the topping (the way I see it, the cookies were telling me they wanted to be crumbs anyway).

(Just know: If you let the kids do it, the bananas come out unattractive, but they have more fun. )

Step Five: Freeze for at least five minutes so the chocolate can harden; ward the kids off from eating the leftover topping; you can continue to freeze the treat as long as you want. We stored ours for a couple days because the kids found they were so rich they only needed a few bites to get full.

Step Six: Enjoy.

Yesterday, Mother in Law showed up for our Thursday lunch with a bag of groceries and the words, “Let’s make our own sushi!”

Being as experimental as the next person, I said, sure. We invited Sister in Law over and Nephew, and the party had begun. When Other Sister in Law got wind of our project, she and Niece joined in as well. In other words, my hour long lunch with Mother in Law turned into a six hour party with ten. Eleven, if you include this guy:

Yes, our entire process was watched over by Mr. Cucumber Man, who entertained The Boy, Little No Limit, Niece, and Nephew over the course of our sushi rolling. His hair is made from eda mame and those are plum pulp legs.

Little No Limit enjoyed making her roll – she was a big fan of spreading out as much sticky rice as possible. The Boy made a sushi roll of crab, avocado, and cucumber because of his no-rice lifestyle, and for those of you who ever wondered how the nori sticks together without rice, the answer is not well. Husband made vegan rolls of cucumber and avocado and tofu. I made crab and cucumber. Mother in Law was a big fan of adding toasted sesame.

Everybody put their own spin on the sushi, but none so much as Niece. Niece got creative and rooted through my fridge looking for “other things” to put in a sushi roll. I was really hoping she would use relish because everyone knows gross is funny. She couldn’t stomach the idea of relish; however, this seemed okay:

“Can I eat?”
“I don’t know. You can try.”

All in all, not a bad experience for the first time making sushi. I just might have to try this again.

Friends came over tonight. Wine was had, jokes were made. I fed seven adults. I made a garlic spinach appetizer, spanokopita (layer after layer of phyllo dough…), stuffed grape leaves, and vegan moussaka, which is not moussaka at all, but a veggie and mashed potato casserole.

The spanokopita and grape leaves were (not meaning to brag, but—) the bomb. Everyone loved them.

However, I started cooking at one o’clock and still hadn’t managed to have everything ready in time because there were bouts of cleaning and kid-interaction interspersed in the cooking time. After everyone had eaten the appetizer, spanokopita, and grape leaves, the moussaka was still cooking. So I cut down the time of the baking. And therein lies the problem.

Impatience.

Why didn’t I just let it cook the allotted time????????

I could have just told everyone, look, sorry, but dinner will be late. Enjoy everything else I made. But nooooooo, I had to jump the gun and serve the moussaka too early (it was supposed to cook for 1:30 hours, and I pulled it out at 1:10). As a result, the eggplant was not cooked well enough. Truthfully, though, the whole dish had a bland taste to it, and I don’t think it had anything to do with the cooking time but the combination of spices (or lack thereof). And what a disappointment. Everyone was so excited by all the other dishes and then I had to end on the GROSS BLAND DISH.

I did get to save myself partly with the almond shortbread cookies for dessert. But still, the taint of the bad not-moussaka dish ruined my confidence for the night. Throughout the entire post-dinner and enjoyable conversation with my friends, all could really think was “did they all think the not-moussaka was gross?”

Of course, no one complained and as they said goodnight they all thanked me for the wonderful meal. I can only hope that the memory of the spanokopita, grape leaves, and almond shortbreads live on, and the moussaka is never again remembered.

And out of curiosity, who does not enjoy Spaceballs or Three Amigos? I just learned that one of my friends HATES them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZ3KVYt8__A&rel=1]