Blog Surfing

I saw this interesting recipe on Tasty Kitchen for rosemary roasted vegetable stacks that you cook on the grill, and use the rosemary as a skewer. I also found this recipe for lemon almond basil pesto that sounds like an interesting twist. And how about some grilled zucchini fries.

Taste of Home has a recipe for Refrigerator Dill Pickles. It has been over 20 years since my mother-in-law and I made a batch. I would like to try to make these but the two of us can't eat 100 spears in two months! I would like to make a quarter recipe.




The peaches we have eaten this summer are so good! I have enjoyed eating a peach with some yogurt and a sprinkle of granola. This recipe for Peach Brown Betty looks great. I found it at My Kitchen Cafe. 


If you like to can fruits and vegetables this time of year, I found some resources that you might find helpful at Simple Bites.  The USDA has a complete guide for canning. The National Center for Home Food Preservation (also part of USDA) has guidelines for freezing and drying food here. Ball also has recipes and tips for successful canning.


This Zucchini and Ricotta Galette likes like a great way to use zucchini. Thanks to Smitten Kitchen whose recipes are always excellent!


Spinach Tiger has a recipe for Flank Steak in Honey Marinade that sounds and looks amazing. A great meal for the BBQ on a very hot day!


I found this article very interesting regarding sugar vs artificial sweetener.
From the Huffington Post.


Allrecipes has a group of homemade ice cream recipes to enjoy this summer.

Speaking of ice cream, The Food Lab tells you how to make real ice cream without a machine. You can read that here.

Taste of Home has a recipe for a baked peach pancake. It looks great!

If you enjoy baking and baking products, Wilton has scalloped baking cups for muffins or anything else you want to bake in them. They come in pink, blue and teal. You can find them here.

How about pizza with only one pan to clean. The Changeable Table has a recipe for upside down pizza in a wok. It bakes in the oven for about 20 minutes. It is an interesting concept.


Cheeky Kitchen has 10 minute chili. If your summer is as busy as mine, you are also looking for short-cuts.

Cowboy Caviar is a summer must have. It is a healthy snack especially with homemade pita chips. You can find the recipe here on One Perfect Bite. If you like all things lavender, you can see her recipes for lavender sugar, lavender butter and lavender salad dressing here.


Judy's Kitchen has a chocolate coconut sorbet recipe that uses coconut milk and fresh ginger! You can find her recipe here. Her mango sorbet looks great too!

Chicken Pesto Pasta Salad

It is really hot here right now. The temperature as risen about 3-4 degrees every day this week. As I'm typing the temperature outside says 93 degrees. I decided to make a pasta salad with veggies and chicken.

A couple of months ago, I bought a pack of the canned chicken from Costco. I tried a sample once and it tasted like tuna to me but dear hubby liked it and it was a healthy option so, why not. I completely reorganized my pantry last week and I saw that I still had all of those cans of chicken. I hadn't used even one.

 
What to do... I was thinking about making pesto and I thought that it might be a good way to use that canned chicken; with pesto to cover up the flavor. Don't take this wrong, it is a good product, I just have to be in the mood for canned chicken that reminds me of tuna.

I boiled a half a bag of whole wheat pasta, approx. eight ounces, drained it and set it in the refrigerator to chill.

I made a quick pesto using four cups of fresh basil, a combination of almonds and cashews to make 1/2 cup, 2 cloves of garlic, grated lemon rind, 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese, 1/2 cup olive oil and salt and pepper. I mixed it together in the food processor and set it aside.

I had placed the can of chicken in the refrigerator to chill a few hours earlier so I drained the water off and added it to the bowl of chilled pasta from the refrigerator. I cut a large red pepper into thin slices along with some small mozzarella balls cut in half and added those to the bowl.

I mixed all of the ingredients together with the pesto and placed it back into the refrigerator to thoroughly chill. I had bought mini heirloom tomatoes from Trader Joe's to add and I forgot to add them for the picture. It made a great lunch with a little fruit and veggie sticks for a hot afternoon at the pool.


I was really glad it didn't taste like tuna salad with pesto.

How to Loose Your Appetite

I have enjoyed eating a fresh peach with some yogurt and granola for lunch until I ran out of my homemade granola. I was happy to see that I had a box of store-bought granola, so I pulled that out of the cupboard, happy that I had a back-up plan. It didn't expire until 8-25-10, so it had plenty of time left. What I saw next was enough to take my appetite away for the rest of the day!! This is what the box looked like from the outside:

This is what I just happened to see before I opened up the bag:

 Right in the center of the picture!

In case you can't tell what it is, here's another shot:

 It has legs and wings!

If you can't quite make out what it is, it's a moth! And it has relatives! Crawling around like they owned the bag! In a bag that is air-tight! It made me think, how many bugs are in the packaged foods that we buy, and how many do we eat if we don't look it over for bugs? All I could think of for the rest of the day, was, what if I had not seen those moths crawling around and had opened the bag and sprinkled them on my yogurt. Ugh!

The box said there were 4 grams of protein per serving, but they should up that number. I prefer getting my protein from more reliable sources!

Wordless Wednesday

The Day the Queen Dropped By

I though I was going to have a very low-key day. It actually started out more low-key than normal. I ate a leisurely breakfast, I didn't get dressed (not in street clothes anyway), I turned off the phones and the dogs and I headed out to the pool and I started a new book I had been looking forward to reading. The neighborhood was calm and quiet and the dogs were sleeping next to me. After about 30 minutes of calm, on the far side of the house, I heard what sounded like a cracking sound followed by a thump. By the time I had looked up there was nothing to see but it sounded like a branch must have broken off of one of our neighbor's trees. It didn't sound like it was a large branch, so I decided to keep reading.

Some time later, maybe 15 minutes, I happened to look up and there were a lot of bees swarming and darting about very fast over our roof and our neighbors yard on the other side of the house. The dogs and I headed inside to check things out, and this is what we found:

 Bees! Lots of bees! A branch had fallen down and it landed right next to one of our doors. I stood there for quite a while wondering when they would fly away. After another 30 minutes or so, I came back in to check it out and now it looked like this:

 I immediately closed all of the doors and windows! It sounded like the house was being pelted with pebbles! The bees were on a rampage to protect their queen who was on our doorstep!

At this point, I called dear hubby and told him that we had a big problem! Because we have never encountered a problem like this on our property, he called the city. Well, they told him he needed to call 911! 

What? I said, I don't think so, we need a bee person! The city said to call 911. Ok, I will call 911, but I don't know what they can do. So, I call 911, and they said, 911, what is your emergency? I said, Uuhhhh...I'll spare you most of the embarrassing details...and you guessed it...they don't do bees. Do you want me to transfer you to the fire department? What would they be able to do? Assess the situation. She was very nice and gave me a number for a different city agency, so I called them. Same thing, call the fire department. I call hubby back, I tell him, I'm not calling the fire department, what can they do? He calls someone else from the city, they say call the fire department, so he calls the fire department, then called me to tell me that they were on the way!

I could hear their truck roll up within about five minutes. Keep in mind that today, of course, I'm looking worse than a hausfrau! Thank goodness they didn't have their sirens going, my neighbors would still be laughing! Three very nice firemen followed me through the yard and into the house and yes, they confirmed, That is a lot of bees! You need to call an exterminator! I told them I was sorry and embarrassed that they had to come to my house to tell me that. They said no problem, it was the right thing to do. Anytime there are swarming bees that could be a threat to human life, you need to call 911 so they can determine the threat level. They don't remove the bees, but they would blockade the area to keep people away from harm! I said, Ok, thank you very much for coming! They thought the house was cool, asked some questions about it and then they followed me back out the gate to leave. 

I called my even dearer hubby back and said, You can be glad that you didn't have to endure the embarrassment of inviting three very nice firemen into the house while you were standing there in your housecoat at 1pm in the afternoon, to tell you that yes, those are bees and you need to call an exterminator! So, dear hubby called and found an exterminator that could be here within two hours. Great! 

By this time, the hum of the bees is so loud you can hear it through the door and windows.

The doggies are trying to figure out what is going on out there!

I was hoping that the queen bee would realize she was in a dangerous place and fly away. All of her worker bees would have followed her and all would be well. But alas, that didn't happen. The bee man arrived and the bees weren't budging. I asked him if he could take the bees away alive and he said that he wished that he could, but it is against the law to do that within the city limits. It just doesn't seem right. They say the world has a shortage of bees, but it's against the law to save them. The only choice is to kill them if you live in the city. I'm still trying to make sense of that information. Believe me, I wanted to save these bees, but I'm only one woman and I didn't have a beekeepers suit handy! 

The next time I saw him, he was armed and ready to start.

  Before I let him spray, he assured me that it was a natural product and not harmful to people or pets.

 

 He is trying to shake them off of the largest branch.

He said that the queen was probably on this smaller branch when it broke off because that is where the main cluster of bees were.

It's not surprising that this thin little branch broke

He sprayed all the foliage along the wall to keep the bees that are still swarming away. Before we or our doggies walk through there, we will hose it all down just to make sure all of the spray is gone.

Cleaning up

He said there was about five to six pounds of bees in that bag. 

He also said that there were more bees than he expected from his first glance and that he had never seen a colony that large. He said they were honey bees without any honeycomb, which means they hadn't been in the tree long enough. It takes about two to three months in one place to produce. We need to stay away from that side of the house for about two days because it takes the bees about that long to stop searching for their queen. Once they find another queen, they will be gone. I'm hoping there is a queen bee somewhere far, far away from here that is looking for lost worker bees.

So much for a low-key day!

Cherry Balsamic Vinegar - Mission Completed

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about starting my Cherry Balsamic Vinegar. If you are interested you can find that link right here. I started it with mashed cherries, pits and all, and white balsamic vinegar. I have been tasting it every week or so, waiting for full-bodied cherry flavor. Oh yes, now there is no doubt that it is cherry! I'm surprised that it didn't even take a month. To taste it, I used a small teaspoon and dipped a piece of bread into it so that I didn't contaminate the vinegar in any way. Next step, to make it useable.

  The cherries and pits in white balsamic vinegar

  I strained the cherries and let them sit for a few minutes, pressing on them with a spatula to get every drop out

There was sediment left in the vinegar so I strained it through a finer mesh strainer four times to make sure the mixture was clear

 

I used my funnel to pour it into the bottle with only a teaspoonful leftover

Notice how pale these are now...

 ...getting closer...

 

...because their bright red color is now in here!

(I realize that this would be considered a picture of very poor quality, but I wanted you to see the full beauty of it's color! I convinced dear hubby to hold a flashlight above it so that you could see it's beautiful rosiness! A real photog never stoop this low!)

We are looking forward to making and enjoying a summer salad with a sprinkle of the Rogue Creamery Blue Cheese and a splash of this!

A Recipe from Mom

  This is my mom and my dad.

 I recently received this note attached to a recipe from my mom in the mail.

It made me pause, sit down and read every word. It was so sweet that she took the time to write out this recipe for me and it really meant a lot to me. I am always amazed how small she writes. The older I get the larger my letters get, probably so that I can read what I wrote!

I can't even remember the last time someone gave me a recipe that they had taken the time to hand write. I don't remember the last time I took the time to write a recipe out by hand. When anyone asks me for a recipe, my automatic response would be to send it by email.

I will save this recipe with the attached note from my mom in a safe place because it is special to me. It was so perfectly written, I had to get my glasses to see if she had typed it or written it out by hand.

Several of my sibs have asked if I had this recipe and I couldn't believe that I didn't have it in my file. Our mom made this every holiday and sometimes in between for special occasions. Now we all have it, thanks to mom!

 Thanks Mom!

If you are interested in printing out this recipe, you can find it in printable form here.