New Cookbooks and the Feast Day Recipe Binder

I mentioned that during my Lenten seclusion I began to compile all the recipes I use most from the cookbooks I own and the Pinterest page I have into one easy reference manual. I’m in my 40s now and cannot remember all these different recipes, or where to find them, anymore...I’m lucky if I can remember the feast day itself between the children and all their activities. For example last year when I finally got around to doing something special for St. Joan of Arc’s Day I went through Mr. W’s Glorious French Food by James Peterson and discovered a recipe of sorts for a St. Joan salad. So that goes in my binder.

After exhausting all of our cookbooks for recipes I decided to fill in some days, and cuisines, with books com the library. T-Bone, my future movie maker, is the assistant director for the school play and on rehearsal days I keep the other two occupied with trips to the library. ‘Catholic cookbooks’ doesn’t yield much in a card catalog search, but I was able to find a couple that were available at the branch. Oaxaca al Gusto by Diana Kennedy has a few recipes specifically for Lent, Corpus Christi, etc., but the bulk of it is more of a documentation of ancient recipes and obscure ingredients lest the become lost to history. The other available book was Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen. I’d like to start honoring Our Lady of La Bang and thought this might be a good starting point. From a quick perusal I could tell it had family stories intermixed with recipes which I love! It turns out the family is actually Buddhist rather than Catholic so while there are no recipes that are tied specifically to any saint or holiday I am loving the narrative within about the family’s escape from Vietnam and the journey to rebuild in Australia.

One of the books that wasn’t available at the branch was Celebraciones Mexicanos by Andrea Lawson and Adriana Almazán Lahl. For years I have been looking for a cookbook of Mexican cuisine that is similar to my go to cookbook Italian Holiday Cooking by Michele Scicolone and this  book looked like it might finally be the one. So I took a risk and bought a copy rather than waiting for a library copy to become available. It recently arrived and I am so happy with it! It is exactly what I was hoping it would be. The recipes are even arranged according to the liturgical calendar starting with Our Lady of Guadalupe! How perfect is that?!

Easter Monday- He Is Risen

It is Eastertide, Alleluia! I spent Lent in my secluded little dark hole. No social media. An earnest plan to work on long forgotten, but half finished projects, like my son’s baby quilt. My eleven year old son. Oops! That got put off for a very long time. I was inspired to reorganize all my collected Feast Day recipes. I know the trend is for everything to be digital now; it is paperless after all which is good for the environment. But I am old; I need something tangible, so I grabbed an old binder, bought a bunch of sheet protectors and dividers from Freddy’s and assembled the recipes into book form for easy reference. I thought about my long neglected blog, but decided that counts as social media. I worked in my garden. I gave up starch (the hardest thing yet so far) hence my decision to make pizza for dinner tonight. And while I waited for it to bake I decided that maybe today would be a good time to resurrect my blog. Yikes, I haven’t been here for four years! It took two attempts to remember my password.

The children are at a new school since I last posted and like a proper Catholic school they have Easter Monday off so we were able to have our traditional Easter egg hunt in the garden in the morning when it was sunny and nice. This was our only egg hunt this year so they really enjoyed it. I had them wear the left over bunny headband from T-Bone’s bunny themed 11th birthday party. So cute! I imagine my time is growing short on being able to do things like this.

Salmon with Creamy Dill Sauce

I've been trying to use up all the leftover dill I had from Epiphany. I tried out this recipe for a dill sauce with salmon fillet. I've never really thought that salmon needed much tarting up; why would I add lemon pepper to it? But this whole recipe was yummy!

Epiphany

This year I used this recipe for the Rosca de Reyes. I wanted one that does not call for powdered milk, because I never have that. In addition to the candies cherries, I used some left over Christmas colored frosting that we used for decorating the St. Nicholas Day cookies and a cookie decorating playdate with some of Jr.'s classmates.

Back to School Dinner Party 2014

Last night we had our Back to School Dinner Party. This year I finally had a chance to make alphabet soup. I originally got the idea here. I used the chicken noodle soup from the BH&G cookbook as a guide. I substituted fresh carrots, zucchini, and cherry tomatoes for frozen and canned. I also added WAY too much pasta. I have never used alphabet pasta before so I wasn't sure how much they would puff up. They puff up! I should have only used half a bag. As a result I added another 32oz box of chicken stock. Even with that little snafu, it was very tasty and I would certainly make it again.


I also finally had a chance to make the twinkie school buses for dessert. It took a while to get the right proportions of powdered sugar and cream to make the icing thick enough to not run, but after that they were very simple to assemble. I also put the stop sign on the wrong side of the bus I think. This was the first twinkie either of the boys had ever had. It took me right back to memories of Hot Dog lunch after a Jog-A-Thon!


I used my kindergarten lunch box to decorate the table along with some antique Hull's Complete Arithmetic text books c. 1895. I wasn't expecting the apples to be more than decorative, but each of the boys decided they needed to have an apple with dinner too.




To get the boys in the mood for school I read aloud from Little Wolf Goes to School by Mary Packard, The Bear Who Shared by Catherine Rayner, and The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt which is a family favorite.

Today is Jr.'s first day of 1st grade and next week Deuce starts Preschool three mornings a week. I can't believe how much my sons are growing up! I'm excited to see how proficient at reading Jr becomes this year as well as all the other things he learns. And I hope that Deuce has lots of Big Boy fun. he will continue to meet with his speech pathologist, but now it will be in a school setting.

"My House is Full of Sevens" 7th Birthday Party

We are big fans of  They Might Be Giants in this household. Our love began with Here Come the ABCs and grew with the 123s and the Science. The Seven song was such a big hit in our house that Jr. decided a couple of years ago that he wanted it to be the theme of his 7th birthday party. #7 shaped puppets? It sounded perfect to me and I was happy to make it happen (as well as a little surprised that he never changed his mind to Star Wars or Angry Birds as a party theme instead.)

Obviously this isn't a theme that has lots of ready made party supplies already out there so I had to get crafty. I used the AR Delaney font to get the perfect round 80s look bubble 7. Then I blew it up several times on the copier to get the sizes I would need for the invitations, puppets, and goody bags. I bought a ream of neon colored card stock and went to town cutting out 7s. I used blank, blue note cards from Target for the invitations. I used medium size 7s with small googly eyes. All invitation wording was printed on copy paper and pasted to the other side of the card.


I used the largest 7s for the puppets. My original plan was to have the children make the entire puppets during the party, but it has worked so well having the rocket ships pre-assembled for Deuce's party that I decided to glue on the large googly eyes on in advance. I thought a herd of 7s would look supper cute so I taped two pieces of of styrofoam to a piece of cardboard and wrapped them with paper to make a display board. (How convenient that we had a bag of styrofoam in the basement waiting to be recycled!) Here they are at the craft table. We also had the portable DVD player set up so the children could watch the music video for inspiration.



The smallest size 7 was used on the goody bags. I was tired of buying googly eyes at this point so I dumped out the hole punch and glued on white paper eyes and used a sharpie for the pupils. Simple. I debated whether or not to have the 7s 'talk' on the bag; in the end I decided they should talk, and they said, 'Thank you for filling up my house."


In the song the 7s repeatedly shout, "We want cake! Where's our cake?" and they devour a cake in the video. Naturally I had to decorate this birthday cake just like the music video. I had bought a box of red and blue velvet cake mix around 4th of July and used cream cheese frosting. I added a blue food coloring to it to make the piping around the top and bottom. I used a store bought gel icing for the swags and it ran . Boo! Otherwise I think it turned out cute.

#7 puppet photobomb


Shock and awe that the candle wouldn't stay lit.


In keeping with the 7 theme we had 7 layer dip and a 7 fruit salad.


And then we served 7-up in little cans to the children and 7&7 to the adults. Because what children's party would be complete without a bar? Good thing I have some vintage bottle crates for all my glass bottle display needs.



I couldn't think of any 7 theme activities so we rented a bounce house in which the boys could jump. The rental was for 4 hours, after the party was over we made our boys jump in it until it was time to bring it down. We wanted to get all our money's worth out of it! It was so much fun to jump in! It was huge though, I don't know whether we'll have space for one in the future if we do all the landscaping we have planned for the yard.

 

Little Miss decorating her 7 puppet.

 The important thing is that the birthday boy had a great time and enjoyed playing with his friends!

A look back at a Baseball birthday party.

I'm starting to think ahead to planning Little Miss's first birthday party. I did a baseball theme for both of the boys. I like the theme so much I did it for Our Little Helper's 2nd birthday too, but that was before I started the blog. I decided to add them now. (Baby Boy's birthday is here.)

For his first birthday I just made white cupcakes decorated like baseballs, super easy. The second time around I decided to challenge myself by making another cake decorated like a catcher's mitt. It was chocolate cake with a chocolate frosting. I think I used a frosting recipe from the Tasha Tudor cookbook. I did a few sketches on paper to come up with the pattern for the 'stitching.' I used a tube of black store bought icing.

 And I used my Baseball plated from Fishes Eddy.

 I reused the birthday banner and left over baseball party hats, plates, napkins, and filled in with plain ones.

 I also bought a bunch of pinwheels in red and blue. I used these to line the walkway as well as used some for party favors. They looked so cute spinning in the breeze.

 A bucket of colored sunflowers by the front door.

 We did this as a very low key barbeque, and from the looks of this table I suspect that some of our family must have brought side dishes to share.  I don't think I was expecting that, but who are we to turn away food?