It's beginning to look...

a bit like Christmas. Over the weekend, D and I went on an adventure. I had gotten it in my head that I wanted to go to a local tree farm and cut down a Christmas tree. Thank goodness he was willing to humor me, especially since it meant he had to do the cutting and the ground had a good covering of snow/ice. It was a fun adventure. I also now know I should bring work gloves among other things. Here is the leaning tree. It has since been straightened (my geometry gene wasn't working over the weekend). The tree is slowly getting decorated and my ornaments we collected every year when I was younger are on there way here. Thanks Mom! I can't wait to open the box since I only remember one ornament.
Also, D and I made some delicious stuffed mushrooms over the weekend. The stuffing is rather like a hummus. It is quite tasty and so I'll share the stuffing recipe with you. I modified it from a book called Cooking with Pumpkins and Squash by Brian Glover.
Defrost two one lb packages of pureed butternut squash (the recipe tells you to roast the squash, but sometimes that just takes too darn long, so this short cut is perfect for the holidays). Puree one can of garbanzo beans (minus the liquid). Combine these ingredients. Add 1 T olive oil, a small bunch of chopped thyme, 1/4 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes, 1 chopped garlic clove, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, juice from 1 lemon, 2 T chopped parsley. Salt and pepper to taste. You can just puree the whole lot if you have a large food processor, or you can combine a small amount of the earlier puree with these last ingredients in a smaller food processor. Everything should be well combined and smooth. This is delicious on crackers. It was pretty good in the mushroom caps (add and cook at 375 for 10-20 minutes). And I had it as part of a simple salad tonight. There is a yogurt sauce that goes with it, however, I cannot attest to how good the sauce is, so I won't report the recipe here. See I told you I wish I was a food blogger.

Delicious

I just made the best dinner in just about 30 minutes (take that Rachel Ray)! I made pan seared scallops with walnuts and spiced carrots. (Note: I think this would work equally well with chicken or shrimp. Chicken could marinaded and then go in the oven and just be finished on the stovetop.) It was not pretty to look at so no photo. But it made me very happy. Add a glass of red wine and I'm thinking I'm not going to work any more tonight. Yesterday was a marathon at work - approximately 7 am - 10 pm. That's too much work, especially when I worked 5 plus hours on Sunday and at least a few hours on Saturday. I was also up at approximately 4 am this morning, ate something, tried to sleep a little bit more but gave up and went to the gym and then to work. Plus I dealt with some fun student issue today with my chair observing. Nothing like nerve wracking! Everything smears together when you work this much. You forget which key goes in which lock, and you haven't even had anything to drink.

PS: Sorry to disappoint about the Roomba and the puppy. A puppy is on the wish list. I just have to figure out how to get around the clause of no pets in my lease. There is a good bit of pet damage in my apartment. And my neighbors (we share a landlord) have a dog. I don't think this will be too difficult a task. And, surprisingly, I actually don't mind vacuuming.

today

I have been wanting to show you a photo of my lovely tomato plant for a while but keep forgetting to take one. Earlier this week, I had a tomato accident. It was quite stormy one night and when I got up in the morning the tomato plant (despite the tomato plant cage) had toppled over. I let out a yelp of oh no! I now have an additional stake in so hopefully that won't happen again. I did loose a branch that had a bundle of tomatoes growing and lots of promising flower. But as you can see from the photos, there are still ones that are looking okay on the plant.
Today, I have done very little work, but I needed a tiny break. I've been processing things in my head though and have taken notes and will make improvements in my writing tomorrow. What did I do instead? I ate some delicious food. I stuffed some zucchini and other squash tonight - I invented the stuffing based on what I had in my refrigerator - this included onions, garlic, mushrooms, rice pilaf, crushed tomatoes, sunflower seeds and cut up squash. The remaining stuffing, I added some wine and more tomatoes to make a sauce I'll eat with pasta for lunch this week. Delicious. I also ate some wonderful strawberries and enjoyed delicious lemon frozen yogurt!

New Dinner

Here's a new recipe I created tonight:

Baked Apple Salad for 1

1 baking apple (center cored out)
1/4 cup apple granola (Trader Joe's)
1/4 cup cut up cheddar cheese
1/4 t cinnamon
1/4 t demura (sp?) sugar
2 cups lettuce
1 t apple cider vinegar
1 t EVOO
1/4 t cinnamon

Mix up the granola, cheese, cinnamon and sugar and stuff into the apple. Put the apple in a glass baking dish and add 1/4 cup water. Bake in a 350 oven for 30 minutes until tender (more for firmer apples). In the meanwhile, wash the lettuce. Mix the last 3 ingredients well. When the apple is done, cut up into pieces and add to the lettuce. Top with dressing. It was quite good. Salty, sweet, savory. Winter salad.

Today

It snowed a lot here this weekend. I have been shoveling a lot. Here's what I've accomplished:


Photo on the left is the large pile that is next to my drive way - literally, I can no longer get snow up to the top and have to walk the snow around. The photo on the right is the view from the bottom of my front steps. Remember when you were young and you made paths and tunnels in the snow and how cool it was. It's not cool anymore.

In addition, I also baked these:

Which contain:

Lt to right and around the plate from the top: pumpkin cranberry bread (smells heavenly), ginger snaps (yes, they do that broken top thing all by themselves), Russian tea cakes (or Mexican wedding cakes), and these delicious broken top double chocolate with ginger cookies that are new this year. I made cookies to take to the staff at work tomorrow and for my students. We started this tradition of taking cookies to the staff as a thank you during grad school. Everyone brought one type of cookie and we walked around like elves around the holidays delivering them to everyone who made our work run as smoothly as it did. It was a big thank you. It was great because we only had to make one type of cookie and everyone got a random assortment. I made the variety today because I was seriously avoiding work! I also did 3 loads of laundry, shoveled for about 1.5 hrs, wrote about 1/2 of my holiday cards, put away a bunch of things. I'm exhausted and sore. No more snow, please.

Organic Soup

This summer I volunteered at a local organic farm. In exchange for my help doing everything from putting up a greenhouse to picking lots of cherry tomatoes, I got a bunch of fresh, organic produce. I received things I wouldn't often have bought and some of it required me to search for recipes. One of the recipes I found was for a creamy potato leek soup. Whenever anything says creamy, I think dairy, something like milk, cream or yogurt. This one uses tofu instead. I found it quite good and it's the season of soup here.

Plum goodness

My sister and I had a discussion about plum pie the other day. I was not surprised when the following npr story about plum treats appeared today. She's usually ahead of the trends!