Food Bonus: Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Cream Sauce

It really is hard to beat nicely roasted cauliflower.  (Thanks, Rachelle, for teaching me so many years ago!)  Today I tried adding a sauce to the roasted cauliflower.  Oh, my, was it good!!!  For breakfast.

I also brought it to the office for lunch.  If there is any leftover, I will eat it for supper!

Here is a quick synopsis of what I did:

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Cream Sauce!  So good.
 375 oven

Put cauliflower in cast iron skillet, sliced in thirds and drizzled with olive oil.  Covered with cast iron cover.  Foil would work.  Baked 30 minutes.  

Removed cover and cooked an additional 25 minutes, until tender.

The underside of the roasted cauliflower.  Isn't it pretty!

Sauce
3/4 cup heavy cream
2 Tablespoons stone ground mustard

1 Tablespoon whole wheat flour
2 Tablespoons butter
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 Tablespoons snipped scallions, green part.

Melt butter and add flour.  Cook for 1-2 minutes then add cream.  Cook for 2-3 minutes then add the salt and mustard.  Cook, stirring, until thick. Add snipped scallions.  Pour over the roasted cauliflower.

So good.  Did I already say that?  My plan is to share at lunch time but the closer I get to that time the less I want to share....I guess I better buck up and remember a giving nature is a Christ-like attribute.

LATER:  Well, I did not happen to share the sauced cauliflower with the people in the office.  I did not stop for lunch.  Well, actually I had to go home, or chose to go home, to pick up the Envelope Punch Board by WeRMemoryKeepers. I also picked up a 12 by 12 pad of paper  and the 1-2-3 Punch Board. (While at home I ate a sausage I had left in the microwave earlier...Hope it won't kill me but I was hungry by then...) I had opened an enveloped that was not addressed properly so I thought it was meant for the mission office, since that is what it said on the outside of the pretty blue sparkly envelope.  When I opened it, the first this I saw was:  "Dear Sister M...."  Whoops!  Not for the office...so I went home to get paper and punch board to make a new envelope to mail the card to the missionary in.

After making the envelope ( a cool purple one), I showed Sister J and Sister D how to make envelopes, then we worked together to make a box on the 1-2-3 Punch Board. Both sisters liked the punch boards.  Maybe a sale for WeRMemoryKeepers!  Nice.

Anyway, by the time we had finished that Sister B. had come in to talk about some changes to documents on our missionary portal.  Then President B. came in for other meetings and when he was done Sister J. and I were involved President and Sister until we finished learning some nifty new things that will make Transfers so much easier on everyone.  And it was time to go home.  

So I ate the last of the cauliflower for supper.  Dear One was not interested at all.  NOT. AT. ALL. Well, his loss.  The best part about that was that I did not eat anything after supper.  First time in ages I did not get sucked into getting more stuff for him to eat and then joining him.  I feel virtuous, and hopeful that the scales will be my friend in the morning...

Mission Knitting: Baby Sweater Begins

Cheryl Brunette has so many wonderful videos on YouTube about knitting. Or go here. Or here for the class...She has a 15-class series on knitting a sweater.  I have started it.

The first class really is how to make a gauge swatch that works for you.

Once you have the gauge swatch knitted, not a miserable little one, but at least six inches square,  you measure it multiple places then take an average.  Any simple calculator will do the job, or you can do it with pen and paper.  Once you have the gauge with the yarn and needles you want to use, you plunk those numbers into the schematic of the sweater you want to knit.  In this case it is a Size 1 baby sweater.  A polo pullover.  I am very excited about it and have a baby waiting to be born to wear it!

Here is a picture of the ribbing.  You can tell I am a little impatient as I am knitting the front and the back at the same time.

Sadly, I had gotten to this part yesterday and realized I was supposed to knit the ribbing with needles one or two sizes smaller.  Oh well.  Did NOT want to start over so I continued.  Babies don't have much in the line of waists so I think it will be all right.  I WILL be more careful when it comes to the cuffs on the sleeves.

Munchie Monday: Rice Noodle Bowl with Ginger-Peanut Sauce

The other day a few missionaries were in the mission office to pick up supplies.  After they were gone I noticed a few papers left on the table where four of them had been sitting while waiting for the other two.  This is a recipe from them!  I do not know where they found it.

For the sauce in a medium bowl I put 3 Tablespoons each  lime juice, soy sauce, and rice vinegar.  Added 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 cup peanut butter, 1 Tablespoon ground ginger,  nearly a Tablespoon sesame oil, and 1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes.  I whipped until well combined and set aside.

What I actually did since I did not have the cabbage, carrots, and cucumbers is that I sautéd a large sweet onion along with one red bell pepper sliced thin.  Cooked the rice noodles according to package...which was that I put them in a bowl and covered with boiling water and let sit for 8 minutes or so.  Drained the noodles and put the sautéed vegetables and noodles in a large bowl and poured the sauce over the top then tossed.  They were ready to eat.  Yummy.  Mostly.

These are the noodles we used:

This is what they looked like ready to eat:

The crazy thing is DEAR ONE ATE TWO BOWLS OF THIS STUFF!!!!!!  Unbelievable.  And the next day he ate the rest. Unheard of!  Funnily enough, I did not like is as much as I thought I would.  Isn't that a pretty pass?!

Food Friday: Anytime Special Treat

Ten days or two weeks before Valentine Day I saw a recipe somewhere with author Cathy Trochelman for some chocolate strawberry sandwich cookies.  I knew I did not want to go to the trouble of making cookies but thought that thick brownies, cooled, then split, would be great.

This is what I did:

Made a double batch of Duncan Hines brownie mix into batter.

Sprayed a six-well heart-shaped silicon pan and two six-well round silicon pans with vegetable spray.

Used the quarter-cup portion scoop to fill the heart-shaped wells first then the round wells.  A few of the second round-well-pan portions took a little more batter as I did not want to add another pan, nor did I want to throw away the extra batter. Placed silicon batter-filled pans on large cookie sheet.

Baked them at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes. WAY NOT COOKED so I cooked for ten more minutes then for 5 MORE minutes after that.  The heart-shaped brownies and the first round-shaped brownies were done.  The round ones with more batter were NOT done, which I discovered when I released them from the pan...so I just put them back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

NOTE: The trick with silicon pans, I have learned, is that the pans and their contents MUST cool for at least fifteen minutes before trying to release the nifty food from them.  If you do not wait, at least if I do not, there is a disaster with the contents I have worked hard to create.

These brownies cooled all night on the rack.  I wanted them a little bit hard-ish to cut in the morning. They sliced nicely with my very expensive Cutco cheese knife. Also VERY SHARP Cutco cheese knife. Ask me how I know...  Since they did slice well, I went ahead and made the filling.

My filling:

In a mixer bowl I place one stick (4 ounces) room temperature butter (never substitute!) and 4 ounces room temperature cream cheese.  I beat them in the mixer (the old Sunbeam Mix Master I got on Freecyle!!! My mother had one which was white and rounded and metal and worked ever so well my entire growing up years.  This one is yellow, plastic housing, with glass bowls, and also works well.  Takes the bite away from leaving my Bosch and Kitchenaid mixers home) until they were perfectly combined and smooth.  At that point I poured in 1/2 cup of frozen raspberries that I had thawed overnight. I considered not using the berry juice but then thought that all the flavor is in the juice and left it.

After beating in the raspberries until smooth and oh, so pretty,  I added 4 cups confectioner's sugar, one cup at a time.  When smooth I removed the bowl from the mixer and put a reasonable blob of delicious filling in the center of each set of brownie slices.

At this point, and since it was 28 degrees outside, and also since there was NO ROOM in the refrigerator, I put the covered container just outside the door.  I am hoping that since the doorstep is seventeen steps up that no one, including dogs, will investigate even though there is a light on totaling illuminating the container.  With good fortune the complex management people will not be walking around looking for infractions at 5:15 in the morning.  They DO fine you if you put your trash or recycling out, I have heard, though I find that hard to believe.  I guess it would depend on how long you left your trash out.  There are more dogs in this complex than children but I am pretty sure I have never seen one run free, so I think the brownie treats are safe.

Now we shall see if our office people like them.  They are a pretty good slug of sugar....I won't be taking one myself since I "licked the beaters" and feel that sugar racing through my veins!  That was enough.

Snow! And Ice.

There has been talk about snow here.  We did have a little snow on the ground when we got up yesterday.  Today this is what we see:

This photo was taken about 4:45 AM.  I was up planning to do a little Spanish.  Instead I worked on the numbers for a little sweater I am going to knit starting soon.  (I had finished the gauge swatch and blocked it last night so I did the measuring this morning and put the numbers of stitches in the pattern schematic so I am ready to cast on.)

After an hour of watching the YouTube class and inputting these numbers I went back to bed.  It was nice to be horizontal but I could not sleep.  The early-leavers from the complex were just plain crawling out of the parking lot, crunch crunch crunching along under our window.  Made me want to just stay in bed all day.  In Vermont I know how to drive in snow but here there is so much angst about the snow that I am uncertain.  It is only half a mile to the office but I am not sure I am brave enough to walk over with scary drivers on the road...

Mission Knitting: Celtic Knot Neck Warmer Scarf

Some time ago I found a pattern that I thought was great.  It looked relatively complicated but turned out to be very easy.  It was called the Celtic Knot Looped Scarf or something like that.  This is my rendition:

You can find the pattern here.

The yarn I used was a clearance yarn at Michaels. I used US size 11 circular needles and cast on 36 stitches.  The yarn is 100% acrylic, not my first choice but the price was right.  Blocking acrylic is not the easiest.  I do not know if the braided section will remain pretty or if it will roll back into cylindrical fabric after a while.  If I knit this again, for the knot section I will knit the edge stitches in moss stitch to keep them from rolling as this stockinette stitch did.

Fun Paper Crafted Treat Boxes

Some time ago I ordered some chocolate-covered  cinnamon gummy bears from the BYU Bookstore.  They came in two days.  I have been dying to make some little boxes to put them in to share on Valentine Day.

After watching multiple box-making tutorials on YouTube I settled on a very simple hinged box.  The girl who showed how to make it made it lipstick-sized.  I thought I could do the same thing with different sized paper to get a larger box.  It turns out, I could!  It makes me very happy when one of "my projects" works out.

How I did it:

Using a Fiskars cutter (which actually drives me crazy since it is supposed to cute 12 by 12 paper but really only cuts 11 3/4...so aggravating) I cut one inch off the edge of the card stock which is attached to the binding so I had a piece of card stock that was 11 by 12.  I cut it the long way so I had three pieces which were 11 by 4 inches.

Using an EK Tools scoring board since my Martha Steward score board is at home, I scored both the long edges of each piece at 1 inch.  I turned to the short side and scored one inch from each end...switching ends after the first scoring.  At that point I then scored at 5 inches and then at 6 inches.

After burnishing on each of the score lines, I folded on each line.  At this point I was ready to cut.  On the long side I cut on each of the short score lines to the first long score line, making four little one-inch "boxes".  On the inner side of the two outer boxes/tabs, I cut a little wedge of paper out.

On the inner tabs I cut small wedges on both sides.  At this point I put tape-runner glue on each of those tabs then stuck them to the long sides that had not been cut.

 The new Extreme Tomboy glue runner which cost a lot of money and hope was TOTALLY WORTHLESS.  And I mean TOTALLY.  However, I managed to get the job done.

You can see where the one-inch "hinge" is in the middle of the paper. When folded and glued, it makes a really nifty box.  The completed box is 3 inches by 4 inches by 1 inch. Very satisfying size.

Here is the completed project.

In case you want to know,  you can put six of those chocolate-covered cinnamon gummy bears in each box.