Picnic leftovers

We're still in the grip of a heat wave. So the menu includes lots of leftovers from my mother-in-law's Fourth of July picnic.

We started the morning with a breakfast of fresh cantaloupe, Morningstar vegetarian breakfast patties and Grammy's Blueberry Crumb pie.

She also made an ice cream cake with fudge, Oreos, and malted milk balls. Nicely decadent.

I also did some weeding in the garden (some things have gone insane since we left on our DC trip).

And started organic green tea brewing in the sun with a big clump of my garden mint.

A Special Tea Party

Today we had some friends to our home for a tea party, though the tea was iced. We wanted to thank our friends Bart and Phyllis for being one of my sets of friends who made soup for me when I couldn’t eat.

The menu was planned by my daughter. I made the iced teas. The first tea was decaffeinated organic green tea with rose (the Tazo rest I adore). Two bags of Tazo Rest to three bags of Bigelow organic decaffeinated green. The second pitcher was Archer Farms Earl Grey with berry and chocolate. Good stuff.

I didn’t take many photos, because in the thrill of entertaining I forgot.

My daughter wanted peanut butter crackers and so she selected Market Pantry sandwich crackers, the Ritz style, and a box of Keebler Club multigrain crackers. We saw spinach artichoke dip in Target and got inspired to make our hot spinach dip.

We bought some Market Pantry bagged frozen cut spinach (and it had a lot of big stems with no greens, a bit of a turn off).

We ended up making a platter of sandwich crackers, club crackers and rye crackers with sides of peanut butter, almond butter and cashew butter on the side. We had a big bowl of whole strawberries. A dish of unsalted almonds and cashews.

Then we made spinach dip in the crock pot and scones. Phyllis made heart shaped cupcakes with chocolate icing and my daughter made some cake in her Easy Bake Oven.

TODAY’S SPINACH HERB DIP:

In the crockpot
drizzle some cold pressed extra virgin olive oil
add garden fresh herbs. In my case, today, I used about
        2 teaspoons oregano
        5 large stalks of chives, chopped
        2 teaspoons parsley
        3 large leaves French sorrel, shredded
        3 leaves basil, shredded
        1 teaspoon dill
add 1/4 cup minced garlic

Cook about twenty minutes.
Cook spinach until thawed in microwave. Does not have to be hot. Reserve 3/4 cup of the liquid. Add spinach and liquid to crockpot. Cook at least one hour on high. Preferably 1.5 hours (more is fine, though you may have to reduce heat.)

Thirty minutes before serving, add cheese. Today I used about 4-5 ounces mozzarella, 4 ounces sharp cheddar, and 2 ounces pepper jack. It tasted sweet, so I added a tablespoon of garlic powder.

SCONES

We made two kinds of scones, adapted from the Betty Crocker 25th Anniversary Cookbook. One was honey walnut. One was blueberry.

From memory:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Mix together 4 tablespoons butter and 3.5 cups unbleached white flour, 4 tablespoons sugar, 3 tablespoons honey, 5 teaspoons baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon (?) salt. Use a pastry blender to make it the consistency of crumbs. Then add one beaten egg and four tablespoons applesauce. Add milk by the tablespoon until the dough becomes soft and dough like. I used one tablespoon vanilla silk, then 4 tablespoons heavy whipping cream, then about 3 tablespoons unsweetened soy milk and one tablespoon water.

I divided the dough in two, and added blueberries to one half and lots of honey and walnuts to the other. Turn dough out on floured surface and press to 1/2 inch thick. Cut into diamonds. Bake 10-12 minutes. My honey walnuts started to burn on the bottom after 10.

Rose tea

I love the Tazo Rest Tea. It's primarily rose, with lavender, lemon, and valerian. All sorts of restful herbs, but no chamomile which always overpowers everything.

I have been making iced tea with 50% green tea and 50% this rest tea, and it's good. Today I scaled back the amount of green tea.

The Tazo tea hot is yummy by itself so I don't know why I'm hesitant to make a full batch of Tazo rest iced tea.

Iced tea and leftovers

Last week's green tea with berry turned awesome. This morning I'm making Stash vanilla nut cream decaf with a regular lipton bag, too. I forgot last week that I do have a glass jar to make sun tea. I bought it on clearance last summer at Wegmans.

For breakfast we had scrambled eggs and fresh blueberries.

For lunch we had leftover pasta from the restaurant last night (my dad took us out to dinner). Can you believe I ate pretty heartily last night, and still had enough of my meal leftover to split it three ways for the family for lunch.

That's when you know portion sizes are out of control.

Sunshine and iced tea!

I'm brewing some tea to ice to go with this lovely sunny day. First day of spring. Haven't been to the backyard yet for a post-winter assessment but I bet my chives are growing.

I have a big mug with four tea bags in it, ready to make 2-3 quarts of iced tea. The mix today is 2 teabags organic green tea (purchased a long time ago from the warehouse club in a big, big pack), 1 tea bag Celestial Seasoning Sugar Plum Spice, and one Celestial Seasonings Wild Berry Zinger.

Feel the Love (Chicken Salad, Lavender Green Tea, and fresh berries)

My girlfriend Shannon has a philosophy for any major purchase: "Feel the Love."

It's okay to spend $100 on a fabulous pair of jeans IF you feel $1oo worth of love. But sometimes, even if something is reduced to $20 from that original $100, and even if it fits, if you're not feeling the love worth the $20, it's not worth buying. Makes sense, doesn't it?

I do that with food. I won't pay $3 for a loaf of factory-processed sliced bread. And occasionally I feel the $4.50 worth of love for the bakery bread I have deemed "magic bread." (Giant's multigrain sandwich bread, it makes the GREATEST toast ever.)

I made a second walk around the farmers market yesterday because I thought I felt the love for the $6.25 fairly large loaf of pecan-raisin bread. It screamed "good toast," "eat me with peanut butter" and "I'm not just bread, I'm dessert." So, I bought it.

Now, remember I spent $40ish total, and this included $15 worth of rabbit. That means 1/2 of what I spent was on two items: a rabbit and a loaf of bread. The rest was produce and spices.

In the same "feel the love" philosophy, I took four organic green tea tea bags and the last two teaspoons or so of my expensive bottle of lavender honey to brew iced tea. (The tea bags were a find at the warehouse club last summer and they're individually wrapped so I don't have to worry about them aging poorly.

Meanwhile, I'm making some plain-style chicken salad to go with the fancy bread. My daughter and I already cut the fresh strawberries (and knowing her, by lunch they may be gone.) I had planned fresh apricot in my chicken salad, but I don't think my apricots are ripe. I slipped a pinch of It's a dilly seasoning, garlic pepper and curry into the cooking chicken.

I sliced and shredded about two cups of chicken, added about two teaspoons of fresh parsley from my garden and at least two, maybe more, teaspoons of fresh chives from my garden.

I lubricated it with 1/2 cup vegan light canola mayonnaise (I hate real mayo, always have. So does my dad). My recipe says 1 cup "dressing" but I thought that would be too wet for the amount of chicken I had, so I added, in addition to the canola mayo, three tablespoons Wegmans ranch yogurt dressing.

I can't wait to serve on the new bread with thin-sliced tomato and red leaf lettuce from the farmers market. I wish it were lunch time.

Midmorning Tea Party

I normally eat my breakfast around 9:30 a.m. This morning, another rainy day, I whipped out the tea set and made a tea party for my little girl.

I diluted my usual homebrewed iced tea for the teapot, prepared a platter of yesterday's homemade biscuits, and scrambled some eggs. I also peeled a pear.

And voilà... One happy little girl who ate two biscuits, a scrambled egg and a pear.

Brought to you by the letter P: Pork with raspberry sauce

I didn't intend it, but dinner became "brought to you by the letter P."

I got home from work and prepped some peas by thawing them in the microwave. Then I sliced about two tablespoons of fresh spearmint from my garden and added it to the peas. I stirred it up, covered it, and set it in the fridge. (Great picnic item, originally from Eileen Breslin's vegan cooking class at Northampton Community College.) Serve the peas chilled.

Then I made some green tea, also with loads of spearmint and poured it over ice in my Princess House glasses. I also got out a bottle of Italian sparkling raspberry wine. I even allowed by daughter to have a small taste for a special post-birthday toast. That was our apéritif.

First course was canned pears (packed in juice, juice reserved for recipe) with some of the sauce from the meat, served over yogurt. (See below for recipe.)

The pork recipe is a variation of Pork Chops with Raspberry Sauce from Allrecipes.com.

Pork with Raspberry Sauce, Angel-style

4 thin pork chops
Mysterious herb seasoning packet from Aldi spinach rigatoni

pinch of fresh ground course sea salt

pinch four-color peppercorns

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

4 tablespoons juice, reserved from a can of pears

4 tablespoons champagne vinegar, a gift from my mom at Christmas

3.5 tablespoons Chambord

almost 1/4 cup organic raspberry jam from Wegmans

1. Preheat oven to 200. In a skillet, melt butter and olive oil.

2. Combine seasonings, salt and pepper. Rub on pork.

3. Cook pork in skillet on medium, about four minutes per side.

4. Place on plate and keep warm in oven.

5. In warm skillet, with meat juices still present, combine the juice, jam, vinegar and Chambord. Cook until the sauce reduces significantly. It will thicken when it cools. I put about have the sauce on the meat right away and left in in the oven as I served the first course. Then when I served, the sauce had thickened and I placed more on each.

My daughter ate TWO.

For dessert, we had some pumpkin roll. I didn't make that, Gayle brought it for my birthday. Her friend makes it.

Peppermint Iced Tea

I made peppermint iced tea today. I really want my famous bittersweet hot chocolate, but I only have skim milk and that would be sacreligious. So I brewed this tea with two plain tea bags and three peppermint.