Sweet and Salty Pumpkin Seeds

This is a recipe from Real Simple and it's true to the magazine's name.  After carving our pumpkins, I wanted to be sure and use some of the seeds for a tasty snack.  We had more than the recipe called for, so here are my ingredients:

• 3 cups of pumpkin seeds
• 3 tablespoons of melted butter
• 3 tablespoons of sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• a heaping 1/4 teaspoon of cinnamon

First, clean the seeds in a bowl of water, rubbing them between your hands.  If you have some stubbornly slimy seeds, pop them in a colander after and run water over them

The pumpkin seeds float and the goopy stuff sinks to the bottom!

Pat them dry on a paper or dish towel and spread them out on a baking sheet.  The Real Simple recipe calls for a rimmed baking pan, but we didn't have one large enough.  I risked it on a rimless one and it turned out fine; you just have to be a little more careful :)

All clean!

Bake the seeds at 300 degrees until they are completely dry (after about 50 minutes mine were already toasty), then pull them out and toss them in the butter, sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

Turn the oven temp up to 350 and toast the seeds until they're golden brown.  Since mine were already pretty well toasted in the first round of heating, I put them in for just around 8 minutes.

Yum!  So good for snacking

Happy Halloween!

We went over to friend's on Friday for dinner and pumpkin carving.  It was delicious and the pumpkins turned out pretty good, too!

Saturday was our proper Halloween- costumes and all.  I also made some yummy pumpkin cupcakes with this recipe from Real Simple.

Me and Frankie

Trick or treat!

I hope you have a spooktacular Halloween!!

Breakfast Bacon Bowls

Amazingly delicious.  I saw these bacon bowls on Pinterest and I've been dying to try them ever since.

Preheat the oven to 350.  While the oven is heating, make your bacon bowls.  Each of my bowls was made of two pieces of bacon.  Cut one strip in half and lay them crossed over the back of the muffin tin.  Then, take one piece of bacon and weave it basket style around the sides of the muffin cup.  I tried two with tin foil and two on the bare nonstick tin.  I think the foil worked out better- it had less shrinking when the bacon cooked.

While the bacon is baking, make your egg scramble.  I chopped up some peppers and mushrooms and sauteed them.

Then I added in the eggs and by the time they were done, I took the bacon bowls out of the oven.  John and I like our bacon a little floppy, but the bowls still held their shape well!  If they had baked for just a little bit longer though they would have been easier to cut through. 

We topped off our eggs and veggies with some feta cheese from the Midtown market.  Delicious!

Just in time for a lazy Saturday morning :)

Autumn Entryway

It is that time of year when the frost starts to set in.  Our begonias have been blighted by the cold, our potted plants put to rest.  In their absence, the entry to our house looked completely bare.  So, with fall on our minds and pumpkin carving in the near future, John and I set off to Home Depot to deck out our newly emptied steps.  Here are the before and after shots:

Our spring pots- they got to be VERY big and pretty. 
Definitely going to use lobelia and geraniums next year!

I'm excited to carve these pumpkins and maybe get some corn to hang on the door too.

The squirrels have already discovered our corn stalks.  We heard them thumping around on the front steps trying to get their paws on it and I managed to snap this picture:

Hello, new friend!

They've even started munching on our pumpkins... At least wait until we've carved them!

Sea Salted Caramel

I've been on a cooking kick lately, what can I say?  And the great apples still in the store were just asking for a caramel sauce for them to take a dip in.  The lovely blog Ruffled Sunshine provides a great recipe (and a super cute printable!) that I decided to give a whirl.

You will need:
3/4 cup of heavy cream
.44 cup of sugar (Thanks to John, I now know that this is 1/3 of a cup plus 5 teaspoons)
3 Tablespoons of butter, chopped up
and some sea salt, just a bit

Of course, I never have everything I need for a recipe even when I go to the store specifically for recipe ingredients.  So, I used some kosher salt instead and it was just fine!

Here is what you do:

First, you pour the heavy cream into a sauce pot and heat it up over low heat.  While it's heating, put the sugar into a heavy duty sauce pot and heat it over medium heat.

Heavy cream, low heat

Sugar, medium heat

Here's where it is important to read ahead.  *Don't stir the sugar!*  It was so hard for me to leave it alone, but resist!  When the melted sugar turns amber, give the pot a few gentle swirls and remove it from the heat.

Too soon!  Don't swirl yet!

NOW you can swirl! 

Then, add in your chopped butter to the sugar and place it back on the heat

This is the stirring part.  Add in the heavy cream slowly as well along with a pinch of salt.  Let it boil for a couple of minutes and then take it off the heat.  Let it cool, and then pour it into a container.

I was amazed at how easy it is to make!  Homemade caramel in a matter of minutes.  I think sometime soon I'll dig up my grandparent's recipe for caramel corn.  Yum! :)

We had some old mason jars in the basement, so I used one of them (small sized) as my caramel container.  However, I had to make two batches to come close to filling the jar.

If I had a color printer, I would have used Ruffled Sunshine's adorable printables.  How cute would they be printed onto stickers!?

Jaded

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my great grandmother was a woman of many talents and is a source of inspiration to me.  While going through a box of old things, I ran across a bag of jade beads that used to belong to her.  I had long ago decided to restring the beads, but I hadn't had a good idea for how exactly to string them until recently.

I wanted to make a necklace that used ribbon, and I found some gorgeous purple velvet ribbon at Joann Fabrics.

To string the beads, I used a silk thread.  In hindsight, I think I should have gotten a colored thread that would have blended in a bit bitter...

Basically,  I cut two strips of the velvet ribbon about two feet in length each.  Then I looped the string around the center of one velvet ribbon and tied a knot.  Next, I threaded one bead at a time onto the silk thread, tying a knot after each one like an old fashioned pearl necklace.  Once the beaded portion was as long as I wanted, I secured the thread to the center of the other ribbon.  Voila!

 

I'm happy with the result and I love the fact that it's adjustable (and super easy to make!)

Healthy Pizza!

So, there are a bunch of recipes floating around on Pinterest for cauliflower crust pizzas.  It sounded too interesting not to try, so last night John and I tried this recipe out for ourselves.  We had both had big lunches that day, so the smallish sized pizza (9 inches) was a great size for a lighter supper.  We even had a little leftover!  Okay, no we didn't.  :)  It was too tasty not to eat the whole thing!

For the crust you will need:
1 head of cauliflower
1 egg (beaten)
1 cup of mozzarella
and a dash of oregano (I chose to omit the garlic)

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.  While the oven is heating, you will need to rice the cauliflower, which I did in our FOOD PROCESSOR!  (Basically, use the pulse setting to shred it into grain-like pieces)  I'm so happy we have one!

 

Once you rice the cauliflower, pour it into a bowl and microwave it all for 8 minutes.  Then, scoop out one cup and put the rest in fridge for making more later (trust me, you'll want to!).  Put your one cup of cauliflower into a bowl and add the beaten egg, the cheese, and oregano and stir together.  Grease a pan (I might even use parchment paper next time) and pat the "dough" into a 9 inch round.

Pop it in the oven for about 15 minutes.  While it's baking, cook the toppings you plan to use.  We chose mushrooms and spinach, my personal favorite.  I brazenly disregarded Julia Childs' advice and crowded my mushrooms into a tiny pan and topped it off with spinach.

 

Once the crust is done, spoon on some sauce (we used Prego) and put on the toppings.  Then heat it under the broiler until the cheese begins to brown.

I think this would be great by itself in little cookie sized portions!

 

 

It's definitely an eat-with-a-fork type of pizza, but it was so good!  I hope you try it too!

Big thanks to Eat Drink Smile for the great idea!