Just a little news and a recipe

In June, I traveled to Arkansas to give a trunk show and teach a short class to one of my mother's quilt guilds.  The first part of the morning I gave my trunk show and answered some questions before breaking for a pot luck luncheon.  Which,  by the way, was delicious and the homemade bread was awesome!  After lunch, I set up for a small showing of projects with plans to demo a bit and teach some strip piecing techniques. It didn't go that way, but was really wonderful anyway.  After showing some of my strip piecing projects, they all just wanted to look at my projects and ask questions.  They were not really prepared - most of them - for a "class".  However, one lady, pictured below with me and my sister, Paige, came prepared, but decided not to sew.  She was darling and requested that we take a picture with her.  They asked if I would come back and teach an all day class next time.  So, I am looking forward to returning to Arkansas to teach some more quilting in the future.  Don't know exactly when that will be, but hopefully sometime soon.  

 

 

 

One of my strip piecing projects that I took was this string quilt I have previously blogged about here.  Since returning from Arkansas, I have added a large blue border all around.  I was thinking at first that would be all I would add, now I am thinking about adding some gray and green 4 patches.  I still have some of the gray strips and I have some bright green fabric in the same print as the dark blue.  I think I will work on that tomorrow and see where it leads me.   I am not sure I want them all the way around the quilt or if I want them randomly spaced, clustered on the corners or what.  I will just make up a bunch and then play.  

 

 

Earlier this week I tested out one of the recipes I have copied down from the Internet - probably from Facebook - for easy lasagna.  It was fast, easy and tastes wonderful.  Here are the simple directions for making this fantastic lasagna. 

 

Ingredients:

1 jar prepared pasta sauce (I used a jar of Putanesca sauce I got at Big Lots and had in my cabinet - I think this made the dinner since it has great flavor with the olives and capers)

1 package refrigerated ravioli (I used Buttoni cheese ravioli in the smaller shape, but used a large package)

Mozzarella cheese grated

Parmesan cheese grated

frozen spinach, thawed and all the water squeezed out

 

Now to assemble.  Put a little bit of the pasta sauce in the bottom of  a 9 X 13 pan.  (You could probably use a 9 X 9 pan and make more layers.)  make one layer of the ravioli - do not overlap.  Pour a little of the sauce over the top and cover with half the spinach and mozzarella cheese, do another layer of the ravioli, sauce, spinach and cheese.  End with a layer of the ravioli and sauce. Be sure you have enough sauce to do this top layer because it's important to cover all the ravioli so it will cook and soften in the oven.  Cover the entire dish with the Parmesan cheese and cover with foil. 
Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.  Uncover and bake about 10 more minutes or until golden brown and bubbly.  Let set for a few minutes on the counter before serving. 

 

I hope you enjoy this as much as I have enjoyed eating on it.  I have put some in the freezer to see how it likes to freeze.  I figure it will be okay since all the ingredients can be frozen.  You could change it up just by changing your sauces and your ravioli.  I think the next time I make it I will use a vodka sauce and a meat filled ravioli in the large squares.  Enjoy!



Checking in on my Blog

Wow!  June went by fast!  I can't believe it's already the 6th of July.  Where has my summer gone?  I have gotten nothing - I repeat, NOTHING done here at home.  I went to Arkansas to visit with my mother and sister - and nephews, too.  While I was there I gave a trunk show and was supposed to teach a short class, but everyone was more interested in seeing my quilts and visiting with me and we never got around to the class part of the day.  It was a lot of fun and I think my mother took some pics with my camera.  I will have to dig it out and post them.  (if I approve of them)  We also did some shop hopping of our own.  A store in the area was having a massive sale - owner had passed away and the family was getting rid of everything - so we hit that one first - about 60 yards later we were ready for lunch and another store.  My sister hit that one pretty hard and we had lunch at a Mexican food place near that store that was one of two the clerk recommended.  I wish I had taken a picture of what my sister and I ended up sharing.  It was large, yes, but not too large, what it was - was delicious!  I am going to have to make something similar here.  If only I could remember everything about it.  I am drawing a blank.  ARGGGG.  Oh well, I will create my own version of something.  LOL.  Well, got a border to put on the previous string quilt.  I finally found the right fabric for it in my collection.

Great Food

What is it?  Shrimp and Grits.  I had never tried shrimp and grits before, but have heard a lot about them in the last few years.  They are one of Paula Dean's favorites and she even had another chef challenge her in her magazine.  At least I think that was what that article was about.  I didn't read the entire thing and it was several months ago.  I digress.  Shrimp and Grits.  Last weekend I got the privilege of attending the Culinary Educators Conference hosted by the Texas Restaurant Education Association and the Texas Beef Council.  It was awesome!!  I learned so much and got to practice a lot of what we were learning.  Wonderful conference.  One of the best I have ever been to and I hope to go back next year.  Enough gushing - on to Shrimp and Grits.  Like I said, I had never had theses before, but they have become really popular recently.  We had the honour of having the executive chef from Sandra Bullock's restaurant, Bess, in Austin, come and demo for us.  She made and served everyone this wonderful dish.  Along with her husband who is a chef/teacher at Escoffiet - another culinary school in Austin.  We were at Le Cordon Bleu.  Even though we ate and cooked most of the weekend, this is the only picture that I took.  Period.  I didn't take any other pics the entire weekend.  Okay, what is in this pic?  White cheddar cheese grits topped with spiced grilled shrimp, bacon, chives and a red wine vinegar gastric.  Delicious!! 

Just Talking - No Pictures

Just a quick blog here. I have been wanting to check in, but life was very, very busy last week. My culinary class along with the hospitality and fashion design classes hosted our Holiday Showcase to our friends and faculty. We made lots of food and goodies while our fashion design teacher decorated the restaurant. It was beautiful!! I just wish I had remembered to take my camera with me that day. Thank goodness my mother brought hers and took pictures. Unfortunately, I don't have copies of them to share, but I will as soon as I can.

Now that life has slowed a little bit, well as much as it can at this time of year, I have been able to sew. I finished the binding on "The 3 Crosses" quilt for a friend - see previous post - and added a label on the back. It is now ready to go. I have 2 secret santa parties Friday morning and I only have one gift made- note to self, take a picture of gift before you wrap it - and have absolutely no clue what to do about the other gift. I will have to find something tomorrow for sure. It's not that I am lazy and don't want to shop. I have looked. okay, only a little bit, but I have looked. I just don't know what to get her. Something will come up. I mean, it has to, right?

For the first party tomorrow morning, I have to make cinnamon rolls. I am making the fun and easy rolls that my sister shared the recipe for and I have improved upon where you put them in the oven over night and turn on the oven in the morning and voila! beautiful, perfect gooey cinnamon rolls. The only problem is that if I do them at school and leave them overnight it will be about 16 hours before they are cooked. That is not good. Way to long to proof in the pan. We will have huge cinnamon rolls and dough that has possibly jumped ship (pan). The solution? I will make them at home and take them to school with me and put them in the oven there. I just hope my oven is large enough to hold the huge pans overnight. (little bitty oven here) I may can cover them and put them on the counter top. I will have to find the recipe and see what my options are. I just know that I can't make them at 3 Thursday afternoon and expect perfect cinnamon rolls at 7 the next morning. Lots to do tomorrow and the dogs are barking - literally, along with the neighborhood dogs. I will share pictures, etc. in my next posting.

Food - enough said

Finally got my pictures to download out of my camera. I thought I was going to lose them forever! I don't know about all of you, but I have had a couple of really hectic weeks, up until this week, that is.

At school, we had an advisory lunch, advisory meeting and a luncheon for 40! That last one was a bit scary, but we did it! My kids pulled it off. We plated and served almost 40 people. They were an hour late getting into the restaurant than what they had previously told me, but thank goodness for my hot/hold we were able to serve a great meal when they finally arrived.

a couple of days before that, I got the chance to go to Frisco to their culinary showcase. The students of Friso and Wiley teamed up and created a wonderful menu of delectable items that was beautifully presented and served. It was a wonderful experience to get to go there and view what they are doing and see the possibility of what my students will one day soon, be doing.

Here are some pics of the food: Okay, I thought I uploaded my pics. Let me try one more time. I don't think I was patient enough for them to completely load last time. Here we go: This is what we were served:

Butternut squash soup with cinnamon creme fraise (don't know if that is how it is spelled or not - pronounced fresh) with caramelized shallots



Field Greens with cranberries and sugared pecans with a round of fried goat cheese


Braised short rib with root vegetables served over blue cheese polenta (which was very creamy and wonderful)


and last, but not least - and my favorite of the night even though everything was simply delicious - apple dumpling with cream and a caramel sauce. Just let me say that I have never liked cooked apples and apple dumplings until this year when my mother made me some of the Pioneer Woman's apple dumplings. This is my next favorite apple dumpling recipe. Speaking of which, I need to e-mail that chef and ask for the recipe.



Hope you enjoyed the pictures and I didn't make you, too hungry!

Cooking again

Okay, it hasn't been as long as I thought it had been since I last posted. I know, tomorrow will be a week, but I really had thought it had been much longer than that. Yes, life and school are both a little hectic, but not near as bad as a couple of weeks ago. However, it's starting to heat up again. The good thing is that the kitchen is starting to come together. There are a few things I need to work on getting, a few phone calls I need to make and an upcoming luncheon that I need to really sit down with the recipes and plan out. Figure out what I can order from my food supplier, what I need to pick up (can pick up) at HEB or Sam's.

Today, my students got back into the labs and made snacky items for the Principal's meeting after school. Things turned out really well. I am pleased how much better they did this time. However, there is a WHOLE lot of learning they have to do before I think they are up to where they need to be. Believe it or not, I had a student ask me today, "now what does the little "c" stand for?" People, that is what I am working with here. She was even a student that was in a foods class all of last year! It is so frustrating. They paid better attention to what they were doing - for the most part - and didn't seem as frazzled as they did the first time. They even got all their dishes washed (by hand) before the end of the period! Baby steps, people, baby steps. We may have to make something else, before the luncheon to get them back in the kitchen.

Yummo Cotton Candy!!

It's fair time again and my friend and I went on our annual trek to see the sights. Not much there, but we enjoyed what little we saw. Along with trying to win a hand carved wooden pin (2X and missed one by 1 number, shucks), we mostly sat and visited with friends, ate some fair food, (not traditional this time, fajitas) and wandered the commercial exhibits and campers. Of course the final purchase of the night was an extra large bag of fresh, right out of the spinner, cotton candy. It always makes me smile and brings back memories of the South Plains Fair in Lubbock. Of waitng around while my parents and 100 others make plans for opening the ACU Hamburger booth (or ACC for most of that time). Of getting out of school early with free fair tickets and going as a family to enjoy the hamburgers, rides and games. Of going to some GREAT country concerts such as Dolly Parton, The Oak Ridge Boys and many, many others that the fair brought in every year. Of getting old enough to go to the fair with a "date". or at least on a group date with a boy you really, really like. Of coming home from college on fair weekends and begging my mother to go with me just so I could go and get me some cotton candy because, unlike today, the fair was the only place you could get this delicious spun sugar and it was a rare treat only gotten once a year. I noticed that the convenience store had some bags of cotton candy for sale this past week and was sorley tempted to purchase some, but I decided to wait until the fair opened and I sure am glad I did.

School, dinner and shoes

YUM!!! I am sitting here at the computer enjoying my dinner. I stopped by Schlotzsky's for some potato and bacon soup and an original. I am so angry at myself. I always tell them to make it without the onions and this time I didn't. I had to pick off the onions. Now, don't get me wrong, I have been picking off the onions (and other stuff I don't care for) most of my life. I am just angry with myself that this one time I didn't do it and now my room smells like onions. There were a lot of onions on this sandwich today. If I were to chop them up and measure them, they would be about 1/4 cup. That's a lot on a sandwich. While I was waiting for my "onion" sandwich, :) the lady in front of me threw out a piece of paper from her car. DELIBERATELY!!! I couldn't believe it. It looked like a receipt, probably the one from her order, that was folded over and over on itself until it was about 1/2" wide and then that strip was folded in half. (what is the deal with all my fractions tonight?) I wanted to get out my car, pick up her paper and hand it back to her along with a couple of trash items from my car and say, "ma'am, I believe you lost this and as punishment for littering you have to take some of my trash." Then I would smile and tell her to have a good day and walk back to my car. Of course, being the type of person she is, A Litterer!, she would probably just throw her paper and my trash out the window. Just for the record, this woman was well over 50 and definitely should have known better.

I stayed late and worked on getting an ISS assignment together. I am putting together a generic packet so that when one of my students is put into ISS, the teacher there can just pull out my packet and the student can work on the assignments there. I have one that it going in on Monday for a 10 day stint. He must have done something really bad. However, not bad enough for him to go out to the alternative center or even jail. I got 4 days done and brought the rest home to work on this weekend along with my lesson plans, quilting and watching movies.

I wore my Gee's Bend shoes to school today and the people that saw them loved them. I did, too! I will have to remember to take both pairs to Bee tomorrow. I can't wear them because then, I would have to untie them and take them off to sew, slip them back on to walk around and then back off again to sew. Yes, I am one of those people, a bare-foot sewer. (notice I did not get and exclamation point) When I was teaching apparel class at the high school I had to make sure I wore shoes I could easily slip off and on just in case I had to sit down at some one's sewing machine and work on it. I know, I have it really bad.

Okay, new day and I am up and raring to go!! (6:20 a.m. - dogs wouldn't sleep any longer) Now, to start in on those recipes that I had planned for yesterday. First off the Butter Brickle Bread. A recipe I got from my sister via my mother. Apparently somebody served this bread at a party my sister went to and she begged for the recipe. Then my mother sent it on to me to try. It is an interesting recipe that is made using a cake mix, a pudding mix, hot water and 4 eggs. You mix it with a mixer and it incorporates a lot of air into the batter. I cooked it in my Pampered Chef mini loaf stone that makes 4 medium/small loaves of bread. they turned out pretty good. I think I need to shorten the cooking time, but other than that it looks good. Oh, yes, the recipe called for poppy seeds and I didn't want to use them so I put in pecans instead. Next time I will triple the amount of pecans. Here is a picture of one loaf.



and all 4 of them:



Next up was a recipe from the Tasty Kitchen, the Pioneer Woman's blog. Since peaches are so abundant right now, I copied off two recipes using peaches. The first was peach cups. It uses crescent rolls, marscapone cheese and peaches. Okay, if you read the previous blog you will know that I am subbing whipped cream cheese instead. The recipe says you can do this. I melted my butter and got my cinnamon and sugar ready and started dipping my dough and making cups out of them in my muffin pan. (yes, another Pampered Chef stoneware item. Love them)



Then I mixed my cheese with some sugar and mounded it into the cups. I slice up a large peach and decided that I may not be able to get those slices in the cup so I diced up that peach and put a bunch over the cheese mix. Sprinkle a little sugar on top of that and into the oven it goes.



After about 11 minutes (according to the recipe) I take them out and . . . and . . . the dough is not cooked much at all. I stick them back in for another 5 minutes and . . and. . . nope. I don't like this at all. Wait, I have another can of crescent rolls in my refrigerator. Let's try this one more time. I scoop out the filling and put it in a bowl. Peaches, cinnamon and all. Well, not all. I probably got some of the bottom of the peach cups into this mixture, but the rest of the dough went down the drain.



I cleaned the pan and started over. I decided that dipping the dough in butter was probably the problem. Also, getting the triangle shapes into a cup shape was a problem. So, this time, I spread out the dough from the can and pinched the perforated edges together to create one rectangle, cut that rectangle in half fat way and put that into the muffin cups. That works great. Then, I melted a little bit of butter and spread it into the cups with my fingers since I don't have or couldn't find a pastry brush. I sprinkled some Cinnamon and sugar mixture over the top of this and loaded them up with the new cheese and peach mixture. Put them in the oven, baked them the 11 minutes. Oops, needs some more time. 15 minutes total and voila



Peach Cups. They are pretty good. However, I will not be making this recipe anymore. They are just not worth it. However, I did scoop some of the cheesy mixture and put it on the brickle bread and that was very tasty. I might mix up some more of that and serve it with the bread. So this recipe wasn't a complete waste.

Food and fun times

I promised I would talk about what I ate at conference. I still haven't unearthed my thumb drive that I saved my nightly summary of the foods I consumed, but here are some of the highlights of that week at conference. You know they were great things when 2 to 3 weeks later I can still vividly remember them. First off was the blueberry and granola pancakes. They were awesome. I deliberately took my camera with me everywhere so I could take pictures of everything and came home with no pictures. Terrible blogger!! Anyway, this pancake batter had homemade granola mixed into the batter along with a few blueberries. Then it was topped with fresh blueberries, fresh whipped butter and sprinkled with powder sugar. You could top it off with some warm maple syrup, which I did. unbelievable! Such incredible flavors with the oats and cinnamon and a touch of sweetness coming from the granola and the fresh blueberries. When I first tasted them, I knew right away that I would have to make some myself. (haven't' yet, but it's coming. first have to make the granola) The next thing that was awesome I didn't even order. Two of my friends had the short ribs. they had a coffee, cocoa, cinnamon rub on them that was to die for. The meat was so tender that it simply melted in your mouth and the flavors blended together in such a richness that . . umm it was incredible!! I wanted to pull their plate over and just consume what was left. It was very good. That is another one I will have to play with and make. Believe it or not, I have never cooked short ribs. Since I am now teaching the culinary arts, I am going to be experimenting more at home so that I can come up with interesting dishes to serve in our restaurant at school. Well, that is all I will leave you with for now. got to get to the midland fair and experience some goodness and fair foods out there.

Judging and all the rest

I can't believe I haven't been on here for almost half a month. Okay, over half a month! I have been very busy trying to get school started, traveling to conference, sitting in in-service meetings and unpacking boxes. Did I say unpacking boxes? just want you to know that I have been unpacking boxes!! Yesterday alone I unpacked about 35 boxes. I am probably half way through the 90+ boxes that I packed up back in May in readiness for this move.

Tonight, a fellow co-worker and I were judges for the Midland County Fair that is opening tomorrow night. This is their first fair in over 48 years so turnout for the entries was a bit sparse. We judged pies, jellies and jams, pickles and relishes, salsa, and canned black-eyed peas. I thought that was all we were going to judge and then I was informed that we were also judging the crafts entries. It was all very interesting and you will have to attend the fair (or wait until Sunday for me to tell you about it) to find out who the winners were. I will tell you that there were a lot of first places due to the low entry numbers in each category.

I have more to say, especially about the food at conference. I wrote down everything we ate while we were there and since I didn't pay for the Internet hookup and didn't want to use the public computers to blog, it is all on a thumb drive in my bag. My next blog will be about the food!!