Black as night Halloween dinner

This Halloween night, I put together a meal as dark as my ride home from work will be after daylight savings this weekend. First up was the cocktail above. I didn’t make it and I didn’t ask what was in it, but despite it’s gloomy appearance, it was super fruity!

Next up, white button mushroom stuffed with kalamata tapenade. Topped with a sliver of pecorino and broiled for 2 minutes, these were a tasty grown up riff on edible eyeballs.

Last up, spooktacular black beans and rice! Happy Halloween, you ghosts and goblins!

Black as night Halloween dinner

This Halloween night, I put together a meal as dark as my ride home from work will be after daylight savings this weekend. First up was the cocktail above. I didn’t make it and I didn’t ask what was in it, but despite it’s gloomy appearance, it was super fruity!

Next up, white button mushroom stuffed with kalamata tapenade. Topped with a sliver of pecorino and broiled for 2 minutes, these were a tasty grown up riff on edible eyeballs.

Last up, spooktacular black beans and rice! Happy Halloween, you ghosts and goblins!

Stuffed baby eggplant and yellow globe zucchini

Summer is in full swing at my farmer’s market and I could not be happier. There’s a new farmer there this year who specializes in unique twists of stand-by summer veggies. He has mint and evergreen striped zucchini and deep purple cherokee tomatoes right next to the brightest neon yellow squash I have ever seen. This week he had some globe zucchini, too, in both yellow and a pale green. I snatched up several figuring they would be the perfect vessels for some kind of stuffing. Flash forward 10 minutes, I’m walking past an Asian reseller at the same farmer’s market who has the most gorgeous baby eggplant stacked high. I had a vision of how awesome they would look next to the yellow squash. Same size, complimentary colors, it just had to happen!

So, the eggplants went into my basket as well and later they both went into a hot oven to bake with a savory tomato stuffing. Both were tasty, but if pressed, I admit to enjoying the zucchini a little more. The skins of the baby eggplant were a little chewy, but I’m not going to complain because it was so good-looking on the plate. These made a delicious side dish to some grilled chicken, but they would be fun served as part of a vegetable plate, too. (If you’re not from the South, a vegetable plate is a meal made up solely of side dishes. And just FYI, macaroni & cheese is considered fair game for a vegetable plate).

Stuffed baby eggplant and yellow globe zucchini, makes 4 servings

4 small baby eggplant, about 3″ in diameter

4 small globe zucchini, about 3″ in diameter

1 can diced tomato, drained well

2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

2 Tablespoons diced red onion

1 Tablespoon chopped fresh herbs (I used oregano and thyme)

1 Tablespoon olive oil

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Slice a thin sliver off the bottom of each eggplant and zucchini so they will sit flat. Cut the tops off the baby zucchini and eggplant. You may reserve the top to use as a ‘lid’ when baking if you’d like. Using a melon baller, carefully hollow out the eggplant and zucchini leaving about 1/2″ think walls. Place the hollowed vegetables in a shallow baking dish.

Combine the tomatoes, feta, onion, herbs, and olive oil in a bowl. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Stuff each zucchini and eggplant full of the tomato mixture.

Pout 1 cup water into the baking dish around the stuffed zucchini and eggplant. If using, place the tops back on the vegetables as lids. Place in the oven and bake 1 hour.

Insta-Party: Carrot-tini and Feta Stuffed Sugar Snap Peas

Well, it’s been a little quiet around Ready, Set, Party recently. But I swear I’ve been making good use of my time while away from here. The full-time gig has kept me busy heading up several major transitions. Let’s just say I’ve gotten an on-the-job MBA in change management. Besides that, two other major events have occurred while I have been absent.

#1 – New dog in the HOUSE! His name is Magnus and he only wears his tie to formal events. He’s an 8 month old, 70 lb bull mastiff puppy. He is a handful, but very sweet. Almost sweet enough that I don’t mind all the dog hair and slobber he leaves everywhere.

#2 – I started a business! With an extremely talented, driven, and funny partner named Kylee. She’s the written word ying to my visual art yang. Our shared passion is helping small businesses with their marketing. So we do websites, copy, SEO, logo design, brand development, print and digital ad design, web-videos, and so much more! We have a handful of clients but we turned a profit in our first quarter in business! If you know anyone who needs marketing assistance, I’d be happy to speak with them. You can find our contact info on the Clear Eye Marketing website.

But I have missed blogging and brainstorming ideas and recipes, fussing with photo styling, and sharing Insta-parties and such. So here I am, back again. I can only stay away from delicious food, drink, and celebrations for so long. This Insta-party makes delicious use of one of my favorite late-spring vegetables – the sugar snap pea. These are straight from my garden, still warm from the sun and incredibly sweet. Filled with a smooth, salty feta cheese stuffing, they’re additive little sweet-salty-crisp snacks.

Feta Stuffed Sugar Snap Peas

16 plump, fresh sugar snap pea pods

2 Tbsp walnut pieces

1 ounce feta cheese

1 Tbsp skim milk

1 teaspoon chopped fresh parsley

salt and pepper to taste

Carefully split each pea pod along the flat top of the pea. Using your fingers, gently open the pod to create a pocket.

In a food processor, grind walnut pieces to a fine powder. Add feta, milk, and parsley and process to combine. Add salt and pepper to taste and stir to combine.

You can spoon in the filling or you can make a quick piping bag. Add feta mixture to a small plastic sandwich bag and push mixture down to a bottom corner, then  snip the corner and pipe filling into the pea pods.

Carrot juice may not seem like an obvious choice for a cocktail. But neither did tomato juice until the bloody mary came along. Gin goes well with fruit juice, and it turns out, with root vegetable juice. I used a carrot juice blend from Trader Joe’s which was sweet with an earthy edge. And that color! This cocktail is pretty, unexpected, and most importantly, tasty.

Carrot-tini

Equal parts carrot juice blend and gin

ice

citrus pepper for garnish (optional)

Combine carrot juice and gin in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake 100 times. If using garnish, rub a lemon around the rim of your glass and dip rim in citrus pepper. Strain carrot-tini into glass and serve.

In Season: Pumpkin Ale Floats

It’s time for another In Season post with Jen over at Cook It, Click It, Eat It. Up today – pumpkins! It’s nearly Halloween and there are pumpkins everywhere. I started researching drinks for this post and I found a lot of pumpkin smoothie type recipes, but nothing that really intrigued  me. Plus, they all called for only 1 or 2 tablespoons of pumpkin puree, which would leave nearly an entire can of pumpkin left over and wasted unless I wanted to drink 3 or 4 pumpkin smoothies everyday for a whole week. I didn’t think that was a good plan!

Finally inspiration struck while I was enjoying another pumpkin beverage that is everywhere right now – pumpkin ale. I’ve had Guinness floats before, so I thought why not try the same idea but with pumpkin ale instead of Guinness? And of course, why not serve it out of a hollowed out pumpkin? I’m sure you can follow my logic on that one.

There were doubters about this particular experiment. Even I was a little worried. Luckily, I attended a pumpkin carving party the day before the photoshoot, hence the Jack O’Lantern in the pictures. His look of surprise perfectly reflects how we all felt about the deliciousness of the drink! Like so much about the Halloween season, something initially scary can wind up being wonderful if given the chance. Just like Teen Wolf.

I used butter pecan ice cream for the float, mostly because that’s what I already had in the freezer. But the nuttiness of the ice cream really worked, though I am quite sure vanilla ice cream would be a tasty substitution.

Pumpkin Ale Float (in a pumpkin), serves 1

1 smallish pumpkin

12 ounces pumpkin ale, I recommend Cottonwood’s Pumpkin Ale if you can find it

3 large scoops ice cream, butter pecan or vanilla

Cut the top off the pumpkin and scoop out seeds. Scrape out as much of the icky pumpkin innards as possible then give the pumpkin a good rinse and dry. Pour beer into the hollowed pumpkin and top with ice cream. Drink with a straw as drinking directly from a pumpkin is challenging.

Don’t forget to hop over to Cook It, Click It, Eat It and check out what Jen’s doing pumpkin-wise (and her spiffy new blog layout). Happy (almost) Halloween!

In Season: Oktoberfest

It’s time for another themed blog post with Jen at Cook It, Click It, Eat It. We chose Oktoberfest this time around since it is…October. Ironically, real Oktoberfest takes place mostly at the end of September, but I don’t like to get too caught up in specifics when there is beer to be sipped.

Since Oktoberfest is all about beer, I put together a fun quick tasting of several seasonal Oktoberfest beers. A beer tasting can get a little on the expensive side if you have to buy six packs of each beer. However, if you live near a Total Wine or store like it, stop by and make your own six pack and score single bottles of different beers to sample for significantly less money. For this tasting I picked up the following beers: Spaten Oktoberfest. Lake Front Oktoberfest, Harpoon Oktoberfest, Magic Hat Hex Ourtoberfest.

Aren’t they pretty? Even though they’re all the same type of beer, there are some noticeable color differences. We happen to have a set of 4 ounce tasting glasses because the husband home brews beer, but any small juice glass will work. A tasting serving should be about 4 ounces, so a 12 ounce bottle will yield 3 servings.

The husband and I worked our way through each one and wrote down our notes. Some crunchy pretzels helped clear our palates between sips. We started with the Spaten since it is the traditional German Oktoberfest. It was a good, very straightforward beer, not particularly complex but very drinkable. The American offerings were much more interesting, though, and we decided the Lake Front Oktoberfest was our favorite due to it’s sweet-bitter balanced finish and perfect fizziness.

 

I whipped up a cute little beer tasting place mat to help us keep track of the beers and record our notes. You can download it here if you ever want to try your own beer tasting at home. I included a handy listing of beer terms at the bottom for inspiration during a tasting.

Now, the picture below was staged, this is NOT how you want to end up after a tasting! We had a great time sampling the Oktoberfests, which was a type of beer I was not super familiar with. Make sure to jump over to Jen’s blog and check out the delicious food side of Oktoberfest, too!

Doable Detail: Block Letter Gift Wrap

I love hand wrapping gifts. Yes, I know gift bags are much more convenient and there are thousands of super cool printed wrapping papers, to say nothing of the adorable tags, bows, and other adornments. But I suspect I am some kind of gift wrapping masochist. Why, oh WHY, in the midst of all these beautiful wrapping choices must I insist on making my own? Nevertheless, I do, and if you happen to get the unreasonable urge to decorate a package by hand, too, here’s an easy tutorial for making a custom block letter gift wrap.

I made this for a very special young man’s first birthday. Can you guess his name? I started by wrapping the gift in plain brown craft paper. I keep this on hand at all times. You can buy enough to gift wrap a small imported sedan for about $10.

I then cut a strip of contrasting paper (white) long enough to wrap around the package. Weighing it down with needle nose pliers while blasting Wolfgang on your (very fingerprinty, ew) Ipad is optional.

Next, either free-hand sketch out the block letters like I did, or use a stencil. Either way, make sure to use a pencil. Carefully cut out each letter using a craft knife. Then go back and erase any pencil marks that might be showing.

Pick out some paper scraps in whatever colors and patterns you desire. Cut them down to size to fit behind each cut out letter.

Flip the paper with the cut out letters to the reverse side. Tape down the patterned paper over each letter. Repeat until each letter is covered.

And there you go, an adorable, custom, hand made gift wrapped package! Who needs cute wrapping paper anyway?

In Season: In the Orchard

Well, summer has gone with nary a peep from me on this blog. So, my friend Jen, of Cook It, Click It, Eat It, and I decided that we both could do for a little motivation (and accountability) to kick start our blogs again. We came up with the idea of choosing a seasonal theme and each doing a post around the theme. Jen will be focusing mainly on delicious seasonal recipes and I’ll be concocting beverages of all sorts and possibly some quick crafty projects. We’ve mapped out seasonal themes through the end of the year, and TA-DA! Today is the first!

Even though it was in the upper 80’s here in NC over the weekend, the calendar says fall has officially arrived. And nothing quite says fall to me like apples. And decorative squash. And sweaters. And warm bowls of soup. And impending death to mosquito kind. But, back to apples. Apple cider, that staple of fall drinks, is quite a versatile cocktail ingredient. A steamy mug with a shot of rum and a cinnamon stick is just the thing for a cool fall evening. But not so much when the thermometer is still pushing past the 80 degree mark. So I set out to find an apple inspired drink that is also cool and refreshing. A little cider, some bourbon, and a hint of bitters solved my hot-weather, fall drinking woes.

Apparently, there is some confusion over apple cider versus apple juice. I have no desire to enter into the debate, but I will say that I used Martinelli’s Apple Cider for this drink for two reasons. One, I was very taken with the attractive leaf motif on the glass jug. Yes, I admit to occasionally choosing grocery products based on prettiness. I am a shallow consumer with a weak spot for attractive packaging. Second, it was a lovely, clear, pale yellow, not dark brown and sludgy like some ciders. Not that there’s anything wrong with sludgy ciders (other than saying ‘sludgy cider’ makes me throw up in my mouth a little), but I wanted a clean, un-sludgy apple taste for this drink. If sludgy ciders are your thing, though, by all means feel free to substitute.

Bourbon & Apples

1/2 cup apple cider

1-1/2 ounces bourbon

dash of aromatic bitters

Combine all ingredients over ice and serve immediately.

I’d been kicking around ideas for a quick and easy apple craft for this post, too. I came up with a clove-studded monogrammed apple, mostly because I have a baggie full of cloves (don’t ask) that need using up. It was incredibly easy to do. I can just see these used at a fall place setting, lined up on a mantel, or nestled into a wreath. To make your own, lightly trace the letter onto the apple with a pencil. Then, using a toothpick, prick small holes about every 1/4″ along the letter outline and insert whole cloves into the holes.

Don’t forget to click on over to Jen’s blog at Cook It, Click It, Eat It and check out what kind of apple-y goodness she has going on for this themed post. I got a text from her with a sneak peek photo and it looked yummy! And stay tuned for more joint posts. Coming up next…OCTOBERFEST! Happy fall, y’all!

Insta-Party: Green Tomato Madness

I recently spent a delightful weekend eating and drinking my way through Charleston, SC with my cousin, who I am lucky to also call a great friend. One evening found us at The Grocery for a very interesting and well-executed meal. It had been on my to-visit list for a few months mostly because they pickle and cure in house. You may not know, but i am quite the pickle aficionado. I dabble in the art of pickling and am an avid fan of others who pickle. You should hear me wax poetic about Gisella, our local farmer’s market pickle master. When I heard The Grocery was doing wonderful things in the pickling realm, it moved to the top of my must eat at list. My cousins, aunt, and uncle graciously humored me while I was in town.

I had practically memorized their online menu so I expected to fully enjoy my meal there, but I didn’t expect to squeal with delight while reading…the bar menu. Four words: Dirty Green Tomato Martini. They pickle their green tomatoes before frying them (genius!) and then in another stroke of brilliant, non-wasteful thinking created a delightful cocktail by mixing the green tomato pickling brine with vodka. Trust me when I say our entire party was practically in a swoon over this drink. It’s a little sweet, a little salty, a little spicy, but not at all vinegary.

Since I unfortunately live several hours from The Grocery and can’t visit frequently for a Dirty Green Tomato Martini fix, I pickled my own green tomatoes with the full intent to rip off, errr, recreate both their fried pickled green tomatoes and the martini. If you don’t feel up to pickling yourself, your local farmer’s market probably has its own version of Gisella doing wonderful work with pickled green tomatoes.

Dirty Green Tomato Martini, makes 1 drink

4 ounces vodka

1 ounce pickled green tomato brine

Wedge of pickled green tomato for garnish

Combine vodka and brine in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake 100 times and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with pickled green tomato wedge.

To get pickled green tomato brine, you have to make pickled green tomatoes. Which are way tastier than I ever imagined. They are delicious fried (think fried green tomatoes meet fried pickles) but equally good straight from the jar. This snack really was a ‘what have we got in the fridge’ concoction, but turned out rather tasty. It was also a good personal reminder for me that virtually any combination of cracker+meat+pickle+cheese=delicious.

Pepperoni, Pickled Green Tomato, & Feta

Um, yeah, so not really a recipe, just combine bits of the pepperoni, green tomato, and feta on top of a cracker and eat.

Anyone having a strong reaction to this post? Totally grossed out by a pickle-based martini or pickled green tomatoes in general? Or are you intrigued and would give it a shot? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Insta-Party: For Bella

We haven’t felt much like partying here at Ready, Set, Party recently. We had to say good bye to our dog Bella last week. Loss and grief are always difficult, but the unexpectedness of her death gives this particular loss an extra sting. But even though I’ve been mournful instead of  festive, I wanted to do an Insta-Party dedicated to Bella with some of her favorite things. Each one brings a smile for the memories and a tear for the loss.

We had an unfortunate margarita accident a few summers ago. In the time I was gone to get paper towels, Bella had managed to lick up a good portion of the spill. Without thinking, I blurted out ‘Bella, stop drinking all the tequila!’ which caused a massive round of giggling. Because really, who has to tell their dog to stop drinking tequila?

The husband put together this lovely fresh citrus margarita for the Insta-Party and we laughed again about our crazy dog with a taste for the hard stuff.

Fresh Citrus Margarita, makes 1 drink

juice from 2 clementines, or one orange

juice from 1/2 lime

juice from 1/2 lemon

2 ounces tequila

1 ounce Triple Sec, orange liqueur

Combine all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake 100 times until ice cold. Serve in a chilled glass (with a salt rim if you so desire).

Bella also really liked carrots. Maybe more like was madly in love with carrots. She would perch nearly underfoot whenever I was peeling them and wait not-so-patiently for scraps. She was also quite an acrobat and excelled at catching peels in midair. I knew her Insta-Party had to feature carrots, but it was incredibly sad to have to compost all the peels instead of tossing them to her and seeing her toothy grin.

Fresh Carrots with Asian Mayo Dipping Sauce, serves 2

3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 3″ long sticks

1/4 cup mayonnaise (light is OK, but full-strength Duke’s would be better)

1 Tablespoon soy sauce

1 Tablespoon rice wine vinegar

1 green onion, chopped

dried red pepper for garnish

Combine mayo with soy sauce and vinegar. Top with chopped green onions and a sprinkle of red pepper. Serve with carrot sticks.

This is my favorite picture of Bella. It captures so much about her in just one image – inquisitive, happy (just look at that tail!), and most memorable – constant energy. She will be greatly missed in our suddenly very quiet little part of the world.