Christmas Candy Countdown

You have too much leftover Halloween candy, don't you. I don't even have kids, we didn't even have trick or treaters, and still we bought a bunch of candy...because Halloween. 

So, use up your extras in a super fun way that was a highlight every year when I was growing up. The Christmas Candy Countdown.

This one's made of fabric.

Instructions:

• Find some kids that you love; count them. 
• Gather the following supplies per counted kid:

• 25 pieces of candy for their countdown stash (You can select or they can choose. My mom says one year I chose all Tootsie Rolls so I could eat the best stuff right away. I don't remember this, but it sure sounds like something I would do.)
• A roll of plastic wrap, or wrapping paper, or if you're ambitious, your odd yards of Christmas fabric
• Ribbon, string, anything about 8 to 10 inches long that ties, some clothes pins, or some sturdy twist ties—any securing device :)
• Line up the pieces of candy and then measure that same length in plastic wrap or wrapping paper. (For fabric, you may need 7-inch-wide strips of whatever you've got, short ends sewn together, then long ends sewn into one long tube, to meet the length required. Payout for this more complicated method is that you get to reuse the countdown next year, but if you're like me, sewing is like running and you do it only when you don't see any other means of escaping your dilemma, so you know, do what you're up for.)
• Pinch your wrapping material between each piece of candy with your securing devices. Cut your ribbon or string into 8-inch pieces. (For fabric tubes, tie off one end of your tube and call it the bottom; drop first piece of candy down to that bottom then tie off above it, then drop candy on top of that, then tie, drop, tie, etc.)
• Hang countdown from something high (or coil up like a snake in a box with the first piece of candy hanging out, or do whatever you want, because you're creative like that).

There are so many combinations of these steps and materials to make this fun for the whole family! When you use clothes pins, you can write the countdown numbers on them in colorful marker. You can use colored plastic wrap. You can zigzag your filled tube to look like a single-line Christmas tree with a name-tag star on top.

Like this. Kinda.

Got ideas for other ways to variatize (made-up word) the craft? Leave a comment and we'll all benefit. There's no limit to the fun, so go have some!

Shrimp Cocktail Cream Cheese Pizza

With the THIRTY POUNDS of cream cheese my mother no-jokingly gave to me as an early birthday gift, I was inspired to realize what the missing ingredient was for this pizza. I'd wanted to make the delicious appetizer into a pizza version for some time now, but when I don't have time to cook, I don't allow my brain to think along its fantasy path of recipe creation, and so this pizza idea was tossed into the back of the think tank.

But today, the baking bug bit hard and I started itchin' in the kitchen like crazy. I made wholewheat bread, Gooey Butter Cookies from Six Sisters' Stuff (so easy. so yummy.), and this pizza—all in 3 hours!

This pizza was super easy for me to make today because I already had the cocktail sauce made from a previous and somewhat magical shrimp snack. And that was back in February, so wow, this sauce really is kinda magic to last that long. Anyway, it's from the Food Network. Roasted Shrimp Cocktail. I've followed Ina's recipe a couple times now and love it.

I didn't bake the shrimp today the way Ina suggests, however, because the oven has to be at 500 degrees F. for an hour before tossing the pizza in, so first make Ina's sauce recipe, then read today's pizza recipe for the rest of the adventure.

Shrimp Cocktail Cream Cheese Pizza

Needed:
Pizza stone
Parchment paper

Ingredients:
1/2 recipe Best Pizza Dough Eva (I only used half because I knew I was only going to make one pizza, but it's a tricky one to halve, so maybe make the whole recipe and make some salted cheesy bread too!)
1/2 to 3/4 cup prepared Shrimp Cocktail Sauce
15 or so 21/25-count raw shrimp (thaw if frozen, peel, devein, all that jazz)
1 tablespoon oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
3 oz cream cheese
Basil flakes

Preheat oven to 500 degrees F. Make sure pizza stone is on bottom rack and in oven for one hour before pizza is ready to bake.

Make the pizza dough not in your food processor like I did. Better to use a standing mixer. Dough will be fairly sticky, even after raising. Set in bowl sprayed with olive oil. Coat top of dough with olive oil spray too. Cover and let raise 20 minutes.

To prepare shrimp, heat oil (I used coconut; any should work) in skillet over medium-high heat. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cook shrimp about 2 minutes on each side until happily orangey-pink.

Drain any oil and allow shrimp to cool enough to handle. Chop shrimp to a crumble texture like ground sausage, to spread better across pizza. Shrimp is kinda stubborn under the knife. If you don't have a Tupperware Chop 'N Prep Chef, GET ONE. I use it for so many things, it's totally worth its seemingly outrageous price. Trust me. And it's fun. It has a lawnmower-pull string to power the chopping motion. You have to restrain yourself to stop pulling if you want a coarser chop because things get mighty fine mighty quick if you don't. :)

Horrendously blurry, my apologies, but that's my Tupperware-chopped shrimp.

Remove pizza dough from raising bowl and knead a couple times to deflate and form round ball. Roll out onto parchment paper using rolling pin if desired and spreading out with hands until about 12 inches in diameter and at least a 1/4" or thinner. Spread sauce almost completely to the edge. Sprinkle on shrimp.

I just used my hands to pinch portions of cream cheese and plop them around the pie. If I did a do-over, I might soften the cream cheese until I could drizzle it around because it certainly didn't melt in the oven. I even thought maybe just mixing the sauce and softened cheese might work well, or at least some sauce-plus-cheese mixture would help the cheese get spread around a bit more. That's where you go exploring to make this recipe your own adventure! Sprinkle with basil flakes and you're ready to bake.

Slide pizza into the oven still on the parchment paper. The paper gets kinda brown and crispy during the 8 to 12 minutes the pizza cooks, but it can handle the heat. The cheese didn't ever get bubbly, but it did start browning, so when the crust begins to brown around 8 to 10 minutes, keep a close eye. When crust is stiff to the touch and golden, remove from oven. (If you have a pizza paddle, sweet; if you're unsweet like me and don't have a paddle, any flat, non-melty device is useful. I use an upside-down jellyroll/cookie sheet to help deposit and retrieve the parchment and pizza.)

Allow to set a few minutes, slice, and enjoy!

Best Pizza Dough Eva

Needed:

(preferred) Standing mixer, like KitchenAid or Bosch, with dough-making attachments

Large bowl

Ingredients:

2 1/4 cups warm water

1 1/2 tablespoons SAF instant yeast

3/4 tablespoon sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

5 1/2 cups flour

(Note: place your pizza stone on bottom rack and preheat oven to 500 for one hour before pizzas are ready to bake.)

Pour water into mixing bowl. Stir yeast and sugar into warm water and let yeast expand for a minute. Add salt and stir. Gradually add flour, up to 3 cups, using whisk attachment. Switch to kneading paddle and add more flour, up to 5 cups. If dough is still smearing sides of bowl, add remaining 1/2 cup flour and mix for 5 to 6 minutes. Dough should be sticky, but should also mostly pull together away from the bowl. 

Scrape dough into a large bowl sprayed with olive oil. Spray top of dough ball with oil and cover. Let raise 20 minutes. Once raised, it should look like it has doubled in size. Remove from bowl, knead a couple times to deflate and form large ball. Pinch dough into about 5 portions for personal-size pizzas or 2 or 3 portions for 12-inch pizzas. Roll at least to 1/4" thinness, spread toppings and bake all before dough can rise some more.

Depending on toppings, dough should cook in 8 to 12 minutes, sporting a golden crust stiff to the touch. Let pizzas set a few minutes before slicing. Enjoy!

Pictured here from bottom to top, some favorites: classic pepperoni, margarita, sweet craisin brie pecan, and salted cheesy bread.

Salted Cheesy Bread

Spread dough with olive or vegetable oil (about 1 tablespoon). Sprinkle kosher or large-flake salt across pie. Sprinkle with your favorite cheese blend (Costco has an awesome 3-cheese blend...but it's also 5 pounds, so...invite lots of friends?). Bake about 8 minutes until golden and bubbly.

Sweet Craisin Brie Pecan

I looooove this pizza. Mostly sweet with a whisper of savory cheeses and a nutty snap—so good. Spread enough (about 2 tablespoons) brown sugar to cover crust minus edges. Sprinkle on 1/3 cup craisins and 1/3 cup chopped pecans. Now I love Brie cheese, so I pretty much use a whole wheel for one pizza. It's sort of mild and can be overpowered easily, so drop plenty of dollops around the pizza. I fill in any holes with chunks of mozzarella cheese. It helps. I've made it without and the pizza is fine, but somehow the mozzarella helps bring it all together. Bake about 10 minutes until crust is golden and cheeses are bubbly.

Margarita

This pizza can tend to get soggy. Be sure to thinly slice tomatoes, seed, and pat dry. You might even consider baking the crust a few minutes first, placing the toppings, then baking again until cheese is melted and bubbly. Place tomatoes and slices or chunks of mozzarella. You can put fresh basil on before or after baking, either way. Remove from oven and let set a few minutes. Drizzle lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste.

Pepperoni

Sauce, pepperoni, cheese, bake, done.

Personal Pizzas 

These are the greatest kid-friendly dinner since each one gets to choose their favorite toppings. Two personal-size pizzas can usually fit on my pizza stone at once, and that's helpful because we don't want too many pizzas waiting in line to enter the oven. The kitchen will be toasty with that 500-degree oven and as the dough sits, it keeps raising, and pizzas toppings slide as the dough mutates beneath. If too many pizzas are waiting at once, toss them in the fridge until their number is called.

The Mild Thanksgiving Dinner Disaster

Twas the day after Thanksgiving and all through the home,
food was preparing and the families were come.
The rolls were all snug in the oven raising
and snitching fingers were veggie tray grazing.

The mashed potatoes were mixed to perfection
and ready for later were all the confections.
I stepped out to the garage to check on the turkey with care,
and the absent scent was first to make me aware

that with this bird there was something the matter.
And then to my dismay—oh how my heart did clatter—
I spied that the temperature knob of the roaster oven
had not been set at 325 for the past hours-half-dozen

but at 225 had my bird been comfortably warming
all while the the rest of us were busily swarming
to spread a buffet worthy to support its leading role.
I sighed and glared at the pinkish raw troll,

turned up the heat, slammed the lid down 
and trudged back to the kitchen, my lips in a frown.
I called all the poor turkey meat lovers by name,
"Now Jason and Aaron and Ammon and Dave,

the turkey won't be ready in time for our feast,
but do not dismay, we'll still eat the beast . . .
just probably after dinner, dessert, and cleanup."
We were disappointed, but we didn't give up!

No, not even after the rolls started burning
and the smoke alarm commenced its spurning
that made babies cry and my eyebrow twitch—
I wanted to scream or laugh, I couldn't tell which—

but we salvaged the roll guts and aired out the room
and though it seems like a tale wrought mostly with doom,
a moment of glory I am able to tell,
Spoon and I scrapped up a gravy that turned out quite well.

With the help of gratitude, humor, and deli meat slices
this year's Thanksgiving feast was something priceless.

And after the pie bar, family time, and holiday crafts,
from the garage came our turkey at last.

So if ever your turkey leaves you in a gravy lurch,
remember your potatoes; give your pantry a search
and I bet you'll find all these ingredients in sight.
Happy Thanksgiving to all and to all a good bite!

Emergency Gravy

I didn't take any exact measurements, so get your experimentation cap on and get mixing, to taste.
Ingredients
A can of broth
3 spoonfuls of Better Than Bullion paste (or bullion cubes or pearls)
Enough milk whisked with enough flour to make a thickener
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon dried onion flakes
1 (15 oz) can condensed cream of chicken soup
Poultry Magic seasoning blend, to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

Dump it all together, use your immersion hand blender (I just got the Breville hand blender. I did a little dance.) to emulsify those onion flakes as they soften. The onions, believe it or not, really make the gravy taste like it had anything to do with meat drippings. The butter helps give it a fatty taste and cozy all the ingredients together.

I think I used about 2 cups milk and oh maybe a 1/4 cup flour or more for the thickener. Bring to a boil whisking constantly/blending as needed. Add water to thin if needed. Add whatever you want if your taste tests beg it.

see (bottom right), it totally looks like normalish gravy, right?

And there you have it. A rather tasty emergency gravy. The kids kept dumping it all over their potatoes and dipping their deli meat slices in it, so . . . success. The adults loved it too, don't worry.

Keep those imaginations cookin'!

The Pie Bar

Make your Pi day (March 14th) or Thanksgiving day an event to remember because you actually get to join in and enjoy it!

I love pies during the holidays, but a perfect flaky-crust-to-filling ratio is hard to achieve and sometimes I just don't want to take the time. This post showcases my favorite way to prepare and serve pies: the build-it-yourself Pie Bar.

The concept is easy: separate filling from crust and let people put as much or as little filling on their cooked cutout crusts as they want.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Place flour and salt in a mixing bowl. Stir together. Use pastry blender to cut the shortening into the flour until it forms rice-size pellets. Sprinkle in water one tablespoon at a time, mixing with large spoon or rubber scraper until flour is moistened and dough almost cleans the sides of the bowl as you stir.

Gather dough into one ball. Flatten on a lightly floured surface and roll out to about the thickness of the ridge of a standard canning lid. The nice thing about the pie bar is you don't have to roll out a perfectly round dough. Just roll it out to whatever shape it becomes.

Cut out pie shapes large enough for one reasonable serving of pie and place dough shapes on ungreased cookie sheet (though I almost always clothe naked baking sheets with parchment paper and recommend it if you've got some). Take a fork and generously stab the dough shapes to prevent dough bubbles. With this leaf shape, you could make your fork stabs look kind of like leaf veins.

Always be adventurous in your creativity. You can brush some of the dough shapes with cream or egg white and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar for crusts to be eaten without filling. Or grate some gruyère and press it into some dough shapes for serving your apple pie filling.

Bake shapes 10 to 15 minutes or until a golden finish just begins to appear. Remove from oven and let cool in pan 3 to 5 minutes.

Remove from pan and serve or carefully set aside on display plates for when it's time for dessert.

For fillings . . . there are countless recipes out there. Mostly I choose the easier routes for the Pie Bar because the concept was engineered for laziness. Make your cream pies from box puddings. A couple scoops of a variety of puddings on as much crust as I want is kind of how I imagine heaven will be. Somehow correlated. . . .

I still cook up my favorite fillings, just without the crust where possible. The only pie I still make in a pan with the crust beneath the filling is the pumpkin pie, because, well, pumpkin pie.

I slice up fresh apples, mix them with sugar, flour, and pie spices and dump them in a ceramic pie dish and bake the filling without crust at 425, stirring occasionally, until the apples are soft. I even once dared mixed in one can of pie filling to make my apples go farther. It felt like I was sinning. The filling was still delicious.

I line the parchment-shod bottom of a pie tin with pecans and dump in corn syrup, brown sugar, butter, eggs, and vanilla; and toss them both in 350 degree oven until set. Then I take it out, mix up the gooey filling, and put it in a separate serving bowl.

Open up cans and boxes and make the holiday easy on yourself for once. No one complained at my house to have this freedom of pie choice. But if you think about the past, no one ever really gave thanks for the two hours each of those twelve homemade pies represented either. So if you love making pie for the sake of making pie, choose your favorite one and take as long as you want to make that pie your PERFECT pie. Then take a load off and serve up the rest Pie Bar style and I promise your holiday will still make everyone happy.

The best part about the Pie Bar is that you get to break all the traditional pie rules! You can have apple-coconut-creme-with-chocolate-shavings pie if you want. You only limit yourself to whatever you put on the table. Toast up coconut shavings; cut out even smaller dough shapes and serve them as "top crust" garnishing; dice up fresh pears and caramelize them with some butter and toss in roasted pecans, because why not?; of course make the Oat Crumble Topping because that's good on anything.

And so you see, by looking outside the pie pan, the height of creativity jumps over the moon.

Happy adventures in the kitchen to you, and happy holidays too!

Oat Crumble Topping

Because I like this on many things, I'm putting this recipe on its own so I can link to it at leisure.

Combine dry ingredients. Using a pastry cutter or fork, blend in butter until combined with dry ingredients. Press or crumble on top of your dessert and bake as your dessert directs.

Or, spread topping on parchment-line baking sheet and roast in 350 degree F oven stirring often about 15 to 20 minutes until crumbly. Then put it on top of whatever you want to taste a bit more heavenly.

Turkey Meatball Turkeys

I can't tell you how surprised I was to NOT find any pictures of this little edible craft online. Dare I claim to have had an unprecedented creative idea? Take that Pinterest!

With 4 pounds of Jelly Belly beans on my desk at work, you could say I'm definitely pro-sweets. But wouldn't you agree that a savory bite just really hits the spot sometimes? These little gobblers are entirely edible and have just the right kick and crunch to them. A sensible and festive appetizer—and that necessary something for the kids to "help" with so they're out of the way!

Ingredients
Turkey (or any meat) meatballs
Round tortilla chips
Jalapeño cream cheese spread (or use/make any savory flavor you prefer; I liked the spice. Laughing Cow soft spread cheese also works great.)
Variety cheeses, sliced
Twist pretzels

Just have enough of each ingredient so that you can "prepare the turkey" for as many people as you hope to impress. Heat the meatballs as directed. I chose to bake them so there wasn't greasiness, just heated meat. Set aside when done so they can cool for handling.

Meanwhile, if you've got a helper, have them lay out cheese slices or cut planks of cheese to your preferred feather thickness. Otherwise DIY! I used a serrated knife to slice blocks of sharp cheddar and Colby Jack cheese to get a textured plank.

 To make the feathers, cut teardrop or rounded diamond shapes out of the sliced cheese.

 If you can find or fashion little cookie cutters, you'll be happy!

If you've got another helper, have him or her carefully break or cut the top heart curves of the pretzel free from the rest of the knot. These pretzel curves look most like neck/head pieces to me, but that doesn't mean you can't think of a more creative and complicated morsel to make a turkey head from. Press longer curved end into meatball. Prepare a hole in the meatball with a quick poke from a knife if your pretzels don't skewer the meat very easily.

Then spread each rounded tortilla chip with cream cheese, covering only one side. (Triangle chips don't work so well. I had to keep breaking the pointed tip off so the turkey would stand, so that the feather fan didn't get as much glorious fanning action.) To ensure the chip will stick to the heated meatball, plop a glob of spreadable cheese on one edge of the chip. Like cheese glue.

Either stick the feathers to the chip in a fan formation first or press the coated chip against the meatball first and then squish the feathers into the cheese where there's still room.

If the meatballs don't stay up very well, you can use left over pretzel bits or cheese scraps to prop them up. You might also consider choosing cheese scrap props to double as little feet sticking out from the turkey's meaty body. Best to eat them sooner than later. The heated meatball can quickly get tough.

So simple and really the flavors and textures are quite enjoyable. But most important of all, cute! ;)

Note: not intended to replace actual Thanksgiving turkey. Your guests will love the meatball turkeys, but perhaps not enough to forgive the lack of turkey in the feast.

Off with you then. Taste the adventure!