Happy Wednesday! Making homemade lemonade is one of those super simple activities that I don’t do nearly enough. This past Sunday I reaaaaally wanted a treat, but I’m sure you remember that I’m saving up for a travel adventure, which means NO treats! At least no treats that I have to pay for. After gazing longingly into my freezer and still not seeing any ice cream, I spun around and spotted an enormous bowl of lemons on my countertop and that’s how this homemade lemonade recipe was born.
For a few years now, we’ve kept a steady supply of the white chocolate macadamia nut Cliff bars in the house. They’re mainly purchased as a quick snack for Calder to take along on bike rides, but honestly, we all love them (even, or especially, Alex) as a quick treat now and then. We also used to pick up more flavors in the past, but over time we finally gave in and admitted that the only flavor we truly loved was the white chocolate macadamia. When I packed one in our bag for the park last weekend, I started to think about how it’s been way too long since I’ve actually had a white chocolate macadamia nut cookie, and it was time to put the Cliff bar down and remedy that. This was the result, and it’s delicious!
While writing this post, I became curious about the history of the white chocolate and macadamia nut pairing, but information was really hard to come by. The cookie doesn’t even have it’s own wikipedia page, rather it’s just listed as a variant of the chocolate chip cookie! When I mentioned this to Calder, his response was “but it’s so much more than that”, and I couldn’t agree more. Somewhere, someone came up with this fantastic flavor pairing, and it’s time to recognize their genius.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had Frangelico or any other hazelnut liqueur, but with nuts as our featured ingredient, it was high time that I tried making my own! While doing some research for this project, I came across a Serious Eats article that encourages anyone interested to make their own rather than buy, and I couldn’t agree more. The pure hazelnut flavor really shines through, and I really appreciate being able to taylor the sweetness to my liking, which is often less than store-bought liqueurs.
After liking what Serious Eats’ encouragement to make the liqueur, I clicked through to their recipe and also liked the simplicity of that, so I used it and that’s what you see reprinted below. Making this liqueur couldn’t be easier, it’s the waiting that’s hard. While I want to say it “only” involves three to four weeks of wait-time, that’s three (or four) too many, and I think you’ll agree once you see my new favorite treat below. I say four weeks, because I was supposed to go on to steps 2 and 3 while our family was in town, and I completely forgot! As a result, I had about an extra week of the hazelnuts steeping in the alcohol, but the flavor is that delicious and strong that I have no regrets… although I’m not sure if I’ll be able to wait that long the second time I make this.
I love, love, love gin & tonics! When I was pregnant with Luc, our friends in Boulder (a big brewery town) would ask me if I couldn’t wait to have a beer, and I would always so no, because all I wanted was a G&T. In fact, when I hit week 39 of my pregnancy, I stopped in a liquor store to pick up some gin… I’m sure it looked absurd that a hugely pregnant lady was buying gin with her two year old in the shopping cart, but other women get the urge to nest, and I got the urge for gin.
Meanwhile, waiting at home for me was an awesome homemade tonic water kit that Calder’s sister gave me last July for my birthday. That was days after I became pregnant with Luc, and it killed me to have to sit on it for all those months! While Sarah was in town last month, we finally made the tonic water and broke open some new-to-us gins.
Yesterday was the cake, and today we’re going to share a recipe for the cashew cream that we served at the party. If you’ve been paying attention, then you’ve noticed that we published a cashew crema recipe last week. Today’s cashew cream recipe is very similar, but rather than a savory condiment, this is a lightly sweet dip that’s perfect when paired with fruit.
First an aside : two weeks ago while Sarah was visiting, there were many moments when our response to someone or our contribution to the conversation was exactly the same (wether we were responding with a grunt, a laugh, an “ooh”, or with actual words like “no way”). It was equally hilarious and spooky. And our cashew cream recipes are yet another example of us wanting to do the exact same thing at the same moment, let’s ignore the fact that it involved nuts and our mom would suggest that we’re both a bit nuts.
Alex turned two at the end of April, and the timing worked perfectly that we had a house full of family ready to celebrate! Since we weren’t inviting his super cute little friends, we didn’t bother to have a theme party. Plus, how could we pick just one theme for the guy who loves, in no particular order : kitty cats, anything with wheels (and wings!), dinos, tools, and speed? We could have gone with a bike-riding kitty cat holding a screw driver, but without including the dinosaur, why even bother, you know?
Even without a theme, I wanted to make a cake that the little guy would love. I also wanted it to be relatively simple. There are so many awesome ideas out there, just scanning Pinterest can put you into option overload. Want to see my kids’ party board? This is where I’ve become good at putting my blinders on. I have sense of what will excite Alex the moment he sees it, and that’s my first criteria in picking a cake. The second criteria is that it be simple, especially since I had my hands full this year. Once I found “the” cake, I stopped looking. And that’s that.
Happy Monday errrrr Wednesday! We’re not the type to make excuses, but we’ve been busy! This past week I spent my days in Boulder with Katie, Calder and their two boys. It was such a blast! I can’t even think about all the fun I had or I might cry. I’m not sure when my tears started flowing so freely, but I cry A LOT these days. Usually it’s about happy moments or cute videos, but sometimes I tear up when people win on Wheel of Fortune. Yeah, what the hell is happening to me?! Anyway, when I think about how much fun I had this past week and how cute the kiddos are and how far away we live from each other I want to cry, but I won’t because I’m in control, right? Right.
If you want to feel in control like me, you’ll totally make this lime crema because it’s the easiest and tastiest dipping sauce on BOTH sides of the Mississippi and as you’re shoveling spoonfuls into your mouth you’ll think “Holy cow that was easy. I rock. I’m a cuisine queen. I’m in control of my supper and my life.” At least that’s how my thoughts played out as I was dipping my sweet potato fries. Oh and lime crema is adaptable too! It’s basically an equation: cashews, liquid, salt and seasoning. That liquid could be any type of milk, vegan or not, or you could use water; I promise it will taste just as creamy with water. It’s amazing. Don’t ask questions.
When we picked nuts as our ingredient of the season, I was excited because I knew it would encourage me to try some new recipes, and this homemade nutella is the perfect example. We are a nutella-loving household, but I had never thought to make my own until now.
If you aren’t familiar with Nutella, it’s a chocolate and hazelnut-based spread from Italy. The original recipes consisted of mostly chocolate and hazelnut, but unfortunately the main ingredients for the modern recipe are sugar and palm oil. And that’s why this is a treat worth making at home, because as you’ll see, this recipe has a solid base of hazelnuts and chocolate. Of course, it also means that making this batch will cost more than picking up a jar from your local market, particularly if you buy quality hazelnuts and choclate, but I think you’ll discover that it’s worth the price. Additionally, jars of homemade nutella make great gifts from the kitchen {in fact, if only I had thought about it sooner, this would have been the perfect treat for Easter baskets!}.
Ingredients
Instructions
It’s common to spread nutella on toast, but that doesn’t interest me. I prefer it with a banana or on a scoop of vanilla ice cream. How do you eat your nutella? Straight from the spoon?
We have the perfect treat to compliment all of the sugar and chocolate that is sure to be passed around this weekend : black walnut shortbread cookies. Sure, shortbread cookies have quite a bit of butter, but a little fat never hurts, and with only a half cup of sugar in this batch, they help to balance those peep and jellybean filled baskets.
Since we’re all about nuts this season, I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to talk about walnut varieties. If you’re eating a walnut right now, chances are it’s an English walnut, also known as a common, Persian, and California walnut. That variety is native to the Eastern hemisphere from China through parts of the Middle East (where it’s Persian name comes from), was spread throughout the world on English trading ships (thus the English moniker), and by the 1700s was being grown in groves in California! If you’ve eaten a walnut, it’s likely that it was the milder common walnut rather than the black walnut used in today’s recipe.
Hey there! With Easter only days away, we wanted to remind you of a fun, easy, and most importantly, natural way to dye eggs. This time last year, Katie and I decided to experiment with common kitchen ingredients to make our dyes. Here are Katie’s eggs using purple onion skins, tumeric and purple cabbage. For eggs dyed with coffee, cherries, cumin, paprika, and brown onion skins follow my instructions. Other than your dye ingredient, you’ll just need some water and vinegar, but as you’ll see in Katie’s post, you can also use a few drops of vegetable oil to make your eggs shine.
This is a great project to do with kids, because you can turn them into scientists ~ they’ll see these foods in new ways and may even want to experiment with dyes from other foods and plants (you may want to start with just a couple of the foods on that list, and then do some guided exploring to have them test out the other foods).
Let us know how it goes!
