Spinach Fettuccine

For St. Patrick's Day, my kids demand green food, just as they demand to wake up to hearts leading the way from their bedrooms to a great Valentine's Day surprise and glorious Easter baskets, etc. The aftermath, I now suffer for doing cute things on holidays when they were younger that I may not necessarily feel like doing anymore. But, anyway. I made the obligatory green pancakes this morning. I got away with the inclusion of lettuce for lunch. And for dinner, I decided to try the Spinach Pasta in the Blendtec Twist Jar recipe book. I had a bunch of spinach from my Bountiful Baskets that I recently started to participate in that I needed to use. The pasta looks really appealing in the Blendtec photo, but I wasn't too sure it would turn out so well.

No, I don't think you're supposed to have to put this much flour on the pasta dough, but I had to.

It wasn't too hard to mix. The ingredients are pretty simple: spinach, white whole wheat flour, egg, and water. I didn't have white whole wheat so I used whole wheat pastry flour and organic all purpose flour and omitted the water because I had just washed the spinach. Well, I was right. The resulting "dough" was pretty sticky. I had to dust everything many times with more flour. (I should have just added another 1/4 to 1/2 cup of flour directly to the dough, but I felt I needed to stick to the recipe on this first go around). I cut them fettuccine style with a knife and let them dry for a while. Then, I had a heck of a time trying to peel them off my board. That's where I really started loosing faith in this recipe. But I made myself go on and threw them in the pot to cook them for about 6 minutes in boiling water. I made some grilled chicken strips (OK, they were frozen) and cream cheese sauce to help everyone with the task of eating this.

Much to my surprise, although, they did NOT look pretty, they tasted great and the texture was ... normal! The kids loved it!

Comments

Tinkerbell Cake

I made something! A friend of a friend ..... needed a cake made for her daughter's fourth birthday. I came up with a few ideas, trying to keep them uncomplicated. She opted for the more traditional nine inch round cake with decorations. I thought it would be simple enough, but it always ends up taking me way longer than I anticipate. I wish I could go to a professional cake decorating class by Debbie Brown or Rebecca Sutterby so I could learn some techniques like how to get things to stay glued on. I could never be a cake decorator -my time to money ratio is kind of ridiculous. But here it is. Monkey Pants now wants a Tinkerbell cake for her next birthday too, of course. I need to wake up early tomorrow to make sure she's not eating the mushrooms off of it. (It's happened before).

Emmeline Apron 2

Just got done with this one. Another Emmeline Apron for a Christmas gift. I wanted to try something different with my choice of fabrics this time, although not too different since they are still Amy Butler prints. I chose some darker blue fabrics from the Daisy Chain (Aquatic) line that I wouldn't normally be drawn too. But I'm glad I did. I really like the result. This time, I did a few things a bit differently. One thing about the pattern I'm not fond of is the wordy, yet poor instructions on how to place the waist straps onto the sides of the apron at the right angle. I really don't know why the correct angle isn't just printed on the pattern. So to minimize the trial and error approach encouraged in the pattern instructions, [TIP:] I laid out the fabric and the strap as it would appear once constructed and simply marked a line on the strap corresponding to the angle of the apron. Then, I flipped both apron and strap layers over together; lined up the strap wit...

Face painting

For my daughter's upcoming birthday party, I decided I might try my hand at face painting. I collected some photos from the internet I liked, check out a book at the library, and bought some face paints at the party store. The face paints are not very cheap but cheaper than hiring a face painter, right. Here's a couple of the faces I've tried so far. Now if I can only get my face painting time down to ten minutes from twenty minutes a face for the party. I think I may have to enlist a volunteer to help out too. The painting part is actually much easier than it would seem. The only thing that makes it challenging is that the canvas is constantly moving around (at least my canvas). It's not too hard to wash off, but the black takes a bit more scrubbing as the paint is grease or oil based. It makes for a fun activity especially as it gets too cold to go outside. My 3-year old thought it was "amazing" when she looked in the mirror. I even talked my husband i...

Search This Blog