The other day I decided to make tacos for dinner. I was sure that I had all the ingredients I needed, so I defrosted chicken (an nice variation to the ground turkey now and then).
I went to get the taco seasoning packet and discovered I didn't have any. Ok, no biggie, I'm resourceful. I looked up a recipe online for taco seasoning to replicate the seasoning packet and sure enough, the internet did not let me down! I didn't have all the ingredients exactly, but I had enough to wing it and come up with something surprisingly good!
Ok, so then, I had everything basically prepared (and by everything, I mean the few fixings my family will eat: cheese and grated carrots) and I discovered I only had three tortillas. Uh oh! Now here's where the new summer version of tacos recipe comes in! I did have some romaine lettuce. I prepared a plate of separated lettuce leaves and Steve and I used these instead of tortillas! I just put the fixings along the spine of the leaf and wrapped the leaf around lengthwise and voila, a yummy, healthy version of tacos.
(I wish I had taken a photo for you -- it looked very summery and delicious.)
Monday, August 24, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Hedwig the Owl Cake
This is quite a belated post because someone just asked me for advice on making an owl cake for her daughter and when I went to point her to my blog post about my Hedwig cake, I realized I didn't have a post about it!
So for my nephew's 6th birthday, he had a Harry Potter party. Having just recently used my new Williams-Sonoma stand-up bear cake pan to make a Dorothy Bear cake. I had this sudden inspiration where I could "see" the owl inside the bear by turning the bear around. The arms become wings, the legs and feet get shaved down to be a tail, and the ears, nose, and bear tail are removed. Now the back of the bear's head is the owl's face.
Can you "see" it?:
Maybe you can see it from this angle:
Anyway, here is how the cake turned out. I really love this particular cake because I was able to create something fairly unique, but I did it using a shaped pan that I already had, so the sculpting was minimized. (Unfortunately, I did have an engineering flaw where I propped up the owl part of the cake with cut off platic straws stuck in the bottom cake. The bottom cake was just from a mix, so not a particularly firm cake, and the straws holding the front of the owl failed in the car on the way over. Poor Hedwig was trying to take a nose-dive and poor hubby was trying to balance the whole cake tray to avoid complete catastrophe. Needless to say, Hedwig needed some repairs on arrival and her beautiful feet were never the same....)
So for my nephew's 6th birthday, he had a Harry Potter party. Having just recently used my new Williams-Sonoma stand-up bear cake pan to make a Dorothy Bear cake. I had this sudden inspiration where I could "see" the owl inside the bear by turning the bear around. The arms become wings, the legs and feet get shaved down to be a tail, and the ears, nose, and bear tail are removed. Now the back of the bear's head is the owl's face.
Can you "see" it?:
Maybe you can see it from this angle:
Anyway, here is how the cake turned out. I really love this particular cake because I was able to create something fairly unique, but I did it using a shaped pan that I already had, so the sculpting was minimized. (Unfortunately, I did have an engineering flaw where I propped up the owl part of the cake with cut off platic straws stuck in the bottom cake. The bottom cake was just from a mix, so not a particularly firm cake, and the straws holding the front of the owl failed in the car on the way over. Poor Hedwig was trying to take a nose-dive and poor hubby was trying to balance the whole cake tray to avoid complete catastrophe. Needless to say, Hedwig needed some repairs on arrival and her beautiful feet were never the same....)
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