It all started with Walter drawing a smiley face on an egg that had been dyed yellow. He then remarked that the eyes he drew sort of resembled those of one of the Mario characters, maybe Toad or somebody.

Of course, that was all it took for me to try to turn an egg into a Super Mario character.

I started with using a rubber band around the egg to mark the “dividing line” between red and white. Then I dripped candle wax on the shell to create the “spots” on the mushroom. The egg was then half-dunked in red dye until the desired color was obtained. Once dry, the wax was scraped off and the face was drawn on.

After doing three more eggs of various characters, we cheated a bit and “touched up” the white areas with Wite-Out before their photo session.

Possible words (and recipes!) to follow once I’ve recuperated a bit!

Update 3/02/09:  Yeah, it was a long time coming… sorry about that.

Here’s the recipe for the salmon/scallop roulade, courtesy of Alton Brown (Good Eats).

For the cheesecake brownies, I made a half-batch of Alton Brown’s Cocoa Brownies, then I made a half-batch of the cheesecake filling from this recipe, and spread it on top of the brownies. I also mashed up some fresh raspberries in sugar and water in a saucepan to make the raspberry topping. It took a while due to the double cooking time plus the refrigeration time afterwards. In the future, I may try making up the batters at the same time and refrigerating/freezing them for a short while to make them less runny, then put them in the pan at the same time (and hope the layers stay separated!)
]]> http://www.moore-reel.com/20090215/a-totally-sweet-valentines-day/feed 0 http://www.moore-reel.com/20090202/super-supper http://www.moore-reel.com/20090202/super-supper#comments Mon, 02 Feb 2009 23:21:02 +0000 jess http://www.moore-reel.com/?p=234 Possibly Related:

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First run was this morning and the making of the omelettes. They didn’t turn out quite as expected… I need a bit of practice getting the food processor to “dice” onions, peppers, and mushrooms, rather than “mince” them all together into a veggie-mush. Oh, well — I mixed them with the eggs anyway. The end result didn’t look very appetizing but luckily we had some pita bread. It made a pretty good filling for our “breakfast pita pockets”, topped with salsa, cheese, sour cream, and baby spinach. Yum!

I really hope to get a lot of use out of this food processor. I’ve got visions of homemade salsa… veggie burgers… falafel (or hummus for that matter)… super-easy cole slaw or egg-roll filling… the list goes on!

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Less than an hour later, here’s what it looked like:

I tried to get a photo of the puppy with snowflakes on her, but she wouldn’t stand still long enough!

Dinner was a home-cooked Linguini with White Wine Clam Sauce and salad. I took the recipe from this site but also incorporated some of the suggestions from the comments.

Dessert was a “marble” cake, made from a box (I know! The shame!) of vanilla cake mix. I divided the batter in half (for the two cake pans), then took about a cup of batter from each half and mixed it with a generous portion of cocoa powder and Hershey’s chocolate syrup. The vanilla batter was poured into the round cake pans and the chocolate batter was dropped by spoonfuls onto it and mixed just enough to get a “swirly” look. After the cakes had baked and cooled, they were iced with some yummy vanilla frosting and the whole cake was drizzled with more Hershey’s… and then it was time to “Dig In!”

Yum!!!

Happy Birthday Wally Bear! I love you SO bunches!!!

Well, Christmas 2008 is finally over with… all FOUR of them! First, there was the Christmas celebration with Walter’s family in Virginia on the weekend of 12/20.

Then we took a detour to Asheville on the trip home to see Laura & Andy, and did a gift exchange there (and had some really tasty Indian food!) Sadly, the photos which were taken there somehow got corrupted (see Walter’s post below.) 

Walter & I celebrated here in Columbia on Christmas Eve… I cooked a big vegetarian holiday feast, we drove around to look at holiday lights, and then we exchanged our gifts to each other. Laura was in town and she stopped by and did us the honor of taking some really great photos of us ^_^.

And then finally, yesterday we drove down to Augusta for the day to celebrate with my family. (I forgot to take photos, but who really wants to see a bunch of almost-rednecks — and Walter — try to outdrink each other?)

Christmas is over… Time to rest now!

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Christmas Hillside

Just a little xmas-y type background that I cobbled together.  Just used a stars tutorial and a bunch of brushes.  I don’t think it came out to bad though.  It is really dark (even on the flatscreen).  Let me know what you think.

Also if you want to mess around with it a little more then I could send the psd file.

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But we also still had one lonely little pie pumpkin left over. And we had recently visited Starbuck’s and had some pretty good pumpkin bread, and I thought maybe I’d try to find a recipe. Here’s one that turned out really well:

Pumpkin Bread:

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup canned pumpkin (I made the equivalent from scratch)
• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 eggs
• 1½ cups flour
• ½ cup chopped pecans
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice

Preheat oven to 350º F. Grease bottom only of loaf pan. Mix sugar, pumpkin, oil, vanilla, and eggs in large bowl. Stir in the rest of the ingredients. Pour mixture into the loaf pan. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

(Credit: http://www.mommymall.com/recipes/2005/12/pumpkin-bread.html)

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