Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!!

 

Nelly dressed up in her favorite “Go Team” outfit and I dressed up as a housewife.

 

My major goal in life is to be a housewife, so I figured, why not dress up as one? It was easy enough… I just wore a dress, an apron, and some fake pearls from forever 21 that broke!

It wasn’t just Halloween weekend, but time for Project Tasteless Challenge 2: Pizza Tricks for Treats! We got to make pizza based on our Halloween costumes!

I struggled for a while about what I would do and I definitely had a kitchen fail! I knew that I wanted to make my dough and sauce from scratch because what kind of housewife would I be if I didn’t do that? I used Eat Live Run’s Pizza Dough recipe which I have used before. It’s pretty easy when all goes right and delicious!

I don’t have a mixer, so I just kneaded by hand for about  8 minutes. It’s actually kind of soothing! I imagine it to be easier with a mixer, but without it still wasn’t hard at all. Once I formed a pretty dough ball, I set to the side to rise.

 

Then I did housewife things like clean my kitchen while the children waited to be fed.

 

I did the dishes, cleaned the counters and table, and swept my whole apartment while my dough “raised”. The recipe said the dough should rise to half it’s size in about an hour, but an hour later and my dough was still the same size. I Google searched if there was anything I could do and I tried to microwave it and let it sit again, but nothing. I am assuming my yeast was old. I bought it 2 years ago and although it doesn’t expire until January, I am sure that’s what the problem was. At this point I was hungry, so I decided just to roll with it and I took a small amount of dough, rolled it out by hand, and decided I would make a baby pizza.

It was super thin crust! For the homemade sauce, you only need 4 ingredients.

1 cup diced tomatoes, 1/4 of a small onion, 1 tbs of minced garlic, chopped basil all cooked together in a sauce pan. I cooked it on high for about 10 minutes or until most of the liquid was dissolved, then just blend it up in a blender.

So good! I love 365 brand diced tomatoes and have another recipe to share later in the week. I never buy jarred sauce now that I have fallen in love with these tomatoes! Once the sauce was done, I spread it on the crust, added some cheese, and added olive and mushrooms in the shape of a soccer ball – get it?! When I think of housewives I think of soccer mom’s driving their kids to practice.! Hey, I tried….

I served up half with some green beans and then went back for the second half shortly after!

Next time, I think I’ll stick to my $.99 Trader Joe’s dough!

 

Soccer Mom Pizza

1/6th (ish) of Eat Live Run’s Pizza Dough

For the sauce

3 or 4 basil leaves chopped

1/4 of a small onion chopped

1 TBS minced garlic

1 cup diced tomatoes

1/4 cup part skim cheese

4 TBS black olives

1 mushroom, chopped

 

 

What was your latest kitchen fail?

Project Tasteless

I was so excited when Rachel announced her cooking competition Project Tasteless. I knew it would be up my alley because she is one of my favorite bloggers, I love to cook, and I’ve been wanting to get a little more creative in the kitchen.

Butternut squash is all of the rage in blog world right now. I bought one because it was on sale at Whole Foods two weeks ago and it’s pretty much just been just a nice fall decoration for my apartment until today. (Where’s waldo?)

I knew this would be the perfect time to use my squash. There’s something about squash and nakedness that go hand and hand, right?! Yesterday I was wandering the isles of Whole Foods per usual, trying to think of what I should make to go with my Halloween decoration and I stumbled across a delicious looking hot soup in their seafood section: Butternut Squash and Crab Bisque. I checked out the ingredient list on the soup and it seemed like something I could make myself so I grabbed all of the ingredients and I needed and then came home to look for a recipe to alter. Guess what I found? The actual Whole Foods recipe!

Side note: If you read my blog often you probably know know that I make claims to be a vegetarian, and here I am making a crab soup for myself. Technically vegetarians don’t eat lobster or gummy bears but a life without lobster and gummy bear is no life at all. So I make my up my  own rules

See that smile? That was because I had no idea what I was in for. Peeling and cutting a butternut squash is quite possibly the worst thing ever! SERIOUSLY, I am not lying. This was the worse thing ever and it’s just a stupid vegetable. 10 minutes into it….Wanting to quit….

As I was peeling this pain in the ass squash, I remembered a present my mom gave me! She is always buying me the most random things in the world.. who knew I would actually need it!

Yup, that pretty much saved my life! This thing actually works really well! After I peeled the squash as best I could, I started to chop away and realized that it was pretty much impossible. I ended up microwaving it a bit to soften it up so that I could chop it. You may think I am a baby (I am) but this was so hard that I actually got a blister!

Do you see it?! On my index finger, Ouch! I will never buy a whole squash again. From now on I am buying the pre chopped stuff.. worth it! Ok once I finally showed my squash who was boss, I boiled up some water for a vegetable broth, diced up 2 celery stalks, a cup of carrots, and 1/2 of a small onion. Now that the prep work was done I got down to business and added 1 TBS olive oil and 2 TBS butter to a large soup pot. Once that cooked up a bit, I added all of my vegetables and spices and sautéed them up for 5 minutes. Then I added the vegetable broth and a boiled everything for about 15 minutes, until all of the vegetables were soft. The original recipe said to simmer for an hour, but I couldn’t wait!

 

Next I added in 1/2 cup of light cream, the original recipe calls for a cup of the heavy stuff but too much dairy upsets my stomach. Then it was time to bend away! I was pretty nervous that this was going to explode all over my kitchen because blenders and I don’t generally get along, but it didn’t!

After your blend, put the soup back in the pot and add your crab. I know nothing about seafood. Since I eat it pretty rarely it’s not something I usually buy, so I just went for this claw meat because it was half the price of the other stuff.

Before adding it to my soup, I gave a taste to my favorite taste testers. They know what’s good Lilo likes spinach and Nelly likes baked lays, so I figured if they approved it’d be good enough for me! It was.

Last step: Enjoy and put some clothes on, it is October after all!

 

Recipe is here.

The only alterations I did were I used vegetable broth instead of chicken stock, 1/2 cup light cream instead of a cup of heavy cream, I used minced garlic instead of fresh, and I omitted the sage. I also didn’t simmer it for an hour and it still tasted AMAZING! This made 9 1 cup servings or 1 baby serving and 4 dinner size servings.