Cooking Tip

Whenever you are sautéing or frying foods, you are always left with little brown bits, called fond, in the bottom of your pan. That fond is like gold and contains extra flavor. If you are making a sauce or gravy, normally, you would put oil or butter in the pan and you would scrape up the fond as you are stirring in some flour. Well, even if you are not making a sauce you will always have some of the fond left. If you were to leave that in the pan after your meal was over, you would have some crusty stuff to scrub because the fond would have solidified - especially since we usually don't wash the pan immediately after cooking. Instead, after you remove the item you just sautéed, immediately put in about 2 tablespoon of chicken stock or broth (you can even use water) and start to scrape up the fond. As the fond is being scraped up with the little bit of stock, it will mix together and turn brown. After all the fond is gone from the bottom of your pan, pour the sauce over your dish. Even if you don’t have a saucy dish, that extra bit will add some good flavor to your food. It works really well with eggs, just put a touch of stock in the pan and scrape around the eggs, that little bit will mix in with your eggs. Another benefit of doing this is that you will end up with a pan that is very easy to clean because the fond didn’t get a chance to solidify in your pan.

I do this all the time and today, I did that with bacon. I sautéed some bacon for a pea salad and was left with some brown goodness in my pan that I didn’t want to waste. I put in about 2 tablespoon of chicken stock. The pan started sizzling and I started to scrape up all that goodness. When the fond was incorporated with the stock, I poured the extra bit of flavor into my salad - it was very tasty and my clean up was effortless.

Large Pursellet

This is my small pursellet that I designed several years ago and has been my go to wallet. It is a wallet and coin purse. It holds all my cards (I have over 18 different cards - no credit cards!) and my bills plus my coins. The bills have to be folded in half in order to fit inside. For a while, I’ve been wondering about making a pursellet that could hold bills that didn’t need to be folded. Well, someone else saw this and had the same thought, so I decided to make a larger pursellet and it took me 5 tries until I finally got what I wanted.

Here is the first attempt. It measures 7 ¼” x 4 ½”. The card pocket wasn’t long enough for the cards to be placed side by side.

The second attempt - measures 8” x 4”. The cards could not fit into the pockets, I had to make the pursellet bigger.

The third attempt - measures 8” x 4 ½”. I made it bigger, but messed up on the pockets. I ditched it, which is why it’s unfinished. I was trying to make the card pocket so the cards went in head first.


 
The fourth attempt - measures 8” x 4 ½”, I got the pockets right and everything fits! The cards go in head first and there’s plenty of head room to zip it up. As I was doing the final touches to it, I realized that it is fairly large - not sure if someone would want to carry around something that large, so I redid it again.
 

Tada!! The fifth and final try - measures 7 x 4 ½”. This is perfect, not too big and not too small and I can get everything I want in it. I could probably put my cell phone in there too along with the coins.


 
 
Here are other pics to show off it's details:


Card pocket: left side has 12 cards - right side has 6 cards


 
 

Unfolded bills and coins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Boxed corners make the inside roomy

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Hand painted bead helps to make a nice zipper pull

**Check out what others are saying about my Pursellet here.


Here's a comparison between the small and large pursellet so you can see the difference:

Small is 6" x 3-1/2"/Large is 7" x 4-1/2"

 

So, after about 4 days of thinking and reconfiguring, I have a large pursellet. I need to make more because these will definitely be up for sale - but first, I need to go buy more zippers!

Awesome Dinner


Just made an awesome dinner. It's called Greek Meatza with Creamy Feta Kalamata Olives and Red Onions.  I took it and put my own spin on it. It's basically a pizza with ground beef crust and it is sooo good. I made the "crust" same as the recipe, except I used fresh oregano.

Before cooking



When I first spread the meat in the pan, I thought it was too much. I initially was going to use only 1 1/2 pounds of ground beef thinking it was going to more than I wanted, but it shrinks by about two inches on each side - pretty cool to see the transformation. Spreading it thin does help it to cook fast - 12 minutes is how long I cooked mine.

For the "topping", I took two roma tomatoes, sprinkled garlic and parsley with a coating of olive oil, and roasted the slices at 425 degrees for 20 minutes and set aside to cool. I used regular sweet onions instead of red - I sliced them thin and sauteed them with some regular shrooms till they were carmelized then put them in a bowl to cool. I bought kalamata and green olives - some of the greens were stuffed with gorgonzola blue cheese - I cut them in half. You can use regular black olives, but the kalamata and the green's saltiness adds great flavor. I also bought two 3.5 ounce tubs of feta cheese.

I took the tomatoes and cut them up and put them in bowl with onions and shrooms. I added 1 tub of feta cheese and mixed thoroughly. In the meantime, the "crust" is baking in the oven. After baking, I scraped off the guck and poured off the excess grease. I topped the meatza with all the wonderful toppings and broiled as instructed.

I made a simple green salad to go with our dinner and it was very tasty. This will be a repeated recipe in my house and either using Mark's recipe or my spin off, I believe you too will love this recipe.

Enjoy!









Gardening Scare

Mr. Frog

Yesterday, I bought some strawberries to plant in my strawberry planter. I was using this potting soil which I had opened about a couple of weeks ago and had it laid on top of another bag of potting soil. I had the opening partially closed with some branches. I was using a small 4” round pot as a scoop to get out the soil and place in the pot. There are about 12 holes in the pot and I was on the 4th or 5th hole when I scooped out this frog! It scared the crap out of me. I immediately dropped him (I’m surprised I didn’t scream) and I got up and ran upstairs where Jim was eating his lunch to tell him. My heart was racing and I had that creeped out feeling. I told him that I would wait for as long as it took for him to go down and remove the frog and see if there were others in the bag - I was prepared to just leave everything as is and go do something else. He was done with his lunch and kindly went down to take care of Mr. Frog for me. He tried to catch it, but he got away. I don’t know how he got in the bag or if he came in the bag, but that was something I never want to go through again.

Thanks for reading.

Comments or questions are always welcomed. I would love to hear what you think of this post or any of my other posts. Thanks!

Save Your Crumbs!

Do you throw out the crumbs from your chip or cracker bag? Well, stop! You’re missing out on some great flavor. I know how it is when you get to the bottom of the bag, it’s hard to eat, everything’s in crumbs and the flavor is usually very strong. Instead of throwing it out, crush them up into even smaller crumbs and use that as a substitute for bread crumbs. For my dinner tonight, I just took 2 different flavors of Kettle chips plus carrot chip crumbs and crushed them up and put them in meatballs. It works really well and adds great flavor.

When my girls were growing up, I used to take Goldfish or cheese Nips crackers and crush them up and used it as breading for chicken. When using as a breading, coat in egg whites first then coat with the chips - low fat mayonnaise also works as a breading base. I’ve even coated fish with crumbs, and if you broil it for about 2-3 minutes before serving (watch that it doesn’t burn), the chip coating will get crunchy.

This works great as replacement topping on a casserole that usually calls for bread crumbs. It will still get crunchy plus it will have better flavor from the chips or crackers instead of plain bread crumbs.

Save the different flavored crumbs and combine them all to create a new flavor - I store mine in the freezer in a large zip bag and just add to it. This is so simple and nothing goes to waste. Just remember that chips and crackers are usually salty so adjust the salt in your recipe (I didn’t add any). So next time you get to the bottom of your chip or cracker bag, don’t throw it out - save it!