I think lemon week is fizzling out. I had high hopes of making lemon jelly (marmalade without the rinds) and salted lemons but then work got busy and I ran out of daylight hours so I might have to end with this little number that Carrien made when she was over last week. What am I saying? It’s the end of the week already? Well, it sort of is for me. Mondays and Tuesdays are my most productive days and then somehow the rest of the week always seems to run away from me. I’ll try though. Just no promises.

This is Lemon Beer Chicken. It was pretty tasty!

Ingredients:

• 3 chicken breasts
• 1/4 cup beer (We used Pacifico because they came in cute little bottles.)
• juice of a lemon
• a dash of hot sauce (like Tapatio)

Directions:

1. Marinate chicken in beer and lemon juice for one hour
2. Drain juice and beer off chicken. Discard.
3. Sauté chicken in 1 tbs olive or vegetable oil until browned. If too juicy, drain off excess until chicken is lightly browned on edges

4. Serve with rice, black beans, cotija cheese, fresh avocado, silantro and tortillas

Don’t forget to add cumin and a dash of garlic or onion powder to your black beans to make them extra tasty!

And here are some complimentary pictures of the kids enjoying those burritos:

You guys: This recipe is amazing. I don’t know where you are on the spectrum of appreciating spicy Indian food but I strongly suggest you try this. It’s delicious. It’s one of those things I think about all day long until it’s time for dinner and I can finally make myself some.

It was actually my friend, Carrien’s idea. She heard about lemon week and told me that in India they make something called “pickle” with lime rinds. It’s not like what we think of like a jar of pickles but more of a relish or condiment that you put with rice. It sounded interesting so Carrien did some research and came up with this recipe which is loosely based on this recipe.

So here goes:

Ingredients:

• 2 serrano peppers
• 1 habanero pepper
• 12 lemons
• 1 inch section of fresh ginger, chopped
• 10 chopped garlic cloves (keeps the vampires away)
• 2 cups distilled white vinegar
• 1 tsp turmeric
• 1 tbs salt
• 2 tbs mustard seed
• 1 tbs coriander
• 1 tsp whole cumin
• 5 tbs vegetable oil
• 6 small canning jars (or the equivalent)

Directions:

1. Heat 3 tbs of oil in a large frying pan until hot.

2. Sauté lemons, turning them over until their skins are golden brown. Do you like our fancy way of dealing with the spitting hot oil? That was my fault. I washed the lemons and then plopped them into the oil without drying them first. Water and oil can make a spitting hot mess. FYI.

(These smelled really good right about now.)

3. Dry the lemons and cut them in half with a knife. Then cut them into smaller slices with a handy dandy pair of kitchen scissors (or use a knife if you happen to have a sharp one). Save the juice.

4. Chop your peppers, ginger and garlic (gloves are super smart when chopping spicy peppers.)

5. Put 2 tbs of oil into a blender or food processor, add chopped peppers, garlic and ginger. Blend to a paste.

6. At the stove using the same oil you sautéed the lemons in, add mustard, coriander and cumin. Heat the seeds until they pop open.

7. Add the paste, stir and simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off heat.

8. Add turmeric, lemon pieces, lemon juice and vinegar and stir until thoroughly mixed.

9. Spoon lemon slices into jars, and pour remaining fluid over the lemons ensuring they are just covered.

10. Stir with a chopstick or knife to remove any air bubbles and seal jars.

Aren’t they pretty? They smell divine. We didn’t pressure can these so I’m just keeping them in the refrigerator but I think you could store them in the pantry since they are technically preserves.

Serve over rice or potatoes or sweet potatoes or yams or chicken or fish…pretty much this would taste good on anything. It’s spicy though so you might want to go slow. Think of it as a condiment and dip something into it! Then come back here and tell me how delicious it is!

I’m so pleased to announce that I will be blogging another Lemon Week! I figure I might as well squeeze as much out of those lemons as I can while I still live here! Ha ha. Pun intended. Anyway, I’ve got a couple new recipes and a couple of old ones and hopefully I can put something new up all week. We’ll see.

You know what’s cool about Lemon Week around here? We’ve made such a big deal about it in the past that now my kid gets really excited about it. It’s like a festival in our own house. We even dress up for it:

Here I am freshly showered, in my lemon week shirt and full of enthusiasm (and coffee probably).

I even took an Instagram of my shirt I was so excited about the whole event.

Bug dressed up in her finery which included yellow and orange accessories. We were ready!

Bring on the lemons!

So first we made lemon bars which I’ve made a zillion times and blogged about. The recipe calls for extra zest so they are extra zingy and delicious. (faster more direct link) I love them. Swoon! Swoon! Swoon! I could eat them all day until I popped.

Then we made lemon loaf which is sort of like what they serve at Starbucks but without the hard candy icing on the top. It has a sugary lemon juice that you pour on top that I think is even yummier, personally. It’s my Great Grandma’s recipe.

You’d like the recipe? Well let me share!

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of sugar
• 1 1/2 sticks of melted butter
• 4 eggs
• 1 cup of milk
• 3 cups of flour
• 4 tsp baking powder (that seems like a lot to me but it tastes fine, shows you what I know)
• 1 tsp salt
• Grated rind of 2 lemons

For glaze
• Juice of 2 lemons
• 1 1/2 tbs sugar

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 355º F

2. Mix sugar, butter, eggs, milk, flour, baking powder, salt and lemon rind

3. Pour into two loaf pans

4. Bake for 45 minutes

5. Mix together juice of two lemons and 1 1/2 tablespoons of sugar

6. Pour lemon mixture over piping hot loaves and serve!

It’s a pretty simple recipe. I love that when I typed it up originally I typed “flower” instead of flour. I guess that means it was passed onto me a long time ago when I was even worse at spelling than I am now. Which I guess could technically be yesterday but I know it was a really long time ago because my great grandma died a long time ago and I’m pretty sure she passed it onto me when she was still alive. So I must have been a teenager or younger. I remember eating it in her little condominium kitchen at her little metal table with the aluminum sides. I remember that and the awful disgusting pepper slaw she always used to make. Funny how things like that stick with you.

Anyway, it was fun to make and think about her making this back in the olden days. I wasn’t super fond of her in her last days. She was a crotchety old bitter woman but here and there I see clues that she had a kinder loving side. I think her lemon bread definitely spoke to that.

Especially the lemon juice topping. I think you should all rush out and make some and then come back here and reminisce with me in the comments about your Grandma. Did she make lemon bread for you? Was it better than Starbucks?

Tomorrow: Lemon Pickle! I’m so excited! You’re gonna LOVE it.

I got a little ahead of myself and twittered and facebooked about five crafts but I hadn’t gotten to this one yet. So HERE is the fifth craft: These are happy little challah bread napkin rings made from recycled plastic trash bags! They don’t exactly look like Challah Bread but they are braided and a whole lot prettier than the plastic bag they came from.

As everyone knows plastic bags blow. However! They are actually quite wonderful as a crafting medium. You can make all sorts of things with them: rope, crocheted into a bag, fused together as fabric…the possibilities are amazing.

Here’s how I made napkin rings:

First you’ll need the tan colored ones. These are not as common as they used to be. In my town everyone has switched to white for some reason. But check around, they still exist in MASSIVE quantities, probably in your own garage, pantry or under-the-sink hidey hole.

Next smooth out your bag of any creases and cut it into three strips. Don’t worry about the handle portions being longer. You’ll trim the excess off later.

Next you’ll need to “fuse” the ends together so you can start your braid. To do this you will need a hot iron and some tinfoil. Fold your tinfoil over a couple times so that there will be two sheets between your iron and the plastic bag strips. Now, very carefully, hold the iron down on the tinfoil in 15-second increments until it fuses. (Be careful not to touch the plastic with your iron or you’ll have a messy clean-up job later.)

Now it’s time to braid!

Braid about six or seven inches and stop. Give yourself about a half inch of unbraided ends and then trim the excess off with scissors.

Wrap your braid into a circle big enough for a cloth napkin to slip through and then carefully insert your tinfoil and iron onto the loose ends using your tinfoil. You might need to fold the tinfoil into a triangle to fit it inside the napkin right. Repeat the ironing technique used above and fuse your ring together.

Voila! You have a fancy napkin ring and you saved the landfills from one more plastic trash bag! Isn’t that a great way to start off the new year? L’Shanah Tovah!

What do you do when you are buried with work, deadlines are falling all around you like giant redwoods in a timber harvest, you have guests coming in from out of town and you decided to have a great big fiesta on Saturday with lots and lots of friends? Do you knuckle down and get your work done so you’ll have plenty of time to clean your house and get ready for the party before your guests arrive OR do you walk around your house and dream up some impossible last-minute DIY home-improvement projects? The latter of course!

Because you wouldn’t want your guests to see the bathroom floor looking like this:

The horror! Actually, it looked much worse than that. The paint had come up in spots and it was soooo dirty. Muddy kid bathing, running-over sinks (that’s another story) and dogs with hair and claws do not do well on painted pressed wood (not to be confused with plywood, that would be a step up). It was the floor that could not be mopped. Oh, I tried to mop it. Believe me. But scrubbing seemed to just make it worse. You know you have a problem when you moisten the wood and it just comes up in crumbs in your hand. It was icky.

So I decided to paint the floor! Giant deadlines be damned. (Don’t worry clients, all’s well in the end.) My mom had taken all the girls over to her house for Camp Grandma so I decided to attack the floor with wild blood-shot-eyes of craziness and then get my work done on the side. That’s how we get things done around here.

Oh yeah.

First, I was just going to paint some flowers to distract from the ugliness of the dirty mint green paint. I drew them in with a sharpie and was quite pleased. Then I painted the flowers and leaves and some odd purple paisleys around the toilet area and discovered that the new fresh paint made the old dirty mint green paint look like a hot mess of awfulness. It didn’t detract at all! It pointed instead and screamed, Look! Look! It’s dirty in here! You’re probably going to catch something awful if you walk in here barefoot!

Oh woe is me.

Did I mention that I was using old house paint from a craft project from a long time ago and I didn’t have enough paint to cover the whole floor and definitely not enough for more than one coat? Good thinking, that thar me. But I tried anyway. I tried and tried to skimp out every last scrape of “lemon icing” paint to cover the ugly mint green but there was just NOT enough.

This is about the time I started walking around my house naked doing a one-woman stand-up comedy show all by myself for myself and the dog. I really wish I could have recorded that because I think I am pretty funny. But there was nakedness and blood-shot craziness so no recording was going on.

I did jot down some notes for this post though. I’m such a blogger like that.

Here are my notes:

1. Don’t have a dog, with hair when you are painting your floor. No matter how hard you sweep and wipe up the hair with a wet paper towel, you will miss about 80 thousand of them. That is why they call painting white wash. You are washing the hair with paint. Check your OCD at the back door.

2. Don’t paint with old paint from a past project because you WILL run out and you won’t be able to match it with your home stash of acrylics or the kid poster paint.

3. Do not leave the phone on the counter where you can’t reach it later without stepping in wet paint.

4. Do not forget to paint behind the door. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

5. Do not paint in your favorite nightgown.

That’s all I wrote down but I’m sure there are about 95 more things not to do when painting your floor. In the end I went to Home Depot, shelled out 88 trillion bucks for a gallon (They don’t sell smaller containers. Gah!) of “lemon icing” matched paint and a gallon of epoxy garage floor paint for cement to put over the top and hopefully make the whole mess more mop-able. I really hope it works and doesn’t peel up my masterpiece when I roll it down Friday morning.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention how drying times had to be factored in. You know how I am so great at math. Ha ha. Imagine me with a calculator and smoke coming out of my ears. It turns out I do have enough time to get it all done before the party on Saturday (when my guests will mostly likely need to use the restroom!!) but it was close. So close in fact that I had to step aside and painfully not paint more detail so that I could give it a whole 24 hours to cure before laying down the garage floor epoxy laminate clear coat, or whatever that stuff is called. It was hard stepping aside. I desperately wanted to add more flourishes and scallops and maybe some tapered dotting but I started stepping in paint in places I couldn’t cover up and I knew it was time to cut my losses.

My original plan was just to paint some flowers as a temporary measure until I could put some groovy old 70′s linoleum down but now I’m kinda liking the flowers. They’re bright, they’re crazy. They make the rest of the bathroom look like an old lady running away from a flower child on acid but I kinda dig it. If this clear coat thing works out, they might stick around for a while.

At least so I can tell this story over and over.

This is a first for me. I signed up for a cooking contest and I’m entering my recipe here. I thought you guys might enjoy it even though I’m not really a foodie.

Anyway, “…as part of the launch of new Knorr® Homestyle Stock, an authentic tasting stock in a new concentrated format, 200 bloggers put their culinary talents to the test to become one of the Knorr Four™ – a panel of bloggers who will share their insights and expertise to provide tips and recipes, and participate in other food fun for exciting rewards. And the first reward is a big one – eight finalists from this recipe contest will win a free trip to BlogHer 2011!”

I already have my ticket to Blogher but I’m hoping I can win this contest and maybe give the ticket to my sister-in-law who is locked away up in Northern California. It includes airfare!

So here goes:

There are three things I like a lot: A strong cup of coffee, chocolate and a dry red wine. Not necessarily together of course but when I dreamed up this recipe for Knorr’s new concentrated chicken stock, I decided a little bit of all three might just be delicious. I’m calling it my new holy trinity.

And of course I sampled all three while I slaved away in the kitchen! That’s what good cooks do!! I didn’t sample the unsweetened chocolate though. That would be silly. I have my other stash of 70% dark cacao in my pantry but I did let Bug have a tiny bite so she’d learn just the way I did way back in the day that not everything that looks like delicious chocolate is. It was delicious in the chili, of course—just not so much by itself.

Yes, this chili with chocolate and coffee and wine is a little rich but I think in small portions it’s very very good, especially if you are big fan of mole like I am. Add a big healthy salad on the side and I don’t think anyone will complain. The chicken and corn and also the lack of anything tomato-based made it work for me but you might want to tweak to your own favorite chili flavors.

So here is my recipe:

1 can of black-eyed beans
1 can of white cannellini beans
1 can yellow corn (though white would have been fancy)
1 small can green chilis (I chose mild)
1 onion
1 clove of garlic (or 1 tsp of garlic paste if you are like me and HATE the smell of garlic on your fingers for days)
5 chicken thighs cut into bite-sized pieces with excess fat removed
2-3 Tbsp olive oil
2 oz unsweetened chocolate (shaved with a fine grater)
1 cup of strong coffee
1 cup of red wine (I used 2-Buck Chuck Shiraz)
1 tub of Knorr® Homestyle Chicken Stock
1 cup water
3 Tbsp chili powder
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1 1/2 tsp ground pepper
Avocado slices and goat cheese crumbles for garnish

First the prep work: Drain and rinse your beans and corn, chop your onion, mince your garlic, cut your chicken.

Saute onion and garlic in a generous amount of olive oil until translucent.

Add chicken and cook through until juices run clear. Don’t cook it to death of course. You want your chicken to stay nice and juicy but you don’t want to add your wine and coffee before it’s done because that can change the molecular structure of the chicken and taste nasty.

When the chicken is done and no pink is showing, add 1 cup of strong coffee (hold the cream and sugar of course), 1 cup of red wine (if you’re like me just slosh a glass-full in, sort of like picking blueberries: one for me, one for the pot) and 1 cup of water. Next add the tub of concentrated Knorr chicken broth (don’t worry about diluting it per the directions on the side of the package—that will just happen in the pot as you cook). Stir and let the gelatin break down into a soup like so:

Let this simmer for a minute or two and then add your chocolate.

I know! Chocolate in dinner! It’s like dessert, but not! Mmmmmmm…enjoy that heavenly aroma.

Once the chocolate has been stirred in, add your seasonings. Let that simmer for a bit while you go yell at the kids to bring in their toys from the front yard and you take a few more sips of wine.

Add your beans, corn, chilis and let simmer on low for about 30 minutes. Just enough time to go check your email and surf around Facebook for a while. It could simmer longer (I know some recipes call for an hour) but I usually just wing it. I’m sure sometimes it simmers for less than 30 minutes and it tastes fine. Just make sure you check it and nothing is burning of course!

Mmmmmmmm….it’s starting to smell like dinner around here!

Serve with some avocado slices and goat cheese crumbles (or sour cream if you’re sensitive to hot spicy chili) and ENJOY!

So here’s a quick flick through my camera stream lately. First a photo taken by Rapunzel of her own hand. She’s not afraid to grab the camera and get in there with the interesting shots. I love that.

Another one of my old saguaro. She can’t believe that I never took this shot myself. Nope, I didn’t. Too prickly!

We had a little tiff at dinner so I’m feeling a bit sentimental as I post these photos. Teenagers are so complicated!

I spray-painted an old wooden chair my mom had laying around. I wanted to give the chair its own post but it’s not like I’m really a DIY home-decorator blog or anything so I’m just going to smash it in here instead.

Spray, spray, spray. Don’t you love it when you forget to change the ISO setting on your camera and the last thing you shot was a product shot inside at 3200 and then you go outside and over-expose everything so bad that your backyard looks like heaven from the 70′s?

Maybe that’s just my version of heaven from the 70′s.

Anyway, the chair looks fantastic! It went from country bumpkin to eclectic mess which is sort of good except I hate eclectic mess. I love the chair though. I just need to de-clutter my house a little so it can shine on its own.

It’s already a favorite for family meetings.

And vain self-portraits.

Speaking of, I need some better self-portraits because I’m A PUBLISHED AUTHOR NOW!!!! And I had to put some dumb hand-held frumpy mom shot in the back of my book. I know I could pay someone to take a real portrait but I like to keep it real (or cheap). I am self-published after all, it’s not like I have a big book-contract deal. But I do have an awesome agent/publisher friend who is hooking it all up. I’m so excited. This is really a dream come true for me.

It dropped on Amazon yesterday for my birthday! This is just a soft launch. I have two more books to illustrate and then we’re going to launch a blog tour with giveaways and prints and a book party (squee!) and I’ll probably talk about it so much you will all get sick of me. But until then check it out! $2.99 yo! It’s only on the Kindle right now I think but you can get a free kindle ap for your mac or ipad. I’ll share more when I get the hang of it. I’m new at this still. (Also available in the UK and Germany)

In the meantime I have two books still to illustrate! (And many more after that I hope) I’m so behind. If you see me goofing off, feel free to kick me in the butt. I’ve got work to do!!! It’s always feast or famine around here.

Yes, my birthday was fantabulous. Thank you for asking. We kept it low-key with a night out with my best beach gal pal DMA and a new friend on Friday and then a family dinner with the niece-com-poops and my Aunt Keren and Grandma on the day itself. My grandma made me my favorite birthday dinner (peanut encrusted Thai chicken—soooooooooo yummy you could die) and Rapunzel made my cake. How can I be mad at her when she’s so sweet like that. Teenagers! She kills me.

Anyway, it was super sweet and fun and the kids had a blastola swimming in Grandma’s community pool.

I love summer.

Why yes, I did make a peach pie. I know! All this fun going on when I have work to do!!! This is what I’m talking about. I should be shackled to my laptop but no, I’m in the kitchen pretending to be Martha Stewart or something. It’s just that it’s summer and the fruit is going bananas (or more correctly, peaches) and it’s such a wonderful new thing to me that I just can’t bear to let it rot! It’s me and the fruit flies and I’m not about to let them win.

Peaches, zucchinis, apricots, plums, sugar snap peas and soon tomatoes. I can’t even keep up with my camera. Life does not stop for the weary!

You know what brings all the kids to my yard? Popsicles that’s what. I’m keeping the whole neighborhood regular with these fruity yogurt pops. They are so delicious and good for you! Well, not counting the sugar in the vanilla yogurt I add… but the fruit! Delicious summer fruit!

This week I added apricots to the mix since we have so many of them. They are so tasty all blended up!

And pretty too!

It’s popsicle o’clock!

Now go make some. Here’s my official recipe:

Cut your ripe juicy fruit up (maybe a cup or two). Add two heaping big spoons of vanilla yogurt, blend in your trusty blender, pour into your popsicle mold of choice, freeze for a day and EAT!

We’d been yelling at the kids to stop knocking the apricots out of the trees for what seemed like months. Finally, it became apparent that the kids weren’t knocking the apricots out of the trees anymore. The birds were and the apricots were soft and ripe when they landed on the ground which means it’s picking time! (Yes, that chair is totally busted.)

Hooray! I didn’t spend all spring paying that water bill for nothing. It was time for me to cash in on some yummy orange fruit!

While I went to the store for canning supplies, the kids picked whatever they could reach and Rapunzel, my oldest niece, got a ladder out of the shed and picked the higher-up ones. They left some yellowy-green ones for later.

You can’t just let these babies sit around and draw fruit flies. Nope. They have to be canned, into apricot jam specifically.

This is the face you make when you know you’ve got a big ugly mess ahead of you. It’s canning day.

My mom did most the cooking. I just cut up the apricots. Boy, did they smell good.

I love the smell of fresh hot jam.

We made 29 jars of jam which is a lot. Four batches. There are more apricots left too but I think I’m done with jam. My mom’s talking about dehydrating the rest but I’m going to let her do that at her house.

I’m done with messiness for a while. Phew!

It was worth it though. TWENTY-NINE JARS! Christmas presents, DONE. Now I just need to design some kind of cool label for them and maybe invest in some kind of big round paper-punch. There’s no way I’m cutting out 29 circle stickers like I did for the Marmalade. No way.

I did make some scones with some of the leftover cut-up apricots though. I just used my lemon scone recipe and added apricots instead of zest except I added a lot more than 2 tablespoons. They turned out super dense. Kind of like an apple fritter without the glaze. Pretty tasty really. You might want to stop by if you’re in the neighborhood.

I’m really digging this rural living. What’s next? Tomatoes, I think. Salsa anyone?

Lest you worry that we are all doom and gloom around here, I wanted to let you know that there are happy times too. We know my Grandfather is in a better place and we had a lot of time to mentally prepare for his leaving. He was really sick in the end and now he has no pain, which is so much better. Of course we miss him. Sometimes I get so bummed out that we all can’t live forever. I want my grandma back, my Aunt Lois, the lady at the laundromat and all those pets I’ve lost… but this is life. The sooner I wrap my mind around the fact that it’s fleeting, the better.

There are still many many reasons to keep on loving and smiling and having the best time that we can while we are here.

So before a whole slew of relatives showed up for the funeral this Saturday, I decided to have my grandmother and aunt over for a pizza night. Of course they’ll be invited when all the relatives are here too but they appreciated a quiet night with just us. Especially since my aunt is just out of her cast and wobbling her way through physical therapy and my Grandma is well, getting old. She gets tired easy. But not too tired to come over and I love that she still does.

I made the dough. It’s really easy, it’s just a matter of remembering to do it an hour beforehand. Have I posted the recipe before? If I did, I can’t find it so here it is again:

PIZZA DOUGH

Ingredients:

1 cup warm water (105ºF —which as Bethany says is hot but not too hot, sort of like kid’s hot chocolate at Starbucks)
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
2 tbs olive oil
2 tsp honey (I accidentally put tablespoons and it tasted just fine, maybe better in fact)
1 tsp yeast

Instructions:

1. Add salt and honey to warm water in a bowl. Mix and then add the yeast. Let sit 10 minutes.

2. Gradually add flour and olive oild and start mixing (hello, kitchen aid dough hook)

3. When mixture gets too heavy to mix, start kneading (my wrists love you, kitchen aid dough hook).

4. Knead until smooth (ish), make a ball, coat with olive oil.

5. Place in a large bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise 1 hour at room temperature.

6. Punch down and let rise another hour (or not. I always skip that extra rising.)

7. Shape, punch with holes with a fork and add toppings.

8. Bake at 400-450º F 20-25 minutes until crust is light brown.

This pizza was for me, Bug and my dad. I’ve been loving having my dad all to myself this week.

And this pizza was for my aunt and grandma with all kinds of icky things on it like onions, mushrooms and garlic! Ew! But that’s why I love pizza night, everyone can bring their own toppings and make what they like.

Then we popped them in the oven.

And it was delish!!! So don’t worry too much about us. We’re doing fine.

p.s. Don’t forget to stop by my review blog for chances to win a mop (which you’ll need if you have a pizza night) and some mulah before May 31st! While you’re there, check out the spin spin spinbrush post too if you haven’t already. Thank you! :)