Homemade Limoncello

I love all things lemon.  I've mentioned before that my parents have a prolific lemon tree (here's a recipe for delicious lemon sorbet), so they're regularly giving us big bags of lemons. I usually freeze both the juice and the zest.  This time, I used the vegetable peeler to remove the zest in big strips before juicing the lemons.

I cleaned a mason jar, then added the strips of lemon zest and some cheap vodka.  I covered the top with plastic wrap and let it sit. 

 

After five days, the vodka had taken on a yellowish tinge.  

 

I strained out the zest, then made a simple syrup (equal parts water and sugar).  I added the simple syrup to the lemon-infused vodka, then let that sit for a day.  (Exact measurements aren't necessary, but if you want to follow a recipe, try this one.)  Store the limoncello in the freezer.

I brought my homemade limoncello to our Labor Day get-together, where the adults sipped it while playing Apples to Apples (one of my favorite games, by the way).  Delicious!

 

By random coincidence, we were given a bottle of limoncello two days later!  Steve was gone on a business trip, so I waited until he got home, and poured a side-by-side tasting of my homemade limoncello and the commercial one.  

(Commercial on the left; mine on the right)

I preferred mine.  It was less harsh, sweeter, and smoother.  But I knew which was which. Perhaps I was biased toward my own.  But Steve didn't know which was which, and he preferred mine for the same reasons.  He described the commercial one as medicinal.  

Yet another case where homemade is better!

Lego Aliens

Do all of you know about Lego Club Magazine?  If you have a Lego fan in your household, it is a must. It is full of ideas, games, stories, and a monthly contest.  Best of all, it's totally free (in the US and several other countries, that is).  

There is a Lego Club Jr. version for kids under 7, which Trevor has received for a little over a year now. When it arrives, he literally drops everything to read it.  He turns immediately to the Table of Contents to find out what page the contest is on.  He loves seeing the winning entries from the previous month and finding out what the latest challenge will be.  

This month's Lego Club Jr. arrived on a day that Trevor was sick and had stayed home from school.  He had a runny nose, low energy, and low fever - not so sick to be miserable, but too sick for school.  It was a perfect day to work on a Lego challenge.  This month's challenge was to design an alien.  We dug out our tub of Legos and got right to work.

Let's see who our astronaut met!

 

First, he met this intimidating creature, made by Trevor.

 

As he explored farther, he met up with my strange blue alien.

 

Finally, he met up with this female alien.  Trevor and I worked together to make her.

What a fun way to spend a sick day!

Snake Sandwich, Popovers and Golden Grahams S'mores

Today I'm sharing three totally unrelated cooking projects: a snake sandwich, popovers and Golden Grahams S'mores.

When I picked Trevor up from school the other day, I asked him what he wanted for dinner. He thought about it for a minute or two, then answered: a snake sandwich. Huh? Apparently one of his kids' cookbooks has an explanation of how to make a sandwich that looks like a snake. Snake isn't one of the ingredients, fortunately.  

He raced into the backyard to harvest some tomatoes and basil, then zipped over to the fridge to check out what else we had. He set me to work cutting bread into rectangles and slicing tomatoes. He started making sandwiches and arranging them on a tray.  Here's what our dinner looked like:

(A pear-tomato tongue, raisin eyes, and pea pod eyebrows. That broccoli piece at the end is a rattle.)

 

An unconventional dinner for sure, but tasty. Except for the raisin eyes. I hate raisins, yet Trevor insisted that I get to eat the head.

The next night, I decided to tackle one of the few remaining cooking items on my list of 40 Things: popovers. It's strange that I'd never made them before. They're really easy and I love how they taste. But somehow I never actually made them until now. It was really fun watching them pop and they were absolutely delicious still hot from the oven. I'll definitely be making these again. Goal #28 accomplished!

 

We invited Trevor's godparents to join us at my inlaws' cabin in Bear Valley over Labor Day Weekend.  I wasn't sure if the weather would be cold enough to light the wood stove (it wasn't), so I decided to make some s'mores bars to bring along instead of planning to make actual s'mores. We had some leftover Golden Grahams from Trevor's school birthday treat, so I started with this recipe from Betty Crocker. I ended up adapting the recipe quite a bit, as I always do. Here's my version:

 

Golden Graham S'mores

6 c. Golden Grahams 

4 c. marshmallows 

1.5 c. chocolate chips

4 T. butter

1/4 c. corn syrup

1 t. vanilla

Melt 3 c. marshmallows, chocolate chips, butter and corn syrup in the microwave. Add the vanilla, then mix in the cereal. Let it sit for a minute or so, then stir in last cup of marshmallows. Spread the mix in a 13" x 9" buttered dish. Let the s'mores set in the refrigerator, then cut into squares. 

I let the s'mores set in the refrigerator, then turned the whole thing out onto plastic wrap and wrapped it tightly for transport. I popped them in the refrigerator when we got to the cabin, then sliced them into bars when it was time for dessert. Absolutely delicious! I've already added Golden Grahams back to our grocery list. 

Designer Showcase

One of my favorite things about Ideas for Scrapbookers (where I am a Contributing Artist) is the weekly Designer Showcase.  Cathy Dippolito schedules a topic, the Contributing Artists send her layouts that illustrate that topic, then she puts them all together into a fabulous post.  We're free to either make something new for the Designer Showcase or dig through our older stuff and share that.

Each week, I search through my Picasa folder of scanned layouts and projects (733 items, as of today) to find the item(s) that best illustrate Cathy's topic.  It's one of my favorite things on my weekly to-do list, as it gives me a chance to revisit some of my favorite older layouts.

For the "Beach/Pool/Water" showcase, I shared a layout about Trevor's swim lessons in 2010:

For "Pages that Make You Go Awwww..." I shared this layout, made in 2009 from a bunch of extra pictures I printed but hadn't scrapped.

For the "Pregnancy" showcase, I went back to 2006, my one and only pregnancy.  (For the record, the first picture is of me at 21 weeks.  I foolishly did not take a picture any earlier than that, leading some people to assume that the picture of me 5 months pregnant is actually a 'before' picture.)

Sometimes I don't have anything to contribute for the Designer Showcase.  This week's topic is Art Journaling, which I have never done.  And that's totally ok, which is part of what I love so much about being on the Ideas for Scrapbookers team.  The eleven of us who make up the current team at Ideas for Scrapbookers represent a wide variety of styles and interests, which means that the posts are always very interesting and diverse.  For any given topic, about half of us have something to share.  If you're looking for new scrapbooking blogs to check out, I'd encourage you to visit any of the other Contributing Artists.  Tell them that Cindy sent you!

Pam Callaghan
Cathy Dippolito
Dolores Schaeffer
Nancy Keslin
Marlene Murphy
Lesley Walker
Gael Spence
Anupama Choudary
Ina Bela
Karen Anderson

A Title as Journaling

The story behind today's layout starts about 14 months ago.  For years, we've been planting a garden with human consumers (us) in mind.  After we adopted Trouble, we adapted our gardening to meet needs of a very hungry bunny as well.  I stopped harvesting young carrots so that the greens would grow and continue to feed Trouble.  

In the fall, we harvested our full-grown carrots, then planted a second round of carrots in hopes that we could grow greens during the winter.  The carrots didn't grow very well through the winter, but they didn't die either.  Once the spring hit, they grew like gangbusters.  They kept growing and growing, giving us a steady supply of greens.  Soon, they were taller than Trevor!  At that point, I decided to let the carrots go to seed.  I was really curious how tall they would get.  

One afternoon in June, Trevor asked for a carrot as a snack.  I sent him outside to harvest one.  I'm kicking myself that I didn't measure how tall it had grown (just over 5 feet, if I had to guess - the plant was in a raised bed and had grown above my head).  But I did take some awesome pictures of him eating it with the gigantic greens still attached.  

The photos were so silly that I decided to be equally whimsical with the title/journaling.  I decided to emphasize the theme by using orange and green for my title.  As I started to play, I decided that my title would be my journaling.  I used orange letter stickers for the word 'carrot' then stamped the rest of the title and glued it in place.  It's definitely a different look for me.  But I have to say, it was a lot of fun!

I looked back through my old layouts and found only one other time that I've used a complete sentence, with punctuation, as a title.  It was back in June 2010.  That page has a very different feel to it, though the basic arrangement of elements is similar.

Anyone else done a punctuated sentence as a title, with no further journaling?  Leave me a link if you have!