Thursday, October 30, 2014

Time For Pumpkins and Seafood!

We had a busy night and it is still not over. Hubs and the Little Man are in the garage putting the finishing touches on a costume for tomorrow.
After someone arrived home from school, we went right to work to create our pumpkin masterpieces!

We had some supervision for the process.


May we present our Minecraft and Demon pumpkins!


For supper tonight we had seafood pasta.
Have I ever mentioned how I do this? I can't remember.
Things we need:
Stick of butter
2 or 3 garlic bulbs
pinch of pepper
package of frozen seafood medley (mine of choice usually includes: shrimp, scallops, octopus, calamari, cuttlefish and sometimes crab meat)
pasta of choice
spring peas
mushrooms
cup and a half of grated Parmesan cheese
heavy cream (35% cooking cream)
dry white wine to cut through all the heavy ingredients

Start the water boiling for the pasta
melt a tbs of butter in a fry pan
sautee the chopped garlic in that pan
turn up the heat a bit
add your seafood

Quite the mix eh?

At this point, I take the rest of the stick of butter and start melting it in a sauce pan
When my seafood is no longer frozen together, I start cooking the pasta and pour the cream into the saucepan with the melted butter
I also toss in my peas and sliced mushrooms

This is the healthy portion of the meal. ;)

Toss a bit of pepper on top of the veggies and seafood and remember to keep it all moving or it gets this weird grey colouring.

When the pasta is a few minutes away from being cooked, I gradually start to add the cheese to the butter and turn up the heat on the saucepan. By this time, I will turn the heat down to low on the seafood and veggies.
The sauce will look like this:

Almost looks like I'm conjuring a demon.

When everything is cooked and melted and drained, I toss it all into a pot and serve.


Stay safe everyone!
Cheers. :D

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

A Few More Nights

When I was a child, the couple of nights we had to wait for Halloween to arrive was the longest. I think I found it more excruciating than Christmas. Actually, I still the wait difficult. It is my favourite holiday. I believe Halloween is the only holiday that is actually geared towards children. Christmas is more of a family, stressed induced panic. You have these head games going on. So and so gave me this last year, I must find something of equal or greater value. We must invite Aunt B and Uncle F. The rest of family will think horrible thoughts if we fail to do so. Those thoughts are probably why I have no problem working during the Christmas season.
Halloween is a whole other bag of tricks. Children dress up as whoever or whatever they desire. You get be someone else for a night and no one will question you and suggest you need therapy. You can let all your creative juices flow. You can be THAT house on the block and it is perfectly acceptable. There are still one-upmanship. I have a couple of houses on my street that try to outdo each other every year, but the children actually benefit.
I love getting dressed up and scary the little ones that come to the door. My husband takes it to another level and tries to scary them before they even get to the driveway. It gives the kids stories to tell the next day as they sway their candy. Tonight we will watch scary movies, carve up our carefully selected pumpkins and put the finishing touches on our costumes. the excitement is getting pretty high. Even the dog is wondering what is happening. This year Little Man actually asked if I could make his costume. He saw how much his father and I had last year and wanted in on the preparation for this year. What is even more awesome, he is having a costume contest at school. This would the first year for this event. A new principal, a new set of ideas. I'm happy about these changes. I believe it promotes the idea of an open mind.

When I am not heavy into prep work, I'M just tooling around the estate. I have been working on a sweater for me.

It has been a very long time since I knit anything with black yarn.

I cleaned up the last of the peppers for the season:


With all the leaves falling and the colours and smells changing,

Jackie has been having a field day.

So much so, she has had quite a few baths lately.

I don't even want to know what she rolled in the last time.

I'm off to veg in front of a horror movie with my partner in crime.
I hope you all have a great day!