Henry, The Dog

Bamboo beauty

I love this fun basket my parents sent us for Christmas. It's made from recycled bamboo chopsticks, stained with black tea leaves and strung together with a little fishing line. It's simplicity makes it strikingly beautiful and I love the shadows it creates.

1/1/11

Welcome to a new year! I love new beginnings and fresh starts. I love the new path of a new year, a new month, even a new day. And what else do I love? New projects! So today is Day 1 of my new 365 project. It's something I've been wanting to try for a few years to help me keep track of all the cooking, gardening, knitting and roofing projects that go on around this house.

These garden lights and rock landscaping were an unexpected yet completely needed project during 2010. With the incredible productivity and drive of my husband's mother, -- who doesn't like when I keep calling her my mother-in-law, so I suppose since she spent FIVE WEEKS with us in 2010 I could start calling her by name on my blog -- Pauline moved bucket after bucket full of roof rocks from piles on our patio down to landscape our garden beds. And I didn't take a single photo of her! That's why I need a photo-a-day project. I love the results of her efforts more than I could have imagined. The new landscaping also motivated Thomas to install low-voltage garden lights along the new dry riverbed path, along the deck edge and up the patio staircase.

Every time I go outside I feel like it's a new garden. Day or evening. Thank you, Pauline. Now it's time to dream about what we will get ourselves into in 2011. And I promise to provide photo evidence!

Crab and bleu cheese ravioli with roasted red peppers {Recipe}

For Christmas dinner we made this bleu cheese crust for our steaks and we had some leftovers that we couldn't let go to waste. Thomas came up with the brilliant idea of making ravioli, crab and bleu cheese stuffed ravioli. Yum! (He says ALL of his ideas are brilliant, I'm going to have to disagree and I totally can since this is MY blog! But I will give him this one, brilliant.) We started by making our own pasta, which is fun and easy especially if you have the pasta roller attachment for the KitchenAid mixer. We also made some roasted red peppers to tuck inside to give a little crunch. Check it out:

PASTA RECIPE:
3 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 tsp salt

Combine these three ingredients and knead for ten minutes. Add more flour if your dough is too sticky or a little water if the dough is too dry. Form the dough into a ball and let rest under a kitchen towel for 15 minutes. Divide the dough and run it through a pasta roller. Work until dough is thin, translucent and about 4" wide.

CRAB FILLING:
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 lb crabmeat (lump is best)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon chopped onion
5 1/4 ounces Boursin cheese
1 cup half-and-half cream
2 tablespoons parmesan cheese
1/4 cup bleu cheese, crumbles
fresh ground pepper

Heat saute pan to med-high. Add garlic and onions and cook for approx 1 minute. Add crabmeat and cook for approx another minute (until heated through). Add the Boursin cheese and melt slowly. Once melted, add the half and half and simmer on med-low until liquid is reduced to a creamy sauce (2-4 minutes). Add the parmesan cheese and bleu cheese. It will thicken nicely. Season with pepper as you like.

ROASTED RED PEPPER:
1 sweet red pepper

Turn on gas cook top flame, place pepper on grates and allow the skin to blacken. With metal tipped tongs rotate pepper until all sides are blackened. Place pepper in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Allow the pepper to rest for 10-15 minutes. Peel charred skin from pepper and rinse clean. Coarsely chop the pepper.
NOTE: if you don't have a gas cooking range you can do this step on the grill, or substitute canned roasted peppers.

RAVIOLI:
Cut the finished pasta sheets into 4" squares, drop 1 tbsp of the crab mixture on to each ravioli square. Add a few pieces of the chopped roasted red pepper, brush corners of pasta dough with a bit of water, fold dough over filling to form a triangle. Makes about 45 ravioli pieces.

Bring a large pot of lightly salted water to the boil. Cook fresh ravioli for about 2 minutes or until the begin to float. Serve hot with a drizzle of olive oil and garnish with any remaining red pepper. Enjoy!

Completely crazy and amazing

I've been in love with creating my own time lapse videos of life and I really love this video of the December 2010 Blizzard in New Jersey. Life by the beach in California doesn't provide weather like this. NOT THAT I MIND.