Wednesday Fun: This is NOT the Swedish Chef You're Thinking Of

I...um...well. How to intro this one?

This link is from our beloved Kashka_z.

And it has bacon.

...and a man smearing butter on a pan with his feet.

...while speaking Swenglish?

Go watch it. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3d-qENAaNbM

Wednesday Fun: Pumpkin Art

What is Halloween around these parts without some creative pumpkin carving? Wander around your neighborhood or do a search on the web & you can find TONS of interesting (or gory or silly or elaborate...) ideas.

You might be a devotee of the classic jack-o-lantern face with its triangle eyes & nose & simple mouth with a couple of teeth. Or maybe a simple variation on that theme.

• Like mine this year! :)
• Mr. Kluges's drooling pumpkin

Maybe you are keen on making a set of pumpkins in a theme or using props to create a scene with pumpkins.

• The KISS Army
• How about some Wizard of Oz? (More links to his stuff below.)
• Fire-breathing pumpkin dragon
  

Using well-known art as inspiration?

• The Scream by Jason Green
• American Gothic, anyone?
• Of course, Mona Lisa's smile's a little creepy anyway.
  

How about designing a pumpkin based on the light inside of it?

• The Sunburst by David LaRochelle via This Old House
• Jack O'Lantern Hell by Plutor/Logan Ingalls on Flickr

Or you get out the wood-carving tools and go for the three-dimensional approach. (Man, are some of these impressive!)

• Zipperface by Ray Villafane, via This Old House (Yes, really.)
  
• Scott Cummings, PumpkinGutter.com - Wow. Just wow. He's got dinosaurs, Einstein, an evil rabbit, Wallace and Grommit and a Davy Jones you have to see to believe! Amazing stuff here!

Whatever sort of pumpkin art you enjoy (or toward which you aspire), I hope you enjoy seeing and/or carving some this October! If you've got links to some great pumpkin art, leave them in the comments because we'd love to see them!


Addendum: Want to make your pumpkin last? Check out this science experiment where 5 methods of pumpkin preservation (plus a control pumpkin) are put to the test!

Wednesday Fun #140 - Autumn is here!

The seasons have changed. No more is it a millionty degrees outside, in my house, or, most importantly for this blog, in my kitchen. I can imagine cooking something again! Something beyond throwing some brats on the grill, frying up bacon for a BLT (of which I did not have nearly enough this past summer!), or mixing up a salad.

How about you? What's this fall weather got you cooking? Turned on the oven yet? I have! While I would have loved some of that do-nothing artisan bread this summer for tomato bruschetta, I couldn't stand the thought of turning on the oven for that long. That has changed! Hooray!

So let's hear it? What are you now willing to cook, thanks to the change into the cooler weather of autumn?

Wednesday Fun: The Return is Foretold!

Hello, all! I hope you had a great summer. I was nearly buried under the weight of tomatoes from our garden, but managed to pull through. :) Thanks for bearing with me during the summer hiatus. Life just got too busy & hot to think about cooking much, but now that it's cooling down again, I'm raring to go.

Let me tell you my thoughts...

I like themes. They make it easier for me to come up with ideas instead of sitting down with a blank page every week. So, October's theme is going to be "Pumpkins & Other Hard/Winter Squash." NOT THAT THE THEME SHOULD LIMIT YOU!!! Got a good recipe or link or question? Post away!

The first Wednesday of each month, I'll start with the theme & links to prior recipes, like I've done in the past when we begin a monthly theme. I like seeing and highlighting what treasures we've already got here. Other weeks might have tidbits/trivia about the theme, a recipe related to it, or maybe some links or pictures or something.

Polls, especially theme-related ones, will likely run two weeks long to give folks more of a chance to weigh in their opinions. I might throw in an extra one here and there for fun and curiosity.

Looking forward, November's theme will be "The Other Red Meat(s)." (Yes, it may have something to do with us soon to be getting some lamb for our freezer, as you might have read over at House of 42 Doors. Feel free to start coming up with some good lamb/mutton recipes for me now, ok?) I'm thinking "Traditional Holiday Favorites" for December, but do speak up in the comments if you've got ideas/suggestions for themes, please. For a list of a lot of the previous themes, go here.

Ok, looking forward to seeing you all back here on Wednesdays! Hooray!

Wednesday Fun going on Hiatus

Ok, gang, I love y'all, but it's too hot to cook. It's too hot to THINK about cooking. It's especially too hot to try to be creative about food and cooking.

Therefore, Wednesday Fun is going to be taking a bit of a summer hiatus (and sanity break). If you've got comments about what you like about WF, what you'd like to see come the fall, or would like to volunteer to take a month or a monthly series (like ShoNuff's restaurant reviews, but whatever you'd like), please let me know.

OF COURSE, please do feel free to keep posting recipes, questions, cool food links, etc.!!!!

See you in the fall!

Wednesday Fun #139 - Very Many Veggies!

Ok, gang, in honor of July's theme being "Vegetable Side Dishes," I'd like to hear how many vegetables you can name! I mean, there are a LOT of vegetables in this world! Don't forget that you get extra bonus cool points if your veggies all relate in some way - all orange, start with the same letter or sound, all stalks or roots, whatever.

Name (at least) 3 vegetables!

Wednesday Fun #138 - I scream, you scream...

Happy Official Summer to you all! And it wouldn't be summer around here without the ice cream truck comin' 'round. With its song. And the resulting excitement and begging. :)

That's ok - growing up in the country, an ice cream truck is still an exciting novelty to me. So we do sometimes get ice cream (even though, oh, the prices!) Penguin almost always gets the same thing - a Dora-shaped ice cream bar with gumball eyes. Pumpkin usually gets something new - an ice cream sandwich, a crunch bar, a chocolate brownie cone... Me? Well, I usually just take a taste of the girls, but I'm a die-hard ice-cream-chocolate-combo girl, so I go for the classic ice cream sandwich, or drumstick, or similar.

How about you? If the ice cream truck
comes calling, what might you get?

Wednesday Fun #137 - How well do you know your spring veg?

Last Thursday we got our first CSA box of the year! Hooray! As always, the first boxes tend to be lighter, so it's about what we expected. Now that it's our third year with this, we can often identify everything in our box right away, but I wonder how many you can get. Granted, we can touch, taste & smell these all & you're going from a picture, but I wonder...

...how many of these items can YOU name?
(Bonus points for #4 possible since there are several kinds here.)

Wednesday Fun #136 - Memorable Matrimonial Meals

This past weekend Mr. Kluges and I attended a wedding. It was a very nice wedding with the reception held at a fancy golf course & country club. Main dishes were sea bass, chicken stuffed with crab, or prime rib. Nice!

So when I got to thinking about this week's WF, I was wondering about what outstanding or memorable wedding reception meals you've had. Any real stand-outs? Maybe extra fancy or creative & fun or incredibly thematic or even amazingly awful... Let's hear about it!

Wednesday Fun #135 - Recipe Round-up

Ok, y'all, May's theme was a Cookbook Challenge - to make a new recipe out of a favorite cookbook. I did mine already (and I'm so glad I did! YUM!!!), and it sounds like ShoNuff did, too. How about you? If so, let us know how it went! If not, why not this week? You've chosen your cookbook already (right?), so go grab it, look though the index OR the table of contents OR the pretty pictures and pick one. Leave the name in the comments, and you'll be that much closer to making it happen!

(If you're really feeling on the ball, go ahead and put the ingredients on your shopping list and you'll be golden!)

Wednesday Fun #134 - Gonna Garden?

Alright, I was working on my weekly fun post, but got a little long-winded, so I just cut-pasted all that and moved it over to my poor, sadly-neglected Musings & Mutterings. I don't know what it's going to think of actual words, not pictures, but it'll manage. So if you want my preliminary thoughts & lead-in to the question, look there! :)

The meat of the matter
(or the vegetable of it, more accurately), is...

Are you planting a garden this year?
If so, what's going in it?

Wednesday Fun #133 - Which Cookbook?

Ok, y'all. I'm challenging you to make something NEW out of your favorite cookbook during May. Now, I know that it can be a daunting prospect, but you gotta start small. How 'bout this? Just pick your cookbook! So, today's Wednesday Fun question is...

Out of which cookbook are YOU picking your new recipe?

Me? Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2002. I think I've even chosen one!

Wednesday Fun #132 - May's Cookbook Challenge

Ok, gang, I know I'm a little late getting this week's WF out, but it's my only day this entire week when I don't have house guests! (In-laws left yesterday, my folks arrive tomorrow late.) But that's ok! Because I really like my idea for May's theme/today's WF!

It's a Cookbook Challenge!

Sometime in May, I'd like you to take your favorite cookbook (or one of them anyway) and choose a new recipe out of it you've never done before. Maybe you're like me and get stuck in a rut. Maybe you've always wanted to try this one recipe but it seems too expensive/challenging/you're-always-missing-one-key-ingredient. Maybe you've just never ventured past a certain page or out of "main dishes" or whatever.

But you know, you love this cookbook. You might as well try a new promising recipe out of it, don't you think?


If it's awesome, post the recipe here on Recipeeps. If it's not, well, then just leave a comment here or post us a "Tales from the Kitchen" story.

Wednesday Fun #131 - Grocery "Get Me"s

Wednesdays (as we may have discussed earlier) are my normal shopping days. I write up my list and all that, keep an eye on the specials, maybe even have some coupons along. Virtuous shopper, right?

Cheetos are never on the list, yet somehow they manage to sneak into my cart a higher-than-my-scale-would-like percentage of the time. As do Sun Chips (do I thank Nectarine's husband or curse him for introducing me to the Garden Salsa variety? YUM!). And every now and again maybe some donut holes...

You get the picture. Make me feel better - tell me YOUR grocery "get me!" items!

Wednesday Fun #130 - Favorite French Fries

Last night's recipes were both a big success! Hooray! Now, one was for oven-fried chicken and the other was garlic fries (minus the garlic step considering my audience!), so nothing too exotic or complicated, but both were delicious... and both were from Cooking Light.

It got me thinking... I'm usually a big ol' fat potato-y steak fries lover, or those Ore-Ida Crispers, but these were excellent (and yeah, I'll post the recipe), and maybe my new favorites. Who knew Yukon Gold potatoes, oil & salt could be so delicious?!

How about you? What's your favorite French fry?

Wednesday Fun #129 - Go Get Good Groceries!

Wednesdays are my grocery shopping day currently. That'll change once our CSA deliveries start up again this summer, but for now, that's the routine. Then, my menu planning will have to become a lot more flexible depending on what we get in our boxes, and with nobody in school and nice weather, we'll probably bike to the local store a few times a week and do smaller amounts each time. ('Cuz not that much fits in the back of the bike trailer!)

As I was putting away the groceries & pondering this week's Wednesday Fun, it got me wondering how you all do your shopping. Are you a once-a-week-big-trip? A pick-up-on-the-way-home-what-I-want-for-supper-tonight? Do a monthly big shopping trip, then only milk & such until the next month? Do all the shopping for your household yourself or share the duties? Shop early, shop late, shop on the weekend, shop during the week? Live for double-coupon day?

Lemme know - what's YOUR shopping routine?

Wednesday Fun #128 - Moscow on the Hill Review

Well this is going to be the end. I've exhausted the TC restaurants I needed to mention... except for one. Moscow on the Hill is located in a great old neighborhood in St. Paul. The area (in driving and walking through it) really has the feel of an area you don't feel the need to leave to be entertained. However, I don't think I could live there because Moscow on the Hill would be the end of me... but what a great way to go!

I've only tried a few different dishes there because I can't stop getting the Czar's Medallions. These are so creamy and delicious... yum, yum, yum. I've also had the Beef Stroganoff which is also fabulous. I've really enjoyed everything I've had there though none of it is what I would call "light". Everything is rich and heavy and complex flavored. Great comfort/winter food.

One of the really cool things... They do Vodka Flights!!! I haven't had the chance to try one of these yet (no designated drive when I've gone) but I really want to. They are also one of the places I've heard about as a great Martini bar. Wow I want a drink.

The thing I think is coolest about Moscow on the Hill is the ability to make everything and everyone seem welcome and fun. I mentioned the Martini bar... well it has that hip feel... it also totally work for me to go to with my mom and a number of my friends (we would probably not be call hip in most groups). Of course I have also seen large families there, with three or four generations represented. The best recommendation I can give is that I've heard a number of older (grandma + aged) women speaking Russian (and drinking lots of vodka) and enjoying time at Moscow on the Hill.

Wednesday Fun #127 - More Eastery Sweetness!

Ok, I've been enjoying hearing from all you 'peeps re: peeps. I knew there were strong opinions out there! Now all this sugary talk has got me thinking about another Easter goodie... the traditional, ubiquitous jelly bean. I myself ADORE the black ones, enjoy quite a lot of the Jelly Belly brands, will eat the more flavored (as opposed to just sugar-tasting) regular ones, but HATE HATE HATE the wrongness of Jelly Belly's buttered popcorn flavored ones*. Just, no. Yick. No.

How about you? Are you a black-jelly-bean-eater, too? Only like the pinks? Adore those disgusting buttered-popcorn* abominations? Make it a habit to eat your jelly beans one color at a time? Grab 'em by the handful from your Easter basket and only pause to pick out the strands of Easter grass that've come along for the ride? Tell us about you and the beans!


*I think it's the texture. Buttered popcorn flavor & squish DO NOT go together! Yuck!

Wednesday Fun #126 - Pro or Con?

There are some subjects about which people often have strong opinions. Religion, politics... peeps. To some, they are small, sugary delights, once available only at Easter, now available practically year-round. Sure, their devotees might divide into the stale vs. fresh camps, but that's merely a small matter of orthodoxy. Then you've got the people who find peeps absolutely disgusting and can't imagine why anybody would voluntarily ingest those overly-colored, sugar-coated, marshmallow gut-bombs.

Now, you won't find me bringing up either politics or religion much on my blogs, but yeah, I wanna know what you think about this one...

Peeps:
Manna from Heaven
or
Tool of the Devil?

Discuss!

Wednesday Fun #125 - Name Three Irish Beverages

And a happy St. Patrick's Day to ye all! Whether you're wearing the green today or not, I still want to hear from you!

Name (at least) 3 Irish beverages you've had.*

(Not necessarily today... but I guess it might be if you're getting an early start!)

*Ok, to get you started, you've likely had Guinness, but what about any Irish whiskeys? or other Irish beers? or any fizzy drinks there - Cidona or Club Orange? Maybe black currant juice like Ribena? or good ol' Barry's Tea?