Runaway October

When­ever any­one asks me where I’d like to eat for din­ner, the first thing to pops into my head is Out­back Steak­house. I’ve had Prime Rib from many many places but I pre­fer it from Out­back by far. I guess you could call me an Out­back Prime Rib fan­girl, I’ll never tire of eat­ing there!

Not too long ago I decided I needed to change things up and order some­thing dif­fer­ent. I set­tled on the Shrimp En Fuego. It’s a lovely com­bi­na­tion of Shrimp, Mush­rooms and Toma­toes in a spicy cream sauce served over an open baked potato. Yum, huh? It seems that when we eat out, I almost always get some­thing heavy in mush­rooms since Matt refuses to eat them.

(Photo by Sarah Caron)

Since we don’t often eat out, I decided I’d try and wing it at home after find­ing a great sale on shrimp. The Inter­nets weren’t so help­ful for a recipe, so I gath­ered all the tips I could find about it and dived in. I can’t tell you how alike it is com­pared to Outback’s because I don’t have the option to try them next to eat other, but it turned out really good. Spicy.

Shrimp En Fuego

Serves 4, dou­bles perfectly

Ingre­di­ents:

• 4 Baked pota­toes, prefer­ably with the skin salted and oiled
• 1  jar Cheesy Ragu Clas­sic Alfredo Sauce (I was lazy and didn’t make my own)
• 1 Table­spoon Chipo­tle Chili Powder
• 3 table­spoon Chili Gar­lic Sauce (Com­monly called Rooster Sauce, and found in the eth­nic food sec­tion of most markets)
• 1 pound fresh shrimp (frozen may be sub­sti­tuted, if thawed), deveined and tails removed.
• 1 pound mush­rooms
• 2 cloves gar­lic, minced or pressed
• Salt and Pepper
• 1 pack­age cherry toma­toes, halved.

Prepa­ra­tion:

1. Pre­heat oven to 350°F.
2. Scrub pota­toes and poke with a fork a cou­ple times. Rub the out­sides with olive oil then roll or rub with medium grind sea salt. Place in oven and cook until desired doneness.
3. When pota­toes are almost done, com­bine alfredo sauce, chipo­tle pow­der, and chili gar­lic sauce in a medium sauce pan. Warm over medium heat, stir­ring occasionally.
4. If you wish, the amount of chipo­tle and chili sauce can be adjusted now. I had to keep the spices low or The Hubs and The Boys wouldn’t eat it.
   

   My food pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t very good, but you get the idea.

5. While sauce is warm­ing, sauté shrimp, mush­rooms and minced gar­lic over medium high heat until shrimp is pink and mush­rooms are ten­der. Add salt and pep­per to taste.
6. If you wish, you can add the sauce to the pan of shrimp and mush­rooms, mix­ing every­thing together, or keep them sep­a­rate. Place open potato on a plate, layer with shrimp and mush­rooms, then sauce with halved toma­toes on top. (It looks bet­ter that way. For the ease of feed­ing my horde I mix every­thing together.)
7. Don’t for­get to turn off the oven.
8. Enjoy!

Here we go…

Quinalt Straw­ber­ries

Sparkler Radishes (Radii?) hid­ing under the Choco­late Basil

Dill

Bush Beans stand­ing tall

Pur­ple Cone­flower Echi­nacea. Maybe some­day. If they feel like it.

Smith & Hawken Birdfeeder

Mush­room Bird Feeder

Pink Polka Dot Plant, Too cute not to include!

White Moon­flower

Mul­ti­col­ored Lantana

In the 12^th cen­tury Macer wrote that merely look­ing at the Marigold plant would improve the eye­sight and lighten the mood.

African Daisy

More African Daisies

Pink Chablis decid­ing it might be time to come out and play

Pur­ple Alstroemeria

Pur­ple Lilac Vine

What have you got growin’ on lately?

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I think this is the ear­li­est in the year that I’ve had a tan. But for good rea­son! My gar­den beds are pretty much done except for a few tweaks here and there.

My won­der­ful hus­band was patient enough to put these together for me yes­ter­day. I only nagged a lit­tle.

Once done, we ran to Home Depot and picked out soil. Not organic, but you make due with what you have. We chose to use the old “2 of every­thing” plan for soil since we didn’t have the resources to go pick up all the free “fer­til­izer” to be found on Craigslist.

Adding soil is seri­ous busi­ness in need of dou­ble super­vi­sion. Obviously.

Nice butt! –wolf whistle–

All filed and ready to plant. There was an irri­ga­tion drip line run­ning under the pre-existing gar­den that we were unaware of. Matt sliced it with the shovel when turn­ing over the dirt. We decided to bring it up and use it instead of just replac­ing the leaky sec­tion. I still need to run lines to each plant, but that’s easy. That’s what the black tub­ing is run­ning along the fence.

Here’s what I’ve got to work with. I had planned on using mainly seeds, but I was wor­ried that by the time they sprouted and had started to set fruit that the heat would make them go dormant.

Planted. Yay! We’ve got 13 tomato plants (Roma, Heir­loom Brandy­wine and Super 100 Cher­ries), Car­rots, Bush Beans, Dill, and Leeks in one bed. Pick­ling Cucum­bers, Jalapenos, Habaneros, Cowhorn Pep­pers, Crook­neck Squash, Hon­ey­dew, Ste­via, Cin­na­mon Basil, Spearmint and Cilantro in the other.

I still need to plant these straw­ber­ries in a con­tainer. They seem to do bet­ter when I can move them around as needed. And find some­one who wants to pro­vide these hon­ey­dews with a home.

See that bird­feeder on the left there? My MIL bought it for me.

So there’s my spring gar­den for the year. At this rate I wont even need sun­screen when we tube down the river this year.

What are you plant­ing this year?

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These lit­tle guys were will­ing to brave the Ari­zona rain to get at the pinecone bird feed­ers the boys and I made the other day. The first batch sat for a week or two before the birds found them, but now it’s like Tem­ple­ton at the Fair.

And this lit­tle boy was will­ing to brave the rain too!

Good thing Fable was keep­ing this spot warm for him.

Fin­ished this scarf today. Can’t decide if I like it nor not? It’s at least 8 foot long, and I’m not even going to men­tion what my brother said about it. Well, maybe. He com­pared it to parts of the female anatomy. What a butthead.

Made my first batch of Sour­dough Bread ever today. It’s so yummy. One of the least finnicky breads I’ve worked with, surprisingly.

I went to check my email and one of the loaves was hoovered down in sec­onds flat. Mostly by afore­men­tioned brother. Butthead.

There is NO Typo. :/

And last, but not least, I finally got around to pack­ag­ing up a Valentine’s Day Sur­prise for a cer­tain spe­cial some­one. Do you know who you are?

And this con­cludes our semi-rainy Wednes­day  stuck at home. Tell me about yours!

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Please don’t for­get to vote for me daily, if you would be so kind. Thank you!

Not too long ago we bought two sets of the Svala table and chairs from IKEA for our “play­room”. I was kinda bummed they came unfin­ished but then got excited that I could do what­ever I wanted with them. I mean, who doesn’t dream of this per­fectly coör­di­nated play­room that looks like it came straight out of a Pot­tery Barn or Montes­sori guidebook?

Svala from Ikea

The kids had dif­fer­ent ideas, as usual. Within a few days they had scrib­bled all over the top with crayons and who-knows-what. Even the table legs had been col­ored on. I’m totally psy­ched with the cre­ativ­ity com­ing from these two lit­tle boys. Psy­ched. Too bad they didn’t con­sult me first because their art­work totally didn’t go with my Pot­tery Barn color schemes.

Daisy Dreams lam­i­nated cotton

I recently came across a tuto­r­ial for an oil­cloth table cover from Twig & This­tle, that I thought was a great idea for the boys’ work­space. I had some oil­cloth that I picked up from my favoritest fab­ric coop but it was very girly.

Then it occured to me that I had a yard of chalk­cloth in my stash. That would be per­fect! It’s fairly water resis­tant for spills and such, and I could whip out the chalks when the kids were bored. Score!

Kathleen’s tuto­r­ial included adorable lit­tle scal­lops around the edge, which I thought would be okay if done in a nice manly color, like black

chalk­cloth. But man, chalk­cloth is hard to work with. I didn’t have quite enough to cover both tables sep­a­rately so I did one cover for both tables pushed together.

I ended up just hav­ing straight edges with a lit­tle bit of dec­o­ra­tive stitch­ing.  I think it turned out pretty good and the kids have throughly tested it. Heck I even ended up eat­ing on it last night because we had a HUGE crowd to feed last night.

Chalk­cloth Table Topper

Pretty Col­ors

This is seri­ous business…

(Declan was still napping)

So if you’re in need of some­thing sim­i­lar head on over to Twig & This­tle for the exact instruc­tions. Or you can check out Oil­cloth Addict for a no sew cus­tom chalk­cloth table top­per, also.