Avocado: fruit or vegetable?

Notes to remember:

My mom keeps making this great lime chicken, which mostly involves sauteeing chicken breasts in butter, lime juice, and garlic powder. I added avocado to mine, yum!

Also made a really quick avocado smoothie with avocado, milk, and chocolate syrup, all mashed up and dumped in a cup drizzled with more chocolate. If I felt like getting the blender dirty I'd blend it all up with ice, but I'm just too lazy tonight.

I think I'll fix something for John and Betsie on Sunday and leave it in their fridge for them to find when they get hungry (after they fly back from Texas). I'm leaning toward lime chicken with avocado and my favorite fruit salad. I wonder if those two would go together at all...guess I'll try it and find out. Oh, and I'll add some grape tomatoes to the chicken, because there are a thousand of them coming off Betsie's plants. Yeah. We'll see what happens.

Chilled Cucumber Soup with Smoked Salmon and Dill

1 1/2 tbsp butter
1 cup onions, chopped
4 cucumbers, peeled, halved, seeded, cut into 1/2-inch-thick slices (about 5 cups)
1 8-oz russet potato, peeled, cut into 1/2-inch dice
3 1/2 cups chicken broth
3 large fresh dill sprigs
6 tbsp fresh dill, minced
1 tsp salt to taste
1 cup crème fraîche or sour cream
3 oz smoked salmon, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add onions and sauté until slightly softened, about 3 minutes. Add cucumbers and potato; stir 1 minute. Add broth, dill sprigs, and salt. Increase heat and bring to simmer. Reduce heat to low; cover and simmer until cucumbers and potato are tender, stirring occasionally, about 25 minutes. Working in batches, purée soup in food processor until smooth. Return to pot. Cool 15 minutes. Whisk in 1/2 cup sour cream and 4 tbsp minced dill. Cover and chill until cold, about 4 hours. Serve with a dollop of sour cream in center of each bowl; sprinkle with smoked salmon and remaining minced dill.

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Another excellent recipe from epicurious.com that did not taste at all like I expected. Apparently crème fraîche is like fancier, whippable sour cream. Also take note of the pureeing the soup in BATCHES; I have a bad habit of overfilling my food processor and leaking liquid whatever all over the place. The smoked salmon goes really well with the dill and everything, although if you leave the leftovers mixed together in the refrigerator as I did, the soup sucks all the flavor out of the salmon and you get slices of tasteless, very oddly textured orange stuff instead. Not terrible, but it was surprising.

Hogwarts Sweets

Late as usual! For the Harry Potter premier, I used recipes from britta.com although I just came across this post on yumsugar.com with more cute ideas. I hope to try them all eventually, and I can't wait till pumpkins are in season to try juicing them.

Anyway, I'm not going to post all the recipes individually, but here's what I made (with Ellen's help):

Cauldron cakes - handles kept falling out so I glued them on with chocolate. They were good, but they smash easily.

Licorice wands - red and black with white and dark chocolate. I like the rainbow + sprinkles idea.

Cockroach clusters - I would crush up the chow mein noodles a little more next time or maybe use rice krispies or something. Oh, and I used peanut butter and chocolate chips. They were basically haystacks, but shhh!

Butterbeer - a big hit with Betsie and me, although no one else would try it. I drank all mine cold, but I can't wait till this winter when I can drink it hot and fizzy. Mmmm! Made with homemade butterscotch sauce too! Britta's recipe was really just inspiration since I can neither buy nor leave the house with butterscotch schnapps, and I don't know where to find butterscotch flavoring. Lots of other recipes mix cream soda or root beer (hmm) with butterscotch sauce, so I just did that. Some actually just mixed butterscotch and milk like hot chocolate butterscotch. That sounds good and warm, but I think I would die of sweetness.

Edit: Yesterday I mixed 12 oz of cream soda and about 1.5 oz of butterscotch sauce in a saucepan and heated it (although I couldn't find my hand mixer or egg beater to make it frothy), which was delicious. I can imagine that would be heavenly during the cold winter. Also, drinking it hot kept the butter in the butterscotch from separating like it did when it was cold. That wasn't so bad though; it would make this delicate foam on the top that just melted in your mouth. I also saw a recipe that involved mixing the butter, cream, sugar, and cream soda all together before cooking it. I wonder how that would change the taste/consistency. Whenever I use up all the butterscotch I already have, I'll give that a try.

Acid whizbees - the most interesting creation by far, which I decided must be a mix of acid pops and fizzing whizbees. I couldn't find pop rocks or sour lollipops/hard candy, so I bought shock tarts and sour nerds. I stuck 'em in a double boiler on the stove and experimented with melting- always an adventure! The nerds didn't really melt, so I just crushed them up and mixed them with the shock tarts, which mushed up beautifully. I made them into little balls (which stuck to the waxed paper, but I'll use a candy mold or something next time) and covered them in white chocolate. I thought they would end up like jawbreakers, but they were delightfully soft when I bit into one, and very sour! I mixed the remaining nerds with white and dark swirled chocolate and made little blobs with those, and then coated the rest of the shock tarts in chocolate as well. What can I say, I was getting lazy.

Edit: Betsie informed me that the swirly chocolate with nerds mixed in was the best- and that it was quite a surprise! That, of course, was the point. =) I'm thinking that chocolate with pop rocks and sour nerds, maybe molded into cuter shapes than squashed swirly things will be my best bet for fizzing whizbees. I need to just order a crate of pop rocks. I hope they never stop making them...that would be a very sad day.

I liked the way these last turned out a lot, especially the surprise of the sour center when your mouth thinks it's eating chocolate. Even the nerds aren't sour until you bite down. If I had pop rocks, I'd probably just mix them with chocolate like always and make little blobs. Actually, I would love to do the shock tart center with pop rocks around that or mixed in with the chocolate coating. That would be a surprise!

Sorry, no pictures. Britta's are all better anyway. I was hoping to get some pictures with my friends when they were eating their little goody bags that I packed for them, but no one else seemed quite as excited about them as I was. I should expect that. =p I am going to try pumpkin pasties as soon I feel up to making pie crust (Would you believe that I could not find a single can of pumpkin anywhere I looked?? Insane...) and experiment with cream soda and butterscotch. And maybe some treacle. I was so excited to find out that that's just molasses, although I'm not really sure how I feel about molasses tarts. Or fudge o.O

Thoughts on the movie here. I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers. Also soon I hope I can start on my Marauder's Map. I just need to decide on a few things...such as what I'm making a map of and what random Latin words to scribble all over it. But this isn't food! Must not...corrupt...blog... ^^

Hogwarts, Hogwarts, Hogwarty Hogwarts, teach us something please!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is coming out tomorrow night! I'm going to see it with some of my friends, and since I keep running into different Hogwarty recipes online, I decided to try some of them. So this morning I made butterscotch sauce for butterbeer and tonight Ellen and I made cauldron cakes, licorice wands, acid sour candy things (sort of a desperate combination of fizzing whizbees and acid pops, and cockroach clusters. I can't wait to sneak them into the theater and give them to everyone. =D I'll post recipes and pictures tomorrow, but I've been neglecting my LJ for way too long. I'm going to give that some love tonight.

another week

My dad made some kind of creamy turkey noodles for dinner tonight. I don't know what all's in it; I was asleep when he made it. But it was really good and I ate most of it, so I just added to what was left for lunch tomorrow. Over angel hair pasta, there's a little turkey etc. left, now mixed with soy sauce omelette and mushrooms and onions sauteed in butter and cream. The bits I had were yummy!

One of my favorite ways to cook eggs (besides soft-boiled) is with a little soy sauce and sesame oil mixed in. It gives it such a nice salty flavor, and it's easy and fits in with lots of other stuff. I also like the tamago omelette that you find with sushi, although I've only made it once. It's sweet and light (when you don't burn it) and seems like it would be a good accompaniment to cold noodles or something.

Fourth of July's this Wednesday. I think we're going to the park with a picnic to watch fireworks. Grandmom's making her father's potato salad (a recipe which has heretofore never been successfully copied by anyone else, although I am going to attempt it), mom's making blueberry muffins, and I'm making paprika fried chicken. I think we'll leave the guys in charge of desserts. ^^ In case you didn't get it, that was red white and blue food. Mmmm, that chicken was so good, I can't wait to have it again!