The Indecisive Artist

A Recipe Card

Earlier in December I joined a digital recipe card swap where the participants would create a digital recipe card and everyone would get a copy of the file to be printed later. Think of it as a pretty recipe card, done much the way you'd scrapbook a layout. I got 67 fun new recipes done in a 4x6 size, so I can either print them of at home or upload them to a photo service. Because they are 4x6, they will be pretty affordable to reprint. :)

So on New Years' Eve, I cooked our traditional NYE meal: chicken carbonara. It's a recipe that is sooo good and sooo easy, but it requires ingredients I don't normally shop for and has about a billion calories a serving, so we save it for a special occasion. I think this is the third year in a row we've made it for New Years' Eve. I guess it's a tradition now. :)

So I can never remember exactly how I made it previously, and I don't remember whose recipe I use - Rachel Ray, Giada de Laurentiis, or someone else... so I decided it needed a recipe card (plus, I never follow their recipes exactly... I do my own thing with it). And since I was fresh off of making them for my swap, it was a piece of cake!

So I've decided to share the card with you.

 

Don't freak at the amount of heavy ingredients. It's sooo worth it. It's not something you'd eat every week, just once in awhile, so a little cream and egg yolk is justifiable, don't you think?

Here's a link to the full-size file for you to use:

http://www.4shared.com/file/78986565/7a3f113c/CarbonaraRecipebyDenisew_copy.html

The recipe card was predesigned by As You Wish Designs at Shabby Pickle, so if you want to try the cards out for yourself, it doesn't get any easier than buying her files!

Jacuzzi Winery

I very much meant to post these winery posts sooner, but things have been hectic. Then, when I did have some time to post, wouldn't you know that my computer died. Well, not the computer, but the power cord. It's not very old either. It just wouldn't work, and without a power cord, there was no way to charge the battery on my laptop. So I headed to Best Buy last night to get myself a new power cord. I didn't want to wait for Dell to determine what was wrong and hope they'd send a replacement. I couldn't wait that long!! Ok so patience is not my strong suit. And just to give you an indication of HOW impatient I am... Best Buy ranks second in my book of all places I despise shopping. (Wally World is numero uno.)

But now I have power. I don't even want to say how much that purchase set me back. Yikes.

Anyway, here are some photos from the Jacuzzi Winery in Sonoma. This was the first winery we visited during our stay. It was just a few miles from the hotel and we got there about an hour before they closed.

I have to say this was probably my favorite place we visited. It was hard because I knew it was the first visit, I didn't want to go to ga-ga over what was there knowing full well that the next winery might be even better. LOL. But I think the reason I liked this one the best was because the wines here were Italian, not Californian. And I prefer Italian reds to California reds, generally speaking. There was one wine we tried there (the name escapes me but it was nothing I had ever heard of) that was so delicious. You know how they have different flavors and tastes they use to describe wines? Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that I think it's a bunch of hoo haa. When I drink wine, I taste wine. LOL.  But this wine was different. It had a finishing taste that reminded me of toasted marshmallows. It was sooooo delicious! I have a couple bottles arriving here soon. Can't wait to drink those babies!

 

This is the Jacuzzi Winery and the Olive Press. I don't know if they actually make the wine there as I didn't see any of that stuff... but the grapes are growing right behind the building. We actually saw this place before we got to the hotel, and I knew I wanted to visit it. Just look at all that Italian looking architecture.

View of the courtyard behind the building. It was sooo pretty here. It was such a beautiful day. Jay sat inside tasting wine while I journeyed outside and around the grounds for some camera time.

Before we tasted wine, we tasted olive oil. DELICIOUS!!!! Each of those silver canisters is a different flavor of olive oil, with the lightest on the right and the spiciest on the left. The one on the left end was so peppery it left tears in your eyes and burning in your throat! We were not prepared for that one! We ended up buying a bottle of the mildest flavor.

Just some of the wines on the shelf. They had the most gorgeous gift shop. I could have spent a fortune. Pottery and kitchen stuff.... oh it was heavenly. The Olive Press (where they sold olive oil) had a bunch of homemade soap and bath goods. It was tempting, but I was content just to smell and not buy. I can make my own olive oil soap. ;)

Finally, this is a fountain out off the courtyard. It was beautiful. Behind this were the vineyards. You can sorta see them in the photo, though it's hard to tell from the photo that that is what they are. Those hills in the background? Napa Valley lies on the other side.  We had to drive around them to get to Napa, even though it was probably just a few miles as the crow flies.

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At this rate it's going to take me months to post photos from all the places we visited. :)

Quick Post Trip Post

Only have a few minutes for a quick post. We were without internet at home until yesterday, so I wasn't able to post a summary of our California trip until now. And since the hotel in Sonoma wanted $10 a day for internet, I didn't have internet access on the trip, either. So much for keeping the blog updated with photos!

Anyway, the trip was awesome. The weather was beautiful - except for Saturday when it rained. We got to see fog in San Francisco as we drove back in to town over the Golden Gate bridge. Sonoma was rural and peaceful and beautiful. Napa was crazy busy with people. The wineries were not snobby at all.... we didn't feel one bit out of place. (We were actually a little nervous about that.) Some of the buildings/grounds at the wineries were literally castles. Amazing stuff.

Gas was $4.14 a gallon. Our rental car was a Kia Optima. (My husband 'forgot' to rent a car before we left, so when we walked to the car rental place - all three of them - Thursday morning, no one had any cars available, which isn't surprising, since San Fran is sooo hard to park in, it's not like they keep lots of extra cars on hand for crazy tourists to just rent at the spur of the moment. Anyway, since we paid $400 a night for the hotel on Fisherman's Wharf, we decided to get our money's worth, and we put the concierge to work finding us a rental car while we toured the city. :)  And luckily, he found us the Kia at Enterprise. At least it got good mileage. :)  )

We visited 10 wineries in total. Loved them all. They were all different - some had amazing wines, some had amazing views, some had amazing grounds. Some were all of the above.

I will have to double-check the final count, but I do believe I took close to 1100 pictures over the course of the trip. Not all are keepers, of course. :) But I had a goal of 1000 photos (or 200 a day), so I'm quite satisfied. Here's one from dinner Saturday night at the hotel's restaurant. The wine we purchased just minutes before at the coop tasting room on the hotel grounds. The restaurant waived the corkage fee since it was purchased there, and because we were already at the hotel and done driving for the night, I was able to enjoy more than just a sip!

We purchased a couple of cases of wine and had them shipped back here, so they should be making their arrival some time next week. I can't wait!

I'm a little sad that our vacation is over - the time went so quickly! And now it's back to reality. Of course, Jay and I are already talking about "when can we go back?" :)

More Cake

I have to share a photo of the big honkin cake I made for my course 3 final. This sucker took 6 cake mixes, 5 pudding cups, 18 eggs, plus lots of powdered sugar and crisco. Not to mention, TIME. LOL. But it was fun. Well, kinda. LOL. It was fun to finish it. Making it and frosting it were a little more work than I was prepared for.

The top layer is an 8x8x4 cake. (Two 8x8x2 cake pans, with the layers put together.) The bottom layer is a 12x12x4 cake. (Again, a 12x12x2 cake pan baked twice.)

I decided to try a chocolate buttercream frosting for the bottom. It was sooo good. It's all I can do to not eat the leftover frosting in an attempt to cure my PMS. LOL.

I wasn't sure how I was going to decorate it. My original idea was to make some daisies, but I didn't prepare any daisies ahead of time... so I went with the drop flowers.

And the frosting is a little cracked on the cake... all that moving around, plus my lack of experience... learning things the hard way! But I think for my first tiered cake, I'm happy with it. (I just wished I had made smaller dots on the top cake.)

I have one more cake class to make it thru. This one will have us doing more stuff with fondant and gum paste and making more fancy stuff with which to top our cakes.

Get this, though... I brought the cake in to work one day and just set it out in the public 'free for consumption' area. I didn't have to encourage people to eat it. But the end of the day there was only a single piece left. :D It's so nice to let other people consume the calories!

Now I'm off to make a last-minute birthday cake for my mother in law. It's baked and cooling. Just need to frost. Maybe I'll attempt those daisies again. :)

I want to be the girl with the most cake

I have had that song playing in my head ever since I started taking the Wilton cake decorating classes at Michaels a couple of months ago. Tonight I started course 3 in the series. It's a lot of fun, but honestly, all the Crisco I'm using is grossing me out a little bit. *LOL*

Anyway, we made a FANCY cake for a course 2 class final, so I thought I'd share a pretty photo of it here.

This is a double layer oval cake. It is just a single cake mix, but a TON of frosting! First there's a layer of plain buttercream on the cake, which we then covered with the basketweave. Now that basketweave sure looks difficult, and I'm not going to share just how easy it was and give away any secrets. Let me just say that I was skeptical at first, but once I learned the trick, it was easy as could be. Just time consuming.... well, not too time consuming because this instant-gratification gal found it still enjoyable enough to consider making more basketweave cakes.

Once the basketweave was done, we added rope borders to the top and bottom edges. That's a lot of frosting.

The pretty flowers were done over the course of a couple of weeks using royal icing - which contains NO grease. In other words, the flowers are fat free. LOL. Just a ton of sugar to send you into a diabetic coma. But they dry hard, can be stored for weeks, and are still completely edible. We just stacked flowers on until it looked done enough, and then added some green flowers in between them all for a little fill.

If I can do this, anyone can do this. I'm soooo not good at it, but I've always wanted to learn. And I can say I'm really enjoying the learning. Plus, it gives me a good excuse to bake more cake. :)