Family Date Day: Quarantine Arcade

With a pandemic outside our doors, our monthly family date days have become a challenge. This is inarguably the LEAST of our concerns right now. BUT with a son who is working long, physically demanding hours and a daughter who works even longer, mentally draining hours - we take our downtime very seriously. When the shelter-in-place order went through, the SECOND thing I asked my kids was, "What would you like to do about date-days?" And the answer after a few minutes of blank stares and shoulder shrugs was, "What about having an over-the-top game day?"

Family Game Day is a weekly event in our house. It's the first thing that gets added to the calendar each week, once we know what my son's work schedule will be. Every other week we flip-flop between "unplugged" when we play board and card games, and "plugged" when we compete in PS4 and Wii games. How do we change that into an event? The only thing I could think of was turning the living room into an arcade.

I was 4-14 during the '80s. Arcades and arcade games were absolutely everywhere. But I didn't set foot in an arcade until I was 22, and I was in a Chuck E Cheese ONCE during the whole of the 1980s. Likewise, we never owned a gaming system when I was growing up. The closest I got to arcade games was the occasional game of Frogger on my cousin's Atari, and watching my Mummy play Mission Impossible on the Commodore 64 and purposefully running the agent down the shafts just to hear him scream again... and again... and again... So when my son developed a passion for vintage arcade games, I had extremely little experience with these blip-blip 8-bit noisemakers.

In my quest to transform the living room, I began with a pair of gift cards from MyPoints I'd been saving "for a rainy day." With these, I hunted about on Amazon and purchased teeny tiny tabletop versions of Skee Ball and Whack-A-Mole. These were for a new surprise and to help set the proper mood. A PS4 retro game (since I was informed that the one I THOUGHT we owned was for a console we got rid of years ago) and a new book of Mad Libs (for when mama's decrepit eyeballs can't stare at screens any longer) were added to the cart as well, along with some popcorn seasoning and a box each of movie-theater candies. All that needs to be purchased now is a pair of pizzas from our favorite pizza take-and-bake that happens to still be open and offers online ordering and contact-free pickup... AND just sent me a coupon!

Because I am a strong believer in ambiance when setting up these family fun events, I then pulled out the printer and got to work creating decorations... cheesy homemade 80's style. With the help of three vintage arcade-y free fonts from FontSpace I soon had enough printed goodies to color and cut, to fill an entire wall in the living room. Several hours and more than a little bit of cramped-hand later I was able to transform this...

into THIS!!!

 My son already owned a few things that made perfect decorations next to the TV, and I set up scoreboards for four different games along with a few movie suggestions that are theme and period-appropriate.

So this weekend, while we stay safe inside our home, we will be "at the arcade" - playing games, snacking on all sorts of goodies, laughing 'til our sides hurt at how terribly BAD mama truly is at arcade games, and watching retro movies.

It's not a trip to the zoo... but it's something to look forward to. Which is all we need for right now.

Scottish Fare: Irn Bru Recipe #2

Today I thought I'd try something naturally sweet with another bottle of our Scottish Irn Bru. I wanted to try cupcakes.

Due to pandemic-shortages at the store, it ended up being more prudent to make a poundcake. So Irn Bru poundcake, with Irn Bru icing it was.

Now to be fair, I have to admit that while I LOVE cake... I don't tend to prefer poundcake. It's a bit too sweet and far too rich for my everyday tastes. But in working with what I had on hand, I figured that cake was cake... and if I didn't end up liking it, there's a 24-year-old starveling in the house that will happily gobble up any baked goodie he sees lying around.

To keep things simple, I used a very simple recipe:
1 1/2 c gluten-free all-purpose flour
1 1/2 c raw sugar
 3/4 c softened butter
3 eggs
and 1/4 cup Irn Bru

Preheat oven to 310F and grease a bread pan (in hindsight, I should have also floured it!) then set aside.
Cream the butter and sugar, then slowly add the flour in thirds.
Add the eggs one a time, then pour in the Irn Bru and mix just until combined.
Pour into pan, and bake for 80 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

For the glaze, I mixed 2 Tbsp Irn Bru with 1 cup powdered sugar. (and only used half of it)

The cake did not rise quite as much as I wanted, but with gluten-free baking that's always a possibility. It had a beautiful buttery crispy crust on the top, but the minute I went to release it from the pan... the crust evaporated. (I did try a crumb, and yes it tastes positively divine!) And I didn't need nearly as much glaze as I'd made, but I am a frosting girl so that may be personal preference.

How did it taste? The cake itself was far more buttery than I wanted, and honestly, I couldn't taste the Irn Bru - it just tasted of sugar and butter. The texture was lovely, however; with a delicate melt-in-your-mouth crumb. The glaze itself DID taste of Irn Bru and was quite good - but when you mix a too-sweet drink with straight sugar, you get something that's painfully sweet. I paired the tiniest of slices with an extra-strong cup of Edinburgh tea and enjoyed it as a sugary sweet, rich buttery treat.


Would someone else like this? Absolutely! If you like rich, buttery sweet cake and soda-flavored glaze, this would be amazing. For me, I will stick to the occasional cupcake.

But it was a fun adventure. The color is a beautiful pale orange and the texture is divine... and while I personally would not choose to eat this, I am sure that my son will love it once he gets home from work. Because just between you and me... I made this for him. Unlike my daughter and me, HE likes poundcake... and his waistline will not suffer from eating an entire cake!

Garden 2020: When crisis inspires gardening

In times of crisis, people return to gardening. It happened in WWI and WWII with Victory Gardens, and it's happening this year with the current pandemic. Seed stores are selling out, and potting soil can't be found anywhere. The uncertainty of not knowing if the grocery store will have what we need when we visit, coupled with an urge to do SOMETHING when we feel as if the whole world is falling apart, seems to whisper to us the memories of our grandparents' yards - with their raspberry hedge bursting with juicy treasure, and neat rows of squash just waiting for the Thanksgiving table.

Gardening is known to be therapeutic. It has been proven to help reduce anxiety and depression, reduces stress, and can lower blood pressure. When special tools and care is taken, it can help keep fingers and wrists limber to slow the progression of arthritis, and it counts as low-impact exercise. Even if you yielded nothing else... wouldn't that be enough incentive to start a garden this year?

This is our 14th year of urban container gardening. Because I'm being asked a LOT of questions right now from people on multiple continents about our garden and how we do what we do... I wanted to start this year's gardening posts by sharing where we began. Because yes, our garden may look like we know what we're doing NOW... but it took us a LOOOONG time, and years of trials and errors to get here. Please, ask away. If I can help even one person avoid some of the mistakes we learned the hard way... that would absolutely make my day!


This is what our garden looked like near the end of the season, in 2007. The first photo is the "south half" and you can see: tomatoes that aren't planted deep enough and barely produced, pumpkins that never fruited, (though they did make a beautiful arbor!) and carrots that were tinier than a baby's pinkie and bitter when we finally picked them.

The second photo is the "north half" and here are: pumpkins that didn't get enough light and never grew, herbs that produced too MUCH and bolted before we could use them, and - honestly I've forgotten what we tried in the orange and black pots... it might have been peppers, or possibly salad greens. *shrugs* Whatever it was, however, you can clearly see that by August they had barely done a thing.

I want to share this because I've heard a few friends say that they lost interest in gardening when their first year didn't look like our 10th... 12th... 13th...

Please, don't compare and DON'T give up! This is where we started. This is what our first year looked like, and it has taken us 14 years of learning, failure, and slowly saving up to acquire some of the more pricey tools that we now have in our little oasis. Small space gardening IS worth it... but it takes time and patience. Two tomato plants in 5-gallon buckets and a pair of favorite herbs would be better than where we began. Start small. Learn slowly. And add one or two things each year.

For our garden this year, we are needing to make allowances as we may not be able to purchase our precious herbs. Life will go on, and we will plant what we can. We might have extra salad greens where the herbs would normally grow. Adaptations will be made, or we'll do without. But our 2020 oasis has begun.

Here is a quick sneak-peek at our 8'x16" deck garden as it sits mostly dormant, awaiting our Memorial Day planting this morning.

Scottish Fare: Imported Tea and Marmalade

This week we are continuing our adventure with imported goodies. Because we like tea so much, we chose Edinburgh looseleaf tea to try. And to go with the tea, some marmalade.

Why marmalade when I make my own? Because while marmalade has been made with quince fruit since Ancient Roman times... ORANGE marmalade, as it turns out, is legendarily Scottish!

This week I prepared breakfast for dinner. We love breakfast foods, but when your son works retail and a pandemic forces him to work overtime - breakfast looks like whatever I can bake with my eyes half-opened at 5am. So every few weeks or so, we have a full breakfast... at dinnertime.

For dinner, I made a broccoli and Dubliner cheese crustless quiche and our favorite oatmeal scones.

The scones are my own recipe. Years ago, when gluten-free foods were still more of a novelty and recipes were few and far between, I wanted a hearty breakfast scone rather than a cakelike dessert scone. But I couldn't find a single recipe! It took several tries, but here is our recipe:

1 1/2 c gluten-free oat flour
1 1/2 c gluten-free rolled oats
1/2 c potato starch
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 c applesauce (for extra protein, substitute 2 eggs)
2/3 c almond milk soured with
1/2 Tbsp lemon juice (for extra protein and probiotics, substitute 2/3 c buttermilk)

Preheat oven to 400F
Mix together dry ingredients, then add wet ingredients and mix just until blended.
Turn out onto a silpat or parchment-paper covered baking sheet and with greased hands, pat into a circle 3/4" thick. It WILL be wet!!!
Using a greased knife or pastry cutter, slice into 8 wedges - separating slightly.
Bake for 15-18 minutes, or until edges just begin to brown.
Serve hot or cold... but we think hot is best!

We found the tea to be much milder than we expected. Being used to Irish Breakfast tea we were expecting a powerfully bold tea and instead, this was a very nice "basic" tea that would go with anything.

The marmalade was wonderful! I make my own jellies, jams, and preserves because American condiments tend to be too sweet for my liking. This was NOT too sweet; it was nice and tangy, with a good dose of the bitterness left intact from the orange peel. If I had made it myself, this is what I would have made... and now I'm inspired to try adding honey to my own marmalade recipes!

These were foods that we eat all the time, and we really only tried the imported versions out of curiosity. While I might not buy them again simply because of their higher prices, they were both quite delicious and we enjoyed them very much!

Scottish Fare: Irn Bru Recipe #1

When I started looking into Scottish recipes and traditional foods, one that showed up, again and again, was Irn Bru. Apparently, it's the OTHER Scottish drink for those who aren't in the mood for whiskey. While I was planning on sticking mainly to homemade recipes, we did want to try just a few imported goodies as well - and Amazon just happens to have a supplier on this side of "the pond." We placed an order for three authentic Scottish goodies, and they arrived JUST before the coronavirus quarantines started shutting things down. We will be trying them over the next few weeks.

Our first imported goodie was Irn Bru. 

What is Irn Bru? It's a BRIGHT orange carbonated drink. (For those that know about my allergies - this has Yellow #6 in it, NOT Yellow #5 - I checked SIX TIMES - so it's safe for those with a tartrazine/salicylate allergy!) I've seen it described as tasting like bubble gum, citrus, and my favorite " a combination of rust, battery acid and pure magic." When our 6-pack arrived, in trying to cut the bottles from their blister wrapping I accidentally dropped a bottle and broke the seal, so we shared a bottle last week to see what we thought for ourselves. WE think we tasted: a nondescript citrus flavor, a medicinal/energy drink flavor, and possibly something floral - which sounds ghastly, but worked, in a strange way. It was, however, MUCH  sweeter than we'd expected so rather than simply drinking all 6 bottles we are experimenting with Irn Bru as a recipe ingredient. 

Our first attempt is based on - but heavily modified from - THIS RECIPE for slow cooker Irn Bru chicken. I had PLANNED on simply using a vegan substitute for the chicken, but in the interest of not visiting the store for what I didn't have on hand while self-quarantining, I ended up needing to substitute roughly half the ingredients. So if you'd like to know how this dish tastes in the UK, PLEASE follow the link and try their version. I based all my substitutions on the fact that the original recipe is described as a sweet-and-sour dish, and simply used what I had on hand. So for my make-do or do-without vegan-version, here's what went into my slow-cooker: 

2 12oz packages Quorn meatless pieces
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tsp roasted garlic
20ml balsamic vinegar
60ml V8
30g cornstarch
1 bottle Irn Bru

I dumped everything into the slow cooker, gave it a few good stirs, and let it run on medium-high for 3 hours. Every hour I gave it a good stir because my little pot is prone to sticking. Otherwise, I left it alone.

Because this was supposed to be a sweet and sour dish, I served it over rice. And... we liked it! It had an American-Chinese flavor, not unlike a mild sweet-and-sour chicken. Were I to make this again, I would add a nice heaping tablespoon of ginger, and some broccoli. It's not at all what we expected, but it's good.

Will we be making this again? I'm not convinced that it's worth the splurge-y price of an imported soda. I WOULD try this again with a properly strong ginger beer, however! But for cooking a savory dish with a funky new soda? Yes, it was definitely worth the attempt, and for someone who can get their hands on Irn Bru - I would definitely recommend this as a fun recipe to try.  
 

Scottish Fare: Cock a Leekie Soup

For Saint Patrick's Day each year, we enjoy our favorite must-have Irish recipes:

* Irish apple-cake with Irish breakfast tea
* Irish cheese with homemade soda-bread rolls and apple wedges
* beautiful bowls of colcannon
* shepherd's pie or a lovely pot of 'tattie stew...

Every year looks pretty similar, and since these are all family favorites we don't mind at all. But this year I wanted to change up just one meal - and with our carb-heavy potato obsession during the month of March, I thought I'd try for a soup.

Cock a Leekie Soup... another Scottish dish with a funny name. This one actually makes sense when you think about it - it's chicken and leeks. Yep, it really is that simple.

After comparing over a dozen recipes, it became quite obvious that I'd had this soup. Thousands of times, in dozens of variations. It's soup, so there are as many recipes as there are cooks in the kitchen but here are the basics:
Chicken - I used a 12oz package of Quorn for a vegan version.
Chicken stock - since our chicken was vegan, I used enough vegan bouillon for 6 cups of water.
Leeks - come in packages of 3, so that's what I used.
Carrots - 2 medium-large carrots.
Potato - the recipes call for EITHER potato OR barley... with our gluten allergy, potato it was! I used 2 medium.
Other random ingredients - seriously, it's soup... I think I saw everything imaginable including FRESH PLUMS as optional extras! I kept things simple this time and opted for nothing but the basics.

Everything went onto the back burner, to simmer for 2 hours. And what we ended up with was... MY basic soup recipe! When the fridge is running empty, or the sky is gloomy, or someone has the sniffles... this is the soup that I make! Sure, sometimes leeks are hard to find so I'll substitute onion. Sometimes I'll add celery and thyme. Sometimes I'll add paprika, and sometimes we're out of Quorn, so I'll add an extra potato to the pot instead. But this is MY soup!!!

I have heard the theories of ancestral memories before. But I had no idea that the soup I make when I'm in the kitchen without a recipe and without a solid plan for a meal... is an old Scottish standby! And the truly ironic thing is that I suffer from GERD - but while onions make my tummy rebel, leeks have never bothered me. So in its proper form, this soup becomes happy-tummy food!

Heh... my tummy knew I was Scottish, before my head! This isn't a matter of planning to add a new recipe to our book, this is a recipe I've unknowingly carried in my head all along!

Scottish Fare: Rumbledethumps

I am of mixed Celtic heritage.

Every March we gravitate towards Irish recipes. Not wanting to limit ourselves to a single day, we eat Irish fare all month long and have acquired dozens of favorite recipes.  And like any good Irish family, that means we go through more than our share of potatoes... and inevitably end up with a few lost tatties hiding in the bottom of the spud bin. You know the ones - barely worth peeling and small enough that they slip down to the bottom, where they sit growing eyes and wrinkles until you find them staring up at you. 

My Mummy traced our Irish ancestors to Counties Cork, Kerry, and Tyrone in Ireland. And I am proud of my Irish roots... but I am MORE Scottish. My Granduncle took a DNA test that came back 98% Northern Great Britain... and Mummy's OTHER side is full of Highland clan names! My own DNA is 2/3 Northern Great Britain - which is SCOTLAND!!!

So this year with my Celtic blood begging for hearty heritage-fare, a desire to try something new, and a bin of little lost tatties making eyes at me, I decided to see if I could find a few authentic Scottish recipes.

I didn't find a few, I found 40. And most of them had the most amazingly fun names like cranachan, cock-a-leekie soup, Strathbogie mist, skirlie, stovies, clapshot...

...and rumbledethumps. I HAD to try rumbledethumps. Who WOULDN'T want to eat something with a name like that? I checked over a dozen recipes and discovered that rumbledethumps are essentially Irish colcannon that's been baked. We LOVE colcannon! From October through April, we make it at LEAST once, sometimes twice every week... and usually make enough to ensure leftovers as well!

Armed with my new knowledge, I carved the eyes from all my lost little tatties and began what I am hoping is the beginning of a weekly Scottish adventure... because I have GOT to try some of these other funny names as well!

I won't bore you with a recipe for mashed potatoes, because anyone who's been in the kitchen for any length of time knows how to prepare them and has their own favorite version. I have been mashing potatoes since I was 7, and have dozens of ways to prepare them, depending on my mood and what may or may not be in the fridge at the moment.

For this dish, I hand mashed my cooked tatties, milk, butter, and a dash of salt and pepper, substituting buttermilk for our regular almond milk this time because it makes the taters taste extra special, and I had some on hand.

To this, I mixed in an equal amount of chopped fresh cabbage. You COULD use less; I've seen recipes for as little as 1/4 cabbage... but this way I can justify a slightly larger portion because it lowers the calories and carbs of the total dish! I smoothed the colcannon into my baking dishes and topped them with cheese. Because I found recipes with every possible type of cheese and wanted leftovers, I made two pans; one with American cheddar, and the other with Kerrygold Skellig. Then I popped them into a 375F (190C) oven for 30 minutes.

Baking the cabbage made it less crunchy than we're used to, but it still had enough texture to add interest, and the 'taters took on a rich buttery twice-baked quality that was absolutely divine.

Despite having the exact same ingredients, this is completely different from colcannon... but every bit as enjoyable and easy to make! We all loved it, and have decided that this is definitely one for the family cookbook.

Rumbledethumps were a complete success, and now I can't WAIT to try more Scottish recipes! Who knows what amazing treasure we'll discover in my next kitchen adventure?