Pomegranates

We live in a agricultural rich area. Currently it is pomegranate season. That means that I can use any amount of pomegranates I can pick or get my hands on. A friend of mine knows my love for pomegranates and has generously let me go over and regularly pick them. For those of you who do not know what a pomegranate tree looks like (though if you googled it, the actually grow on bushes) it is a huge 8 foot tall and covered in 2-3 inch thorns.
One of her trees has very scary looking bugs on them, they are leaf footed bugs.  These bugs are like the devil himself. They not only fly, they jump at you and cling to you to scare you at a later time. They are over an inch long and so gross. Needless to say my picking is accompanied with lots of yelps from me, and laughter from my kids and friend.

First trip yielded about 60 of them. I had never done anything with them except eat them or drink the already processed juice. I have never processed it myself. After a google search I found a few ways of getting the juice from the seeds. I decided to go with the easiest way. I just get the arils (red juicy seeds) from the pomegranate, throw them about a cup at at time into a blender and blend for a few seconds. It bursts the arils open and releases the juice. I then drain it through a double folded cheese cloth, to strain the juice from the seeds and the skin of the arils.

I now have beautiful fresh juice to do what ever I want with! In the past two weeks I have made pomegranate jelly, syrup, molasses, white chocolate pomegranate mousse pie, pomegranate cupcakes and pomegranate pork chops. Plus, lots and lots of frozen pomegranate juice to use at a later date.


I think my family by this point is getting tired of pomegranate everything, but my husband still brought me home another box of them yesterday! Not sure what I will be doing with this batch, but once they are processed into juice I will figure it out. Any Ideas?

Only day 2

Today is only the second day of my new cooking challenge and I already hit a wall. I actually Google what can I make for dinner? 30 or more recipes later I was ready to quit. But then I came across Almond Dijon Tilapia. Sounds good right. Only problem, I do not have tilapia,  almond flour, or dijon mustard. 
This recipe got my wheels spinning. How about substituting chicken breast for tilapia? I will still work. Can I create my own almond flour by grinding almonds up? Can I take out the dijon mustard and add garlic and ground pepper? Mmm fresh parmesan cheese would be good too.
This is just ending up to be almond parmesan grilled chicken. I am doing a flash fry then baking it for 20 min. Right before it is done I topped it with a little mozzarella cheese and browned.
Serving it on a bed of macaroni. It is nutty, cheesy, delicious goodness. 

Blueberry pie

Last night I decided to make pie crust from a basic biscuit recipe. I made the dough, then baked it on the back of cupcake tins.

This is the result. Blueberry pies for breakfast. I think it is safe to assume Benjamin likes it.

Vietnamese spring rolls

This is the kids favorite meal to make. They love the rice noodles, rice paper and filling it with the vegetables they want. Tonight we are doing lettuce cucumber, zucchini, carrots, sprouts, chicken, mint and anything else the kids may want to add to it.

For mine and hubbies we have rice noodles, lettuce, sprouts, grilled wasabi chicken, zucchini, cucumber, carrots and mint. I made a sweet and spicy dipping sauce.

Full disclosure: this is our 5th time making them. The first time it took me 2 hours to prepare all the veggies, cook the shrimp and 3 attempts at the rice noodle before they were correct. The first attempt ended with very soggy gross noodles. The second attempt was slightly less gross noodles. The third was magical. The rice paper was also a learning curve. Very steep curve at that. Either the paper was perfect or a soggy mess. There really was no in between.

TOO long

It has been too long since I last blogged on my cooking. I will begin again tonight. The meal for tonight will be Spring Rolls. Let's see how this works out.