quick takes

Quiche! Rolling out the corn-rice dough made me spit and yell, so I just patted it into the pie plate. Easy peasy! Really the exact same process and proportions as glutinous flour pastry dough.

Candy candy candy! It cooks low in the pot, then soon before it's done cooking it foams up and grows like crazy.

After cooking. Looks pretty and glossy, yes? I also drizzled on some chocolate. (It's for a Christmas present; I won't say whose!) For the record, I had two other batches that got crystallized and ruined, and a third that burnt (I was also making biscotti, and I had company, so you know, I didn't blame myself too much, but it sucked.)

Getting out keebler elf on!

We packed 16 tins and a couple of bags with three varieties of biscotti for Christmas.

We slipped these little eco geeky Christmas greetings in each tin, put on glittery "de/a" stickers, and stacked them in the office. I'll be bringing about half down to the freezer shortly, for people we won't see for a couple of weeks.

Sweet potatoes, sliced medium fine in the mandolin, with oil, lime juice, salt, paprika, and red chillis, OH MY GOSH.

Keeler's out of dry food and we haven't had a chance to go somewhere cheap for her in the last few days, so we've been giving her our backup cat food, which is a wet food I made her that we keep in the freezer. It has beef liver, quinoa, chickpeas, onions, red pepper, hmm maybe some other stuff but I forget. She loves it. It isn't really scientific or anything, but I figure it has to be at least better for her than most dry food, so we let her enjoy it, and we let ourselves enjoy feeling like extra good cat owners when we bring it out.

Pasta! On candy day I also made corn-rice pasta dough and again, rolling it out made me want to scream, so I put it in a bag in the fridge ("I'm sending you to the fridge, and I want you to think long and hard about what you've done!!"). After we both had had time to cool off, I decided to break the dough into little bits and roll it into thick noodles between my palms for our lunch today. It worked really well! The sauce was made with long-roasted eggplant, cooked in advance last night, 3 cloves garlic, rose wine vinegar, white wine, olive oil, about a tbsp tomato paste, sundried tomatoes in oil, parmesan, sliced black olives, black pepper, oregano, and parsley. It was SO GOOD, I can't lie. I still taste it. Mmm, garlic.

Tonight I'm going to try this crazy paleo pizza basically made out of cheese. How could it be bad? I also have a piece of salmon in the freezer from when the valiant Samantha came to cook for us while we were sick that I want to make salmon jerky with (except what the heck are coconut aminos??).

Tomorrow, as per my Christmas eve tradition, I'm going to make a little gingerbread house, I think. If I find the courage, again, to roll out GF dough. I'm going to use coconut flour that Sam gave me, maybe 70%, and 30% buckwheat. Oh boy oh boy oh boy! And okay, if you don't have Pinterest, you need to see these. SO CUTE! Okay, it's all in Polish, but you get the point, right? Tiny=cute. So maybe I'll make a whole freakin teeny Polish village of gingerbread cuteness.

On Christmas morning I'm going to make bacon, mm bacon. I'm also going to make this bread for the boys. I've had it filed on Pinterest for a few months, but only today actually looked at the pictures and saw how easy it is to shape. So excited!

What's cooking in your kitchen??