DIY Footprint Thank You Notes

And now for something completely different....

Ok so frankly I haven't cooked anything really blog-worthy recently. So instead I'm going to post a tutorial on how to make baby footprint thank you notes. I ran out of the baby boy thank you notes I got at Target, and even though Quentin is almost 5 months old, he's still receiving gifts that we need to write thank you notes for (he's so spoiled!). So I decided, instead of heading back out to Target to get more thank yous, I would attempt to make a more personal version.

Surprisingly enough, these are not pinterest-inspired. (If you don't know what pinterest is, you're missing out...email me for an invite!). While I would guess these have been done before, I came up with the idea all on my own!

Here's what I did:

I used washable paint to make imprints of Quentin's feet. It took 3 tries for each color to get a decent print. I originally wanted to do this project with his handprint, but without a second person to hold his hand open for me, this was totally out of the question!

Once the footprints dried, I scanned them into the computer and chose the best version of each color. I copied and pasted them into a "Pages" document (we're a Mac family, but I'm sure you can do this with Word). Each page got 2 footprints, on the right side of the doc. Then I added a text box and wrote "Thank you" vertically and changed the color to white. I thought about doing red font for the green footprint and green font for the red footprint, but decided I liked the look of white better. I had to do a little testing on regular printer paper to make sure everything was centered correctly for when I cut and folded my cards.


Once that was done, I printed several copies onto cardstock. In order to find the exact middle of the paper, I just folded it in half and creased the edge of the paper. I realize that I could have just measured and marked the middle, but for some reason when I did that the fold was always just a tad off. Hence the folding method.


Then I folded the paper flat, and cut it using a paper cutter.


I creased the edge of the paper in half again to find the middle. And using a blank sheet of cardstock to make sure I kept my line straight, I made a light but firm score in the cardstock using a box cutter. You should use just enough so that the paper folds cleanly and easily, but not enough that you cut through it (obviously). You can skip this and just fold it in half, but the results wont look as professional.


Tada! Footprint thank you card:




Hope you enjoyed this. I'm thinking about branching out and including more DIY type posts here if people like them. Feel free to give me feedback on what you would think of these posts.

And in case I don't get back onto fraises et tartines before next Thursday, Happy Thanksgiving!

Pesto and Heirloom Tomato Tarte

Finally a food post! It will be a quick one since I am about to head to bed, but that's ok because this recipe is super easy and delicious. I made it while Q was napping, when my mom was coming over for lunch. Of course, by the time we were ready to eat, he had woken up and I ate the tarte one-armed with a fussy baby in the other arm. This did not, however, make the lunch any less tasty.

All you need is a frozen puff pastry dough, some pesto, 2 heirloom tomatoes and some parmesan cheese. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Roll out the dough and press it into your buttered pan. Spread pesto on the bottom (I always keep ice cubes of pesto in my freezer for last minute pesto fixes...I think I used 3 cubes for this). Cut the tomatoes into thick slices and lay them in the tarte. Sprinkle with parmesan cheese and bake for 15 minutes. Then lower the oven temp to 350 and bake for another 10-15 minutes...until the puff pastry and parmesan are golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool for 5 minutes or so. Serve and enjoy!

p.s. I apologize to all readers who do not live in California...I realize that a post about heirloom tomatoes right now is a little late for you. Really, I'm not trying to rub it in that we are still enjoying tomatoes here.

Catch-up post

Alright so clearly I've gone on an impressive blogging hiatus. A lot has happened since my last post, so an update is in order. Let's pretend I had actually been updating this whole time with a few choice mini posts-

January 16, 2011- I am so excited to finally be able to share our wonderful news....I'm pregnant! I'm 16 weeks along and expecting our first baby in late June. We can't wait to meet him or her!

February 11, 2011- We had our 20 week ultrasound today and found out we're having a baby boy!! We were shocked...for some reason we fully expected this little bundle to be a girl, but we're thrilled either way.
February 24, 2011- We closed escrow on a house today. It's in a cute neighborhood of San Jose and we love it! Now we have room for our growing family.
Most of March 2011- We've been hard at work painting our new home. We haven't moved in yet because we hope to have it all painted before filling it with all our things. Don't worry...we're using no-VOC paint so preggers is OK to paint.

April 1, 2011- We moved into our new house today. Thank you SO much to all our wonderful friends who lent a helping hand (and very strong upper bodies) to move all our things. You are amazing! No pictures from today, unfortunately...you'd think I'd have had time to do that considering no one let me lift a thing.

April 30, 2011- We had a housewarming party today to welcome our friends and family to our new home. We purposefully set this date to force us to be all moved in a settled by the end of the month. It was quite a feat but we got everything done and had a great time. Thanks to everyone who came to help us celebrate!

May 1, 2011- Part of the "getting ready for housewarming party" last month was finishing up the nursery. We got some stencils to paint a farm theme on the walls. We love how it turned out!

In progress...

...aaaand done!

May 8, 2011- Finally a foodie-related one for you. Today is Mother's Day! Since I am not technically a momma yet, I made lunch for my mom (and dad and husband) today to thank her for being a wonderful mom! We had a lentil salad on a bed of butter leaf lettuce, topped with roasted bell peppers and a poached egg. Turned out pretty tasty.

Giant belly on Mother's Day

June 18, 2011- Father's Day! I went significantly less fancy for today's breakfast, but hey...give me a break. I'm 9 months pregnant. Plus, this is one of Trevor's favorite breakfast dishes- sauteed potatoes with onions, cheese and avocado with eggs on the side. Mmm!

June 26, 2011- Our sweet baby boy, Quentin, was born today at 8:36am! He is absolutely perfect and we are completely in love.

Proud parents

July 26, 2011- Quentin is 1 month old today. The last month has been wonderful, albeit more than a little tiring. But wonderful all the same. Little Q is starting to look at us more and pay attention to momma's voice. He loves to nurse and to cuddle. He loves to sleep on our chests.
August 26, 2011- Quentin is 2 months old today! He started giving us smiles a few weeks ago, but he sure makes us work for them! He's been smiling and giggling in his sleep since he was 3 weeks old, but isn't ready to giggle yet while awake. He is getting so strong already and is looking like he might roll over any day now!
September 26, 2011- Quentin is 3 months old today. He rolled over 2 days after his 2 month birthday. He kept doing it for a few weeks and then decided he'd had enough of rolling over and stopped. That's ok though...we're getting tons of sweet smiles now, especially when he first wakes in the morning!
October 12, 2011- Quentin is 3.5 months old and already getting his first taste of apple sauce. This was definitely not the plan...we were going to wait until 6 months (as recommended by the WHO), but our little man has reflux and kept spitting out his medicine, so his nurse practitioner suggested hiding it in a little bit of applesauce. The first day, he was very confused about what this foreign substance entering his mouth was. By the second day, he was taking my hand to help me shove the spoon in his mouth. He is quite a fan of applesauce. Must be because we all went to an apple orchard to pick the apples together and then momma made and frozen the sauce into baby-sized cubes. Lucky boy!

First taste of applesauce- confused

2nd taste of applesauce- big success!

October 15, 2011- Today we took Quentin to the pumpkin patch to pick out his first pumpkin! He was pretty intrigued by the sea of orange surrounding him, and all the other kiddos running around looking at pumpkins.

With his momma

With his daddy

Alrighty, I hope you enjoyed my collection of "mini-posts"! It has been quite an exciting 10 months since my last post...hopefully I wont neglect fraises et tartines for another 10 months. I have recently started taking pictures of my culinary creations again, and while they're not quite as complex as in my pre-baby days, we're still eating pretty well around here. Cheers!

Chicken Meatballs with Fettucine and Tomato Sauce

For Christmas this year, I got treated to a kitchen gadget I've had my eye on for ages, but never pulled the trigger on....because I mean, who really needs a meat grinder? I would say this definitely falls on the "want" side of the spectrum rather than the "need," but it's still really cool! Plus, as we are seeing more and more news stories about food-born illnesses, my already crunchy-green-locavore-sustainable self is becoming even more cautious about where my food comes from. Especially meat. Even more especially ground meat. I always have to wonder what all is included in ground meat, and what bacteria might be lurking in there. My solution for the past few years has been to purchase my meat from local sources of grassfed beef. For a while, we were able to purchase beef from our CSA. At the time, we were using Eating with the Seasons. They had a deal with Paicines Ranch in Hollister and would deliver the beef in a cooler along with our veggies. This worked pretty well for us, but I found the quality and variety of veggies to be lacking, so we switched to our current CSA- Two Small Farms. They don't offer meat delivery, but we've been very pleased with their veggies, so we're sticking with them! Next season, starting in March, they are splitting back to their two original farms- Marquita Farms and High Ground Organics. I'm sure we wont be disappointed! Anyway, back to the meat. After Paicines Ranch, we started buying most of our beef from Prather Ranch, available at the Campbell Farmer's Market, supplementing with grassfed beef from Whole Foods. The meat grinder doesn't change where we will buy our meat from, but I may start buying more whole cuts of meat and grinding them myself. Even Whole Foods is not perfect and grinding the meat myself helps me to know exactly what went into my hamburger.

As far as chicken goes, Prather Ranch has whole roasting chickens, in season, although they often run out before I get to the farmer's market. Mostly, we get Rosie Organic Chicken from Petaluma Poultry (through Whole Foods). That's what we bought yesterday to try out my grinder! My new toy was super easy to use, and Trevor even said it was easy to clean. I think I see homemade bolognese in our future. Below, I've posted my recipe for the tomato sauce and for the chicken meatballs. Obviously, you can purchase already ground chicken for this recipe and they will turn out just fine. So if you don't have a meat grinder, don't fret...try it out!

Tomato Sauce:
Ingredients:

• Olive oil
  
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled and finely chopped
• 2 celery stalks, peeled and finely chopped
• 1 can tomato sauce
• 2 cans diced tomato sauce
• 2-3 Tbsp tomato paste
  
• 3 bay leaves
• dried oregano to taste
• dried thyme to taste
  
• salt to taste
  

Instructions:

1. Heat a heavy-bottom saucepan over medium heat. Add enough olive oil to lightly coat the bottom of the pot and then add the onion.
   
2. Once the onions begin to become translucent, add celery and carrots. Cook until they begin to soften.
   
3. Add tomato sauce, diced tomatoes and tomato paste. Bring to a simmer.
   
4. Add spices. Allow to simmer for about 40 minutes, until the vegetables are soft. Before serving, remove bay leaves. Season with salt just before serving.

Chicken Meatballs:
Ingredients:

• 1 medium onion, cut into about 12 pieces.
  
• 2 very cold chicken breasts, fat removed and cut into 1-inch cubes.
• 5 Tbsp whole wheat bread crumbs
• 1 egg
  
• 1 Tbsp dried oregano
• 1-2 tsp dried thyme
• 2 tsp garlic powder
  
• 1-2 tsp kosher salt
• Olive oil for cooking

Instructions:

1. If using a meat grinder- set up grinder, turn Kitchen Aid to speed 4 and begin feeding pieces of chicken and onion. Use the provided plastic tool to push chicken down for grinding. If not using grinder, put ground chicken in a bowl and chop onion as finely as you can. Mix onion and chicken with your hands.
   
2. Add egg and mix into chicken.
   
3. Add breadcrumbs, oregano, thyme, garlic powder and salt. Mix thoroughly with your hands.
   
4. Form meatballs and place them on a plate as you go to keep them from sticking together.
   
5. Heat a heavy-bottom pan (I used a cast iron pan) to medium and add enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan.
   
6. Place the meatballs on the pan, allow to brown on one side and use kitchen tongs to turn them.
7. Once the meatballs are browned on all sides they are ready to serve. Remove from pan and serve with tomato sauce and pasta. Enjoy!
   

Pesto, heirloom tomato, pepperoni & zucchini pizza

I think I pretty much gave the recipe away in the title of this post. Pretty basic pizza, but don't let that boring word "basic" fool you. Sometimes the simplest meals are the best. You really can't go wrong when you choose ingredients at the peak of seasonality, make your dough from scratch... oh and the pepperoni was from an artisan "charcutier" at the San Pedro Square Farmer's Market in San Jose. I have to say, it was pretty delicious. For more specific "sub-recipes"...the dough recipe can be found here, and my pesto recipe is here. And the rest is pretty independently obvious. Have fun coming up with your own pizza creations!

And since this was such a short post, you get another pizza picture! Enjoy!

Making Homemade Applesauce

Last weekend I visited my good friend and her family. When I arrived, she immediately told me to keep my shoes on- we were going out back to see her compost. "I got my compost pile to steam!!!" Of course, this was something I wanted to see. She and I have long been on the same wavelength about the way we want to live our lives. We take immense satisfaction in doing things ourselves- even if it takes a little longer- in order to maximize food enjoyment and minimize our impact on this earth. In high school, we baked together and went berry picking together. We've long dreamt about our adjacent farms, complete with chickens for eggs, goats for cheese, vegetables and fruit galore, and and a brick oven for baking bread and pizza. Clearly, her parents have something to do with ingraining this lifestyle in her, because when they got married and purchased their home 30 years ago they planted many fruit trees, which are now thriving. They have lemons, oranges, nashi (kind of like asian pears), persimmons, nectarines, and apples. When I saw the apple tree, I asked what they were planning on making with the apples. My friend said that her parents don't use the apples because they tend to be very "buggy." She asked her parents, and they said I could take as many apples as I wanted! Hmmm.....it didn't take me long to decide I would make my year supply of apple sauce to freeze. So we set out to pick apples, and boy did we pick apples- 17 pounds in all! I also ended up with about 5 lbs each of lemons and nashi. Yum!

For the next 3 days, I was cutting and slicing apples (making sure to cut out any bugs, of course!) and cooking the slices down into applesauce. The recipe is a very simple one- apples, a little lemon juice (to keep the apple slices fresh until you are ready to cook them down) a little water (if the apples seem dry), sugar (if the apples are tart), and cinnamon (if you're a cinnamon kind of person). Really, all you need are apples. The other ingredients are up to you/the apples. It's also up to you whether you peel the apples or not. I opted to not peel them, but I did run the sauce through the coarse setting of a food mill to break down the peels a bit after cooking them. Once the sauce was ready, I jarred it, labeled it, and put it in the freezer to be enjoyed throughout the winter and spring.

Oh and in case you're wondering, 17 lbs of apples ended up filling 12 pint jars, plus several smaller jam jars and a medium-sized tupperware container.

Thanks you Travis' for all the apples, and the nashi and lemons too!

Steak & Cocozelle Squash Dinner

Yesterday, for the first time, I tried my hand at canning. Tomato sauce, to be specific. I purchased a large amount of organic heirloom tomatoes from a guy who had somehow decided that he needed to plant 40 tomato plants in his backyard this summer. Tomato overload for him=lucky day for me! He gave me a very good price for a beautiful harvest of tomatoes (more on this in a future post). Suffice to say, I was exhausted last night and definitely not in the mood to cook more. So I had Trevor grill some steaks from Prather Ranch (grass-fed beef purchased from the Campbell Farmer's Market), and I sliced up & sauteed some Cocozelle Squash, which were purchased, along with the tomatoes, from my newest overzealous gardening friend. The beef was a delicious treat, and exactly what we both needed after a hard morning workout for Trevor and a kitchen "workout" for me. The squash, though, was my favorite. I was unfamiliar with this type of squash and O.M.G. it was so scrumptious! I could eat it everyday. For the rest of my life. I'm not sure Trevor would be quite so enthusiastic about it (he doesn't usually get as excited about vegetables as I do), but lucky for him they're surely only ridiculously delicious at the peak of their freshness- in the summertime. This brings me to my locavore thought of the day- If you eat what's in season, you'll never get bored with any one fruit or vegetable in particular. You might tire of zucchini at the end of a particularly healthy summer harvest, but after abstaining from it for 8+ long months, you will be more than ready to start zucchini overload all over again. So go enjoy the last few weeks of summer produce! Soon I'll be writing about winter squash, potatoes, kale, beets, spinach and all my other favorite fall produce.

Holy mother of....

CABBAGE??

Picked up the CSA veggies today and we got this HUGE head of cabbage. Actually, looking at this again I don't feel that the picture does it justice. But really, it's big. And heavy. And chock-full of vitamin C. I'm not sure yet what this cabbage will end up in, but I'm sure it'll be tasty. It might not even be in a fraises et tartines creation, since we are now splitting the CSA box with a friend, but nonetheless I'm sure it'll be tasty (unlike many people, I'm actually a cabbage fan).

Up next...what do you do when life gives you 17 lbs of apples...?