North Georgia Fair 2014

Last month we made our annual trip to the North Georgia Fair with my parents, in celebration of my mom's birthday. I mostly took picture of the kiddos ~









But I did lag behind a few times to snap shots of the long trail of colorful sky buckets.



And before we left I requested a few minutes with the one thing I really wanted to photograph ~ the swing.







I could happily take pictures there all day!

Garlic Miso Chicken Wings

I'm always on the lookout for a good chicken wing recipe! This time we tried the Garlic Miso Chicken Wings from Just One Cookbook. If you've never cooked with miso you are missing out. I love that stuff!



The flavor was good, but a little more subtle than I would like. If I made them again I would probably reserve part of the marinade to brush on at the end (or mix up something similar). But I'll probably just keep trying new recipes for the fun of it!


Last week the whole family had a miserable cold and we're still recovering. I lost my voice for 4 days! And cooked a lot of soup. One night my son got a fever, then my daughter got it the next night, so it seems like they caught something else on top of it. A few days later and now she's barfing from a stomach bug... I can't wait for everything to clear up! This is my son's first year at school and he's definitely been bringing something home about once a month.

Chicken & Bacon Pastry Pockets & Japanese Custard Pudding

Friday nights we always have a family "Snack Night" and watch a movie. The food is usually an assortment of frozen snacky things that we heat in the oven, but I occasionally use it as an opportunity to try out some new appetizer recipes.

Last week I got a little adventurous & tried two new recipes! The first were these Chicken & Bacon Pastry Pockets from Our Best Bites. Every recipe of Sara's that we've tried has been a resounding winner! Unfortunately we haven't had as much luck with Kate's (2 women run the blog), but about half of hers were keepers too.



I've never cooked with the pastry sheets before & thought they were a little pricey until I saw that they really made a lot of food. Of course the puff pastry crust turned out delicious! I wasn't sure about the 'chive' flavor in the sauce, but nothing was overpowering & it tasted similar to what you'd expect from a creamy pot pie sauce. These were very good!



My one warning about the recipe ~ she said to use 2 tsp. of filling for each pocket. I tried that at first & ended up with about 1/3 of my filling left! I pried open the seams of the pockets & shoved another teaspoon in each one & that seemed like a much better amount. So ditch the teaspoon and just use a tablespoon of filler for these (3 tsp.).


For desert I turned to my other favorite recipe blog, Just One Cookbook. I've been itching to make this Custard Pudding for a while now, especially since they use such common ingredients like milk, eggs, & sugar.



Unfortunately every time I try to make anything caramel it ends up a burned mess, and this was no exception. They were not very sweet & would have benefited from the caramel topping, but I had to leave it off. We were not a huge fan of these & found them a little too eggy, but it's always fun to try something new!

Salt & Vinegar Potatoes

We tried these Salt & Vinegar Potatoes as a side recently. The recipe's photo looks so good, but they were *painfully* tart. I'd like to try them again, but next time instead of boiling them in pure vinegar, I'll try half vinegar & half water to see if that mellows them out a bit.

Alton Brown's Soft Pretzels & German Pretzel Dip

I came across this recipe for "Obatzer", a German dip for pretzels ("offered in every real Bavarian beer garden"). My husband is a big pretzel fan, but I'd never heard of a pretzel dip before & had to try it right away!



We've made soft pretzels in the past, but were not in love with our old recipe, so I decided to try the Alton Brown recipe that she used. It was a real winner! The dough definitely rolled & stretched out much easier than our previous tries & they actually seemed simple to make. I find it odd that mine ended up covered in white stripes, but that is a minor complaint.

My husband liked the dip, but I was not a huge fan. I wasn't sure if it would be savory, sweet, or a blend of the two, but the main flavor seemed to come from the spicy onion. I do like the idea of a dip though, so maybe I'll have to experiment with my own!


By the way, this week I finally cracked open my copy of Animal Cross: New Leaf. Any players out there? We were pretty obsessed with Wild World, and this one is no different! If I get a little scarce around here you'll know that I'm probably out shaking trees or hunting giant island beetles. ;)

Pad See Ew

At Thai restaurants I normally order Pad Thai, and I can make a tasty version at home, but I have a friend who swears by Pad See Ew. I did order it once, but the restaurant ended up being a dud & both of our meals were very bland, so I wanted to give it another try some day.

This recipe looked very tempting, so I decided to make it for lunches this week. (Looks like she has lots of other tasty & quick Asian recipes!) Thankfully our new house is less than 5 minutes from an Asian market (angel chorus), so I knew I'd have no trouble with the ingredients.



The Chinese broccoli was a new one for me! For the recipe she separated the leaves from the stem & then sliced the stem into thin sticks. The leaves were huge, so I ended up chopping them down a bit too. For 4 cups I needed about 3 stalks ~ but keep the leaves & stems separate, because she adds them at different parts of the recipe! The taste was similar to kale leaves and broccoli stems, but with a slight bitterness.

I had previously bought a bottle of "black/dark soy sauce" for Pad See Ew, based on a different recipe. But this one called for "dark sweet soy sauce", so I begrudgingly headed back to the store. I didn't find "dark sweet", but saw several "sweet" & am about 95% sure it is the same thing. I'm glad I ended up buying it, because that stuff is tasty!



The recipe turned out great! I didn't really make any changes, other than cooking the chicken longer because I forgot & cut it into bite sized pieces rather than thin slices. Next time I would add 1-2 extra Tbsp. of the sweet soy sauce for a stronger flavor (and darker color). Yummy!

Spray Bottle Manicure

One of my favorite nail art blogs, The Nailasaurus recently linked to this awesome tutorial video for creating a manicure that looks like a turquoise stone. You drip polish on the surface of water (similar to a water marble manicure), and then spray the polish to create a fun texture. In the video she used spray hand sanitizer, but I had a similar tutorial pinned where they used rubbing alcohol (Check out that link for a quick photo step-by-step). And for my very favorite version, she got an amazing spotty texture by spraying nail polish remover, but I think the change in texture had more to do with the sprayer.

I've had some terrible luck with water marbling in the past, but after that recent video I couldn't get this technique off my mind. All the recent moving, unpacking, and cleaning kept me from painting my nails for a while, but I had to give this a try! I decided to use silver as a base color, black for the details, and sprayed with nail polish remover.

My first attempt was not the best. The only nail I liked was the pinky ~



I wiped off everything but that one nail  and gave it another go (topcoat over your basecolor helps it come off easy). This time I aimed my nails at the more intricate textures and they turned out great!



Wow! My favorite nail ended up being the middle finger on my right hand, so I had to include a picture of that. It was not easy to reach the button for this shot!



Sometimes I ended up getting a very faint gray marbling rather than black, so I just sprayed some more polish & dipped it again. You can see the traces of gray on the ring finger here.

By the way, I tried painting my fingers around the nail with glue like the video, but only had clear Elmer's glue on hand. It didn't peel off quite as nice as she showed, but I was able to rub it off. For the right hand I just taped around the nail ~ much quicker, but more clean up at the end!

I was shocked that these were so easy to do, and they turned out *awesome*. Many times I'll spend forever creating some intricate nail art, and by the time I'm done I just feel "meh" about it. It looks good, but I just don't care anymore! It's been a long time since I've done anything that wowed me like these.