Making… Smores pie?

What’s a Smores pie you say? Well, it’s down right delicious of course! The second I saw it in my Vegetarian Times magazine, I knew I had to make it. Memorial Day seemed like the perfect occasion!

Vegetarian times taught me that marshmallow fluff is vegetarian! No gelatin like normal marshmallows (this is good for my vegetarian friends).

My husband consented to allow me to use his Malley’s dark chocolate that was still left from Valentine’s Day. Malley’s is a delicious chocolate company in the Cleveland area.

I had to break it up and put it in a bowl:

Heat soy cream to a simmer:

And then pour the soy cream over the chocolate and whisk in one egg, some vanilla and a pinch of salt:

The chocolate mixture was then poured into a prepared graham cracker crust and baked for 25 minutes. The edges of the pie crust were covered with foil to keep them from getting too brown.

After cooling for an hour it was time to “spread” on the marshmallow fluff.  Well, marshmallow fluff is not the kind of stuff you spread. It’s more like a plop:

Somehow I spread it out enough and then put it under the broiler until it was brown on top:

The finished product was very rich and delicious. Definitely more flavor than a campfire smores!

Bicycle print

The finished print

Drawing, carved block, and print

This is my second print since receiving the linoleum print tools as a gift earlier this year. My inspiration for it is obviously the lyrics to Queen’s “Bicycle Race” and the fact that I’ve been riding many miles training for the Escape to the Lake Bike MS Event which happens in two weeks.

You can see the finished product but also the different steps of the process in the pictures. In one picture you can see my original drawing (I used a compass for the wheels) that I then transferred to the carving block. I carved it using special carving tools.  I mixed paint to create a dark green color, rolled it on the carved block and transferred that to the paper.

I’m offering one of these prints to anyone who donates to my fundraising page for the Escape to the Lake. I can make them in light or dark shades of black, red, blue, green, or yellow.  If I don’t know you personally, please contact me before donating so I can confirm that I will be able to create a print for you.

Making garden herb infused olive oil spread

Sometimes we like to make little personal pizzas on top of flatbread for dinner. Instead of pizza sauce, we tend to use olive oil or hummus.

Our garden is somewhat sad this year due to the crazy drought we’ve been having but at least the herbs are doing well.  I picked some thyme, oregano, garlic chives and rosemary from the garden to start with:

I then stripped the thyme, oregano, and rosemary leaves from their stems and sliced up the chives and put them in my mortar:

I proceeded to use the pestle to crush up the herbs:

and then mixed in olive oil:

We spread this concoction on our flatbread pizzas and we could definitely taste the herbs after the pizzas finished cooking. Yum!

Making a summer cocktail

I guess it’s not officially summer yet, but in Texas it feels like it’s been summer for months. You may remember the vodka infusions I made recently.

I finally got to try the watermelon rosemary infusion and I must say, it was delicious. I used the Rosebud recipe from Kitchen Konfidence.  It was fun to muddle the watermelon with the crushed ice:

I used rosemary sprigs from the gigantic rosemary bush in the backyard. Rosemary grows like crazy in Texas:

Yum! I recommend seedless watermelons if you can. I still had to strain out the little seeds from the glasses.