Gazpacho - one of my summertime favorites

Gazpacho is a cold soup originating in the southern region of Spain called Andalusia . It descends from an ancient Andalusian concoction based on a combination of stale bread, garlic, olive oil, salt, and vinegar — a cold breadsoup.
Today, in the United States , most gazpacho recipes include tomato, cucumber, bell (sweet) pepper, onion, garlic, and celery. Some also include olive oil, bread, vinegar or lemon juice, fresh herbs, sugar, canned tomato juice, or hot sauce. Gazpacho is sometimes pureed until smooth, and sometimes served with small or large chunks of vegetables.

Try this one:
http://www.recipezaar.com/60897

More of Chrissy's artwork

Dijon Marinade for chicken or pork

A few weeks ago I concocted a new marinade recipe for grilled chicken. Dan, as always, had a good suggestion to make a few tweaks and here's the final result.

1/2 cup dijon mustard
1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup soy sauce
garlic powder to taste (probably 1-2 tsp)
black pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients together and marinate your meat of choice for at least an hour.

I made the chicken version for Girl's Night and we marinated a pork loin when Dan's dad was here.

Speaking of cupcakes

Lisa brought some delicious Raspberry Lemonade cupcakes to Girl's Night from a local bakery (Happy Cakes) and we all loved them. Thanks Lisa! I promptly requested 4 or 5 cupcake cookbooks from the library. For photos, my favorite cookbook was "Hello Cupcake" and for recipes, my favorite cookbook was "Crazy About Cupcakes."

Last night (good thing we have air conditioning) I decided to make and decorate some cupcakes. I used a yellow cake mix since I had it on hand and truthfully, I was more interested in the decorating than the baking. Of course, I enlisted Dan's help. He gets dragged into a lot of my little crafty projects...

The frosting recipe was a simple Vanilla Buttercream from "More from Magnolia Bakery" that we divided and colored these soothing pastel shades.

Girl's Night

Dan left town a few weeks ago to fly back to Ohio and drive the jeep back to Colorado. I took the opportunity to host a Girl's Night with a few friends. Chrissy brought her henna and we all got tattoos.

Yummy homemade Lemon Curd

Lemon curd is an English favorite and has many uses. It is a wonderfully tart, soft, thick, spread that originally was served with scones at teatime, but it now used on toast, to fill cakes between the layers or crepes, in tarts, as an ice cream or cheesecake topping. Mix it with whipped cream for a quick lemon mousse. I decided to try making it for the first time.

INGREDIENTS
1 cup white sugar
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
1 cup fresh lemon juice (about 6 lemons)
3 lemons, zested
1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted

DIRECTIONS
In a microwave-safe bowl, whisk together the sugar and eggs until smooth. Stir in lemon juice, lemon zest and butter. Cook in the microwave for one minute intervals, stirring after each minute until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a metal spoon. Remove from the microwave, and pour into small sterile jars. Mine took 5 1/2 minutes at 50% power. Store for up to three weeks in the refrigerator.

Glass Fusing Class - look I'm an artist!

In early March I took an all day workshop called "Beginning Fusing" at Bella Glass Studio here in Denver. It was an early birthday present from Dan. The class description reads: "Explore the creative designs of hot glass. In this class you will learn the fundamentals of kiln forming while creating your own exciting fused glass pieces." We made 2 pendants, a vase, 2 coasters, and a picture frame. I really love the pendants and the vase. The white, red and black pendant was "tack" fused. In other words, it was heated just enough for the glass to stick to itself. The blue pendant was "fully" fused. The blue glass is on the bottom and a slightly larger piece of clear class was placed on top. Then I added chips of iridescent dichroic glass on top of that. Then the pendant was heated enough so all the layers of glass melted together to form a smooth surface. For the vase, we each selected a flat, square piece of class. After you polish the edges and corners a little (to make them less sharp), you simply center the piece of glass over a vase form in the kiln, when the glass is fired, it melts or slumps over the form.

With the coasters, I was trying to match the colors in our living room but the execution was a little disappointing. For the picture frame, our only color choice was black and then we could add other colored glass chips. I chose pastels because they would show up against the black and it doesn't really match any color scheme in our house.

It surprised me a little that the class was mostly about the technical aspects of the craft - very little about the artistic aspects. Over all, it was enjoyable and I might go back and take more classes.