Basic Crepes Recipe

I love homemade stuff, especially when it comes to food!!!! A favorite is homemade jam prepared in summer for winter recipes. 

An ideal companion for any jam is crepes. Crepes are so good that there are some restaurants devoted to crepes. Crepes with honey, crepes with chocolate, crepes with jam, crepes with fresh strawberries, crepes with strawberry sauce, crepes with cream, and the list goes on and on.

Today, I want to share with you my basic crepes recipe. These crepes are good for salty and sweet garnishing plus you can prepare your crepes beforehand and freeze them for time of need. Just make sure to lay a layer of wax paper between the crepes, then wrap them well and freeze.

DIY Marshmallow Flower Bouquet

I LOVE, LOVE flowers!

Nothing can brighten my day as a bunch of flowers! So imagine the effect of edible flowers! Flowers are such a great way to express your feelings and love…

You can imagine how excited I was when I accidently found these on this Portuguese site devoted to sharing ideas. The tutorial on how to prepare these beautiful, attractive, impressive marshmallow flowers was so clear and included self-explanatory photos. I am soooo looking forward to preparing these for my daughter’s birthday in two weeks.

You will instantly fall in love with these flowers and you will think, “why didn’t I know about these earlier?!?!”

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls Middle Eastern Style Recipe (Mahshi Malfouf محشي ملفوف)

Stuffed cabbage leaves are universally loved!

As many countries attribute it to their cuisine, I decided to try to find the origin of stuffed cabbage rolls. I did a google search and WOW…..you won’t believe how many countries insist that stuffed cabbage is THEIR DISH! Some forums even have heated discussions on the subject! So I settled that finding the exact origin is a lost cause and agree to the fact that stuffed cabbage leaves are very, very, very, very popular across the Middle East, Balkan countries, Eastern Europe, Armenia, Finland and Sweden.

Arabs call stuffwed cabbage “Mahshi Malfouf”. “Mahshi” means stuffed and “Malfouf” has a double meaning of ‘cabbage’ and ‘rolled’. Turks and Armenians name them “Dolma”. Poles call them “Gołąbki” meaning ‘little pigeons’ while Czechs and Slovaks refer to them as “Holubky”. They are known as “Sarma” to Serbs, Croatians and Bulgarians and “Sarmale” to Romanians. Swedes and Danes call them “Kåldolmar” while in Finland they are known as “kaalikääryle”. Whatever their name, stuffed cabbage rolls are the epitome comfort food!

I found it strange that stuffed cabbage rolls are popular in Sweden and Finland. All the other countries are close to each other, while these two are so far away. So how did cabbage rolls reach their cuisine?

In 1709, Charles XII of Sweden lost the Battle of Poltave against the Russians and fled to Moldavia which was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. There, he spent two years in exile trying to convince the Ottoman Empire to help him defeat the Russians after which he returned to Sweden. Since he had borrowed considerable amounts of money from Ottoman creditors to finance his wars, they followed him to Sweden and during this time stuffed cabbage rolls were introduced in Sweden and from there to neighboring countries.

Cabbage rolls consists of cabbage leaves wrapped around a filling that traditionally is based around meat and rice and seasoned with a variety of seasoning. There are also popular vegetarian adaptations. The rolled cabbage leaves are then cooked by either baking, simmering or steaming. The sauce that the rolls are cooked in, or served with, is the distinctive factor that varies widely between the different cuisines. Also some cuisines use fresh softly cooked leaves for wrapping while others use pickled leaves.

In the Middle East “Mal-fouf” dishes are very popular. We use cabbage leaves, vine leaves, and Swiss chard leaves for rolling. The stuffing can include meat or not. The districting factor in our version is the spices we use and the lemony sauce. The Armenia version, that my grandmother used to prepare, is also lemony but much more so than this version.

Creamy Body Wash Recipe

My husband travels a lot!! For the past two years he has been on and off the planes more than he did his entire life!! I used to collect the small soaps as souvenirs to display in the bathroom, so he will bring me small soaps from every trip. Now I have such a collection, that  they don’t fit in any display basket! Action was called for!

I started using them, but they are so small that in a few days you end with up with an unusable soap and in the trash it goes!  So I decided to google what can they be used for. Have I told you lately what a good and likable friend Mr. Google is?  It is amazing what you can learn from the internet!

As soon as I started googling I entered into a world that I didn’t know existed!!! Did you know that it is very simple and CHEAP to do your own hand and body soap??  I didn’t! I was content buying my expensive body wash! 

So I started looking for what to do with my sample soaps and in the process discovered a gold mine! I discovered how to prepare my own Dove Body Wash! There are a lot of recipes out there and the variation of the water used to prepare the body soap is huge, but all agree that the water used with the Dove soap is on the lower end.

So far I have prepared this creamy body wash twice. The first time the body wash was too thick for our liking but the second time with some adaptations to the recipe it was great; not too thick nor thin!!!  And, I not only doubled it, but quadrupled it! I can guarantee you that I will be preparing this a lot in the future and experimenting with different soaps and scents. 

Yeah, I know, I showed you my picture of all my mini soaps and you thought that is what I will be preparing! I did end up preparing a hand wash with them and we are using it as I am writing this post but I still haven’t nailed down the exact portion of soap to water that I like so that post will have to wait. What I discovered from the three times I cooked liquid soap is that there is a big difference between using the Dove creamy soap bars that contain about 1/4 moisturizer and the other soap bars. The creamy ones need much less water.

Tips: Vegetable Carving for Everyday

Food carving and garnishing is a great way to notch-up your dishes and give then a nice, appealing, and professional look.

Food carving is the art of carving vegetables or fruits to form beautiful objects and shapes. There are different techniques for carving food, some elaborative and artistic, while others simple and easy yet beautiful.  No matter the technique, the final result is an attractive dish! 

Although the exact origin of food carving is disputed, all acknowledge that it came from East Asia and has been practiced in Japan, China and Thailand for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Nowadays, food carving is gaining worldwide appreciations especially as beautifully carved vegetables and fruits are travelling through the viral net across countries and continents.

Today, I am happy to introduce you to my friend Selena, a talented artist and fruit carving blogger from Russia. We thought it would be a great idea to do a guest post on each others blog as a way to introduce our reader's to a whole new world of art and flavors.