Spiced Salt

Xmas is coming soon and many people look for gifts. Why not making a gift yourself  ?

I made already some spiced salt,Ii used some left over berries and mixed them with sea salt. After I tried the mix on a baking tray as seen in the picture.

Finally fill it once dried in a glass and decorate it nice, voila, a spiced salt as gift. It tastes great and i use it a lot now for cooking.

Wedding Gifts

Summer time is wedding time here in Ireland
I know its custom to give a couple on their wedding day money, mostly in a envelope.
What else would you gift someone who got all the rest already, since most couples life together for a while before the get married. In Austria its custom, that friends of the couple gift either a money tree, or in this case (the couple wanted to go for a cruise for the honeymoon) a Money ship.

I think its a nice way to present the usual gift a bit different. What do you think, would you gift that way ?

Food painting for Kids

A short while ago my lovely daughter had her first birthday and since the weather wasn't that nice that day I prepared different activities for the invited kids.

One of them was food painting, so I made different colored coffee cookies and had some sugar decoration colors ready to be used to paint on them.

Here a picture of the artwork which  survived the day, since some of course got eaten straight away.

How to make Pickled Eggs ?

I categorized this recipe with cooking disaster, and I will explain later why...

But first let me start to explain, why i had the idea to make pickled eggs in the first place ?

You might remember my article of my chicken Heidi high preforming, and she is still together with the other chickens producing a lot of eggs every day.



So I was looking into it, how to conserve some eggs I wont use straight away, and add value to the product egg.

On a visit to London i heard about pickled eggs, so I had to try this.

On the above "pickture" you see what is needed:
4 eggs
100 ml vinegar
200 ml water
1 teaspoon English mustard
a bit of salt
a bit of sugar

1 onion

Boil the eggs hard, put them into a conserving glass, mix the other ingredients well and add them to the glass. There should be no air remaining in the glass

This way you can keep it for up to 2 month, you should anyway see or smell in case the egg goes bad.

I tasted it myself after 5 days, and here comes my point why I declared it as a cooking disaster. The egg was very much tasting like vinegar and mustard. I hated it and barley could eat that one egg.
Anyway, to be completely sure what I have done, I have asked on Face book for a English men to taste my pickled eggs. I shortly found one so I passed by Grahams Shop  to bring him the remaining three... He loved it...

Well, all ladies out there, if you want to make a English man happy,
you know now what to do !

So, will complete now the remaining Xmas Shopping !

How to make a Xmas crib

I am not exactly a great wood worker,
but was still in need of a little Xmas Crib in order to present the lovely figures i got last year from my in laws in a nice setting under the Xmas tree.

I remembered the salt dough prints I did with my baby last summer. So I thought Salt dough can be used also the make a little building (crib)

So how to make the dough, you can look that up in my earlier post , unfortuantly in this project my one year old couldn't help much.

I started with a case kind of like a pizza,
and added on to that.

On the picture on the left you see i made walls, and checked if they will be high enough for the figures i already had.

With toothpicks I brought some strengths into the structure.

From time to time i put the structure for 10 minutes in the 180C degree oven, to make it more stable, and than to add on and make the walls high enough.

I figured i had to make pillars in the corner to support the structure as well.





Painting the roof, here my one year old could help.


The wholes in the room have been there,
but i figured i leave them, so i can stick through them 2 lights from the xmas tree lights later.

This way it will hopefully look more romantic.

.

Thats the final result, considered that i only spend about 30 minutes to form the building, i am pretty proud of myself looking at it.


I am already planning add ons for next year, and since the matterial is flexible I also could do more artwork on it, with paining it, or add an wall brick stone effect, etc...

With 2 pins i actually fixed also 2 angels on the roof...

Well, anyway, thats a easy way to make a little crib, with 100%  biodegradable ingredients.

Enjoy the Xmas time !

Make Xmas tree decoration with your Kids

Its so simple to make nice, self made Xmas tree decoration.
All you need is:
2 cups flour 1 cup salt and a bit water,
make a stable dough.
Use a cookie cutter of any form, for example Xmas Trees and Bells.
Let the salt dough cookies dry in the oven on low temperature. Make sure that you punched a hole on top so you can hang them later.

Let your kids paint them with water colors and let them dry well before you hang them on your tree.

Even your smallest kid can help.

Enjoy !

Edit:
This is how the tree looks than after:

Gift Idea: Self made spiced salt

Xmas is coming up and I was looking into a nice gift idea for my friends. 
The Idea came when I was visiting a friend and he used spiced salt for cooking. The idea to a gift was born, with ingredients i already had at home from the last holidays in France.
Sea salt, rosemary, lavender, pepper corn....

I mixed it as followed:
1 kg Salt, 2 soup spoon pepper, 4 spoon rosemary, 1 spoon lavender.


From the baby I got plenty little pots at home, and from a old curtain I cut round covers for the salt, so that also the wrapping of the gift looks nice, as soon in the picture.

I think its a great idea, and I hope my friends will like it.

After 2 weeks I smelled the glass contents, and have to say it smells and tastes fantastic !

Supporting Munster

Munster is playing La Rochelle today, so my house is getting decorated a bit in Munster Colors (Red / White) which are also colors which are important for our family.

Coming from Austria, married to a girl from Monaco, living in Munster, its just natural that this colors play a big part in our life.

A great way to decorate in red and white is for example taking some rice, and red food coloring. As shown in this picture, its so easy to mix a few drops of food coloring into the rice.

The result you can use to decorate a plate with a candle on top,as shown in this picture, or if you fancy it cook the rice and serve it for dinner before the game to show your support.

Up the Rebels ! Go Munster !