stir fried turkey in lettuce wraps

i have been interested in cooking with fish sauce for quite some time. so a few weeks (or more) ago, i bought a bottle on a whim at a chinese grocery store. coincidentally, i found this recipe shortly after in my jan issue of food magazine. even better, the march food magazine had several more recipes using fish sauce. excellent.

UPcycle some menswear

the march issue of martha stewart living has some great projects using old menswear that can be found here.
my favorite ideas?

how about this girl's shirt dress?

maybe i can adapt it for a dress in my size.

this sweet little bunny.

and how clever is this tuxedo pillow (under the bunny)?

so many projects. so little time...

all images from marthastewart.com

mint-filled brownie cupcakes

my friend's birthday was last week and i wanted to surprise him with something delicious. i wanted something that would be somewhat durable in the texas heat, in case he wasn't home, so i could just drop it off on the door step. who doesn't like to come home to a bundle of treats?

i was pretty certain that i wanted to go with cupcakes. the problem with most cupcakes is that they have icing, which would not hold up in 100+ F degrees. naturally, i went to my martha stewart cupcake cookbook (where else?!) and found an interesting recipe for mint filled brownie cupcakes. i had no idea if my friend likes mint, but i took the risk and went with it anyway!
the best part of this recipe is that it can all be done with one bowl! if you don't have the book, you can find the recipe here.

the ingredients (note the special, genius, yet simple filling):

making the brownies:
final product:

taste test: the husband loved it. i loved it.

i bought some pretty boxes from michaels (also martha brand) for packaging and carted them on over to my friend's house the next day. he was pretty surprised. and pleased. i think. he also claimed to love the brownies, so i'll consider this recipe a success.

chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios

sometimes i go through spurts where i enthusiastically try several new recipes a week for weeks on end. this has not been the case for the past month or so- i’ve been on a “let’s eat cereal for dinner” or “let’s go out” kick lately.

however, last week i spotted a couple interesting recipes in my martha stewart living magazine- chilled avocado soup + honeydew and cream ice pops with pistachios. this weekend, the husband and i decided to test both out.

we started with the chilled avocado soup. the ingredients were simple enough- half an avocado, 1 cucumber (peeled, seeded, diced), ½ cup buttermilk, 1 small garlic clove 1 tb lemon juice, salt, pepper, plus water for thinning if necessary. all we had to do was whirl all of it in a blender and then chill for an hour or so.

unfortunately, the avocado was a little raw. i had put it in the fridge earlier in the week and completely forgot about it. however, my brilliant coworker, who apparently knows everything there is to know about avocados, gave me a tip to put my avocado in a paper bag (and since i don’t have any paper bags at home, to wrap it in newspaper), and stick it in the oven (with the oven off). apparently this method works best if you leave it in there for at least 8 hours, but I only had about 2… and i really do think it was slightly softer when i pulled it out. i wrapped the avocado in a page of the sunday comics :).

taste test:

pretty good- a little tart. we had doubled the recipe so we had plenty of soup leftover for saturday. fairly filling and the flavors were more involved on the second day. i bet it would have been even better if the avocado was actually ripe.

saturday we made the ice pops. the recipe can be found here.

we didn’t have any ice pop molds, so we used silicone cupcake holders and ice cube trays.

various prep stages: chopped pistachios, honeydew before pureeing, honeydew after pureeing + other ingredients (looking remarkably like the avocado soup):

filling the molds:

finished mini popsicles (ignore the crooked toothpicks):

our thoughts on the ice pops? me: DELICIOUS. husband: pretty good