Mountains of Kale and a Pizzelle Party

Today I had a fabulous day off!

I started by being productive in the kitchen at around 8:30 am this morning. On the agenda: soup!

I had a huge bunch of kale sitting in my fridge that was calling to be used, or it would have gone bad. I decided on some butternut squash kale soup!

I followed the recipe on Anne’s blog…but made some tweaks, including adding a can of mixed veggies to the pot.

I used 1 can of veggie broth, 1 can of butternut squash puree, a huge bunch of kale, soy milk, olive oil, 1 can of mixed veggies, salt, pepper, cinnamon and onion powder. I tasted a small spoonful while it was cooking and it tasted delish.

But after making the soup, I still had tons of kale leftover. I mean, what was I thinking buying all this??

After tweeting around, Nicki suggested I blanch and freeze it, which was a fantastic idea! The whole process took about 30 minutes. First, I washed and chopped the kale. Then I boiled a huge pot of water. When it was boiling I threw all of the kale in, and boiled it for 2:00 minutes, and then threw it in a bowl of ice water, which is supposed to stop the cooking. Then, I dried it off in paper towels, and put it in freezer bags to freeze until the next time I want to make something with kale. What an ingenious idea, thanks Nicki!

This afternoon I also had a lunch date with Chris for Indian Buffet. We wanted to check out Jewel of India since they have a 6.99 lunch buffet on weekdays. Score!

They were a little late with setting up the buffet. It starts at 11:00, when we got there, but they didn’t have it ready until about 11:15ish.

My plate of Indian goodness...rice and peas, a potato dish, a lentil dish, and some fried crispy potato thingies…all delicious. But I have no idea what the names of these dishes are. It was good!

After lunch I headed over to my cousins’ for a Pizzelle making “party” with my sister. The girls got a pizzelle maker for Christmas last year and we had been planning on having a pizzelle party for almost a whole year…we finally got around to having one!

Step 1: make dough: eggs, flour, sugar, butter and vanilla.

Step 2: scoop dough into round balls onto pizzelle maker.

Step 3: Let cook for about 2-3 minutes or until pizzelles are golden brown.

Step 4: marvel at how pretty pizzelles are!

We even got fancy and made chocolate pizzells with mint chocolate filling.

They were so good! They taste almost like a thin wafer sugar cookie.

It was a lot of fun making Pizzelles with my cousins and my sister! We’ll have to have another one….maybe an ice cream making party?? (they have an ice cream maker.)

After consuming one too many pizzelles I headed over to the gym to get my workout in, which was 60 minutes on the Arc Trainer, which actually was a really intense workout. I set it to “Cardio” and was working up a sweat five minutes into my workout. Phew! Now it’s time for me to relax for the night.

Question: did you have a day off today? If so, what did you do?