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?