At first I thought I’d have a hard time coming up with items for a Sabriel reading kit, but when I sat down to brainstorm, I couldn’t stop the flow of ideas! Charter marks! Mogget! Swords! So much more! Though Google searches turned out to be comically tricky…since “Sabriel” is also the name of a character from Supernatural. Uh-oh! 😛
But after some digging, I managed to find a lot of fun stuff! I’m especially proud of the amigurumi Mogget I found on Etsy. Enjoy! ^.^
While reading Sabriel, one of the dishes that stood out most to me was the grilled fish Sabriel eats when she arrives at her father’s house. The fish itself is described as “small and almost circular,” and it’s served with a delicious-sounding sauce of tomato, basil, and garlic. As soon as I read those words, I knew I’d found the entree for my Sabriel menu!
Though the sauce’s base isn’t described, it sounded to me like it was most likely a cream sauce (I’ve seen similar sauces served with fish before). The fish had me stumped at first. The closest comparison I could think of was tilapia, since it’s silver and on the smallish side. I grilled some up, whipped up a cream base I adapted from this recipe, and roasted some grape tomatoes. This has become one of my favorite ways to prepare fish!
In the book Sabriel, toffee and dried fruit are the snacks that help Sabriel make it through her trek through the wintery Old Kingdom. I was intrigued by the idea of making a toffee tea, so I took a look at some of the custom blends other people had made on Adagio.com to get a sense of how they achieved the right balance of flavors for toffee tea. Chocolate and caramel seemed to be the two standbys, usually paired with a nut flavor (almost always almond). I developed my own chocolate/caramel ratio to get the right balance of flavors and added in some hazelnut to make it unique. Enjoy!
Welcome to our latest Book of the Month: Sabriel, the first installment in Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy! Sabriel was on my TBR for years before I FINALLY got around to borrowing the audiobook from my library last September. It was sooo good! I love Sabriel as a main character, and did I mention that the audiobook is narrated by Tim Curry? So yeah, there’s that awesomeness too. Plus, some of the foods in the book sound SO delicious that I knew I wanted to make a menu for Sabriel here on blog. So here we go!
When Sabriel first visits the Old Kingdom, she must trek through the snowy, treacherous countryside to her father’s house. Her only sustenance: dried fruit and homemade toffee.
I’ve made fruit chips from apples before, but I’d never tried making more traditional dried fruit. Now seemed like as good a time as any to try! Plus, with a new baby taking up pretty much all my time, I could use some healthy, ready-made snacks to save for emergency munchies! 🙂
What would a James and the Giant Peach menu be without peaches? A travesty, that’s what. Of course, not just ANY peach recipe will do. I wanted to make something special but simple at the same time. After all, this is a kid’s book we’re talking about! Grilled peaches with ice cream came to mind, and I dressed them up just a little by glazing the peaches with honey and making homemade ice cream with the most glorious of all the spices: CINNAMON. The end result was sweet, refreshing, and delightfully simple. The perfect snack after flying across the ocean on a giant peach!
P.S. The cinnamon ice cream recipe included below is for a Cuisinart ice cream maker and is a slight variation on the vanilla ice cream recipe that comes with the machine.
I mentioned a few months back that I would post pictures of our book-themed baby room once we got it all set up. And now it’s FINALLY finished! It took ages, but we’re very pleased with the outcome. Three cheers for postpartum productivity! 😀
As you can see from the pictures, we’ve got a bit of a hobbit theme going on. We had a hobbit baby shower and asked guests to bring a favorite childhood book instead of a card, so it seemed perfect to style the Little Mister’s room after Middle Earth. Plus, we wanted something gender neutral, since we didn’t know if we’d be having a boy or a girl. I love how it turned out, and I’m toying with the idea of theme-ing our future children’s rooms after other favorite books (Chronicles of Narnia, Harry Potter, etc.).
As you can also see from the pictures, there’s no crib. We’re co-sleeping, so the Little Mister currently sleeps in a Pack ‘n Play right next to our bed. As such, his “bedroom” acts more as a nursing and changing room, which we’ll gradually phase into a bedroom as he gets older.
One group of characters often forgotten from James and the Giant Peach is the Cloud Men (perhaps since they were left out of the movie). In the book, the Cloud Men are responsible for creating such atmospheric phenomenon as rainbows, storms, and snow. When James and companions float past a Cloud Man city in their flying peach, they see Cloud families preparing dinners of fried snowballs.
These sounded delicious, so of course I wanted to make them for the blog! And I knew exactly how I wanted to create my own interpretation: mashed potato balls mixed with bacon and cheese, rolled in panko crumbs, and deep fried. Utterly delicious and fun to make!
Time for another reading kit! It’s been a while since I’ve done a children’s book, so I had a good bit of fun throwing this kit together. I’ll admit, it was tempting to make everything peach-themed, but I’m proud to say I branched out and managed to include a lot of other iconic things from the book as well. Enjoy! 🙂
When I was planning this James and the Giant Peach menu, I obviously had peaches on the brain. But while trying to figure out how to include a tribute to NYC in the menu, all I could think of was APPLES! I tossed around a few options until I hit upon the idea of hand pies. I decided to go the savory route and paired them with cheese, resulting in the final product you see here!
These savory hand pies are filled with melted Gouda and apple slices seasoned with thyme. Oooh that cheese—I couldn’t get enough! The buttery, flaky crust toppd with just the right amount of salt brings it all together into a little package with big flavor. Enjoy! 🙂
Easter is just around the corner, and I’m eager to make some spring-themed Easter recipes for my family get togethers this year. But like most holidays, I run into some problems when deciding what to make for Easter parties.
I usually want something festive and easy to pass around, but I still want it to be unique enough that it’s not just a repeat of what someone else is bringing. Luckily, I’ve developed a repertoire of these sorts of recipes over the past few years of blogging. So I thought I’d share some today! 🙂
Here are my favorite go-to Easter recipes! Enjoy!
