Blood Magic: Vegetarian Borscht

Stoney and I have been on a vegetable kick lately, and I decided to make a vegetarian version of one of my favorite soups: Borscht!  I've made borscht in the past using the stovetop, and while it's always delicious, it's a pain in the neck to make.  The solution?  Crock pot it!  I also had the vitamin to help me puree up some of the recipe, so that was an extra plus.

What you need:

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 large yellow onion, roughly chopped
• 1 carrot, peeled and chopped
• 4 small celery stalks
• 4 small daikons, peeled and chopped
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 leek, diced
• 3 beets, peeled and chopped
• 2 14oz. cans diced tomatoes
• 1 potato, peeled and diced
• 1/2 medium green cabbage, shredded
• 4 cups vegetable broth
• 1 tsp sugar
• salt & pepper, to taste
• Optional toppings: yogurt or sour cream; horseradish or dill

To begin, heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a skillet and then sauté the garlic, onion, celery, carrots, and daikon, seasoning with salt and pepper. Once everything has softened, pour it into a blender along with one can of tomatoes and puree it.

Next, sauté the leeks in the skillet that you used for the onion mixture, adding a little more oil if necessary.

 Put your puree in the slow-cooker, and then add in the other ingredients (except the optional garnishes).

Let it cook on low for 6-8 hours (or on high for 3-4).  I had planned to whip up some horseradish yogurt to serve it with, but I forgot yogurt at the store, so that didn't happen, but I still maintain that it would be outrageously delicious.  Sour cream and dill would also be a tasty addition.

Winter is Coming Pumpkin Alfredo

With fall officially winding down, I decided to make one last delicious pumpkin dish.  The "alfredo" sauce is incredibly easy to throw together, and it was really tasty with a big pile of zucchini noodles.

What you need:

• 4 zucchinis
• 3/4 cup raw, unsalted cashews
• 1 cup vegetable broth
• 1 tbsp minced garlic (or more, depending on how much you like garlic)
• 2 springs fresh rosemary, stems removed and discarded
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 3/4 cup pumpkin puree (canned or make your own)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg
• salt & pepper, to taste 

Start by spiraling your zucchini into zoodles.  To keep the zoodles from getting too watery when you cook them, I recommend spreading them in a thin layer on a paper towel, sprinkling with salt, covering with another paper towel, and gently pressing the paper fowl down.  Let them sit this way while you get everything else ready, and that way a lot of the moisture will be pulled out of them.

The rest is pretty simple.   Blend the cashews and 1/2 cup of vegetable broth in a blender.   Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a sauce pan over medium heat, and then add in garlic and rosemary, cooking until fragrant.

I used more than 1 tbsp of garlic... it's just too tasty!

Turn the heat to low, add in your blended cashew mix - at this point, to get the last bit of cashew/broth paste out of the blender, I put the remaining 1/2 cup vegetable broth in the blender and blended with the remaining paste.  Pour that in your saucepan, too.  Add the nutmeg, cinnamon, pumpkin, and salt and pepper, as well.  Stir to make sure everything is blended and let it heat through.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining 1 tbsp of olive oil in a skillet or wok over medium-high heat, and then toss in your zucchini noodles.  Cook until heated through.

Remove the zucchini noodles from heat and mix in your sauce.

Enjoy!

The Gift Shepherd's Pie

I've always loved Shepherd's Pie, and decided to make my own fall vegetable-inspired version.  Instead of mashed potatoes on top, I used a pumpkin/sweet potato puree, and just to pump up the vegetable content, I added some Lacinato kale to the beef mixture.  I was incredibly happy with the results, and would happily eat this all winter long!

What you need:

• 1lb ground beef
• 3 ears corn, roasted and cut off of the cob
• 1 bunch Lacinato Kale, stems removed and leaves chopped 
• 2 medium sweet potatoes
• 1 small pumpkin
• 1 onion, chopped and divided into 2 piles
• 2 carrots, chopped
• 1 tbsp sage, chopped
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 3 tbsp butter (or butter substitute, I used Smart Balance light butter spread)
• 2 tbsp worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1 tbsp flour
• Salt and pepper, to taste

First, pre-heat your oven to 350F.  Pierce the skin of the pumpkin and the sweet potatoes in a few places, wrap the sweet potatoes in foil, and place all three in the oven, baking for an hour.  While they are cooking, heat 1 tbsp butter in a skillet over medium-high heat and sauté 1/2 of the chopped onion, setting aside when it's done.  Shuck the corn and season with salt, pepper, and olive oil to taste, then wrap in foil.  

When there are 30 minutes of cook time remaining, put the corn in the oven with the pumpkin and sweet potatoes.  When the pumpkin and sweet potatoes are done, unwrap the potatoes and corn and set everything aside to cool down.

Next, melt 1 tbsp butter in a skillet over medium heat, and add beef and season with salt & pepper and 1 tbsp worcestershire sauce.  Once the beef has begun to brown, add the remaining onion and carrots and continue to cook until the onions have become translucent.  

While the beef and onion mixture is cooking,  heat the remaining 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp flour in a small saucepan over medium heat, making sure to stir constantly.  Add the broth and 1 tbsp worcestershire sauce and whisk as it heats to prevent lumps from forming.  Let it cook down for 1 minute, stirring to ensure it doesn't burn to the bottom of the pan.

Once your gravy has thickened, add it to the beef mixture, stirring everything together.  

Next, add the chopped kale in batches, letting it wilt.    

Now, add your beef mixture to a greased baking dish, and cut the corn off of the cob, adding it to the baking dish.

At some point during your cooking, you will also want to make your potato/pumpkin topping.  This can be done at any point after the pumpkin and sweet potato come out of the oven.  To make the topping, cut your sweet potatoes and pumpkin in half, and (after removing pumpkin seeds) spoon the flesh into a blender.  Add in the cooked onion that you set aside earlier, sage, salt and pepper, and 1 tsp oil.  Blend until you have a smooth mixture, and then spoon it over the top of your beef and corn mixture.

Bake for 30 minutes at 350F, uncovered.

Enjoy!   

Standfast's Roasted Ratatouille

I've been itching to do a recipe with eggplant, because the farmer's market has had some lovely eggplants.  It is also starting to get out of zucchini and summer squash season, so I opted to do a ratatouille.  For this one, though, instead of putting everything in a pot and letting it simmer to create that beautiful sauciness, I used the vitamix to make a slightly spicy tomato sauce and then roasted everything in the oven.  It came out great!  I would definitely make this again.

What you need:

• 1 onion, rough chopped
• 2 carrots, rough chopped
• 2 celery stalks, rough chopped
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 red bell pepper, de-seeded and roughly chopped
• 1 poblano pepper, de-seeded and roughly chopped
• 2 habanero peppers, de-seeded and roughly chopped
• 2 green tomatoes
• 1 pink tomato
• 1 tsp herbes de provence
• Basil leaves
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 2 Japanese eggplants, thinly sliced
• 5 roma tomatoes, thinly sliced
• 1 heirloom tomato, thinly sliced
• 2 zucchini, thinly sliced
• 2 yellow squash, thinly sliced
• 2-3 oz. Romano cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

To start, make a puree of the first 12 ingredients (onion through salt & pepper).  Next, grease an 8 x 11 baking dish and pour about 3/4 of the puree into it.  

Now arrange your eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, and squash in a spiral around the dish, like so:

Pour the remaining puree over the top, and grate the cheese over the top.

Cover and bake for an hour, then uncover and bake for an additional 20 minutes.  Enjoy!  It's actually way better the second time you eat it, so make sure to leave enough for leftovers!

Acorn Hall: Ground Turkey Stuffed Acorn Squash

Wow, so, it has obviously been awhile since the last time I posted a recipe on here.  A lot has been going on!  Stoney and I moved from middle-of-nowhere TN to the "big city" (Nashville), ran around in the Hyena costumes at DragonCon, and have just generally been crazy busy.  

One of the biggest perks about moving to Nashville has been the local Farmer's Market.  The theme of this week's market?  Squash!  We found some amazingly beautiful Acorn Squash and also found some wonderful spices at the international market inside of the Farmer's Market pavilion, so we decided on stuffed squash this week.  

The recipe is 4 servings, and your squashes will be completely overflowing with deliciousness!  It pairs wonderfully with a pumpkin beer.

What you need:

• 2 medium acorn squash
• 1 tbsp ghee (or butter, we found ghee at the international market and decided to give it a try)
• 1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
• 1 large jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely chopped
• 1 tbsp minced garlic
• 1 red bell pepper, chopped
• 1 large celery stalk, chopped
• 2lbs 99% lean ground turkey
• 1 tsp Hawaiian Red Clay salt
• 1 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
• 1 tsp garam masala
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 1/4 cup tahini 
• 1/4 cup water
• 3 cups baby spinach leaves
• 2 tbsp sliced almonds, finely ground

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Cut your squash in half and scoop out the guts and seeds.  Spray the flesh with olive oil and sprinkle with Hawaiian red clay salt and pepper.  

Spray a baking sheet with oil, as well, and place the squash flesh-side down.  Bake for 20-30 minutes, or until the squash is soft and the flesh is ever-so-slightly browned.

While the squash is cooking, heat the ghee in a skillet over medium heat, and then sauté the onion, peppers, garlic, and celery for about 3 minutes.  

Next, add in your spices and ground turkey, cooking until the turkey is cooked-through.  

  

Add the tahini, water, and spinach leaves next, cooking until the spinach has wilted.  Remove from heat.

Once you have baked the acorn squash (don't turn the oven off!), let it cool and then scoop out most of the flesh (but you are stuffing them, so remember to leave enough flesh in the squash) and stir it into your stuffing mix.  Leave the hollowed-out squash on the baking sheet.

Now stuff your squash!  Realistically, they will be overflowing, but fret not!  More to eat later!  Now bake everything for 10 minutes, and then turn the broiler onto them for 2.

Faceless Men: Banzai and Shenzi Completed Costumes

Banzai: "Hey did we order this dinner to go?”

Shenzi: “No, why?”

Banzai: “'Cause there is goes!"  

The Lion King

We did it!  We finally completed the hyenas, and with plenty of time to spare before DragonCon!  The costumes ended up being a hit, and we somehow managed to win Best in Show in the Hallway Costume Contest out of over 300 entries.  We were thrilled!  I honesty figured we'd have no chance when we saw the number of wonderful entries, so we were floored when they announced the results at the Masquerade!

Walking in the Parade... It was miserable... .9 miles of hell.
But all of the kids yelling "Mufasa!" and the general great
reception made it 100% worth it.

Here are links to all of the tutorials we made during the construction.

1. Hind Feet
2. Masks
3. Ears
4. Front Legs
5. Neck and mounting the head

There was no tutorial for the body since we just got gray onesies, painted them, and added a tail.

It's been quite a process, but we met a lot of wonderful people at DragonCon who gave us great advice for future projects, and we are chomping at the bit for the Smooth-On projects to arrive in the mail so we can start next year's project...

If you want to stay up-to date on next years project follow us on facebook at Phenix Cosplay,

Just a hint, but the costumes next year will have to do with Fallout.

Rob Stark: Head and Neck Mounting Tutorial

When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world. 

 Timon, The Lion King

This was by-far the part of the costume I was most worried about.  I had quite a few amorphous ideas about how the head would be mounted and the neck would be formed, but for quite awhile, I had no real idea of how any of it would come together.  Luckily, it did come together, and it ended up looking pretty darn cool!  We sacrificed quite a bit of visibility doing it the way we did, but we ultimately decided that we wanted to fabric all the way down to the mask from our heads.  The original Broadway costume was totally open from the head to the mask, like so:

It looks awesome, and I am pretty sure it was done that way to allow the actors to really be able to see where they were going on stage, but the way we figured, we didn't need our visibility to be quite as good, and if we were in a situation that required full range of vision, we could just un-velcro the fabric and let it hang down.  The fabric we used is surprisingly see-though, and the color ended up being pretty close to what we had done the masks and body-suits in.   We did end up cutting small eye-slits into the fabric, but I don't think they were too noticeable.

To wearable parts of our head mounts were a GoPro chest harness and a GoPro head strap.  We then took the leftover crutch bars (the tops, which were cut off to make the hand stilts) and used Thermo-Loc (an extremely hard thermal plastic that comes in little sticks, just microwave on a silicone sheet for a few seconds and its malleable.  Available at http://www.thermo-loc.com/), just to attach the crutch to the clip that goes into the chest mount.  To really make sure the crutch was secured, we wrapped the crutch in duct tape.  Before you lock the crutch bar onto the clip, though, you will want to go ahead and drill a hole on the other end.  This hole will let you attach the bar to the head eventually.

Make sure the bar is attached at an angle so that
the head is positioned properly when bent over

On the base of the masks we used the sticks of thermo-loc to make a little loop that stuck out from the bottom of the mask like so:

We added hot glue to secure
then tape over everything, just to to be safe

This hole and the hole in drilled in the aforementioned metal bar are used to attach the head to the chest mount in a way that allows it to move (with the added benefit of making it easier to put on since the head is removable).  This was accomplished with a cheap trip to the hardware store.  Using a hitch style cotter pin, a clevis pin, and a washer.

How the cotter pin, clevis pin and washer look
when put threw the mounting bar

Now that the heads are mounted on a movable platform it was necessary to get them to move in sync with our heads.  That was actually way easier then it sounds.  We took the Go Pro head mounts that came free with the chest mounts we bought and tied a piece of twine to each side of the mount.  Then glued the other end of the twine to both sides of the top of the heads.

Takes some experimentation to get the
length of twine right.

At this point the heads are wearable.

As soon as we got the heads mounted like this we realized the chest mounts for the go pro where never meant for that kind of weight and are not comfortable so we ended up adding some foam padding we had left over from the feet to the underside of the chest mounts.

The next goal was to attach the necks to cover up our faces.  We did this by using a near see-through women's blouse, with everything above the lowest point of the sleeves cut off.  We hot glued the edge of the shirt to the back edge of the heads and used velcro patches to attach to the body suit.  Don't forget to cut eye holes.  Once we had the top of the blouse attached at the top we put it on and pinned up the bottom so that we could cut off and sew up the excess to make the necks flat.

pinned up bottom before it was cut off.
Pay attention to the exposed bar and mount.
We left this open intentionally so we could see
where we where walking.  since we where low to the ground
others could not see this opening

Don't forget to add hair onto the top of the neck.

FIN!

The Hound: Creamy Chicken "Fettucine"

 What's the matter Colonel Sandurz?  CHICKEN?

Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

I've been loving my spiralizer, and how easy it has made trying new veggies.  I had heard about Jicama for awhile, and saw a recipe which used the Jicama to make noodles.  The recipe's creator raved about how good the noodles were, so I decided I would get a jicama and make myself a noodle dish with it.  The sauce is pretty basic, with onion, tomato, and garlic as the main players, but the addition of the mascarpone cheese added a wonderful creaminess to everything, and who doesn't love putting parmesan on their pasta?  All in all, it was an incredibly easy recipe, and I've learned that I absolutely adore Jicama noodles!  They maintained their crunch despite being simmered in the sauce for awhile, and they have a great flavor that is mild enough not to overpower the dish. 


What you need:

• 8oz. Boneless, Skinless Chicken Breast, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 1 red onion, diced
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 3 plum tomatoes, diced (aim for 3/4lb of tomato)
• 1 Jicama, spiralized to create your noodles
• 1/4 cup Parmesan Cheese
• 2 tbsp mascarpone cheese
• 1 bunch basil
• 2 tbsp coconut oil
• 1 cup water
• Salt & Pepper to taste

To begin, heat the coconut oil over medium-high heat.  Add the chicken and let it cook for about 3 minutes.  

Next, add in the onion and garlic, cooking until onions have begun to soften.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  Next, add in the tomato paste, cooking an additional minute or two. 

At this point, add in your tomatoes and 1 cup of water and bring everything to a gentle boil. 

Let simmer for a few minutes before adding in the Jimaca noodles and about half of the basil.  Once the noodles and basil have been added, cover and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure the noodles are covered in sauce.

Stir in the mascarpone cheese and let everything simmer for about 5 more minutes.  Stir the parmesan cheese in right before serving, and garnish with the remaining basil leaves. 

Bran Stark: Hyena Front Leg Tutorial

Look at you guys! No wonder we're dangling at the bottom of the food chain! 

Shenzi, The Lion King

The front legs ended up being far easier than Stoney and I had anticipated.  To make one set of legs, all it required was a set of aluminum crutches, an angle grinder (to cut the crutches), two 4" PVC couplings, a wire clothes hanger, foam (the same foam used for the hind feet), black fabric, duct tape, a drill, and 4 pennies.

Freshly cut crutches

Penny over the cut edge for safety

Fully duct-taped crutch ends

The arm cuff, secured by duct tape

Top view of the taped-in cuff

They work!

For the next step, we cut out the paws out of foam (same as with the back feet, but we didn't have to worry about gluing the foam onto shoes), and carved them to look more like paws and less like big blocks of foam.  Because the paws will be going onto crutches, you also have to cut a hole in them, which will allow the crutch pole to go through.  We carved the hole wider on the bottom to allow the foam foot to move with the crutch as we walked.  We also spray-painted the bottoms black just so they would blend in if we started waving our paws around.

At this point, you will need to get out the power tools.  To attach the paws, we drilled a hole towards the bottom of each crutch (the foot of the crutch pulls all the way out, and that is the pole you drill into). 

The goal was to get the paw to sit around the foot of the crutch without spinning around and getting out of place.  This is where the hole comes into play.  You drill straight through the side of the pole, and then, using a thin metal rod (we used a cut up coat hanger, since we had already used part of it for the ears), you push the metal through one side of the foam foot, through the hole in the crutch, and then out the other side of the foot.  Like so:

Coat hanger poking through to other side of foot

The end result: foot held onto crutch

Once the metal has gone through, use hot glue on both ends to create a cap, which will prevent the metal from piercing the fabric and/or coming loose entirely.

When furring the feet, we did all of the toes first, then put the foot on the pole, and then finished furring.

The final step to creating your front legs is furring the rest of the crutch.  To do this, we essentially just created a fur sleeve, and then glued the fabric at the top and bottom to stabilize it.  Cut out a piece of fabric that can wrap around the length of the crutch (give yourself about an inch of extra fabric on the sides, and some extra on the top).  Sew down the length of the fabric to create your sleeve (we did the stitching on the inside to hide the stitches, but at this point you can do whatever you are comfortable with).  Before putting the fabric onto the crutch, you are going to want to make a cap for the metal screw that keeps the crutch's hand grip in place.  We just used a piece of foam that we cut a slit into and glued down:

Now just slide the sleeve up from the bottom to the cuff, and use hot glue to paste the fabric onto the inside of the arm cuff.  This acts as padding for the cuff while also keeping the fabric in place.

Slip the foot of the crutch, which now has the furred foot attached, back onto the crutch.  Use hot glue to attach the bottom of the fur sleeve to the foot.  At this point, you have a fully finished front leg!