Simple Syrup -- Complex Flavors!

With some extra kaffir lime leaves from our pork belly, we thought we'd throw together some simple syrups to have on hand.  They'll come in handy when we want to make cocktails.  Plain simple syrups, just sugar and water, are easy ways to sweeten any drink, especially iced drinks.  But throwing in some aromatics will make them even tastier.

We made 2 versions; kaffir lime and ginger, and just kaffir lime.  To start, we combined equal parts of water and sugar, tossed in the aromatics in 2 separate pots, and gave them some heat.  

You'll want to make sure all of the sugar dissolves, and then just let it boil.

Once it's boiled for about 10-15 minutes, it should be ready.  It'll be thicker, like a syrup, and coat your spoon.  Then we just poured them into some mason jars, and let them cool with the lids off.  Once they've cooled, we just popped them into the fridge for safe keeping.

They taste amazing, and I can't wait to mix them into some cocktails!

Cleaning Out the Fridge

With the holidays approaching and both of us heading out of town soon, we need to clear out the fridge and try to eat our remaining CSA goodies.  We haven't been cooking as much this past week between holiday parties, pop-up tacos (more to come on this soon), and birthday celebrations, so we have quite a bit of food to get through.  So I turned to my trusty friend, Gojee, to see what kinds of recipes he had to offer.

If you haven't heard me say it before, you'll hear it now...I LOVE this website.  You can type in what ingredients you have, things you don't like, things you crave, etc., and it will spit out a slideshow of recipes that meet your criteria.  The main veggies we need to use up are the kale and potatoes.  In those ingredients went into the "I Have" field, and out came 100 recipes.  Since we also have onion (white and green) from the CSA, and some eggs in the fridge, we settled on the Spansh tortilla with kale.

First things first...slice the potatoes.  Here's where I realized having a mandoline would really come in handy. But the box grater worked fine enough.  Once sliced, we layered them into the pan with some olive oil, salt and pepper, to get nice and crispy and brown.

While those were cooking, I sliced half of the white onion, and a few green onions.  We also deribbed the kale.  Is deribbed a word?  If not, it should be.  Once the potatoes were golden brown, we tossed in the onions to sweat them out a bit.  The kale followed shortly thereafter.

While that was all cooking, I beat the eggs...all 3 of them.  Yeah...here's where I should've checked how many eggs we had left before we started cooking.  Lesson learned.  Once the kale was wilted down, we dumped in our eggs, trying to distribute them throughout the big pan.  It only took a few minutes for them to cook up, and we were ready to eat.

To top it off, we threw a dollop of chipotle sour cream on top.  This was leftover from last week's sweet potato latkes.

And since I had a couple oranges, we decided to make a little orange crush cocktail.  I flexed my muscles a bit and squeezed the juice from the 2 oranges.

To that, we added some Aperol, vodka, and fresh mint.

If you like cocktails, and don't have stainless steel straws, you need to get some.  Thank you, Tiffany, for sending me some.  They get so icy cold in your drink, and just enhance your cocktail sipping experience.  Although we were lacking about 4 eggs, it was still a tasty, filling meal.