Category: Fitness & Recipes

Categories
Fitness & Recipes Video

Airstream Kitchen: Gnocchi Sauce

Airstream Kitchen Gnocchi SauceWhile attending church one Sunday we got into a conversation with the mom of a young family who very excitedly invited us over for dinner the following evening so she could pick our brains about traveling full time. Trade information for good company and amazing food? No hesitation. When asked if we’d like Italian or Mexican for dinner, I randomly chose Italian since we had just had burritos the previous evening. Boy did I pick right. Her husband’s family is Italian and over the years she has challenged herself to cook the part. In fact, there’s a little rivalry between his full-bloodied Italian Grandma and herself that I found quite amusing.

She made something called Gnocchi, and I watched in fascination as she rolled, cut, and pressed these weird looking pasta/potato/roll looking things before boiling them in water and covering them with the most delicious sauce EVER. My kids were also big fans, so when we ran into the Gnocchi all packaged up and pretty on the shelf at Costco they BEGGED me to get them.

“But I want to try making them from scratch,” I said. “Scratch always tastes better.”

“No, mom. This will be WAY faster. PLEASE?” Andrew replied.

Sigh. Okay. Twist my arm. I texted my new friend for the recipe and she came back with a list of ingredients and “Well, I just sort of make it up” instructions. Perfect. I never measure anything anyway. Basically the recipe is a combination of a marinara and alfredo sauce. Just pick your favorites and mix them together and voila!

So, here’s my “non-recipe” plus a fun little video of how we actually made it in the Airstream. Buon Appetito!

Gnocchi Sauce (all ingredients are extremely approximate – use your best judgement)

2 tbsp butter
3 garlic cloves
1/2 small onion
2 tbsp Italian Seasoning
2 tbsp Flour
8 oz can tomato sauce
1 can diced tomatoes
8 oz Cream Cheese
2 tbsp butter
1 tsp Chicken Bullion
2 tbsp milk

Saute garlic and onions in butter until translucent. Mix in Italian Seasoning and flour. Add tomato sauce and diced tomatoes. Stir until combined. Add cream cheese in chunks and stir until melted in. Add butter & chicken bullion. Add milk a little at a time until sauce is the desired thickness. Heat through and serve over Gnocchi.

Categories
Fitness & Recipes

Airstream Kitchen: Candy Cane Sugar Bars

Airstream Kitchen Candy Cane Sugar Cookie Bars

It’s Christmas Week! Instead of sharing our normal posts, we’ve decided to mix it up and share mostly Christmas-y stuff this week. We have really made an effort to have the most awesome, mobile Christmas EVER, and so far we are doing pretty good. For one of our activities last week, we made another recipe from Real Mom Kitchen and I thought I’d share how we pulled it off in the Airstream. First off, these are super yummy. As she describes on her website, Real Mom says that sometimes she wants the taste of a sugar cookie, without all the hastle of rolling out, cutting, and then baking. These totally nailed it. They seriously taste like sugar cookies, but are much faster and easier to make. Plus, I love peppermint almost as much as I love pumpkin.

We don’t have a mixer in the Airstream. There’s just not enough room to store something that I would only use occasionally. Enter, the Blendtec. I already posted about how much I absolutely love it for smoothies and syrup, but this recipe was partly an experiment to see if I could get another use out of it.

Here’s the recipe modified for use with the Blendtec (settings in parentheses)  and limited kitchen equipment.

Ingredients

  • 1 cup butter, room temp
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 5 cups flour
  • 1 tsp salt
  • ½ tsp soda
  • 3 crushed peppermint candy canes

Frosting

  • ½ cup butter, room temp
  • ½ cup shortening
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • pinch of salt
  • 4 cups powdered sugar
  • 5 Tbsp milk
  • 1 cup Hershey’s Peppermint Kisses or Bars chopped into pieces
Instructions
  1. In the Blendtec, cream together 1 cup butter with 2 cups sugar until fluffy. I used the “batter” setting. It got pretty thick though so keep your rubber spatula handy. Adding the eggs helps thin it back up.
  2.  Add eggs, one at a time, mixing after each egg (pulse). Add vanilla and mix well (batter).
  3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, and soda and whisk (by hand) to combine.
  4. Pour creamed mixture over flour mixture in the bowl and whisk (by hand) until just until combined adding crushed candy canes into the dough when the batter is almost combined. (My arms got tired so my awesome husband helped with this one.)
  5. Spread on a greased 9×13 pan (because that’s all you have). Bake at 375 degrees for 10-15 min, until light golden brown or until a toothpick comes out clean.
  6. Cool completely. While it’s cooling, wash out your Blendtec because you need it for the frosting.
  7. For frosting, combine ½ cup butter and shortening until smooth and creamy (batter). Add vanilla and salt (pulse).
  8. Add powdered sugar in 1-2 cup increments until combined (speed 2), then add milk & mix until smooth and spreading consistency (pulse). Spread over cooled cookie and sprinkle with the 1 cup of chopped peppermint Hershey Kisses. Cut into bars and serve.
 There you have it! My kids gobbled these up and I definitely ate more than I should. Happy baking!
Categories
Fitness & Recipes Video

Airstream Kitchen: S’more Fudge

Airstream Smores Fudge

**The recipe is from Real Mom Kitchen, one of my favorite recipe sites.

I love yummy things to eat around the holidays, and I’ve never made fudge, so I thought it’d be the perfect experiment in our little Airstream Kitchen. Are we capable of making holiday goodness? Watch the video to find out!

There you have it. As far as consistency goes, I felt like it never fully set but that could be affected by the altitude? Maybe? I’ll blame it on that. And we did share it. Hopefully they didn’t die of our cooties, but they seemed pretty impressed when we showed up to our dinner invitation with homemade fudge. “You MADE this?” they said in complete awe of our awesomeness. Why yes, yes we did.

Categories
Airstream Accessories Fitness & Recipes Most Popular Posts

Using a Blendtec in an Airstream + My Favorite Smoothie Recipe

Using a Blendtec in an AirstreamI have a smoothie obsession. I love them. Green smoothies usually, but most of the time they end up puke brown and I still guzzle them. So do my kids. When the time came to pack the van for the trip out to Virginia (pre-Airstream) the Blendtec didn’t make the cut. There just wasn’t room for it, and I was okay with that. Our house swapping partner said she had a good blender and it was only for 6 months. I’d live. Right? Wrong.

I missed my Blendtec. There’s just something about the raw power that it harnesses to create such an amazing smooth blend of frozen fruit and veggies. All the other blenders I’ve tried don’t come close. After we bought the Airstream I knew I needed something to make my smoothies. I couldn’t very well take the blender from the house we were staying in, so we bought a Magic Bullet to try it out. Smaller, uses less wattage than the Blendtec, and there was a chance an inverter could run it when we weren’t plugged into shore power in the Airstream. The consensus? Weak sauce. The only pro was that the smaller blending cups were nice – I felt like I could make a single serving quite easily. After making 5 single servings, however, I was afraid I’d burnt out the motor. Smoothie just for me? It did okay. Smoothies for the whole family? Not a chance.

I became desperate. My parents were flying to Virginia from Utah to come visit for a week and I begged, pleaded, and bribed them to take a trip to my house, collect the blender (and a few other things we needed) and  fly it all out to us. They love me so much they did. Nestled in a suitcase among a soft bed of socks, the Blendtec made the cross country trip.

And now it sits in the cupboard above my sink ready for use. I make a smoothie for breakfast or a snack at least 4 times a week. I realize there a lot of other things the Blendtec is good for, but I have simple needs. Occasionally I’ll use my frozen strawberries to make syrup for breakfast and the kids (okay, me too) love it.

The Blendtec won’t run off the battery (so we have to be camped or parked somewhere we can plug the Airstream in for electrical power), but we don’t have a generator or solar panels yet so chances are we’ll need power anyway. Good excuse, right? We need to power to run the laptop. There are definitely other blenders you can try. One of our other Airstream friends loves her low wattage Cuisinart. I just can’t do it though, so until we outfit the Airstream to live without hookups, I’ll just enjoy my smoothies.

My Favorite Recipe

1 cup of water
1/2 cup of oats
1 cup of spinach (usually frozen)
1 scoop of Vanilla Protein Powder
1 – 1.5 bananas (frozen or fresh)
6-9 frozen strawberries
A peeled clementine or 2 if I have them

Add in order and press the Smoothie button. Enjoy!

 

*Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in anyway with Blendtec. I wasn’t paid to write this post, but they did mention to me on Instagram they’d love to see a photo of the Blendtec through the Airstream window. Their request inspired me. I wouldn’t turn down a complimentary Twister Jar though. What do you think Blendtec? 🙂