My incredibly creative friend made these. There was a pig, but his house fell down.

Yes, they are sugar bombs. But who can resist such a thing, especially for Halloween?

All you need is a box cake mix, a tub of frosting, sticks, candy melts (available at Michael's), assorted candies, and a bit of creativity.

Make the box cake, then mash it up to crumbs. Mix in about  3/4 of a can of frosting. This will make cake-Play-Doh that you can shape into whatever you want. Birds, pigs, Pokemon, or the simplicity of a singular creepy eyeball. Freeze of refrigerate them for a bit to get them to stick better.

Now the fun part.

Follow the directions for melting the candy. Dip one end of the stick into the candy melt and then into the cake ball. This is so that the stick stays stuck. Then, dip the whole ball into the melt. Decorate while the candy coating is cooling around the cake ball. Angry birds were made using Twizzlers, candy corn, black licorice and candy eyeballs from Michael's.

One box of cake mix can make about 48 very angry birds, or at least 6 levels of house-of-pigs-collapsing mayhem.

Eat Well. Be Well.

Onions. Garlic. Ginger. 
The first two are, by far, the most used ingredients in my house. And while I don't use ginger quite as often, for each of them, I found a very useful, wacky and ridiculous-sounding way to make cutting, peeling and chopping the Big Three a lot easier. This isn't a "Punk'd" blog. I have adopted these new ways.

Skinning garlic in 15 seconds
I posted this link on to the Feeding My Ohana Facebook Page a couple weeks ago. It was so quirky and unbelievable, I had to try it.  Bash a whole head of garlic with your hand to split the cloves up. Then dump all of it into a covered bowl and "shake the Dickens out of it" for about 15 seconds. And peeled garlic magically appears.

It's utterly amazing. I even used a Tupperware instead of the the two metal bowls, but it still worked. My only advice is to do the garlic smash outside, either on a table or a cookie sheet, because it's a little messy. Also, this is best when you need a lot of peeled garlic all at once because the garlic get a little dented in the "shaking the Dickens out of it" phase.

Cutting an Onion with a Piece of Bread Sticking Out of Your Mouth
I use onions about 4 times a week. So I cry a lot. Someone recommended that I put a half-slice of bread in my mouth so it hangs out like a bad moustache. Blogs and message boards both swear by and thoroughly pan this technique.I tried it in the privacy of my own home with no pictures. I looked ridiculous. I felt ridiculous. My kids thought it was ridiculous. But it worked (more than once), so there's definitely something to it. I've done a little more research and it seems that burning a candle as well as a very sharp knife will help. We shall see.

Skinning Fresh Ginger with a Spoon
Thanks to the good peeps at Hui 'Ilima for showing me this trick. Don't bother with a peeler or the precision, slightly risky peeling with a knife.

Simply cut the fresh ginger and use the side of a spoon to peel the skin off. Like the Dickensian garlic method, you'll be done in about 15 seconds. No knives makes it a job for anyone. This should be read, "Your kids should peel your ginger from now on."

So try these and let me know how they work. Better yet, post or send me your best human kitchen tricks.

Eat Well. Be Well.

We've all had them. What sounded like such a good idea all-too-quickly torpedoes into Complete and Utter Cooking Disaster. Doesn't taste good. Doesn't look good. One substitution too many and bam! Unlike Emeril,  it's an into-the garbage and go-get-the-takeout fast day. 

I've had a bunch of them. While my family is very tolerant and will eat pretty much anything once, my children are merciless, and have made a sport of thinking up entertaining names for kitchen failures. A chicken curry with eggplant, green beans and coconut milk was dubbed  Prison Curry and they asked if it was served in orphanages. Another recipe whose official name is "Savory Lamb Burgers" was endowed with the title Poop Burgers because of aesthetic and aroma shortcomings. 

Finally, there is the outrageous disbelief that two lovely foodstuffs can be combined to ruin each other as in, "How in the world can can you take perfectly good furikake and and perfectly good salmon and have it taste like something weird called furikake salmon?" However, the all-time worst is simply called by its given name, 
Salmon Couscous. This is the meal against which all epic fail meals are judged. 

The most recent fail was Macadamia Nut Eggplant. It was edible, but barely. It sounded like a good idea, scoop out the eggplant meat, dice it upy and stir fry in some olive oil, garlic, Worcestershire, shoyu. Cook in a little ground turkey and chopped onion and top with bread crumbs and macadamia nuts and bake in the eggplant shell. Easy one-dish meal. 

Not. First of all, do you know how hard it is to scoop out raw eggplant meat? Strike one. Second, all I taste is salty. Strike 2. Finally, you get this hash-like brown food that you stuff back into the eggplant that you cored and bake it. Let me just say that long brown, cooked stuffed eggplants just do not look good and really don't look much like food. Strike 3. Out. The children said, "Well, it wasn't as bad as Salmon Couscous, but..."

And it was time for dinner by phone.