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I received the April/May 2010 Betty Crocker Cupcakes, Cakes & More magazine in the mail and immediately went to make the Pink Champagne Cupcakes. I changed the color to blue since I didn’t have pink food coloring, but the result was fabulous! I added on some multicolored sugar sprinkles and some silver edible ball sprinkles as a last touch. Very tasty! The recipe can be found here on the Betty Crocker website.
They were almost too pretty to eat! Almost… My family goes through dry parsley on a regular basis. It goes on to seared chicken, beef stews, steaks… You name it. Well, a trip to the store revealed that organic parsley spice isn’t cheap. Who wants to spend five bucks on a bottle that won’t last very long? The cheapest solution: dry my own dang organic parsley. Yes, it can take a little bit of time, but not more than ten minutes. And buying it fresh and organic was a third of the price! How could I not embark upon this adventure? The first step was to cut the parsley down to little leaf bunches, wash the parsley, and rise it off. I use an organic vegetable wash that I bought, but you can easily make it from scratch by using lemons and vinegar. Here’s the link to that.
To speed up the drying process, I tossed the parsley in my salad spinner and spun it like crazy.
Onto the dehydrator trays it goes! I tried not to cut the pieces too small, as they would have fallen through the cracks in the dehydrator tray.
I set the dehydrator at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. The drying time took about 22 hrs total.
From there, I took the dried parsley pieces and put them into my food processor. A few presses of the high button had them at just the right size.
This was seriously easy and the result was the best parsley spice that I have ever tasted! Skip the expensive spices and just do it yourself. I have to confess that I am particular about my ranch dressing. I primarily use it as a dip as I have other salad dressings that I prefer over it. However, my husband is a huge fan, so I decided to try to make some homemade ranch dressing. The recipe is from the Allrecipes.com site and has been slightly modified from the original recipe posted. This is due to the nature of the mayonnaise that I bought – organic mayonnaise from Trader Joes. It is much tangier than regular mayonnaise so I had to adjust the sour cream from 1/2 cup to a 1 cup. I recommend picking a less tangy mayonnaise for simplicity sake and less headache. I also ground my own spices to a powder. Here is a picture of the ground spices in the mortar and pestle.
Homemade Ranch DressingIngredients
Directions
It was very good and pretty easy to make! I recommend trying this out if you must have ranch dressing. Homemade does make a huge difference! |
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