Steampot Supper

This last Sunday Brandon and I had a few of our good friends over and had a steampot supper (think like Joe's Crab Shack).
I did not use a recipe, nor have I ever done ANYTHING remotely like this before... so this was a huge experiment. I had looked up online how long to boil the meats, but other than that, it was just "dump and stir".

In the pot were 2 pounds of red potatoes, 2 large onions, 4 pounds of shrimp, a dozen baby ears of sweetcorn, 4 pounds of andouille sausage, and a whole bunch of crab (king and snow). For the liquid I used water, a couple cans of beer, and a TON of garlic and Old Bay seasoning. That is pretty much it.

Some of the pots I used to make everything in... to the right in red is an 18 quart roaster oven that I used as well.

 

The yummy food getting ready to be added to the pots

CRAB!!

The table of food

Yes, everyone has their own little dish of melted butter to dip in :)

Other side included whole wheat dinner rolls, southwest ranch coleslaw/salad, mixed seasoned veggies, and there were brownies for dessert. We also had fresh-cut lemons and little dishes of butter for everyone's enjoyment. Of course a few adult beverages were served as well. At first I had wanted to just line the table with a bunch of paper and pour everything in the middle and just have everybody dig in... but then with the different side dishes it was going to be too hard to do that. We did end up using plates and silverware (and bought some crab leg splitters from Joe's Crab Shack), but we still dumped all the crab in the middle of the table.

 After supper, we played a board game that one of our friends brought over called Settlers of Catan. It took a little while to get used to, but once we got the hang of it, the game was SO much fun! I would say a very short description would be a strategy game where you collect various cards and trade them in to build roads and towns to get points and then win the game. Kind of like a combination of Pit and Monopoly.... maybe... sounds strange but it was fun :)

All in all, the night went very well and everything turned out SO yummy! I definitely want to do this again sometime. Thanks to those that came and made the night so much fun!!

Christmas Gifts

Ok this is a little late, but I didn't want to spoil the surprise of anyone... but anyway... I made spiced sugar body scrubs (thanks Pinterest) and gave them to several people as homemade Christmas gifts. I don't remember the exact recipe, and I know I tweaked it anyway so it really doesn't matter what the original recipe is. 

The main ingredients are:

Brown sugar

White sugar

Spices (nutmeg, pumpkin pie spice, cinnamon)

Coconut oil

Olive oil

 Pretty much all I did was mix the ingredients together until I was happy with the consistency.  The only downfall was that it took a LOT more oil than I was expecting, and the coconut oil was a little pricy. It also is solid at room temp, so I needed to run the jar under hot water to get it into a liquid.

Lastly, I made little labels and put them on the jars and gave them to a few people. I meant to give them to more people than I did, but I ran out of the coconut oil and it was too expensive to buy more.  Sorry!

 

It was a fun, quick project, to help soften skin and help others relax a little ... plus it smelled wonderful! I also think this could work well with all white sugar and using a peppermint extract or lemon extract. Really, I am sure you could use about any essential oils that you liked. I might have to make more of these in various scents.