I love curry; I mean I really really love curry. I’ve never heard of a pumpkin curry, until I went to a teeny Thai restaurant called Thai Classic in Paso Robles, CA while we were on a little wine tasting adventure…it was one of the most amazing curries of my life! I only ordered it, because everyone on Yelp was screaming about it…who knew a pumpkin curry could be so good! Love! Ever since then, I have been on a mission of try to recreate this epic Thai pumpkin curry. It also gave me an excuse to make my very own pumpkin puree, which is also a first. This recipe is different from the magical dish I had in Paso, but I was pleasantly surprised by all of the lovely flavors that were packed into it. Who knew pumpkin could be so delicious in savory dishes! I will continue to try to recreate the Thai pumpkin curry that I had in Paso, but I think this will hold me for a while. At least I hope it does, because Paso Robles is a little trek from NYC.

Ingredients

1/2 tablespoon olive oil or ghee
1 large onion, chopped
1 C chopped broccoli
4-6 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup pumpkin puree (from the can or homemade)
1 cup canned tomatoes
1 cup vegetable stock or water
1/4 cup coconut milk
1 can garbanzo beans, rinsed and drained
2 to 3 tablespoons red curry paste (use less or more of the paste, depending on how spicy it is, and then add more, to taste)
2 or 3 tablespoons honey
salt and pepper
2 cups cooked quinoa

Directions

1. In a large skillet or wok, cook chopped onion and minced garlic in olive oil for about 5 minutes on medium heat until soft.

2. Add pumpkin, canned tomatoes (I pureed them in my Vitamix until smooth, because I don’t like tomato chunks), vegetable stock, coconut milk, and chickpeas. Add 1-2 tablespoon of red curry paste, stir everything well, and season with salt and pepper. Taste your curry, season with more salt if needed. Add another tablespoon of red curry paste, if desired. (Note: Some curry pastes are spicier than others so taste your creation before you add more).

3. I find it important that you start adding honey only after you’ve seasoned the curry with salt, because we’re using honey here not to really sweeten the curry but to balance the flavors. Add 1 tablespoon of honey (after seasoning with salt), taste your curry. Add another tablespoon (or 2) of honey if it suits your taste.

4. Bring to boil, make sure to stir all ingredients well together to combine flavors and spices. Reduce to simmer and cook for 15 minutes on very low simmer.

5. Serve with quinoa; garnished with chopped green onion, cilantro and if you are feeling sassy some diced jalapeno.

I also had some left over pumpkin seeds, from the pumpkin puree that I made so I added those to the top of the dish as well…it made it look fancy.

Enjoy!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Chickpeas, Curry, Pumpkin, Quinoa. This post has no comments yet.

Drumroll, Please…I am so excited to announce that my recipe, craft, and travel blog Glitter Spice has a new look!

Sorry about the lack of posts, but I have been working hard on doing a complete blog upgrade to go with the new logo. It is still a work in progress, so I welcome your feedback. If you have a minute check out her glittery new look, thank you so much for the support!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Uncategorized. This post has 4 comments.

One of my goals for 2014 is make healthy meals simply. So this is my week of super quick and simple recipes, that will save you time and money. I don’t make a lot of pumpkin things, but I had some left over decorative sweet pumpkins from Halloween that were on the verge of going south. I didn’t want them to go to waste, so I decided to tackle making a pumpkin puree. Last year we were traveling in Paso Robles, CA and we had the most amazing pumpkin curry at a Thai restaurant called Thai Classic. I never knew pumpkin could taste sooooo good! I am more of a savory than a sweet person. So I had an idea to make my own pumpkin puree, so that I could make a hearty pumpkin curry out of it. Follow the simple steps below and never buy pumpkin in a can again!

Ingredients

3 Small Sugar pumpkins (at least)
1 roasting pan
Purified Water

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 375.

2. Give your pumpkins a good scrub and carefully cut them in half. Scrape out the seeds and the guts with a melon baller or a spoon. Set the seeds aside, for roasting later. I love roasted pumpkin seeds!

3 Once all of the gut strings are out, place your pumpkin halves face down in a baking dish or roasting pan.

4. Add a little water to the pan to help the pumpkin roast.

5. Place the pumpkins in the oven for 30-45 minutes. When you can stick a fork in your pumpkins they are done.

6. Let the pumpkins cool until they can be handled and scoop out all the great roasted pumpkin. I scooped the pumpkin right into my Vitamix.

7. Once you have all of your roasted pumpkin in you blender, put the lid on it and process until smooth. If you don’t have a Vitamix, you can process your pumpkin in batches in your blender or you can put your baked pumpkin in a bowl and process it with a handmixer.

8. Let cool and then package into 1 to 2-cup portions and freeze. Depends on what you want to use it for.

9. When I’m ready to use some of the homemade pumpkin puree, I just thaw and drain off any extra liquid. Then I use the drained puree as you would canned pumpkin.

Easy Peasy!

Now go roast your pumpkin seeds!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Pumpkin. This post has no comments yet.

Perfect Quinoa – DF,GF,V

I worked at Whole Foods back in the day and I never knew how to pronounce the weird grain Quinoa. Quinoa pronounced KEEN-Wah, not Q-Noah, not Qui-No or any other fun way you have heard it pronounced. I have been using quinoa in place of rice in most of my recipes and I have loved it. If part of your New Year’s resolution is to eat a bit healthier, then quinoa is going to be your new best friend. It is nice to have a protein filled rice alternative that tastes just as good as rice, but also packs a protein punch to make a well rounded guilt free meal. Quinoa is one of the most versatile food items that I have started to use in the past year or so. Just like rice there has been a lot of trial and error in learning how to make it well, and I think that I have finally discovered the secret. When I first started making quinoa, it would turn out really mushy and had a weird soapy after taste. I thought that it had something to do with the water or broth that I was using, but come to find out it has to do with a natural coating that is on the quinoa. All I had to do is rinse the heck out of it and have a little patience. After the quinoa is rinsed, toast it in a pot with some oil before adding your liquid of choice and BOOM! You now have the most perfect quinoa. To get yourself emotionally prepared for the most amazing quinoa of your life, enjoy the fun quinoa video below. Besides a good laugh it should also teach you one of the ways that quinoa should not be pronounced. 🙂

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcQmBCM3JMs]

Ingredients

1 Cups Quinoa
Olive Oil
2 Cups Liquid, such as broth or water
Salt (optional)
Fine Mesh Strainer
Patience

Directions

1. Measure out 1-cup quinoa and 2 cups liquid.

2. Place the quinoa in a fine-mesh strainer, and rinse thoroughly with cool water. Rub and swish the quinoa with your hand while rinsing, and rinse for at least 2 minutes under the running water. Drain. This will eliminate the bitter soapy taste that quinoa tends to have.

3. Heat a drizzle of olive oil in the saucepan over medium-high heat, and add the drained quinoa. Cook, stirring, for about 1 minute, letting the water evaporate. You can get sassy and add flavored oil instead of olive oil, to add a little boost to your quinoa.

4. Stir in the liquid and the salt (if using) and bring to a rolling boil.

5. Lower heat to a low simmer and cook covered for 15 minutes, until all of the liquid is evaporated.

6. After 15 minutes, turn off the heat and remove the pot from the burner. Let stand for 5 minutes, covered. This is where your patience comes into play

7. After 5 minutes, remove the lid, fluff the quinoa gently with a fork, and eat! (You should see tiny spirals (like teeny tails) separating from and curling around the quinoa seeds.

Now go make the heck out of some curry and dump it all over your perfect quinoa.

Pumpkin Curry…Click HERE for the recipe!

Enjoy!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Quinoa. This post has no comments yet.

Happy New Year from Julia the Mystical Traveling Unicorn!

I can’t believe that 2013 has come and gone, how the heck did that happen!? This year has been filled with many fun adventures, new friends and new experiences. We started the year off in San Diego and ended it in New York City! I got married officially to my beautiful wife and I met a unicorn named Julia along the way! It always feels so good to start fresh in the New Year, there is a magical feeling to it and I get excited to think of all of the adventures and challenges that are yet to come. I have been brainstorming the past few days on what should be my first post in the New Year. One of the things that I am most proud of from 2013, is that I have been able to consistently blog every month for a year straight! That is a big deal to me, and I have realized that blogging has become something that I look forward too. It just makes me so happy when I see people reading my posts. So for my first blog post of 2013, I thought that I would do a year in review in photos from my most popular posts from each month. Enjoy!

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

Veggie Taco with Gluten Free Tortillas – GF,V,P

October

November

December

Apple Cinnamon Whiskey

My top 3 posts for 2013 were my Crockpot French Onion Soup, my Spaghetti Squash Pad Thai and my “Not Your Granny’s Granola“. I had the most fun writing about our cross-country road trip from San Diego to NYC, because I got to recount all of our fun adventures with Julia the Mystical Traveling Unicorn. It has been so fun going back in time through my blog and reliving all the magical memories from 2013. As an added bonus I have decided refresh my GlitterSpice logo a bit. I hope you like it. Stay tuned for a new layout to match the sparkly new logo in the next few months 🙂 Thank you for a great year, and for taking the time to read my little space on the interwebs…it makes my heart smile.

Cheers,

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Year in Review. This post has 4 comments.

Apple Cinnamon Whiskey

It has been super duper chilly in NYC the past few weeks, but I have to admit I have loved the snow. To stay warm I have been drinking hot tea by the gallons and eating as much hot soup as I can get my hands on. In the evenings I have been enjoying our Charlie Brown Christmas Tree, working on my holiday crafts and sipping’ on some super tasty apple cinnamon whiskey to help keep me warm. I love a good whiskey in the winter, but I bet you are wondering where in the heck I got an apple cinnamon infused whiskey??

Derika and I were down to our last few apples from our apple-picking extravaganza in New Jersey. We picked way more apples than we had planned, because it was just so much fun! To help get us through the apples I made baked apples, apple sauce and we used the rest of them in our green smoothies, but we still had a few left. I didn’t want them to go bad, so I decided to combine them with some of the left over whiskey we had from our wedding. What ended up coming out of this experiment was a whiskey from the Gods! I have been sipping on small glasses of this whiskey in the evening as a treat and it makes me so so happy. The key word here is ‘SMALL’ glasses. You will be tempted to drink large glasses and before you know it the bottle will be gone and you will find yourself running round half naked frolicking in the snow. This whiskey is a lot stronger than it tastes and it WILL creep up on you… Trust me! Even if you are an experienced whiskey sipper do not under estimate this magical beverage. 😉 Now that we got that out of the way, find out how to make this amazing beverage below.

Ingredients

750 ML. of Whiskey ( I used Jack Daniel’s Whiskey)
4-6 Apples
4 Cinnamon Sticks
Airtight Container
Patience

Directions

1. Wash your apples well. Cut them up and put them into your clean airtight container.

2. Pour in your whiskey and completely cover your apples.

3. Add your cinnamon sticks.

4. Allow it to sit for two weeks in a cool, dark place. This is where your patience comes in handy.

5. Once it’s done, strain it.

6. It looks so tempting, but I would recommend not eating the apples. It looks like they’re going to be super tasty. THEY ARE NOT! The sweet apple flavor now lives in the whiskey, leaving the apples tasting of death. As a courtesy, I tasted these apples for you, so just save yourself and take my advice. 🙂

7. Package your whiskey in an airtight container, I used a mason jar. I stored my whiskey in the fridge, because I like the way it tastes when it is chilled.

If you make this recipe today, it will be ready just in time for you to take to your New Year’s Eve party…Where you will make all of the friends! Now go forth and remember, small glasses and sharing are the key to success when hanging out with this tasty beverage. Enjoy!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Apples, Cinnamon, Whiskey. This post has 2 comments.

MMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmm….Good! Soup is definitely one of my favorite things, especially if it has a little kick! It is super chilly here on the east coast right now, but this zippy tomato basil soup will warm you right up and it is a cinch to make. The inspiration for this recipe was a parmesan cheese rind that I have been saving in my fridge. I have always wanted to use one in a recipe, and I thought that this rind would be the perfect addition to a tomato basil soup…and I am always looking for a reason to make soup. I really wanted to use fresh oven roasted tomatoes and fresh basil, but given that this is not the time year for tomatoes in NYC, I opted for a can of good quality crushed organic tomatoes with basil. I will just have to make this soup again in the summer. Oh, darn!

Ingredients

1/2 TBS Ghee or Butter
1 28oz Can Crushed Tomato with Basil
1/2 Cup Shallots, diced
1/2 Cup Yellow Onions, diced
6 Cloves Garlic, diced
2 Cups Veggie Broth
1/2 Cup Fresh Basil, Diced or 1 TBS Dried Basil
1/4 Tsp Crushed Red Pepper *omit for a non-zesty soup*
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
1 Parmesan Cheese Rind

Directions

1. Melt the Ghee or Butter in a soup pot. Sauté the onions, garlic and crushed red pepper until they are soft and slightly brown, about 5 minutes.

2. Add the onion, garlic and the can of crushed tomatoes to your blender and blend until they are your desired consistency. I don’t like chunks in my tomato soup, so I blended it until it was smooth.

3. Return all of the blender contents to the soup pan. Add the two cups of veggie broth and the basil and bring the soup to a boil. Once your soup is boiling reduce the heat, add the parmesan cheese rind and simmer for 40 minutes uncovered, stirring occasionally.

4. After you are done simmering your soup, remove the remainder of the parmesan cheese rind and discard. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Serve with additional parmesan cheese, fresh basil if you have it and maybe a grilled cheese. Yay…Soup!

*Note – To make it vegan just use nutritional yeast instead of a parmesan cheese rind and use olive oil instead of ghee. To make it Paleo, omit the parmesan cheese rind.*

I hope your holiday season is going great so far!

A little holiday cheers from my teeny xmas tree :)

A little holiday cheer from my teeny xmas tree 🙂

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Tomatoes. This post has 2 comments.

Holiday Wreath. Updated Snowman Wreath for the holidays! Get Crafty 🙂

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Uncategorized. This post has 2 comments.

We spent Thanksgiving in Florida, and we were so excited to spend a week in the warm weather swimming, visiting with family and getting a little sunshine. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had a different plan and decided to have the coldest weather that Florida has seen since February…Bah! Of course, I only brought sun dresses and one pair of jeans…let’s just say that my jeans were well-loved by the end of the trip. We always go to Clearwater Beach no matter what the temperature is, because I love to twinkle my toes in the powder sugar sand and shop at all of the rainbow umbrella vendors along the boardwalk.

Checking out the boardwalk

We also made it to the chilly beach just to twinkle our toes in the sand a bit…

Twinkling our hooves in the sand…

I tried so hard to eat healthy over the Thanksgiving holiday, but the weather was bad and that meant we had more time to cook a bunch of delicious things. All of the traveling and all of the holiday goodies definitely got the best of me.

Thanksgiving Feast brought to you by the Double D’s

Since we have gotten back from Florida, I have been craving all things cheesy and carby…FAIL. All I want to do is eat pizza and pasta, but instead of making the gooiest spaghetti dish that I can come up with. I decided to lighten it up a bit and make a spaghetti squash bake. I totally forgot about this dish until my friend Danielle asked me why it was not up on my blog. So this one is for her. 😉 Spaghetti Squash can be a bit watery, which is why I originally did not like it. When you bake it the squash dries out a bit, this makes me a happy camper. The cheese, which is also my friend will help some of the most discriminating spaghetti squash folks enjoy this dish.

Ingredients – Serves 4

1 Roasted Spaghetti Squash
1/2 Bag Quorn Grounds or protein of choice
1/2 Onion, diced
1/2 Cup Broccoli, chopped
1/2 Cup Zucchini, diced
3 Cloves Garlic, minced
1/2 Cups of your Favorite Spaghetti Sauce
Part-Skim Mozzarella Cheese – as much as your little heart desires

Directions

Your Spaghetti Squash should look like this.

Heat up 1/2 TBS olive oil and sauté your veggies, garlic and Quorn Grounds (or protein of choice) for 3-5 mins. Set aside.
I like to make these in individual bowls, so that I can just throw them into the oven and serve. If you don’t have any bowls that are oven safe you can always make this in an 8 x 8″ baking dish.
Spray whatever dish you are using to make your baked spaghetti squash with a little cooking spray. Cover the bottom of you baking dish with a layer of spaghetti sauce, followed by a layer of spaghetti squash, a layer of the veggies and protein, another layer of sauce and cover that with cheese. Continue this layering process until you are out of ingredients or your baking dish is full. I like to top my dish with more sauce, some mozzarella cheese and some Italian seasoning.
Preheat the oven to 375 and bake for 30 mins or until you dish starts to bubble. If your cheese is not toasty brown on the top after 30 mins in the oven, throw it under the broiler on high for a minute or two.
Remove it from the oven and let it hang out with itself for about 5 minutes so that it can cool off a bit and settle. Then serve with some Parmesan and crushed red pepper…

*Note~ If you bake it in individual bowls, make sure to warn your guests ahead of time. Also leave out the Quorn crumbles to make it gluten free and leave out the cheese to make it Paleo or vegan.*

Enjoy!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Spaghetti Squash. This post has 7 comments.

My favorite thing about growing up in the Midwest was definitely the fall. I love the color change, crunching the leaves under my feet, Halloween, warm snuggly sweaters and going to the Cider Mill. I appreciated all of these things during the 26 years I spent growing up in Michigan, but I did not realize how much I took them for granted until I moved to the West Coast. Our first move was in 2006 from Michigan to Seattle. We moved in August and I was so excited and nervous, that I did not spend much time thinking about the things that I was going to miss. Summer turned into fall, which made me excited, because I still got to experience fall in Seattle…I was ready to see how amazing the Cider Mills were. Washington is the #1 apple producing state in the country, follow by New York and then Michigan, so they had to have the best Cider Mills! In the middle of September, I started mapping out all of the fall fun that we would have. To my surprise, I could not find a single Cider Mill! When I started to ask around I was met with a perplexed gaze from most people, who asked me if I tried looking in Yakima, WA. When I told them I had, they responded with “I guess I don’t know what you are looking for then, you can get apples and cider at the farmer’s market.” FAIL!

In the Midwest, it is a tradition for most people to load their family and friends into the car, drive a good 45 minutes to an hour to a place called a Cider Mill. At this said Cider Mill, you will experience all the things that are wonderful… The joy of picking your own apples! Spend an obscene amount of time watching a woman who looks like your grandmother, make amazing fudge and pies from scratch! See how cider is made as it is pumped through the cider mill, while you are simultaneously sipping on fresh hot apple cider and eating at least a dozen piping hot donuts! Take a bumpy butt numbing hayride out to the apple field, because you like the challenge of not spilling your 5th cup of cider on yourself. In the apple field you will frolic around a bit, and completely wreck your fancy apple picking shoes on all of the rotten apples you are prancing on. You will then proceed to pick way more apples than you need, because it is fun and you have become an apple-picking machine! On your way to pay for the bushel of apples you just picked, you will stop and get a candy apple snack, because it is pretty and you worked hard. You will buy more cider and donuts for the road, along with your Halloween pumpkins, some amazing fudge and a pie from grandma and leave with an epic stomachache and a huge grin on your face. Winning!

Derika and I lived in Seattle for 4 years, and every Fall I looked for a Cider Mill thinking that I was crazy, but I never found one! My next million-dollar idea will be opening up a Cider Mill in Washington. 😉 We moved to San Diego in August of 2010. Fall really snuck up on me the first year we were in San Diego, because it was 80 and sunny through October and most of November. I actually swam for the last time on Halloween that year! Because of the amazing weather, I was running a little behind in my Cider Mill research. But with or without the weather distraction, I was not having much Cider Mill luck. All of our friends kept telling us to take a ride up to Julian, CA…they said that we would be able to find Cider Mills, pies and fudge made by a grandma and an amazing hard cider. I was sold! In early November 2010, Derika and I jumped into the Mini for a day of Cider Mill fun in Julian. The ride to Julian was beautiful, and the town of Julian was adorable…but there wasn’t a Cider Mill in sight! We did end up stopping at a cute little bar that was attached to The Bailey Wood Pit BBQ. The wait for the BBQ place was long, and all we really wanted was pie and a hard cider. The bar was empty, cozy and we were we able to get some of the notorious Julian Pie a la mode and a Julian Hard Cider! Sooooooo, GOOD! We had an amazing time and I would recommend a trip to Julian to get your pie and hard cider fix if you are ever in San Diego.

We moved to New York in August on 2013…I don’t know why we always move in August. I swear it is not intentional. After we got unpacked I started doing research on trips for the fall. I was so excited to learn that Cider Mills do in fact exist in New York and New Jersey! We decided to take a little road trip to one in New Jersey that was about 45 minutes outside of Manhattan called Melick’s Cider Mill and Orchard. The drive was simple and they had it all….pick your own apples, hayrides, candy apples, cider, donuts, and pumpkins! I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. It had been 7 years since I had been to a Cider Mill, and I needed to pick apples immediately. We went over to a cute old woman who supplied us with an empty basket and a fancy apple-picking tool (that I have never seen before) and she pointed us in the direction of the apples!

Professional Apple Picker #1

Apple Picking Machine!

Surprisingly, this was Derika’s first time to picking apples…I have no idea how I let that happened!? We had so much fun and the handy-dandy apple-picking tool really was super helpful. I might need to bring this idea back to Michigan! We ended up picking more apples than we needed, because we had become professional apple pickers in no time at all. We left with a ton of apples, a half-gallon of cider, some pumpkins and a huge grin on our faces and no stomachache…Winning! Over the past couple of weeks we have shared the apple love with our friends, and we have been creative in how we have been using the apples. I made some stuffed apples for dessert the other night.

Also I am currently working on some Apple Cinnamon Whiskey!

Stay tuned for recipes, and get out and appreciate your local Cider Mills if you live near any! I am already counting down the days until my next Cider Mill trip! Yay Fall!

Posted by Danielle Heckman & filed under Uncategorized. This post has 2 comments.

Pumpkin Curry

Ingredients

Directions

Glitter Spice has a glittery new look!

Easy Pumpkin Puree

Ingredients

Directions

Perfect Quinoa

Ingredients

Directions

Glitter Spice’s 2013 Year in Review

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Apple Cinnamon Whiskey

Ingredients

Directions

Slightly Spicy Tomato Basil Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Holiday Wreath

Baked Spaghetti Squash

Ingredients – Serves 4

Directions

My Ode to the Cider Mill

Hello!

Follow Me!

This & That

I’m Famous!

Blogroll