Harry Potter Themed Date

My husband and I love the Harry Potter books and movies. The story is so fun and creative. I had been wanting to have a Harry Potter themed date for awhile and finally decided to start preparing for one at the beginning of last week.

First, I sculpted the sorting hat out of tootsie rolls.

Then, I made golden snitches. I used Lindt chocolates with golden wrappers for the base, an idea I got from this blogger. The wings were made of card stock and glitter glue. I shaped them by letting them dry on a bowl.

In the "Half Blood Prince" movie, Romilda Vane gives Harry Potter chocolate cauldrons spiked with love potion, but Ron ends up eating them. I thought it would be fun to recreate these treats and I found the perfect cauldron recipe on this site. I filled them with whip cream.

I made a snake sandwich to represent Voldemort's snake, Nagini. The bread recipe came from this site. I made one large loaf instead of the 3 you are suppose to make. I baked it for 15-20 min.

The bread was so good. It tasted like the Italian bread loaves you get at the store. I will definitely be making it again.

 I used my fondue pan for the leaky cauldron soup, which was nothing fancy, just canned soup.

Did you know that Harry Potter has it's own wiki site? Well it does and it's huge. That's where I got the idea for dragon milk cheese. When I came across the idea I instantly knew what cheese I was going to use...The chipotle marinated mozzarella curds from Rogue Creamery. They just look dragony to me.  The cheese had a little heat to it and it was great on crackers.

Right now is the perfect time to have a Harry Potter date/party, because all of the halloween stuff is out in stores. I found these pumpkin delights at the store by the Twinkies and stuff. They were so good and festive. They had jack o'lantern faces.

I found gummy frogs at Winco and dipped them in chocolate.

I used peanut clusters for the cockroach clusters.

Ron, Harry & Hermione drank Polyjuice potion in order to look like other people. I found this old looking bottle at Walmart and filled it with tamarind soda for the potion.

I got the idea for these easy broomsticks on pinterest.

I knew I couldn't forget the every flavor beans. I used jelly bellys.

I used crunchy cracker/bread sticks for the wands. I really wanted to differentiate one and make it the elder wand, but I ran out of time.

I wanted to include Harry Potters owl Hedwig. So I created this snack, but it was more for looks.

Lastly, I put the symbol of the deathly hallows on a peanut butter cookie.

 

The font I used was called "witches magic." Here's a link to the free download. I used another font on the same page that was made up of pictures, because it had the Harry Potter logo.

I printed out three posters/signs to hang on the wall.
1.) The Harry Potter logo
2.) This saying "life would be so much easier if we weren't Muggles." source
3.) I made a "have you seen this wizard?" sign and put my husband's picture on it. source

I played the Harry Potter theme music as my husband entered the room and found all this set up.

Putting the date together was a lot of work, but it turned out to be so much fun. My husband told me that I went "above and beyond," and that made me feel good.

We got full and watched the 6th Harry Potter movie, which is one of my favorites. Now we have lots of food left over and a few more movies to watch before getting to the end of the story.

Chopped

Chopped is one of my favorite food network shows. The episodes have different chefs that compete against each other by preparing dishes with a handful of ingredients in a limited time frame.  They can use food from a pantry to incorporate into their dishes too. The person who makes the best dish, usually wins money.

We had a "Chopped" themed date last week. We made one dish each using four ingredients that we bought for each other. We also used food items from our kitchen pantry that we thought would go well with our ingredients.

My husband bought these ingredients for me to use.
1.) Garlic roasted tomatoes
2.) Strawberry cream cheese
3.) Baguette
4.) Kiwi

I was taken aback when I saw the tomatoes and the strawberry cream cheese, but it ended up working out. 

I made sandwiches with tomato aioli, meatballs in a caramelized sauce (incorporating a little strawberry cream cheese, kiwi, lemon juice, and chili powder) topped with lettuce.

We both liked our sandwiches and I was pretty proud of the dish I made. I asked my husband if he thought I should be chopped and he said, "no, you're hired."

I bought these ingredients for my husband to use.

1.) Mango

2.) Crescent rolls

3.) Lemon grass

4.) Beef tip steak

He stuffed crescent rolls with a beef / lemon grass mixture. He incorporated cream cheese, lemon juice, and sugar into the mixture and topped the whole thing off with slices of mango.

My husband's not as much of a kitchen enthusiast as I am. So, he was not super excited about this date in the beginning, but as our date progressed, I could tell that he started to have fun. In the end he was proud of the dish he put out.

I bought cupcakes from Roth's for dessert.

Our date turned out to be one of the funnest we have had. My husband and I both really like to be creative and we were able to use our creativity, which was fun and rewarding.

I think this would be a fun activity for older kids too like teens or pre-teens.

Day at the Beach

I love the ocean. I could walk on the beach all day taking in it's beauty, watching the waves come crashing in, smelling the salty sea air, feeling the ocean breeze on my face, and muddling my feet in the warm sand. That's just Heaven to me.

The ocean was one of the things that I really missed when we lived in the Midwest. So, I am especially grateful that we live so close now.

My husband and I spent a day at the coast this week. We stopped off in Lincoln City to walk on the beach.
We shopped at the outlet mall too while we were there and had lunch at Kyllo's restaurant. We ordered seafood. That's a must when you're at the coast, right?

 As we were leaving, I noticed some people on the beach digging for clams. That is one of my favorite things to do, but we'll have to wait until our baby gets a little older for that.

We ended up going further down to Newport. We wanted to see the sea lions at the dock. It was fun to watch our baby's reaction to their barks and to the ocean.

We got ice cream before we left and that concluded our date. It was a fun day.

Candy Bar Poster

I made this poster for my husband.

 

It's a spin off of a poster this blogger put together.

Fondue

I surprised my husband with chocolate fondue the other night. We dipped strawberries, pound cake and marshmallows in it.

Everything was delicious and I have to say, that if there is such a thing as a romantic food, then chocolate dipped strawberries is definitely at the top of the list.

We both really enjoyed our date and it was so easy to put together.

The Lord of the Rings

I knew that a Lord of the Rings themed date would be a big hit at our house, because we love the movies and my husband has read all the books.

We started out our date in the dining room where I had Lord of the Rings style food set up. I had music from the Lord of the Rings playing in the background too.

I made what looked like elvish lembas bread.

I used fake leaves, from Joanns, that had wires down the center that made them perfect for wrapping. I filled the leaves with cornbread. Other people online have used shortbread recipes to make lembas, which I might try in the future.

I made a stew and attached a sign to it that had Sam's funny potato saying. Here's a video link to that part of the movie.

For dessert, I recreated the Volcano (Mt. Doom) that's in the land of Mordor using brownies and raspberry ice cream.

 

My husband picked out the hobbit movie to watch afterwards. Probably because it's newer and we haven't watched it as many times as the Lord of the Rings movies.

We both had fun on our date and I could tell that my husband liked it, especially when he first saw everything set up on the table.

I would have liked to recreate the trees (Ents), but I had a hard time coming up with a food idea that would look enough like them. There was a cool idea for making a ring cake too, but we already had a dessert.

I thought about hanging a candy ring on the door with a sign that said "one ring to rule them all," but I ran out of time. Maybe next time when our kids grow up and we introduce them to the story.

Salt themed date

Several months ago I went to a cooking class and learned that there are many different flavored salts in the world...maybe even a hundred. Becoming aware of this sparked my interest in trying new flavors. Not too long after, I came across a selection of different flavored salts at Roth's.  So, I decided to surprise my husband with a "salt" themed date.

I bought five different flavors of salt

1) Roasted Garlic
2) Fleur de Sel
3) Spanish Rosemary
4) Black Lava Sea Salt
5) Chili Verde

Then I made up my favorite pretzel recipe, cut the dough into squares and sprinkled each of them with different flavored salts for us to try.

It was interesting to taste the different flavors of salt, but the secondary flavors (rosemary, garlic, chili) were pretty mild.

We both kind of got salted out after awhile of eating the pretzels and wanted to drink a tall glass of water. I was glad that I bought the chocolate sea salt truffles for dessert, because they helped to balance out the salty flavor.

 Then we watched a show from the history channel about salt mining - video link

The video had some interesting parts. We learned about how salt mines were formed, where they are, how salt is extracted, and what else salt mines have been used for.

If I were to do this date again I would probably just buy salty foods that we like - mixed nuts, salted chocolate, etc. We still had fun though.

Spiderman Themed Date

I told my husband that I had an "errand" to run yesterday. When I came back I had a pizza in hand and told him "look what I found in the bushes." We both laughed. Then I said, while opening the box, "look who delivered our pizza". He laughed again.

I can't remember if Peter Parker worked as a pizza delivery boy in the first or second Spiderman movie, but I know he wasn't one in the third movie, because we watched that last night after eating pizza.

It was a lucky thing that I decided to buy pizza at domino's when I did, because they were having a sale and I got a large one topping pizza for only $3.99!

We both enjoyed our movie themed date and my husband told me that he appreciated the thought I put into it. We'll have to do it again as a family date when our kids get older. Perhaps we'll even have a parent or child dress up as spiderman and surprise the rest of the family with pizza at the door. Haha!