Recipe: EASY #Halloween "Mummy" Jalapeno Poppers!

Jalapeno Popper Mummies!

I now have a series of posts I am calling "Recipes That Work!" because when I find one that does, with minimal adjustments, I get ALL excited! Others in this series are my posts on making Apple Roses, Zucchini Roses, Tamales, Vietnam Summer Rolls, and Tamarind Paste. 
The other night, for Very Special Guests at the Elkhorn Inn & Theatre I made Halloween "Mummy" Poppers for the first time, and they turned out great, and were a BIG hit! I also made some fun Halloween Cocktails, and my next post will be about them. 

But first: Mummies!

The recipe I started off with was this: https://www.aol.com/article/lifestyle/2018/10/24/best-bites-happy-halloween-jalapeno-popper-mummies/23570460/
I read it 14 times, LOL, and it looked like something that even I could do without it becoming a #PinterestFail disaster, so I got Chef Dan to get me the ingredients- but I changed a few things, as I am wont to do...

Ingredients:
10 Jalapeno peppers
Shredded Mozzarella Cheese (or the melting cheese of your choice)
Chives
1 roll of Pepperidge Farm Crescent Roll dough
A bit of flour or Bisquick, for rolling out the dough
1 egg
Eyes: You can use candy eyes, or cream cheese and olive bits, or plastic eyes (that is what I used)
Tools: Rolling pin; sharp, flat knife or pizza cutter; brush for the egg wash; bowls; baking sheet

Instructions:
1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Shred the Mozzarella in a bowl (or use pre-shredded Mozzarella), and mix with chopped chives. You can add salt and anything else you like to the filling at this point. The cheese needs to be soft so you can stuff the jalapenos. (The original recipe called for cream cheese, but we prefer Mozzarella...)

3. Slice the jalapeno peppers in half lengthwise. Leave the stems on some, as it's cute!

Halved jalapenos

Crescent Dough cut into strips

4. Flour your rolling surface and rolling pin lightly, and roll out the crescent roll dough. Push the dough together to close up the perforations.  Make rectangles from the dough. You will get 4 rectangles from one roll of dough.

5. Using a pizza cutter or a sharp flat knife (pictured), slice the dough into thin strips. You will get about 10 strips from each rectangle.

Cheese-stuffed jalapenos

6. Fill each Jalapeno half with the cheese mixture, as shown. (The softer the cheese, the easier it is to do this).

7. Wrap each jalapeno with the dough strips like a "mummy", leaving a place to put the "eyes", as shown. You may have to piece together dough strips- it's easy!

Mummy-wrapped jalapenos

Brush with beaten egg...

8. Beat the egg in a small bowl. 

9. Brush the "mummies" with the the beaten egg wash, and place them on a baking sheet.

10. Bake in the oven at 400F for about 10 minutes until they are golden brown.

11. Add the eyes, and serve immediately! (Remove the plastic eyes before eating. Duh!)

Jalapeno Popper Mummies!

They were delicious- and VERY filling- and a BIG hit, and we will definitely be making them again and again! 

Let me know in the comments if you've made them, and any special things you added, or if you changed anything!

Jalapeno Popper Mummies!

Garden Porn!

My tongue is hanging out and I'm exhausted.
After weeks of licking my lips over the Burpee and Park's seed catalogs, fantasizing over their color photos of Jumbo This and Giant That, dogearing the pages with my favorites, and then freezing up the computer with 25 pages (more color photos! OMG!) open simultaneously, I finally Did The Dirty Deed and ordered seeds and plants and cool gardening doohickies for the Elkhorn Inn's 2010 garden! Woo-hoo!
In the dead-cold of an unbelievably snowy WV winter, gardening websites and seed catalogs really Do constitute "garden porn"! One dreams and imagines how great this year's garden will be... or at least how much better than last year's... planning all the things one will do differently this time around (weed more, fertilize more, douse everything with bug poison Far more often, get the tomoatoes out in Cozy Cotes on April 1st...) I went browing the gardening blogs I follow, and found some things (Chinese Red Meat Radishes) I'd known nothing about, and great, new (to me) garden sites, such as Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (where I got Vietnamese herb & veggie seeds), and R.H. Shumway's (lemongrass, strawberries, etc.). Searching Google for Chef Dan's Purple Potatoes, I found the Maine Potato Lady, where I ordered both Purple Majesty & French Fingerlings. I posted my most pressing gardening concerns (black rot (I think) on our grape vines that shriveled our hundreds of grapes and nearly broke my heart, and the wormy thing that keep killing all our squash vines) on a gardening Facebook page, and got some cool tips; I have so many print-outs and info that I really need to make up a Gardening Binder... Every year I try to do more companion gardening, planting things such as basil and tomatoes together, and this year I WILL put markers by EVERYTHING we plant, so we'll actually know what is what! And I WILL get out there with Dan to spread manure as soon as the snow is gone...

Back in Flushing, NY in the early 1970s I was an Aggie- at John Bowne H.S., the only Ag H.S. in the City of NYC! I was FFA and actually made it up to Chapter Farmer- I still have my Extremely Cool blue FFA jacket with my name embroidered on it in gold! Our school's "Land Lab" focussed on strawberries and chickens (and although I loved the pink & blue eggs from the Polish Game Hens, I learned enough about raising chickens to NEVER want anything to do with them ever again...), but what fascinated me was plant genetics; Gregor Mendel was my teen hero! I poured over seed catalogs all winter, dreaming and scheming of what I could sucessfully grow in pots and window boxes on our apartment terrace in LeFrak City! My dad hung Gro-Lamps in my bedroom, and when my mom and I moved to a house in Rego Park, we constructed a real walk-in greenhouse in our attic where I grew gardenias and even propogated African Violets! (Lugging gallon jugs of water up to the attic was the bane of our existance...) Although for college I went to the Cooper Union as an art student, I "kept my hand in the soil", as it were, working on Kibbutzim in Israel (mostly picking rocks out of the fields, but also packing live fish, and one glorious day on the tractor checking cotton bug traps...), but gardening took a backseat in my life- and my thumb got browner and browner until I couldn't even keep an herb plant alive on a windowsill- until Dan & I bought our WV property. Then we had a true need to "landscape", and the desire to grow veggies came back, full force! Dan literally trucked in 100s of pounds of topsoil - truck-load after truck-load- to create our little gardens, and even rented a tiller to make us a bit of a corn field! The first year we planted our veggie garden in 2003, cars literally stopped and trucks honked as they went by- we were obviously quite the novelty, weeding tomatoes on the highway- and we were both surprised to find that almost no one in our area planted a garden- 'cause that's what you do when you're lucky enough to have a little plot of land, right?
I actually started this year's garden when I ordered Dan his Valentine's present: a fab composter from Gardener's Supply Company. I actually did a cover illustration for them back in the 90's, and so they have a spot in my heart; while not "cheap", they do have very good stuff, and after following composters on eBay for months, the Eco Stack Composter I got from GS was not only cheaper, it promises to be so Easy-Peasy to put together and use that even I may be able to deal with it. (!) We have tried DIY composting (a.k.a. as "making a big pile") and it didn't work the way we wanted; getting a real composter has been on high on our to-do list for basically the last 8 years. (Yes, I know this seems about as romantic and sexy a present for a guy as getting a woman a vacuum cleaner, but I like to think of it as "Honey, I love you SO much that I want to recycle your eggshells!" I'm gonna put a big, red heart on it, and trust me- I'll make it up to him somehow!) Since due to shipping costs ordering just one thing feels stupid, I hunted around and landed on some other cool stuff, such as a."vine trellis", in the hopes of getting more than one melon and one cucumber, and two heated seed-starter trays... Last year's garden was Not Good (to put it mildly), and a deep and frustrating dissapointment, but our 2008 garden was Fabulous: we had great crops of corn & tomatoes, & so many peaches that we gave them away; we literally harvested a 5 gallon drum of basil leaves and made 6 quarts of pesto! Although we enjoy our garden and Chef Dan gets a kick out of cooking with the fruits of his labour- which taste FAR better than the tasteless stuff one buys at WalMart- I'm always amused when I read about how people put in veggie gardens to save money, because ours is Definitely a Money Pit! At some point I really should do the math and figure out what one of our tomatoes actually costs us to grow, but I'm afraid to learn that it's a $60 tomato! After 7 years of gardening here, I can state catagorically that we do Not garden to save money! We garden because nothing compares to the tatste of a sweet grape tomato in the sushine or pasta tossed with homemade pesto. Because when the tulips flower in April it means that spring is here. Because Chef Dan's fresh-oregano-stuffed roast  turkey is amazingly delicious. And because that's what you do when you're lucky enough to have a little plot of land...

Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark...

Can you sing the theme song to "Green Acres" in Hebrew?

The vegetable garden has grown quite a bit since Dan first built it in 2004, & I am ever threatening to put up a sign in Hebrew that states "Kibbutz Goldstein-Clark, Volunteers please go to the Office", in the hope that at least one confused Israeli tourist will stop in...

The "yard" next to the Inn was nothing more than a rock-hard field of coal-lumps, but the Old Aggie in me had visions of a vegetable garden out there, and I began trolling the Internet for the Companion Gardening info I vaguely remembered from John Bowne Agriculture HS. I really had No Clue about the amount of Heavy Labor creating a garden out of a coal field would entail, however, and had I had to do it myself, the lot would still be a field of rocks. To shut me up, essentially, Dan built us a garden there with railroad ties, filling it with several tons of Real Dirt & a lot of eye-rolling hope that something might actually grow... In the spring of 2004 we put in a bunch of strawberry plants, as well as tomatoes and peppers and everything else we could find at Wal-Mart, Lowe's, & Eller's Quick Stop, and I Miracle Gro'd the dickens out of it, and that first summer we were literally giddy from our "harvest"! We not only had tomatoes and peppers, but cantaloupes & cucumbers & potatoes & onions & herbs! I planted giant sunflowers, and they shot up to the sky and rewarded us with something truly lovely to look at from the front porch. I'd be out there weeding the tomatoes in my high-heeled clogs & cars would slow down and honk... What a novelty- a crazy woman gardening on Route 52! Our friends G & M gifted us with a DVD of Green Acre's first season, which was actually pretty much on the money; as a child my "party piece" was to sing the theme song of GA in my best Hungarian accent. (See? Life imitates Art...)

Our friend Kathleen, who has the Gillum House bed-and-breakfast in Shinnston, WV, brought us a dozen oregano plants, we set them in as a border, & they took off like wildfire. It got to the point where we were harvesting a Silly amount of oregano, and by the fall we had so much damn oregano that Dan was creating what would become some of the Inn's "signature" recipes: Oregano-Stuffed Roast Cornish Game Hen, Oregano-Stuffed Roast Turkey... His turkey recipe was indeed inspired: after brining, he stuffed it with whole branches of oregano & garlic & then roasted it, & it was truly Divine... I entered his turkey recipe in Park Seed's Recipe Contest, and he won first prize: a $50 gift certificate with which to buy more plants!

But in 2005 the Japanese Beetles arrived with a vengeance, and literally ate everything in sight. They spent all summer screwing on the roses before devouring all the flowers and leaves, and they demolished the vegetable garden. I was literally in tears, hunting on the Internet in vain for JB Killers and spraying everything with "organic" insecticides (hot pepper/tobacco/dish soap concoctions), as well as Sevin & any other poison I could find. Nothing worked. Our harvest was dismal.

2006 was a continuation of 2005, only worse. My mail-order climbing roses barely survived the Beetle Feeding Frenzy, and the sweet corn was stunted & grub-filled. In May of 2007, with the fruit trees in flower (the apple tree across from the Inn looked like a magnificent, giant white snowball), the roses in bud, & everything green and gorgeous, we had:a ludicrously late frost, 4 inches of snow, & a week of 10-degree weather. the tulips & daffodils went into "suspended animation" and were fine, but we lost roses, butterfly bushes, and eventually our little dogwood tree. I was in tears and close to despair; It seemed like The Garden was nothing more than a toilet down which we were throwing 100 dollar bills & false hope. In desperation I ordered a giant can of Milky Spore and got it down in mid-May, but I didn't have much hope as it's supposed to take several years to get the JBs under control.

But lo and behold,.we didn't see a Japanese Beetle all year!

I assumed it was the Milky Spore, until the fall, when I read some Bird Watcher posts on a WV Yahoo Groups chat room, and discovered that No One in southern WV had seen any JBs... & it occurred to Dan & I that the hated late spring frost may have killed the beetle grubs!

We will know this spring...

The bottom line is that this last summer we had THE best garden ever! I put Cozy Coats & Tomato Cages around our tomatoes and set them out early, and we were rewarded with a bumper crop of tomatoes all summer- 8 different kinds! (The best were the cherry tomatoes which were literally as sweet as candy). . We had hot peppers out the wazoo, eggplants, okra, baby field greens, enough basil to make 8 quarts of pesto, and sweet corn what-to-die-for...

A garden is about dreaming and planning, as well as hoping & praying & weeding & digging & spraying, and so the dismally cold & gray winter is spent pouring over brightly colored Burpee & Park Seed catalogs (and websites), dog-earring the pages of the things you dream about seeing flower in the spring and harvesting in the fall...

We've learned in the last 5 years that some things just will NOT grow here- I've given up on petunias, for example- but that others do amazingly well- oregano & basil, for two. Last year I planted basil all over our property, and we had a Pesto Processing Party, freezing 8 quarts of what I call the "essence of summer". The marigolds, impatiens, & vinca did splendidly, too...

Back to the catalogs & dreams of spring.. and as Eva would say: "Vould you like a Gin & Tonic, Dahlink?"