Sometimes you just have a strong desire to just eat “bad” food. “Bad” as in not-that-great-for-you food. Well, that hankering happened for me over the weekend. I was in the mood for macaroni and cheese. It had been months since the last time I had a good, baked mac & cheese. Luckily for me this desire also came with the ability to make another Pioneer Woman recipe. This recipe also came from my favorite cookbook of hers: Recipes From an Accidental Country Girl, her first one.
Over the Labor Day holiday, we had some people over the house. It was mainly just family, but, as you could have guessed, I had to make the dessert. I was really in the mood for banana pudding but I also wanted to make something beyond the traditional vanilla –especially since most of the people who came to the little get-together are chocolate-lovers.
It took me almost no time at all to realize that the Magnolia Bakery Handbook had a recipe for chocolate banana pudding and I was sold! Simple and delicious, but also something a little different than the regular banana pudding.
In the recipe, it asks you to use the chocolate Nilla wafers, but I wasn’t able to find them, so I used the regular vanilla and it worked just fine. Plus I find that store-bought, chocolate cookies are not really chocolate-tasting. So, for me, personally, the vanilla Nilla wafers probably were for the best. Since the chocolate Nilla wafers would have added a bit more chocolate flavor, I did use extra mini chocolate chips.
Also to bring out the flavor of the chocolate, I took a page out of Ina Garten’s cookbook and added about a half teaspoon of espresso powder to the whipped cream. This provided a subtle hint of coffee-flavor, but not too much to overwhelm the flavor of the chocolate. And better still, the caffeine didn’t keep anyone awake past their bedtime!
Since I’ve made banana puddings a couple of times before, Ina’s recipe and one from the Magnolia Bakery Handbook, I didn’t take too many pictures. But, I do highly recommend this dessert. It’s the perfect twist on the classic, but without changing too much or making you go crazy. As usual though, banana pudding won’t keep in the fridge for more than 2 days. After that the wafer cookies become too soggy — but, to be honest, I’ve never had my puddings last longer than a day after being served!
My family has decided to take a little trip out of town. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to join them, due to work commitments. But, while I won’t be able to get away, I will be able to cook a lot while I’m home by myself.
Now that I’ll be responsible for my own meals over the next seven days or so, I am going to use my day off today to figure out what types of meals I wish to make. Of course, I will need to include some baking in there, too! In fact, I have been recipe testing a chocolate chip cookie recipe and I’m getting closer to the finished product! Hopefully by the end of the month if will be up on the blog.
I recently purchased some lighting instruments for my food photography. After I made the cookie recipe last night, I decided to play around with some things. This was one of the shots my friend and I took.Continue reading “Kitchen Updates”→
My birthday was earlier this week, and as hinted at in last week’s post, I decided to bake my own cake!
After many recipe page views and checking a handful of different food blogs, I finally settled on one! I ended up going back to a tried and true baking blog, Sally’s Baking Addiction. This website features so many options to chose from, that it took a while to narrow it all down. I eventually decided on German Chocolate Cake!
I can’t believe it! What happened to May? It appears that, to date, May was my least active month on the blog. There was a reason for that: things started to open up, activities began again, and my time became more constrained. However, some of the things I had lined up for this summer have fell through, which is too bad for me, but it’s great for the blog!
I have a personal goal for June: 6 recipes made during the month.
To be honest, doing two will be easy since my birthday is just around the corner. I will, obviously, be making my own cake. I’m also making cupcakes for a work thing next week, as well.
I am going to try to include at least one savory recipe in the mix, but, as you may have noticed, my focus on been on baking.
What Cake Am I Making For My Birthday?
It actually took me quite a while to find one that appealed to me. I knew I wanted to branch out a bit and make something outside of the Barefoot Contessa and Magnolia Bakery canon (even though the latter has some amazing cake recipes). After some searching online, I decided to stick to a tried and true baking blog: Sally’s Baking Addiction.
After paging through recipe after recipe, and one mouth-watering photo after another, I finally made my decision!
What cake is it?
It’s a surprise. You’ll have to wait until next week to find out!
This recipe can be found in Barefoot Contessa At Home
Last week, dinner was a simple chicken dish. And I have to say, I think I like Ina’s recipe for Chicken Piccata better than any I’ve had at a restaurant before! The simplicity of this recipe makes it a stellar recipe for weeknights. But it’s also elegant enough to serve for a special occasion.
Chicken Piccata, in Ina’s version, is simply breaded chicken cutlets in a lemon sauce. I did make a few changes so the recipe would be healthier (and less messy) but I think the general idea still comes through.
This recipe can be found in Back to Basics, page 126.
For dinner last week, I decided to tackle my first of what will eventually be many Barefoot Contessa pork recipes. To be honest, pork has never been my favorite meat. The texture, to me, is in between chicken and steak and since I’m not a big fan of steak (or beef in general), pork has always hard to swallow.
This recipe can be found in How Easy is That?, page 195.
Even though Salmon with Melting Tomatoes had a built-in side dish, I still needed one more thing to truly round out the meal. Enter: Couscous with Toasted Pine Nuts.
I still had some pine nuts from when I made gremolata a few weeks back. At least that’s where I think I used the pine nuts originally. I can’t really remember. So many recipes. But I wanted to use them up since I didn’t really know how long they would “keep.” I was storing them in the fridge since they are nuts, after all. And since nuts have oil, they can spoil! (Thanks Rachael Ray)
Luckily this recipe used them all up. Sadly, I will have to buy them again at some point and fork over almost $10 for like 5 ounces of nuts. But that’s a story for another time.
Friday I woke up and decided I felt like baking. I know, I know. What a surprise. I was planning to get lunch with a friend who I haven’t seen in a while, so I thought it would be nice to make cookies and give her some. I’ve learned that if I want to keep baking the way I have been, it’s best to give the treats away. That way, they’re not in the house very long and tempting me to eat them all!
Naturally, I decided on the most common and most popular cookie there is: chocolate chip. And naturally, I knew it would be the recipe from Bobbie Lord’s Magnolia Bakery Handbook. Thanks to my well-stocked pantry with baking supplies, I only needed to run to the store to get some chocolate chips.
This recipe can be found in Barefoot in Paris, page 82.
Last Friday, I made a recipe out of one of my favorite BC cookbooks, Barefoot in Paris. I’m not really sure what it is about this cookbook that interests me so much. Perhaps it’s the fancy food. Maybe it’s the fact that it allows me to live vicariously through Ina in Paris. Whatever the reason may be, the book is full of French-inspired cuisine that tastes great.
The original recipe for this soup calls for making pistou, which is basically the French version of pesto sauce. But it is March in New England, so fresh basil is hard to come by and what the grocery stores do have this time of year is expensive and doesn’t look too great. So, I decided to not make the pistou for this recipe.
Overall, this soup is basically a French-style minestrone. Though, personally I prefer the heartiness of a minestrone over this one. There are more layers of flavors in minestrone and this vegetable soup kind of felt a little flat. We had ample leftover and I found myself adding in crushed red pepper flakes each time I reheated it, just to add to the flavors.
This soup uses a vegetable that I’ve never seen in a soup before: string beans. It was a nice way to use this vegetable and spiced up the vegetable soup-monotony that I usually have (carrots, onions, potatoes, etc). Leaving the skins on the potatoes and using white potatoes give the soup a natural thickening agent, especially as it cools.
To keep with the healthier-eating plan that my family and I have been doing, I used vegetable spaghetti instead of regular spaghetti. As expected, once the soup cooled and remained in the fridge a few days, the pasta did act like a sponge and soak up a lot of the excess water. However, it seems that the pasta didn’t “bloom” as much as other pastas used in vegetable-based soups before.
Overall, Provencal Vegetable Soup is nothing to really write home about. While it is easy and can be adapted to use any vegetables you have available to you, the flavors weren’t really there for me. As is common with many Barefoot Contessa recipes, the heavy use of pepper overpowers the dish.
