Catch up...

I’ve gotten a bit behind on the blog.  The holidays always overwhelm me.  Here are some of the things I’ve made over the past few months....

Crispy Cauliflower With Turkey, Capers, Raisins, And Breadcrumbs
- This was adapted from this recipe
- I added ½ pound ground turkey
- I decreased the olive oil to 1-2 tablespoons
- I decreased the breadcrumbs to ¼ cup, but I think next time I will skip the breadcrumbs altogether
- I used balsamic, worcestershire, and poultry seasoning for seasoning
- I added a splash of broth and a few flavored vinegars (cider, oregano, balsamic)
- It was higher in calories than I wanted, but I think I have a few areas where I can adjust
- Really, you could add just about any herbs and seasoning to this


Winterized Greek Salad
- This was adapted from this recipe
- It was delicious!
- I wanted to use this as a weeknight salad, so I needed to get the calories down to about 100 cals per serving.  So...

- I sauteed the sprouts in chicken broth instead of oil (not as crispy, but still tasty)

- And I skipped the cheese

Pumpkin Chai cookies
- This was the recipe
- I think these would be better with a pumpkin frosting
- The cookie is good and moist but not very sweet.  It’s a little cakey, almost like a scone


We also had an Inter holiday dinner (since we weren’t here for Thanksgiving).  I pretty much followed all of these recipes exactly.
Baked Brie and Cranberry Sauce (Incredibly good and easy!  This will become a staple on my Thanksgiving table from now on)

Mushroom dressing (Also, very good.  I did use a rosemary bread for a little more flavor)

Turkey Wellington (Jamie Oliver recipe... this was very good, but so complicated to make that I think I would prefer just doing a basic turkey)

Double chocolate mint cookies (Really yummy, esp if you like chocolate and mint!)

Gingerbread Trifle (I think this was my favorite of the night!  Everything about it was perfect - a really well put together recipe from Martha Stewart)

I have started making holiday cookie bags for family and friends.  Here is what I made this year:
Peppermint Chocolate Cake Balls (Devil’s Food chocolate cake, Dark chocolate frosting, peppermint patties)


Salted caramel and chocolate chip cookies (these were ok... not my favorite - cookie was a bit dry and crunchy)


Fruitcake Cookies (This was my favorite of the three.  It’s a good recipe with a nice, soft cookie that’s not overly sweet, which I find nice in the middle of the holidays when everything is sweet)


Finally, for New Year’s Eve/Day, I made the traditional foods...
Black-Eyed Peas (Texas Caviar - black-eyed peas, yellow and green bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, red onion, lime juice, green onion, and cilantro),


Cabbage (Cabbage and Olive Salad),


and ham (Fried Spam - yes, Spam.  And it was yummy!!)

I also made:
Beer and Cheddar Bread (and yes it is THAT good!!  wow - this was so yummy!!)



And Snow Pudding (this seemed like the perfect winter dessert and it was - light and snow like and perfectly sweet)

An Indoor Picnic

The past 2 weeks I’ve taken a bit of a break on the blog because it’s been all Olympics!  I love them.  Plus I had a wonderful time last weekend hanging out with one of the best women on the planet.

A couple of weeks ago though, we had my cousin and her fiance over to hang out, watch Olympics and eat yummy food.  I went a little crazy and offered them 3 “menus” to choose from (I’ll write more about that in another post) and they chose the “Indoor Picnic” menu.  
The original menu was:
Appetizer: Charcuterie
Main: Buffalo Turkey Burgers
Side: Potato Salad
Dessert: Ice Cream Sandwiches

They decided the Oreo Brownies from one of the other menus sounded more appealing, so I made those instead of the ice cream sandwiches.

We started with the charcuterie.  I was kind of glad they picked this menu because this appetizer required no cooking.  We went to Antonelli’s and got a couple of British cheeses (a nod to the Olympics) and some salami and a couple of types of pepperoni.  I bought olives and cornichons, but of course forgot to put them out.  But it was ok because everything was delicious and we had plenty of food.

The buffalo turkey burgers came from this recipe.  We used ground turkey thigh meat because it’s higher in fat and when I made the patties I replaced ½ the pepper with paprika.  I love paprika and thought it would work really well in this recipe.  It’s too hot to cook outside though so we made them inside on the grill pan.  Instead of cooking them in aluminum foil, we cooked them almost all the way and then finished by basting them with the hot sauce and butter mixture then topped them off with provolone cheese.

For condiments I made caramelized onions - just a tbsp butter, tbsp olive oil, and 2 thinly sliced onions in a pan over medium/high heat for about an hour; blue cheese salad dressing to use instead of mayo; pickles made with hops; lettuce and tomato.

Verdict: I love these burgers!  They were juicy and all the herbs and spices added to the ground turkey made it very flavorful.  I would baste it a bit longer to get more of the “buffalo” flavor and reserve some of the butter and hot sauce mixture for a condiment.  I plan on trying the ground turkey thigh meat for other burgers though because this was the best burger I have tried since adding meat back into my diet.

For sides we had some chips and a somewhat less traditional potato salad.  I went the vinegar route instead of mayo for the dressing.  This Martha Stewart recipe caught my eye because I love cornichons and capers.  The only thing I changed is I used all yellow fingerling potatoes because I wanted to keep the color light.  And I forgot the parsley.  But overall it was a very tasty potato salad.  I really prefer the vinaigrette to mayo - the sourness and saltiness of the vinegar and the pickles goes so well with the butteriness of the potato.  And the various textures make it fun to eat as well.

Then there was dessert.  Wow - am I glad they switched to the Oreo brownies.  The initial recipe I had called for 2 cups of sugar and I thought that was way too much, so I went on a search for what seemed like a good brownie recipe and then figured I’d just add the oreos.  I ended up with this one.  But then I decided I wanted to make them more interesting.  I have this recipe for homemade oreo cookies, so I made a batch of the “cream” from that recipe and used it as icing.  Then covered the whole thing with oreos.  These were seriously yummy brownies.  Uber decadent - but worth every calorie.  I usually have pretty decent willpower - I can eat one of something and then bring it to work to share or only eat one piece per night - but I struggled with these.  They were a bit too high in calories for an evening dessert (although not as bad as you would think), but I hated to bring them to work because I wanted them all!  I would like to try the brownie recipe by itself and with other additions - peanut butter cups, butterfingers (would be good for Halloween), and peppermint patties (as in the original recipe).  And the icing may become my “go to” icing for everything including cakes.  It was delicious and had a consistency I really loved.

Finally, I also made a large batch of tea with lemonade.  Nothing fancy, but I wanted to use my new beverage jar and I thought it was a good picnic drink.  Using my Maw Maw’s tea method, I brewed 6 bags of Lipton the night before - brought it to a boil and then turned it off and let it sit, covered, overnight on the stove.  I know it sounds crazy, but it results in some yummy tea.  Normally, in the morning, I would heat it back up, add a lot of sugar and mix it with more water.  But this time I mixed it with a store bought lemonade that already had sugar and then added some lemon slices for garnish.  I found it very refreshing and I do love my beverage jar!

A weeknight dinner

Last week I decided to try this recipe for Sweet Tea Brined Chicken.  My husband and I love sweet tea, so this recipe really attracted me.  I only wanted to make 2 breasts, so I cut the recipe in half.  I used 2 large, bone-in, chicken breasts, rosemary, lemons and a sweet onion.  The recipe is for cooking on an outdoor grill, but all we have is a small charcoal one and we didn’t want to mess with that on a weeknight.  I decided to let it brine overnight, sear it on the stovetop and then bake it in a foil pouch to retain moisture.  I like this method A LOT!  I will likely start doing this from now on for my weeknight chicken dinners rather than grilling (re: other post regarding trouble with grilled chicken).  It was easy and clean up was a breeze and I didn’t have to stand over the stove.  There are a couple of things I would do differently with this particular recipe though:
1) Just use boneless, skinless breasts.  I didn’t find the bone-in breasts made a big difference to flavor and they are a pain to eat.  Maybe if I did something with the bones, but I haven’t gotten into stock making yet, so I would prefer not to have the waste.
2) Stronger tea.  The tea flavor really came through in the taste, which I have to say actually surprised me.  But I think I want it to be even stronger.  I may even try honey instead of brown sugar.  And possibly different tea types.

I also made a Panzanella salad and a Blueberry Buttermilk Pie.  The salad is one I have made before and definitely one of my favorites.  I had some leftover artisan bread in the freezer and a few slices of that defrosted and toasted made the perfect croutons.  Also, I have recently been using this vinegar from Williams Sonoma and it is amazing!!  Seriously the best cider vinegar I have ever had.  This is one of my own recipes - after looking at many different panzanella recipes, I picked ingredients I liked and came up with my own.  I have included it below.

Italian Panzanella Salad

Serves: 4

Ingredients

Dressing:

1/4 cup cider vinegar

1/4 cup olive oil

salt and pepper

1 tsp fresh oregano, chopped

Salad:

3 cups artisan bread, cubed

2 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper

1 tsp fresh oregano

1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

1 english cucumber, cubed or halved and sliced

1/2 medium red onion, diced fine

1 tbsp chives, chopped fine

4 ounces provolone cheese, diced

1/4 cup fresh basil, chopped

Directions: 

In a bowl, whisk together vinegar and oil and oregano; season with salt and pepper.

Cube bread, toss with oil, salt, pepper and oregano.  Toast in 350 oven for 10 mins.

Combine tomatoes, cucumber, onion, and chives. Add bread.  Add vinaigrette.  Toss to combine. Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours, and up to 8 hours. Just before serving, stir in cheese and basil.

The pie was sort of a toss in at the last minute - I wanted to make a dessert and I just happened to have all of the ingredients needed for this pie.  I did not make the crust, I used the Pillsbury roll out crust that I had in the freezer.  I do plan on eventually making my own pie crust dough to freeze, but I currently have 2 boxes of the pillsbury dough and I want to use that first.  I also replaced the white sugar with honey.  We liked the pie, but it was a bit tart.  That could be because I used the honey as sweetener, but I think if I made this again I would just add a wee bit more honey rather than switching to white sugar.  But the texture both right out of the oven and after refrigeration was great.  Hot - it was creamy and gooey and the blueberries just popped.  Cold - it had the texture of flan - creamy and custardy.  It was super easy to make too and I think could be a good base for just about any fruit.

Sunday Cooking - Chicken, Pancakes, and Egg Salad

I started this blog in order to make notes about recipes I try and to record other general food thoughts.  However, I find myself not wanting to post unless I have a photo and that is just silly.  Because I made things this weekend that I need to make note of, but after a week of taking A LOT of photos at a work event, I couldn’t bring myself to take any pics.  So here are my notes...

Marinated chicken breasts (based on Food Network recipe)

I make these and then freeze them and just heat them up for dinner every once in awhile.

- 2 tbsp cider vinegar
- ½ tsp each of dried oregano, herbs de provence, dried parsley, dried rosemary
- 2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
- 2 teaspoon onion powder
- 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
- Kosher salt and white pepper
- 4 boneless, skinless chicken breast, each about 6 ounces

Mix it all together and marinate chicken for 8+ hours then grill.

Notes:
I still have trouble grilling chicken.  It seems to take much longer than the recipes suggest to cook through.  I know the pan got too hot, and I’ll adjust that next time, however then the chicken will just take longer.  I’m not sure how to fix this issue...  and I hear different things - cook until juices run clear or cook until the internal temp is 165.  Well, by the time the internal temp gets to 165, there are no juices left!  So what is correct??  Am I being too cautious?  Any tips are welcome.

The marinade however was super yummy and easy.  I would add just a little lemon or lime next time.  I may even try one of my flavored balsamics.


Melt in your mouth pancakes

I really have been craving pancakes lately.  But I want super soft, melt in your mouth pancakes and no recipe I’ve ever tried gives me that.  So, I searched again.  And again, every pancake recipe claims to be “melt in your mouth”, but they are the same ingredients and same technique that I’ve tried before with blah results.  Then I found this one from bobanahalf.com.  I found it fascinating that he used club soda and thought, I’ll give this a shot!  It seemed easy enough.

I will say, they were delicious!!  And I definitely feel I have found my go to pancake recipe.  They just sort of dissolved in your mouth and they tasted so buttery, even though there is no butter.  In fact, they are only 87 calories a pancake!!

Notes:
Next time I will make the full recipe - the recipe makes 18 pancakes and I simply did not want to stand there and make 18 pancakes, so I scaled it to 6 which was not a lot of batter.  And because of that, I made the pancakes very small because I wanted to get 6 servings out of it.  They were a bit pathetic, but still tasty.

I also think the batter needs to be a little more liquid.  I only added a splash of milk at the end and I think it needed a bit more.  It probably would’ve been easier for me to get my 6 pancakes if the batter had not been so thick.

And again, my pan got too hot.  I need to watch that, I’m pretty bad about it.
 

Egg Salad

I had some “extra” eggs and wanted to use them up so I threw together a quick egg salad.  I decided to try the baking soda trick I’ve been seeing around the internet - add a teaspoon of baking soda to the water to help with the peeling later.  It actually worked quite well.  They were pretty easy to peel.

- 5 hard boiled eggs
- 1 pickled, diced finely
- 2 tablespoons pickle juice
- 1 teaspoon mayo (I used Vegenaise)
- 2 teaspoons greek yogurt
- ¼ teaspoon salt
- ¼ teaspoon fennel salt (I got this from Williams Sonoma recently... it’s delicious! I couldn’t find a link to it though)
- ½ teaspoon paprika

Boil eggs, then split them, putting the yolks in a bowl.  Mash up the yolks.  Dice the whites (finely) and mix them with the yolks.  Add the remaining ingredients, stirring after each addition.  Chill.  Serve on toasts or with crackers or fresh veggies.  It’s a bit chunky, so it would be nice in a celery rib or endive leaf.

Notes:
I like the chunkiness, but I think I would like to try dicing the whites more finely next time, or whiz everything up in food processor to make it more blended.

I would like to add celery and maybe try celery salt instead of the fennel since I think the celery flavor would be really good in here.

Add more pickles.  :)

The Strawberry Party

May 10th was my birthday.  May 3rd was my cousin’s birthday.  On top of that, our friends from Seattle were visiting this past weekend and wanted to see everyone.   So, as usual, any reason to have a party...  :)

Since May is strawberry season, our grandmother would always make Hillary and I the Duncan Hines Strawberry cake.  This cake is what started the ball rolling on the party.  I’ll have a separate post about the cake, but basically I decided I wanted to recreate it from scratch.  Then I saw a strawberry cocktail recipe and I thought “Why not have a strawberry themed party?!”  After weeks of looking at strawberry recipes, here’s what I settled on:
Strawberry Bruschetta
Strawberry mascarpone bites
Cheese tray with strawberry jam
Strawberry scones
Strawberry and mixed field green salad
Strawberry chicken club on homemade bread
Strawberry amaretto cocktail
(And of course the cake)

Funny little story... to make all of these dishes, I needed 12 pints of strawberries.  While in line at the checkout, I’m putting my strawberries on the conveyer and I hear “Whoah!  That’s a lot of strawberries!”  The little girl in front of me (about 7 yrs old) was in shock.  She asked “How many is that?” and I said “12!  I’m having a strawberry party.”  She then turned to her Dad and said “She’s got 12!  We only got 2!”  Then, my favorite part, she proceeded to help me unload my groceries onto the conveyer.  What a great kid!!

So I’ll just walk through each one of the dishes...
Strawberry Bruschetta
I bought one loaf of a long, wide french baguette, sliced it down the middle, brushed it with olive oil and grilled it.  It was long enough that each half gave me roughly 13 slices, which was perfect.  I made 2 types: A caprese style with chopped strawberries, diced mozzarella, olive oil, good balsamic vinegar and chopped basil; and a goat cheese, strawberry and honey.
I got the idea from this site/recipe.

They were both quite tasty, but I think the caprese was my favorite.  I like tomatoes in general, but I am picky about what I like them on and have never loved caprese.  But the strawberries work so much better than tomatoes in my opinion!  I think my palate just prefers the slightly more sweet flavor of the strawberries to most tomatoes.  Hillary reiterated this because she really doesn’t like tomatoes, but the strawberries worked quite well for her too.  I may even make this into a salad.  One complaint - it was hard to eat without everything falling off.  Which, granted, is a common problem with bruschetta.  Next time I would try layering the strawberries with the mozzarella.

Caprese Bruschetta

Strawberry Mascarpone Bites
I wanted something that people could just pop into their mouth when they were hanging around chatting and these were perfect.  Simply strawberries cut in quarters and filled with a mascarpone cheese mixture.  I followed this recipe, but I used amaretto instead of chocolate liquor since I had the amaretto on hand.  They were so, so tasty!  One of the favorites of the day based on an informal poll.  :)

Thanks to Jessica for assembling these!!

Cheese tray with strawberry jam
Nothing too fancy here... we had Beecher’s Flagship cheddar and a Forme D’Ambert blue, with rosemary crackers and Strawberry Mojito Jam that our friends brought from Seattle.  It was a perfect compliment to the 2 cheeses.

Strawberry Scones
Ok, so this was by far the favorite of the day.  This is one of the best scone recipes ever!!  I got it here and I just used fresh strawberries instead of the frozen berries.  These are super light and fluffy and the ingredients are wonderfully healthy.  She even offers vegan options.  I would highly recommend trying these scones.  They were easy to make, but you do need a lot of flour for handling because the dough is sticky.  I plan on trying them with blueberries and then later in the summer, peaches.  I also want to try a savory version - maybe cheddar and rosemary.

Strawberry and mixed field green salad
I looked at A LOT of salad recipes.  I wanted something more interesting that just strawberries, spinach and a simple vinaigrette.  I ended up picking this recipe strictly because of the dressing.  It’s nicely complicated with flavors that seemed like they would go really well with all the other ingredients.  It calls for spinach, but since there in spinach in the sandwich, I didn’t want to use it twice.  So I replaced it with mixed field greens.  It really needed the spinach though.  It needs a hardier green.  Arugula may work as well.  The dressing however is one of the best.  I plan on making a batch for the fridge to use on random salads.  It’s really unlike any other dressing I’ve had - tart and slightly sweet and a beautiful coral color.

Strawberry chicken club on homemade bread
I wanted at least one fairly hearty dish that could act as the “entree” - even though everything was finger food.  I looked at several sandwiches and settled on this one because most people like club sandwiches.  Also it just looked good in general.  And I thought the homemade “outback” bread would make a really good sandwich bread.
So I baked off 4 loaves the weekend before and froze them.  Took them out 2 days before the party and put them in airtight containers.
I didn’t want anything too large so I didn’t do a “stacked” version - I just made one layer.  And the only other thing I changed is I marinated the chicken in a lemon, rosemary, garlic marinade because I really wanted the chicken to be juicy and flavorful.  I’m really glad I did that.  The chicken came out super yummy - very lemony and herby.  My husband and I were very glad that we had leftover chicken.  We will be making yummy sandwiches and salads for a while.
Overall the sandwiches were really good.  All of the flavors worked really well together.  And again, I think the fact that the strawberries were just slightly sweeter than tomatoes, it just worked a little better.  Plus, they have bacon on them.

A HUGE thanks to Jessica and Alex for assembling the sandwiches!!

Strawberry amaretto cocktail
I was a bit disappointed in the cocktail.  Not because of the recipe, which was this one, but because I don’t think it was really what I wanted.  I thought I wanted a champagne or prosecco based cocktail, but when it came down to it, I think I would’ve preferred a punch of some kind.  I wanted something more mixed and fruity.  And my husband had to spend too much time making drinks.  I think I’m going to stick with punches for parties from now on.

Overall we really enjoyed our party.  I was really happy with the food and it was great to have everyone together and visiting and eating and laughing.

Tomorrow I will post about the cake....  :)