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Archive for the ‘Non-Baking’ Category

Celebrations!

I went a little crazy last week baking all day on the President’s Day holiday…the prettiest creation? Mardi Gras cupcakes!! The frosting is wonderful cream cheese frosting from a can, but I made the cupcakes from scratch! Fun! It was a simple yellow cake recipe from my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook.  Fairly easy (would have been easier with a stand mixer!) and very tasty.   I went a little crazy with the frosting colors and played around for a bit…the batch made two dozen, so by the time Matt got home from work, the kitchen was covered in cupcakes and the other food I’d been working on (chili, mac & cheese, apple bars). Very exciting!

Why all the excitement??? Big huge enormous wonderful news!

Matt proposed!!!! AHHH!! So, it’s been almost 2 weeks since then, but it happened on 2/13 and I am still sort of reeling.  We aren’t in any hurry to start planning, but are really enjoying the love….lots of love to go around.  Plus, Santana is so happy! Look at her excitement:

Of course, we put the ring on the pup…she was not very happy about this, but it made for a funny picture: 

Here’s the ring on me 🙂

 

I LOVE it! The diamond was a gift from my grandmother for my undergrad graduation and it means a lot to me that we could take that diamond and get it set in the perfect ring.  Especially with someone I’m so crazy about. LOVELOVELOVE 🙂

Back to Basics

I’m currently blogging from the lovely Red Roof Inn just outside of Charlotte’s airport.  We spent the long weekend in NC with my aunt, grandma, brother and his girlfriend.  Extremely relaxing and just what I needed.  We did absolutely nothing…sat around, watched tv, made fun of each other, and ate lots of grandma’s delicious food.  Love it.  We’ve been spending lots of time watching the US Open….Matt is a huge tennis fan, and I am catching on. 🙂

Santana spent the weekend at the PetSmart PetsHotel….I felt like a mom dropping my kid off at school for the first time.  It was rough.  I called to check on her once this weekend, and the guy I talked to said she has been having a great time, playing with other dogs, and really enjoying the extra vanilla ice cream treat we paid for.  I can’t wait to see her!

Anyway, before we left, there wasn’t much to blog about food-wise, since we spent the week using up the stuff in our fridge.  Not only did we pull out some of the leftover frozen chili (mostly so that I could make cornbread and make another strata!), we also used a bunch of our fruits and veggies from the CSA in really easy, hearty and satisfying dishes that just got tossed in the oven to bake.  It was nice having things that were so quick and simple.  I love being able to just add a little oil and seasoning (or sugar and cinnamon in the case of fruit), throw the pan in the oven and have a tasty dish that brings out the best qualities of the produce.

Here are a couple pictures of our roast vegetables (pre-roasting and finished product).  We always love these, and I think in the winter we’ll do it a lot more.  It’s hard to justify heating up the apartment with the oven mid-summer.  This batch had freshly dug red potatoes, beautiful striped beets (they lost their stripes while they roasted!), local carrots and a couple green bell peppers.   Tossed with some olive oil, smashed garlic, salt and pepper.  We served it with some butter lettuce dressed with a bit of parmesan herb dressing.  We had some salmon burgers from the store we planned to add on top, but they were not tasty at all, so we just omitted.  It was still delicious and I had the leftover veggies the next day for lunch!

I love the way the veggies get crisp along the edges and all of their sweetness comes pouring out with a little bit of coaxing.  

The second was a fruit crisp.  We got a ton of blueberries in our box (and had some leftover from when Matt’s mom and aunt were in town), so we grabbed some raspberries and peaches from the store.  Tossed with a little sugar, cornstarch, and a couple other things. The mix filled a huge baking dish.

These colors are amazing together.  I didn’t manage to get a picture of the finished crisp…we were too hungry…but it got topped with a streusel-type topping and baked away.  Gooey and warm and perfect for topping some vanilla ice cream.  My coworkers got the leftovers of this one.

A week of delicious reminders that sometimes it just takes a tiny bit of prep to create some wonderful flavors from produce. 

We get home tomorrow afternoon and then head out Thursday morning for a long drive down to Berkeley for a wedding.  Another week with very little cooking.  We’ll see what comes the following week and then I’m on the road for the last week of September and most of October/November as well.  Maybe Matt will have to guest post with all the fun things he is eating while I’m travelling for work. 🙂

Summer!!

I have been wildly delinquent in posting because we have been enjoying lots of sunshine and just generally staying pretty busy.  I have a few really yummy recipes to post.  Today, just a couple quickies.  For 4th of July lunch, we grilled up some bbq chicken on our stovetop grill pan and got some wonderful char marks!

We had this with thin-sliced grilled potatoes and grilled corn succotash.  The succotash was really simple and delicious with our chicken and potatoes.  I wasn’t a huge fan of the leftovers, but I made a ton of it, so I ate it a couple more times for lunch and snack.

Grilled Corn and Edamame Succotash

• 4 ears shucked corn
• 1 cup frozen edamame
• 2 cups green beans, washed and trimmed
• 1 cup chopped onion
• 1 clove minced garlic
• 1.5 Tb butter
• 1 cup cherry tomatoes
• 1.5 Tb lemon juice
• 1 Tb balsamic vinegar
• Salt & Vinegar

1. Grill corn for about 10 minutes, turning often to get lots of grill marks all the way around.
2. Boil 4 cups water and cook edamame and beans for about 3 minutes to par cook.
3. Drain and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process.
4. Melt butter in a pan and sauté onion and garlic until lightly brown.
5. Add the corn and cook for a couple minutes.  Add bean/edamame mixture and cook for another couple minutes.
6. Remove from the pan to a large bowl and add tomatoes, lemon juice, balsamic, salt and pepper.  

Super easy and really fresh!

 

Matt and I don’t eat a lot of fresh fruit as snacks, so when our CSA box comes with new fruits that we’re not used to eating out of hand, I try to come up with somewhat healthy ways to use them and get as much fruit into our diet as possible. 

This past week I made another pie.  The last pie I made was a bit fancier, much prettier, and probably quite a bit healthier.  This pie, however, was amazingly wonderful and we finished it by Thursday night.  I didn’t get many pictures of the actual pie-making process, and the slice of pie that I have a picture of is a mushy mess, but this is what made it so delicious. 

Cherry Pluot Custard Pie Heaven

• 1 pie crust (Pillsbury for this one)
• 1 box Jell-O Pudding custard mix (I should have used two…it was a pretty thin layer of custard.  And the next time I make a pie like this, my plan is to actually make the custard.)
• ~1 cup fresh cherries, pitted and cut in quarters (I never liked fresh cherries when I was growing up, but now that I’m in Seattle, I’m finding that fresh cherries in Washington—which they offer up as samples while you walk around farmer’s markets—are a really wonderful summer snack)
• 4 pluots, peeled, pitted and chopped
• Cool whip galore

1. Prepare custard according to directions for thick pie filling.
2. Cook fruit over medium heat until it gets nice and juicy and wonderful.  I added a tiny bit of sugar to the mix.
3. Line pie plate with pie and blind bake until it is nice and brown.  You’ll notice in one of my pictures there is a big glob of white chocolate in one slice of pie…this is where I poked a hole in the baked crust.  I mended it with white chocolate chips melted into the space to prevent the custard filling from oozing out.  Matt did not object to a giant piece of white chocolate with his pie.
4. After the fruit has cooked down quite a bit, strain mostly solid parts from the liquid sweetness.  Save this! (I drizzled a bit over our first piece of pie, and the rest I shook up with some limeade for a sweet summer drink)
5. Mix the strained solids with the prepared custard (after it has rested like the package says).
6. Spread the custard mix evenly in the pie crust and top with cool whip.

Is there any question that this was delicious??? The tangy tart bite of the fruit mixed spectacularly with the thick rich custard, and a giant serving of whipped cream never made anything worse.  So satisfying!

 

Memorial Day Feasting!

Santana gets grumpy if we sit down to dinner and she hasn’t eaten yet.  She also gets grumpy if we do anything throughout the day that doesn’t involve feeding her or laying on the couch with her, but especially grumpy if she thinks we’re forgetting her dinner! In fact, if we say the word “Dinner” her ears perk up and she runs towards her food/water mat.  It’s adorable.  Matt got some cute shots of her wolfing down her dinner in celebration of Memorial Day. 

To celebrate the holiday and the extra day together at home, we got lots of chores done, had a bagel topped with scrambled eggs for breakfast (along with Daniel’s Banana Latte…SO good and super easy.  You have to try it!), grabbed soup from the market across the street for lunch, and tested our new grill pan on some burgers for dinner!

The burgers were made from:

• Ground Beef
• Finely chopped red onion and red bell pepper
• Cayenne
• Ground sage
• Ground thyme
• Salt & Pepper
• Paprika
• Cumin

We topped our burgers with bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, cheese and condiments.  Yum!  We had some onion rolls from the store that were perfect and complimented the spicy, flavorful kick of the burgers! As you can see, I’m a fan of pickles 🙂

On the side we had Grandma Brown’s Baked Beans (who else has had these?? I can only get them when my mom sends them from home!), corn on the cob (from the freezer, sub par, but fitting for the occasion), and sweet potato shoestrings.  Our CSA box called these “yams”, but "yam shoestrings” sounds funny, so we’re going with sweet potato! Julienne, toss with a tiny bit of olive oil, bake and then salt! SO tasty!

Matt had a Red Hook Slim Chance and I went with a Berry Nectar + Vodka to wrap up the day.  I love long weekends…and this one was much much needed!

In other news, our car is ready to pick up this week AND take a look at my new hair cut! Matt likes the flash on the camera that makes me look like my chest is exploding with an energy ball and says he needs to look at me some more to get used to the hair. Hopefully he will recognize me tomorrow 🙂

 

Ooh ooh! I meant to direct you over to Erin at I Walk In This World.  She won some nut butter cups a while ago and I was SUPER delinquent in getting them to her because of some crazy life things.  However, they arrived across the country in pretty good shape (better than the ones I sent to Angelea for sure) and she seems to love my experimental flavors:

• Puppy Love Cups (I have actually made a version of these before): Carob heart-shaped cups with peanut butter filling.  Carob is the puppy’s friend…if you’re doing special baking for your pup, carob is a safe alternative to chocolate! And what pup doesn’t love peanut butter??
• Peanut Butter Scotchies: Butterscotch Cups filled with Peanut Butter
• Nutty Nut Butters: Peanut Butter Candy Coating filled with Almond Butter
• Dark Chocolate Cashew Bites: Pretty self-explanatory. Some yummy Whole Foods Dark chocolate filled with cashew butter. 

These turn my entire kitchen into a sticky mess for at least a couple days anytime I make them, so it is usually not a super-common occurrence.  However, I have some white chocolate chips looming in the cupboard and am tempted to take them for a test drive with some nut butters.  I love sending yummy treats to excited bake sale winners, but these babies are easy to make for yourself too!

Ok, Santana just started making adorable half-wimpering/half-growling dreaming noises on the couch behind me (I’m hoping she never grows out of this), so I have to go squeeze her and head to bed!  Hope everyone had a wonderful long weekend and is excited that tomorrow is Tuesday already!

Super Easy Homemade Pizza

I love homemade pizza crust…it makes me really really happy. The problem is, I usually am not in the mood to make dough. So I have a ridiculously easy pizza method I use when we want that quick dinner bite of pizza. Just as easy and fast as heating up a frozen pizza in the oven (or toaster oven), and you have more control over the ingredients, which is always a good thing!

I use a homemade, Crockpot marinara that I usually make in giant batches when canned tomatoes are on sale, or when we have herbs at the end of the summer to use up. I freeze the sauce in small freezer bags in two-serving portions. Perfect for heating up and throwing on top of pasta for a quick dinner for Matt and I. Also perfect for defrosting the day before and using for pizza! Since we only made two small pizzas, there was still lots of sauce left, but that’s something that you can easily heat up and throw on some pasta or veggies or whatever you like for marinara (dipping sauce for breadsticks??).

Here it is:

 Top 2 whole wheat pitas with about 2 Tb of marinara, spaghetti or pizza sauce. Sprinkle on a little Italian Seasoning and Parmesan Cheese. Add toppings of your choice (we used what we had leftover in the fridge…pepperoni, bacon and some sautéed onions). Top with shredded Italian Cheeses (mozzarella, provolone, asiago, whatever you like). Bake at 350 degrees until the cheese is bubbly and just starting to brown.

 That’s it!! Let it cool for a few minutes, slice and enjoy! So easy! Pitas make amazing mini pizza crusts because they have a doughy chewiness, but also get nice and crisp when you bake them in the oven. If you’re just doing one pita, you can also just throw it in the toaster oven, which makes it even easier.

We’re crazy about pizza and are always looking for new ways to fit it into our meal plans! Since we had falafel on Monday night, we had leftover pitas, and this worked perfectly. It’s not NY style pizza, but it will definitely hold us over.

I am looking forward to the next chance we get to go to Queens together (I have NO idea when this will be) so we can share some Napoli pizza, right across the street from where Matt grew up. Look how happy it makes us! (Please note our awesome fake smiles.  We have perfected this artform.  Also, who thought it was a good idea to eat a giant pizza before we went to Herhey Park that day?? It seems like poor planning, but it was delicious!)

My parents are flying into Seattle this afternoon, so it will be a busy weekend of eating out rather than much cooking at home, so we’ll probably be a little sparse on the blog side of things, but maybe some new places will pop up to review!

Have a wonderful sunny weekend!