Other People's Recipes.

The Sweet 100

2008-09-27T13:10:15Z

I have about 75 people coming over to my house tomorrow for a bake-off of the meat variety, and my house is TRASHED. I spent last night making kimchi and sausage soup, and researching bibimbap and plotting how to protect my guests from a hurricane while still keeping most of them outside. I spent the day yesterday shopping for food and booze for the masses, and I have spent the whole week before basically picking my toes and playing with kittens.

So since I HAVE to clean my house RIGHT NOW I decided to to this little thing I found on Cakespy. I was going to do the original one that had the top 100 foods you should eat before you croak, but I like sweet things. I was surprised that I have tried less than 60 of these sweet things, and less surprised that there was only one that I would never eat (which I have already eaten. Bananas Foster is my kryptonite. Barf.) NOW I will start cleaning the house. Oh and someday I might come back here and actually put recipes up! I made the mistake of reading the book Julie and Julia, and decided that I needed to cook my way through my very own cookbook. So instead of digging through the thousands of recipes I already have, I have been cooking recipes from the American Century Cookbook. Of course I just couldn’t start at the beginning and work my way through either, I had to go through the entire cookbook and label them by year and then start cooking the recipes. So, I should be back in about a year, or when I get bored with the project (oh that would be last week. See you soon!)

I would love to see some other responses to this little top 100. I feel like a dessert loser!

1) Copy this list into your site, including the instructions!
2) Bold all of the sweets you’ve eaten!
3) Cross out any of them that you’d never ever eat.

4) Consider anything that is not bold or crossed out your “To Do” List.
5) Optional: Post a comment here linking to your results–or just post a comment letting us know how many you’ve tried, or what you’re going to try next!

Red Velvet Cake
Princess Torte
Whoopie Pie
Apple Pie either topped or baked with sharp cheddar
Beignet
Baklava
Black and white cookie
Seven Layer Bar (also known as the Magic Bar or Hello Dolly bars)
Fried Fruit pie (sometimes called hand pies)
Kringle
Just-fried (still hot) doughnut
Scone with clotted cream
Betty, Grunt, Slump, Buckle or Pandowdy
Halvah
Macarons
Banana pudding with nilla wafers
Bubble tea (with tapioca “pearls”)
Dixie Cup
Rice Krispie treats
Alfajores
Blondies
Croquembouche
Girl Scout cookies
Moon cake
Candy Apple
Baked Alaska
Brooklyn Egg Cream
Nanaimo bar
Baba au rhum
King Cake
Sachertorte
Pavlova
Tres Leches Cake
Trifle
Shoofly Pie
Key Lime Pie (made with real key lime)
Panna Cotta
New York Cheesecake
Napoleon / mille-fueille
Russian Tea Cake / Mexican Wedding Cake
Anzac biscuits
Pizzelle
Kolache
Buckeyes
Malsadas
Moon Pie –for lunch every single day in high school.
Dutch Baby
Boston Cream Pie
Homemade chocolate chip cookies
Pralines
Gooey butter cake
Rusks
Daifuku
Green tea cake or cookies
Cupcakes from a cupcake shop
Crème brûlée
Some sort of deep fried fair food (twinkie, candy bar, cupcake)–I know shocker. You all thought this was the first I would bold.
Yellow cake with chocolate frosting
Jelly Roll
Pop Tarts
Charlotte Russe
An “upside down” dessert (Pineapple upside down cake or Tarte Tatin)
Hummingbird Cake
Jell-O from a mold
Black forest cake
Mock Apple Pie (Ritz Cracker Pie)
Kulfi
Linzer torte
Churro
Stollen
Angel Food Cake
Mincemeat pie
Concha
Opera Cake
Sfogliatelle / Lobster tail
Pain au chocolat
A piece of Gingerbread House
Cassata
Cannoli
Rainbow cookies My grandmother used to get these giant gold boxes of rainbow cookies and petit fours, and I have wasted HOURS of my life trying to find out where they were procured.
Religieuse
Petits fours
Chocolate Souffle I have NEVER had a chocolate souffle, but I remember drooling over the one in the Babar book.
Bienenstich (Bee Sting Cake)
Rugelach Shana Tova!
Hamenstashen
Homemade marshmallows
Rigo Janci
Pie or cake made with candy bar flavors (Snickers pie, Reeses pie, etc)
Divinity
Coke or Cola cake
Gateau Basque
S’mores
Figgy Pudding
Bananas foster or other flaming dessert Oh how I loathe you bananas foster.
Joe Froggers
Sables
Millionaire’s Shortbread
Animal crackers
Basbousa

Mini Quiches

2008-08-30T18:02:13Z

Every winter I throw a big ole weekend long party, and this year I decided it would be smart for me to make appetizers ahead of time, so that when it was two am and we were all drunk and hungry, I could just pop some frozen appetizers in the oven and everyone would think I was a hero. It worked. All my friends think I am some kind of superhuman Martha Stewart. Ha! Fooled you! These were the biggest hit, and this year I will make a million more. My drunk friends apparently don’t get fed often.

1 pkg refrigerated pie crust or one recipe pastry crust
one portabello mushroom
8 oz. button mushrooms, porcini mushrooms, or whatever other mushrooms are on sale that week
2 T. butter
1 T. olive oil
1/2 c. whipping cream
1 egg ( or the equivalent amount of Egg Beaters. These are just as good if you just use the egg whites)
1/4 tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper
1 c. shredded swiss cheese
bacon, cooked, drained and crumbled. ( I didn’t use the bacon in all of them, because I have vegetarian friends. In fact, I don’t think the original recipe even called for bacon, but I don’t have it any more and I have no idea where I got it. I just found this scribbled mess on my dining room floor.)

Preheat oven to 375

Let crusts stand at room temp for 20 mins, roll out into 12″ circles. Wash mushrooms (yes, with water people. It doesn’t hurt them. MYTH! Just dry them off after you wash them, or the next step will take longer) Chop up in food processor or with knife. Place butter and olive oil in skillet and cook mushrooms over medium heat until all liquid is evaporated and mushrooms are brown and tender.

Spray 24 muffin cups with Pam the wonder Spray. (I wrote down 1 3/4c. but I just used standard size cupcake pans.) Using a pint glass, cut 24 circles from pie crust (12 from each crust) rerolling if needed. Press into muffin pans. Divide mushrooms between cups.

Combine egg, cream, salt and cayenne pepper and beat well. Pour mixture over mushrooms, about 2 tsp. per cup. Sprinkle each with grated cheese.

Bake for 18-20 mins or until center is set.

These freeze awesome, and the recipe doubles fantastically. I have zillions of cupcake pans, so it was easy for me to do a quadruple batch in a short amount of time, if you don’t have a lot of cupcake pans this might not be so easy.

When you freeze them, cool them to room temp first, then put them on a tray and freeze them on the tray, then put them in a zip lock bag.

These were not as popular as the bite size ones, but they were pretty darn tasty.

Oh to reheat, bake at 350 for 12-14 mins.

Things are getting smoky in here….

2008-08-23T01:34:38Z

I have not touched my pile of recipes in a very long time. I have not touched the boxes of old recipes, the bag of magazine pages, the pile of church cookbooks, or the random whispery papers from my Grandmother’s collection.

My boyband (saying husband has never come easy to me, so I combined boyfriend+husband…hence boyband) has recently become smitten with sausage making, and most of my time is spent researching recipes for him to try, buying smokers and grinders and meat cookbooks, and wondering what the hell we have got ourselves into.

His sausage is good, but after a while it all tastes the same to me, and all I want is salad.

Until tonight. Tonight we did the first trial run in our ginormous super-shiny smoker, and the first thing he made was smoked potatoes. Which he is using to make smoked potato, cheese, and bacon sausage. I have tasted the filling, and seriously I am restraining myself from going and eating all of them.

They need to be smoked again, and then I am free to eat them.

If you have a smoker, or a grill that you can add a smoke box or woodchips too, take some potatoes, peel them, and throw them in there. Leave them there for about eight hours, and then make mashed potatoes out of them.

Seriously good stuff.

Technorati Tags: od, potatoes, mashed potatoes

Roasted Garlic and Onion Jam

2008-08-22T15:59:12Z

Months ago I went to a birthday party at Novare Res, the new beer garden in Portland. They have fantastic little cheese and meat plates that I am fairly certain come from The Cheese Iron (AKA: Best Place in the World). They also have a ham and cheese sandwich that literally stays in your brain for days. It is the only sandwich they serve, and that is quite all right with me because it is the best sandwich I have ever had. So I went home and tried to make the onion jam that came on the sandwich. Onion jam probably sounds icky, but with some Harriet’s Mustard and some ham….drooool.

3 lg. spanish or sweet onions
2 heads of garlic, roasted
2 T. sugar (I started with 2 1/2 but it made it too sweet)
2 T. brown sugar
3 T. balsamic vinegar

Squish the roasted garlic out into a bowl. Peel and cut the onions. I cut mine in half and then make 1/4 in slices. Coat a skillet with cooking spray, heat over med-high heat. Turn heat down to medium add onions and cover. Cook, stirring occasionally, until soft and translucent, about 20 minutes.

Add sugars and recover. Cook until golden, about 30 mins. Stir occasionally. Add 1/4 c. water and stir. Cover until dark brown, about 20 mins. Add vinegar, garlic, and another scant 1/4 c. water. Cook until liquid is absorbed. Transfer to a bowl and cool. Will keep in the refrigerator for about two weeks.

This is excellent on meats, or you can take a block of cream cheese and dump some of this on it and serve it with mustard and crackers. It is also fantastic in salad dressings. Weird, I know. Yum.

[tags] onion jam, jams, onions]

Peanut Butter Frosting

2008-08-16T03:10:56Z

oh so gooooooood. I put this on plain old chocolate cupcakes. Then I put it on vanilla cupcakes. I think tomorrow I am going to put it on anything I eat.

1 8 oz. pkg of cream cheese (room temp)
1 stick of butter (room temp)
4 c. powdered sugar
3/4 c. jif peanut butter

Mix the cream cheese and butter together, add the sugar a cup at a time (you may want to use more, I actually really like how unsweet this frosting is) Beat until fluffy, about two minutes. Add peanut butter and blend until smooth.

I made half a batch of this with crunchy peanut butter and half with smooth. Both were fantastic. The crunchy was much harder to pipe obviously.

I frosted 31 cupcakes generously with one batch of this.

Originally from Sky High: Irresistible Triple Layer Cakes, and featured on the Smitten Kitchen site (check out the cake it was originally intended for….sexy! Adapted to work for cupcakes.

Technorati Tags: frosting, peanut butter, baking, cupcakes

Chicken Enchiladas with Green Sauce

2008-07-22T19:13:12Z

I think I have about 50 recipes for Green Chili Chicken Enchiladas, and I never use any of them, I just throw stuff together and go TADA! Enchiladas! This one is From Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food, so it takes forever for her to say, hey toss all this stuff together and stick it in your food hole! Which I plan on doing tomorrow night. Tonight is Buffalo Burgers!

3 pounds bone-in, skin-on chicken breast halves
Coarse salt and ground pepper
5 garlic cloves, unpeeled
2 jars (16 ounces each) medium green salsa
3/4 cup heavy cream
12 corn tortillas (6-inch)
12 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, coarsely shredded (3 cups)
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped (optional)

Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Season chicken with salt and pepper; place with garlic on a rimmed baking sheet. Bake until 165 degrees. Meanwhile, combine salsa and cream.
Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees. Shred meat, discarding skin and bones. Peel and chop garlic. (Or hey, you can use that super handy already minced stuff that comes in the jar! Martha would not approve, but you would save yourself some time.) Combine chicken, garlic, and 1/2 cup salsa mixture.
Stack tortillas flat, and wrap in damp paper towels; microwave on high for 1 minute to soften. Working with one tortilla at a time, dip in salsa mixture, lay flat, and fill with 1/3 cup chicken mixture. Roll up and arrange, seam side down, 8 enchiladas lengthwise and 4 crosswise in a 9-by-13-inch baking dish. Top with remaining salsa mixture, then cheese.
Bake until cheese is browned and salsa is bubbling, 40 to 45 minutes; let rest 10 minutes. Serve, sprinkled with cilantro, if desired.

Strozzaprettie with Pecorino

2008-07-18T13:32:49Z

I would like this for dinner please and thank you. I especially like the fact that Strozzapretti translates to “Priest Strangler”.

Via Apartment Therapy

Strozzapretti with Pecorino, Prociutto and Something Green
serves 4

1 lb Strozzapretti pasta
1 cup chicken stock
6 egg yolks
1 cups freshly grated pecorino romano cheese, plus 1/2 cup chopped
2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon good quality, flaky salt
3 heads Belgian endive, chopped cross-wise to within 1 inch of stem, or total 2 cups chopped green (herbs, cooked kale, chard, etc.)
1/4 lb prosciutto, torn into bite-sized pieces.

Set a large pot of water to boil. In a small saucepan, bring the chicken stock to a simmer over low flame.

Meanwhile, in a large bowl, combine egg yolks, Pecorino, pepper, and salt. Whisk gently. Add endive.

When the pot of water reaches a boil, add a good shake of salt and cook pasta to al dente. Drain it quickly and toss into the bowl with the egg mixture, allowing some of the pasta water to mix in. Pour the simmered stock over the pasta and toss everything together gently.

Divide between four warm pasta bowls and lay a nice handful of prosciutto across each portion. Serve immediately.

Pineapple Cookies

2008-06-17T19:00:21Z

1 c. shortening
1 c. brown sugar
1 c. white sugar
1 c. crushed pineapple
1 c. nuts
2 eggs well beaten
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. soda
4 1/2 c. flour
2 tsp. vanilla

Mix and drop on greased cookie sheet. Bake in 400 degree oven until brown.

–

This recipe is super stained and has lots of ancient bits of crushed pineapple on it. It is always my belief that if a recipe is well-stained, it must be good. I don’t know how I feel about pineapple cookies though. I am not a big fan of the pineapple, unless it is soaked in tequila or on a ham pizza, but I would be willing to try this stained recipe out on my guinea pig friends.

Apple Cake

2008-06-07T21:35:37Z

From the Woman’s Club- Nov. 1988

2 c. sugar
1 stick butter

cream sugar and butter together. Add:

2 eggs
2 tsp soda
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
4 c. finely chopped apples, any kind.
1/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 c. nuts (whichever kind you prefer)
2 c. flour

Bake 45 mins at 350 in a 9×13 pan.

—

The only way I have ever made this cake was as cupcakes, with maple frosting, and they were fannnntastic. A very moist cake with a very apple pie kind of taste. yum.

Butterscotch Thins

2008-06-07T21:31:50Z

Holy cripes my family likes cookies.

1/4 c. butter
1/4 c. shortening
1/3 c. sugar
1/3 c. brown sugar
1 egg
1 1/3 c. flour
3/4 tsp soda
1 tsp. vanilla
1/3 c. nuts

Melt butter and shortening. Add sugars and mix well. Add egg. Beat until light in color. Sift flour and soda and stir into mixture. Add vanilla and nuts. Shape into roll. Roll in wax paper and chill. Slice thin. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet. 375 mins for 10 minutes.