So you may have noticed I’ve been missing in action for a while. Or maybe you didn’t. That’s OK, too!

I’ve actually been cooking up a lot of delicious stuff. I even took pictures of some of it. Like this Mexican Noodle Casserole, or Sopa Seca as it’s more authentically called.

Mmmm… It was really good.

Unfortunately, my laptop is having issues. The battery doesn’t hold a charge, and even when it’s plugged in it likes to just shut itself off without warning. Like when I’m in the middle of typing out the changes I made to a Mexican Noodle Casserole recipe that I only had in my head and now I can’t entirely remember what they were.

Grrr. Of course, we have two other computers in the house but I am a true creature of habit and I only like MY laptop.

I also made this…

…which was amazing. I didn’t change the recipe at all except for adding 2 links of turkey sausage (totally negating the vegetarian aspect of things) and a little extra sauce. Head on over to Fork Knife Swoon by clicking the photo above for this ultimate cold-weather comfort food recipe.

And as if that wasn’t enough of a carb-overload, I made these later that night…

…and they were HEAVENLY. If you have any snickers bars left from Halloween you should already be over at Cookies and Cups getting that recipe! You don’t even need all snickers. I used a mixture of snickers, milky ways, and 100 grand and it worked out perfectly.

Back to the Sopa Seca. You can find the original recipe here. I used rotisserie chicken in place of the turkey and queso blanco instead of cheddar. I can’t remember the rest of the changes but if you make it like this I’m sure it will be excellent. I do recommend serving the casserole immediately. Mine got mushy overnight. Yuck.

There you have it. Comfort food, three ways. Now if only I had the comfort of a reliable laptop…

This month’s Recipe Redux theme is “Orange You Glad It’s Fall?”. Markets are plentiful with the orange colors of autumn including pumpkin, carrots, squash, sweet potatoes and even golden beets. Not only are these bursting with fall flavors but they are also chock-full of carotenoid antioxidants. The challenge was to create and share a favorite orange antioxidant-filled dish.

I have to say that I almost didn’t represent.

I immediately thought of pumpkin. Of course, if you regularly browse through all the food blogs in the blogosphere you know we are being absolutely inundated with pumpkin this week/month/season. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – I love pumpkin! – but I mostly love the sugary, fattening, pumpkin rolls and cakes that are dripping with cream cheese frosting. I outgrow my jeans just looking at that stuff.

I tried to lighten up a creamy, cheesy, pumpkin cake but it really wasn’t redux worthy. It was OK but it left me wanting for the real thing.

Then, coincidentally, I made this wild rice with roasted butternut squash for dinner. I wasn’t even thinking of the redux but, of course, I reduxed the recipe I found because that’s what I do. It was so surprisingly good. I mean, I thought it would make a good accompaniment for dinner but it was really, REALLY good.

[Sidebar] Squash gets a bad rap. It’s so sweet and delicious yet I can’t get my kids to take a single bite without fake gagging. Interesting how they will eat pumpkin and sweet potatoes which are, like, almost the same thing! My husband thinks it’s because squash is a bad name for food. Maybe they should rename it, like they did with Orange Roughy which is actually called a Slimehead. Not many people were ordering Slimehead before the re-brand now were they? [End Sidebar]

This recipe may seem like it has a lot of steps for a side dish but it’s worth the effort. All the roasting and sauteing is what gives the flavor depth. It makes quite a bit, probably 8-10 servings depending on the portion size, but that’s great because you can take leftovers for a healthy and hearty lunch the next day.

Is it too early to talk Thanksgiving? If you’re looking for something a little less traditional to serve this year I think this would make a welcome addition to the Thanksgiving table. (And don’t forget to check out all the other great orange recipes linked below!).

Adapted from Bon Appetit.

There are some awe-inspiring blogs out there and The Bitten Word is one of them. It’s the collaboration of two awesome cooks and writers who happen to have an enviable food magazine collection. But they don’t just collect the magazines like, ahem, many of us. They actually make the recipes inside.

The moment I found out about their Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge (#tbwc2c) I jumped right in. Me and 350 other people! That’s a testimony to their tremendous readership. When they first announced they needed 60 people for the challenge to work I knew they would have many more.

I couldn’t wait to get my assignment. When the email came through that I would be on team Saveur I was ecstatic. Saveur has some of the most unique and delicious recipes. I was sitting in the bleachers of a swim meet scrolling through the spreadsheet on my phone (between races, I swear!) and then I found my name. Next to it was the name of my assigned recipe: Chawanmushi.

WTF? Chawan-what?

That was my first thought. I think it was my second thought, too.

Chawanmushi, as it turns out, is a savory steamed egg custard that is traditionally served as a Japanese appetizer. Made with shrimp and chicken and fish broth.

…

I’ll admit that this sounded totally gross to me. I briefly thought about bailing. I mean, I find flan utterly disgusting and that doesn’t even have boiled anchovies in it.

Then, all of a sudden, I realized this would give me the perfect excuse to buy some adorable vintage ramekins that I’ve been coveting on etsy.

Chawanmushi it is!

I hate when I’m right. Actually, no I don’t. I pretty much love being right but in this case I really wanted to be wrong about how gross this was.

The flavor was pretty interesting and not bad at all. I scooped the shrimp out of each ramekin and ate it. It was delicious. But the custard itself was wretched. I knew it would be when I saw how it quivered as I pulled it out of the oven. That’s right, it quivered. I’ve read comparisons online to silken tofu, which I’ve never had and won’t be trying now.

But Saveur magazine can’t be all wrong. I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who would love this. If you like Japanese food, silken tofu, and flan this is totally for you!

Recipe from Saveur.

I’ve been very busy working on my contribution for a super awesome recipe challenge.

Literally. It’s The Super Awesome Cover-to-Cover Challenge from The Bitten Word (which also happens to be a super awesome blog you should check out!).

By “very busy” I of course mean busy just thinking about doing it and/or procrastinating. Hey! It’s a challenging recipe. Cut me some slack!

In the mean time I remembered I had this tasty little number stashed away in the vault. It’s a very easy grilled pizza that I put together for an impromptu party this summer. It’s perfect for sharing with friends. I mean, if they’re good friends. Otherwise you may just want to hoard it all for yourself.

Cut this up into little wedges and it makes the perfect little party app. Everyone loves Buffalo chicken. Seriously. And if they don’t they’re not coming to any of my parties!

5.0 from 8 reviews

Print

Buffalo Chicken Grilled Pizza

 

Ingredients

• 2-4 tablespoons butter
• ⅓ cup Frank’s hot sauce*
• 1 chicken breast, fully cooked and cut into bite-size pieces
• ½ cup shredded pizza cheese
• ⅓ cup crumbled blue cheese or Gorgonzola
• a few slices of red onion
• 2 pieces of naan bread (I used whole wheat)

Instructions

1. Melt butter and mix with the hot sauce to your liking. The more butter you use, the less spicy your sauce will be.
2. Toss the chicken pieces in the sauce. Remove chicken pieces from the sauce with a slotted spoon and set aside.
3. Spread a thin layer of the remaining sauce on top of each naan.
4. Top each pizza with the pizza cheese, chicken, blue cheese, and red onion slices.
5. Preheat grill. Turn one side of the grill to low and one side to high.
6. Place pizzas on the low side. Cook pizzas until bottom is crisp and cheese is melted. About 15 minutes.
7. If using the oven, cook at 425 for 11-13 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Notes

*Frank’s hot sauce is the best. If you use another sauce your results will vary For a prettier presentation, try grilling the onion slices before adding to the pizza.

WordPress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe

3.1.07

A couple nights ago my favorite restaurant was running a drink special called “the Punk Rocker”.

I had to try it for the name alone, even though the ingredients weren’t exactly what usually attracts me to a cocktail. Hard cider (yum), bourbon (yes, please!), ginger liqueur (no problem), and cinnamon.

Cinnamon is touch-and-go. Sure, I love it in pies and desserts. A dash of cinnamon lends a certain depth of flavor to Indian and Moroccan dishes. But in drinks, cinnamon makes me nervous. One bad experience with Goldschlager will do that to a person. {shudder}

But I’m glad the name drew me in to this drink, because I really enjoyed it! My husband’s not particularly fond of cinnamon or hard cider, and yet he kept stealing sips of my drink. He described it as “autumn in a glass” which is spot on.

I recreated my own version at home that is lacking in ginger liqueur (because who has ginger liqueur lying around?) but it’s hardly missed. If you don’t have any cinnamon sticks you can try using a plain simple syrup (1 part sugar, 1 part water) and a pinch of dried cinnamon.

An alternate title to this could be “The Post That Almost Wasn’t”.

Man, did I have technical difficulties last week. I know many of my readers are also fellow bloggers so I have a little bit of advice for you guys. (The rest of you can feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)

Bloggers: you know how you have all those groovy little plugins that make all the cool stuff happen on your blog. Well, if they’re not broke, don’t fix them. My husband warns me to never install the updates to these plugins for fear they might break my blog. I hadn’t updated any plugins for a long time but there were so many notices and warnings telling me that I needed to update to the newest versions that I finally caved and did it. In fact, I updated all of them at the same time.

And then one of them broke my blog.

I had no way of knowing which one it was because I installed every available update all at once. I have to give a special shout-out to Lindsay of Pinch of Yum for helping me sort it out so quickly. I solicited her for advice knowing that her husband is a programming and coding whiz, but right away she knew which plugin it was and how to fix it. So thank you, Lindsay!

I guess there are two morals here. First, do you really need to update your plugins? I’d say probably not as long as they are working for you. Second, if you do have the uncontrollable urge to install the updates, which I’m sure I will again, do them one at a time so if something goes haywire you can identify the cause and fix it with a lot less panicking.

Also, I apologize to any of you who got a random email with just a picture of this amazing soup and no recipe. That was cruel.

Every so often I get this weird urge to cook with leeks. It happened again last week. Plus, it was getting pretty damn cold out so potato leek soup seemed like an obvious choice.

Oh! Speaking of leeks, I have another public service announcement. If you have a garbage disposal, don’t try to put all the dark green parts of the leeks that you can’t use down there. This may seem like common knowledge but several years ago, when I was a very novice cook preparing one of my first Thanksgiving dinners, I didn’t even hesitate before doing it. The result was… undesirable. Let’s just say it was the Thanksgiving dinner that almost wasn’t.

Back to this soup. It’s hearty, rich and delicious but without all that guilt accompanied by heavy cream. No cream here except for a bit of light sour cream to give it a smooth, velvety finish. It’s substantial enough to make a meal on it’s own with a side salad and some bread. I topped mine off with crumbled turkey bacon and cheddar cheese, and my entire family ate it without a single complaint. I think I even heard a couple of compliments in between the slurps.

I love it when I have a stroke of genius.

(FYI, deciding to add Nutella to make something ordinary extraordinary pretty much always counts as a stroke of genius.)

The other day was just like any other in the fact that, surprise!, there we bananas rotting on my counter. Why doesn’t anyone ever bother to actually eat the bananas? Note to family: bananas are yummy and good for you.

Anyway, this day was a little bit different because I realized that every time I opened my cupboard there was a giant jar of half-eaten Nutella staring at me. The jar was left over from my husband’s Nutella phase. I’m not exactly sure how a person gets over a Nutella phase but evidently, it’s possible. Personally, I could always be in a Nutella phase but I would also weigh 300 pounds so we won’t go there.

Clearly, I needed to transform these old bananas and Nutella into a scrumptious treat.

Banana muffins with chocolate-hazelnut swirl? Yes! That totally works.

The base recipe for these muffins is fast and easy. Then all you have to do is top the batter with a healthy dollop of Nutella and swirl it all together. Don’t be afraid to swirl it around good so the Nutella gets mixed in.

I apologize for the annoyingness of this recipe only making ten muffins. Ten muffins! The two empty muffin cups drive me kinda nuts in an OCD way but that’s as far as the batter will stretch. Sorry.

P.S. I see Jif has a chocolate-hazelnut spread now, too. I’ve been wondering for a long time why some other company hasn’t given Nutella a run for their money. I haven’t tried it yet but Jif is the BEST brand of peanut butter so I’d wager that it’s darn good. If anyone has tasted it, let me know how it is. If you have some, use it now. Make these muffins!

Inspired by banana crumb muffins.

I know what you’re thinking right now.

You’re thinking, “She hasn’t posted anything in over a month and now that she has the house to herself again and plenty of free time, she gives us a green smoothie? Are we being punked?”.

But let me assure you, this is no joke. I overindulged in way too many things this summer.

Too much take-out.
Too much beer.
Too much wine.
Too much sun (as if that was possible).

So today, after the kids left for school – haaaaleluyah! – I felt like I needed a big glass of liquid health.

My “green” smoothies never actually turn out green because I add so much other stuff to them. Truthfully, they usually turn out an unappetizing shade of brown but the blueberries made this one a lovely deep purple shade.

Deep Purple? Smoooke on the waaater. Oh. Sorry.

If you’re one of those people who think green smoothies are gross, I encourage you to try this one. It actually tastes really good. Sometimes green smoothies ARE gross and I just chug them as fast as I can to get it over with, but this one has a delicious blend of interesting flavors.

Go ahead, don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it!

Note: If you hate cilantro, however, this isn’t for you. You could try leaving it out or substituting parsley but I really love the little kick the cilantro gives this.

There are a few reason why I’m not fond of the first week of August.

First, there’s the unavoidable realization that it’s going to be fall soon. And fall means rain and impending winter, both of which I loathe.

Then, I realize that school starts soon (a very, VERY good thing) but I haven’t prepared for that at all. Time to scurry and make appointments for physicals and eye exams, shop for school supplies and, worst of all, new clothes for the world’s fussiest tweens.

Ok, I’m panicking a little bit now.

Don’t even get me started on the freaking cicadas. For the love of god. Stop. Making. That. Horrid. Noise.

The one saving grace of the first week of August is that we pick our annual supply of fresh blueberries.

My husband’s family has a blueberry patch in Short Tract, NY. I’m not even sure exactly where that is but sometimes it seems like it’s near the end of the world. A 2-hour drive across the bumpiest and hilliest of roads leads us to this little town that even Google doesn’t know anything about.

But that’s where we go to find the plumpest, sweetest, juiciest, (and free-est) blueberries.

I was going to show you some photos of my family frolicking through the field, picking and eating blueberries in equal amounts, and occasionally starting a blueberry food fight. But this year I didn’t go. For the first time in fourteen years I decided to stay home and float in the pool. It’s kinda too hot for me to be laboring in open fields this year.

Instead you’ll have to look at a few photos of this delicious blueberry crisp. The first 9-inch pan I made disappeared in five minutes. And there may or may not have been only two of us eating it. Luckily I made a healthy(er) version of it.

Blueberries are a superfood, people!

This crisp features less butter and sugar, and a little less topping overall. It’s packed with antioxidant-rich blueberries and healthy oats so you can enjoy it while feeling slightly less guilty about eating half the pan. Perfect by itself or with a dollop of vanilla yogurt. (Or ice cream. No one’s judging).

 
Adapted from Cocoa and Lavender.

Time for another episode of culinary confessions. I’ve never owned or used a springform pan. Basically because they have always terrified me.

When it comes to things I’m afraid to do, baking in a springform pan ranks right up there with canning and using active dry yeast. (Of course there many things I’m much more terrified of that I’ll never do, e.g. bungee jumping or LSD. But this is a cooking blog so let’s try to stay on topic.)

My fear of canning comes from the distinct possibility that I’ll do it wrong and accidentally poison a lot of people. And I’m sure a number of people share my fear of baking with yeast. Proofing? Fermenting? Kneading? Yikes! I think that one’s pretty reasonable. But I can’t say why it is, exactly, that I’ve never been brave enough to tackle the springform pan. Many a cheesecake have gone unbaked due to this irrational phobia.

Wait. It’s a pan. And it’s in two pieces. How does the batter not leak through the seam and all over the oven? Then how on earth does it break away from the cake without crumbling the entire thing?

Actually, it’s not at all irrational.

But when my friends decided to have a beer themed dinner party, I couldn’t think of a more fitting dessert to bring than the chocolate stout cake that riddles the internet every St. Patrick’s Day. Just one problem. It has to be baked in a springform pan.

So I went to Walmart and wandered down the cookware aisle with trepidation. “Oh my God, am I really doing this? Am I actually going to purchase a crazy two-part pan with a latch and it’s own Wiki page?”. All my fear diminished once I saw the cutest lime green pan ever. I mean, really, What could be scary about lime green bakeware? Ridiculous.

As it turns out, this cake is ridiculous. Ridiculously easy to make, that is. It come together almost entirely in one saucepan and popped right out of that crazy pan with no problem. The frosting is simple, too. You don’t even have to frost the sides!

Be careful not to over bake this. It will appear underdone in the middle giving you the urge to leave it in the oven for an extra five minutes. Don’t do it. I did and I think the result was ever so slightly dry. I prefer a moist cake which this one should be for all the liquid ingredients.

In my opinion Guinness doesn’t really taste like much on it’s own so I definitely didn’t taste it in the cake. I’d love to try this again with a chocolate porter. Now we’re talking!

Oh, by the way, the recipe only calls for 1 cup of Guinness so you’ll have to measure it out and drink the rest of the can. Then you’ll have to have another full Guinness because that was barely any beer, let’s get real.

Adapted slightly from Nigella.com.