The Sad Cupcake

 You can’t be sad when you’re holding a cupcake. My dear friend Faye, gave me this magnet. It made me laugh and I thought it was the truth. Then I found an exception to that.  When that cupcake is a lie, the phrase misery loves company comes to mind. 

Welcome to a story about a terrible cupcake.

My friend Nic is a vegan. A gluten free vegan. Being vegan and gluten free is not a terrible thing. I have had some amazing vegan food and gluten free food in my life. While it is not my way of life, I am open to trying new recipes. Nic wanted to make red velvet vegan gluten free cupcakes.  She found a recipe on the internet. 

This is proof that the internet is a cruel and terrible place. They looked like cupcakes. They tasted like misery and tragedy. Of course I brought one home for my husband to try. After all, what if they were fine and I was just being super critical? (Truth: Misery loves company and I needed someone else to be just as traumatized as I was over the experience.) I have never seen a person spit a cupcake out of their mouth so quickly. My husband might never forgive me for the cupcake betrayal.

Things that were wrong with the cupcake:

1. Texture - It was crumbly yet gummy, like it lacked the will to live, but was trying anyway
2. Flavor-It did not taste like red velvet. It did not taste like chocolate. It tasted somewhat nutty.
3. Icing- The recipe had described it as tangy. Tangy is not something an icing should ever be. I am pretty sure my husband described it a barf. 

Lesson learned. Be wary of anything that is mostly held together by maple syrup, coconut oil and optimism.  Thank you Nic for reminding me that cupcakes can be deceiving. Happiness is not always a cupcake.

Tomato Soup Resolutions

 Nobody wants to hear about New Years Resolutions. A resolution is a personal thing and if you made one, it is something personal to you and not anyone else.   I have a few attainable resolutions that I have made this year.  They aren’t anything major, but if asked I’ll share all of them.  Today I have one that I want to talk about and it is going to be quite a journey.  I want to write about the journey and to do so, I need to share the goal. 

I want to make the best tomato soup.  

I know.  It isn’t what anyone was expecting. I don’t even know if it what I was expecting when I was thinking about resolutions, but then outside influences happened.  My husband is a unique outside influence, because he doesn’t even try to influence anything other than my music choices. We were watching a food documentary and talking about favorite foods and comfort foods and the goal came to me out of the wild blue yonder. 

When I was a wee young lass (think around age 8), my mother and I would eat tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches together. It was our thing when I was a kid, because no one else in the house liked tomato soup.  At the time I didn’t like tomato soup. I just wanted to hang out with my mom and I loved grilled cheese sandwiches.  I learned swiftly that cheese and tomato are secret best friends.

I am an adult now, and I love tomato soup.  It is the go to soup that my husband and I can agree on and is a nostalgic sort of comfort food. If I am making soup, it is in the top the requested.  Until recently, I have never made tomato soup from scratch. It has always been a name brand canned soup.  Recently I have made my first attempts into learning the art of tomato soup and for a soup that some think of as a side step away from ketchup, it is not an easy soup to make. 

The first step in the journey was to do research.  I have a plethora of cookbooks, but the one I used as the basis of my first attempt was Ski Town Soup.  (If you recall I may have blogged about a chili I made when I was going through a cookbook challenge. The chili was magnificent.) This cookbook held half a dozen variations of tomato soup from notable ski resorts.  I was able to flip through and compare the different ingredients and preparations with ease and come up with a game plan for my first attempt.

 

First attempt consisted of roasting tomatoes in the oven and then peeling them. While the tomatoes were roasting with rosemary and thyme, diced carrots and onion were sweating it out together in a sauce pan.   After the tomatoes were done being roasted they were peeled, chopped and cooked with the carrots and onion. After simmering together, chicken broth and basil was was added and all of it spent quality time in a blender until it was an odd tomato smoothie.  After blender time, cream was added to the soup to make it a creamy tomato.  Salt and pepper were added through out the process.  Everything was heated through and served with grilled cheeses sandwiches.  The end result wasn’t terrible, but certainly not the best. 

The ratio of carrots used in comparison to tomatoes, made it seem more like a carrot soup. (Who knew carrots were that mighty?) I like the roasted tomatoes. I think they brought out a nice flavor, even if peeling skins off hot tomatoes is an act of madness. I was a nice soup, but not the best tomato soup.  Additional  experiments will commence.  If you have any suggestions on processes/ ingredients to tweak let me know.  There is no wrong path to take to get to the best tomato soup.

Ice Cream Failure

 

This is a little bit of a convoluted story about ice cream and failure.

This story starts with my mother in law giving me a recipe. She had acquired this recipe from a friend and is raved as a no fail bread recipe with only two ingredients. I thought it would be a great recipe to try and a wonderful excuse to buy a half gallon of ice cream. My thought process would be that I would make the ice cream bread and tell my dad about the wonderful uses for ice cream other than just eating it.  That was my plan.  Eat ice cream, try a new recipe for bread and pick on my father and report back to my mother in law on my success.

I really want to say that I executed the plan flawlessly. If I bragged on this as a success and smirked over my kitchen prowess, then know that I was utterly lying. I totally bombed on this.  I think  the fault lie with the ice cream. I thought it would sounded wonderful to have chocolate peanut butter bread. That it would be great to make into French Toast.  There is one thing that I failed to consider with Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, is that there is literally ribbons of peanut butter in the ice cream.  Cold peanut butter is stubborn. It does not like to mix and will not unclench its might grip in even melted ice cream.  Trying to get the chilled peanut butter to relax and mix with flour is a  nightmare that I would not wish on my worse enemy.  Once I had everything incorporated I popped it in the oven in a loaf like shape.

In all honesty it looked like I giant brown turd.  It did not look appealing and sadly it did not change into any sort of shape while it baked. It wen tin the oven looking like a turd, and it came out of the oven looking like turd. This was not the easy kitchen victory that I had anticipated. It was the anthesis of that.  My husband, the supportive champ that he is, shave me is best Paul Hollywood impression and let me know it was under proved. 

I had thoughts that perhaps I could salvage this experiment and then write I heart warming tale about over coming adversity and try to tie it into a moral or child hood lesson I learned from my father.

My glorious idea to salvage it, was to first slice it up, so it no longer looked like a turd. The second part was to bake/toast it to be like a biscotti and maybe put a little bit of fudge icing on it. Everything is better with fudge icing on it. Except it isn’t. It still tasted like stale ice cream, except now it was dry and the fudge icing made it really obvious that the bread was lackluster.  It was not what I was trying to accomplish and was a rather embarrassing kitchen failure. 

Sometimes things just suck. There is no way to make it not suck. Sometimes you just have to accept that and keep moving. On the bright side, I had still had ice cream. 

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

Comfort Food: Twisted Chicken Noodle Soup

I should probably call this Thai Chicken Noodle Soup or Not My Mother’s Chicken Noodle Soup, but both of those seemed like really long titles for a recipe this delicious.  (Mom- If you are reading this, your Chicken Corn Soup is awesome and also great comfort food.)

This recipe originated from my husbands work.  They have a healthy eating section to encourage positive life choices and this recipe sounded good to him, so he forwarded it to me. I took what I liked out of the recipe and molded it into something heartier that makes a good meal by itself or an excellent part of a soup and sandwich meal.

Ingredients:

1 large sweet potato

1 tablespoon of olive oil

2 tablespoons water

1 Onion diced

1 tablespoon dried ginger or 2 inches  of fresh ginger rood thinly sliced

2 tablespoon curry powder or 1 tablespoon red curry paste

1 (15 ounce) can unsweetened coconut milk

3 cups of vegetable broth

2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sesame oil

1/2 cup fresh chopped cilantro

1 cup edamame 

3/4 cup riced cauliflower & sweet potato mix 

2 cooked chicken breasts chunked in bite size pieces(I use rotisserie to save time)

1 small packet of Thai vermicelli rice noodles

Directions:

1. Wrap sweet potato in cling form wrap and microwave for 7 minutes.  This should cook the potato all the way through.  Put the potato in the freezer to bring down temperature for handling later.
2. In a pot for noodles, fill will water and put on the heat to boil noodles.  A watched pot never boils, so move on to step 3 as the water heats. 
3. In a large soup pot, heat olive oil over medium heat.  Add the onion and ginger; cook until onions are tender and translucent. This should take about 5 minutes. Add the curry and water and stir together with onion ginger mix for about a minute.  Once everything is blended, add the unsweetened coconut milk and vegetable broth to make the soup broth.  It should smell amazing.  Bring soup broth to a boil and then let it simmer while you work on step 4.
4. Take the potato out of the freezer. It should be cool to the touch but not frozen. Remove the skin from the potato and dice into small pieces and put in the broth. If the potato is not cool, it will mush when you attempt this step.  IF the potato is still super warm, put it back in the freezer and work on other steps. 
5. Add the chunked cooked chicken into the broth along with the edamame and riced cauliflower/sweet potato mix.  Stir the the pot every now and then to verify that it nothing has settled to the bottom of the pot.  
6. The water for the noodles should be boiling.  Add noodles to the the pot and stir.  You want to make sure that nothing sticks together. Rice noodles cook quickly.  Once they are done cooking, you will want to rinse the noodles in cold water to stop the cooking process.  Once the noodles are cooked and cool to the touch, refrain from eating them from the bowl and put them in the soup broth. IF the sweet potato is still in the freezer cooling down, take it out of the freezer and it should be fine to dice and put in the soup. 
7. Stir all the ingredients together and let simmer for at least five minutes. You want the potato to gain some of the curry flavor.  IF the noodles seem to overwhelm the soup, it is okay to add half a cup of water. 
8. Add salt, lemon juice, cilantro and sesame oil to the soup.  Stir to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie letting the ingredients incorporate in to the broth and then serve.

This is a hearty chicken noodle soup that is full of flavor and sneaks in a couple of vegetables while providing comfort that only a chicken soup can provide.  

Butternut Squash Soup

Butternut Squash Soup

As winter is finally beginning to make its appearance, I now feel comfortable saying it is soup season.  Nothing warms you from the inside like a good bowl of soup.   I could continue to wax poetically about soup and give you details as to what makes this soup special, but as I have discovered, when you are looking for a recipe, you just want to get to the recipe.  So without further ado, here is my Butternut Squash Soup Recipe.

Butternut Squash Soup Recipe

This is a crock pot recipe!

Ingredients:

1 medium butternut squash pealed, seeded and cubed

4 medium sized parsnips, pealed and chopped

1 large white onion chopped

2 red apples, pealed, cored and chopped

1 cup vegetable broth

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1 pint of half and half

Instructions:

1. Add everything except the half and half into the crock pot. 
2. Let the crock pot cook on high setting for at least six hours. Stir as needed.
3. All of the vegetables should be soft.  With a hand mixer, beat the softened vegetables into a purée. 
4. Stir in the pint of cream into the purée and let the mix heat through for another half hour 45 minutes in the crock pot then serve.

The soup is excellent with your choice of crunchies, dried cranberry’s and a dollop of sour cream.

Overnight Oats

I like to prepare meals for several days at a time. It makes life a little easier knowing what is one the menu. Breakfast is tricky to make in advance, but one of the recipes I make is overnight oats.

Recipe

1 cup Oats

3 tablespoons Chia seeds

3 tablespoons Flax seeds

1 cup Yogurt (any flavor)

1/4 cup slivered almonds or chopped walnuts

1/4 dried fruit (cherries, blueberries etc.)

1/3 cup milk (almond, cow, soy etc.)

1 tablespoon honey

Mix everything together, put in containers and place in the fridge over night.  Pull it out of the fridge and it is ready to eat. Filling and easy to prep ahead breakfast.   

The Chuck

A while back my dad asked me for ideas and what to make with cornmeal that was not cornbread.   I immediately suggested polenta, but somehow that failed to satisfy the hunger growling in his stomach.  Chatting with Gat, I was inspired to experiment with dinner.  I haven’t quite come up with a name for it, but it is basically an inside out enchilada or deconstructed enchilada.  I am still working on the name. Or perhaps I’ll just name it after my father.  

The Chuck

Ingredients

1 pound boneless skinless chicken chopped 

1 can of  red enchilada sauce

1 tablespoon minced Garlic

1 tablespoon chili powder

1 tablespoon cumin power

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon oregano

1 can of corn nuggets drained or 1 cup of frozen corn

1 box jiffy Corn bread mix

1/2 cup diced fresh chilies or 1 small can of diced green chilies

1/2 cup diced onions

1 can of diced tomatoes (I like the ones with habaneros mixed in, but you can really use any of them.)

1 can of beans  drained and rinsed (I use black or small white, but others will work.  Dealers choice)

2 cups shredded Monterey Jack cheese

1 egg

1 cup milk

Olive Oil

Tools

Large Skillet

Medium Bowl

Small bowl

9 x 13 baking dish (deep dish if possible)

Spoons

Spatula 

Tequila (just kidding, you don’t need this)

Instructions

Turn the oven on to 350 degrees

In a bowl mix chopped chicken, garlic, chili powder, cumin powder, salt, and oregano until chicken is evenly seasoned. Set aside.

In a large skillet, drizzle olive oil and heat. Once warm, add diced peppers and onions.  Cook until onions are translucent. Add  seasoned chicken mix and cook chicken until cooked all the way through.  Add diced tomatoes, corn and beans, enchilada sauce.  Cook until corn and beans are heated through.  Transfer contents of skillet mix into a 9x13 baking dish and set to the side. 

In a bowl open Jiffy corn bread mix, and mix according to the box. (This is where the egg and the milk come in from the ingredient list.) Once the mix is as smooth as corn bread mix can be, with a large spoon, ladle large dollops of  mix into the chicken mix. Think corn bread dumplings. Once all of the corn bread mix has joined the chicken mix, sprinkle the entire dish with the shredded cheese and place in the oven. Bake for 30 minutes. The cheese should be nice and melty and the cornbread should be cooked all the way through. If the corn bread looks runny, put it in for another 10 minutes. 

The end product is a dish that makes me think of tamales, enchiladas and comfort food all wrapped into one.  Excellent for next day lunches.   While I haven’t tried it, I am sure the concept would work well with shredded beef, pork, or chorizo if you were looking for variety. 

Experimenting on Old People

You are not to experiment on old people.

Say it again.

You are not to experiment on old people.

Say it one more time so it sticks.

You are not to experiment on old people.

Berating myself about using my grandparents for taste testers is not really going well.  It lacks sincerity. It isn’t like they left clutching their stomachs in agony.  That in itself makes it a successful brunch, right?

Truth be told I learned the art of experimentation on guests from my grandmother.  She would often have several experimental dishes when she would host holiday dinners. (And most of us have survived.)

After I lured them into the house with the help of the charming Dib cat, the real fun began. The food experiment this time was something that my grandmother loves and that would be baked oatmeal.  A traditional baked oatmeal typically tastes like an oatmeal cookie and you pour milk over it while it is warm.  The one I tried is from Five Hearte Home and is called Banana Nut Baked Oatmeal. 

Oh, my goody goody gumdrops is it good.  It tastes like a cross between an oatmeal cookie and banana bread.  The maple syrup in it and more to go one it adds the perfect amount of sweetness to balance the density that the oatmeal brings.    The best part is that it was easy to make and doesn’t need to bake for an eternity.  If you are looking for something different that is relatively healthy, I would certainly check it out. 

No grandparents were harmed in the making of the baked oatmeal. So far all participants have survived. Further testing will be conducted. 

Comfort Food: Peanut Chicken

I had this idea that I was going to write this epic post about recipe that is a frequent flyer on the dinner circuit in my house. It was going to patriotic. It was going to be swoon worthy.  It was going to disclose the secrets of comfort food. It was going to involve peanut butter.  In fact I was going to make the recipe to make sure I had all my measurements to correct and that I wasn’t missing any steps, since I can make this recipe practically in my sleep.

Then tragedy struck.  Not major tragedy that change the entire course of lives, but more of a dinner tragedy.  My recipe of ultimate comfort food, the one that I could do in my sleep, I totally fucked up on. 

The problem was simple.  The soy sauce and the Worcestershire sauce are in the same shape bottle and they both have a red cap.  Being on auto pilot and not paying attention to what I was actually pulling out of the fridge, (because why would the bottle locations change) I totally dumped half a cup of Worcestershire sauce in my recipe. I then had to scramble to mellow to taste of Worcestershire sauce and make it be friends with the peanut butter.   It may have one of the least spectacular meals I have ever made.  It was a pretender to the throne.  One bite and you knew it wasn’t the infamous peanut chicken, but more of something that had aspirations of being steak and failed. 

The lesson here isn’t that you should always identify your ingredients before you put them in the sauce, but more of don’t become complacent.  Focus on what you are doing even if it something you have done a thousand times before, because maybe that thousand and one time will be different.

Peanut Chicken  

Use the big stir fry pan or a wok.  This is going to make a lot of food. 

2 1/2 Cups Chicken  Cubed

1/2 Cup Diced Onion 

1/4 Cup Diced Peppers

1 Tablespoon Minced Garlic

1/2 Cup Shredded Carrots

1/2 Tablespoon Chinese Five Spice

1 Tablespoon Chili Garlic Sauce

1 Tablespoon sesame oil

1 Tablespoon chili oil

2 Tablespoons olive oil

Sauté everything together until the chicken is cooked through and the carrots are limp. 

Add

1/2 Cup Soy Sauce

2/3 Cup Chunky Peanut Butter

1 Cup of Chicken broth (Water can be used in a pinch)

This should make a rather liquidy sauce.  If it is super thick, add more chicken broth.

Add

2 Cups cooked rice

Brown rice, white rice, doesn’t matter.  Perhaps not wild rice, that doesn’t hold the flavor as well.   Mix everything together until warmed all the way through and then serve.   The sauce should mix and cover all of the rice.  The meat and vegetables should be mixed in evenly, kind of like a fried rice. 

This is one of those foods that also holds well in a crock pot for hours if you were to make a double batch.   It is spicy, yet savory and has all the comforts of home. 

Pizza Chicken - A Compromise

The Year of the Pizza Chicken

Sometimes dinner takes a little bit of creative compromise.   

Me: What do you want for dinner Christmas Eve?

Jon: 🍕

Me: We are not having pizza.

Jon: 😢

Me: Beef, Chicken or Pork?

Jon: 🐔

Jon: ...🍕🐔

Me: I’ll figure it out.

And this is why I have Pinterest.  I found the perfect combination of Pizza and Chicken that would look good on Christmas Eve dinner plate.  The recipe by Simply Stacie was wonderful to follow.  

My husband took the lead on the prepping the chicken by pounding it flat and then rolling it with the stuffing.  Simply put, the Chicken is laid flat and then filled with a combination of red sauce, pepperoni and cheese. It is then rolled and then topped with more sauce pepperoni and cheese. The cheese rolled into the sauce prevents the chicken from being dry and the pepperoni adds a savoriness to the chicken.  The chicken went nicely with garlic rice and sautéed spinach and carrots.  It was the perfect meal for a semi fancy meal. 

In honestly it was one of the simplest recipes I have ever done, since all I did was the filling and turn the oven on. In fact two out of three people at the table seemed to love the recipe and mentioned that they wouldn’t mind eating it again, which I consider a win for a holiday experiemnt.  If you are looking for something different to fix that leave you with a flavorful moist chicken, I would recommend Pizza Stuffed Chicken.

Name That Sandwich

I am sure that I get the best ideas when I am on the tread mill or folding laundry.  My mind tends to wander and look for avenues to distract myself from what I am actually doing.  I was folding the endless supply of socks when some jingle on the radio made my brain take a left turn.My brain certainly picks odd things to get distracted over. Part of it could be that I was getting hungry, or that I have heard the same commercial for a Rueben on the radio over and over again and it made me wonder why it was called a Rueben.  

If you were to have a sandwich named after you, what would it be called and what would be on it?

With no rush to get back to matching white socks with a logo in one spot to other white socks that have the logo in a different spot, I texted a dozen friends to find out what would be on their sandwich.  The results amazed me.  I feel like I have enough good recipes to open my own cafe.  Can you guess who suggested what as a sandwich? 

Creators: Faye, Nic, Hannah, Barbie, Erica, Ken and Teresa

• The Outcast
• Ingredients: Chocolate M&M Cookies with dark chocolate ice cream filling rolled in black sprinkles
• The Irish Gal
• Ingredients: Slices of Corned Beef, Dubliner Irish Cheese on homemade white bread
• The Descendant
• Ingredients: Capocolla Ham, Genoa Salami, Aged Sharp Provolone, Roasted Red Peppers on a yeasty roll
• The Gaia
• Ingredients: Freshly mashed avocado with scallions and caramelized onions mixed in, sautéed portobello mushrooms, dijon mustard, roasted red peppers with Mediterranean spiced sea salt on Boston Bibb lettuce on a gluten free Texas toast that as a thin smear of basil pesto
• Don't Heat Up the Bacon
• Ingredients: Sliced turkey, bacon, tomatoes, spinach, red onions with chipotle mayo  on toast
• PB on PB
• Ingredients: Creamy Peanut Butter with Strawberry Jelly on a Potato Bun
• The Sea Pig
• Ingredients: Tuna Salad with sliced hardboiled eggs, thin sliced Black Forest Ham and thick slice of extra sharp cheddar cheese with a slice of tomato and hand pull of spinach and couple of spicy pickles on toasted sour dough bread 

Thank you every one that gave me a sandwich order. It sounded delicious and I apologize for not being able to use everyone’s response. I was somehow was able to finish the laundry despite the grumbling of my stomach and now I have a bunch of new sandwiches to try!