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Since technically it was uploaded and mostly ready to go yesterday, I am going to write this goal off as a success. http://www.kitchenista.org is live! I’ve moved all my food posts over and in the future will be posting my recipes and reviews there, reserving life@justthere for more …well, life related things. Feel free to update your bookmarks accordingly as really, the food is the interesting part. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go wrangle my screaming toddler now. Still plugging away at a new design (and perhaps an new URL! stay tuned.) and with my toddler’s current obsession with getting out of bed the second we shut the door, time is at a premium. As is sleep, but that’s actually good training for the new kid. As a result, dinner has been relatively uneventful and dessert has been popsicles, thus the lack of recent posts. And to top that off, my nesting instinct has kicked in and I am compelled to clean out and organize every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen. I am pretty sure this is my husband’s favorite part of life, period. I did try an interesting experiment this evening, prompted by the monthly challenge in the LJ bakebakebake community: being creative with a box of cake mix. I can’t tell you what I did else I’ll give it away, but I think I’ll nail it down on the next try. Meanwhile, the Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom for this half of the month consists entirely of recipes from Mark Bittman’s “How To Cook Everything” and while all three things thus far have been delicious - the matambre in particular, and I will, in fact, write that up tomorrow - I can’t help but feel that NO ONE CARES about my penne alla vodka from tonight because it contained 5 ingredients. Similarly, the brown jambalaya was terrific, but not only was it very simple it photographs very poorly. Let’s be honest, no one wants to see a bowl of raw chicken, or “chopped” raw sausage. It’s just not visually appealing. So, that’s the scoop for now, my goal is to have the secret experiment solid by the end of next week and the website up by the end of this weekend (yeah, right). We’ll see how that works out. I am having the most ridiculous formatting issues with my posts, so expect a new look sometime in the near future. Perhaps a look that will not force me to edit and re-edit and re-edit trying to find the magic spacing combination to keep my divs from floating all over the place. Argh. Recipe courtesy of Serious Eats
As an extreme novice home chef, I’ve been generally operating under the concept that the more complicated and time-consuming the recipe is, the more I’ll learn from it. Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist, from the New York Times tells me I’m a moron and I can accept and partially agree with that. I still feel like if a recipe is too simple, or too easy to prepare, it’s a copout of some kind, but in the interest of making sure my kid eats what we do (to try to encourage an adventurous palate) and feeding the one I’m pregnant with more than just Otter Pops and Doritos, I’ve been trying to add simple, fast recipes to my Bi-Monthly Menu of Doom. The past two weeks have featured more of the fast – pastas, soups – and this is one of them.
You will need: (for 3 servings)
Delicious, but not quite what I was after, these tart shells are extremely versatile for either a sweet or savory filling, and while the lemon cream was fluffy, creamy and lemony, I think it could be put to better use elsewhere, like in a full-sized pie. Similarly, though the blackberry sauce is tasty, in the sauce-making process it lost the tartness I think the lemon needed to balance it out. That said, these are still very good and not very complicated, so I thought I’d share it all the same.
Though I am calling this recipe mine, it is comprised (like most recipes) of pieces of others. These shells actually belong to a recipe for Pecan Delights that my dad sent me 3 years ago, which are ridiculously tasty, but I’m the only one in this household who likes pecan pie. (it’s wrong, I tell you. Just wrong.)
There is an unholy and desperately sad kind of amusement in preparing for a steak a poivre dinner while simultaneously making lemon-blackberry tarts (to be posted soon!) and having to run back to the computer to be reminded of how to bake a potato. Pregnancy, thy name is brain-dead. [14:54] <@Ali> no, there’s a stone you bake bread in your oven on Greyson was being friendly with an older woman passing by us as I was putting the groceries in the car at Target. She was being friendly back and when Grey pointed at her bags, she told him it was cereal. I smiled at her and she went on to say, “That’s one good thing about not having a man around, you can eat cereal for dinner if you want.” I think she might be on to something there. Warren really likes Reese’s Cups. He will stick a bag of the miniatures in the freezer and only have one or two at a time, so it lasts him about a hundred years. I have no idea how he can do this, as I would eat one or two every 12 minutes or so, give or take a few seconds. So anyway, with the economy being as it is and some adjustments to our budget and another baby on the way, we opted not to do any Valentine’s Day presents this year, and instead of paying the babysitter and going to dinner and a movie, we ordered a pizza and watched a movie we already had instead. Unfortunately, I am unable to not give presents of some sort on holidays. It’s necessary that I find some way to show my appreciation or else SOMETHING TERRIBLE WILL HAPPEN, I am sure of it. So, I thought, I have a cup candy mold from making Cupcake Bites (a post yet to be written), I have a toddler so there’s bound to be peanut butter, what on earth should I do? I know, I’ll make peanut butter cups! Genius, I tell you, sheer genius. Guys, this turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. I looked at a few online recipes, decided none of them really worked for me and I might as well improvise, so I did and I call it a success. My success, let me share it with you.
Four ingredients! That’s it! Awesome, I know. Anyway, moving on, I mentioned three potential methods just in case you don’t have a candy mold and don’t want to buy one, and though I made one batch for Warren the day before Valentine’s, I only made twelve so I had quite a bit of the peanut butter mixture left over. Thus, for the purposes of this sharing time, I made another batch today using all three methods. I have to say, the candy mold set me back a whopping $1.50 at a local craft store (Roberts, for you Utahns) and it was significantly easier to use and the end results look much cleaner from it, so if you even think you might enjoy these and make them again it would be worth it to try to locate one of your own. Let’s get started, shall we?
from Cook’s Country
First, let me just say that if I had to list my top 10 favorite desserts, brownies would not be on it. It’s not that I dislike them, it’s that I’m so ambivalent. It’s a bit like chocolate cake for me, it’s just not something that excites me in any way. But my husband is a big brownie fan, and if I don’t make things he likes I will end up eating all of it and that is just a bad situation for everyone. So I have learned to tolerate the brownie in all of its forms, and I keep trying new recipes thinking hey, this may be the brownie to change my mind. It may be the enlightening brownie, the epiphany brownie, if you will. Internet, this may be the epiphany brownie. If you harbor no hatred for marshmallow, pecans, sugar, chocolate or butter, you really, really need to try this brownie. The government might lie to you, but I certainly won’t. |
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