Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Novemba Novemba


I have been working early and late lately. Luckily, it's not one great long stint. I get a break in between classes/clients. Today I needed to cook. I was thinking about why I often prefer baking to cooking. What I came up with was this: when you bake, the goods can be saved for later. Often, however, savories should be enjoyed right as they come off the heat/out of the oven/get tossed together, etc. As with any rule, there are exceptions to this one. Soups, breads, dips, chicken, tuna, or egg salads. All of this helped me decide what to create today. At the top we have roasted acorn squash. Simply seasoned with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

Here are the acorn squash seeds, with almonds, cinnamon, egg white, splenda, and kosher salt. Baked in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes...stirring occasionally.

This is what my cute mom calls "Really Good Veggie Soup". I could eat it at every meal for the rest of my life and die with a happy belly.

This is just pureed cottage cheese with spices. It's tasty for dipping veggies in when you need a handy snack.
That's all for now, as I must get ready to go back to work!

Monday, October 22, 2007

Monday Night Dinner

I was wanting some healthy comfort food. Warm veggies, melted cheese, etc.
I stuffed pounded chicken breast with sundried tomato basil feta and field greens.
Sauteed apple and sweet walla walla onion to put on top of field greens and celery with a honey dijon balsamic vin. Melted provolone and garlic/parsley seasoning into a cubed (but not sliced all the way through) mini-baguette.
Lastly, I sauteed some green beans with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon.
YUM.

These cookies sucked.

I wanted to make oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Mostly cause I love the dough. I also wanted to do something autumnal. What comes to mind? Pumpkin. Yay! Pumpkin oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. What a BRILLIANT idea! Right? Right? OhOhOh so wrong. They didn't flatten enough, the pumpkin was too strong, and they had an aftertaste to boot! (Maybe due to too much nutmeg, or perhaps because I used whole grain white flour??? I don't know).
















I am not posting this recipe, as I promise you don't need it in your arsenal.


Even though the cookies sucked, I liked the photos. What a waste of good ingredients.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Yeah, I was a vegetarian for ten years...

For some reason, in recent time, Sunday night has become "steak night" at our house. Sunday night is often the only time the whole family gets together for a meal. Lately, my brother Grady's lovely girlfriend Whitney has been joining us for Sunday night dinner. It was certainly not on purpose, but I think the first half dozen times she came over, we managed to be serving red meat. One night we had to promise her we'd fix something different the next weekend.


This evening though, I am oh-so-thankful for steak Sunday. Look at the gloooorious salads we created! As I was a vegetarian for a decade, I still love my veggies. The steak is such an integral part of this meal though! Even just for the color contrast. Ricky grilled a rosemary and balsamic marinated flank steak on the kingsize Weber, aptly named Bubbaque. I roasted some sweet Mayan onion, and some mushrooms with balsamic. Other goodies on the plate include blanched broccoli and cauliflower, mixed field greens, garden fresh mister stripey and sun sugar tomatoes, red bell pepper, raw red onion, and french bread crisped on the grill with some butter and mediterranean sea salt/garlic mixture. I made a dijon dressing, Jenni chose Newman's own light balsamic vin, and Ricky loves Litehouse Chunky Bleu Cheese. The bleu cheese really is fantastic with the red onion, the cruciferous veg, and of course, the steak...so Jenni and I used up some of that too.


Grady and Whitney couldn't make it for dinner tonight, but this is one steak Sunday they'll probably be sad they missed out on. Oh well, there's always next weekend!

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

The second cheapest therapy session I know...


The kitchen is a place where I can quiet my mind. I can focus simply on the task at hand. I freely admit that this quieting of the mind is not something I am very good at. Which is precisely why I had to bake today. My father told my mother to tell me not to bake...but I had to do it anyway. I tried to respect his wishes by compromising a bit. I made a very small batch of cookies. I even put them in the freezer and gave some away to a neighbor, so as to hide the evidence. Said cookies are still in the tupperware I packed them up in. They have migrated however, from the freezer to the countertop...that was NOT my doing. I left them there.
These are my most recent attempt at "healthy" cookies. Healthier...but as has recently been brought to my attention by the newly health conscious Cookie Monster, cookies (whether healthy or traditional) are a "sometimes food". The Cookie Monster's lost his cookie eatin' gusto.
Here's the recipe.





Whole Grain Lower Sugar Cookies

4 T. unsalted butter, softened
1/3 c. sugar
21 splenda packets
1 egg
1 t. vanilla extract
1 t. almond extract
2 c. White whole wheat flour
1/2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together sugar, splenda, and butter until light and fluffy. Add egg and extracts. Mix well. Add dry ingredients and beat on medium until thoroughly incorporated. At this point you could either roll your dough into a log and slice it, or you can roll it out and use cookie cutters. I did the latter. I rolled my dough quite thick, and ended up getting about 2 dozen cookies.

You could leave them unfrosted. I actually thought they were quite lovely that way. A sweet wheaty biscuit. I felt like decorating, however.

Easy Frosting

2 T. butter
1/8 c. milk
2 c. powdered sugar
1 t. vanilla or almond extract
any desired food coloring

Mix ingredients together and frost away! This frosting is very forgiving...you can thin it out with more milk, you can thicken it up with more powdered sugar.

Oh yes. The most important part of this post. I didn't realize that I needed to flour my cookie cutters until late in the game. For this reason, the ghost's skinny little hands were sticking in the cutters. Rather than try to squish them back onto their arms, I decided it would be fitting to bloody their extremeties instead. Ghoulish little halloween cookies, they became.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Okay. Okay. Salt City...SAVORIES!

  • It may be once in a blue moon that you get one of these posts. Why? I tend to eat the same things most days, no reason to take pictures of big bowls of vegetables, little bowls (sometimes huge) of cottage cheese, grilled chicken, turkey breast, etc. That being said, this night I made:

Veggie stuffed spring rolls with two dipping sauces. One mildish, one uber spicy.

Lettuce wraps with onion, chicken, water chestnut, and cilantro filling.

That little bowl is spicy coconut brown rice.

















In case you hadn't figured it out for yourself...I L.O.V.E. veggies. I love spice. I should eat more whole grains. Grains in general really. Let's dub them carbomohydrates. I've somehow let myself become "scared" of them since society went insane with their Atkins Approach or whatever it has been dubbed.

Pizza, say you?

OOoooh, I'm sorry. You thought you were getting savories.
Alas...



FRUIT PIZZAS! These lovelies consist of a sugar cookie base (made with oat flour), a sweetened cream cheese, and all sorts of fresh fruit.

They really are an easy dessert option. They are, however, somewhat time consuming. I am a bit of a perfectionist and don't appreciate when fruit pieces become oddly shaped/sized, or I'm out of whack on my fruit placement. The second pizza got off kilter too long before I realized it, and the fruit had happily settled into the cream cheese...I didn't de and reconstruct this day.

Rainy Saturday Concocting



There are many things I am grateful for. Among them?? Rain. Saturday afternoons. Sales on Baking Ingredients. Coffee. Cooking shows. All five at the same time. The sale is the critical point here. Normally, I would not buy marshmallows unless I needed them for something specific. For some reason, though, they called out to me among the chocolate chips, coconut flakes, bags o' nuts, et cetera. GOOD THING! What came of these gelatinous little confections?? Why, s'mores, of course. Afterall, no one likes "raw" marshmallows.


So I began by creating a cookie base. There were no eggs in the house, and I realized this a little too late in the game. Having no intentions of going to the store, I decided to make do. I wanted it to be graham crackery (duh), and not too sweet. Here's what I came up with...


Graham Cracker Cookies


1 c. salted almonds, pretty finely ground (I used my magic bullet)

2 graham cracker sheets, finely ground (again, the magic bullet, bless it)

1 c. dark brown sugar

3/4 c. white whole wheat flour

1 t. baking powder

1/2 c. softened butter (one stick)


Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly spray (PAM) a mini-muffin pan (mine has 32 spots). Whisk together everything but the butter. Add the butter and incorporate with your hands. The dough will come together into one nice ball. Set out some parchment paper, and roll the dough into two foot long logs. Slice the logs into 16 pieces each. Place the slices into your greased muffin pan. Bake for 12 minutes. Let the cookies cool for a good ten-ish minutes before you take them out.


After the cookies were cool, I couldn't decide if I wanted sandwich cookies, open-facers, or something resembling a moonpie. I decided to go the sandwich route. I melted a couple cups of mini marshmallows over medium high heat, stirring constantly. I wanted the toasty flavor of a campfire s'more, so I waited until the marshmallow began to brown slightly. When this happened, I began spooning the marshmallow onto some of the graham cookie bases. AHHH! Worst idea ever. So I did that to fifteen of them before I gave up. I topped six of those fifteen with six un-marshmallowed cookies. Six sandwiches was all I was up for this afternoon.


So with the nine remaining marshmallowed, and seventeen remaining unmarshmallowed cookie bases, I decided to take the broiler route. I topped all of the cookies with 4 marshmallows, and put them under a broiler on medium heat. I stood there and watched cause I knew those suckers would brown up quick, I'm no stranger to marshmallow roasting!


Then I simply set all my marshmallowed cookies back on the parchment paper, melted a cup of milk chocolate chips, and drizzled away.


They are devilish little things. I simply could not help myself from snagging another...and another...and...you get the picture.


Peabody's Glorious Bailey's Cake

Last Tuesday was my father's 50th birthday. I wanted to concoct something faaabulous for him. Unfortunately, many of his loved ones had this plan, too. People were assigning themselves courses right and left. As quick as I could, I assigned myself cake duty. Mistake??? Well, not exactly. Considering how indecisive I can be at times, and the infinite number of recipes entitled "The Best Birthday Cake Ever", this could have been trouble. I had been, however, trolling CulinaryConcoctionsByPeabody regularly. THANK YOU PEABODY! I still had a hard time making up my mind to actually stick with one recipe (as opposed to cramming 4 or 5 into one). Peabody's Bailey’s Caramel Irish Cream Cake (http://www.culinaryconcoctionsbypeabody.com/2007/09/19/totally-awesome-fer-sure-dude/) seemed decadent, and extravagant enough to celebrate a 50th birthday.

If you go to Peabody's website, you will see that I left off the store bought caramel topping, and opted to top the cake with leftover ganache and frosting bits. I just piped them into little mounds.

Oh! Speaking of leftover frosting and ganache...boy was there plenty! Peabody often makes "small batch" baked goods. This recipe was for a "regular" (9 inch rounds) sized cake. I literally could have frosted 24 cupcakes in addition to the cake. And by no means am I a stingy froster.

Also, as the name of my blog would suggest, I am in fact, in Utah. See: High Altitude. This being said, I would absolutely use Peabody's recipe as a base again in the future, albeit a loose base. I loved the frosting. I would be happy with a regular ol' ganache...no caramel candies necessary (as they didn't add much flavor IMHO). The cake layers were too dense and crumby for Salt City elevation. Don't get me wrong, the cake got rave reviews, there are just a few things I could tweak to guild the lily in the future.










the B.L.O.G. creation

As of late, I have been wasting A LOT of time reading food blogs. Certainly not in vain, as I have come across many an integral recipe. It was only a matter of time before I hopped on the wagon and created my own. I cook. I bake. I take pictures of the things I eat. It would be tragic if I were the only person who got to enjoy my mishaps, miracles, mistakes, messes, and everything inbetween.