Easter teaser...

I am going to be late for spinning today if I don't hurry this internet business up, so all you get on Easter is a little hazelnut teaser...

Be back later with the full story...

Tragedy and a regular (albeit beautiful!) meal...

That is my almost full jar of A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. sundried tomatoes...crashed to the floor. Sad day.

This is a BIG bowl of veggies. I looooove veggies.
This post's purpose was mostly to make you feel sorry for me, because of the tomato incident. The veggie bowl photo happened to be taken on the same day as the tomatoes, and I thought the colors were amazing!

Friday Afternoon in the Kitchy

Kath's kale chips (YUM!)...I sprinkled them with nutritional yeast flakes. My kinda chips!

(with flash, then with no flash and HANDS!)

Then I tried to adapt my mom's fabulous oatmeal cookie recipe to be a little lower in sugar, and a little higher in fiber. They were just okay. I say, have a reasonable portion of the real thing.

You are SO good lookin...

I knew nothing about Babka until Seinfeld enlightened me.

I am a Utahn. My understanding is that those of you who live in the East know all about Babka...so I turned to you for guidance. I searched many food blogs and recipe sights to find what people considered the ultimate Babka. The verdict??? Neither cinnamon, nor chocolate, but a marriage of the two. Apparently, the streusel topping is as important as properly acting yeast. Marry and streusify I did.

Yeast doin' its' thing...

Dough with dough hook

Streusel topping made while dough rises

Inards, also made while dough rises

Large loaf, all rolled up and generously twisted

Preparing mini-loaves. The recipe was supposed to make three large loaves, I did two large and made four small out of the last large. I thought the tiny ones turned out better!!

Tiny loaves before baking

Large loaves before baking

Large loaves straight outta the oven.
Y.U.M.

I have serious intentions of proper experimentation with all kinds of Babka in the near future. If you live in Utah and you'd like to reap the benefits of the gargantuan recipe yield, all you gotta do is give me the word!!

Cracka-Lacka

I like to bake cookies mostly. Why???
Oh, because I love to eat the dough.
But today, I baked crackers. With some inspiration from
Kath and her husband over at Katheats.com, I started
throwin ingredients into a bowl. I ended up with red quinoa,
almond slices, pepitas, sunflower seeds, salt, pepper, and
flax seeds. I toasted all of these and then cooled them. To
this I added whole wheat flour, vital wheat gluten (for higher
protein, that was silly...nobody wants glutenous crackers!!),
olive oil, honey, and water.
Some of them got fresh rosemary and basil in their
dough. Some of them got topped off with delicious
pecorino romano.
They are high fiber, high protein, high MUFA fabu
little treats!

Yeah, I bake my own Birthday cake...

This cake is a ridiculous height. There are two yellow layers and two chocolate layers inside. I contem plated freezing a layer, but I simply couldn't have two of one and one of the other, so tall cake it was.

The layers were chiffon. I used Mark Bittman's basic chiffon cake recipe. It was yellow. In the chocolate batter, I reduced the flour and added that much cocoa powder. I felt this was a good method.

The frosting is vanilla seven minute, with chocolate seven minute marbled in. It was really just going to be vanilla, but I am a frosting girl, and felt as though there wasn't enough. When I decided to make more, I figured the outside might as well match the inside.


Here it is all dressed up.

Meet the folks that would be my parents if I had not parents night...

I don't love noshy food. I just don't feel satisfied standing and picking at things. I like to sit down with dishes and napkins and presentation. A night like this, however, calls for nosh.
Nosh we did.
Smoked salmon with capers, cream cheese, red onion, and lemon (with crostini, cucumber, or water crackers as vehicles).
Crudite and half tomato half herbed dip that I made with a cottage cheese/yogurt base.
Pomegranite margaritas.
And Ryan's contribution...Gin/Champagne/Lemon cocktails.
I managed to make myself sick off of gin one night in high school, and champagne sometime shortly thereafter. Needless to say, I couldn't stomach much of that cocktail, but it sure was tasty!

I don't know who decided it would be a good idea to try to teach a bunch of inebriated souls how to play new card games. That is what ensued after the nosh had been noshed, though. It was rough, we literally threw in the cards pretty quickly after we began.


This is Mrs. Piggy Lopez. She is a pretty tolerant dog.

What Next???

This here is
Christ
mas Eve dessert. I somehow managed to not get a photo of the inside of the cake. WAH WAH. I love love love the way the outside looks. It is a knockoff of the Chocolate Pepper mint Stick Marsh mallow Fantasy Cake from CulinaryConcoctionsbyPeabody.com
I made it with part whole grain flour, and less sugar, part splenda. It was delicious, but you should never ever try to make seven minute (or marshmallow) frosting with reduced sugar. It just doesn't create the same billowy effect. I kind of knew that going in to the experiment, but if you know me, I am pretty stubborn, and I had a "I will make this work" mentality that December day.
If you haven't checked out Peabody's website...go there (but only if you've got a few hours to kill!)

Blogging Hiatus, New Post, Old Food

I am certain there must be some statistic regarding the amount of time a food blogger blogs. For example, 1 in 5 food bloggers post three times then forget all about their endeavor.
So...
the last time I posted was in November. November!!! That's a third of a year that's gone by! Time flies. F.L.I.E.S.
My lack of posting was not for the lack of things to post. Other things have simply found my time. Here, this lovely Saturday
afternoon, I will play a little bit of catch up.

This is a whole wheat german chocolate cake I made for my mom's birthday in December. It was disappointing, honestly. The wheatiness overshadowed the other flavors.
Sorry Mom.

Looks good though, right?
Note to self: play around with recipes in spare time...not for people's birthdays.

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 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.

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!

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.

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.