i really didnt think they would puff up so much...

mmmm turnovers! so my CSA has been consistently giving me apples, every week. like, 2-3 delicious looking apples that i dont know what to do with! don't get me wrong, i enjoy apples, but for whatever reason, i have difficulties getting through them. delicious for dessert but so filling! and blahblahblah i just dont eat enough fruit. so the apples were just piling up! what to do with them?!?!?

apple turnovers was my answer.

i found a tasty recipe online on epicurious...surprise surprise. it involved cooking the apples before with some sugar and water. for some reason the recipe didnt include any cinnamon or nutmeg. which i dont understand at all. why wouldnt there be cinnamon and nutmeg in an appley dessert? so i added it anyway for some nice flavor, and mashed the tender apples with my dough knife.

so these turnovers are made with puff pastry dough, which i do know how to make but will probably never really make myself again because it is a really annoying, time-consuming process involving more than a pound of butter and it is so so so much easier to just go buy dufours! which they make with real butter! unlike pepperridge farm which is disgusting. i suppose i could make quick puff pastry dough, which only takes a few hours...maybe next time. the downside, however, is that puff pastry dough has to be kept cold. but not too cold. so you keep it frozen, but then have to thaw it in the fridge, but only in the 2-3 hours before you are going to use it. but by the time i got home from work, i only had ~1 hour to defrost my dough before needing to start cooking! tried the fridge for a bit, and then outsied the fridge, and then spread out under stove lights. clearly not the way to properly defrost puff pastry dough.

so i filled my little squares of dough with chilled apple filling, folded them over, crimped the edges with a fork, coated in egg, sprinkled with sugar, and made little slits to let steam out. and there i was, making the edges all crimped and pretty. which was silly, as you can see from how they puffed up you cant see the crimping at all! (to be fair, i have done crimping things with puff pastry before, when making fruit tart log type things, and it can work, it just needs to be hugely exaggerated, which fork crimping doesnt do...also, with quick puff pastry, it doesnt puff up as much, as with the real stuff (including the store-bought) does, which i totally forgot)

anyway, they were delicious! and a nice way to use the apples! even though i have tons of filling left...

comfort food

MmmmmmmmmmmmMMMmmMMmmMmmmmm. That's pretty much all i have to say about this dinner. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. so so delicious.

I was trying to figure out what to cook tonight. I wanted something real and filling, but didn't want to put much effort in, as unfortunately i appear to be coming down with a cold of some sort. its that annoying annoying coming down with a cold where you can feel the dryness in your throat and the dryness in your nasal cavity and you KNOW that the sickness is coming even though it isnt really there yet. and you dont want to go to bed because you know you will feel worse in the morning, not better.

anyway, i wanted a simple but delicious meal. and i have some sweet potatoes and potatoes etc leftover from my CSA share that i need to continue to try to use up. and i remembered back to one time in college, when melinda and jamie and i went grocery shopping, and picked up some frozen ravioli and pasta sauce and cheese and threw it into a baking dish when we got home and it was so delicious...and so that was my nice, simple plan for tonight. stopped at the market on the way home and picked up some frozen ravioli, some sauce (i went with a garlic alfredo, for something creamy/cheesy, because i am an unhealthy person), and then some cheese for on top.

once i got home, i threw a gigantic sweet potato in the microwave (yes, it was gigantic. massive. huuuuuge! like, the size of my foot) then cut it up, mixed it together with the frozen ravioli (spinach & cheese!) and the garlic alfredo sauce, then sprinkled cheese on top, threw it in the oven for 30 minutes...and presto! delicious dinner!! so amazingly tasty! and i have leftovers!

blondie? brunette-y?

okay, so i didnt take this picture. jessica did, at jay's party last week. but she posted it on facebook, and so i have stolen it and am hoping that she doesnt mind. i did, however, bake the blondies in the picture!!

so these are from martha stewart's cookie book. i got home late friday evening, and needed to bake something to bring to jay's housewarming! so i searched through my martha stewart cookie book to find something that both sounded tasty, and would be something i could bake with what i had in my kitchen. i settled on 2 recipes: either martha's pear pistachio blondies, OR her cream cheese blondies. A quick poll next door said to go with the fruit and nut version. I, of course, had to alter the recipe, as I have with everything I've tried from martha's cookie book so far (not too many recipes).

and so i made cranberry pecan blondies! would have done walnut, but i already had the pecans chopped, so. blondies, with cranberries, pecans, and crystallized ginger mixed in, baked in a tart tin/pan. martha cuts them in little slivers like pie pieces, but i cut in a grid so the pieces would be smaller and easier to hold.

mmm tasty! next time, i think i want to put a little chocolate in...just a little bit, under the surface, to add a little more sweetness and a chocolatey surprise once you take a bite. mmm.

root root root for vegetables!

i would like to preface this blogpost by mentioning that while i was in newport this weekend at a pizza & beer tasting, i was sitting with people devoid of taste buds. one of the pizzas was ribeye with goat cheese, which sister and i were very much looking forward too, as we love goat cheese, and spent our week in the south of france eating it ~daily. Anywho, as the pizza is coming out, the other 4 people at our table were like "i am so not looking forward to this pizza, it has goat cheese on it, gross." ...

...

can you just absorb that for a minute?

goat cheese.

gross.

i wanted to cry. my sister and i just looked at eachother in horror, that we had to sit with these people who dont understand what good cheese is.

now that i am done with that tangent, onwards to the root vegetables that i rather boringly roasted tonight. for 2 weeks in a row, my CSA has given me tons and tons of root vegetables. tons of sweet potatoes, tons of regular potatoes, some random beets (that i dont really understand - the purple outside ones were yellow inside, the white outside ones were pink on the inside...what?) and carrots and WHAT DO I DO WITH THEM ALL? i mean, this week i got tons of tiny little potatoes and the thought of having to peel all of them...ugh.

anywho. tonight i chopped up sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, beets, carrots, and roasted them in my pretty little baking dish. and it was...boring. somewhat tasty, especially with some feta cheese on top. but on the whole...boring. i really dont know what to do with the rest of my sweet potatoes and regular potatoes though. suggestions appreciated.

breakfast in bed

except not really. because i didnt eat it in bed. and I am pretty sure that I actually made this for dinner instead of breakfast. semantics. anywho, i bought some bread, and felt i needed to take advantage of it. and i had some eggs that i needed to use. and spinach. and with all of those things in my fridge, i totally started craving eggs on toast! amazing how that happens.

this was actually my first time making eggs not-just-scrambled. i'm fairly incompetent frying things, to be honest. I cant make omelets - they just fall apart. I cant even flip pancakes properly! its seriously depressing. which is why all of my eggs always end up scrambled instead of more exciting. BUT i really wanted yummy eggs. and so i went to the internets to learn the proper way to cook them. and i think it went fairly well! sure, i broke the white of the second egg at the end, BUT i didnt break the yolk! and that is the important thing. the accompanying salad and bread with cheese were also delicious.

and because i am so behind in postings (that breakfast dinner was a week and a half ago!) just like i am behind in using my CSA share foods, its a double-post! Last week i was so busy with work, and had so many greens in my CSA share, i just didnt know what to do with it all! i steamed the spinach for a nutricious side (felt a bit like popeye. mmm) but what to do with all of the arugula? well, i turned to epicurious. and found a recipe for arugula pesto!

now, i love pesto. it has always been one of my favorite pasta sauces. creamy or oily, love them both. and NO ONE else in my family ever liked it. i mean, i think that my mom did, but neither brother or sister liked it (i think they didnt like the fact that it was green?), so i rarely got any pesto. such a sad life, i know. and when i was in sydney, the little cafe next to our class/lab had this delicious little ziti with sun-dried tomato pesto that i ate...probably a few times a week while we were in class. so delicious. so, since i am clearly a fan, i thought it would be fun to make arugula pesto!

now, i'm not so good with following recipes for non-baking things. somehow i feel like it doesnt matter how much oil or cheese or pine nuts are actually in the pesto. so i pulled out my trusty little food processor, and started choppity chopping the arugula. annnnnd then added more arugula. annnnd then more arugula. and then oil and parmesan cheese and pine nuts (which i sacriligeously did not toast! i know! the horror!) and chopchopchopchop and presto! pesto! delici-ous-o! i even have some in my freezer for a lazy night!

pretty baking dishes

i am getting bad at updating this as often as i take pictures. i've been trying not to bring my laptop home if i don't have work to do at night...which in turn means that on the nights that i have the free time to update, i dont have the laptop with which to post it! but i will get better at catching up on the backlog.

so, i recently purchased some pretty new baking dishes. Crate and barrel just released them, and they were so popular that stores sold out almost immediately, and they took them off the website for a bit because they had gotten so popular. when the baking dishes were back on the website, it said shipping was delayed until late march. late march!! The first store i looked in didnt have them there. but! there were 2 sets left in the 2nd store i went to, and i managed to snag one, 2 weeks ago. Sooo pretty! and the perfect size for cooking for smaller amounts of people (aka, just for me sometimes!)


I had some leftover celeriac and potato (and cream, and cheese, and onion) from my week's CSA share, and so i decided to make a gratin (though i was very tempted to just do another celeriac salad because it was so so tasty!). annnnd the gratin was delicious. once again playing with the mandoline. i also had a bunch of carrots leftover. i <3 cooked carrots. they are kind of awesome. but they often take a while to cook. and lets be honest, i am not super patient. but! sliced super thin with a mandoline, they cook faster! with butter and brown sugar and delicious. also, steamed some cabbage for dinner, because saw it at whole foods and yum.

such a tasty dinner! especially with some bread covered in the brie that em and bryan brought last week!

an excuse for a dinner party

Work has been so crazy lately, that I am usually just trying to get through the week, and rarely have time to actually make weekend plans in advance. I get to friday afternoon, and i think "what am i doing this weekend???" ...and lately, its been "i have absoluately no plans. what can i do? who is around?" so this past week, maybe thursday evening, i was catching up on my cooking magazines, and i thought, why not have a dinner party this weekend? invited emily, bryan, and tanya, and set the plan in motion! particularly exciting as it was the debut of my new dishes, my new serving dishes, and use of some of my new cooking implements.

My menu was in part dictated by the CSA share this week. what could I make to really take advantage of the lovely things that I got in my share? Well, to start, i decided to make a parsnip soup. it has parsnip, potato, and apple, all from my CSA, and then leeks, which i purchased at whole foods (and chicken broth, and cream, and butter, but shhh). it turned out pretty good! as a garnish, because i had some frying oil left, and love playing with my mandoline, i sliced up a potato and an apple, and made chips! yes, i deep-fried thin slices of potato and apple (you can see them in the white cups in the picture above) - and they were pretty tasty! some didnt crisp up quite the way i wanted, because the oil didnt fully dry off, but they were still great, and not soggy.


course #2 was the salad course. this one i really really liked, actually. so this week in the CSA we got celeriac, something i don't think i have ever actually had. but i was very excited about it - originally thought i would make a gratin with it (and i have extra so i might tomorrow night!) but i kept reading about how good it is raw, and i remembered seeing giada making a cold salad with it on the food network over christmas. now, i hate giada. i think she is annoying and smiles too much. so fake. BUT i was intrigued by the idea of a celeriac salad. so, i sliced it up with my mandoline (yes, i'm obsessed with it, it is one of the most amazing gifts ever!!) and then julienned with my trusty green santoku knife, and then did the same with a nice crisp green apple (whole foods, because while i did get apples in the CSA share this week, i really wanted to use a granny smith for the salad for the flavor). i then did the same with a bit of fennel...now this one i was a bit hesitant about, because i don't know how much i like fennel, so i only used half a fennel bulb...and it actually worked quite well! mixed it all together with a dijon vinaigrette, and had a great little matchstick salad that was nice and refreshing!


Okay. now we move on to the main course. So, i am always looking into cooking what i call "real food" which really means that i like trying to cook meat. i eat like a vegetarian half the time, mostly because i don't really know how to cook meat for 1 person in a normal weeknight dinner. so its great when i have people for dinner, because i can cook meat and not have to worry about having so much leftover i wont be able to finish it in time. so while flipping through one of my recent bon appetit magazines, i found a recipe for pork with pears and shallots. now, the recipe claimed to be for a week night meal, only taking 35 minutes to prepare, so i almost didnt want to do it for this weekend because i didn't want to do something so "simple" but the recipe looked so so tasty so i went with it anyway. involves browning the pork and cooking the shallots, then throwing the pork in the oven while browning some pears. i of course worried about whether the pork cooked through, and was paranoid about how well my meat thermometer was working, and ran to borrow my neighbor's, but both thermometers told me the meat was done, and so phew. i didn't kill us.


it was pretty damn tasty. Em and Bryan were late, and the sauce had thickened so much, that I ended up making some extra, thinner sauce, to add on top, and i think that added to it nicely. and of course i am always paranoid about having enough food for people (even though you'll note that we're on the 3rd course right now) so i needed a side dish! a simple green beans with carmelized (or way way overdone) shallots (sensing a theme yet?) which was also tasty.



For dessert, I went with another recipe from the bon appetit magazine. I'd originally been thinking of trying to make these chocolate souffles - the magazine claimed that its not actually that hard, and they will come out perfectly, but i just didn't trust them because you have to serve them warm and i didnt want to have to put them in the oven during dinner considering my dining room is my kitchen. so, maybe next time. this time, i went with this simple chocolate nut tart with dried fruit...that was actually really good. it is really really simple, but tastes really good. like, really really good. pieces of yummy dried fruit covered in chocolate good.



and a slice, so you can see inside:

we ended the night with some of bryan and em's most recent brew, entropy - i don't know how they made it, some special process, but it tastes like a dessert wine, or a port, instead of a beer! it was absolutely delicious though. I was surprised how much i liked it, because i tend to not like the sweeter dessert beverages...but this was just absolutely amazing. mmm. cannot wait until they are marketing their brews!



a successful night!