Ricotta-Basil Gnocchi

One of my roommates’ favorite dinners to make is gnocchi – which I think is pretty impressive for a girl who, before last September, had never cooked or done her own laundry in her life. Why she decided to tackle gnocchi is beyond me, but I’m glad she did, because it always tastes delicious. The only thing we ever dispute about it is how to pronounce its name – another of my roommates is very Italian, so it is her unrelenting wish to have us call it nyAH kee. (And we do, sometimes. We also call it NO chee, NO kee, knocky, and so forth. We’re consistent like that.)

Anyway. I’d always wanted to try making it, since it seemed so simple (but good). So the last time I went home, I did. We had some extra, fresh basil lying around from a previous meal, so I did a little Googling, and came up with this (please ignore the dodgy basil on top; it was all that was left):

An Overdue Post: Pistachio-Cranberry Pesto Ravioli

I originally wrote this about three weeks ago, and must apologize for my tardiness in getting it up:

Let me tell you a few stories about the times I’ve made pasta from scratch.

The first time was at the beginning of last July. That summer, I had made a deal with my mother: it was okay if I didn’t get a job if I cooked at least five days a week, and kept the house in a reasonable amount of order. That summer was my time for learning: I taught myself to follow new recipes, learned new cooking techniques, and generally found out how to operate in our kitchen. New, challenging things excited me.

One day, I decided to make Italian Sausage Soup with Tortellini. I told my mother the dinner plans, but not the rest of the secret: we were out of tortellini. She didn’t guess, and after having a friend over for a few hours, I gleefully got to work.

The thing about our kitchen at the time was that even though it was well-stocked with a treasure trove of gadgets, it lacked one crucial item: a rolling pin. We’d had a wooden one years ago, but it had either disappeared or been irreparably broken – either that, or sacrificed to the gods of clay and play dough.

When making pasta, it’s absolutely necessary to have a rolling-pin-type instrument if you don’t have a pasta machine (and sometimes, even if you do). But I like to think of myself as a resourceful creature, so I used what we had: a tall, purple, plastic drinking cup.



Perhaps the tortellini turned out a bit too thick, but they suited the soup well, with a chicken, Parmesan, and mushroom filling, and they were awfully cute.



The second time I made pasta from scratch was sometime last autumn. I’d been in my college apartment for a few months, and had been trying to make something special every time it was my turn to cook. Let me tell you, Sweet Potato Ravioli with Pecans and Brown Butter Herb Sauce is no exception.

Thankfully, we had a rolling pin, although not much of a surface to do the rolling on, considering our apartment kitchen has tile countertops. (My mother’s kitchen is the same, but there’s also a big wooden cutting board that rolls out like a drawer, and is removable, should you so desire it to be so.) There was instead a large, plastic cutting board that we had theretofore used for drying dishes when our dish drainer overflowed.

Let me tell you, even with a real rolling pin, this ravioli-making was nearly an all-day endeavor – or maybe, an all-night one. I had to make it in two batches, because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to eat. (Thank goodness one or two of my roommates were coming home late.) I can also tell you that it was absolutely delicious. We treated ourselves to fresh sage, and I fell in love. If you’ve ever wondered about the silly name of this blog, well, there’s a hint. We ate some of the leftover filling with a spoon. I didn’t take any pictures because it had long-since gotten dark, and I was too tired to move.

The third time I made pasta, it was for Thanksgiving. My stepmother had heard about my recent interest in cooking, and was looking to have me help out with the feast. She was looking to put a new spin on the old traditions, and I thought my sweet potato ravioli was a perfect fit for the theme.

Just a little bit before that, my mother, having heard about my latest pasta-making endeavors, promised me a pasta machine. She said she had one, but when we dug it out of the laundry room cupboards, we discovered it was for clay only. (Who ever heard of such a thing? Haven’t you always wanted to eat clay-studded linguini?) Not to be discouraged, we headed out to Bed, Bath & Beyond, and found a nice pasta machine on sale.

Nice, but a little bulky and heavy when it’s crammed into your suitcase, and you’ve got to take said suitcase on Amtrak for a three-hour ride (with holdups) on what the conductor has announced is the busiest day of the year, so please put your luggage on your lap to make room for the other passengers, thank you very much. (Thankfully, most people cleared out early on – my stop was the second-to-last – and I could put my suitcase on the floor.)

But that was just the beginning, of course. First, I didn’t let the dough rest in the refrigerator, so it looked nasty and discolored, and didn’t behave right. Fortunately, I did end up putting it in, and it turned out fine.

Then, the pasta machine is supposed to clamp down on the counter, so you can turn the dough through it more easily. The trouble was that my stepmother has really nice counters, so we could not attach the clamp to them. One of us then had the brilliant idea to have my father physically hold down the pasta machine while my stepmother or I fed the dough through. So there we were, three of us huddled round the dumb thing, trying to figure it out. We’d try to feed the dough through, and my father could barely keep the machine against the counter, because the dough was so thick and tough (as it’s supposed to be, thus the inclusion of a clamp). When we did get enough dough through, it would bunch on the sides and tear in the middle, so that we had to keep feeding it through on the same setting, to much of the same result each time.

In the end, we just gave up on the pasta machine, and my father found a rolling pin.

We meticulously stuffed our raviolis, lovingly pressing fork tines around the square edges, and marveling at the little guys as they bounced around in boiling water on the stove.

But when we excitedly picked them up with our forks and took a bite, we learned that we hadn’t gotten the dough thin enough, and it seemed like our raviolis were more dough than filling. There were bits of dough left on all plates.

It’s said that the third time’s the charm, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s the fourth time. Because the fourth time I made pasta from scratch, it couldn’t have been more perfect.

It was the beginning of finals week. We were supposed to go to the grocery store, but hadn’t been able to get organized enough to do it. We had also decided that there would be no scheduled cooking for that week, because everyone would be stressed and under too much pressure.

Personally, I’m a procrastinator, so I never have much to do during finals week until the end. I also get stressed out easily, but I find cooking and baking relieves that stress. Also, a fair amount of food during finals week is pretty necessary to have around.

Only, we didn’t. I was horrified at the thought of no dinners for four days. So I decided to get resourceful for most of them. I scoured the cupboards. I scoured them so hard that my brother’s graduation present was a dozen shortbread cookies – they require no eggs, no milk; just flour, cornstarch, butter, and sugar.

One night, I stumbled across a recipe for pistachio pesto. I looked in the cupboards. We had a half a Safeway bag of pistachios, and a half a Costco bag of Craisins. And I had an idea. I made sure everyone (or almost everyone) would be home for dinner that night. Then I fished out the pasta machine and the food processor using my chair-slash-stool, made the dough, and set to work on the filling.

When it came time to use the pasta machine, I got nervous. Unlike my stepmother’s counters, ours are not something we can or should display proudly when we have company. Therefore, I thought, it would be no problem to use the clamp on them. Guess again. The clamp was too small, the counter too thick. I glanced around frantically, and eventually, my eyes settled on the dining room table. It would have to do.

I cleared it of my roommates’ study materials, wiped it down, dried it off, and sprinkled a corner of it with flour (I put an empty garbage bag beneath the table, to catch said flour later). Then, I carefully attached the clamp. I was afraid, because the table, while good, isn’t necessarily the sturdiest thing – or at least, I didn’t expect it to be with a pasta machine attached to it. I remembered my father pressing down with all his might to keep that machine down, and imagining all that pressure applied to our poor table. Frankly, I was expecting the table to break. Or at least protest enough that I would have to get out that stupid rolling pin. If I already wouldn’t have to, because of the stupid pasta machine.

But then, a miracle happened. You know how, sometimes, you struggle with something, give up, and then come back a few days, weeks, months, years, etc., later, after your brain has had time to work through the problem, and it’s like there was never a problem to begin with? That was my miracle. I guess the pieces of pasta we’d been trying to feed through the machine were too big, because I divided the dough into smaller pieces, flattened a little with my hands, and then fed them through, one at a time, on the thickest setting. After maybe one time of struggling, they all went through, as near-perfect as possible.

With the tingly feeling of Luck’s presence at my side, I decided to be daring. I’d switch it to the thinnest setting, just to see if it would work.

It did. My beautiful, glorious pasta machine spat out paper-thin sheets of pasta into my waiting hands.

This fourth time was no less work than the other three. I was sweating profusely, and my arms ached from all the times I had to turn that crank. And I swear, it took me an hour to fill all those little circles – I used a medium-sized biscuit-cutter this time, inspired by the wonton wrappers most recipes tell you to use. There were a lot of them, after all, since I’d pressed the dough so thin. I did them batches like I’d done before, so that I could eat. The reason the raviolis in the photos are so thin and ugly is because they’re from the second batch, when I’d started to run out of filling (but not dough). I should’ve grabbed some from the first batch, but they were eaten up almost as soon as I could put them on the table.

I was worried that they’d be too thin, since I’d used the lowest setting on the dough. Turns out, it was just right. Even the raviolis that weren’t filled as full as they could be, because they were out of the second batch, weren’t doughy at all.

Pasta-making is not easy. It gets easier the more times you do it, but it will always be labor-intensive and exhausting. I had gotten about four hours of sleep the night before, because I couldn’t fall asleep till late, and had to wake up at six in order to get to my eight AM, Saturday final. From start to finish, the ravioli-making took me about three hours, not including the hour or so the dough had to rest. What I do remember is that afterward, I hobbled upstairs, and took a nap until eleven that night. I woke up long enough to brush my teeth, wash my face, and change into pajamas, and then I went back to sleep. Including the nap, I slept for fourteen hours. I can guarantee you that even if I had gotten a full night’s sleep the night before, I’d still have slept at least twelve.

If you’re going to make pasta for your main dish like this, or for any dish, you need to be prepared for it. Well. You can never really be prepared, especially if it’s your first time making it. But you have to know that it’s going to take a while, and that it’s going to take work. You also have to know that you will never feel prouder than when you see that little ravioli, or little tortellini, or little whatever, staring up at you from the counter, because you know you’ve put everything you have into it – your love, your curses, your labor. Even if they don’t turn out as beautiful as you hoped, or as tasty as you dreamed, your efforts have still physically manifested themselves in your kitchen. You’ve made something that most people will buy in a store. You’ve experienced something that most people won’t. It’s like a little secret you keep tucked inside your chest, a ray of sunshine that warms your heart and makes you smile. You’ve made this thing. Now eat it, share it, love it.

Edamame Soup

As much as my roommates and I are cornbread people, we are perhaps equally soup people. Out of the five days we cooked this week, no less than three of us made soup. It is May. Yes, it's been cooling down on the weekends (enough that weather.com issued a SEVERE WEATHER ALERT for my area; I thought we were going to have freak tornadoes or something, but it turns out the temperature's just going to be in the fifties/sixties during the day and maybe in the low-ish forties at night; so I guess we'd all better hole up in our basements and prepare for the apocalypse, jeez). But not necessarily during the week, where it's been in the high seventies most of the time, if not higher. In a normal, non-soup-fanatical household, we probably wouldn't be eating soup three times in one mid-May week. But we are determined to eat as much soup as we can before the mere thought of doing so in the summer heat burns us up from the inside out.

We've even been scarfing down the leftovers. Maybe we have issues, but I'm okay with that, as long as we get to keep eating soup.

This edamame soup was my contribution this week. Somewhere between potato leek soup and cream of zucchini soup, it was surprisingly scrumptious, and very high in protein – because, if you didn't know, edamame beans are soybeans! I topped my soup with a slurry of extra virgin olive oil and sesame oil, and a pinch of caramelized onions.

Corn Cheese Chowder

I know it's May, but we're supposed to get rain this weekend, so hopefully soup isn't entirely inappropriate. Because this soup is one of my favorite soups, and is the reason why I always keep at least one can of creamed corn in my cupboards at all times, just in case. This is the soup that I will whip up as a lazy Saturday night dinner, or an I'm-so-hungry-I'm-losing-brainpower lunch after class.

Now, I'm used to making it with American cheese, but American cheese freaks some people out, so feel free to substitute some freshly-grated cheddar.

If you use cornstarch instead of flour, this should be gluten-free.

Orzo & Broccoli Pesto Salad

This is another vegetarian meal from last month, one that is actually surprisingly filling. Although we ate it in April, the pesto/salad would be a nice thing to make when it's unbearably hot out in the summer, if you don't want to have to fiddle with the oven, or spend too much time over the stove. Making any kind of pesto is always messy business, but you can always leave the cleanup for a little later, after you've sat down to enjoy the nice, cool meal you've created.

I served the pesto/salad with freshly-baked Lemon Poppy Seed Bread, using the same recipe as these muffins from February, but in loaf form.

(And yes, I am well aware of the fact that I need new pretty plates.)

Orange Mascarpone Tart

I learned something when I made this tart a month ago: I am not a cheesemaker.

The original recipe tells you how to make your own mascarpone cheese, which of course I was eager to try, if only because I needed heavy whipping cream for another recipe and could therefore kill two birds with one stone. I don't think my cheese turned out quite right, and I didn't enjoy attempting to make it as much as I thought I would (I got too impatient waiting for the temperature to rise). Maybe someday I will attempt to make cheese again in the future when I am more prepared, but that future is not now.

Still, I'm glad I tried it. And the tart still came out well, in spite of any cheese difficulties. It was even better that we had all the other ingredients on hand.

Oh. And I am in love with my tart pan and its removable bottom. It was $6.95 total, as I was doing a free trial of Amazon Prime at the time, and somehow finagled free shipping and no tax out of that. It was well worth it!

Orange Cranberry Scones

I am down to a small handful of cereal (plus crumbs), and one packet of dinosaur egg oatmeal (to be saved for emergencies, or cold weather). The yogurt is gone. I had pancakes, toast, and scrambled eggs at various points over the weekend. Needless to say, the breakfast options for this morning were very few, indeed. So I was quite lucky to run across a recipe for scones before my hunger zapped my capacity for all rational thought. (Sneaking crumbles of dough as I made the scones also helped stave off said hunger.)

Admittedly, that first recipe, that brilliant beacon of an idea to the half-starved (or thereabouts) called for unholy amounts of butter. You know how I am about butter. Yet Fate would not allow me to despair! It just so happened that, while checking my favorite food blogs, I saw a link that took me to another link that took me... to scones. Scones with not 1/3 cup of butter... but three little tablespoons. I rejoiced! (Or mostly, my stomach growled in approval.)

I was a little bit skeptical about using a mix of whole wheat and white flour, just because whole wheat sometimes makes things... not as delicious (compare a partially whole wheat flour pizza crust to an all-white flour crust, for instance). But I trusted my recipe in the end, and got ten beautiful scones because of it – scones you wouldn't have any idea were lightened up, because they tasted so good.

Plus, I got to drink the leftover, fresh-squeezed orange juice, which is always my favorite part. And, now I have something to eat tomorrow morning before my eight AM discussion section.

Blackberry Pie (and Blackberry Mini Pies)

I have two confessions:

1. We ate the pie without taking pictures because,

2. The pie was ugly. I had never attempted a lattice-top crust before, and it was not a pretty sight. I felt badly about that, of course, the pie being for my roommate's birthday, and all. In spite of its unattractiveness, though, the pie didn't fail to taste wonderful.

After making (and eating) the pie, I had a little bit of crust dough left and a lot of filling. (I blame that on my small, Marie-Calendar-sized pie pans.) I probably could have sat there and eaten both (to my detriment), but I had a better idea: mini pies!


Please forgive the out-of-focus picture!

A Whole (Vegetarian) Meal

What was on the menu a few weeks ago? Crockpot Chickpea Stew with Balsamic Caramelized Onions, Rosemary Sea Salt Focaccia Bread, and a salad.

It was a little cooler out then – granted, we've had some cold spells recently (plus hail, apparently!), so it may not be totally inappropriate to this post now. I would make the stew no matter the temperature, though, if I'm being completely honest. It is just delicious. The focaccia bread is a different recipe than I usually use, but very flaky and good.

The salad was a bit fun, because I set it up as a salad bar on the kitchen counter, and everyone could build their own masterpiece.

And can I just say that I absolutely love balsamic vinegar? We practically guzzle it down at my apartment. (Although, thinking about actually guzzling any kind of vinegar is making me a little queasy. Duly noted.)

Oh, and everything except for the bread is gluten-free, as far as I know.

Low Fat Banana Bread

Have you ever experienced something that you could only define as a moment? Something that seems to exist out of time itself, a separate, stolen entity just for you? In the movies, these moments are generally in slow motion with a soundtrack of soft soprano vocals or silence. You can see the exact second when everything begins to still, yet come alive. Perhaps scenes like those seems dumb, and highly unrealistic. It's all well and good to be artistic with your editing program, but moments like that don't seem to exist in real life.

Maybe you'll believe me when I tell you that I had a moment earlier this week, or maybe you won't. And maybe you'll think I'm silly when I tell you that that moment involved banana bread. Maybe it's a you-had-to-be-there kind of thing. I don't know. All I know is that for me, it was magical. Simple, fleeting, but magical.

I had the banana bread in the oven. It had been baking for at least twenty minutes, and so the smell of it had begun to leak from the oven and spread into the kitchen, and from the kitchen, to the living room. There were only traces of it, though, as if you could only sense it there if you knew to search for it.

I was patient but restless. Still apron-clad, I paced about the living room, waiting, searching for small tasks I could do to pass the time. Then all of a sudden, I came to walk beneath the whirling ceiling fan, and I stopped. First, the cool air gently met me; next, I inhaled. The scent of the banana bread was somehow stronger here, as though it were spiraling down toward me from the fan blades themselves. I just stood there for my moment, looking up, breathing in. It was quiet. Everything seemed to slow. I felt that, if I spread out my arms, I could somehow gather the scent, the air itself, to me, and we would simply exist forever in this column of time. And then I smiled.

Baked Spice Doughnuts

I've been having an off week. Not consistently bad, just... off. So on the days where I've come home feeling rather sour, I've hung up my keys, flung my backpack to the floor, whipped out my laptop, and done the best thing I know to make me feel a little bit sweeter: I've baked. I may have stormed into the kitchen on one occasion, glowering at anything that moved, but what really matters is that I emerged sometime later feeling happy and relaxed.

Sometimes I just know when I need to bake. Sometimes without even thinking, I will gravitate toward the kitchen and automatically begin gathering ingredients from my cupboards like wildflowers. Times like these, I bake not for sustenance, but for peace of mind. I bake because there is nothing better at cheering you up than doing something you love.

But it does help that I love both the baking and the eating, especially when it comes to these doughnuts. They're a lot healthier than normal doughnuts because they're not deep-fried, and have the potential to use some low fat ingredients without compromising taste. Plus, they're light on the butter! Whoo hoo!

They also couldn't be easier to make, which is a good thing, since you may find yourself wanting to make another batch immediately after.

Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Remember when I mentioned yesterday that we'd eaten frozen yogurt with our carrot cake? Well, surprise! (Or not-so-surprise, for the foreshadowing-detecting-savvy.) I figured that birthday cake without something vaguely ice cream-like is just shy of a travesty, especially when you've had an ice cream maker staring at you morosely from your cupboards all winter. As an added bonus, the lemony flavor matched the lemon zest in the cake's frosting.

Now, our ice cream maker is a little unusual – it's one of those Donvier ones (look at the picture of the blue one, that's it), where you don't use ice and salt and don't have to crank it like a maniac. Instead, you chill the magic, cylindrical metal container overnight; the next day, you pour in your would-be ice cream, and turn the funny handle on top once or twice every three minutes. (They say you're supposed to do it for twenty minutes, but it usually takes an hour.) I've got it on a long-term loan from my mother, because I'm the only one who's used it in the last six months (read: years).

Personally, I am fond of the ice cream makers you have to crank like a maniac. They bring back memories of Girl Scout Camp and slightly runny vanilla ice cream. (We had to crank in shifts.) But I'm not about to look a gift horse in the mouth – especially one that makes ice cream. And I can say that I have successfully made three or four batches of ice cream in it.

I'd never made frozen yogurt before, though, so I was a little skeptical about it working. The instruction booklet said you could do it, but since when do instruction booklets know anything?

You may laugh, but it turns out I was a little bit right in my skepticism, just for a different reason. You see, the ice cream maker worked too well. Upon contacting the bottom of the chilled cylinder, the yogurt mixture instantly froze, so that there was a solid block of frozen yogurt about two-inches deep on the bottom, and just enough climbing up the sides to make it impossible to turn the handle. This meant that for the next half-hour or so, I would get to systematically poke at the remainder of the frozen yogurt mixture, which was behaving as it was supposed to.

I don't know if our freezer is just possessed, and went above and beyond the call of duty when freezing the cylinder; or if maybe nonfat Greek yogurt has mystical freezing properties heretofore undiscovered. Whatever the case, we ended up with a thick, gorgeous layer of perfect frozen yogurt, and a bottom layer of ice-like crumbles that one could happily eat with an ice pick. It did taste good, though I was a little dissatisfied with the aftertaste, or afterfeeling, I suppose: the same one you get after drinking lemonade (and which is why I don't drink lemonade). Personally, I think it tasted better as unfrozen yogurt. I'm sure you could fix that by omitting the lemon juice, though, and increasing the amount of lemon zest.

(Somewhat) Low Fat Carrot Cake

I love waking up early on Saturday mornings to bake. Or I suppose any morning, really, but Saturday is best; I can work as slowly as I like, taking my time because I know I have no other plans but to relax and recover from the week.

There's something to mornings, too. Being that we're in college, my roommates (and I) often don't wake up until around noon (give or take an hour). This means that, if I happen to wake up at nine, as I did yesterday, and venture downstairs at ten, I will be the only one about. So I can assemble my ingredients, set the oven to preheating, turn on the 2008 Mamma Mia! soundtrack, and fall into peace. And maybe one of my roommates will appear an hour or so later, but I've still been able to enjoy that secret time, that secret delight of knowing I'm the only one awake while everyone is sleeping – that I've been able to greet the world that day before anybody else.

Yesterday, as you have probably inferred, was one of those mornings. I started baking/preparing at ten, and continued at various points throughout the day. The reason was that we were all going to celebrate our roommate Louisa's birthday, which was during spring break – thus the reason we were only just now getting to it. She wanted carrot cake as her special birthday treat, and I was determined to make it a bit healthier, thereby somewhat guilt-free, as she is on a diet.

I don't know how healthy it turned out (that frosting was determined to ruin my good intentions), but it did taste good with frozen yogurt after we spent a while playing games and eating pizza. I can also tell you that it continued to be good as we snuck seconds while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Just in case you were wondering.





Recipe and more pictures if you read more...

Healthier Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well, well, well. It's already April – April Fool's Day, to be exact. If I were perhaps a bit more mischievous, I'd have thought up some clever prank to post here today. (Yes, food pranks do exist!) But as I am not, my small readership shall be spared. Instead, I've got a batch of oatmeal cookies to share – ones which I made roughly two weeks ago and, you guessed it, forgot to tell you about. (Luckily for my roommates, they got the memo anyway.)

Keeping with my butter-vendetta, these cookies use yogurt instead of butter, and in the general "health" trend, contain other lovely things like skim milk and egg whites. The original recipe technically didn't call for chocolate chips, but there are limits to my health-consciousness when it comes to cookies.

I know I've been absent most of March, but I promise there are more things to come this month! The weather lately went from an utterly frigid – by California standards – winter to a rather humid summer with little transition and regard for Spring's feelings, so I've been craving more seasonally-appropriate treats. Plus, we are celebrating two of my roommates' birthdays within the next week, and I've a few tricks up my sleeve not quite of the sort that an April Fool might have in mind.



Recipe and more photos if you read more...

Chicken (or Vegetarian) Tagine

Oh dear. I made this two Thursdays ago, but never posted it. Oops!

It is, however, the Most Delicious Thing Ever, so perhaps I can be forgiven. I had to bask, you see.

...Right.

If the photos don't make it look like the Most Delicious Thing Ever, well, that's because I couldn't get a proper photo on Thursday, and had to wait till Friday to drag the not-quite-sorry leftovers upstairs and subject them to a photoshoot.

Please note that you can make this vegetarian if you so choose – or you can make a part of it vegetarian, like I did, especially if the vegetarian in question will eat chicken broth. (But if not, just use vegetable broth!) You can also make it gluten-free by substituting cornstarch for the flour.




Many more pictures if you read more...

Cast Iron Skillet Corn Bread

I'd been wanting a cast iron for a really long time, and last weekend, my mom bought one for me! I hefted its weight gleefully in my hands, imagining all the recipes I could finally make, the ones I'd been drooling over for the last couple of years.

Let me tell you something: the cast iron skillet does not disappoint. I've used it twice already, and it makes your food look beautiful and all the more delicious.

Or maybe that's just because I've been so excited about the novelty of the thing.

I made some cornbread molasses rolls on Thursday, which, while I didn't take a picture because it was too dark (and I was stressed about having to write a seven-page paper), I will definitely make again and share with you. Today, after waking up hungry at one in the afternoon, I went for some good old fashioned corn bread.

Here's just a hint. This recipe isn't very healthy. I've been in the mood for fatty things lately.



(There's another picture if you read more.)

Chocolate Rum Cake

We had some rum left over from the Tiramisu, and as we didn't really want it sitting around, we decided to turn it into a Chocolate Rum Cake. I was a bit skeptical at first, because I don't like a strong rum flavor. However, after letting it sit overnight, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the rum flavor had, indeed, mellowed out, and made a lovely complement to the almond extract.

Unfortunately, this is the best picture I was able to get. I forgot to take a picture of the cake while it was whole, and by the time I got to it to take a picture, there were only a couple of pieces left.

Hobbit Food: Mushroom Stroganoff

If you've read Lord of the Rings, you may have picked up on the fact that hobbits absolutely love mushrooms. I suspect they'd choose mushrooms over a chocolate cake any day. If I'm remembering correctly, early on in the first book, Frodo and company are given a basket of mushrooms to carry on their journey like blueberry muffins.

I don't have as much of a vibrant passion for mushrooms as hobbits do. I think, more than anything, I want to like mushrooms more than I actually do. For the sake of the hobbits, you know. I am enough of a mushroom fan, however, to know that mushrooms cooked just right are absolute bliss.

When I came home from class today, I was absolutely starving. I had a late breakfast, which, after sitting through class and running off to some tiny, hidden used bookstore to fetch a book I need for a class tomorrow, meant that I would be having lunch around three o'clock. Which meant, of course, that I was starving. I wasn't sure what I wanted until I remembered that my mom had given me the leftover mushrooms from the Quick Chicken Fricassee. Then I knew. Oh, I tried to play coy by Googling mushroom recipes, but I knew deep down that I already had the perfect recipe saved.

As it turns out, it was more than perfect. It was absolutely heavenly.

Mushroom haters, get thee back! (Or get thee to a nunnery. You choose.)

Quick Chicken Fricassee

This weekend, I went home to my mom's house for the first time since Christmas (oops). Despite the Amtrak delays that seemed determined to thwart my journey home, and the couplet of blackouts on Saturday that nearly destroyed our Kinders-soaked steaks, it was relatively relaxing. My brother and I drove up to our local mountain – everyone should have a local mountain, don't you know? – and hiked about in the patchy yet miraculously low snow. My mom and I shopped a bit. I read a bit.

I also finally got a chance to look through the Cook's magazines I had left at home, to which my dad got me a subscription months ago, but which I keep forgetting to browse. I was missing out, ignoring them for so long! They do marvelous things with snow peas.

One recipe caught my eye immediately: Quick Chicken Fricassee. Even though I was supposed to be home relaxing, I just had to make it.

I apologize in advance for the abhorrent quality of the following photograph. We were all hungry, and had no patience to hold still and take pictures in the rapidly-fading light. This, sadly, was the best of the lot.

Tiramisu

Two of my roommates have been on a rigorous diet for the past few weeks in order to lose weight for their Judo tournament. Or rather, they had to lose weight to get to a specific weight for their weigh-in, so they could be in a lower weight class. (How many more times can I use a form of the word "weight"? Any bets?) Their weigh-in (that's one more!) was on Thursday night. If you recall, Thursday is my night to cook; so they asked me to make something fatty and delicious for dinner.

I admit, I panicked at this. I've been trying to cook healthier lately – healthy, and more inclined to vegetarianism, as one of my roommates is a vegetarian. So we all came to the conclusion that I could make something unremarkable (my words, not theirs) for dinner, and something spectacular for dessert. I told them they could have any dessert they wanted in the world. They chose tiramisu. (If you're curious, we had Spinach Lasagna Rolls for dinner.)

After Googling for a bit, I found a tiramisu recipe that doesn't use store-bought ladyfingers. I don't like using store-bought things like that if I can help it, because it feels a little bit like cheating. I knew this would make it one of the more complicated recipes I've made, but I was excited for the challenge.

An Old Favorite: Lemon Poppy Seed Muffins

I seem to have a penchant for cooking on Saturday mornings. (I also seem to have a penchant for the word penchant. Although, every time I use it, I get paranoid, and am reminded of that scene in The Princess Bride with Inigo, Fezzik, and Vizzini, where Vizzini keeps crying, "Inconceivable!" And Inigo says, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.")

This Saturday morning, I decided to go for an old favorite: lemon poppy seed muffins. The recipe I usually use is meant for making bread, instead of muffins, but lemon poppy seed bread takes forty-five minutes to bake, whereas their muffiny counterparts take about twenty. And I was hungry.

Due to a shortage of normal-sized muffin tins, and a surplus of muffin batter, I ended up getting twelve normal-sized, albeit overflowing, muffins, and twelve mini muffins. I was a bit overzealous on the filling up of the normal muffin tin, and filled each cup almost to the top. So theoretically, I might have gotten another batch of mini muffins if I'd been a bit less careless. I was also out of muffin-tin liners. As a consequence, we are really now almost out of PAM.*

* We were only almost out of PAM before. Not really almost.

Whole Wheat Pear Pancakes

I love treating myself to a pancake breakfast every once in a while. Whether it's on a Saturday morning like today, or in the quick half hour before I have to catch the next bus to class, pancakes are always worth making. Pair them with scrambled eggs, or just a simple bowl of yogurt, in the end, you'll feel full and satisfied.

A few days ago, in that 'quick half hour' mentioned above, I tried out a recipe for whole wheat pancakes, which were surprisingly good. I decided, though, that they could be even better if I combined them with another recipe I'd found, which adds grated pears to the batter.

This morning seemed like the perfect time to try them out.

Rosemary Crackers

Thursday night is my night to cook for my roommates. I peruse food blogs the week or weekend prior, hungrily scrounging for something to feed them. Nothing is too elaborate or too simple; I'm willing to try anything.

Tonight, I made a double batch of Garlic Soup, based on this recipe, a salad (with added pears and thawed, once-frozen strawberries that, combined with balsamic vinegar and olive oil made a kind of sweet vinaigrette), and Rosemary Crackers.

The soup turned out pretty well (it uses French bread to make it creamier, instead of using a lot of cream), and the salad was delicious (we ate the entire thing). The pictures didn't turn out so wonderful, since it was already dark, and my camera sadly couldn't work its magic.

Maybe it's just because I baked them earlier in the day, when I could set them on my windowsill in full sunlight, but I feel that the Rosemary Crackers were something special. So that's what I'm going to share tonight.

Chicken Noodle Soup (Usually)

Homemade chicken noodle soup is a beautiful thing, though it took me a long time to realize it. I grew up on the Campbell's stuff, and on the rare occasion my mom would make it from scratch, I thought it was inferior to its canned counterpart. Children are weird, I guess.

Apparently I grew out of it, though, because two weekends ago, when I was sick, I woke up in the almost-early-afternoon with a craving for homemade chicken noodle soup. Perhaps it was a part of my so-called "health kick," but even the tornado-noodled Progresso we have stashed in our cupboard didn't seem good enough for what I wanted. So I did a little searching for the most basic chicken noodle soup recipe possible, and found something perfect to build on.

Just a couple of days ago, I made it again, taking advantage of some of the ingredients we now had on hand. It proved once again to be just about the best thing ever. Even if the only non-frozen meat we had was leftover pork roast.

Three Biscotti

I have something to confess: I have a vendetta against butter. I avoid using it as often as possible, and have passed by many a scrumptious-looking cookie recipe because of it. "1/2 cup of butter" on an ingredients list makes me cry inside.

Don't get me wrong. I love buttery things. I've just somehow gotten it into my head that something with little to no butter is a lot healthier than something with lots of butter. I'm not the healthiest eater, not by any means. But lately, I've been trying hard to make steps in the right direction, for both my sake, and the sakes of my roommates, whom I feed at least once a week.

Cue the biscotti. I've never liked biscotti. NEVER. I thought, though, that maybe that was because I'd only ever had the store-bought stuff. After all, I wasn't a big fan of fruit pies until I started making them myself. The fact that I stumbled upon a LiveJournal post about biscotti with absolutely no butter in them whatsoever looked promising. I told you. I have a problem.

Then when I was searching for recipes and found one with a comment that said that real biscotti aren't meant to have butter in them anyway, as it makes them gross after a while, I was finally convinced.

So a week ago, I took advantage of all the nuts, candy canes, and Craisins we had lying around in our cupboard, and made three different types of butter-free biscotti.



I cut my biscotti wider than you're supposed to, and my roommates got into the pumpkin ones before the biscotti could go in for their second round of baking, so I got less than expected. Still, they tasted so amazing! I am officially a biscotti fan.

Braided Cranberry Bread

I will just tell you right now that I don't make up my own recipes. I can sing plenty of songs just fine, but I'm stumped when it comes to writing a tune of my own. Maybe I can change around the lyrics and harmonize instead of singing the melody, but it's still the same song, deep down. The same goes for me and food.

I love cooking food. It's what calms me down and fires me up. I stay awake into the wee hours of the morning, my eyes squinting with exhaustion as I peruse food blogs and try to ignore the stirrings they insight in my stomach.

I also have a particular fondness for photographing my food. That is, when it looks pretty (which isn't as often as I'd like), and when the sunlight is good enough that it can transform my poor little camera into a vessel for greatness. (This translates to me carrying my food outside, or upstairs to strategically place it on my bedroom's wide windowsill.) But I usually don't have much to do with these pictures except post them on Facebook and make my faraway friends jealous.

So the deal is this. I don't know how often I'm going to update this with (hopefully) lovely pictures of food. But I'm going to try, when the sunlight is right and the food gods are in my favor, to post as often as feels right. Sporadic, maybe, but right.

To get ahead of the game, I'm going to post the last few things I made and (somewhat decently) photographed. The first is this delicious Braided Cranberry Bread, which I made back in early December while I was home for winter break.

Old Soul, Odd Bird

You've probably heard somebody remark about old souls before. Maybe somebody's told you that you are one because of some remark you made about black and white movies or a penchant for square dancing. Maybe not. And maybe if somebody did, you thought they were crazy.

Nobody's ever called me an old soul in so many words. The fifties-style apron I wear when I bake has been commented upon. My fondness for cleaning and knitting have been duly noted. I have happily chatted with fellow admirers of Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart.

But as I look at my other opened browser tabs and spy one labeled "How to Clean Tile Grout," I have a niggling suspicion that maybe I'm not just an old soul, but old. The fact that I have been nicknamed "Wife" and "Mother" by various transients and co-inhabitants of my apartment perhaps confirms this. I am the old woman with smooth-backed hands. I go out dancing on Friday nights with a spatula in my kitchen, and we have a wild time. Then I vacuum the floor. Please tidy your room and bundle up warm before you go outside. Don't eat too much butter or you'll die.

This is the role I have adopted in my household, and I like it. Maybe it seems boring, but there's some comfort in being the pseudo-caregiver, the reliably sedentary roommate. There's comfort in curling up on the sofa with a book or knitting needles, dragon scales or yarn balls at my feet. There's a joy in seeing the smiles on my friends' faces after I've served them up something hot and delicious, a certain methodical calm in cleaning up the kitchen afterward.

I'm an old soul and an odd bird, and many other things, I know. I have quiet passions.

I hope, though, that you don't mind me sharing a slice of them with you.