Food Mood Life Update
Sep 14, 2011 Uncategorized
According to my blog dashboard, this is my 100th post. I don’t feel like it’s been that many but the dashboard doesn’t lie. I’m happy to be celebrating 100 happy posts with all of you.
In honor of the 100th post, I thought I would celebrate by sharing some of my favorite cakes along with some updates about my life. I’ll pair my favorite cakes with the areas of my life according to how I see fit. There really should be a cake for every situation. I hope you enjoy the pairings I’ve made.
Topic #1: Favorite Things: Chocolate Cake with Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Icing
For starters, I thought I would list a few of my recent favorite things. This cake would not really be my favorite (the Pink Lady Cake below is probably my choice), but this cake definitely won in terms of favorites over the past year or two. This cake has been made at least 5 times, and considering the number of other cakes that have also been made that is quite a few times. It is definitely a crowd-pleaser, and that makes it a true favorite.
Some of my favorite things:
1. Playing with Hurley- Pretty self explanatory I think. He’s just so cute.
2. Reading - Lately I’ve been re-reading the Harry Potter series. I’m currently on Chapter 6 of The Order of The Phoenix. If you haven’t read the books but you like the movies you are really missing a great deal of amazing additions to the story until you read the books. I recently read the Hunger Games series too. Any suggestions for exciting and fantastical or science fiction novels are appreciated.
3. Pinterest- if you haven’t joined Pinterest yet I don’t know if I want to encourage you to start. It’s a little bit addicting. Pinterest is a website where you can create “pinboards” on various topics. I have several boards like “home decorating”, “food I want to make”, “favorite outfits”, etc. When you’re browsing the internet you can click on pictures you see and “pin” them to your boards. So when you are logged into Pinterest, you are constantly seeing only super cute and fun ideas and things that other people have “pinned”, and you get caught up in everyone’s wonderful ideas and inspired to create. Pinterest is covered with ideas for using chalkboard paint, and recently I was inspired to turn a few picture frames into chalkboards, which are now hanging happily in my house. Since I started using Pinterest I have also bought and made a plan to use furniture stripper to refinish some old furniture I have. See, Pinterest is inspiring. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do the project as well as the picture I saw, but at least I feel crafty. I think that might be the point of Pinterest.
Proceed to Pinterest with caution, but if you do proceed look me up and follow my pinboards 
4. Music- Lately I’ve been choosing Mumford and Sons over and over when I turn on music. I must love them. I also recently found a classical radio station (yes I use the radio in my car) and have been listening to that a lot lately as well. I played piano growing up and have always loved old classical stuff. I love Rachmaninoff, Vivaldi, and Brahams. I promise, I’m not at all pretentious. I by no means think I am cooler than you because I like Classical music. I really just genuinely love it. I also love Missy Higgins. She’s my best friend I think.
5. Movies- Lately Netflix has been my absolute favorite thing. Instead of canceling when they raised their prices a few months ago, I looked at all my options and ended up bumping up my contract to 2 DVDs/Blu-rays at a time instead of 1, and I haven’t looked back. I love movies, and I don’t know if I really have a favorite except my childhood favorite, Princess Bride (I think that’s everyone’s favorite movie who was born before 1985). Instead of sharing my favorite movie I think I’ll tell you what’s at the top of my queue. 1. The Soloist 2. The Darjeeling Limited 3. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe 4. The Chronicles of Narnia: Price Caspian 5. Pride and Prejudice. Please let me know if I’ll be wasting my time with any of these.
Enough favorites, on to more cakes. Read the rest of this entry »
Home-made Vanilla Ice Cream that doesn’t taste home-made
Sep 11, 2011 Uncategorized
Growing up, I was always the boring kid who only liked vanilla ice cream. I don’t think it was necessarily that I disliked the other flavors as much as it was that I just loved vanilla, and I didn’t see any reason to eat any other kind. I had a friend who gave me such a hard time about it. She and I played softball together, and often after practices or games we would go to get ice cream. She would order really fun flavors and I would ALWAYS order vanilla. Vanilla is so simple and perfect. It’s smooth and creamy, without swirls of goo or hard chunks of candy or nuts. I love it. She did get me to order peppermint once and I did enjoy that, but ordering something different was always short lived and I would find myself reverting back to vanilla time and time again. There’s really no beating it.
I’ve tried many different brands and love Edy’s, Haagen-Dazs and the other super smooth and thick varieties. I’ve never really been a big fan of home-made ice cream either. Something about the process seemed so… not worth it. If you are able to go to the store and pick up a tub of insanely delicious and smooth wonderfulness for $5.00, then why go through all the effort and end up with a vanilla flavored ice cup, which is more of a slushy consistency than you’d like? It just didn’t make sense to me. Of course, that was because I had never tried really good home-made ice cream.
That all changed when I met Brian’s family. Brian’s mom has made home-made ice cream on several occasions with great accomplishment. Recently though, Brian decided he wanted to learn how to make ice cream, and I was extremely skeptical that he would be able to pull it off. His mom is great at it though, and I thought maybe with a few tips from her he could, with time, generate something that would be semi-worth the effort. He read through some recipes and decided on Alton Brown’s Vanilla Ice Cream from the Good Eats 2 Cookbook. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention at all to how he did it. I don’t know if it’s hard to do or not, or what the steps look like as you do them, but I do know with certainty that the ice cream he made is one of my favorite vanilla ice creams on the planet. My view of home-made ice cream has changed forever.
In order to make ice cream you need an ice cream maker, which we don’t have. We do, however, have a KitchenAid Mixer and Brian’s mom let us borrow the ice cream maker attachment. I don’t know if the brand of ice cream maker affects the outcome, but whatever the KitchenAid ice cream attachment did was perfect.
Hurley really wanted some. He watched Brian the entire time he ate.
Here is the recipe from the Good Eats 2 Cookbook. The result is a mouthful of joy.
Vanilla Ice Cream- makes 1 1/2 quarts (enough for 8 people to eat it with pie and still have some left over)
Ingredients
3 cups half-and-half
1 cup heavy cream
8 large egg yolks
9 ounces sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Directions
1. Combine the half and half and cream in a medium saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and set aside.
2. Whisk the egg yolks in a large mixing bowl until they lighten in color. Gradually whisk the sugar into the yolks until smooth.
3. Slowly ladle one thrid or the hot dairy into the yolk mixture, whisking constantly. (This is the tempering part.) Return this mixture to the pot containing the rest of the dairy. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently, until the custard thickens slightly, enough to coat the back of a spoon (170- 175 degrees F).
4. Wash the original mixing bowl. When the custard is ready, transfer it to the bowl, stir in the vanilla, and cool at room temp for 30 minutes. Cover and refrigerate until the temperature drops below 40 degrees F. Best to let it chill overnight.
5. Pour into a prepped ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer’s directions. Within 25 to 30 minutes the ice cream will attain a classic soft-serve consistency. Enjoy it as is or move it to the freezer to harden for another 3-4 hours.
Creating a healthy weekly meal plan that saves time and money: Part 2
Jan 4, 2011 Uncategorized
Now that the rules are established, let’s go through how you plan these meals. This entire process used to take me longer, but now the planning part (before shopping) takes about 30 minutes. It can take longer if I really want to spend a lot of time looking at recipes (which sometimes I do), but it doesn’t have to take an extremely long time. The efforts you put into this will be well worth it, I promise.
Step One: The first thing I do is print off this sheet. Click on the following link for a download:
I sit down with this sheet, which is a weekly calendar divided by meal times that I can write on as I look up recipes or look around my kitchen and decide on what to make. It looks like you have to plan a LOT to fill this out, but really it ends up saving you lots of money and time. Before I did this, I would go to the grocery store and pick up things I thought we would eat, but after writing down a plan I would notice that there isn’t room for some of those items on the sheet. Either I would end up wasting the food I bought because we didn’t eat it, or we would eat it in addition to what we planned to eat and would end up eating too much that week. Planning out what you eat does take a little time, but for me it is really worth it.
Step Two: Do inventory
Look around your kitchen and see what you have. First, look for fresh fruits or vegetables that will expire. Those are things you want to be sure and use this week. Make a list of these items, along with any pantry items you have already like a box of pasta, can of beans, rice, etc. These are the ingredients you want to look for in recipes this week. That way you will save a lot of money by not having to buy a lot of ingredients.
Step Three: Hit the books… or the web
This is the fun part. Now you get to find recipes that you want to make for the week. Here are few of my favorite resources. These are what I use consistently every week to find what we eat.
1. Mexican Everyday by Rick Bayless. This is hands down my favorite cookbook. When we got this book about a year ago Brian decided he wanted to make every recipe in it, and we almost have done that. At first we would make 3 recipes a week from it, and after a while we noticed Brian started to lose weight. The only change in our life was that we were eating from Rick Bayless’s book, and he lost about 15 pounds. This book is full of healthy, delicious, and different Mexican recipes than you will find anywhere else. It is honestly amazing. Plus, the recipes are all easy and fast, which really helps.
2. The Food Matters Cook Book by Mark Bittman. This book is one that follows the rule I told you, “Eat real food, not too much, mostly plants”. The recipes in this book contain little if any meat, lots of fresh vegetables, and lots of various grains. If you like things like couscous, buckwheat, bulgar, and cabbage, this book is for you. If those things sound scary, I want to encourage you that they aren’t! I made cabbage rolls from this book reluctantly one day, but they ended up being one of my favorite recipes of all time. Every single recipes is ridiculously healthy, so anything from it is a good choice for healthy eating.
3. Any recipes by Rachel Ray. I use the Food Network website mostly by visiting her page, but you can also find a lot of recipes of hers on her magazine’s website, Everyday with Rachel Ray. Her recipes are generally fast, generally easy, and generally really delicious. I make a lot of her stuff. Last year I had a subscription to her magazine and I would always find great recipes from it to use for fast and easy meals.
4. Food Network’s Website. This has a ton of recipes if you want a fun place to look online for new ideas. There is a healthy eating section on the site that is great, but I think it’s ok to make something by Paula Deen every now and then too, even if she does use a lot of butter. Just don’t pick her every time.
5. My own family cookbook. We don’t actually have a real cookbook, but I make things all the time that my family has made for years. Cooking what you know is always a good place to start.
Step Four: Create the plan
Now all you have to do is fill in the calendar. When you choose a recipe, be careful to make sure it doesn’t contain a lot of ingredients that are hard to find or that you don’t want to buy. If you don’t mind looking for grains of paradise or wonton wrappers then by all means, pick whatever you want, but if it’s important to you that the ingredients are easy to find then keep that in mind when you pick your recipes. Also, it’s a good idea to choose recipes that contain similar ingredients. For example, this week I am making two things that contain cilantro. This way I will use it all up instead of making something else that takes (for example) parsley and leaves me with a bunch of each left over at the end of the week and less money because I had to buy two herbs instead of one. This takes a little time to find recipes that can use up all of your ingredients, but it really does save money.
Here is what my calendar looked like for this week:
Collect the recipes as you go by saving them on your computer, printing them off, or writing the page number of the cookbook they are in on the calendar. You will need the recipes in the next step. Once every spot is filled in, you are ready for the next step.
Step Five: Create the shopping list. Download this sheet for help: Grocery List
Look at your plan and recipes and mark down everything you need. Dont’ forget to include amounts. Sometimes I mark down that I need whipping cream (for example) and I get to the store and forget how much I need. I either end up buying way too much or not enough. Writing down amounts can help.
Here is my shopping list, but keep in mind I made these recipe choices based on the fact that I already had a lot of ingredients, so don’t go by my list. For example, I had black beans and canned tomatoes already to make the chorizo and black bean chili, so all I needed was cilantro and chorizo to complete that meal. You won’t see all of the ingredients needed to make the dish checked off on your sheet if you have some things already in your house.
Step Six: Go Shopping
I don’t know how much time you have or how involved you want to get with this, but if you want to really save money sometimes it’s best to go to more than one grocery store. This might not be true depending on what you choose to eat, but sometimes I make things with ingredients that I can only find at certain stores, and I go there for those items and Wal-Mart for others. Sometimes Target is cheaper than Wal-Mart for certain ingredients like coffee, peanut butter, jelly, and half and half (things I frequently shop for), but Wal-Mart can’t be beat for canned goods or bread. This week I went to Whole Foods for chorizo and Frontera Salsa, but Wal-Mart for everything else. You can price shop around if you want depending on what ingredients you choose.
Step Seven: Relax and enjoy your week of cooking
Some people don’t think the words “relax” and “cook” should be used together in the same sentence, but I have found that cooking is one of the best stress relievers for me. I love to cook. I love to come home and chop things, stir, and create a delicious meal. It gives me something to focus on after work and creates a good transition between work and home. I notice on nights when I don’t cook I tend to think about work throughout the evening, but cooking and eating with Brian help my mind to shift back into a relaxed mood. Hopefully after a few weeks of living with planned meals you can say the same.
Throughout the week I’ll share some of my recipe I cooked this week, and from now on I’ll always post my favorite weeknight recipe. Even if this plan isn’t helpful for you and your family, at least now you know a little more about what I do every week.
Winter Rugelach
Dec 12, 2010 Uncategorized
Today I woke up, and for the first Sunday in a long time, I realized I didn’t have any homework to do. School was over as of last week and from now on my weekends will be spent doing whatever I want. No more rushing around doing laundry between pages of writing papers! Sunday nights I can actually sit and relax, read, watch a movie, or do my favorite thing: write.
I want this blog to be better and about more interesting things that simply recipes, but I have honestly felt that in the last year I haven’t had time. I know people say that a lot and I’m sure that my life is no different, but blogging about food doesn’t only require time to write, but time to cook, a good enough memory to remember to take pictures of what you cook, time to manage the pictures and edit them, then time to think of a semi-creative way to talk about the food you made and make it relate in a small way to your life. Then, you can sit down and write about it. If you forget to take pictures or if you don’t have time to cook for a while, then the whole process is postponed until you have time to do those things. It’s terrible. I’ve been waiting for some kind of living pattern that will allow me to cook on a regular basis and write every day. Now I have a job with a great schedule and I’m done with school, so I guess what I’m trying to say is that I expect I’ll be writing more now. I hope you’ll be alright with that.
Thanksgiving Trivia Quiz Results
Nov 27, 2010 Uncategorized
Congratulations to Koes for getting all of the answers right in the Thanksgiving Trivia Quiz and winning the December Food Magazine Assortment! Sorry to anyone who wanted to play but visited the site while it was down both Thanksgiving Day and yesterday. I don’t know what was up with that.
Here were the answers to the quiz:
The Thanksgiving Trivia Quiz
1. According to Butterball corporation, they recommend that you thaw a wrapped turkey in the refrigerator how long per 4 pounds of bird?
a) One hour per 4 pounds
b) 8 hours per 4 pounds
c) One day per 4 pounds
d) 4 hours per 4 pounds (or one hour per pound)
2. Thanksgiving is celebrated only in the United States
True of False?
3. The first department store to hold a Thanksgiving parade was:
a) Montgomery Wards
b) JC Penny’s
c) Gimbel’s
d) Macy’s
4. What is the name of the famous rock credited to where the pilgrims first landed? Plymouth Rock
5. Butterball says that once the turkey is done, you should let it stand for 15 minutes before serving because:
a) So you don’t burn your tongue when you eat it
b) It’s easier to carve
c) To let the aroma go through the house
d) To let the stuffing cool a bit before you take it out
6. What was the name of the ship the pilgrims came over on? Mayflower
7. Who was the captain of the ship? Christopher Jones
8. Which President was the first to establish Thanksgiving as a legal national holiday to be held the 4th Thursday in November?
a) Abraham Lincoln
b) Franklin D. Roosevelt
c) Thomas Jefferson
d) James Madison
9, Butterball recommends that you cover the breast and top of the drumstick with aluminum foil when?
a) Right away when you first put it in the oven
b) When it is half way done
c) When it is 2/3 of the way done
d) The last 15 minutes of cooking
10. What part of the turkey is saved and snapped as a superstitious good luck custom? Wishbone
11, Which President moved Thanksgiving up one week to help stimulate the Christmas shopping economy?
a) Theodore Roosevelt
b) John Kennedy
c) Franklin D. Roosevelt
d) Dwight D. Eisenhower
12. Butterball says that when making your turkey stuffing, you should have all the ingredients already cooked before you put it into the bird. True or false?
13. In what year did Macy’s first Thanksgiving Day Parade take place? 1924
14. Butterball says the best place to put the meat thermometer in the turkey is:
a) Breast
b) Thigh
c) Top of leg
d) at an angle so it hits both the meat and stuffing
