June 26, 2008 at 10:56 pm · Filed under dessert, food
Here’s another recipe from a while back. I made this and brought it in to work, and made little signs that said that if you were allergic, you would totally die – they’re THAT peanutty. So, uh, allergic people, don’t make this. You might even want to look away from the screen.
One person told me that I had combined his two favourite dessert components, oatmeal and peanut butter, into one magical dessert. They made me thirsty, and they didn’t have any chocolate, so of course they could have been better in MY mind, but they’re still quite good.
Ingredients
Bars
1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups oats, quick or old-fashioned, uncooked
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 8-oz bag Reese’s Pieces – and if you think this means the peanut butter CUPS and not the little candy-coated bits, get out of my blog. Seriously.
Streusel Topping
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
6 tbsp butter, room temperature
Method
Bars
Pre-heat oven to 350 F.
Lightly spray a 13×9″ baking pan with non-stick cooking spray – or, if you’re like me and don’t have a 13×9″ pan, do two 9×9″ or 8×8″ or whatever. It fits fine, and it didn’t hurt me that I re-used the same pan to do two sequential batches.
Beat sugar, peanut butter and butter until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla; beat well.
In a separate bowl, combine oats, flour, and baking soda. Add this mixture to the wet ingredients; mix well.
Stir in Reese’s Pieces.
Spread dough evenly in pan.
Streusel Topping
Combine flour, sugar, cinnamon, and salt.
Using a pastry cutter, cut in the butter until fine crumbs form.
Using your hands, squeeze together most of the mixture to form large clumps.
Now, let’s put it all together: press the streusel topping onto the top of the bars in the pan.
Bake 35 – 40 min or until center is just set.
Cool completely before cutting.
Apparently you should store it tightly covered, but I wouldn’t know since I didn’t have any left to store!
June 20, 2008 at 2:27 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Ok, ok, first off, I know the header’s not right. I know. But for the moment I’m going to leave it; I stayed up until 1:30 last night trying to make it work, and the fact that it’s showing up at all (and so is my favicon! Whee!) is enough for me at the moment. When I feel sufficiently inspired, and/or rested, I’ll tackle fixing it again. I can’t decide whether to re-crop the photo and make the images bigger, or whether to just make the columns smaller. Ho hum pig’s bum.
First recipe time! It’s the most recent thing I’ve made, instead of one from the “archives.” Those are mainly there so that I can keep posting with some degree of regularity, even when I didn’t actually get the chance to make anything. Although next weekend I’ll have plenty – it is The Weekend of Two Barbeques, and both of them are asking for us to bring stuff. Yay! That is soooo not a chore. I’m totally excited to bring food.
I found this recipe on Foodgawker, being as that – and, previously, Tastespotting – is where I get pretty much all my recipes. I was careful to note whose blog I got it from, which is not something I did in the past since I didn’t assume I’d be posting them again once I’d made them. So if, in the future, I fail to attribute something, please don’t think I’m being a dick. I just don’t remember where it came from! From whence it came! You know.
Sausage and Mushroom Pasta in Mushroom Cream Sauce
(slightly adapted from Soy and Pepper)
Ingredients
2 portions tubey-shaped pasta (I used mostaccioli! Little mustaches! Ah ha ha!)
4 hot Italian sausages (the original recipe didn’t specify what kind of sausage, and this is what we had in our freezer)
at least 1 clove of garlic, minced (I used one regular-sized clove and one wee miniclove… what? Garlic’s good)
2 – 3 green onions, sliced into big sections
3 mushrooms, sliced (the original recipe called for 4 or 5, and I would have done that if I was cooking just for me, I truly would, but Matt does not care for mushrooms, so I “halved” that part of the recipe so he wouldn’t have to contend with too many of them)
1 1/2 tsp wholegrain mustard, which is apparently the name for mustard that is neither Dijon nor the fluorescent hot dog kind
200 ml light cream, which is between 3/4 and 1 cup, in case your measuring cup doesn’t have both scales on it
a glug of olive oil, maybe
salt and pepper
basil
parmesan
Method
Cook the sausages. Leave any sausage grease in the pan; you can use it later.
While they’re cooking, chop up the garlic and green onions.
Drain the sausages on paper towel, then slice them up.
Cook the pasta according to package directions or however you like to cook pasta.
While it’s cooking, throw the garlic and green onions into the pan you used for the sausages and cook them up for about a minute in the sausage grease. You can always add olive oil if the sausage grease situation is insufficient.
Dump in the mushrooms and saute until cooked.
Now, if you are like me, you always think the sausages are cooked and then the middle is still a little pink, which you may have discovered when you sliced them up. Not to worry. Just fling them into the pan, they’ll be fine in a minute or two. Once you are satisfied with the status of the sausages, add the cream and mustard, give it a few good mixes to combine the mustard into the sauce, and then simmer until the sauce is reduced. Which, in this case, means “until it’s thickened enough to be good pasta sauce, a few minutes.” What, I didn’t go to cooking school, I don’t know instinctively how long it takes to reduce a cream sauce. Maybe you do.
Give it a couple cranks of salt and pepper, fling some basil merrily over the top, and serve it on your pasta. With parmesan, if you like (and I definitely do).
I liked it. I’m a sucker for anything with mushrooms, though. I had my doubts about the mustard situation, I’m not the biggest mustard fan in the world, but there was just enough to make the flavour interesting without being overpowering. The mushrooms flavoured the sauce as well, which was a plus for me.
Matt said he liked it too, although I don’t think he was turning cartwheels about it or anything, and I imagine the mushrooms had something to do with that.
Hmm. My photo is too wide. I’ll fix it later. Oh brave new world of pre-made templates, how I shunned you for good reason.
June 19, 2008 at 10:53 am · Filed under meta
Hey.
This is going to be my food blog. I was inspired a few months ago, but what with working on the wedding, I didn’t have time to get started on this. Now that that’s out of the way, I can give this the attention it deserves.
So, a little background: I’ve had an online journal (the word “blog” is so… fake and gross) for 7 years now, but it is about personal stuff. And I guess it may not count as a blog anyway since I had to take the commenting system down. Whatever. Some of you are coming here from there; some of you aren’t, and that’s fine – this is not that. This was started with the intent of becoming a part of a community, not just yammering on about my day, and with improving my skills in both cooking and taking pictures.
That said, I don’t want or expect to be any kind of a professional chef or photographer. I like to eat food and I like to look at it, and I know many of you feel the same way. So get off my back if you’re about to complain about something being not up to some standard.
I don’t have tons of money or tons of fancy kitchen equipment, although I did get a KitchenAid mixer and a Le Creuset pot as wedding presents – I certainly could never have afforded them on my own! Same goes for fancy-pants ingredients. If there’s a less expensive version of the same general idea – regular lemons instead of Meyer lemons, for instance – you can bet that’s what I’ll go for.
I don’t usually have time to make really, really involved recipes, and I can’t cook from scratch every day. I don’t even eat “dinner” (qua dinner) every day! If I’m coming home from the gym after work, it’s too late to cook and too late for me to want to eat. I’ll have a little snack or something instead. And this occurs at least two workdays a week, and often more frequently. So that means that even the recipes that are like “make this part the night before, then throw it all together tonight” don’t really do it for me. Most of the time. So don’t expect extravagance. See also: the blog’s title. If I see a recipe that looks good and doable with the equipment that I have and the ingredients I can reasonably get, I’ll add it to my list, and I just do whatever’s at the top of the list when I have time.
I’m not just cooking for myself. I’m also cooking for my husband, and he is even less fancy-pants than I am. He also has some food preferences that don’t match mine, so if my repertoire seems limited, it’s because I’m trying not to make things he’ll think are disgusting. If I’m ever cooking for just myself, or for some group of people that does not include him (insofar as this will ever happen), I’m happy to branch out a bit. I got interested in food blogging through the late, lamented Tastespotting, and am now getting my food blog/food photo fix from its replacement, Food Gawker. So I guess my aspirations are pretty clear, huh.
I’m never, ever going to turn into a vegetarian, vegan, or raw foodist, nor am I going to go on some diet that cuts this or that out of my life. If you want to do it, that’s fine, but don’t expect it from this blog.
And finally, since I am a young white female from North America, I have a messed-up relationship with food. I love it, but I don’t love its effects on me. It doesn’t hurt that I spent a year of my life being sick in a digestive sort of way – that’s taken some foods out of the equation for me permanently, and others are being let back in on a provisional basis.
I’ve worked up a backlog of recipes I’ve made and photographed, so I can get started as soon as I can upload some pictures. And speaking of pictures, expect some changes to the design, too. I’m at work right now, so I can’t fuss around with Photoshop since I don’t have it here, but once things calm down enough at home that I have time to do it, I’ll do it.
Yay! I’m excited! I hope you are too.
