My 16 year old daughter, Eleanor, is obsessed with making cupcakes and cakes lately! For Christmas she got a cake decorating kit and lessons, and she has been making sweets constantly ever since. Last week she made these Double Chocolate Mint cupcakes, which are perfect for St. Patrick’s Day. The are chocolate cupcakes filled with chocolate mousse and topped with mint flavored whipped cream frosting, and they tasted amazing.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to use my juicer more! I bought an Omega J8003 Juicer a few years ago, but I only use it a few times a month. So I am trying to use it every 2 or 3 days now. Juicing is a great way to get more fruits and vegetables into your diet, and goodness knows I don’t eat enough vegetables! I keep buying kale, meaning to use it in juice and then finding it wilted in the back of the refrigerator a week later.
Today I threw out the kale (again), but I did find some spinach to use in my juice. I combined 2 apples, 3 carrots, about 2 cups of spinach and a 3/4 inch piece of ginger to make some juice for today. I don’t usually include ginger, and it added a very strong taste to the juice, that pretty much overwhelmed all the other flavors.
My son had to make a dessert for his homeschool co-op history class, and he ended up making this Maple Nut Cake. It is supposed to be colonial although I am not sure how colonial a packaged cake mix is. Anyway it was a way to use some of the maple extract I bought a few years ago and had never opened! It tasted delicious, and it was very easy to make.
This is a quick pasta recipe with a little bit different taste. The tomatoes are roasted instead of sauted, which gives the dish a deeper flavor. I also like this recipe because it is easy to keep the sausage separate until the last minute, so I can keep it vegetarian for my daughter.
A few days ago I posted a recipe for Buitonis Chicken Marsala Ravioli, and today I have another Buitoni pasta recipe, this time using Roasted Butternut Squash Agnolotti. This recipe is even easier than the first one! When using these kinds of gourmet filled pasta I don’t like to make a sauce that is too complicated, because I want to be able to taste all the great flavors of the pasta.
The Roasted Butternut Squash Agnolotti is filled with butternut squash, impastata ricotta, aged parmesan, grana padano and is accented with amaretti cookie crumbs. I loved this pasta, I think because it had so much cheese, and in so many different varieties. The sauce I paired it with is a simple tomato and green onion sauce, and the key to making this is not to cook the tomatoes too much. You want the tomatoes to be warm, but not completely cooked. I used multicolored heirloom grape tomatoes for this, so it would be prettier, but it would be fine with all red ones.
I love chili, especially this time of year. Chili is the perfect wintertime food, because it is warm and filling and spicy. Plus there are so many recipes and variations I rarely make it the same way twice. Sometimes I make Cincinnati Chili, sometimes I make Texas Chili, sometimes I make White Chicken Chili, and sometimes I make it vegetarian. The possibilities are endless. To help celebrate Chili season and its variations the Chili Appreciation Society International and Bruce Foods sent me some Mexene Chili Powder and Louisiana Hot Sauce to review.
No Harry Potter movie celebration is complete without hot Butterbeer to drink! So here is an easy recipe. I like this one because you melt candy to get the butterscotch flavor, so it doesn’t take long to make. It is super sweet though, since you take cream soda and add sugar and candy. It even foams up on top for the authentic Harry Potter “frothing foam”.
This is a good recipe for using up extra lunch meat. My husband likes me to have lunch meat on hand for weekend sandwiches, but no one but him and my son eat it. So half the time it ends up not getting eaten, and since it is expensive I hate to buy it and then not use it. This recipe will use it up, and with this recipe you can stretch a little bit of meat a long way. You can easily vary the recipe depending on what meats and cheese you have on hand.
