birthday pie

I love pie.

This year for my birthday, I had a chocolate chip pie.  It's kind of like a giant deep-dish chocolate chip cookie, easy to make, and also amazing.  

People ask me for this recipe ALL THE TIME (not realizing that it's on Nestle's website), so I thought I'd share it.  Try this!  If you like chocolate, pie, and cookies, you will loooove it.

NESTLÉ Toll House Chocolate Chip Pie

1 unbaked 9" pie crust (I always use a frozen store-bought one)

2 eggs

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (I'm a slave to milk chocolate.)

optional: 1 cup chopped nuts (mmmmmm, pecans)

Preheat oven to 325.  Beat eggs in large bowl on high speed until foamy.  Beat in flour and sugars.  Beat in butter.  Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.  Pour into shell and bake 55-60 minutes (or until knife inserted halfway between edge and center comes out clean).  Cool at least a little before eating, and then try not to devour the whole pie in one sitting.  

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"This isn't your average book," said Ron.  "It's pure gold: Twelve Fail-Safe Ways to Charm Witches.  If only I'd had this last year I'd have known exactly how to get rid of Lavender and I would've known how to get going with... Well, Fred and George gave me a copy, and I've learned a lot."

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Johnson-style Nanaimo Bars

Yesterday was Canada Day, so Joel and I celebrated like we always do - poutine for dinner, Nanaimo Bars for dessert, and watching a show that teases about the differences between Canadians and Americans.  To my dismay, however, I learned that most of my friends had never tried a Nanaimo Bar and / or didn't know what they were!  So here, friends, is the recipe I use.  I've never tried an authentic Nanaimo Bar, but I've made so many substitutions, I'm sure they no longer taste authentic.  :)  They do taste delicious, though.  

This is a refrigerated no-bake bar-style cookie... kind of.  The actual prep time for each layer is very short, but there's about an hour and a half of setting time.  The tiny parenthetical asides are my personal notes, learned in the process of making these. :)

Start with a pan (I use 9" round) lined with foil or plastic wrap.  It's much easier to cut and serve these if you can remove the whole thing from the pan.

Please don't judge me.  I am NOT a food photographer.

Bottom layer:

1/2 c. unsalted butter, room temperature (Salted butter works, too.  Also, since you're melting it, it doesn't need to be room temp.)

1/4 c. sugar

5 T cocoa powder

1 egg, beaten

1 1/4 cup graham cracker crumbs (about 10 crackers or most of a store-bought graham cracker crust:) (For gluten-free, I'd sub in quick oats. This ingredient is mostly for texture anyway.)

1/2 c. finely chopped almonds (If your almonds have freezer burn, finely chopped pecans are also delicious.)

1 c. coconut (We don't like coconut, so we use quick oats instead.)

Melt butter, sugar, and cocoa powder together.  Slowly add to beaten egg.  Stir in the rest of the ingredients.  (I do that step with a spatula in the pan I'm going to use.)  Press firmly into ungreased pan.  (Eat a forkful.)  Refrigerate.  

Hm.  It looks like I snuck some Heath bars into the bottom layer last year.  Yum!

Middle layer:
1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature (Again, salted is fine.)
3 T whipping cream (I couldn't tell any difference when I used milk.)
2 T custard powder (or vanilla pudding powder)
2 c. powdered sugar

Cream all ingredients together and spread onto the bottom layer.  Refrigerate 30-60 minutes (so it stays separate from the top layer.)

I cover it with plastic wrap during setting time so it doesn't absorb any funky fridge odors.

Top layer:

4 oz semi-sweet chocolate (2/3 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips) (REALLY USE SEMI-SWEET, even if you're a slave to milk chocolate when baking.)
2 T unsalted butter (Salted is good.)

Melt together.  When cool but still liquid, pour over other two layers.  Refrigerate at least one hour.

Enjoy!  Really - I think it's impossible not to.

(I told you I made a lot of substitutions:)

Agua de jamaica

Here's a recipe for those of you interested in trying agua de jamaica (a juice made from dried hibiscus flowers).  Enjoy!

on top of spaghetti

I made homemade spaghetti sauce tonight!

It was very tasty.  I picked the tomatoes from our garden; blanched, peeled and cored them; and cooked them into some taaaasty marinara sauce.  There wasn't tons of extra, since our tomatoes are pretty tiny, but what extra there was will be frozen for another day.  Yum!  

(Sorry I don't have a picture - you'll just have to imagine it.)

Recipe:

A bunch of tomatoes, peeled and cored

1 onion, diced

1 can tomato sauce

1/3 cup chicken broth

1 tsp dried basil

1 tsp dried parsley

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

Pour all ingredients into a large pot and boil until thickened.

If your eaters don't like chunky tomatoes, 

pour into a blender (or use an immersion blender) and blend until smooth.

Enjoy!

updates

For those of you who are interested, I updated the cooking blog this weekend with several new recipes people keep asking me for :)  You should check them out!  They're super tasty and use normal (read: in the house) ingredients!

Black Beans & Rice with Chicken and Apple Salsa
Black Bean Soup
Lime Chicken Burritos of Deliciousness and Love
Tortillas warmed on the stove fire
Cinnamon-Apple Pork Chops 
Pumpkin Waffles

All Rhodes lead to Rome.

We're going to a family's house for dinner tonight, and I'd been meaning to make rolls for a while anyway, plus one of our friends who moved recently left us with a whole bag of Rhodes rolls, so I thought I'd give them a shot.  

I'm not sure they worked.

They were supposed to double in size, but they're small enough I could enclose one in my hand.  I think so, anyway.  Right now they're burning lava hot so I haven't actually tried.  How is it that I can make homemade rolls excellently well but can't manage the frozen variety?  

Oh well.  Who said Greek chicken wasn't good with mini baby-sized dumpling rolls? :)

P.S. Yes, I know that Greece and Rome aren't the same place, but we're having Greek chicken for dinner, not Roman chicken, and have you ever heard anyone say that all roads lead to Greece?  Me, neither. 

domesticity

I'm sorry.

I hate to toot my own horn, 

but

I know my way around a kitchen.

Let's just be honest.

It turned out yummy!

Here's the post on "my" cooking blog, in case you're interested.


2 boneless skinless chicken breasts
1 can whole berry cranberry sauce
1 tiny onion, quartered
2 gala apples, cut into slices
a couple dashes cinnamon
a couple tiny dashes all-spice
a couple splashes lemon juice

Serve on rice with some lime juice.

Make a "plate" for the chicken by laying one apple's worth of slices on the bottom of the crockpot.  Put chicken on top, followed by a "lid" of the second apple.  Dump in the can of cranberry sauce, followed by  a quarter of the onion in each corner of the crockpot.  Dash on the cinnamon, all-spice, and lemon juice.  I didn't even stir it!  Wait in anticipation to see if it turned out well...

RESULT:

Yum-ola!

Strawberry and Chocolate Nachos

We made these Strawberry and Chocolate Nachos (from www.ourbestbites.com) to eat while watching the third Narnia movie tonight. All I have to say is, De-lici-ous.

Ingredients needed: tortillas, butter, cinnamon sugar, strawberries (or another kind of fruit that would be good with chocolate), chocolate

P.S. The Narnia movie was very good, too. I really like those movies a lot. Very well-made, besides having a good story.

What's Cookin'?

My sister-in-law decided to start a blog that I will be helping write on and I wanted to let you all know about it!  It's called What's Cookin'? and it'll have recipes that I and my sisters-in-law make - family recipes or otherwise.  She just barely started it so there's not a ton on it yet, and I haven't posted anything, but in case you're interested, there it is!  I'm super excited to share my family's recipes since they're different from my in-laws' recipes and also some of the ones I've found or created since being married.  Also, you'll get to see some of the awesome food I eat while I'm in Mexico!  It's going to be awesome. :)

No-Bake Cookies

(recipe from allrecipes.com)
1 3/4 c. white sugar
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. butter
4 T unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 c. crunchy peanut butter
3 c. quick-cooking oats
1 tsp vanilla

In a medium saucepan, combine sugar, milk, butter, and cocoa. Bring to a boil... Remove from heat, and stir in peanut butter, vanilla, and oats. Drop by teaspoonfuls onto wax paper. Let cool until hardened. 


We made these yesterday. Yum.  I'm glad no one seems to have ruined no-bake cookies with some kind of weird fruit (quick about me: I don't like it when people ruin perfectly good treats with fruit.) but I realized while I was eating a cookie tonight that if you were to ruin a delicious no-bake cookie with fruit, using orange extract might not be so bad.  Kind of like one of these:

And I suppose maybe, just maybe, raspberry may also be acceptable.  Not preferred, but acceptable.

But really, let's just leave them the way they should be - chocolate and peanut butter.  And thank you for leaving them that way thus far.

work

Well, I'm sitting here at work, not doing much.  I feel kind of bad because I feel like I'm wasting the University's money - I'm just reading recipes and stuff.  Not so connected to my job.  BUT at the same time, I don't feel awful because I told my boss a little bit ago that I was done with my work and needed a project to do.  So I'm doing my best to do work, and my boss knows that I'm not currently doing it... but still.

However, in this down time, I found a delicious recipe that I believe I will be trying SOON.  Homemade pop tarts.  But you don't only have to use them for unhealthy fillings! Turns out, Alton Brown has made something very similar on his show (called Pocket Pies) and the comments are full of ideas for different fillings!  Chocolate pudding, brown sugar filling, but also things like pizza, ground beef and potatoes, eggs and cheese, leftovers (kinda weird, but some leftovers would be good in a crust!), shredded pork, jam, fresh fruit filling, etc.  I'm thinking these would be SUPER tasty and hope to make some up soon.  I'll probably make a variety of kinds.  They seem like they'd be something that could be yummy to grab on the way out if I'm running late. Just keep them in the freezer, put a couple in the oven when I get up, and then Joel and I would both have breakfast ready. The egg kind sounds pretty good, I think.

Well, enjoy! I've spent a while reading about them and can't wait to try them.  I'll let you know how they turn out!

Let her plan dinner!

I just wanted to share the link to a blog that I have been LOVING!

http://letmeplandinner.blogspot.com/

The girl who writes it is a friend of my sister's, which is how I found out about the blog.  She cooks super delicious food, but she plans her meals according to what's on sale at the store, which is something I've been trying to get better at.  She posts about once a week - on Wednesdays, the day that most sales start.  She'll do a post for her meal plans (6 days/week + 1 leftovers), the ingredients in each meal, which ones she already has in her pantry and which she needs to buy (the shopping list!), and then she tells where she shopped that week and how much she paid for each item + the total shopping total for the ingredients + any other "stock-up" type foods she buys + the total cost for each meal.  Plus, she lives in my area, so she shops at the same stores I do (and therefore, has the same prices I do).  I LOVE IT!  It's been so helpful the last couple weeks.  I can hardly wait to see what she puts up tomorrow!