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I can never get my act together to send holiday cards in December, but somehow I managed to send some Halloween cards: The funny thing is that I was so excited to send these that all through the first half of October, I kept wondering if it was too soon and deciding it was. Then a week before Halloween, I remembered that I had forgotten all about them! Hopefully I got them all in the mail in time. Happy haunting! Halloween season calls for something dark, delicious, and maybe a little creepy:
I have made this chocolate cheesecake many times with great success, and I was itching to play with the recipe a little. What I did was blend the non-chocolate ingredients of the filling, divide it in half, flavor the halves separately, and then layer them over the crust. I used just over two tablespoons of organic matcha, smelling and tasting as I went. Once it baked, the sugar sort of overpowered the matcha, so next time I’ll try at least three. I’d almost rather go too bitter than come up short again because the chocolate should balance it. That’s my theory, anyway. The chocolate wafers in the crust recipe, by the way, are these. If you’ve never used them, they’re often found in the ice cream section, with the cones and sauces. I bought a package and somebody ate most of them, leaving me less than I needed for the cheesecake. Our grocery store hasn’t gotten a new delivery of these wafers in weeks, so I scraped and crushed some Oreos to substitute. Let me tell you: maybe don’t do that. It tastes delicious, but there was some unusual dripping out of the bottom of the springform pan that I use for cheesecake, making a smoky mess in the bottom of the oven. I’m just glad it didn’t drip into the homemade mac & cheese that I was cooking below! The sugar skull is by Wilton and came in a pack of a dozen. They looked so cute all around the perimeter of the cake, but I was too impatient with the ganache and it came out a little ugly, so no photo. Maybe next year! Last week there was a question about whether one of our speakers would be speaking this week. I volunteered to take her place and give my first speech, but then toward the end of the week it looked like she was back on, so I didn’t work on what I had written at all. Well, at the eleventh hour today, it was determined that I would speak after all! I made some quick edits and practiced all the way home from work, in front of the cat, and then all the way to the meeting. And guess what?
Taking a chance paid off! Except my speech was about being an introvert, and now the other members don’t believe I am one. I told them I only ‘turn it on’ for interviews and presentations! Confession: I sort of bribed the jury.
The green ones are ginger-lime, from this recipe. The white ones are pumpkin with cream cheese frosting, from here. I highly recommend both. I didn’t really do this to bribe the jury — I didn’t even think I would be speaking when I made these! The truth is that I went a little crazy in the Halloween/baking section at Michael’s last month, which pretty much meant I would be baking a whole lot of cupcakes and mini-cupcakes for Halloween. Tomorrow night I will frost the ones that I’m dropping off at the kennel on Thursday. The staff there is awesome and I like to treat them once in a while. Who is on your ‘treat’ list this year? What about tricks? I’m SO full right now, because of this:
Ms. Childfree Chic highlighted the recipe on her own blog recently, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before Mark and I were eating it! The recipe itself is here. As usual, I made a few modifications. One thing I really like about this soup a the lack of vegetables that I have to work around. I actually like carrots, even though I blended them in the lentil & sausage soup. The only ingredient that gave me pause in this recipe was the onion. So I blended it! Problem solved. And even though I don’t like to see vegetables floating around in my soup, I do like to see herbs floating around, so I added about half a teaspoon each of dried marjoram, basil, and parsley. I could have added more and it still would have been good. Mark and I were talking last night about people who think they can’t cook. I think a lot of people are under the impression they will ruin a recipe if they don’t follow it exactly, but that’s not necessarily true, especially for a soup. I used a little more beef than the recipe called for. It also called for three carrots, which I find silly, so I bought a bag of petite carrots, chopped them down to smaller pieces, and used all of them. I added potato chunks until they seemed about equal with the carrots. The last thing I did was double the broth so it would cover the ingredients — that was important because of the most substantial modification I made. I just wasn’t up for all the steps in the recipe, so I reduced it to two: chop the things that need chopping, then dump everything into a crockpot. I let it cook on low for about 6.5 hours, and the beef was so tender it was falling apart. You just can’t mess up crockpot cooking. Actually, you can, and I did once — but I’ll tell you about that another time! My second-favorite thing about the State Fair of Texas was livestock, up close and personal. We started petting some sheep, and this one wouldn’t let Mark stop:
Every time he tried to stop, it would nudge his hand to continue. How can you not love that? These snuggie-wearing sheep reminded me of Sweet Pea:
Separated at birth, yes/no? By the way, in case you’re wondering:
Next my mom and I rubbed shoulders with a champion (more like our shoulders, his butt):
Then it was on to the bunnies. Is there anything quite as sweet as a bunny face? Unlikely.
Granted, some bunnies are sweeter than others.
One last bunny to fulfill your Thursday cute quota:
Have a great weekend! Quick, what’s the difference between these two types of cat food?
Trick question — they’re the same food. The plate on the right has already been picked over. Sweet Pea won’t eat the rectangles. Sometimes she pushes them right off the plate. At the moment she is a little peeved that we put them in a bowl before we went to Dallas for the night, so she is having a harder time eating around the rectangles. When we come home from work, she acts like she’s starving despite a whole mess of food. I stir it up and she’s fine for a while. I’m glad we didn’t buy a huge bag of this stuff, since we won’t be buying it again! As for toast, or Toastmasters to be more precise, tonight I picked up my second ‘Best Table Topics’ ribbon to go with the one I was awarded last week. The topic was my first cell phone. I talked about the giant, grey brick of a phone that I used to call my mother when my car died on a busy road in a rainstorm, and I had just enough momentum to glide into the driveway of a very shady house. The very shady, but very nice inhabitants came out and actually got my car started again, by which time my mother arrived to follow me home. The people from that house also offered to follow us home, but we declined. By ‘they,’ I mean ‘we.’ We met my parents in Dallas yesterday for the Texas State Fair, the USA’s official proving grounds for all manner of fried foods. Did you know that there are people in this country who spend a couple months a year frying fair food, and make enough money that they spend the rest of the year thinking up new things to fry? (If you don’t believe me, you would if you had seen the line at the tent selling fried butter, the one thing I would really have liked to try but didn’t.) If that’s not the American dream, then I don’t know what is. A sampling of the things consumed by our party, starting with my holy grail, the fried s’mores pop-tart (the funnel fries were conveniently offered at the same stand):
I consider myself something of a pop-tart connoisseur in the way Imelda Marcos is a connoisseur of shoes, or Elizabeth Taylor is a connoisseur of husbands. As such I eagerly awaited this treat, and it did not disappoint. I hope it shows up at the Houston Rodeo this year! I was on the hunt for fried sweets, so I left the fried frito pie and fried broccoli to the others:
I did make an exception for chicken-fried bacon, because bacon is meat candy. The stuff at the fair was far better than what we got at the rodeo a couple years back:
I didn’t try the dipped cheesecake, but it looked good enough that I may have some at the rodeo this spring:
The one thing I tried but couldn’t finish was the fried gummy worms. They were like mini-churros with a hot, liquid candy center — delicious, but overwhelming:
Other fried items seen but not eaten: fried cookie dough (I was going to have some, but it was at the same place as the fried butter and I didn’t want to wait in that huge line), fried lattes, fried margaritas, fried grilled cheese, fried Texas caviar (black-eyed peas), fried club salad. I read that there was also fried beer and fried chocolate, but I didn’t see those. After eating our way through the fair, would you believe that we went back to our hotel and ate? Last night I represented my alma mater in a college fair at a local high school. It’s hard to spread brotherly love in a town dominated by the Longhorns vs. Aggies rivalry (with an honorable mention for the Sooners). I couldn’t even give away all of my pens!
Oh well, more pens for me. A couple more college fairs and I should never have to buy a pen again. The funniest thing is that I ran into a woman from Toastmasters! She’s the only member newer than me, and she happens to be a dean at that high school. I took the opportunity to ask whether there was someplace I could donate my extra literature after the fair. The guy who later received it in the library didn’t seem completely convinced that I’d gotten someone’s blessing, but it didn’t matter once I was out the door and beating feet across the parking lot, fifteen pounds of brochures lighter! Even though it’s been in the upper 80s here in Houston, I am DYING to start wearing my fall clothes. It’s just not cool enough, so instead I’m starting my celebration of fall with homemade soup! I have been craving the lentil and sausage soup that they serve at Carraba’s. That soup is amazing, and there are tons of recipes to be found online so you can make your own version at home. But the thing is that they all have chunks of vegetables in them. I really hate the texture of most cooked-down veggies. So I picked a recipe and fixed it. Any cook can tell you how essential mirepoix is, but what if you hate chunks? Or chopping? I’d have carpal tunnel before I got everything chopped to an acceptable size where it wouldn’t squick me. The answer: blend it! I threw the zucchini in there because I knew I wouldn’t want to eat that, either. I ran out of room for the onions on the first pass:
So I added them for the second:
That’s a double batch of mirepoix, because the recipe only called for two stalks of celery and I didn’t want a bunch of celery rotting in the fridge. The bag of carrots had a little more than I needed for two batches, so I used them all. I really don’t think you could mess this up, since it’s just the base.
I put half in a freezable storage container for the next time I want to make soup:
I don’t think it will be in the freezer for long, though, because Mark went wild over this soup. It really is delicious! As for recipe tweaks, there are no measurements given for the spices, so I used a teaspoon of each and added rosemary. I think it worked great. You’ll want a lot more than a teaspoon of the red pepper if you want it to be spicy, though. I bought a 1.2-lb package of sausage, which is more than the recipe calls for, but if you love sausage like we do, go for two packages. You won’t be sorry!
The best part is that I made the mirepoix a day ahead, so making the soup was super-easy. Another tip: brown the sausage in the soup pot (before you add the other ingredients) so you don’t lose any fat. Fat = flavor! In other news, I brought this home tonight from Toastmasters:
My question was about my biggest challenge. I talked about trying to fit into my current work environment, which values quite different things than my previous place of employment. Guess a few people could relate!
Six hours of driving, 28 hours in Austin, and too much fun and food to quantify. That pretty much sums up my weekend. We saw (dog tutus!), we ate, we shopped, and we ate some more. I was so full after my [second] breakfast today that had to take a quick nap before I drove home to Houston. We have another eatapalooza on tap for next weekend, but in a different city. (Foreshadowing!) Until then: vegetables. Well, and the cupcakes I brought home. ;) |
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