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By Amber, on March 21, 2010, at 10:00 pm Sunday is smoothie night, and here’s what we’re drinking:
 We don’t measure anything, but here’s what’s in it: a quarter of a very large papaya (skin on if your blender can handle it), a couple cups of pineapple, a banana, a couple cups of milk, about a quarter bag of fresh spinach that was on its way to being not-so-fresh, a large squeeze of agave nectar, and a man-sized double handful of ice. We were going to add mango, but ran out of room in the blender because of all that darn spinach. The result tasted slightly leafier than previous smoothies, but still tasted and smelled sweet and delicious.
I go straight to the gym in the mornings and get ready for work there, so I’ve been freezing a bottle full of smoothie and leaving it in my trunk during my workout. By the time I get to the office a couple hours later, it is about 2/3 slushy and 1/3 frozen (I expect that it will all melt once we get into Houston summer weather!). I consume it with a handful of nuts for protein and healthy fat. Here’s one ready to go from the smoothie I made for breakfast Saturday:
 That mix was a quarter of a papaya, a mango, a banana, about a cup and a half of pineapple, a little less than a cup of milk, and a few handfuls of ice. It was so good that I didn’t even add sweetener!
By Amber, on March 16, 2010, at 10:00 pm I love nail polish, but I can’t be trusted not to mess up painted fingernails immediately, which is why I usually just do my toes — I don’t write or cook with them (aren’t you glad to know you can safely accept a dinner invitation from me?) and nobody gets close enough to notice a dent or a smudge. Or sheet imprints. How do I always get sheet imprints on my nails, hours after I’ve painted them?
For the last year I’ve used a quick-dry oil on the occasions that I wanted to paint my fingernails, and it worked pretty well, but I still had to sit around with my hands in the air for a while afterward to keep from denting the polish. Plus my topcoat kept getting destroyed by my daily sunblock, which really makes all the effort seem pointless. When I ran out of the quick-dry oil, I decided to try a quick-dry topcoat that I found at the grocery store:
 So I gather from the label that this stuff has been around a while and I may be the last person to know about it, but it is my new favorite thing. It was inexpensive, it dries ridiculously fast and hard, and so far it seems immune to my sunblock. I’m so excited to finally be able to enjoy nail polish that I have to keep myself from running out and buying ten new colors!
By Amber, on March 14, 2010, at 10:05 pm I thought I could never love another kitchen appliance as much as I love my KitchenAid mixer. Until we got a blender.
I don’t like fruit, but I like fruit-flavored things, and I like shakes, so we figured this was a good way to add healthy things to our diet. Especially Sunday nights, after we spend the entire afternoon moaning that we’ll never be hungry again and force ourselves to unenthusiastically eat something before bed just so we don’t wake up ravenous.
You should see the recipe book that came with this sucker. Apparently you can make ANYTHING. Like bread dough. Or peanut butter. Or soup — blend long enough and it heats up! You can throw anything in there. It’s like a home version of Will It Blend?
Today we went a little crazy at the farmer’s market and brought home a ton of produce for the blender’s maiden voyage. We didn’t use a recipe, just put a little of this and that in and blended away: grapes, a tangelo, a carrot, kiwis, spinach, strawberries, a banana, Greek yogurt, raw honey, agave nectar. The result tasted pretty good, looked a little worse, and smelled awful. I’m not writing this recipe down for posterity, but I’m pretty excited to see what else we can make.
 Just no yogurt next time. I hate the smell of yogurt, why did that sound like a good idea? :)
By Amber, on March 7, 2010, at 10:00 pm Pork and barbecue sauce were made for each other, but we don’t have a grill or a smoker yet, so we usually get our fix at Beaver’s. Lately we’ve been slow-cooking pork at home and now it’s all I can think about.
I have used my mother’s country-style ribs recipe in the past, but it can be hard to find that cut of pork. I recently learned that they’re not ribs at all, but shoulder portions cut into rib-like shapes. Pork shoulder is sometimes labeled ‘Boston butt.’ I don’t know why they have to make this so complicated, but now I know what to look for.
This is one of the easiest things we make, and it feeds us hearty portions for two nights. Everything is cheap — a 4-5 lb pork shoulder is about $8, two nights’ worth of green beans are about $4, a large sweet onion is no more than $2, and you can go cheap or gourmet with the barbecue sauce. We also like to buy a loaf of fresh rosemary sourdough ($2.50) and eat it over the two nights. Best of all, you get to eat in your pajamas.
So here we go: slice a sweet onion and line the bottom of the crock with it. Rub the pork shoulder with salt and pepper, and set it on top of the onion. Pour your sauce of choice on top, and cook on low for 8 hours. It’s easiest to serve with tongs, since it will be falling apart. Pour some more sauce on your portion. We put the leftovers in foil and reheat them the next night (with a little more sauce) at 350 for about 45 minutes, and cook the rest of the beans.
Try it and see what you think!
By Amber, on February 11, 2010, at 10:00 pm I like to cut as many corners on this as I can — that’s what makes it easy:
For a fairly small time and energy investment, I can get two or three dinners and maybe a lunch or two out of this meal.
The fresh ingredients are 1-1.5 lbs of thin-sliced beef (I buy it pre-cut into strips and marked ‘for stir-fry’), a bag of carrot chips, roughly half a pound of either snow peas or snap peas (I like snap peas better), five or six jumbo white mushrooms (or a comparable amount of your favorite mushroom), and a few big cloves of garlic (or more if you really love garlic).
On the nights that I make this, the first thing I do when I get home from work is marinate the meat with lots of soy sauce, a good-sized splash of red wine (any cheap red wine is fine — even cooking wine is good enough), and plenty of powdered garlic and powdered ginger. I stir it all up to make sure it’s coated and add more of the garlic and ginger powders, then stir it up again and maybe add even more. I cover that and put it in the fridge, then take a nap (see, I told you this was easy).
When it’s time to cook, start the rice, or get your spouse to start it because you had a rice cooker when you were single and now you suck at making rice. While that’s cooking, rinse your peas and chop your mushrooms and garlic.
You’ll need some tongs, and a spatula for stirring. Put some oil into the wok and it turn it to med-high/high. I like canola or coconut oil. Coconut oil is good for you and adds a nice dimension to anything you cook in it (I say this as someone who won’t touch shredded coconut, so if you think you’re a coconut hater but you like the smell, try the oil). Add the beef and its juices, then pull all the pieces of meat out when they have cooked and set them aside in a dish. At this point, add the garlic and let it brown a little, then add the carrot chips.
The carrot chips take a while — I usually let them cook seven minutes until they’re just al dente. Add the mushrooms and peas, mix them well to get the mushrooms coated in the juices that are at the bottom of the wok, and let that cook for about two minutes, stirring occasionally. Finally, add the cooked meat back in (along with the juices that have leaked out), mix it well, and serve it up on the rice. Dig down to the bottom of the wok with a spoon and drizzle some of the juices over each serving.
If you try this, I’d love to hear how it turned out!
By Amber, on January 17, 2010, at 10:00 pm We call these ‘cornbread cookies.’ There are no corn products in them.
My mother used to make these every year at Christmas when I was little, and she’d glaze and top them with red and green decorator’s sugar. The recipe yield is 90-100 cookies, more than our family could eat over one holiday, so she would store some unfrosted cookies in the freezer. When I got older and lived on my own, she’d send me back to New Jersey after the holidays with a freezer bag or two of my own stash.
I had a bag that lingered long-forgotten in my freezer (I’m talking a year or more), and Mark found them one day when I was out. That evening he told me he had eaten some cornbread that was in the freezer. I was pretty certain I didn’t have any cornbread, and he was pretty certain he knew better since he’d eaten it. Thus, these will forever be known as ‘cornbread cookies,’ although I really don’t think they taste anything like cornbread.
What they do taste like is moist, dense deliciousness, thanks to the Ricotta cheese. They’re still amazing months (or years) after you’ve put them in the freezer and forgotten that they’re there.
Italian biscuits:
Cream well:
-1/2 lb butter
-2 cups sugar
Add 3 eggs and beat well.
Add:
-1 lb Ricotta cheese
-2 tsp vanilla
-4 cups flour
-1 tsp baking soda
-1 tsp salt
Drop by small teaspoons onto greased cookies sheet. Bake 10-15 minutes at 350 F. When cool, can be iced and dipped in sprinkles.
Icing: confectioner’s sugar and milk to make a glue-like mixture. Almond or anise flavoring can be added to icing.
So that’s one of my childhood favorites. I substituted half vanilla, half Fiori di Sicilia to give them a little citrus kick. It probably should have been more like 3/4:1/4 because the Fiori di Sicilia is very strong, but there haven’t been any complaints around here. I also made them more like large tablespoons of batter and extended the baking time because I really didn’t want to make 100. I ended up with about three dozen, and obviously I was too lazy to make frosting of any sort. Two days later, I think we may be down to our last dozen.
By Amber, on December 29, 2009, at 10:07 pm So that chocolate shortbread that I messed up? I kept the dough because I hate to waste good ingredients, and I found the perfect use for it.
First, press the dough into the bottom of ramekins, not too much thicker than the cookies you meant to make:
Next, bake it the same way you would the cookies:
Finally, top with ice cream. I used eggnog ice cream because the smooth sweetness perfectly balances the salty, very dark chocolate dough:
I served this fresh out of the oven to our guests, and no joke, they were still raving about it the next day. I’m pretty sure this mistake will be requested again in the near future!
By Amber, on December 22, 2009, at 9:17 pm I was excited to share this recipe because it is so easy and so tasty:
What you can’t see is that I completely screwed up and you can hardly pick those up without them falling apart. It seems that when you double a recipe, you should double all of the ingredients. Whoops. But let’s not talk about what I did there. Anyway, I tried again and got them right:
 For the vet’s office!
The recipe is here. I first made these a couple Christmases ago and they’ve been a household favorite ever since. The cats look cute, right? But take my advice: it’s not worth it to try to get fancy with the cookie cutters on shortbread cookies because all of that butter makes them crumble, and half of the cats ended up Manx. Nothing says ‘Happy Holidays’ like mutilated cookies!
Yesterday I finished distributing my holiday baking gifts around town. Now I can get down to the business of baking for our soon-to-arrive guests!
By Amber, on December 20, 2009, at 10:45 pm That’s not hyperbole, look at how dark these are:
 Like many of my favorite baked goods recipes, I found this one in a King Arthur e-newsletter. If you like baking, you should subscribe. Anyway, these brownies have a nice balance of sugar and dark chocolate, and they hit that sweet spot between cake and fudge. They really don’t even take that much longer than a mix, but they’re ten times better. These are way too good for a school bake sale.
The recipe is here. I can’t stress this part enough: the key is using double-dutch dark cocoa, which is a blend of regular Dutch-process and black cocoa. I first ordered it because I couldn’t find Dutch-process cocoa in stock at any local grocer. This blend sounded intriguing, and now I won’t use anything else if I can help it. Normally I love playing around with brownie ingredients, but these are so good that I haven’t been able to bring myself to change anything about the recipe since I got it in February!
By Amber, on December 17, 2009, at 11:16 pm You can eat it in the ramekin:
 or out:
 With an eggnog ice cream chapeau!
We’ll have family visiting for the holidays and I have this dessert extravaganza planned, but I had never made molten cakes so I wanted to do a test run. I looked at a bunch of recipes and chose this one because it looked like one of the least complicated. It turned out to be one of the easier desserts that I’ve ever made. I used Ghirardelli 72% cacao baking chocolate and just estimated 6 oz from the 10 oz bag.
The only surprise was the cooking time. I placed the ramekins on a small cookie sheet so I would be able to get them out of the oven without burning myself or dropping them, and I had to keep extending the cooking time until the tops looked done enough at 20 minutes.
The recipe fills four 8-oz ramekins, so I baked two right away and put the others in the fridge overnight. I baked them tonight (for science!) and they were every bit as good as last night. Mark thought they were better, but I’m pretty sure that was a result of all-day anticipation! I’ll definitely be making these ahead of time so I can just pop them in the oven after dinner when we have company.
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