Tag Archives: yummy

Guess Who Has A Menu Planned?

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I finally planned a menu for NaNo!  I guess this goal of cooking new things every month actually came in handy in that I put some thought into what I wanted to cook next month.

I’ve decided I’ll my using my Crock-Pot next month!  It’ll be easy: just prep everything the night before, put everything in according to the recipe, and a few hours later, I’ll have food!  I have a few recipes for tofu bookmarked, and a few soup recipes that are also bookmarked.

I decided to abandon my idea of cooking everything this month, freezing it, and then thawing it out as needed in November.  I came across this blog a while ago where the blogger used her slow cooker everyday for a year, and figured that NaNo would be a really good time to actually use my slow cooker.  And the less time I have to worry about food and cooking, the more time I have to procrastinate!

I still have no idea about snacks, especially since I ate some of the snacks I got at the grocery store.  But it’ll be the typical snack stuff: pretzels, maybe some cookies or fruit snacks, popcorn and those fruit cereal bar things.  Some sort of snack-y dessert, like cookies or brownies.  Or other bars.  Cake balls!  Or cake pops.

As for drinks…water.  Hot chocolate and apple cider!  Any drink I can make in the slow-cooker.  And no NaNo is complete without my beloved COFFEE!  Well, caffeine in general…but it’s pretty hard to compete with coffee.

I definitely want to make pumpkin pie…completely from scratch!  It’ll be a good way to procrastinate on my writing.  It’ll be a good break from writing, like when I’m switching from one novel to the other.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I’ll be procastinating like it’s going out of style.  Back to food, though, I have nothing else to add!

Have a great day, and I’ll be back tomorrow with a post about my NaNo Survival Kit.

Baking: From My Home To Yours

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Book: Baking: From My Home To Yours by Dorie Greenspan

Pages/Format: 514/Hardcover

What I Thought: I kept hearing about this book on different food blogs I follow, including Tuesdays With Dorie, and I figured I might as well check it out from the library.

I loved the random tips scattered throughout the book, and in general, I liked how the the book was organized.  There was a breakfast sweets section, cookies, cakes, spoon desserts, and a few other sections I’m forgetting.  The only issue I had with the organization of the book was that each section had different subdivisions.  Like, the cookie section had one part for bars, and two different sections for cookies.  Actually, a better table of contents would have been helpful.  At the very least, each section could have had a listing of the different categories.

Another issue I had was her usage of the chocolate baking bars instead of cocoa powder and/or chocolate chips.  There’s nothing wrong with the bars, but spending a few minutes chopping up chocolate when I can just use a bag of chocolate chips?  Really?  Granted, she does offer chocolate chips as an option for some of the recipes, but why would I want to buy 12 ounces of chocolate (in bar form) when I can get the same amount in chocolate chips for the price of one bar?  I think she said that the quality of chocolate chips isn’t very good, which is why she prefers to use bars, but I haven’t noticed any difference between the 2.

Like I said a couple paragraphs ago, there were random tips scattered throughout the book, and those were pretty helpful.  With a lot of the recipes, there were different variations you could do, and it had instructions for how to freeze and store the desserts.

Rating: 4 out of 5.  There were a lot of good recipes, but I felt like the table of contents could have been better.  The amlount of recipes and the sheer number of variations and add-ins were slightly overwhelming.

Still, I definitely want to get my own copy, because I loved it.

The Joy Of Cooking (The 75th Anniversary One)

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Book And Author: The Joy Of Cooking by Irma Rombauer, Marion rombauer Becker and Ethan Becker

Pages/Format: 1132/Hardcover

What I Thought: There were things I liked and didn’t like about this cookbook.

What didn’t I like?  For one, the length.  I get it’s meant to be the guide to cooking, but goodness!  It’s a long book, complete with a nutrition guide, a section for entertaining, a section of different menus, plus a bunch more at the end.  Examples of those include  keeping and storing food, canning, freezing, and knowing your ingredients.  Scattered throughout the book are little sections about stuff, like a section about tea, different kinds of pie, and different kinds of cakes.

The format of the recipes was odd, but something I could get used to.  Here’s the general idea of the format: ingredients, recipe, ingredients, recipe.  That’s how I tend to cook, so that’s why I could get used to it.  But at the same time, I’m slightly worried about skipping over something.  Another annoying (and very distracting) aspect of the format is the references to other pages.  Example: Pie.  The pie crusts have their own section, so you refer to that, and then proceed as normal for the rest of the recipe.  The cakes are a good example too, because the glazes and icings are in a different chapter.  Also, some recipes direct you to read different guides.  Example: some of the pie recipes direct you to read about fruit pies and rolling pastry dough.

Again, I get it’s supposed to be the ultimate guide to cooking or whatever, but found that going back and forth between two different pages distracting.  As for directing people to different things to read before making whatever recipe, it’s probably good for beginners, but for me, I found it distracting.  Had I moved away from the dessert section, and gone to make, say, pasta or soup, my opinion might be different.

So what did I actually like then?  There really are a lot of recipes- according to the front cover, 4500 of them!  This accounts for a good chunk of the length, and I do like that they’re thorough, and try to be somewhat definitive.  The few recipes I tried were really good, and I really did like how the recipes themselves were formatted.  Generally speaking, I liked how it was organized, but I felt like it could’ve been slightly better.  With multiple recipes on a page, I felt like they could have found a better way to make each recipe stand out.

Rating: 3 out of 5.  The recipes were good, but I found certain things to be really distracting, which downgraded the rating.

Everyday Italian

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Book: Everyday Italian by Giada De Laurentiis

Pages and Format: 255/Hardcover

My Thoughts: Since I checked this out from the library, I only had time to make a few of the recipes, all of which were really good!  Plus, there’s a few more I wanted to try, but I didn’t get the chance.  It’s definitely something I want to buy when I get the chance.  Or maybe I can just check it out from the librayr another time.  The recipes I did make were interesting: lots of fresh herbs and veggies!  I managed to not hurt myself while chopping the vegetables up, which is a miracle.  And washing/rinsing and then chopping them the second I got home from the grocery store is a really good idea!  It made everything go a lot faster knowing that everything was ready to go. 

Plus, I love the simplicity of the recipes: I did have some trouble finding some of the fresh herbs at the grocery store, but thankfully it was really easy to substitute them with the ones I could find. 

Rating: Based on the few things I managed to make, it gets a 4 out of 5.  I love the easy-to-follow recipes, and the layout of the book.

Food Update Plus Harry Potter!

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I didn’t cook nearly as much as I had hoped, but at least I made a couple things.

Brown Butter Blondies

I made Brown Butter Blondies, which I found over at My Baking Addiction.  They were pretty good, although I’m not the biggest fan of butterscotch.  It was also my first time making blondies, and I’m definitely making them again.  I don’t know if I’ll use this particular again soon, although I probably will just to get rid of the butterscotch chips.

Rotini With Salsa Di Limone

I also made Rotini with Salsa di Limone, which I found over at the food network.  I didn’t have any tomatoes, so I opted not to use them, but it still came out yummy.  I guess you can’t really call it Salsa di Limone, since there’s no tomatoes in it, but the oil and the cheese and the lemon made it yummy!  After spending some time recently watching the food network, I’ve decided that I like Giada.  I checked out a couple of her books from the library, and I’ll probably review those in the next few weeks.

And of course, I have to talk about Harry Potter!  I finally got my tickets for it- I had a slight change in plans for it though.  I was going to go with friends, but I waited too long to get tickets at the theater we were going to, so they sold out.  😦  But I still want to go at midnight, since it’s the last Harry Potter movie ever, and if there’s a good time to see a midnight movie for the first time, it’s going to be for Harry Potter!  So I’m going with my mom instead.  I’ll try and get some pictures.  At the very least, I’ll bribe my mom with cookies or something to get her to take a picture of me, because I’ll be going in costume!  I’m super excited!  So excited, in fact, that I may see it twice, which is something I so rarely do.

Today Is Going To Be A Cooking Day

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Yesterday, I decided that I needed to cook today.  I know I’m making brownies, and I have a few things I’m thinking about making.  Hopefully, they’ll turn out well.  The baking I did turned out really well, but as for the actual food…not so much.  I’ve been watching the food network over the last couple days, and it’s making me hungry!

I decided to check out a couple cookbooks from the library, which is something I thought I would never do.  Mainly because I don’t want to get anything on them…but at the same time, it’ll be a good way to test out cookbooks before I actually buy them.  And checking them out works just fine because I’m already starting to get bored with the cookbooks I already have.  Someday, I like to have a decent collection of cookbooks, and I’d like a few of them to focus on baking!  I definitely want the Bread Baker’s Apprentice and Baking: From My Home To Yours, and I definitely want to see what else is out there…and maybe I’ll find a few people that I love as much as I love Rachael Ray!

I think that’s it for now, so I’m off to bed!  I’ll share what happens with the whole cooking day sometime this week!

Adventures In Baking

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I made cheesecake squares and peanut butter snickers cookies yesterday.

I’m definitely branching out with the whole baking thing, and am not making my way through every chocolate chip cookie recipe under the sun.  If I make something that’s not cookies, it’s usually brownies.  I can’t remember the last time I made cookies, so I figured I go looking through some of my favorite food blogs and see if there was anything interesting…and found peanut butter snickers cookies over at the brown eyed baker.  They were pretty yummy if I do say so myself.

I also made cheesecake squares- I wanted cheesecake, but not an actual cheesecake, so I made cheesecake squares.  I’m not a big fan of making the crust- it was fine until I had to press it into the pan.  It was thinner in some places than in others, and I’m quite sure that it’s because I just put the crust into the pan and didn’t pay attention to the fact it should be relatively equal in the whole pan.  Other than that, they seemed to come out okay.  And it took about 10 minutes of crushing the graham crackers by hand to realize using the rolling pin would be a lot easier.  The only thing I didn’t like about the cheesecake squares was that they were a lot more lemon-y than I expected.  If I make them again, then I’ll definitely adjust the lemon juice and the lemon zest.

I think I’m going to start doing more muffins and quickbreads…that is a project for next month.  Or maybe this month.  I’ll see how fast the cookies and cheesecake squares go.