I didn't actually make a food item

Hello,
So I didn't actually make anything that involves food or edible items, but, I did make another blog. YES! I made my I'm traveling to Europe blog and so I thought I would take the time to tell you about it. Or really, just link it here and tell you that not only will I be chronicling my adventures in Eastern Europe, but I will be eating a lot of Soviet style dishes which you might be interested to find out about. As a consolation, here is a picture of a Passover dinner I once made. Look at that traditional plate, mama would be proud!
Also, shameless, but please read both my blogs. I'm sure my roommates will be on top of things and update about their culinary marvels.
Love and goodbye for the next 2 months.
Nomad Wannabe

Warning: these are not your mom's regular chocolate chip cookies

So after being home from school for a week, I finally had a free day. What do I do on a free day you might ask? Bake! I know that my roommates have been waiting for me to make my first blog entry, so I decided that today would be the day.

As promised, I finally made these Nutella chocolate chip cookies. Of course my first blog entry had to include this chocolate-hazelnut goodness. I swear I eat so much of this stuff I would bleed out Nutella if I could.

My roommate sent me the link to this recipe about a month ago and since then I couldn’t stop thinking about these cookies. It was just a matter of time of when I was going to make them.

The preparation wasn’t difficult at all, just your average chocolate chip cookie recipe…or so I thought. When it came down to measuring and mixing in the Nutella, I really had to put some effort in it. (I was too lazy to get the mixer out). And measuring? What measuring? If I had it my way, I’d dump the whole jar in the bowl. I had to scoop the Nutella out of the jar to measure it out. In all honesty, it wasn’t a pretty site. There was chocolate spread everywhere. On the counter, on body parts, you get the idea. My least favorite part was waiting for the dough to chill. I’m a very impatient person and waiting around for dough is not fun.

The end product is all that mattered. The cookie looks and tastes absolutely delicious. It came out just as the recipe promised, slightly crispy on its edges, but moist and chocolately in the middle. I only wish my roommates (especially the other one who doesn’t eat gluten products) were here to enjoy them with me.

Happy eating!

I do love a good homemade buttercream.

As all two of our readers know, I gave up gluten for Passover (just run with me here) and have done my best to continue since then.  I used to bake something about once per week, but now that I've given up conventional flour, baking is hard. We had an unsuccessful attempt at making homemade pasta--mostly because the gluten free flour I bought tasted positively terrible. I still had a couple cups left, so last night (Friday, yeah, I know) I tried out a recipe for sugar cookie bars from my current favorite food blog.

The flour, I am happy to say, was not as bad in the cookies as it was in the pasta. I took my chances by not adding xanthan gum (since...I don't have any), but everything turned out well. The generous helping of buttercream on top covers up any lingering weird flavors from the flour.

They're not beautiful, but they're the tastiest* gluten free cookie bars I've ever made!

*and only

:)

Non-Sugary Items

Now that I am free of educational responsibility, it seems that my life is busier. How that works I cannot tell you, but I have no good excuses for my lack of food words. However, I think this recipe will make up for my absence, I'm almost positive actually. For some reason, even though no reason is really needed, I think that eggplant, mushrooms, onions, spinach, goat cheese, mozzarella, tomato paste, and orzo all go extremely well together, and if you don't think so, well, no one is forcing you to eat this. Everytime I have those ingredients lying around I make the same thing and I've slowly added more spices and tweaked the recipe as it tasted better and better. You might be doubtful, but try it once and you'll try it again. It's like pringles, but for dinner.
Also, I was snacking on some strawberries while making it, just because I could.


Anywho, here is what you need to know:
Ingredients:
1/4 cup orzo
2 tbsp tomato paste
3/4 cup chicken broth
1 cup spinach, fresh
1/2 medium eggplant, cubed
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 medium onion, diced
7-8 small button mushrooms, chopped
2 tbsp goat cheese
1 tbsp mozzarella
paprika, salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder to taste



Instructions:
1) In a skillet heat up some olive oil or canola oil (I like canola because my mama uses it). On low heat, saute onions and garlic, making sure onions are translucent and that the garlic doesn't burn.
2) Add the mushrooms and the eggplant to the skillet and on low-medium heat let cook until done (eggplant should be really soft and mushrooms should not be rubbery). Do not season until the vegetables are cooked (this I learned from the food network, more specifically dearest paula dean and all her butter-full dishes, yum!)
3) While the vegetables are cooking down, boil the chicken broth and add the orzo, let cook for 8-10 minutes until al dente and then drain. Put back into the pot and add the tomato paste. Put back on the stove on the lowest heat possible to keep it warm and to let some of the tomato paste rawness cook out. Add the spinach to the pot and put a lid on it. This will let the spinach passively cook with the steam from the orzo).



4) Season the vegetables with paprika, salt, pepper, onion powder and garlic powder to taste. Don't add too much salt because the goat cheese is pretty salty, ooooo how I love sodium.
5) Ok, now vegetables and orzo are both done, success! Let's combine them. Add the orzo/spinach mixture to the skillet with the vegetables and add the goat cheese and mozzarella.



6) Stir together and there you go. It's time to eat. YES!



I highly enjoy this meal and I hope you do too. If you're reading this, congrats! That means that I appreciate you. So thanks! And I know that we're supposed to start a bakery, but, again, I do like sodium full things. Maybe I can be the other half of paula dean. We can be butter and sodium, delicious.

what else do they add smell to?

Just stopping by to post a picture of the delightful breakfast I had...last Monday I believe? I am in love with fresh fruit, but I eat it so quickly that I never have any left to enjoy for the rest of the week! We're taking our weekly food shopping trip tomorrow, so rest assured, I will have fruit with every meal until it's gone (which will probably be Wednesday evening).

Have a lovely Monday night!

Would you bankroll my muffin shop?

Because we've been in school since January 4th and will not be done with academic classes until June 4, the lovely higher-ups at the SON gave us today off. I took that very liberally and decided not to deal with anything school related for the entire day. I now have at least 30 emails in my inbox that I must attend to related to the two group projects I'm involved with, but first things first!

NW and I have lived here for a year now. Our third roommate moved in last August. We've probably eaten about 10 meals together, total, including holidays like Easter and Thanksgiving. This blog has brought us to the table once again--tonight we collaborated to make a fancy dinner that none of us had eaten before--homemade (gluten free) ravioli filled with ricotta with pumpkin sauce.

The pasta making:

Not gonna lie, this ravioli did not turn out great. I think it would have tasted wonderful if we had used regular flour, but I am adamant about staying with this gluten free thing. My roommates suffered for me. Thanks guys!

We got the dough recipe from this arugula and goat cheese ravioli. It really may be good, I don't know. Someone try it with real flour? 

The filling turned out just fine--we mixed some spices into ricotta and then brushed the dough with egg wash to make the two sides stick together.

The best part of the meal, by far, was the pumpkin sauce. It sounds crazy, but it was delicious!

We nixed the nutmeg and substituted milk for cream (it didn't seem worth it to buy a carton of heavy cream for three measly tablespoons). I didn't get a shot of the sauce on the ravioli, but let me just inform you that NW was eating the sauce with a spoon straight from the pot. That good.

In conclusion, if this blog does nothing else for us, at least we got one more night of cooking together before roomie #3 goes home for the summer. :)

Secret Ingredient Bake-off

I skipped out on the middle of my public health class, but have to go back for the end. I’m currently sitting on the floor outside the classroom waiting for a break in the lecture so I can sneak back in. While I wait, a story!

Senior year of college, fall semester. The residence hall NW and I lived in hosted a secret-ingredient competition that involved baking. We entered, and drew the ingredient…cream cheese. Both of us hate cream cheese in our desserts, so we were disappointed, to say the least. We only had two hours to come up with the final product, so we quickly scoured the web for something to pull together with our unfavorable ingredient. We came across a recipe for pate a choux, passed over it, and tried to find something else. I mean, French pastry? For the first time, in a competition? It couldn’t turn out well. We almost decided on cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing, but at the last minute decided to go all out with the pate a choux.

We sifted, we mixed, we piped, we flattened out the peaks in the dough with our fingers, we baked…and the dough rose beautifully. There was a gorgeous cavern in the middle of the dough for us to fill with cream cheese pudding that we made. We put the pudding in a Ziploc bag and squeezed it into the dough. We melted chocolate and cream to make a ganache. We threw together a raspberry coulis. We added fresh berries to the plate. And voila!

In the end, we got second place (and never received the Shaws gift card we were promised!) due to having boring plating. The winners made some delicious apple cupcakes with really cute decorations made of caramel pieces, but we still think ours tasted better and took more skill to make. Hopefully we’ll have more competitions like that in the future. Maybe…a throwdown?!