french breakfast puffs

i was perusing AllRecipes.com for a simple dessert that i could bake up with whatever i had on hand. luckily i stumbled on something perfect…French Breakfast Puffs. i had everything i needed on hand..something simple and sugary, perfect for my sugar cravings! no, i didn’t have it for breakfast, instead i had it for dessert after i cooked up a lemon-garlic chicken recipe from the foodnetwork site. it was good, but not as impressive as those puffs! think next time i would let the chicken marinate in the lemon-garlic broth, because it was too subtle for my taste.

Lemon-Garlic Chicken served atop linguine noodles [noodles just tossed with butter, black pepper, and parsley flakes, simple yet delicious]. recipe from here

French Breakfast Puffs, recipe from here but here it is if you’re too lazy to go to the site! i just want everyone to see how simple it is, and try em out! you probably have everything you need on hand =] i didn’t have shortening on hand, but that was easily solved with an oil substitution.

INGREDIENTS

* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1/3 cup shortening
* 1 egg
* 1/2 cup milk
*
* 1/2 cup white sugar
* 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
* 6 tablespoons margarine, melted

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease 12 muffin cups or line cups with paper muffin liners.
2. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, cream together 1/2 cup sugar and shortening. Beat in egg. Stir flour mixture into shortening mixture alternately with milk. Beat well. Spoon batter into prepared muffin cups.
3. Bake in preheated oven for 20 to 25 minutes. While muffins are baking, combine 1/2 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon.
4. Remove muffins from oven and muffin pan. Immediately, dip the tops of the muffins into the melted margarine, then into the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Repeat with each muffin, until all muffin tops are covered. Serve warm.

the lone muffin in a bed of cinnamon sugar. mm mmmm.

the french breakfast puffs aren’t really very “puff-like” more like a little muffin is what they are. it’s not a light airy pastry, it has a breadier feel to it, but veryy good.

highly recommend!

been gone far too long

to all my 2 viewers, sorry i haven’t updated my blog in a couple months! it’s not that i haven’t been cooking or baking, i’ve just been either too lazy to update, or nothing was that noteworthy to blog. well tonight i think it’s blogworthy. tis the season where leaves begin to fall to the ground, where sweaters and boots are dawned, and where we just want some good comfort foods to soothe after a long day. it was a rainy day today here in the easy bay area of california. rained hard all day, and it was just the perfect day to have a nice big hearty bowl of chili (with cornbread of course!). chili is great. i have never made it prior to today, and i am extremely happy with the results.  i got the original recipe from here. i saw how the chili called for mesquite bbq sauce and my favorite…chocolate! i have heard of putting chocolate in chili, as well as other things such as beer and orange juice. i made the recipe into my own by adding half a bottle of New Blegium Hoptober beer, a splash of orange juice, and twice the amount of chocolate. the beer and chocolate really did make a huge difference. the orange juice, since it was so minimal didn’t do much, but i’m sure i will try it again in the future. the chili was not too spicy, but it left a good fire feeling in your mouth. and as for the cornbread, mmm, thats all i have to say.

pot o’ chili

cornbread

sprinkle that chili with some raw onion and shredded cheese mmm.

delicious, isn’t it? i was really disappointed i forgot to put the best garnish on top of the chili..avocado! since it goes great with everything. i bought avos just for this purpose! ah well.

anyhoo, here’s another comfort food that i cooked up a couple weeks ago, that i was too lazy to post.

country fried steak, onion roasted potatoes (and broccoli) =] . was mm mm good!
recipe from here

baked goodies and moroccon chicken goodness.

this week i realized how much food is apart of my life, and my passion for baking, cooking (and eating). i knew i always enjoyed doing it, but something really hit me this week, where i realized that this is what i love doing. i made use of the several times this week, and thought i was about to break my hand mixer (seeing that it’s my mom’s which she had since her wedding. 30 years old!) it’s probably time to invest in a good mixer, preferably the god of all mixers:

Someday :) Anyways. Here’s what went down in the kitchen this past week: better-than-brownies chocolate cookies. i found the recipe off on The Brown Eyed Baker’s blog, and they looked sooo good and chocolately and fudgey delicious that i had to try them. i did enjoy them, but they were a little too rich for my taste, since it was made with bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate, the chocolate flavor was intense. if i were to make them again, i would substitute some of the bittersweet chocolate with milk, just to lighten it up. but i do enjoy my share of dark chocolate every now and then :)

Better-than-Brownies Chocolate Cookies, recipe here

drench it in a glass of milk and it’s even better! milk is required to eat this cookies, they are far too rich to eat without!

next up: bread baking 101. I have Tosca Reno’s Eat Clean Diet Cookbook, which has a bunch of yummy looking healthy recipes, and the one I chose this week was just a simple Whole Wheat Bread. It turned out pretty decent, soft, whole wheaty, bready. I had a slice with nutella and oh my, nutella makes everything so freakin good.

serve atop with some fruit preserves, nutella, butter, peanut butter, or even make a turkey or vegetable sandwich with it. the good thing about it, its versatile.

then we have my first ever cheesecake, made specifically for National Cheesecake day which was yesterday, but I didn’t really get to enjoy it until today because I wanted to let it chill overnight, and I started baking it pretty late. instead of a simple new york cheesecake, I opted for something more, but not too crazy: banana cream cheesecake. i was going through my bookmark of blogs, searching each for the perfect cheesecake recipe when i found it. it was so simple, yet so good. who doesn’t love banana cream pie? and then cheesecake! well honestly, i’m not a hugeee cheesecake fan, but i do enjoy it every once in a while. my favorite being tony’s mother’s cheesecake, which is just so soft and cheesecakey goodness. yum! topped with strawberry preserves oooh yeah. well anyways, i attempted to bake my first cheesecake, this is where i thought my hand mixer was going to give out. it was overheating and it’s not as powerful as one would hope to blend together 4 boxes of cream cheese. yikes. but it definitely turned out good for being my first cheesecake. i know that in the future when i have made many more cheesecakes, they will just get better :)

unfortunately i didn’t have a springform pan to make the cheesecake with, and i didn’t want to purchase pie pans, so i just used a 9inch cake pan, which turned out to work just fine. i didn’t want to over fill the pan, and so i ended up having leftover crust pieces [made of nilla wafers! so good] and a good amount of extra batter. so i filled out 8 cupcake slots, and made cheesecake cupcakes too!

Banana Cream Cheesecake. recipe here

this picture does no justice to how it tastes.

how cute! topped with a nilla wafer and whipped cream, deelish!

lastly, is a recipe from August’s edition of the Rachael Ray magazine. there are a bunch of recipes in this issue that i want to try, but seeing that i had almost all of the ingredients for this dish was perfect. it’s a Moroccan Skillet Chicken with Pine Nut Couscous. and yes it tastes as good as it sounds:

i just love couscous. with pine nuts especially! the two just pair together perfectly, and it goes so well with this moroccan dish. it uses so many flavorful spices; sweet paprika, turmeric, coriander, cumin, and cinnamon! yum! and anything that adds green olives is okay in my book. and the lemon slices and lemon juice add a citrus-like and almost refreshing taste to it. i would definitely make it again in the future, especially since all you really need is the spices and you are set!

i don’t know if i am going to cook anything up today, but i’m probably going to take a pause from baking, seeing that my refrigerator is getting full!

stuffed portabello shrooms

portabello mushrooms have to be one of my top 5 favorite foods. i almost forgot that i had a few in the fridge, and wanted to use them up before they went bad. i saw a recipe for stuffed portabello mushrooms a while ago, and never got to doing it until tonight at about 10 o’clock at night. i used this recipe just as a base to see what types of flavors and stuff to add. i ended up using ground turkey because it was all i had on me, and it worked out just fine. i don’t usually measure things out when i’m cooking stuff off the top of my head, and like i mentioned, i didn’t use that exact recipe from the site. here’s what i did use:

3 portabello mushroom caps, stem and dark parts scooped out
1 lb ground turkey
a few strips of bacon chopped up
half of an onion chopped
few cloves of garlic chopped
about a tablespoon or more of tomato paste
a few sundried tomatoes chopped
a good tablespoon or more of herbs de provance
little bit of garlic salt
little bit of sea salt
little bit of ground black pepper
some leftover shredded 4 cheese mix
grated mozzarella cheese
evoo

prehead oven to 400 degrees
1) heat pan with some evoo, then toss in onions and garlic, til soft
2) add chopped up bacon and ground turkey til browned
3) add spices + sundried tomatoes
4) add tomato paste, mix around
5) take the meat mixture and add to the portabello mushroom caps
6) add the shredded/grated cheese atop meat
7) put in oven for about 15 minutes, til cheese is gooey and melty on top
8) ENJOY

i also cooked up some yummy garlic cheese wedges again, because they go so well with…everything! since tony loves them so much, i knew he would at least enjoy those, if not the mushrooms. but the good thing is he enjoyed the stuffed mushrooms as well =)

ground turkey + bacon stuffed portabello mushrooms

garlic cheese wedges

oh how i love garlic. used plenty of it for these dishes, and was inspired to do so because my sister in california went to the gilroy garlic festival (jealous!).  you can never have too much garlic in my opinion. =)

fried goodness.

today i really wanted to go to long john silver’s for a basket of fried goodness. i haven’t been there in ages. well, i was busy and it was crappy out, so i didn’t go. instead i decided to make my own fried goodness! i whipped out the last portabello mushroom i had, some button mushrooms, and my eggplant, and went to work. i realized i couldn’t just eat this fried goodness by itself, and had to have some mashed taters along with it! then i said to myself, “okay, you need to eat some vegetables along side this.” well instead of going with my first thought of frying up some kale, i decided to make a raw kale salad with avocado. then it hit me. bacon would make this meal the ultimate fried goodness meal. i haven’t eaten bacon in a whileee..and since i started eating meat again [not as much as i used to, but on occasion], i decided to whip out the bacon.

i found a recipe for “chicken fried portabello mushroom” a few months ago and never got to use it. i followed it loosely, and it’s from the food network site, found here

this definitely filled my fried food craving i had, and i don’t think i want to eat fried food for a while now. you know how its just so delicious while you eat it, but then afterwards you just feel like going for a really long run, but at the same time you wanna lay down [and of course, the bed always wins in this scenario].

when i was frying all this up, i realized i rarely ever fry when i cook, which is a really good thing, hah. but seriously, if you ever have a hankering for some fried mushrooms from brown’s chicken or something of the sort, fried vegetables are really easy to do. you basically just need eggs, flour, and seasonings…and the fried item of choice. and i just remembered the other day i was hankering for some brown’s chicken fried mushrooms baddd. who knew?! you could fry your own!

well here are the results of my fried-night [if it was friday,(fryday) i could make a funny, but its not.]

fried mushrooms + egg plant slices

serve that shit with some ranch! ha ha .

kale salad with mashed avocado and bacon.

[also contains evoo, lemon juice, sea salt, and pine nuts for some more crunch]
unfortunately, i think my kale was going bad, it was more bitter than usual. raw kale can be hard for people to eat, cause its not as “soft” as lettuce. but it tastes great blended up in smoothies! green smoothies mmm. you can hardly taste the greens. trust me. i usually drink them daily =] and after tonight, i think i shall just sip on them tomorrow to get rid of this terrible fried feeling. heh

fried eggplant

fried portabello shroom

cheesy bacon mash

i did add a little gravy to this, but not photograph it cause it looked awful, and honestly didn’t taste great, mainly cuz i was just making it out of head, and didn’t know what i was doing. haha. if you are going to serve this stuff with gravy, i suggest looking up a recipe, if you don’t already know how to make some. mine started off just tasting like flour and grease, but got a little better as i added some other stuff.