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Monday, November 29, 2010

Four Cheese Ziti or Homemade Mac an' Cheese

The official title for this recipe from Cuisine at Home was Ziti with Four Cheeses but it is so easy to make and that sounds much too fancy, to me it felt a lot like mac and cheese just with different cheeses. This dish is amazing, kind of like something you would expect to get at a restaurant, but easy to make on your on stove at home.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Ricotta Cheesecake with Caramel Apple Sauce

Boy has been asking me to learn to make cheesecake for a long time now; so when I spotted this recipe browsing through Cuisine at Home I knew it would end up on our table pretty quickly. This recipe is amazing, and even if you don't like cheesecake you must try this caramel sauce poured over something, it really is to die for!

Friday, October 29, 2010

Meatballs from Cuisine at Home

These are a family favorite, and the good news is they are not challenging to make, it's a lot like making cookies! This recipe can be easily scaled up to fit your crowd, or your freezer, because they freeze quite nicely too! Nothing like homemade meatballs in your freezer ready to be pulled for any weeknight dinner! My experiment with this recipe was substituting wheat bran for 1/3 of the bread crumbs and nonfat milk rather than whole. Result: no impact on flavor, but I'm guessing there must be some improvement on the nutritional information. These are great with pasta, in submarine sandwiches and in soups!

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Butter and Sausage

Yes this recipe is a spinoff off last time's recipe. Again this is adapted from the year 2000 Sep/Oct issue of Cuisine at Home magazine. While we were eating this the first time, with no sausage or modifcations, Boy expressed that while he was willing to eat the recipe again he wasn't excited about eating the recipe again. So of course I asked what he thought would have made it tastier, he responded that bacon or sausage would improve it. So I turned right around and added some sausage to it! The following recipe is what I came up with, I used a chicken apple chardonnay sausage from Trader Joe's but fell free to use any mild chicken sausage you like.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Roasted Cauliflower with Mustard Butter

Today I am introducing you to my absolute most favorite cooking magazine, from which this recipe comes. This is from the 2000 Sep/Oct issue of Cuisine at Home. I love this magazine, the recipes are great, the pictures are both beautiful and informative as they often demonstrate at least a few steps of the recipe; and the articles that preface recipes are engaging. It is a joy to read, even when the recipe they are discussing is something I would never normally eat or make. As a result I own all of their issues for the first 12 years of publication and greatly enjoy going through them as the seasons change looking for seasonal recipes and new inspiration. Their roasted cauliflower with mustard butter recipe is a delicious side dish, but we used it as a filling vegetarian meal and loved it, although Boy thought it would be better with some meat in it as a main dish.

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Devil May Cry by Sherrilyn Kenyon Book Review

I found this book as an awesome bargain book at Dollar Tree, they had messed up on cutting the pages so couldn't sell it for full price I suppose but I could read it just fine. I really enjoyed this book as a pleasure reading book,

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Honey Vanilla Pear Cake


Have you ever bought pears from the grocery store? Then you’ll understand how you can completely forget about them ripening forever on your counter until suddenly they need to be used right now. Well using smitten kitchen's nectarine brown butter buckle as a starting point and with modifications from The Flavor Bible I ended up with this cake,

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Chocolate Zucchini Muffins from Closet Cooking’s recipe

I wasn't kidding about the giant zucchini last time, I used this recipe to use up the other half of the monster. Boy is big on all things chocolate and told a guest that they were brownies, so yes these are delicious! I again borrowed from Closet Cooking's solid recipe.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Blueberry Zucchini Muffins from Closet Cooking recipe


A coworker gifted me with a lovely homegrown zucchini from his garden, which was just a bit too big for eating straight in my opinion. So, I of course went looking for zucchini bread recipes and found this one on Closet Cooking.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Today’s Yard work Project - Planting Citrus Trees in Really Big Pots

I’ve had this crazy idea in my head for a while, that it would be really cool to have my very own fruit trees in my yard. Our backyard is not all that big and not much was done with it when we moved in; as in it’s mostly weeds. Perusing the gardening aisle at Home Depot I found these darling dwarf citrus trees.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Tomato Mozzarella Pesto Pasta Salad

For me dinner is often a combination of two challenges: 1. what in my fridge is perishable and in danger of not getting used? 2. How can I prepare a healthy dinner containing ingredients that won’t require an extra trip to the store?
This served quite well on achieved the objectives. The perishables involved were heirloom tomatoes from

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel Book Review:

While I found this in the historical fiction section, it felt more like a biography. My guess it that this is because the primary reference documents were letters, parts of which are printed directly into the text and so

Monday, September 13, 2010

World War Z by Max Brooks Book Review

When I first read the back of the book cover, I thought this would be a really scary book to read, you know, the kind that gives you nightmares?

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Plum Cobbler

After a surprise CSA box showed up at our house (I had suspended delivery for a few months and forgotten it was going to show up), I suddenly had a lot of produce to work through including 2 pounds of small mystery plums. And so I searched the internet for ideas on what to do with these and found a recipe for plum cobbler on Simply Recipes: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/plum_cobbler/

Sunday, August 29, 2010