Two weeks since my last post. It’s not for lack of trying new recipes. I have tried several, and all have been major flops. There were “store bought cookies” that tasted nothing like the classics we grew up with. There were stews and muffins and biscuits and… well, the list is long and the results were depressing. I finally decided to go with a recipe that could not possibly fail: coffee cake, and a William Sonoma recipe to boot. And now look at me! I know it may seem absurd, but it’s February and here I am pulling out pumpkin show stoppers.  I was so nauseous all of November that I missed my pumpkin fix. After 17 looooong weeks into being pregnant, I am finally getting my appetite back. And so it’s time to pull out some of those recipes that I would have made back in autumn if I had not been so sick.

Continue reading: pumpkin streusel coffee cake

The reason I have been delinquent in posting for the last 4 months is that I am 4 months pregnant!  After two miscarriages last year, we are so thrilled to share this news. We cannot wait to meet our little guy (or girl!?!) and have our lives forever changed. In the meantime, all those pregnancy hormones have messed with my love for food. All I seem to eat these days is cereal. Life cereal. Raisin Bran. Cheerios. Frosted mini-wheats. I have a whole arsenal of cereals to eat because so far cereal has been the one thing guaranteed to taste good any time of day or night. Everything else has been hit or miss, and new recipes are *never* exciting these days. It’s challenging to blog about the new foods that I’m eating when those new foods are simply a new brand of cereal!

My appetite still isn’t what it was, but I did manage to eat some fish today, so that’s promising! While things are on the up-and-up, I’m back with a tweak on one of my favorite recipes: apple pie. I love making apple pie, but I love even more the idea of a personalized apple pie. Here I take my favorite apple pie recipe and cook it in small pots for individual servings. The best part? Layer the tops with cute cookie cutter shapes to match the seasons!

This recipe was originally posted in December 2009. I thought it needed an image makeover and the recipe is so amazing that I am re-posting it so that those of you who are new to the blog are aware of how important it is to make this. Immediately.

This aptly named dark chocolate mousse may be the death of you, but it’s oh, so worth it. I gave a dish to my mom yesterday to take home. She wrote me an email today asking me never to do that again. She takes one bite and then completely loses self control around this amazing dessert. And it’s no wonder. This recipe is from Cooks Illustrated – and boy do they know how to make a mean chocolate mousse.

Continue reading: death by chocolate mousse

Once in a while, I bake foods that I know that I won’t like. These lemon bars are among them. I just don’t love lemon enough to eat gobs of it in one dessert. A sprinkle of zest here or a dash of juice there is fine, but almost any food that is centered on lemons will not be on my top 10 list. Or even my top 20. That said, baking foods that I don’t like presents an interesting challenge: how do I judge if they are good? I have extremely high standards, so I wanted to know if these bars were worth blogging about. My friend Joy is a lemon-bar lover famous for her own lemon bar recipe. She says these are great, which means that if you like lemon bars, you’ll love these.

Continue reading: lemon bars

Happy New Year! I’m a bit late for this. My husband’s last days of Christmas vacation were Sunday and Monday and we spent as much time as possible frolicking and playing and very little time on the computer. It was a fabulous vacation full of games, parties, friends, food, and afternoons reading books in front of a roaring fire. Going back to work is a rough transition after 12 days off! We are adjusting… slowly…

The New Year is a time for making healthy food choices (even if we are only fooling ourselves for a few weeks!) and this bread is one of those. A third of the flour in this bread is whole wheat, providing a nutty healthiness. Yogurt is high in protein and calcium and here it makes a soft, pillowy bread that’s perfect for sandwiches or toast. I especially love it with butter and homemade jam. (I will talk more about homemade jam in the spring when strawberries are making their debut and again this summer when all the rest of my favorite fruits come into season. )

The first time that I made these and shared them with my foodie friend Jeremy, the first words out of his mouth after taking a bite were…well, unrepeatable here. But let’s just say that he thought these were amazing. I went to France last year and I can attest that these rivaled those decadent Parisian pastries. Perfectly flaky with a center strip of delicious dark chocolate…. oh, wow. The thought of them makes me want to sign off here and go whip up another batch.

Continue reading: chocolate croissants

This month for the Secret Recipe Club I was assigned Lindsay’s blog, Life and Kitchen. Lindsay has a host of recipes on her blog that range from sweet to savory and from simple to more complex. She shares stories about her family throughout her blog posts and the pictures of her daughter are adorable! It took me a bit to decide what to make this month, but when I saw these onion rings I knew they would be a winner. Any Cook’s Illustrated recipe repeated on Annie’s Eats is guaranteed to be a real winner, and these crunchy onion rings were no exception! I love that these onion rings aren’t quite baked and aren’t quite fried. The oils from the chips that are used in the crumb mixture combined with a thin veneer of oil in the bottom of a rimmed baking sheet are all that’s necessary to make a perfectly crunchy onion ring, without the hassle of deep frying.

Continue reading: oven fried onion rings (secret recipe club)

I found this recipe in The Cheeseboard Collective Cookbook and almost passed it up simply because it seems that everyone already has their favorite chocolate cake. I decided to try these cakes anyway and I’m so glad that I did! They are delicious! I absolutely loved them topped with sweetened whipped cream, drizzled with a homemade chocolate syrup, and sprinkled with cocoa nibs. Divine! I plan on submitting a recipe like this to the Scharffenberger Elevate a Classic Dessert Challenge. Maybe I’ll win $10,000!

This past week I finally bought the Cook’s Illustrated Cookbook that I’ve been reading so much about. I do not often use cookbooks since I get so much inspiration from blogs that I follow, but I figured that such a huge compilation would not steer me wrong. I was toying with several ideas of which recipe to make first and landed on this fried chicken recipe because, I kid you not, it had the word easier in it. Cook’s Illustrated is notorious for having complicated recipes and I was in the mood for something simple. If you have bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces, you are in luck because this recipe really is pretty simple. If you don’t have pieces, you can do what I did and cut a whole chicken into pieces. It isn’t as simple, but you end up with a chicken carcass that you can use to make some chicken stock.

The marinade makes the chicken so amazingly tender, and the batter is simply divine. Salty with a hint of spice and crunch and delicious! I could not get enough of this chicken! And it was so filling that we could have easily fed a party of six, which means I know what I am serving the next time I host a dinner party.

Continue reading: fried chicken

My mom is the bread baker in my family, so I usually leave all my bread requests up to her. It’s not that I can’t make bread. It’s just that she makes bread daily anyways, so why bother making my own when I can easily pop over to her house and grab a loaf that’s fresh from the oven? If I don’t eat it, her chickens will! That said, sometimes the aroma of warm, yeasty bread filling my home is too enticing to pass up, so I have a host of go-to recipes for those occasions. When I’m in the mood for an artisan bread that takes no time at all, I always go for the no knead bread. When I want something a little fancier, I bake some ciabatta. And when I want a sandwich bread, I have several loaves to pick from, including mom’s whole wheat bread and this delicious oatmeal honey sandwich bread.