It’s been a long while since I’ve posted a new recipe! I’ve been vacationing in Hawaii celebrating one last big hurrah before baby comes!

One of my favorite local restaurants is Lettuce because I can order a HUGE salad heaped with fruits, veggies, cheese, and nuts and still leave feeling healthy with money in the bank. I love a great salad, but when it comes to chopping ingredients, I am super lazy. I tend to serve “greens with dressing” more often than not because the idea of pulling out a cutting board and chop, chop, chopping for the next 15 or 20 minutes just to make something that will be a side dish is incomprehensible.

The last time I went to Lettuce a girlfriend suggested that I try the half salad, half sandwich combo. She assured me I’d still get plenty of salad along with a hearty sandwich. I just had to be willing to take a leap of faith and try it. And so I did! I was served my usual salad with a side sandwich comprised of layers of prosciutto, fresh mozzarella, roasted peppers and fresh basil all on a thick, fluffy cloud of focaccia bread. Oh. My. Gosh. It was heaven. The sandwich/salad combo is now a new favorite and I decided to replicate the sandwich at home. This of course meant that I needed a decent focaccia recipe. I have a few favorite blogs that I use to find fail-proof recipes and one of those is Annie’s Eats. Her promise that this focaccia would bowl me over was not in vain. It really is amazing, even if you should get a doctor’s note before you can eat it.

I don’t often make fancy sandwiches for lunch but this was a special occasion. My dear friend Michelle spent 7 hours with me one Saturday painting the nursery and helping me register at Buy Buy Baby. I value time more than almost any other resource, so I wanted to make Michelle a lunch she wouldn’t soon forget. I re-created the salad/sandwich combo from Lettuce (yes! all that chopping!) and we feasted like kings… or, in my case, like a pregnant lady.

This focaccia is out of this world. It is absolutely worth the effort to make it. It is moist, delicious, and stunning both as a sandwich bread and as a bread for serving alongside a hearty soup. You won’t be disappointed.

Continue reading: herbed focaccia bread

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. )

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.

I have a confession to make: I did not make this bread. I had to commission my mom to do it for me. When I was assigned to Kate’s blog I was *super* excited. Kate has tons of amazing looking recipes with beautiful pictures and I immediately selected a few that I wanted to try. My intention was to prepare these recipes for a baby shower that I was hosting this weekend. Then I got *super* sick on Friday morning and ended up in the ER on Saturday for extreme dehydration. The doctors loaded me up on fluids and meds and told me to go home and rest. No baby shower. No cooking. No Food Babbles blog recipe. I was bummed. Not wanting to leave Kate orphaned, I texted my mom and asked her to do the baking honors for me. She agreed and then came over today to drop off this gorgeous Lemon Blueberry Loaf for me to taste and share with you! Three cheers to mom for helping me ensure that my Secret Recipe Club post came together just in time for the big reveal on Monday!

You might think that pita bread is difficult to make, but really, it’s super simple! Do you want to know how I know? I made the dough and left one of my high school students in charge of shaping the dough during an afternoon of baking. I figured that if a high school student who lives on Taco Bell and Gatorade can form delicious pita pockets, anyone can! And look at those big, pillowy puffs of bread! Perfect!

You can use this pita bread to make a pita-pocket sandwiches or simply tear off pieces of the pita bread and dip them in homemade hummus.

Continue reading: pita bread

There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that these biscuits are amazing. The bad news is that there’s a stick of butter in them, so your cardiologist isn’t likely going to recommend that you serve them with every meal. The good news is that they taste so good that you’ll *want* to serve them with every meal. Or is that bad news? Gosh, I’m confused.

These are so fluffy with their layers and layers of delicious pockets just screaming for you to fill them with a pat of cold butter. I love serving these biscuits along with my all-time-favorite minestrone. In that way, I feel like the healthiness of all those vegetables more than balances out a little bit of butter.

Worried about your waistline? If you are looking for a low-fat buttermilk biscuit, I have one for you here. You simply have to try to see beyond the absolutely awful photos. God bless 2009. It was a great year for everything except my photography skills. I love the lower fat biscuits as much as I love the high fat ones. That’s saying a lot because we all know how much I like my full-fat-junk-food. My friends rave about both recipes, so I recommend trying both and then deciding which you prefer!

First, let’s have a moment of silence while we all wipe the drool off of our chins. Done yet? Okay, me too.

Next, let’s consider how the original creator of this recipe gave something so divine looking such a completely un-divine name: “chocolate things.” No joke. That’s the official name. If I didn’t love chocolate more than almost anything, I may have skipped over the recipe altogether. I’m so glad I didn’t. This is a new favorite, and given that it is relatively easy to make, I would rate it 5 stars. All hail the chocolate things. Hip hip, hooray! Hip hip, hooray!

If you’re a bread maker, you should know that this dough is going to be very, very soft. At first, I figured I must have forgotten to add a cup of flour. I actually remeasured all the ingredients in separate bowls on a scale and compared that to my dough weight. Nope. The dough was right. It’s just a very, very buttery dough. Go with it. All that moistness translates into divine goodness after it’s baked!

When someone recommended I check out Nick Malgieri’s cookbook to get a recipe for chocolate cupcakes that surpasses all others, I had no idea that I would also find a host of other amazing recipes that I would come to love. Obviously, I love his cupcake recipe and his crescent roll recipe. Could his other recipes continue to impress? Today I did a “Nick Malgieri Bake-a-Thon” and made three more of his recipes. His dinner rolls and blueberry muffins turned out fabulously, so I am excited for the opportunity to share those with you!

These dinner rolls were super easy to make. I know some of you are intimidated by yeast. Fear not! This requires no kneading! Just toss the ingredients in a food processor, pour into a bowl, let rise and voila! It’s time to shape those rolls. If you don’t want to tie them in knots, just leave the balls of dough as spheres and they will still make very elegant dinner rolls. Serve slathered with a pad of cold butter and some of your favorite jam.

P.S. Who says you can’t serve these rolls as hamburger buns? Or cut them into slices for some decadent French toast? Or use them in any other number of ways instead of as dinner rolls? The sky is the limit!

I grew up eating crescent rolls out of a can. You know, the ones made by the company whose name rhymes with Phillsbury? Yup, those are the ones! And those are good, but nowadays they are a special treat because they are loaded with calories and a host of other unpronounceable ingredients. I wanted to make a dinner roll that was lighter in calories, tasted great, looked beautiful, and was easy to make so that I could share it with you. Let me introduce you to these wonderful low-fat, golden, light and airy dinner rolls. I think you’ll become fast friends.

crescent dinner rolls

As I already mentioned, my zucchini plant is smaller than most peoples’ zucchini fruits. I don’t know what happened to the garden bed where I planted all my squash. It’s like someone sprinkled Miracle-Gro’s evil twin sister on it. My parents’ 85 year old friend stopped by today remarking about how disappointed he was with his zucchini this year because he’s only gotten a few fruits. I showed him my 6-inch plant with all four of its leaves and he literally could not believe that it was really a zucchini and not some impostor. I think that in all 85 of his years, he’s never seen anything so preposterous. There you have it. I’m 28 and I’ve seen everything.

On the other hand, my other friends’ zucchini plants are producing more fruit than any sane person would know how to use, so I’ve become the universal zucchini deposit box. I now have more zucchini on my counter than I ever could have grown on my own and I’m searching for more and more creative ways to use it. I have made chocolate chip zucchini muffins before. I decided to try the same recipe in a loaf pan and was glad that it worked out perfectly.