I love my mom’s potato salad, but it takes several hours to make and sometimes I don’t have that much time (or energy! phew…. this pregnancy stuff is draining!). I came across this potato salad recipe eons ago on Brown Eyed Baker and its simplicity intrigued me. I have made it twice in three weeks, which is not something that I generally do. Because it is so easy to make, so tasty, and it goes well with so many main courses, this will be a mainstay in our house. Best part? No potato peeling required! Yahoo!

Continue reading: herbed vinaigrette potato salad

When my husband decided at the last minute to go out for Vietnamese food for dinner, I decided to treat myself to a special meal including recipes that I knew that Brant might snub. Brant is skeptical of most biscuit recipes except this one, so I took advantage of his absence to make these white cheddar biscuits. Oh, and how delicious they were! My dad stopped by the next evening and I toasted one for him and covered it with slabs of butter. He devoured it it in no time… and then asked for a second one!

These aren’t your traditional biscuits. They’re more like a cheese bread shaped like a biscuit, and that makes them all the more delicious to me! I loved the subtle rosemary and cheesy tastes and thought that the biscuits were delicious both plain and smeared with salted butter. Try them alongside a hearty stew and let me know how you like them!

I know what you’re thinking. Green beans aren’t that exciting. Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re wrong. These green beans are exciting. In fact, often times they’re my favorite part of the meal. Unless, of course, they are served alongside these mashed potatoes. I’d probably choose the potatoes just because puddles of melted butter scream my name in the night. TMI? Okay, I’ll stop.

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!

Back to the quinoa again. I made a huge batch the other night and decided I would test recipe after recipe until I found one I liked. I was shocked when I loved these quinoa cakes and then again when I found out that I also loved this salad. This is not much different from my standard winter salad, except that I also add a hefty handful or two of quinoa for some nutritious protein. It can even turn a side salad into a main dish!

But if you really, really, really want a great tasting salad, fry your quinoa. It probably ruins all the nutritious benefits of this grain, but really, who cares? It’s delicious! And it’s still healthy because you’re still eating salad! I was inspired by this when I was making the quinoa cakes and some of the quinoa fell off the patties and into the oil in the pan. It got super crispy and I thought, “Hmmm… I bet we’d love this as a salad topping!” If you add 1 cup of cooked quinoa to a splash of hot olive oil, the quinoa turns a toasty brown and makes the most amazing crunchy topping. My husband loved this part so much that he literally licked the pan clean. Try it. You’ll like it.

I’m not sure if mashed potatoes will ever be considered a health food, but I certainly don’t feel guilty about giving myself a double portion of these. Instead of having a stick of butter, they have a mere tablespoon. To give the potatoes that same smooth, buttery taste, a bit of sour cream and a splash of milk goes a long way. The secret to these amazing potatoes isn’t just the ingredients, though. It’s also in how they’re cooked. Cook’s Illustrated originally posted the recipe for their light mashed potatoes in one cookbook and their alternative cooking method for full-fat potatoes in another cookbook. I decided to experiment with combining the new cooking method with their light mashed potato recipe and boy oh boy! These were the fluffiest, smoothest, creamiest, most delicious mashed potatoes I have *ever* eaten. The cooler fall and winter weather is a perfect excuse to load up my plate with these spuds.

I promise you that if you try these mashed potatoes, you’ll never go back to the old ways of making taters again!!!

Continue reading: “lite” fluffy mashed potatoes

Tomatoes. Yeah. I know. We’ve talked about this already. I have a lot of them. You see them featured every other day on my blog. Deal with it. I just processed the last huge batch (a blog post on that coming soon!) so I promise to let up soon. Then we’ll move onto winter squash. If you thought I posted a lot of tomato recipes, wait until you hear about the pumpkin and butternut squash!

This is a pretty basic recipe, and when you want the flavor of your heirloom tomatoes to shine, basic is exactly the type of recipe you want. It would make a great side dish or appetizer at a party. It’s pretty, it’s easy to eat, and it’s delicious!

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!

If it’s good enough for Annie, it’s good enough for me. Annie’s Eats is one of  my favorite food blogs and I love almost everything she makes. She wrote in a recent post that she had put off trying these corn cakes for a loooooong time (something we food bloggers are wont to do given that we have so many recipe ideas flying at us every day!) and that her only regret was not making them sooner. I decided at the last minute to add this recipe to my appetizer list for my birthday dinner. They were an absolute hit (everyone especially loved the salsa that went on top) and the leftovers reheated nicely in the toaster oven for my lunch the following day. I highly recommend serving these as an appetizer or side dish. They’re delicious!

These are awesome. It took me a while to perfect the recipe, but now that I’ve done so, I want to serve them at every gathering we host. What better way to eat veggies than wrapped in bacon!?

The first time I made these, I followed the directions exactly and immediately could see room for improvement. The original recipe called for cooking the bundles on a jelly roll pan, which was fine until you served them and realized that the bacon tops were crisp but the bottoms were soggy and floating in grease. Gross. Additionally, the green beans were dried out from 40 minutes in the oven, making them overly chewy and difficult to eat.

The next time I baked these, I cooked them on a cookie rack to keep the bundles from floating in grease, and I turned and basted them half way through cooking to allow the bacon to brown evenly on all sides. And to solve the problem of the bacon and green beans cooking at different rates, I blanched the green beans for 4 minutes in boiling water and pre-cooked the bacon for a couple of minutes on the stove until it was just beginning to cook and yet still very pliable. This halved the cooking time and resulted in much more evenly cooked bundles. My only problem was the sauce; I had doubled it, which was a great decision, but the brown sugar kept caramelizing into a solid mass. That would not work very well for basting! I decided that the brown sugar should be added to the sauce last, off the heat, and simply stirred until dissolved. The result? Green bean bacon bundle perfection.

green bean bacon bundles
recipe adapted from How Sweet It Is and cooking methods developed by Dishing the Divine

1 pound fresh green beans
10-12 slices of thick-cut bacon (I used applewood smoked bacon and loved it)
4 tablespoons butter
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar

Preheat oven to 400F. Place a cookie rack on top of a large baking sheet.

Boil a large pot of water. While the water is boiling, cut the ends off the green beans. Blanch in the boiling water for 3-4 minutes, until the beans are bright green and tender crisp. Drain in a colander and rinse immediately with cold water. Set aside.

Cook bacon in batches on the stove for 2-3 minutes or until the meat is just starting to cook but is still very pliable. (It should not be crisp or else you won’t be able to wrap it around the green beans!)

Gather the green beans in bunches of 6-8 beans, wrap with a piece of bacon, and place on the cookie rack. Secure with a toothpick if you desire. Repeat the process for the remaining green beans and bacon.

On the stove over medium high heat, heat the butter until melted. Add the garlic, salt and pepper and cook until garlic is fragrant, about 30 seconds. Remove the pan from the heat, add the brown sugar, and stir until dissolved. Baste the tops of the bundles with half of this mixture.

Cook for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and carefully rotate all the bundles so that the tops become the bottoms. Baste again with the remaining sauce. Cook for another 10 minutes or until the bacon is crispy brown. Serve immediately, adding more salt to taste.