The evils of garlic powder

So this started out with the best of intentions
I read the comments for the recipe and it said to use less of the spices and to bake the darn thing in the oven if you don't have a grill.

I put only a teaspoon of garlic powder and a good sprinkle each of salt and black pepper.
I was drinking a bit at the time so maybe it was more than a sprinkle.
Anyway the zucchini now go in the oven and I cook some carrots and potatoes in a skillet.
It comes out....well lets say a little strong.
I made rice to eat it over and with the rice it is OK
not getting a great review this.
possibly that has something to do with being drunk and cooking just for myself but I am gonna blame the garlic powder.
With real garlic you know how much is appropriate but who knows how much is too much powder? Not I clearly.

Chocolate sheet cake (Debbies birthday cake)

So I must confess that while I love pies I have a fear of cake baking.
I know it isn't rational but there is a lot that can go wrong in a cake and you would never know until it comes out of the oven.
For example this chocolate sheet cake which I baked twice because the first time I mixed up the measuring cups and thought I was using a one cup when I was really using a 1/3 cup. I realized when I poured it in the pan that something was probably wrong but it wasn't until it came out of the oven too small, too thin and too eggy that we figure out what happened.

So I showed up to spend the weekend at the Longman's for Aunte Debbies birthday and found that I had forgotten something ... a present for her b-day.(Oops)
So instead of worrying about it I baked the cake of her choice a chocolate sheet cake with chocolate icing.
Yum

The recipe goes like this
Take one cup water, two sticks of margarine and four table spoons of coco and put them in a sauce pan.
bring to a boil. In a seperate bowl add two cups of flour and two cups of sugar.
Once the stuff in the pan boils add a teaspoon of vanilla, a teaspoon of baking soda, two eggs(lightly beaten) and a half a cup of buttermilk.  Stir it all up and them pour it over the flour/sugar mix. Stir for two minutes.
Put the whole thing in a baking pan
Bake at 325 for 30ish minutes.
(credit to Sandy Wallace)

ICING
So the icing is a little tricky but fun
Take a sauce pan and put a stick of margarine in it.
Add 6-7 table spoons of milk and four tablespoons of coco powder.
bring to a boil (slowly!)
Once it is boiling stir in a pound of icing (powdered) sugar.
 turn off the heat.
It might be watery but don't worry it will stiffen up.
(credit to Sandy Wallace)

Cabbage Fritters

So some of you are not from New Orleans.
So you may think that Mardi Gras is the only time people throw things off of parades.
You would be wrong.

On St. Patricks day it is traditional to throw all the ingredients for Irish cabbage stew off of the floats.
Both Courtney and Jessy were visiting me and we all attended the parade, me teaching them the finer points of begging for worthless throws, Courtney representing the Irish with her red hair and Jessy providing sardonic comic relief.

It is also traditional for girls to kiss the guys marching in the parade in exchange for the beads or small silk flowers they carry.....

So we came home with about a thousands cabbages, two little bags of carrots, no potatoes and plenty of beads and silk flowers.

Once we had put a whole cabbage into the soup it became clear that we needed something to do with the rest of the cabbages.So I found a recipe for cabbage veda. I fussed with it by using regular flour instead of the kind called for, adding in a whole bunch of sweet corn and a bunch of egg to make the whole thing stay together and some zatar and Tony Chacheres for taste. The end result was basically a latke with cabbage instead of potato.
It sounds horrible but it was actually really yummy especially with the sweet corn.

Crawfish pie

I made this with a lovely wholewheat crust so that Gail and I could
eat it during Tuesday club while watching dancing with the stars.
Got to love an Emeril Lagasse recipe

Honeydew lime popsicle

This is so pretty I thought it didn't need a recipe.

No chicken pot pie

Okay so this is a fancy recipe from a book but here is the scuttle butt.

Chop up some veggies (fresh)  boil them in about two cups of water with a bullion cube for like ten minutes.
Now add in the frozen veggies.
Last stir in a 1/4 cup of flour with some chicken flavoring mixed into a cup of milk.
Cook for about 5 min.

Now pour it into a dish, cover with pie crust or frozen puff pastry dough.
Bake at 400 degrees for half an hour or until the crust looks done.
Eat.
I think this might be the last pie for a bit
I do love pies but I'm trying to broaden my pallet.

YUMMY PIE!!

Don't kill Gail Quiche

So the last two weeks I have been taking my leftover pies to "Tuesday club"
The trouble is that the most faithful member and host of the club is Gail
The trouble is Gail has blood sugar issues so she can't have sugar.
thus I found a recipe for quiche which she can eat.
I bought whole wheat pastry flour too.
Jess mixed up the crust and we worked together to make the thing turn out.

It is an aussie recipe which made it a bit more complicated
Oh and we used an onion and a half since I like sweet onion
here is the link.

Chocolate silk pie

So this recipe is from chocolatepie.net
I did some weird stuff with this recipe
Jess is visiting so we went to Whole Foods to get some groceries.
The recipe calls for "chocolate wafers' but the store only sells chocolate coated vegan wafers so that is what we went with.
Then it called for Walnuts which we subbed out for crystallized ginger.


So basically we are ignoring the recipe....
It was labor day weekend so I made the crust at home, packed it and all the ingredients up and headed out
to visit the Longman clan. When I got there they were arrayed outside, the men clustered around Christopher's ailing Volkswagen beetle, the women are arrayed in chairs ... watching the men.
I stole some of the watchers to help me make pie.
It was a good time with Olivia pouring chocolate and Jess whipping cream while I chop up the pears.
The pie is/was super yummy

oops forgot the link for the recipe Here

Shoo Fly Pie

So in all my restless jetlaggednes
 I decided I should bake a pie.
I googled best pie ever and found this you tube video.
It features a woman making Quaker shoo fly pie.
So I was like what the hell?
I could not find the turkey syrup called for in the recipe. Actually at first I had no idea what it was however a quick look at yahoo answers says that it is a sugar syrup used to glaze turkeys. At any rate they don't sell it in Rouses. Thankfully the thoughtful video mentioned that you can sub in half cornsyrup and half molasses.
The recipe makes two pies and I also made a home made pie crust to put it in.
It came out great a deep brown from the molasses, crunchy on top and gooey on bottom. YUM.

Nigerian Pepper soup

So before I went to Nigeria I started learning about local food.
One of the mainstay dishes is pepper soup.
While in Nigeria I ate exactly no pepper soup.
But now that I'm home I thought I would give it a shot.
 I found the recipe on the blog of a fellow traveler/cook.
I made it for dinner the day after I got back as a way of fighting off the jet lag.
It is actually a really simple dish tomato paste, fish, bell and chili peppers and some vegitable broth and onion.
There is no garlic in it which I thought was weird until I tasted it and realized that the garlic would not have gone well with the thyme.

 yumm! ya'll should try this it tastes pretty good.

Yogurt wrap

So I went to visit my parents in Nigeria.
It's a long story. Dad works there, if your reading this you either know the rest of it or don't really care.

So I was hoping one of the perks of the trip would be the chance to try new and exciting food.
Boy was I wrong. It turns out that we are allowed to eat two kinds of meal type 1 is the meal we prepare in our kitchen from imported or heavily disinfected food. Type two is the meal from the upscale Lagosian Restaurants on our approved list. The food at home is American 'cause that's where we're from and the approved places serve American, Asian or Indian food because that is the high status food here. This recipe is dedicated to anyone who ever tried to make a avoid eating leftovers by combining the first things they found in the fridge.

Use a frying pan to brown a flour tortilla
Coat one side of the tortilla in plain un-sweetened yogurt
add chopped up peices of cucumber and tomato
Sprinkle Tony Chacheres (or if you don't have that some salt and pepper.)
Roll the whole thing up and eat.

Special thanks to Janet my new big sister who disinfected, pealed and chopped all the veggies for this recipe. Janet I know you can cook if only we give you recipes so here you go.
: )

"Ultimate" Chocolate Chip Cookies

So I didn't have time to go shopping and I really was supposed to be writing a final paper but this recipe I cut from the back of a flour package was too good.

The first batch came out a little bit too hard but the second batch was all gooey and yummy.
I took them to Metro and they were a big hit.

The recipe is available here. Betty Crocker and Gold Medal flour will want you to sign up for emails but you can click out of that . The sight comes with a "how to" video just in case the two sentences of instructions are too complicated for you.

Flan

So I am operating now on  a six day work week which really cuts into my cooking time!
Any way class let out at about 3pm today so I stopped on my way home to explore this little shopping district on Ferret. (I was really looking for the farmers market but it wasn't there.) I ended up spending all the cash I had on me buying 2 skirts and a blouse for 17$ in the Junior League thrift store and then wandering into the little Honduran Grocery down the street. So I am in the Honduran Grocery where they will take my debit card but only if I am buying 10$ worth of stuff. Since I am out of cash and really want a cold drink I proceed to wander around picking out strange grocery things to supplement the weeks groceries (for the record Guava paste is really yummy.)  Anyway that is when I spot the box of flan mix. Sold
Now mix you are saying to yourself, how hard can that be? That should not even count!
Well for the record the first instruction on the box is to brown a half cup of sugar a task I have never done in my life followed by a step that involves boiling milk something I don't think I've ever done on purpose except as a cure for insomnia.
I am sitting now waiting for the flan to cool.  The sugar browning went okay except that my spatula has a hard candy coating now. I used a glass bowl as the mold which now that I am looking at the spatula I think may have been a bad call. Maybe something flexible would have been a better plan? Well worse comes to worse I can always just fill the bowl with water and let it sit, the sugar has to dissolve eventually... right? 

Epilogue 
So it totally fell apart coming out of the "mold" but it was super yummy and tasted just like the real deal so I'm pretty happy.The excess sugar however is still stuck to the bowl so we'll see how that goes.

No Roll pie crust

So I discussed the pie crusts the other day,
I thought I ought to link to the pie crust recipe I used for the 4th of July pie.
This is the no roll one.
It doesn't look as good as the roll one but it is super easy
I filled it with some flour, sugar, apples, cinnamon, cloves, lemon juice and blueberries.
On and i did some lattice strips for the top by mixing up some flour, butter and honey.

Apple pie

So I have been learning to make pie crust.
I tried two recipes one that had to be rolled out and one which did not.
I think I like the one that needs rolling better.
It looks nicer although I haven't tasted the pies yet.

Happy fourth of July Ya'll

Fish soup

So I started with a chicken soup recipe  from the book "recipes to the rescue."
But I decided that this would be a good way to use fish from my recent fishing trip.
Uncle Mitchel and I went out for a day on lake Ponchatrain.
It was a beautiful day and we were on the water before the sun even came up.
I do love riding on a boat, wind in my hair and watching the sunrise.
We caught lots of fish mostly trout but a few redfish ect.
It was also nice to spend some time with Uncle Mitchel
By the time I got home I was heat sick from the hours on the water.
So I stuck all the fish in the freezer all in one bag.
Now of course I have a block of frozen fish.
This is what I started with.

So I rinsed warm water over the giant block of fish and cut off pieces until I had 2 cups.
I poured some vegitable stock over it and stuck the whole thing in the microwave for 2 min to defrost.
Meanwhile in a stock pot I started cooking with hot oil and two chopped cloves of garlic, and a bunch of chopped green onions.
Once those had cooked up a bit I dumped in the fish and stock.
I cooked just this for about 5 min
Then I added a can of creamed corn and the rest of the the box of vegitable stock.
Once that had boiled long enough for the fish to look done I beat a couple of eggs.
I stirred the egg into the boiling soup making egg drop shreds.
I let the whole thing boil for a bit more and stirred in some Tabasco and Tony Chacheres.
The soup came out really yummy and pretty quick.
 
Ingredients:
1 table spoon of vegetable oil
2 cloves of garlic
1 bunch of green onions.
2 cups of fish
1 can cream corn
1 box (50 ounces) of vegitable stock
2 eggs
Some pepper, or Tabasco sauce.

Eggplant Caviar

SO the recipe for this stuff is in a cookbook that I gave away when Jessy came for a visit.
But I am okay with that since it took hours to make and wasn't all that great. It involved insane amounts of veggie chopping blending frying ect. In the end you got brown paste that was basically the eggplant equivalent of re-fried beans. I was okay but It took way too long and the recipe makes a ton. I took it to work, no takers on brown goo to go on crackers..... go figure

Eggs in a basket

This was a recipe I got from a cookbook in the shelter office back when I was shadowing all the time. Basically the shadowing entailed sitting with Megan waiting for the phone to ring so that I could listen to her take a crisis call and learn how to handle it. After an hour or so of not catching much of any calls I started reading the cookbooks they keep back there for ideas. This recipe is supper easy. You just take a piece of bread and use a cookie cutter or something to cut a hole, then you butter fry the toast just as if you were making toast in a frying pan then you crack an egg into the hole. The result is like a cross between french toast and a fried egg. Yumm.

Emergency Pizza

This is a recipe you are going to have to read to believe.
click here to to read the recipe.
I was enjoying the tax holiday and using it for its intended purpose, that is creating my very own emergency kit. So naturally I start looking for recipes things that I could make if the power went out during a hurricane.
That is when I found this recipe with it's attendant use of canned white beans, tuna, pizza crust, tomato, and vinegar I just had to try it. It is a little weird and I did cheat and toast the pizza crust in the oven but all in all it was quite yummy.
Happy Hurricane season Ya'll

Gazpacho ... sort of

So I started with this recipe
http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/gazpacho/

I was like its summer time, Gazpacho will be perfect for lunches for the week.
couple of things went off plan. First off I bought a container of creole seasoning mix which saved me from chopping onions, I have no idea however what the proportions of stuff in it was but it was fine chopped so it was perfect for soup. And I bought some big yummy creole tomatoes.


So far pretty boring we're making a soup.
That is until I put the ingredients in my blender creating a fountain and then a flood of tomato all over my kitchen.....
Any way I re-chopped some of the tomatoes and I did the cucumber up really fine and added some extra lemon and vinegar, I used my hands to mush it up. I also added extra garlic powder and some dried basil.
It tastes pretty good

Stickies

So this is also from Ann Jackson originally. Since I am giving credit and I changed the recipe quite a bit I am going to post my variation.

Lazy College Student Stickies

Ingredients:
1 pre-made pie crust
Some Honey (to taste)
Cinnamon
Ground Cloves
Butter (Ann said 3 table spoons but really however much it takes to make you feel sufficiently buttery)

Take the pre-made pie crust out of the packaging (if it was frozen you'll need to thaw it)
Put enough butter on to make you feel like your arteries will clog up.
Now pour on enough honey to make you feel like this will make a giant mess
Shake on a whole bunch of cinnamon and ground cloves
Roll the whole thing up like a cigar and cut slices
Put each slice in its own divot in a silicone muffin pan (or if you do it on a baking sheet put down tin-foil over it as these will stick like crazy.)
Bake at 325-350 for aproximately 30 min.
take out and eat.

Cherry Strawberry Pie

So this is the first recipe from my crazy new cookbook. It is called Cookin' Southern Vegitarian Style by Ann Jackson. She has all sorts of weird ways to make things taste like they have meat in them, and most of them call for soy margarine which I happily replace with butter.
It is meant for any kind of berry so I was a little nervous about how this would come out.
Turns out it was both beautiful and delicious. Definitely a keeper.

Eggplant Parmesan Caserole
This may be the yummiest thing ever.
Christopher and I make it now every time he comes over.
That first time Nina and Chris and I made this and the bruscheta and had it with a nice red wine.

Spanikopata

I made this after going to the Mediterranean Grocery store
On the weekend I went fishing.
I really liked the easy snack recipe,
All the ingredients are easy to find
Even the Philo dough once you realize to look in the freezer section.
Once I found it in the Meditiranian place I saw it in Rouses.
Spinach, cream cheese, fetta, egg yolk, I added some yummy stuff like tony chacheres and parmesan cheese.

Rasberry Fool

I made this recipe the day my whatever had his "friend" in to visit.
I hung out with them a while
Then went back to my room and beat the shit out of the heavy cream and Rasberry Jam.
This was the day that my sis went to the hospital with Alcohol poisoning.
I went to New York 
He said he would come throw it out.
A week later, it was still in the fridge.

Riccota Cheese Tart

I made this tart instead of going to a Memorial Service for Kim Kelly.
It was a long rainy day.
I turned the oven off and went to the service but I couldn't even make it in the door.
I was so tired, and so sad, I could not stop sobbing.
Jessy called and I sat and listened to sobbing from Jessy
Upset about a boy of all things

I came home and finished making the tart while watching the L word
 It is delicious with a citrus orange flavor.
Wish I had people to share it with.

The recipe for this is here