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.