Making beer bread

Since I came across this recipe for different types of beer bread on Bake at 350, I knew I wanted to try it. My previous experience with beer bread was delicious. A softball party for team “Beer Me” was the perfect opportunity to bake up a batch, or two as it turns out.

I decided to make a loaf of the orange nutmeg for the party and a loaf of gruyere and rosemary for my husband to take to work.

The recipe calls for self rising flour which we don’t have and I’ve never used it before. My husband pointed me to wikipedia which says you can make your own self rising flour by adding 1 tsp of baking power and 1/2 tsp of salt to regular flour. I combined those ingredients with a bottle of beer (Avery White for the orange nutmeg bread), 3 tablespoons of sugar, zest from an orange and freshly grated nutmeg.

For the gruyere and rosemary bread, I used a bottle of Real Ale Pale Ale.

I then baked the breads for 1 hour at 350. The bread smelled wonderful.  When I took it out, the orange rosemary bread was drizzled with a fresh squeezed orange juice and powdered sugar glaze.

The gruyere rosemary bread was covered with butter.

While the bread looked tasty, it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped.  The baking powder must have been too old because the bread turned out too hard.  I also think a sweeter bread would have been better.

Making… Smores pie?

What’s a Smores pie you say? Well, it’s down right delicious of course! The second I saw it in my Vegetarian Times magazine, I knew I had to make it. Memorial Day seemed like the perfect occasion!

Vegetarian times taught me that marshmallow fluff is vegetarian! No gelatin like normal marshmallows (this is good for my vegetarian friends).

My husband consented to allow me to use his Malley’s dark chocolate that was still left from Valentine’s Day. Malley’s is a delicious chocolate company in the Cleveland area.

I had to break it up and put it in a bowl:

Heat soy cream to a simmer:

And then pour the soy cream over the chocolate and whisk in one egg, some vanilla and a pinch of salt:

The chocolate mixture was then poured into a prepared graham cracker crust and baked for 25 minutes. The edges of the pie crust were covered with foil to keep them from getting too brown.

After cooling for an hour it was time to “spread” on the marshmallow fluff.  Well, marshmallow fluff is not the kind of stuff you spread. It’s more like a plop:

Somehow I spread it out enough and then put it under the broiler until it was brown on top:

The finished product was very rich and delicious. Definitely more flavor than a campfire smores!

Making a summer cocktail

I guess it’s not officially summer yet, but in Texas it feels like it’s been summer for months. You may remember the vodka infusions I made recently.

I finally got to try the watermelon rosemary infusion and I must say, it was delicious. I used the Rosebud recipe from Kitchen Konfidence.  It was fun to muddle the watermelon with the crushed ice:

I used rosemary sprigs from the gigantic rosemary bush in the backyard. Rosemary grows like crazy in Texas:

Yum! I recommend seedless watermelons if you can. I still had to strain out the little seeds from the glasses.

Vodka infusions!

So it may or may not be a surprise to you that vodka is my favorite alcohol to add to drinks. I love my Bloody Marys, the spicier the better, and my drink is not completed until it’s garnished with home-pickled green beans!

When someone first sent me vodka infusion recipes on Kitchen Konfidence I just knew I had to make the infusions at some point. Now that we’ve skipped spring in Texas and are straight into hot summer weather I decided it was time. I selected the Watermelon Rosemary infusion because I love watermelon. While I don’t really like grapefruit, I had to try the Grapefruit Tarragon infusion because of the drink it was featured in – a Salted Tarragon Greyhound. Not only is it a beautiful looking drink, it’s also a bit salty and it’s named after a dog! Some people even think my mutt is part greyhound (she’s not, she’s too slow). Soon I hope to enjoy the Watermelon Rosemary vodka in the Rosebud recipe as well.  I’ll have to get the ingredients to mix the drinks this weekend.

Anyhow, here was my experience making the infusions.

Slicing up the grapefruit. Such a pretty fruit but such a gross taste to me! Notice the bottle of Tito’s in the background. It’s my favorite vodka AND it’s local. Win!

The first step was to put the fruit in the vodka and let it infuse for four days. Somehow I lost those pictures, but after four days you add the herbs.  Here’s the grapefruit with the tarragon:

And the watermelon with rosemary from my giant rosemary bush in the garden:

Those mixtures sat for two more days and tonight I strained them using a fine mesh strainer. I tried to get a decent amount of the liquid out of the fruit.

The finished product! The grapefruit infusion is on the left and watermelon on the right. Can’t wait for a delicious drink!

Making Stir Fry

Like most people, my husband and I like stir fry. The problem is that every time we try to make it at home, it’s bland at best despite following tasty sounding recipes.

Every so often we forget that we’re bad at making stir fry and give it another go. This time, I was persuaded to try yet again by two things. This blog post from Yard Farm, ATX about how to roast cabbage by tossing it in olive oil with some salt and pepper. It suggests using the roasted cabbage as a noodle substitute and I do love some cabbage. Then, the most recent Vegetarian Times magazine had a section on Asian dishes, including one for Stir Fried Rice Noodles. The recipe calls for rice noodles, asparagus, sugar peas, eggs, green onion and a sauce. It looked amazing.

Luckily for us, it turned out delicious this time, despite the changes I made to the recipe.

The recipe in Vegetarian Times:

Asparagus and Sweet Peas ready to be cooked, sliced green onion, minced garlic:

Eggs being cooked omelette style, to be sliced up later:

Rice noodles soaking in hot water (we didn’t completely replace them with cabbage):

Sweet peas, asparagus, and garlic cooking:

Roasted cabbage – oh man, this was so good I just ate it by itself:

All ingredients together, simmering in the sauce:

Making stout into cake

Yes, I really did bake two cakes this week. The second one was for my husband’s birthday. This is the second time I’ve made this chocolate stout cake from use real butter.  Yes, the recipe really is in that blog post after you scroll past all of the pictures.

This year, I changed two things from what I did last year. I substituted half of the butter for applesauce to make the cake moister (which worked) and I used a milk chocolate icing that my husband bought rather than the fudge icing I used last year. I recommend the fudge icing. Both years I used Guinness in the cake because we happened to have some and it’s not fancy enough for my local beer snob to drink.

Guinness, butter, and applesauce, oh my!

Heating the stout and butter, and then after the butter melted, adding the applesauce:

Mixing in the cocoa powder:

Mixing eggs and sour cream:

Adding the chocolate mixture:

Ready for the oven!

Out of the oven!

First layer iced:

Done!

Making a breakfast birthday cake

I got to do some more baking recently for a coworkers birthday. This baking was special because the celebration had to be at 9:30 am.  So instead of a dessert cake, I came across this Cinnamon Apple Cake recipe from Cooking Light that is perfect for breakfast! Also, I was amazed by the insane number of outstanding reviews it had, so I knew I just had to try it. An added bonus is the fact that the cake is relatively low in calories.

My husband bought the largest organic Fuji apples I have ever seen so I ended up chopping up just two of them and still had way more than the 3 cups called for. To make apple chopping easy, I used my peeler / slicer / corer contraption from Williams Sonoma, given to me a few years back by my mother-in-law. That thing rocks if you bake with apples often!

So many apples…

Dry ingredients combined:

(P.S. My apple corer contraption is the same red as my Kitchen Aid mixer, another awesome baking gift from my mother-in-law)

Mmmm… apples all cinnamon’d up and ready for use!

Folded into the dough – I noticed this recipe seemed to have more apples than dough, which of course makes it delicious. Also, I used extra apples. I spread some on top too because I had so many. And maybe I ate a few of the chunks.

The cake was baked in my 9” springform pan and that worked out just fine. I think next time I will bake it for a bit longer because I don’t think it was quite cooked all the way. I subtracted the 5 minutes for my larger pan as the recipe suggested but I think that was too many.

It earned rave reviews from my coworkers (and myself). Definitely worth making again.

Making Super Bowl Food!

As everyone remembers, yesterday was the Super Bowl. We hosted a party at our house. Unfortunately for me, my Steelers lost but it was a good game and it’s hard not to like the Green Bay Packers (well, except when they beat the Steelers, then it’s easier). Fortunately for me, our Super Bowl food was a hit! I prepared Kung Pao Tofu Sliders and my husband made pulled pork with pickled onion sliders. Both were quite delicious if I say so myself.

Making Kung Pao Sliders

The recipe from the latest issue of the Vegetarian Times magazine. The sliders are made of marinated and baked tofu squares and a carrot and zucchini slaw.

First, I spent way too much time julienning carrots and zucchini. I wonder if it would have been okay to shred the veggies with my food processor instead.

Then they were mixed with the crazy dressing that had soy sauce, sesame oil, peanut butter, mayo, natural cane sugar, garlic, cayenne powder and probably other things I can’t remember. The slaw chilled overnight.

On Sunday, I cut up two packages of extra firm tofu into small squares.

It was marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil and sugar.

It was then baked for 25 minutes on each side. After that, assembling it with the slaw and bun proved it was absolutely delicious! You can see the pulled pork slider in the picture as well.

Slider buns are tad tricky to find, so we used “brown-n-serve” rolls from HEB, our grocery store. They were cheap and perfectly sized!  And now we have them left over for dinner for most of the week, yum 🙂

Today’s hummus flavor is…

As you may remember from a previous post, I make hummus fairly regularly.

Today’s flavor is caramelized onion. The ingredients were chickpeas, lemon juice, a caramelized sweet onion, yogurt, a dash of olive oil, dash of kosher salt, dried thyme, parsley and oregano.  The onion gives the hummus a slightly sweet flavor that I enjoy.

Smoky beet cakes – a lucky new years food!

Link: Smoky beet cakes – a lucky new years food!

On New Years day I like to make us foods that are considered lucky. For some reason I decided that beets were lucky without actually knowing if that’s true or not. Really I just wanted to make this beet cake recipe. It was fun because of the food processor and the fact that I got to turn my hands dark red by forming beet patties.

I only have a picture of them with the rest of the food from that day. They were quite tasty and would even make good veggie burger patties!