Milestones

There’s a couple milestones to acknowledge today.

First, my husband and I have now been married for 6 months. That’s half a year. And it’s been great. I’m glad to be married to you, honey. You’re the best man I’ve ever known.

Second, my blog just reached 500 total hits! YEEHAW!!! I know that’s lots and lots of clicks from just a few people, all of whom I know personally, but there’s some of you I’ve never even met that are reading this thing. How awesome is that!

Refried Beans (with Bacon)

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this recipe at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same recipe, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

Lots of people have a good refried beans recipe, and for good reason, it’s really pretty simple. I’d never made them from scratch, as I always thought it must be a complicated process. I mean they are fried once, and then refried, right? Actually, wrong. Turns out the term refried beans is just a mistranslation of frijoles refritos, which doesn’t mean RE-fried at all, just plain fried beans.

It’s easy to make vegetarian refried beans by starting with oil, but refried beans are well-known (infamous?) for containing lard. And, for good reason, it’s darn tasty. Some recipes call for rendering some bacon for the lard and then removing the pieces, but since I always love me some bacon, I left it in.

One thing I don’t understand is why all the refried beans I’ve ever had from a can or in a restaurant have such a uniform brown color. When you cook a pinto bean, the outside loses its pinto spots and turns that pinkish brown color, but the inside of the bean is white. So my refried beans always turn out a bit pale and washed out and bit unappetizing in photos. Ah, well. They sure are tasty though.

Super All-time Best Oatmeal Cookie

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this recipe at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same recipe, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

These cookies have lots of good stuff in ‘em. I’ve been told by a friend with some food biz cred that I could start a cookie-business with these. The friend produces those delicious candied pecans and walnuts that you’ll find at Trader Joe’s, and she offered me kitchen space and business advice if I wanted to start my own cookie business. I’m not interested in a cookie business, and who knows how serious she really was, but what I do know is that these cookies are damn good.

The recipe is based on one I found in a Cooks Illustrated magazine a few years back, and the basic idea is a perfectly chewy oatmeal cookie, with bittersweet chocolate chunks, tart dried cherries, and freshly toasted walnuts. It has no cinnamon or other spices, relying on the chunky stuff, and a healthy shot of vanilla, for its flavors. There’s no white sugar, only brown, and I prefer to use a gourmet dark brown sugar like Billington’s. I also like to use a bit of steel cut oats to vary the texture a little, but that’s completely optional. If you don’t use steel cut oats, just replace them with more rolled oats.

Here’s the recipe.

Smoky Spanish Soup with Winter Squash and Ham

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this recipe at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same recipe, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

I’ve been looking for interesting things to do with the surplus winter squash we’ve been getting for weeks and weeks from our CSA. I’ve made Elise’s Pumpkin Bread, with the addition of a streusel topping, for the folks at the office several times. The other obvious thing to do with the squash is soup, but I’m not too fond of traditional sweet squash soups with cinnamon and pumpkin pie spices. Then Deb over at Smitten Kitchen posted a recipe for Black Bean Pumpkin Soup, which sounded awfully good. The problem was, when I went to make it today, I hadn’t paid much attention to the ingredients list, so instead of 3 cans of black beans, I had 1 can of pinto beans, and instead of canned tomatoes, I had tomato paste, and instead of cumin, I had curry powder, and then I wanted to experiment with this new smoked pimento I got the other day, so the recipe underwent a bit of a metamorphosis. Like the Black Bean Pumpkin Soup that was the inspiration for this recipe, this is squash soup in which the squash is not the main character, but plays an important supporting role. The tomato paste and the smoked pimento give it a richness and a depth, and a deliciously subtle spice.

Here’s the recipe.

Experimenting with the new camera

I organized a baby shower at work the other day, and picked up fancy cupcakes from the local gourmet grocery, Draeger’s. Like I’ve been saying, the macro setting on our little point & shoot does a pretty decent job when there’s good light. Aren’t these cute?

No fancy stuff…

There’s always stuff I want that I don’t have. Now that we’ve got this great point & shoot little camera, I’m thinkin how great it would be to have a digital SLR, and then wouldn’t it be great to have Photoshop so I could do some real editing of my photos. Oh, and while we’re at it, how about a new Kitchenaid Mixer, granite countertops, and 3000 square feet of kitchen space, of course with lots and lots of natural light.

As my husband says, when he’s feeling a little feisty, “It’s good to want things.”

So in the meantime, I’m actually pretty pleased with the results from our new little point & shoot. No touching up or recoloring at all.

By the way, anyone know what kind of plant this is?

Bacon, Chicken, Mushroom, and Tomato Sandwich (BCMT)

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this recipe at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same recipe, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

Perusing through the archives of my husband’s blog, I just realized I was not the first to blog a recipe in this relationship! Jeremy posted this deliciously manly (read: fattening) recipe under the title “Simple Hungry Man Recipes: Bacon Chicken Mushroom Tomato Sandwich.” Well, I have no shame, and I’m going to repost it here, since my lazy ass hasn’t been cooking anything all week, and this concoction sounds mighty good right about now.

This simple, hungry-man recipe should please even the manliest of men.

Here it is, in the words of my husband:

This is one of those posts I’ll be deleting later, but…

WOOOHOOOO!!!!!

I just passed 200 hits on my blog!!

Granted, 192 of them are probably from my husband. But still.

Next celebration at 500!

Then at 1000! Then 10,000! Then ONE MILLION HITS ON MY BLOG!!!!!!!!

MWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

Pot-Luck Wedding, Highly Recommended

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this post at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same post, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

Since I’ve been hecka lazy about cooking for the last few days, I figured I should post about something. What with my husband participating in NaNoWriMo, and all sorts of bloggers posting away for NaBloPoMo, I’m starting to feel guilty. So here’s a topic I love to share, and hell, it’s even food-related!

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me talk about my wedding at some point or another. My husband and I were vehemently opposed to going back into the depths of credit card debt that we’d been working so hard to clamber our way out of, just to feed a bunch of our friends and family some fancy food that probably wouldn’t be nearly worth the price per head that it would cost us. We were lucky enough to have some very generous friends donate the use of their backyard for our wedding and reception, so it just seemed all-around appropriate to have a potluck wedding reception. I highly recommend this to everyone!

Here’s what the buffet table looked like:

The friends whose backyard we were using had the brilliant idea of hiring a couple of servers to collect people’s potluck contributions on their way in, and then the servers managed everything getting plated, heated, and rotated appropriately. So this is just one snapshot of the buffet table, as it evolved throughout the evening.

If you’re looking carefully, you may be wondering about the brown items in the middle of the table. Yes, that is Chocolate-Covered Bacon. With Sprinkles. You’d actually be surprised, this concoction had it’s admirers. And no, not just the family dog, they don’t even have a dog. This fabulous dish was courtesy of Jeremy’s friend Matthew, and it served it’s purpose as the fulfillment of a drunken dream of the best food in the world. (It actually was kinda good.)

In addition to the buffet, we were lucky enough to have a friend make our wedding cake:

And another friend did the flowers (including those on the cake):

Let me just say, I highly recommend doing your wedding this way. Even if you have to pay for a cake and a florist, the potluck adds such a community feel to the event. Everyone gets to show off their favorite dish, and share in good food with friends and family.

Pictures taken by George Paginini and Jayanti Anand.

Sauteed Baby Artichokes

I’ve moved!

Please click here to view this post at my new home,

very tasty

I promise, it’s the same post, and it’s prettier!

Come on over!

or, This Blogging Thing is Harder Than I Thought

I started prepping those baby artichokes in the post below, remembered to take a picture of the prep, and then, wouldn’t you know it, I ate those babies right up without taking a picture of the final product. Well, anyway, I’ll learn eventually. Here’s the baby artichokes as I prepped them. At least I got one picture taken.

I learned from Elise that baby artichokes are completely edible once they are stripped of their outside leaves. They are a variety of artichoke that is fully mature when it’s smaller, but it also does not have a fully developed choke.