Mum's the Word

Ice cream cake! Ice cream cake! Ice creamy creamy cake! Ice cream cake! Look what Rick got me for Mother's Day! :)

I Dreamt I Ate My Pillow

and when I woke up, I saw a train made out of rainbow marshmallows. I went to the Bellagio again and this time they had a new display next to the chocolate fountain.

Berry Good

I made some blueberry muffin/cupcakes today using yellow cake mix. Not too much of a recipe, I just added 1 cup of frozen blueberries to the mix, 3 tablespoons of whey protein, 2 tablespoons of benefiber (gotta pretend it's kind of healthy) and 1/2 cup white chocolate chips to half of the muffin cakes. Then I mixed and baked according to the instructions on the box. All the blueberries sank to the bottom of the muffin cakes when they were done baking. It looked like the muffin cakes had collapsed halfway through the baking process. What happened to the muffin cakes with the white chocolate chips? The cocoa butter acted like regular butter and just melted into the mix, which made for a kind of greasy muffin cake. I topped off the cakes with a lemon orange glaze, recipe below:

Here's the muffin cake with an orange glaze:MMM! The muffin cakes are incredibly tender and feel like they'll fall apart at a moments notice. The glaze was VERY tart by itself, but complemented the muffin cakes nicely.

Orange glaze:
Ingredients
1 1/2 T lemon juice
1 t orange zest
1/4 T butter
1/2 C powdered sugar

1. Combine powdered sugar with juice and microwave for 10 s, mix
2. Add the rest of the ingredients and microwave for 10 s, mix
3. Glaze away!

Everything is Better with Bacon

I went to Country Waffles today, which is a staple out in this area. I ordered the bacon cheddar waffle. It was okay, dense and crispy. The waffle was pretty big and I couldn't finish it. It came with a side of cooked apples, which crumbled into mush in my mouth. I think they used WAAAAY too much thickener for the sauce. I took one bite and left those alone.

Carbs and Meat

Here are the steamed meatballs that I made from the leftover dumpling mixture:All I did was pop them in the rice cooker for 20 min and serve them up with soy sauce.

Humina Humina Hummus!

Made roasted red pepper garlic hummus today. Yum. I had some left over roasted red pepper from the panini and incorporated it into the hummus today. It was so very tasty, I forgot to take a picture, but believe me it looked good. I served it up with honey wheat sandwich thins made by Arnold's that I used scissors to cut up into little wedges.

Tommy Toes

I cooked up the ravioli that I made on Saturday and topped it with a fresh tomato sauce. Wow. I used to despise tomatoes and I still do, but this simple tomato "sauce" had my mouth watering for MORE MORE MORE tomatoes.The ravioli cooked very quickly and stuck together because they were made from wonton wrappers and were too big. Lesson learned, make triangular ravioli OR turn them into tortellini. I modified the recipe because well...at this point in my life, I know what I like in my food. Did I mention it was DELICIOUS? This was probably one of the best dishes that I have tried out of that book. It just looked so fresh. I think I am going to try this for all my sauces. Heh...or we can stick to Ragu. But it's so simple! Here's that I used for the tomato "sauce" it will make you one serving:

Ingredients:
1/2 pint cherry tomatoes, sliced in half
1/2 clove garlic, sliced THIN or minced
1 T olive oil
1/4 t salt
1 T dried basil (if you have fresh, even better!)
1 t red pepper
1 t black pepper

1. Add olive oil to pan on medium heat until hot
2. Add everything else and heat for 5 min
3. Smoosh some of the cherry tomatoes
4. Remove from heat
5. Add 3 T of pasta water if you desire more of a sauce consistency
6. Top your pasta and grate TONS of parmesan cheese on to the dish.

First Panini I Ever Did Make

Use a pan, looked like grilled cheese, tasted divine. Whole wheat bread filled with "grilled" chicken breast, pesto, home roasted red pepper, and mozzarella.

Worst Walmart Buy Ever

Today I was really excited to cook a honey glazed salmon recipe only to be thwarted by REALLY crappy product. Wow. I was extremely dissappointed when I opened up this package to find four vacuum sealed tail fillets. Okay, that wasn't the most disappointing part, the disappointing part was when I went to remove the fillet from its own bag, the fillet split into two! That's right, they packaged two super slim (I'm talking almost sliced smoked salmon thing here) into one bag. UGH! Talk about false advertising. Never going to purchase this product again:Anyway...enough of the ranting. Here's the final dish:Since the fillets were paper thin, obviously the cooking time was cut from 4-5 min per side to 1 min per side and the fat STILL oozed out. Sigh... The sauce was lovely and paired well with the steamed broccoli. Omega 3s and folic acid...

Here's what it was supposed to look like (you can also click on the photo to zoom in for the recipe):

Ring in the Chinese New Year

with pot stickers. I made some pot stickers mostly from scratch today, with a few shortcuts. A couple years ago, my aunt gave me the advice of buying coleslaw mix instead of processing a head of cabbage to save time. Of course nothing beats hand rolled wrappers, but that was for another day and age. See modified recipe below:I blanched the coleslaw mix and SQUEEEEEEZED every last drop of water out (which was very easy with a bath towel and my body weight). I mixed that together with some ground turkey that I purchased. Another shortcut was using "fresh" ginger from a tube:Mmm mixy meat:Here are the raw/frozen pot stickers:
I'll post the cooked ones later on. I also made pearl meatballs with the excess meat to be steamed at a later date:
Ingredients

20 oz ground turkey
1 coleslaw mix
2 green onions, finely chopped
1 T fresh ginger root, finely chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar
2 teaspoon sesame oil
2 T soy sauce
1 teaspoon sushi vinegar
1 (12 ounce) package wonton wrappers

Directions

1. Boil water and blanch coleslaw mix. Drain and squeeze when cooked through.
2. In a medium bowl, mix together the all the ingredients except for the wonton wrappers. Chill in the refrigerator for a couple hours, or overnight.
3. Place a tablespoon of the meat mixture into each of the wonton wrappers. Fold the wrappers, and seal the edges with a moistened fork.
4. In a large, deep skillet, heat 3 tablespoons vegetable oil over medium high heat. Place the pot stickers into the oil seam sides up. Heat 30 seconds to a minute. Pour water into the skillet. Gently boil 7 to 8 minutes, until oil and water begins to sizzle, then add remaining oil. When the bottoms begin to brown, remove pot stickers from heat.

Celebrate!

The days after....I am a big fan of paying less for the same thing, just through the virtue of patience. Yea...I stocked up on all kinds of Valentine's candies (didn't permit Rick to buy them before/during Valentine's day). The clerk that checked me out at CVS couldn't stop chuckling to himself when he saw me drop an armful of candies on the conveyor belt.

Giant Pocket-Sized Cookbook

I planned this week's meals out using our new book that Rick picked out.His favorite part? The "NO-DIET" part of it. My favorite part? It's like reading an A.D.D. magazine.

Best V-Day to date...(get it?)

Rick and I did movie and lunch for Valentine's Day today. We made the trek up to Fresno and ate at Limon after some Yelping. The emptiness of the restaurant worried me a little bit (every other restaurant within a one mile radius was packed and had 25 min waits to get seated), but we stayed anyway. The prices were far from astronomical, which was nice. I ordered the Papa a la Huancaina which was priced at $6.50. The description stolen from their menu: Traditional Peruvian Plate, steamed potatoes served with aji amarillo cream cheese sauce with olives and eggs. Here it is:
The cream sauce tasted like a spicy Hollandaise, overall a solid dish. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be piping hot or cold? It was served a little bit above room temperature. Rick ordered the Pollo Latino which was priced at $17.75 and described as: Pan-roasted chicken breast, truffle-infused macaroni and cheese, served with Dijon mustard sauce. Yum. The dish took them 15 minutes to prepare, but it was worth the wait. Well the mac and cheese made it worth the wait. Sooooooo....delicious!! I couldn't stop scraping the mac and cheese off of Rick's plate. The pasta was cooked al dente, the cream sauce was rich, but not overwhelmingly so and had a nice woodsy flavor. The chicken was nicely flavored, the critics at Yelp! were right, the chicken too salty, ONLY if you ate the skin. The meat itself was flavorful and pretty moist as far as white meat goes. MMM...mac and cheese! What does delicious mac and cheese look like?
I left the place stuffed and Rick was hungering for a little more...like DESSERT!

What's best for dessert? ICE CREAM CAKE! We picked one up at Baskin Robbins.Below is the world's most annoying and catchy commercial. I found myself chanting it involuntarily one day.