Recipes
My own recipes and my attempts to recreate the recipes of others.
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Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting
As promised, I took another set of cupcakes for a test drive last weekend in preparation for my upcoming baby shower! I thought it would be appropriate to complement the chocolate peanut butter cupcakes with something very opposite. I chose Lemon Blueberry Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting because they seemed the perfect counterpart. Instead of rich and heavy, they are light and fresh! Pick your poison! (Oh, that actually makes me feel kind of glum when I consider the fact that sugar is actually poisoning us. #tryingnottothinkaboutit ) Well, moving on! My husband was my co-taste-tester. His memory is somewhat selective when it comes to trying my food. If he…
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Ina’s Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting
Do you ever experience recipe overwhelm? Like, how many different ways are there to make chocolate cupcakes? Obviously, as a certified Type A lunatic, I envision myself finding 20 recipes and testing them all side by side because I want to be sure I found the best one. How can you just randomly point your finger into the ether and choose a cupcake recipe if you haven’t taste-tested it alongside all its competitors? (Maybe you’ve seen the Crate and Barrel commercial with Reese Witherspoon testing cranberry sauce recipes? So relatable.) Most recently, I wanted to find, as I mentioned above, a great chocolate cupcake recipe. I searched the internet as…
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Arancini – A New Holiday Tradition
I love the holidays for one billion reasons, but perhaps one of the most significant is the food. It gives me an excuse to try new and elaborate things that you would just never bother to make on a weeknight, or even a normal weekend for that matter. Holidays give you an excuse to make true special occasion food. (And luckily we have “Januarys” every year to give us an excuse to omit all special occasion food and become pious again… but that’s another story for another day.) This year, I decided to try a recipe for a traditional Italian food, arancini. Arancini, as far as I understand them, are…
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Snowball Cookies
It’s about that time of year again when I throw caution to the wind and forget all my resolutions to eat and be healthy and refocus my attention on cookies instead. It’s the time when I indulge in nostalgia and buy extra sugar, flour, and butter, casually forgetting how I told myself maybe it would be best not to have much of these things in the house. When the holidays roll around, all bets are off. (And I’m easily swayed by the manipulative world of the Food Network telling me that eating indulgent food will improve the quality of my life.) We kicked off the season with this recipe for…
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Chocolate Peppermint Ganache Cookies
The holiday season has officially begun, and even though we likely all overate this week5, today is nevertheless a day when I feel like celebrating by breaking a few rules. I try pretty hard all year, but no matter what I tell myself, I know that at Christmas, I will feel slightly cheated if I don’t get to enjoy making and eating a few cookies with a bunch of butter and sugar. Not “breakfast cookies,” not “date-sugar” cookies, not “sneak-in-a-vegetable” cookies, just regular old nostalgic Christmas cookies. BUT! Since this is to be treated as a celebration and a rare occurrence, when I do make some naughty cookies, they have to…
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Ina Garten’s “16 Bean” Pasta e Fagioli
When pasta and soup come together, I’m really very much in heaven. And Ohio, I know I say a lot of stuff about your winters, but you know I’m just messing with you, right? I didn’t mean it. Without Ohio winters, I wouldn’t get so many chances to eat soup, and I really stinking love soup. Now that we’re in the thick of fall with winter fast-approaching, I think it’s time to start using this opportunity to make the best of our miserably cold existences and eat some damn soup. With the return of Netflix’s Stranger Things tonight, I’m gearing up for a cozy night in, and a few consecutive…
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Garlic Hummus with Roasted Jalapeños
I’ve been a little bit obsessed with anything spicy lately, maybe because summer’s here. It feels appropriate. Roasted jalapeño garlic hummus is pretty much the perfect solution. I’ve been consuming it at a truly irresponsible rate ever since I came up with it, and now every trip to the store involves stocking up on chick peas and jalapeños. All summer meals should really involve something on the grill. Charring jalapeños is a low maintenance way to create an excuse to be outside by the grill without needing to set down your wine. I don’t care for activities that require me to set down my wine. Personally, I’m enjoying this…
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Derby Day Bourbon Chocolate Walnut Bars
Derby Day’s a-coming! Ok, let’s review why I would care about that. I don’t have a horse. I don’t ride horses. I don’t attend horse races. I don’t live in Kentucky. There are associated foods that I like. Oh yes, that’s the one. It’s because there are foods I like. Even though I’ve never been to the Kentucky Derby, and I know virtually nothing about it, I’d like to ride the coattails of this pseudo holiday and take advantage of the opportunity to make some food that I may otherwise have never tried. So, let’s call these Derby Day Bars. Whatever you call them, you DON’T call them…
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Tropical Fruit Salad with Toasted Hazelnuts and Coconut
I literally woke up this morning in the middle of a dream about tropical fruit salad. It started with plantains (which did not make the cut in my real-life salad because they have no business there), but then it snowballed into mangoes and pineapples and toasted hazelnuts, and all sorts of things that I ended up REALLY wanting to eat. And thus, a goal for my day off was born! (Or at least a second goal that would compete for attention with my previously established goals of washing my sheets and taking the dog for a run. I think I can find time for all three… ) Why was I…
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Kale and Brussels Sprouts Salad with Hot Honey Mustard Vinaigrette
Occasionally it dawns on me that I haven’t eaten anything green in way too long, and I feel an urge to overcompensate. I think this is a familiar feeling for most people. My husband’s reaction is to open up the container of raw spinach and just start shoving handfuls into his mouth. “Taking his medicine,” I believe is how he describes it. Well, that makes it seem like a penance, and I love food too much to waste any of my lifetime meals on something I don’t want to eat. So I’m going to go the extra mile (when I can) and make a salad like this one. This is…
