Wordless Wednesday: Freedom Toast

Tags

brunch, King William, San Antonio, Southtown, The Monterey

Freedom-sized French toast at The Monterey, San Antonio.  (I had brunch with Ginny and her daughter last week!)

For more WW, click here.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Mochi Cookies

Tags

baking, chewy cookies, chocolate, easy, fall, gluten-free, mochi, mochiko, pumpkin, recipes

With mochiko being a new-found flour friend, I’ve been on the hunt for good mochi cookie recipes.  Not really seeing anything super exciting, yet while also being taunted by  Pumpkin Mochi by justJENN recipes, I came up with a theory.

Pumpkin cookies are often super cakey, and mochi is wonderfully chewy. What if you just replace the regular flour in pumpkin cookies with mochiko?  Answer: Jessica worries and spends lots of quality time with google.

The solution that I was happiest with and ended up using came from Joy of Baking, where it’s suggested to use 7/8 cup rice flour to 1 cup all-purpose flour. Mochiko is actually sweet rice flour (or glutinous rice flour), but I decided to give it a shot anyway.  To make life easier, I went with her recipe for pumpkin cookies. 2 cups all-purpose flour?  1 3/4 cups mochiko!  Maybe too easy?

My uneasiness with flour experimentation and the lack of daylight at 1 a.m. means no process photos.  You can see that they turned out looking like totally legit cookies, though!  They tasted like totally legit delicious cookies, too.

Wordless Wednesday: Angles

For more WW, click here.

Thanksgiving Procrastinators Anonymous

Tags

baking, cooking, idea, recipes, Thanksgiving

Maybe you figured it out this weekend.  Maybe you’ve known for months.  Maybe you spent last Black Friday brainstorming for this week you freakazoid.

Or maybe you’re just like me and have no clue.  Is it bad that I don’t even know if I’m responsible for more than desserts this year?

I guess it’s time to finally start thinking about what I’m going to make for Thanksgiving.  Hey, when you don’t have a turkey to thaw, it’s never too late, right?  …

Just in case I’ve got some fellow chronic procrastinators out there, here are some yummies made or craved by me:

Butternut Squash Barley Risotto can be a side but is hearty enough to be a main dish for the vegetarians out there.  It’s so creamy and packed with flavor!

Why have Tofurky when you can have Crustless Potpie Over Sweet Potato Biscuit from Vogue Vegetarian?  Oh.  Em.  Gee.

And yet another veggie alternative that I’ve been eyeing for over a year: Nut-Stuffed Delicata Squash from Shutterbean.  Tracy says the sage makes the filling taste sausage-y!

Duh: T-Day requires carbs.  Double Duh: Carbs are 100000x better when homemade.  No-Knead, Overnight Dinner Rolls were a delicious and simple answer to my dilemma with my family’s lunchtime Thanksgiving last year.

Wordless Wednesday: Ball and Chain

Tags

viola, Wordless Wednesday

(There should be a chinrest, but I was messing with it.)

For more WW, click here.

Daring Cooks’ Challenge: Cooking with Tea!

Tags

Asian, bok choy, cooking, miso, noodles, soup, tea, tofu, vegan, vegetarian

Sarah from Simply Cooked was our November Daring Cooks’ hostess and she challenged us to create something truly unique in both taste and technique!  We learned how to cook using tea with recipes from Tea Cookbook by Tonia George and The New Tea Book by Sara Perry.

Cooking with tea?  Interesting…though I almost didn’t do this challenge.  The vegetarian recipe provided sounded good, but potentially bland.  I did it though, and my instincts were correct, to me at least.

Pumpkin Stout Gingerbread Bundt with Brown Butter Icing

Tags

baking, brown butter, bundt, cake, fall, gingerbread, icing, pumpkin, recipes, stout

Ahh, fall.  Your days are shorter, the air is cooler, and leaves crunch beneath our feet.

Wait…what’s that other sound?

Bundt pans trembling with fear!  Or is it with glee?

That’s right, we’re hurtling towards National Bundt Day (November 15!), made popular and most earnestly celebrated by Mary the Food Librarian.   Last year was my first time paying tribute to the curvaceous confection, and thus the Zebra Bundt Cake was born.  This year’s offering is much more visually tame, but the flavors certainly make up for that.  

Wordless Wednesday: Sunny Welly

Tags

Mt Victoria, NZ, Wellington

From Mt Victoria, Wellington, NZ in January 2010 (take me back!)

For more WW, click here.

An unexpected weekend of sorts…

Delicious avocado gelato at WF…two years ago.

People of Austin: if you happen to see me at Whole Foods on a Saturday night, it’s not because I ran out of organic potatoes for that dinner party I’m hosting. Au contraire, with the exception of last weekend, there most likely is not a social gathering at my abode.  (Wait, do felines count?)  I am probably lonely and am using “grocery shopping” as an excuse to be around other human beings.  It also gives me the excuse to drive down 6th on a weekend night.  Wooo!  I’m one wild ‘n crazy gal.

Ironically, I should have been swimming in a sea of fellow bloggers (and delicious food) this weekend at the Foodbuzz Blogger Festival in SF, but am instead drowning in an ocean of regret.  Oh, the melodrama!  But really, I had been looking forward to this event ever since becoming a Featured Publisher over a year ago and the tweets are kind of killing me.  I won’t bore you with my last minute decision to stay, but it was the responsible thing to do.  I have learned from this lesson and next time will swiftly kick responsibility in the pants.

So much for the awesome day-by-day recaps I had been hoping to write.  I’ll bake something soon though, don’t worry.

Wordless Wednesday: Halloween, (real) 80s style

Tags

Wordless Wednesday

Max Headroom (sister) and Ballerina Princess Fairy (me), circa 1986/1987.

For more WW, click here.