Modification Mondays: Orange-Spice Upside Down Cake

"You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either."

Do you ever buy a bag of oranges, eat two of them, and then think to yourself, "Okay, now what the hell am I going to do with the rest of these oranges?" Anybody? No? Well anyway, I do that at least once a year, and then I either force myself to eat them and get thoroughly sick of oranges, or throw them away and feel super guilty. Either way, it sucks. So this time, I said to myself, "No, I will find something delicious to do with these oranges, and it will be amazing!" And, well, not to brag or anything, but I kinda did.

My basic idea was a pineapple upside down cake, but with oranges. I found a basic pineapple upside down cake recipe in the Red Plaid Cookbook, as well as a recipe for something called citrus cake. I also found a recipe for maple-glazed pineapple upside down cake in The Old Farmer's Almanac Everyday Baking, which a friend who knows me very well got me for Christmas last year. So I took all those recipes, sat down with a pencil and Google, and set about smooshing them together and modifying for maximum orangey goodness.

The working copy, stuck on the fridge for optimal accessibility.

The cake part is pretty standard yellow cake, except I added a bunch of cloves and put some orange juice (fresh squeezed!) in with regular milk instead of using buttermilk. I also added some orange zest (freshly zested from the peels of the oranges I just juiced!).

Protip: Zest the orange peels, not your hands.

It's worth noting that you can significantly cut down your prep time by using store-bought orange juice and orange zest, and I wouldn't judge you at all for doing so; that just wouldn't have contributed to my goal of using up as many oranges as possible. I used two oranges for juice and zest, and then I sliced two more for the upside down topping, leaving only two more for me to force down my gullet (or suck it up and juice them for breakfast).

You mix together the cake batter pretty much like normal cake batter; start by creaming together the butter and sugar. (An electric mixer will be helpful here, but an industrious baker can do it by hand if they're dedicated.) I made a rookie mistake and realized halfway through my prep work that I didn't have enough butter for both the cake and the topping, so I substituted mashed banana and a touch of vegetable oil for the butter in the cake. This added a subtle banana-y flavor to it that wasn't bad, but it's not exactly what I was going for, so I'm leaving it out of the official recipe, since it was a last-minute substitution instead of an intentional modification.

Anyway, once the butter and sugar are creamed, add in the other liquid ingredients. (If you're using fresh orange zest, add that in here, too. If using store-bought, you can put it in with the dry ingredients.) Mix together the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then add them to the wet ingredients and mix it all together.

Now, for the fun part - the topping! For the orange slices, peel before slicing, and make sure you get as much of the white stuff off as possible. Slice the oranges side-to-side, and slice the top and bottom off very thinly and discard to get rid of all the nasty white stuff where the ends of the sections come together.

If you have a 10-11 inch cast iron skillet, now's the time to break it out. If you don't, you can use a small saucepan for this part and bake the cake in a 9-inch square baking dish instead. It'll still be good, but it might lack a certain je ne sais qua. (Actually, the edges will be slightly less crisp. That's really the only difference.)

Melt the rest of the butter in the pan and stir in the brown sugar and maple syrup. If using a baking dish, pour it in and spread it over the bottom. If you're already in the cast iron skillet, carry on. Lay out your orange slices in a single layer in the butter/sugar/syrup mixture. Sprinkle some raisins in the spaces between them.

Pour the batter in on top and stick that sucker in a 350° oven for 35-40 minutes or until the cake tests done.

Turn the cake over onto a heat-proof platter...

 Or pizza pan - y'know, whatever you've got on hand.

 Let it cool as long as you can stand to, then slice, serve, and enjoy!

Orange-Spice Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Prep/Cook Time: 1.5 hours (less if you use store-bought orange juice and zest)

Servings: 8

Ingredients:
(US Customary)

Cake

• 1/2 c. butter
• 3/4 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1/3 c. milk
• 1/3 c. orange juice
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp. molasses (If you don't have any, you can leave it out without dire consequences)
• 2 Tbsp. grated orange peel
• 1 1/2 c. flour
• 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking soda
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 tsp. cloves (this gives you a pretty strong flavor; if you're not a huge fan of cloves, you can cut it to 1/2 tsp., use cinnamon instead, or just leave it out altogether)

Topping

• 1/4 c. butter
• 2 Tbsp. maple syrup
• 3/4 c. brown sugar
• 2 medium oranges, peeled and sliced horizontally
• 1/4 c. raisins

Special equipment: Juicer and zester or box grater (use smallest side) if using fresh orange juice/zest. Electric mixer useful but not essential. Cast iron skillet optional.

Instructions:

1. Cream together 1/2 c. butter and sugar. In a separate container, mix together milk and orange juice. To butter/sugar mixture, add eggs, milk/OJ mixture, vanilla, molasses, and orange peel. Mix well.

2. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cloves. Add to butter etc. and beat to combine.

3. Melt 1/4 c. butter in cast iron skillet, if using. (Otherwise use a small saucepan). Stir in maple syrup and brown sugar.

4. If using separate baking dish, pour butter/sugar/syrup in and spread over the bottom. Otherwise leave it in the skillet. Lay orange slices in a single layer. Scatter raisins in the spaces between.

5. Pour cake batter over oranges. Bake at 350°F for 35-40 minutes or until the edges of the cake are pulling away from the sides of the pan and the cake tests done. Turn cake over onto a heat-proof platter, cool, slice, and serve.

Autumn Stew/Roasted Squash Seeds

I believe I have mentioned before my love affair with winter squashes; I also shared a recipe that requires a partial can of pumpkin. In furtherance of my addiction to squash (and to give you something to do with the rest of that can of pumpkin), I concocted a stew that is, as far as I'm concerned, the season of autumn, condensed into one Crock Pot full of autumnal goodness. (I've done this before, with slightly different results; if you're curious, you can check out the post on my personal blog that I haven't updated in like a year now. This one is more creamy and less sweet, but they're definitely related.)

To start, gather every autumn-y food thing you can find, plus some other stuff:

The main things here are the butternut squash, sweet potatoes, apples, and sausage. But the other stuff's important, too.

Pumpkin-Raisin Bread

I mentioned on Facebook awhile back, and I fully believe this to be true: when Jesus said "Man cannot live on bread alone," I'm pretty sure he was forgetting about pumpkin bread. It is, as far as I'm concerned, the perfect quick bread: sweet enough to spread on a little cream cheese frosting and call it dessert, but healthy enough to butter it and eat it for breakfast instead (or lunch, or dinner, or elevensies, or afternoon tea, or whenever you damn well please).

This recipe is slightly modified from one I found in The Red Plaid Cookbook, which I inherited from my mother, and is the cookbook of the gods:

Don't be fooled by the cover; all true disciples know that this is actually called "The Red Plaid Cookbook". (All true disciples being my mother and me.)

Their recipe is for pumpkin-nut bread, but I think it's better without the nuts. I also used slightly different seasonings, because I am very opinionated when it comes to pumpkin-flavored things. Anyway, let's begin.

I think a couple of the seasonings are missing here. That, or they're hidden behind the pumpkin and salt. I'm bad at photography.

Stuffed Acorn Squash

Have I mentioned my enormous love for winter squashes?

It's a little ridiculous. As soon as those things hit the grocery store shelves in September, I start stockpiling for the squashpocalypse.

Artist's rendering

My favorite way to eat just about any winter squash is roasted or mashed and doused with butter and maple syrup, but given the large amounts of squash in my house, I figure I have to mix it up now and again to avoid the diabeetus. (Also lest my husband stage a squash-madness- induced revolt.)

So one of my other favorite things to do with squash is to stuff it. There's a lot of leeway, as far as what tastes good stuffed into a squash, so here I'll just put the combination I came up with most recently. Feel free to get inspired and experiment with whatever you have on hand.

Mushroom and Bacon Casserole

I found this recipe in my Cooking Light magazine and couldn’t resist trying it. This could easily be altered to be meatless, though I did enjoy the bacon! It does require some chopping and work, but it’s a filling, warm winter dish!

Before baking in the oven (the heat of the dish had already mostly melted the cheese!).

Ends & Bits: Non-Fussy Pot Pie + Bonus Gin Cocktail

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

So I was having one of those days where nothing sounded good for dinner so I just didn't eat until I got a headache, realised I was being dumb, and decided I had to cook something. So I started with the advice of my old pal Carmel: Fry some onions. Just fry some onions and see where you end up.

I think this was original conveyed as a metaphor or life as well. Profound, yo.

So I started cutting up my onions to fry and realised we had bacon. Lots of bacon. "American-style" bacon even.

Spoiler: Australia does a lot of things really, really well. Bacon is not one of them. The "American-style" bacon my housemate found is an improvement. But... it tastes like the person who made it asked, "How is American bacon different than Australian bacon?" and then made it based off the answer without ever really trying American bacon.

 Anyway, I decided that the only thing better than frying onions was frying onions IN BACON, so I cut up some bacon along with my onion and started frying them all together and pondering what  I wanted this to end up as. About this point, I decided what I really wanted was a pot pie. Completely weather inappropriate to me, but it sounded delicious.

So I started doing a quick internet search for pot pie recipes and I was... underwhelmed by the results. They were all super fussy... Buy store-bought puff pastry and prepare it according to the instructions! Roast the vegetables first! Use only these exact vegetables! Then braise them slowly on the stovetop for four million hours! Make a roux separately and add it to the veggie slowly or you will ruin everything! Etc. And I just could not be fussed.

So I decided to just throw things together and see what happened. What happened was delicious:

Seriously delicious.

It takes a little bit of time to come together, but is incredible unfussy as a recipe. This is basically a "template" recipe--no strict ingredients, just vague proportions. (Thanks to Jules at The Stonesoup for the terminology of template recipes...they're basically the way I think about cooking.) The butter/margarine and some kind of flour are pretty essential, but everything else negotiable. Throw in whatever you have around!

Family Tradition: Green Potatoes

So as some of you may be aware Erik and I bough a house. We moved in to it on Monday and hosted Thanksgiving dinner on Friday. (Yes, yes we know Thanksgiving is on Thursday, but since most people only get Thursday and Friday off and many had to travel from far away it made sense to celebrate on Friday.  Also we needed that extra day.)  We had many of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans,  pies my mother made, and green potatoes. Wait, green potatoes?  People have heard about green eggs and ham, but when I mention green potatoes it usually doesn't ring a bell.  For the uninitiated, green potatoes are a Dutch tradition from Erik's mother's family.  And as the new bride I really wanted my Mother-in-law to be impressed with my ability to feed her son, so green potatoes were definitely on the menu (even though it meant we would have two potato dishes on the table).

Christmas Morning Cinnamon Rolls

We don't have a lot of food-based traditions in my family apart from Thanksgiving, and even those are mostly the same ones that everybody has: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, the souls of children, that sort of thing. But one that we do have is that my mom always makes cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning. She usually gets the Pillsbury rolls in a can, and that's fine, I don't judge, but for the man-panion & I's first Christmas as a married couple, I decided I wanted to try from-scratch cinnamon rolls for breakfast.

(Then I woke up Christmas morning and realized I was out of flour, so we had cereal and I made Boxing Day cinnamon rolls instead. But no matter, they were still tasty.)

I started out where so many of my culinary adventures start, in the Red Plaid Cookbook. It yielded a fairly straightforward recipe for cinnamon rolls, which I followed pretty closely, with the exception of halving it and omitting the raisins (raisins are delicious, and they belong in many baked goods, but not cinnamon rolls).

If you've never made any sort of yeast bread before, it might seem a little intimidating, but I promise, it's not. It helps to have an electric mixer with a dough hook...

Not least of all so you can play pirates in the kitchen.

...but with only slightly more effort, you can make these suckers by hand, and it's still totally worth it.

Winter Comfort Food: Roasted Brussel Sprout & Chicken Sausage Pasta

It's no secret that I love the resource that is Pintrest. I can scroll through the foodies' delight corner when I'm bored, tag the dishes that look tastiest, and make them later when I'm in need of a new meal to shake things up. The best part is, it's gotten me to try things that I never ate growing up.

Like brussell sprouts.

There are certain things I just never ate as a kid, given my mum's aversion to them. Beets, any kind of seafood (at least at home. Like father like daughter, I would always eat fish when we went out to restaurants!), and most definitely brussell sprouts. But I've heard such good things about them, usually along the vein of, "Oh, you just haven't had them MADE the right way! Have you tried roasting them?"

So when I found Cait's Plate's recipe for Roasted Brussell Sprouts & Chicken Sausage Pasta, I thought I would give it a try! Zac and I would be in big trouble if either of us gave up gluten - pasta is definitely our go-to answer for "what should we have for dinner?" That being said, we both have the bad habit of calling a bowl of pasta with obscene amounts of cheese/butter/garlic oil/etc "dinner." While it's certainly hella tasty, it doesn't rank too high on the "did I eat my veggies today?" scale.

I think my favorite part about this recipe is how few ingredients it requires. I'm not a big fan of giant shopping lists...inevitably, I will forget that one item. And then I kick myself all the way back to the grocery store...which is no fun on your bike in Chicago winters! Anywho, this dish requires 5 whole ingredients.

Ends & Bits: Little House-Inspired Bean Soup

Refrigerator empty? Cupboards bare? Need to stretch the wilty remains of last week’s grocery run until next payday? Toss all those little ends and bits in a pan and make something delicious! This series explores the skill set of just “throwing together” a meal by looking at what you have available to work with and going from there. This takes a willingness to experiment and a bit of a knack for knowing what will taste delicious together. It also helps to have plenty of practice and exposure to a wide varieties of recipes with potential variations. It is in this spirit that we run our regular Ends & Bits series.

Hi, my name is Andrea and I'm obsessed with the Little House on the Prairie series. I own all the books and two complete spinoff series; I've been marathon-ing the show on DVD from the library; I even own the goddamn cookbook.

I have literally read this cover-to-cover.

I tend to re-read the original series just about once a year, and so a couple days ago, I finished The Long Winter for the umpteenth time, in which the whole town is snowed in for like 7 months straight and the trains stop running and everybody pretty much almost starves. But early on in the book, it talks about how Ma makes bean soup and how very tasty and warming it is when it's so very cold outside.

Meanwhile, back in real life, for various reasons, the darling husband and I are trying to see if we can make it until next week without going grocery shopping, which means we're digging into the bottoms of the cabinets and fridge to use all the stuff we've been pushing aside because there were other, easier things to cook. And yesterday, I found half a bag of dried beans that have probably been in the cabinet for over a year, and it all clicked: I would follow the example of Ma Ingalls, make do with what we have, and whip up some tasty bean soup.

This recipe is not directly from the Little House Cookbook, mostly because they had rather less on hand than I do and their bean soup would have been pretty terribly bland, and also because I don't have salt pork. (Is that even a thing anymore?) Rather, it is simply bean-based and inspired by the use-up-and-make-do-with-what-you-have attitude so often found in the Little House series.

Spoiler: 2014 Is Pretty Great!

Happy New Year from this side of the international date line! Thank you everyone for your support and contributions as we got this project off the ground this year. Looking forward to a wonderful 2014 full of lots of delicious food and fun collaboration. Check back later today for a delicious traditional New Year's Day meal from Andrea.

Here's to hoping everyone has a wonderful and safe time ushering in the new year.

Sydney wishes you a happy NYE, too!

Brittany's Epic Christmas Cookie and Dessert Round-Up

So pretty much everyone knows the best part about Christmas is the cookies, right? Well, okay, I'm willing to concede non-cookie desserts are pretty good too. But Christmas cookies are probably the most important part of the holiday tradition to me, and it doesn't really feel like the holidays until I've gotten myself covered in flour in the pursuit of deliciousness. (It's also one of my three acceptable use cases for Christmas music.)


Last year, I had just moved to Australia and had only made a couple of friends to date. I didn't start work until January, so I had a lot of time on my hands. It was also my first Christmas ever away from home, which was a mixed bag of emotions. Since I'm totally good at processing feelings and shit, I squished all those to the side and buried them in mounds and mounds of Christmas cookies. I seriously made an absurd amount of Christmas cookies for someone who only knew about 5 people in the entire continent she was on. The Boy and I ate a tremendous number. I took about a third to his family. We froze another third and ate on them for months. I think I even ended up throwing out some when I moved house in April.

This year, I still have a bunch of time on my hands because I don't start my new job until January, but I also have a wonderful big group of friends and am psyched to be hosting my first ever Christmas Day at my own home. (I have a giant ham and a wafflemaker. BRING IT ON, CHRISTMAS.) I also run a nerdy social group in Sydney (because of course I do), so I decided to have a giant cookie-making party with those fine folks. So without further ado, may I present...

BRITTANY'S EPIC DAY OF COOKIE MADNESS!

The tastiest of all the task lists.

Fancy Foodie Friday: Macarons, Part 1 (Macaron d'Amiens)

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. 
  
So I'm currently taking a bit of time off of work until my new job starts and my visa transfer escapes bureaucratic purgatory. While I'm (f)unemployed, one of my plans for the downtime had been to learn lots of new things. I'm learning to play the ukulele. I took an awesome sailing class. I even painted a painting that didn't totally suck!

Although that hill behind the bird is the grave mound of his misshapen brother who had to be eaten by the earth and replaced by a less terrible bird for it to reach that stage.

Last week, I took an awesome macaron-making class at the Paris International Cooking School in Sydney. It was an intro class/demo, and we rushed through making 5 different styles of macarons in just a couple of hours, did some generous sampling, and then got to take home a box of our creations. (Side note to my Sydney friends: I'll probably go back for one of their longer weekend workshops early next year--let me know if you're interested in joining me!)

Testing the consistency of the meringue in class.

I've never attempted macarons before, because I've heard they're very finicky, but after this class, I've undertaken the adventure. I thought I'd do a short series on my adventures.

I thought I'd start with the easiest and least finicky macaron I learned, Macaron d'Amiens. These macarons are the regional variety from Amiens, a small city in the Picardy region in northern France. They're apparently not very popular or well-known outside of the region, which is unfortunate because they are delicious. They're a super chewy, heavier honey and apricot macaron. Serious amounts of yum.

Homemade Yogurt

Confession: around the time Brittany created this brilliant blog, I developed some serious stomach/nausea issues. Thus, I have been unable to cook for the past few months (unless you consider cooking to be combining a can of condensed soup with water in the microwave, then hey! I've become a pro at that!). This recipe is for creating homemade yogurt, something I had been doing on a monthly basis.

So although I didn't make something specifically for this first blog post, I’m still excited to share this with you because it’s been a part of my repertoire for a very long time. Sadly, I only have a few photos of the yogurt-making process to share (and apologies in advance to Facebook/Instagram friends…you've probably seen these photos before!) My fingers are crossed that by my next post, things will have resolved and I will have something new (with way more awesome pictures) to share.

So why make your own yogurt? Because it’s insanely easy and tastes about a million times better than the store bought stuff. And (ok, here’s my real reason) making it yourself is cheaper than buying it pre-made. Even when I use organic, grass-fed, local milk it is still cheaper, per quart, than the generic brand stuff available at Wal-Mart. For a family like mine, that loves its yogurt, that money saved can make a difference in the grocery bill.

Modification Monday: In Search of Fond Memories

You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either.

So I love Italian wedding soup. Specifically I love Knox’s* version of Italian wedding soup, which I’m sure is nothing special. It probably comes out of a can, but I love it so much. Italian wedding soup days meant nothing but Italian wedding soup, didn’t matter what was on the dessert bar; nothing would adulterate that delicious soup. Well maybe I exaggerate a little bit, but I usually had two bowls so that didn’t leave a lot of room for anything else. So I was pretty excited to find this in my Crockpot cookbook.

*Knox is a college.

Fancy Foodie Friday: Thyme Steak with Lemon Ginger Potatoes and Carrots

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. This is the second installment in the series.

It took a fun, creative sous chef to turn an eat-to-live girl into a food lover. I told my boyfriend Doug about this project, and he was instantly ready to create a delicious dish. Honestly, anytime we take the time to make dinner, it's amazing. The first bite is always an explosion of tastiness that makes me instantly happy and more in love.

This meal is no exception.

This dish presented some new flavor combinations that I personally never tasted before. The carrots are interesting in that they have the vinegar flavor, but not the bite. After the honey is added, the finished product has such a unique flavor that you'll either really enjoy it or not like it at all. The lemon ginger coconut oil that he's been cooking with is a perfect harmony of lemon, ginger, and coconut. We've even thrown it in when cooking rice, and it makes it 10x tastier.

Recipe, cooking, and cooking terms brought to you by Doug Sprous, Sous Chef (my main inspiration to expand my palate and learn how to cook properly).

Apple-y Goodness: Apple Cider Baked Chicken

I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

I.

LOVE.

Apples.

I think part of it stems (yes, pun intended) from growing up in Upstate New York. We lived a half mile from an apple orchard; every fall, my folks would take me and my brother apple picking. Homemade applesauce was mum’s specialty - and it was PINK, which makes it all the better. Having moved to the midwest, I realized I’m extraordinarily picky about my apples...and I can’t get a good macintosh apple (insert obligatory computer joke here) out here to save my life.

Needless to say, when Zac and I were surfing through my pintrest board of “ooh, that looks tasty and I want to try that sometime” recipes and his eyes lit on the Apple Cider Baked Chicken, I was more than ready to write the grocery list!

And it’s a pretty simple grocery list at that. Some chicken legs, potatoes, onions, lemons, apples, apple cider, and mushrooms, plus some pantry staples like olive oil and salt and pepper and bay leaves. All in all, it’s a pretty inexpensive and uncomplicated grocery list, requirements for just about any recipe I’m going to try!

The only tricky bit to this recipe is the planning ahead component. For all that I love planning ahead when it comes to Things I’m Doing and People I’m Hanging Out With, Zac and I are reeeeeeally terrible at forseeing anything beyond “what am I hungry for right now?”

Fortunately, the only planning ahead this recipe calls for is measuring and dumping things into a giant ziplock bag! The night before (or in our case, the morning of) you just gotta put the onion, lemons, apple cider, olive oil, thyme, apple cider vinegar, mustard, garlic, bay leaves, salt, pepper and chicken legs in the ziplock bag and let it marinate till it’s time to cook.

What’s nice is that once you’ve done that work in the morning, all that’s left to do when you’re actually cooking is chop up the potatoes and apples (and mushrooms if you want to add those to the recipe!), dump everything in a cast iron skillet or casserole dish and stick it in the oven for an hour and change.

And then you get this sort of tasty deliciousness that is full of apple-y goodness:

And since we had more cider than the recipe called for, of COURSE our drink for the night was apple cider spiked with honey whiskey!

So here you go! Next time you’ve got a hankering for something delicious with apples and cider, we’ve got you covered :)

Modification Mondays: Chocolate Chip Banana Cookies

You know when you start with one recipe and then end up with something totally different? Or start with a vision in your head they you can’t find a recipe for, so you find 3 or 4 recipes that are sort of similar and awkwardly mash them together, with a bit of your own flare? Or have to adapt well-loved favorites to new dietary restrictions? Or look at old stand-bys and think: “This should totally have bacon. Or tomatoes. Or bourbon.”? Yeah, the Modification Mondays series is for you. Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to follow our recipes either. This is the first post in the series.

Greetings, fellow eaters, creators, and lovers of food. For this, my first post here, I will be sharing my all-time favorite classic chocolate chip cookie recipe, plus a new (and healthy?!) twist. [ETA: Two twists! Read to the end!]

Behold, the recipe:

This, dear friends, was clipped out of some forgotten newspaper or magazine by my mother before I was even born. This piece of paper was printed when the Berlin Wall was still a thing. It also contains what I am convinced is the greatest chocolate chip cookie recipe known to man.

(It should be noted, however, that it also makes the largest chocolate chip cookie recipe known to man. I always halve it and still end up giving cookies away.)

Fancy Foodie Friday: Roasted Cauliflower, Sirloin Tip Roast, and Caramelized Onion Pasta

Feel like a treat after a long week? Splurge on a special ingredient? In the mood to spend a little longer in the kitchen? Got a hot date to impress with your culinary prowess? Check out the recipes in our ongoing Fancy Foodie Fridays series. These recipes might be a little too complex, time-consuming, or expensive for the every day, but are a nice challenge or treat for a fancy evening in. This is the first post in the series.


I’m a big fan of cooler weather. Many of the things I like best in life (soup, hot tea, fuzzy blankets, fuzzy socks, a lit fireplace, etc.) are best-suited to cooler weather. It’s also the perfect time of year for roasting. I live in Buffalo, NY, and this week is the first week it’s gotten nice and cold, so I’m celebrating by turning on the oven!

Roasting is my favorite way to prepare vegetables. It’s well-suited to my favorite veggies, which tend be the roots—cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, parsnips—but I’ve also found it works well for things like broccoli and asparagus. Asparagus especially gets these delicious crispy tips and turns very nutty in taste. Denser veggies like carrots or rutabagas take longer.

Pumpkin Pie for Breakfast: All Those Others Were Imposters Edition

So I didn't really have any intent to do an immediate follow-up to yesterday's post, but HOLD THE PHONE, I JUST MADE THE MOST DELICIOUS BREAKFAST EVER. And I had to share immediately. As in, I'm still eating it as I type this post.

I had a flash of inspiration this morning as I was getting ready to make a Pumpkin Breakfast Mug. I didn't feel like oatmeal, but I did feel like pumpkin pie for breakfast. (Let's be real, though, when don't I?) And I remembered a few years ago when I was having a pancake breakfast, but had a co-worker with a gluten allergy coming. My general approach to cooking gluten-free is to just make things that don't have gluten in them naturally rather than fuss around with flour substitutes.

So I found this recipe for bananacakes (I'd link it, but can't find it at the moment) that just had a mashed banana, scope of almond butter, and an egg. The texture was a little glomy, but they were delicious! They're my go-to for gluten-free breakfasts for friends, and I eat them myself all the time, despite loving gluten and its happy puffy formation in my baked goods.

Anyway, my flash of inspiration was to make this recipe with pumpkin instead. And OH, MY GOODNESS, I CAN'T EVEN HANDLE THE DELICIOUS. Be careful with this one, folks--you may never want to eat anything else ever again.