Very Vanilla Cheesecake:

Over the holidays my friend Dana made this cheesecake for a co-workers birthd… http://bit.ly/gURpoM

Over the holidays my friend Dana made this cheesecake for a co-workers birthday. It was amazing!! I am not a huge cheesecake fan
and would ordinarily take a small piece or pass altogether but I had 2 pieces of this cheesecake! It was light and fluffy and full
of vanilla flavor! It was perfect with fruit on the side. I couldn’t wait to get the recipe and share it on my blog.
Here is the the recipe for Dana’s very vanilla cheesecake.

This recipe from Alton Brown was fantastic. I made this for a post Thanksgiving feast and it was
the hit of the dinner!
I didn’t make the onions though. I found a can at Trader Joes and used those instead.
The onions were crunchy and tasted great. Also a lot faster.
The cream, the onions and garlic combined with the green beans, YUM!

Here is the recipe for Best Ever Green Bean Casserole

Pumpkin Stuffed With Everything Good
I heard about this recipe as I was driving home late one night, on NPR and I couldn’t wait to go home and look it up on-line.
It is from cookbook author Dorie Greenspan’s new cookbook, Around My French Table.
Her friend from Paris, Helene Samuel told her about this dish, and she thought, ‘That’s nice, that’s nice,’ and finally her friend said, ‘You’re not paying attention to me. This is a great dish. You have to make it!
So I made it and it was great! I smelled so good when it was cooking
Greenspan says “You can do more with a pumpkin than carve it and stick a candle in it — you can also stuff it, bake it and eat it all up.”
She suggests many different types of fillings, I stuck with the original stuffing of stuffing of bread, bacon, garlic and cheese, I did add peas to it though.

Try this recipe it was great!
Pumpkin Stuffed with Everything Good

This Carrot cake recipe is from an older cookbook, The California Heritage Cookbook, from the Junior League of Pasadena
It was published in 1976, I was 15 years old. My Mom got it as a gift from my God-Mother, Sherry Buntzen. She lived in San Diego
at the time. She was a teacher and loved kids. She was  a great cook and a great friend of my moms.
I have made this cake so many times and I kinda of forgot about it.
I made it today for a wedding shower and made another one to take to work for the gals that couldn’t make it to the shower.
Everyone loved the cake! It is very moist and the frosting is creamy and has a tang. I love the combination of the moist cake
with a hint of pineapple and the cream cheese frosting with a hint of lemon.
Very, very good!!
Recipe for Classic Carrot Cake

Now that the weather is changing (at least today!!)
It is not a hundred degrees outside so soup seems a welcome change from barbecue.

This recipe is from the Best of Americas Test Kitchen and it is wonderful! It is very fast. The trick is using ground chicken
meat. This releases flavor quickly instead of waiting hours to extract the flavor from a carcass.
I think this recipe is better than a slow cooked old fashioned recipe.

The recipe for Hearty Chicken Soup

I just bought a new kitchen scale. To be precise; an EatSmart Pro Scale from Open Sky.
I have used one in the past, when I was on weight watchers diet.
I know the importance of weighing my food instead of eye balling for weight loss, but I didn’t know how important
it was when baking. This video from Rose Levy Bernanbaum,
discusses why she feels it is important to weigh your ingredients when baking.

According to Baking Illustrated, “Baking is an exacting art and nothing provides accuracy more than weighing ingredients.”
They tested 2 types of scales, electronic and mechanical and the electronic scales were vastly preferred.

Now after using my own kitchen scale and trying a pie crust, once using the scale and one measuring, the pie crust that I made after weighing the ingredients came out much lighter and flakier. So I have to agree with the pros.

I highly recommend using a Electronic kitchen scale when cooking.

My friend Lindsey Birthday was a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to surprise her with a new dessert.
I knew she love chocolates chip cookies and I wanted to find something that would fit the bill.
The first cookbook I thought to look in was “Baked” by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.
I was flipping through the book and discovered this recipe.
I whipped it up and brought it to work. The comments were this was not just good but”amazing!”
People are still talking about it and asking when we are going to have another.

Tuscaloosa Tollhouse Pie, is a “cross between a pecan pie and and chocolate cookie-a very good,
gooey chocolate chip cookie.” It is primarily a southern dessert, not often found in any part of the country
(except in my kitchen in California!)
The pie is almost always served warm and a la mode.

I have to say this one of my new favorite desserts and will be making it for a long time to come.

Bon Appetit

Recipe for Tuscaloosa Tollhouse Pie

Well this was a very good cake, Coconut Sheet Cake with Hibiscus Sauce. I made it for my friend Yanni, who made the quarter-century mark. She felt very old… We should all be so old!

Anyway back to the cake. It was moist, not too sweet. The frosting was made with whipped cream and cream of coconut, very light and creamy.
It was good just like that, nothing extra was needed but then you tasted the Hibiscus sauce. Together they were sensational!

Dried Hibiscus flowers are also called Jamaica flowers, can be found at most Latino markets. I happen to have 4 or 5 in my town.

Jamaica water is a very popular drink, so with the flowers after I steeped them for the sauce, I steeped them in water again and drank the water.
It is very refreshing.

Enjoy the cake, my friends at work really did the whole thing was gone in an hour!

Recipe for Coconut sheet cake with hibiscus sauce

This was a wonderful chicken recipe from Bon Appetit September 2009 issue.  Very easy to prepare! The Italian name is Chicken al Mattone, (with a brick.)
The brick presses the chicken to the the pan so that it comes out juicy and very moist and the skin is golden brown.
It requires very little seasoning, just a simple marinade of lemon juice,  garlic, olive oil and rosemary.
The sauce in the pan was wonderful. We sopped up with a good loaf a rustic Italian bread.

I served the this with a recipe I found in the cookbook Lidia’s Italy, by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich. (This is one of my new
favorite cookbooks.) The recipe was Roasted Potatoes and Artichokes. The combination of the fresh waxy potatoes
and the baby artichokes cooked with onions and garlic was phenomenal!! Then combined with the chicken and a glass of
Sauvignon Blanc. Wow it doesn’t get much better than this.

Recipe for Chicken with a  Brick
Recipe for Roasted Potatoes and Artichokes