Pumpkin everything

Our fall office bake sale was today.

Fall bake sales are the best.

I got a pumpkin cream cheese cupcake, "frosted" with nutmeg cool whip (a revelation) and a piece of cranberry coffee cake and a piece of pumpkin cheesecake.

...A good morning...with a fantastic "breakfast." :)

P.S. The pumpkin cupcake was particularly wonderful....and I got the recipe!

At long last

I've been feeling like we aren't eating well...too much comfort food and not enough salad. So I tried to plan some light meals that include raw vegetables this week. On Monday we had warm chickpea and arugula salad (for a picture see this blog dedicated to Mark Bittman). This salad comes from my mother-in-law's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian cookbook. The recipe came very highly recommended, and it didn't disappoint. I served it with a white bean soup from How to Cook Everything. The white bean soup was fabulous...just my style...really simple and cheap and good.

White Bean Soup

1/2 c dried white beans (navy or great northern), rinse and picked over

6 c water or broth

1 medium onion, chopped

chopped parsley for garnish (optional...I liked it better without the parsley)

salt and pepper

I have found that beans don't get really soft when you cook them with salt, and you need to them to be really soft in this recipe. So, I cooked the beans and onions in 6 c water for about an hour. Then I added a couple of teaspoons Better than Boulion chicken broth base. Better than Boulion is very saltly, so I didn't add extra salt. Once the beans are soft, puree the soup and serve. That's it! I love soup!

After dinner my father-in-law came over to watch Monday night football. Shortly after he arrived, he and my sexy husband went downstairs to grab a beer. They were gone for a long time, and I heard lots of banging around. I assumed that they were checking out my sexy husband's basement project. Wrong. I walked into the dining room to grab my checkbook so we could pay our condo fee, and I caught them with the oven pulled out and tools everywhere. An hour later, my oven was fixed!!!

Out of gratitude I made them apple crisp with homemade icecream.

I thought it might be fun to make little individual apple crisps. It wasn't worth it. We ate two individual crisps per serving anyway.:)

Oh yeah. Now the fun starts.

New gadgets and goodness

My sexy husband and I got a new desktop computer! It's a fortunate/unfortunate consequence of my sexy husband's lay-off. We were using his work laptop. Then he had to return it.

In honor of our new machine, I'm posting two recipes that you really can't make without a machine like this. I got one for my birthday last summer. Since then it has had a permanent place on my countertop along with my food processor, my toaster, and my aerogarden.

My favorite honey peanut-butter ice cream
This ice cream has a wonderful salty honey base that would be fantastic all by itself but really rounds out the peanut butter and chocolate very nicely. It definitely ranks up there among the best ice creams I've ever had...and I made it up all by myself!

1 cup whole milk (I buy organic because I don't want my sexy husband to get man-boobs from all of those hormones...could that happen?)
2 cup cream (heavy or half and half...you decide.)
1/4 cup sugar
1/3 cup honey
1/2-3/4 tsp sea salt (the added benefit of the salt is that it keeps the ice cream from freezing rock hard)
1/4 tsp vanilla

1/2 c creamy peanut butter (Sorry, the natural stuff won't work. I used Jiffy.)
a handful of shaved chocolate (I'm still using up Easter bunnies from last year)
a handful of chopped peanuts

Add sugar and honey to milk and whisk until dissolved. Add cream, salt, and vanilla. Whisk to combine. Freeze in ice cream maker. When it's about 5 min from being finished, add the peanut butter by the spoonful and the chocolate and peanuts.

My sexy husband's favorite vanilla chocolate raspberry ice cream
The add-in's in this basic vanilla ice cream were all my sexy husband's idea.

1 cup whole milk
2 cups cream (same deal)
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla (if you are using imitation, you might want to add more)

1 small container red raspberries, roughly broken up
1/2 bottle Smucker's chocolate magic shell ice cream topping

Add the sugar to the milk and whisk until sugar is dissolved. Add cream and vanilla. Pour into ice cream maker. About 5 min before the ice cream is done, add the red raspberries and magic shell.

If you don't have an ice cream maker, I highly recommend getting one. Put it on your Christmas list. Making ice cream is really fun, creative, cheap, and easy (and in a machine that doesn't require ice and salt...fast). Besides all that it's rewarding and tastes WAY better than the other stuff.

That explains it

Maybe these fantastic desserts that my sexy husband and I got last week at Whole Foods play some part in my budget crisis. But it was SO worth it. My sexy husband choose this one...it had a raspberry cream/mousse and a vanilla cream/mousse between pastry layers with real barely sweetened whipped cream on top.

I chose this one. It had a small slice of chocolate cake on the bottom topped with espresso cream/mousse, dark chocolate cream/mousse, and chocolate cream/mousse. The whole whole thing was wrapped in chocolate and topped with chocolate "fingers", chocolate covered espresso beans, red raspberries, and real barely sweetened whipped cream. Oh man! It tasted even better than it looks or sounds. Coffee and chocolate play so well together.

I wish I knew the difference between cream and mousse.

Mark Bittman and No Bake Cheesecake

Some of you already know that Mark Bittman is my favorite food writer. By his own admission, he is not a real chef. He doesn't actually make up his own recipes. He takes other people's recipes and minimizes them...meaning he takes out all of the unnecessary ingredients and steps and makes them accessible...and keeps them fantastically good. Every single one of his recipes that I've tried has been excellent. Ask Brandi. She's made a few too.

Anyway, he writes a column for the New York Times called the minimalist, and it's updated every Wednesday morning (or maybe Tuesday night...I check it at work). His column gives me a reason to come to work on Wednesday, and usually be pretty excited about it. This week's recipe reminded me of Cindy who is always looking for summer recipes that don't require the use of the stove or oven....and of course I don't even have a working oven right now so this recipe is good for me as well.

Check it out.

I must also say here that Mark's parents got me an ice cream maker for my birthday!!! Last night I made lemon/lime (the limes were fresh, but they didn't have enough juice, so I added some lemon juice) mint (fresh mint leaves) sorbet. Oh yeah. It was good...really good...but a little too sweet. Actually, a lot too sweet. I'm going to cut the sugar in half next time. If you have an ice cream maker, ask me, and I'll give you the recipe. Or come to my house and enjoy it for yourself.