Paula Deen's Peach Cobbler

     I just couldn't let the week pass before I threw in my two cents about Paula Deen and her current controversy. Of course, what she said was wrong, but the fact that the media is blowing it as far out of proportion as they are is a real shame. Anyone who bothers to find out the whole story will understand that something she said 30 years ago, in private, and in reference to an extremely traumatic experience has nothing to do with her character today. So in order to show my support for my girl Paula, I made her famous peach cobbler. I tried to stay as true to her recipe as possible, but I did cut it in half and cut back a little on the butter. If you're on Paula's side, make this as a tribute, and even if you think she's the devil, make it anyway because it's still delicious!

INGREDIENTS:
4 fresh, ripe peaches
3/4 cup self-rising flour
3 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup water
1 cup sugar, divided
3/4 cup milk
a sprinkle of cinnamon on top

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 and grease an 8x8 glass baking dish.
2. Make sure your peaches are perfectly ripe, so that they are easy to peel but don't turn to mush when you slice them. They will give a little when you poke them. First, cut all the way around the peach through the stem area. Then twist the two halves in opposite directions to separate the halves, like you would for an avocado. Once the peach is in halves, peel each one just with your hands. Finally, remove the pit and slice each peach half into thin wedges.
3. Simmer the peach wedges with 1/2 cup of the sugar and the water on the stove over low heat for about 7 minutes. You want the sugar to melt and make a syrup, but don't stir them so much that they lose their shape completely.

4. While the oven is heating up, put the butter in the baking dish and place it in the oven to melt.
5. In a medium bowl, mix the rest of the sugar with the flour and milk until there are no lumps.

6. Take the dish with the melted butter out of the oven and pour the flour mixture on top of it evenly, but don't stir it.

7. Spoon the peaches over the top of the batter and be sure to pour in all of the syrup. Again, don't stir it! Then, add cinnamon on top and bake for 45 minutes.

For some reason, my cinnamon jar didn't have a top with holes in it, so my picture looks a little unevenly sprinkled. Oh well...   Serve this with ice cream if you want, enjoy and come back tomorrow! I have so many goodies to share, I don't even know what to post next!

Classic Shrimp Scampi

     I never understood why some people are averse to shellfish, barring allergies of course.  Shrimp and crab are definitely in my list of top 10 foods. However, I have to keep in mind that I grew up eating that stuff, and if someone tried to get me to eat crab meat for the first time today, I'd think they were nuts. Anyway, I think most people do at least like shrimp. This is another one of my favorite examples of how fancy food can be really easy. There are a bunch of different ways to make shrimp scampi, and someday I'll try some others, but this one is simple and delicious. The only hard part is defrosting and peeling the shrimp if you get frozen ones, but you could get fresh ones or at least ones that are pre-peeled. After that, it takes less than 30 minutes to cook. Just a disclaimer: This isn't healthy at all and I'm not going to pretend that it is, but try it anyway. Life's too short!

INGREDIENTS:
4 servings of angel hair pasta
1 lb. raw medium shrimp, fresh or frozen and defrosted
3 cloves of garlic
1/2 stick of butter
1/4 cup olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/4 cup bread crumbs
1/4 cup shredded parmesan
salt and pepper
fresh parsley to garnish if you want to get really fancy

DIRECTIONS:
1. Start boiling water for the pasta, but it cooks in only 6 minutes, so add it to the water when you put the shrimp in the oven.
2. Preheat oven to 400 and grease an 8x8 glass dish.
3. Prepare your shrimp i.e. defrost, de-peel, de-tail, de-vain it if it's not done for you already.
4. Chop the garlic and sauté it with the butter and oil over medium heat for 2-3 minutes.

5. Add the shrimp to the pan. Season with salt, pepper, oregano, and lemon juice and cook on both sides until they turn from clear to pink (maybe 5 minutes, give or take).

6. When the shrimp are fully cooked, turn off the fire and spread the shrimp out in a single layer in the glass baking dish. Then sprinkle the top with bread crumbs and parmesan. Bake for about 10 minutes.

7. Serve over pasta and garnish with chopped parsley and extra lemon wedges if you want to.

Enjoy, and come back tomorrow for a great dessert with a little bit of a political statement attached.

Caprese Salad

     This is probably the easiest recipe I'll ever post because it requires no actual cooking. Still, it's something that everyone should know about. I think i've shared my love of my favorite trio of Italian ingredients before. These are of course, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil. They belong together, and this simple salad really lets the flavors of each shine through. Make this throughout the summer, every time you have an Italian dinner. It makes a perfectly light and refreshing appetizer.

INGREDIENTS:
8 slices of fresh mozzarella cheese
2 tomatoes, sliced
a few fresh basil leaves (Unfortunately, I only had the kind from a jar today, but that works too.)
2 tablespoons olive oil
juice of 1/2 lemon
1/4 teaspoon each of salt and pepper

DIRECTIONS:
1. Slice the tomatoes and cheese. If you're really lucky, you can buy fresh mozzarella already sliced specifically for this purpose.
2. Mix the lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper in a small bowl. If you're using refrigerated jar basil, add 1/2 teaspoon of it to this dressing.
3. Layer the tomatoes, cheese, and fresh basil leaves on a serving plate. Then, use a spoon to drizzle all of the dressing over the top. Obviously, it looks a lot prettier with fresh basil leaves, but you get the idea.

Enjoy, and come back tomorrow for the main course I made with this!

Viennese Beef Stroganoff

     A few weeks ago, I posted my go-to recipe for beef stroganoff. It's classic and definitely the right place to start. Once you've gotten the hang of that, I encourage you to move on to this variation. There's a little backstory here: On my last trip to Europe, I spend two days in Vienna. Although I haven't been to many places yet, I have to say Vienna is so far my favorite city, so you should all go there. Anyway, Upon arrival, my friend and I decided to stop for lunch in this great little restaurant, and there, I had the best beef stroganoff I ever tasted. I knew I had to recreate it someday. Now I know that technically, this is a Russian dish and that calling it stroganoff requires that it be made with sour cream. This is very different because of the spices and the lack of dairy. As I was doing my research for this post, I found that most people call it Viennese beef goulash, but I clearly remember that the menu in that café called it  Vienna style stroganoff, so that's what I'm calling it. Note: In the authentic version I had, the meat was very tender and easy to pull apart, like it had been simmered for a couple of hours. I decided to speed up the process because ain't nobody got time for that. If you do though, by all means, go for it! Also, I used stew meat for this because that's what my dad bought for some reason and there's not really much else you can do with stew meat. You're welcome to try it with a good cut of meat though. Some people make regular beef stroganoff with ground meat, but please don't do that. It's just not good. Finally, the peas I added to this recipe don't really belong, but I just can't handle it if there are no vegetables in a dinner. Adding those is up to you.

INGREDIENTS: (makes 4 servings)
1 lb. of beef, cut into bite-sized pieces.
1/2 onion
1 clove garlic
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon paprika
1 bay leaf
1/4 teaspoon marjoram
2 cups beef broth
2-3 tablespoons flour
a little olive oil
Throw in a few frozen peas if you want.
4 servings worth of egg noodles

DIRECTIONS:
1. Boil the noodles.
2. Chop the onion and garlic.
3. Cut the meat into small pieces, heat some oil in a large pan, and brown the meat.
4. When the meat is browned, add the onion and garlic and cook until tender.
5. Next, add the broth and vinegar and bring to a boil.

6. Add the paprika, marjoram, and bay leaf and stir well. Then gradually add flour until the sauce thickens. Aim for gravy, not soup. Let it simmer for a few more minutes. If you want to add peas, do that now, otherwise, you're done.

7. Serve over egg noodles and enjoy!

If you're in the mood for something sweet, check out yesterday's recipe!

Tangy Lemon-Lime Bars

     We finally had our oven repaired yesterday, so naturally, I made lemon bars to celebrate. My love of citrus is no secret, but for some reason, I never got around to making these until now. On a recent trip to the grocery store, I was very disturbed to find a lemon bar kit in the boxed cake mix section. Regular boxed cake mix is pointless enough, but I'm afraid to know what's in the lemon bar box. Hopefully they let you at least supply your own lemons instead of giving you some gloppy, sugary mess in a can. But even if that is the case, they're still charging you way too much for just some sugar and flour in a box. I've said it before and I know I'll be saying it forever: Baking from scratch is not nearly as hard as you think! In fact, this refreshing summer treat takes less than 45 minutes.

INGREDIENTS:
for crust:
1 cup flour
1/4 cup powdered sugar
pinch of salt
1 stick of cold butter

for filling:
juice of 3 lemons and zest of 1
juice of 3 limes and zest of 1 (Juice should total between 2/3 and 3/4 cups.)
1 1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup flour
4 eggs
extra powdered sugar for the top

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350. Spray and then line an 8x8 baking dish with parchment paper. Make sure the paper comes all the way up on 2 opposite sides of the pan so that the bars are easy to lift out after baking. As you'll see in the pictures, I was dumb and didn't do this.
2. For the first time in my life, I actually made a pie crust in a food processor like you're supposed to. If you have one, pulse all of the crust ingredients in it until the butter looks like small peas. Cut the butter into tiny cubes first and add them gradually. It shouldn't take very many pulses. Alternatively, use a pastry cutter to do this by hand.

3. Press the crust mixture into the bottom of your pan and bake it for 20 minutes. Before you bake it, it may seem too crumbly, but don't worry, it turns out perfect. Then, when it's slightly browned, remove it from the oven and lower the heat to 300.

4. While the crust is baking, zest and juice the lemons and limes into a small bowl.

5. In a medium bowl, stir the sugar and flour together, then whisk in the eggs one at a time. Finally, add the bowl of citrusy goodness and whisk until completely smooth.

6. Pour this over the slightly cooled crust and bake for 20-25 minutes on 300.

When it's done, it'll be yellower and feel a little bit spongy on top and won't jiggle in the middle.

7. Remove from oven and let cool for 10 minutes. Then, run a butter knife around the edges before lifting it out of the pan by holding the sides of the parchment paper. Let it cool for another half hour or so and then cut them into squares with a sharp knife. Sprinkle some powdered sugar on top if you're serving them right away. Otherwise, stick them in the fridge and wait on the powdered sugar because it absorbs and becomes invisible pretty quickly.

Enjoy, and come back tomorrow for one of my European favorites!

Creamy Veggie Pasta with Chicken

     In continuing with my health kick, I've rediscovered another great little invention, called pasta that's made out of vegetables. I know it's really nothing new, but yesterday I tried the kind that's apparently made from carrots and guess what! It doesn't ever taste remotely like carrots! Since I'm Italian, I eat a lot of pasta and I really couldn't live without it. I have tries whole wheat varieties, which I like well enough, but I have to say the veggie version is better. So while you could make this meal with any type of pasta you want, I highly recommend giving veggie pasta a try. Besides that, this meal is chockfull of fresh vegetables, honestly because I was trying to use up what we had in the house. If you have different ones on hand, you can probably throw in whatever you want. This recipe makes about 4 servings.

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 box of non-spaghetti-shaped pasta (My carrot pasta was a fancy macaroni.)
3 boneless chicken breasts
one small bunch of broccoli
one bell pepper (Pick your favorite color.)
a few handfuls of fresh spinach
1/2 onion
1 cup chicken broth
3/4 cup milk
1-2 tablespoons flour
shredded parmesan cheese for garnish
olive oil, salt, and pepper

DIRECTIONS:
1. Boil the pasta.

2. Chop the broccoli, pepper, and onion before and set all the veggies aside.

3. Heat a little olive oil in a pan. Cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces and cook them over medium heat for about 5 minutes.

4. When the chicken is pretty much cooked, add the onions and cook them for 3 minutes.
5. Add the broth and milk, heat it for a minute, then gradually add flour until the sauce thickens to your liking. Turn the fire down a little once the sauce looks good.

6. Next, add the broccoli and cover the pan to let it steam for a couple minutes.
7. Add the peppers and spinach. Cover the pan again for a minute to let the spinach wilt. Then continue to stir everything until the spinach loses about 90% of its original volume.

8. Finally, add the pasta to the pan and stir it to coat it with the sauce.

As you can see, my pan was just barely big enough to fit all the food! Serve this with a little bit of parmesan on top. Enjoy!

Almond Milk Vanilla Pudding

     When I started this blog, I posted decadent, fattening goodies every day, and I thought it was cute and quirky to poke a little fun at my love of sugar, butter, and carbs. Don't get me wrong, I will always love that stuff, but I'm going to start really making an effort to come up with healthier recipes, at least some of the time because I know the decadence won't be cute forever. As you may have noticed, I've recently gotten addicted to almond milk, so today, I decided to make vanilla pudding out of it. This is the thick kind, made to shape in a mold, and I honestly don't know what I think of it yet. The presentation is definitely fun to play with, since you can mold it into any shape you have and top it with whatever fruit you want. It's growing on me with every spoonful. So you be the judge.

INGREDIENTS: (makes 4 servings)
2 cups plain almond milk
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
pinch of salt
4 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons water
fruit for topping (I used 2 kiwis and 1/2 a pomegranate.)

DIRECTIONS:
1. In a small saucepan, warm the milk, sugar, salt, and vanilla over medium-low heat for about 3 minutes.
2. In a small bowl, mix the very cold water into the cornstarch. It will be stubborn and really clumpy at first, but keep coaxing it until smooth.

3. Slowly add the cornstarch mixture to the milk. Raise the heat closer to medium and whisk constantly. Let it thicken and boil for 20 seconds, then turn off the heat.

4. Pour into a mold of your choice or just little cups. Spray molds with Pam just to be safe. I filled 2 hearts and 2 fancy glasses. Cover these and refrigerate for at least 2 or 3 hours to set.

5. Prepare your fruit topping. I chopped 2 kiwis into very small pieces and mixed them with the seeds of half of a pomegranate and didn't need to add any sugar. If you want to be more traditional, you could try a berry topping, but for berries, I recommend heating them on the stove with a little sugar first. If you heat the fruit, let it cool completely before putting it on the pudding.

6. When you're sure that the pudding is set, take it out of the mold by turning it upside down onto a plate and top it with the fruit. Put some effort into the presentation on this one!

Enjoy! And come back tomorrow for a delicious pasta recipe!

The Healthiest Chocolate Shake Ever

     For my third smoothie creation of the week, I give you the chocolate un-milkshake. It's a refreshing summer treat that's actually about 80% good for you. There will be some taste-testing required here because it's up to you how sweet or chocolaty you want it to be. This recipe makes about 12 ounces. On a side note, next week, we're finally getting the oven fixed, so hopefully I'll have some more actual meals to post soon!

INGREDIENTS:
3/4 cup almond milk (Either use unsweetened and add sugar to taste at the end, or use sweetened and add less sugar later.)
2/3 cup crushed ice
1/2 banana
1-1 1/2 tablespoons cocoa powder
a spoonful of extra Zucker if you really need it

DIRECTIONS:
1. Blend everything.

2. Drink it out of an actual glass. It really adds to the experience.

Tomorrow, I promise I'll have something more exciting, but in the meantime, this is pretty yummy!

Homemade Almond Butter

     I have yet another confession to make: I don't really like peanut butter. That may sound crazy to some of you, or even un-American, but I can't help it. I never really cared for PB&J, I've never felt compelled to bake with peanut butter, and with the exception of my twice yearly cravings for a Reese's cup, I'd never dream of combining it with chocolate. Occasionally, I'll have some on an English muffin for breakfast, and for some reason, I do enjoy those chewy grocery store peanut butter cookies, but that's really it. I'm a much bigger fan of Nutella, and especially almond butter. If almond butter wasn't ridiculously expensive, I would eat that exclusively. Now that I've discovered how to make almond butter myself, I may never buy peanut butter again. If you've never tried almond butter, you should. The only way I can describe it is that it's nuttier and has a richer flavor and more interesting texture than peanut butter. To make it, you only need 4 simple ingredients and a good food processor.

INGREDIENTS:
2 1/2 cups raw whole almonds
2 tablespoons canola oil
1 tablespoon sugar
salt to taste

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350. Spread the almonds out on a cookie sheet and bake for 7 minutes. You can skip this step, but roasting the almonds really enhances the flavor.

2. Run the almonds in a food processor for a total of about 10 minutes. As they break down, they will release natural oils. Every 2 minutes or so, stop the machine and scrape the sides of the bowl with a rubber spatula. After about 3 minutes, it will look like this:

 3. At the 5 minute mark, add the canola oil. After about 8 minutes, it will look like this:

4. At about 9 minutes, add the sugar and salt. Run the machine for another minute, then taste test, adjust, and blend again if necessary. Everyone likes a different amount of sweetness and salt in their peanut and almond butter. When the almond butter is done, it will look like this:

      The texture will be a little different than that of peanut butter. It's denser and spreads differently. Store it in tupperware in the fridge because it obviously doesn't have the preservatives that regular peanut butter has. Enjoy this! Put it on anything you would put peanut butter on (bread, fruit, etc.). Or just eat it by the spoonful. I'm sure tempted to! Come back tomorrow for the healthiest chocolate milkshake you'll ever have!

Zebra Cake Copycat

     Since I felt bad for not posting any baked goods this week, I decided to post something I originally wasn't going to. This zebra cake caught my eye on pinterest and is very similar to the one from notquitenigella.com. I usually try to be more original, but I had to try this because I had been completely confused about how to get a vertical stripe pattern in a cake until I found this. I had seen pictures of them before and I have put a lot of thought into this, but I was shocked by how easy it actually is. The other reason why I wasn't going to post this is because I made the mistake of cutting the recipe in half so I wouldn't end up eating a huge cake by myself, so the striped pattern you'll see in the pictures is not as clear and even as it would be in a full-sized cake. Check out the original website for some much better pictures of what the full-sized version will look like!

INGREDIENTS:
(for a 12inch cake)
2 tablespoons butter
8 ounce block cream cheese, softened
1/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
6 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons cocoa powder

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat the oven to 325. Grease and flour a 12inch springform pan. Wrap a pice of foil around the bottom and sides of the outside of the pan. Then, find a casserole dish big enough for the pan to sit inside and fill it 1/4 full with water. Don't put the cake pan in the water until the batter is in it. At that point, if the cake pan floats, there's too much water.
2. Melt the cream cheese, butter, and milk together in a glass bowl on top of a small pot of boiling water. Whisk it well, then put it in the fridge while you separate the eggs.
3. Carefully separate the eggs and beat the whites with the lemon juice and sugar on high speed in a cold bowl until they look like whipped cream. For several tips on how to beat egg whites, see my previous post about soufflé.
4. Add the flour, cornstarch, and egg yolks to the cream cheese mixture. Then gently fold in the egg whites, 1/3 at a time.

5. Get another bowl and divide the batter in half. Be as precise as possible. Now add the cocoa powder to one bowl. Make sure both batters are mixed thoroughly and that they have the same consistency. Every time I make any kind of black and white cake, the chocolate batter seems denser than the white. This must be because the cocoa powder thickens it, and I suspect that this is why the white stripes of cake in my pictures are not as wide as the chocolate stripes. So if the white batter seems runnier to you, try adding just a very small amount of flour to the it until it matches the consistency of the chocolate.

6. For this part, you'll need a tablespoon and a steady hand (unlike mine). Start assembling the cake by taking spoonfuls of white batter and plopping them in the middle of the cake pan until they make a circle. The circles should be smaller than the circumference of the pan, but they will spread out on their own as you add more. On top of the white batter circle, add a few tablespoons of chocolate batter to make another, slightly smaller circle, that fits inside the first white batter one.

7. Continue this pattern of stacking smaller and smaller circles of batter, alternating colors. Eventually, the first few layers will spread out to fill the edges of the pan, but as you get closer to being done, the batter circles you will need to make will get very small. Be as careful as you can to avoid dripping batter onto areas of the opposite color. You'll see I messed up a couple of times, no big deal. When the circles get too small to look like circles, you're done. Even if you have extra, just bake that up in a separate pan or throw it out if it's not much.

8. BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL not to tilt the pan as you carry it. Place it in the water in the casserole dish and make sure the foil is still snug and it doesn't float. Bake for 1 hour. Then let it cool for 15 minutes before removing it from the pan.

9. Now it's very important to chill the cake thoroughly and quickly. This is probably just my food safety paranoia, but I can't stand it when cheesecakes take hours and hours to chill in the middle. Most actual bakers would probably find this ridiculous, but I usually take all of my cheesecakes out of the pans and immediately put them in the freezer for 1-2 hours. Then I move them to the fridge, and slice in only once they're completely cold.

     Sorry it's not the greatest picture of the inside. I think it will look better in a full-sized cake, which I will make one of these days and then post here to compare. In case I didn't make this clear, this is technically a cheesecake, but it's more of a cheesecake/normal cake hybrid. It's like magic how it rises and makes the zebra pattern. It doesn't even need a crust or frosting that would detract from it's visual appeal. So try it, and let me know how the pattern works for you. I clearly haven't mastered this one yet, but I thought it was so cool, I had to share it anyway!