While I was home for the holidays, tinaconnolly came to visit, and we made Quiche Florentine. Our version featured eggs, cream, spinach, onion, bacon (optional, obviously, if you wanted a vegetarian version), and gruyere cheese — in a homemade crust (Yay pastry chef Tina!).
I can’t stand regular oatmeal. The flavor is fine, but the gloppy texture just doesn’t do it for me. Most oatmeal is made with rolled oats — oats that have been hulled, steamed, rolled, and flaked so that they cook quickly. Steel cut oats (aka Irish oats), on the other hand, are hulled oats cut into two or three pieces, rather than being squashed flat.
Steel cut oats take longer to cook, but they have a lovely chewy texture. …
After seeing Gord’s post mentioning that he had a big box of tasty satsuma/mandarin oranges, I went out and got some for myself. Yum!
Two ripe bananas were transformed into muffins:
I had to search around a bit for a muffin recipe that only called for 2 bananas (most want 3), and ended up using this one. They go really well with honey butter (which Maureen had at Thanksgiving — tasty and easy, just mix honey with room-temperature butter).
There’s a place three blocks from my apartment that has gelato and cupcakes. (I suspect they have a lot of other things as well, but I’ve never gotten past the gelato and cupcakes.)
This particular cupcake is a vanilla cupcake with lemon filling.
It was tasty.
Fortunately I have yoga class tonight to help burn off all the lemon-vanilla calories from my afternoon treat :)
Turkeys were on sale at the grocery store the day after Thanksgiving, so I picked one up and roasted it for Sunday dinner, along with a couple of the traditional accompaniments. The turkey was a relatively small (9lb) bird, but with only two of us eating it, I still ended up with plenty of leftovers to play around with.
So for lunch today I made turkey and dumplings, with leftover turkey and homemade turkey stock:
Had a lovely lovely time at Maureen’s ‘orphan Thanksgiving’ tonight. Good company, good food and drink. Food highlights included juicy delicious turkey, sausage-parsnip-apple stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, sweet potatoes topped with brown sugar and pecans, pumpkin pie, deep-dish apple pie, and chocolate amaretto cake. (And I ate all of the above, including ALL THREE DESSERTS. It is Thanksgiving, after all.)
My contribution to the feast was French vanilla ice cream, spiced pumpkin seeds, and cinnamon-sugar coated roasted almonds:
The almonds came out …
Whole Foods sells vanilla beans — a single bean folded in half and placed in its very own little spice jar:
I bought one, so as to follow shelly_rae‘s suggestion that vanilla bean ice cream might make a good accompaniment the apple pie she’ll be bringing to Maureen’s “Orphan Thanksgiving.”
I’ve never worked with a whole vanilla bean before, but it’s kind of fun. You slice the bean open and scrape out the little tiny seeds inside:
…
I had a pair of slightly overripe bananas:
So I decided to make banana pancakes this morning:
Recipe: Smash 2 very ripe bananas, stir until mostly smooth. Add vanilla extract, cinnamon, a tablespoon or two of sugar, and one egg. Mix together. Add about a cup of Bisquick. Stir to combine. At this point, my batter seemed a bit thick, so I added maybe a quarter cup of milk.
Serve with butter, and if you are a …
Turkey-Pesto Meatballs
Little tubs of ready-made pesto were on sale at the grocery store, so I bought one.
Some ideas for what to do with pesto:
– roasted root vegetables (Brush chunks of potato, turnip, carrot, etc. with olive oil and roast in a 400 degree oven until tender on the inside and golden brown on the outside. Toss roasted veggies with a big dollop of pesto and a little bit of butter).
– pesto butter (Let butter come to room temperature, stir in some pesto, …
