As soon as I saw Alex’s no knead bread over at Moonstitches, I knew I had to bake this bread. If you happen to have a nice cast iron dutch oven on hand, all you have to do it mix the ingredients and let this dough sit and sit and sit some more, throw it into the dutch oven and get ready to eat pure goodness. Don’t forget to plan to be home when the dough has completed its 18 hour rising session like I did. Mine ended up rising for a whole 24 hours on the first go-round. Oops. It didn’t seem to make much of a difference though.
My next attempt will include 1/3 of the flour to be whole wheat and add chopped rosemary and garlic. That should turn out okay, right?

Also baked these cookies the other night. Just the usual Nestle Tollhouse recipe with oats thrown in to add a little somethin’ somethin’. I don’t think any other cookie can top these in my book.

I will be driving down to Tehachapi tomorrow and then L.A. on Saturday to get those pictures taken with the family. So exciting! I can’t wait. Hopefully I’ll get some good picture taking time in myself so I have some material to post when I get back.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

I suppose it is because of the new shiny kitchen, but I have been really been in a cooking mood lately. After the Baby Dutch pancakes, I decided to try out a Donna Hay recipe from her book The Instant Cook. I’ve tried a few from her books before and wasn’t very happy with my results. While I’m still a beginner in the kitchen, I don’t think it was completely due to my lack of skill, I just figure, maybe her taste is not for me.

-but when I tried her olive baked chicken, my mind was made up. I love you, Donna Hay.

Not only was it a piece of cake to make, the chicken had just the right amount of saltiness. It paired perfectly with artichoke dipped in a simple garlic lemon-olive oil dip. I don’t know how much of a difference it made, but I used Kalamata olives, while Donna Hay recommends green olives. Kalamata just seemed a bit more interesting to me.

And after that cooking high, I still hadn’t gotten enough, so I moved on to baking a flourless layered chocolate cake. The recipe was from a recent post on Smitten Kitchen’s website. My cake didn’t turn out nearly as beautiful as Deb’s did and I probably didn’t do everything correctly (I am a bit flaky, so who knows what I did wrong!), but I wasn’t very happy with it. The cake wasn’t very fluffy, and a little too eggy for my tastes. Although I guess you couldn’t tell very much because it was overpowered by the whipped cream frosting, but again, whipped cream frosting isn’t really my thing. I like thicker, more buttery frostings. All in all, I’m sure her recipe can turn out well (if done by the right person), but I won’t be attempting this again, because it was a lot of work for me.

Next on the list of food making was my Greek Style….omelette? Well, I guess it’s not really an omelette per se. It’s really just a bunch of junk thrown in scrambled eggs, ‘omelette’ just makes it sound more legit. Either way, I’m really happy with this one.

Greek-Style “Omelette”
serves one

2 eggs
1/3 cup heavy cream
sliced turkey
Muenster cheese, sliced into thin strips
sun dried tomatoes, chopped
kalamata olives, pitted and chopped
1 tsp. butter

Shred a small handful of the turkey (I used the pre-sliced kind from the deli) and place in medium sized frying pan along with 1 tsp. butter. Cook on medium heat until turkey slightly browns and butter is sizzling.

Meanwhile, whisk cream and eggs in bowl. Pour over turkey and slowly stir until the mixture is a bit clumpy. Don’t overstir!

Add cheese and sun dried tomatoes. I usually have to flip the eggs over once to cook all the way through. This whole cooking process doesn’t take very long at all. Don’t let the eggs overcook. You still want them to be a bit soft when you plate them.

Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle the kalamata olives on top. This pairs well with Greek yogurt. Enjoy.

I’m in the new house. We are unpacked enough to function normally now, but we still have boxes and boxes of random stuff to figure out what to do with. And we’ve encountered many mishaps along the way.

For instance, we had to go without a refrigerator for a whopping five days, but it really wasn’t that bad. I even managed to eat more healthfully without a refrigerator, sticking to a simple fruit and cracker breakfast with a glass of room temperature tap water and you know what? I discovered I kinda like room temperature water compared to the cold stuff (something that I always assumed I wouldn’t enjoy). Funny how there is still so much to learn about myself, even after 22 years.

Regardless, it was still a great feeling when the refrigerator was delivered and knowing that hey! I can keep my food cold now! Today being the first real day with cold storage, I decided to celebrate and make Dutch Baby pancakes. I love how ridiculously simple they are to make (and how fun they are to watch bake!). In the oven, they manage to puff up to three or four times their original size and then turn a delicious golden brown. Topped with a bit of powdered sugar and fresh squeezed lemon juice, they are perfection!

I finally even put the blender that Erin and Justin bought me (remember the Mock Xmas?) to make a peanut butter-banana smoothie with cacao nibs. The nibs taste completely awful straight out of the bag, but mixed in the smoothie, they gave it a wonderful chocolate flavor without all the sweet.

Dutch Baby Pancakes
(serves 2)

2 Tbs unsalted butter
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp cinnamon
1 lemon
powdered sugar

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees fahrenheit.
2. Beat eggs in medium bowl.
3. Add remaining ingredients to bowl; mix well, taking care to leave no lumps.
4. Over stovetop, melt the butter on a cast-iron (or oven proof) skillet.
5. Add batter to skillet and bake in oven for 25 minutes or until the pancake is a nice dark golden brown.
6. Slice into small triangles and dust with powdered sugar and a squirt of lemon juice. Serve immediately.

Peanut butter-banana with Cacao Nibs smoothie

This one I don’t have exact measurements for. I usually create smoothies willy-nilly and they always come out fine.

For a small one serving cup, I used:

2 small scoops of vanilla frozen yogurt
2 spoonfuls of peanut butter
A handful of cacao nibs
A splash of milk
1 small banana
1/2 tsp. of vanilla extract

Blend and enjoy!

On A completely different musical note:

I’m hesitant to write much about this on my blog because I’m pretty sure most who read this have no interest in this type of music, but you see, I love metal. I really do. A lot. So just in case anyone reading this may like metal, I’m going to post this.

I just bought tickets to go see the Heaven & Hell tour at the San Jose HP Pavillion. Who on earth is Heaven & Hell you say? It’s a bit of a reunion between metal lords Ronnie James Dio and Black Sabbath (Tommy Ionni, Geezer Butler, and Vinnie Appice). I don’t think most people know about Black Sabbath’s Dio years, but you really should. While Black Sabbath with Ozzy is of course, great, with Dio, it’s something else all together. After all these years Dio is still with it and rocks just as hard as he did way back when (uh, before I existed!). Such a powerful voice from such a short man! And he’s so humble.

Listen Here

On top of that, Megadeth is touring with them! Joe has seen Megadeth a ridiculous amount of times, but this will be a first for me. Although, I’m hoping they play enough from their older albums, because I’m not all that crazy about the new stuff.

What I want to Hear at the show.

This spring is going to be chock full of fun stuff going on. It just keeps getting better and better.

The next few months or so are going to be a bit hectic. I don’t really know how I’m going to get through it. I guess I should just ‘take it one day at a time’, right? Yep. Right.

The move is days away and we have yet to pack. We still need to rangle up some boxes. We still need to buy a refrigerator. I have a midterm portfolio review next week and still have to finish about 5 drawings for it. Ack. Then after a week or so of trying to unpack, I have to head down to Tehachapi, pick up mom and sister and drive to L.A. to get our family portrait taken by Shannon over at Pearblossom! She takes lovely photos and I can’t wait for the photo shoot! After that I get a little time to myself to wander Tehachapi and the old hometown for a photo session of my own. I haven’t really had much time to just go out and take pictures. It will be nice to finally get a good amount of time.

After that we still have the trip to Portland, OR (in May) and Europe (in June!!). We still haven’t finalized our destinations on that vacation, but it looks like it will be Iceland and England. Imagine how much knitting could be accomplished during a flight to Iceland? That will also be perfect because my knitting/crocheting to-do list is growing by the day. Joe’s mom is still waiting for her scarf, so is Juliet, and Joe’s niece, Haley is now requesting a scarf of her own. Of course I am happy to oblige, it’s just she might not get it until, oh, the dead of summer.

Also some baby news; whew, not me of course! Joe’s friend Jeff and his wife announced it at their bbq this past weekend. It was unexpected of course, but how great is that? Now I can try out my new knitting skills and make them a gift! What’s even more great is that they are plant geeks (well, Jeff for sure) and the baby may get a cool botanical name. I hope to incorporate this into their gift. Yay, plants and knitting! Plants and knitting!

On a somewhat related note…I really want to be able to knit this sweater I spotted on Zephyr Style, but of course, I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. But one day, I am going to be wearing that sweater. It’s orange, no less (I’m still on my orange kick, you can tell)!

Speaking of orange, I’ve picked out the color scheme for the web redesign (#FF9900, #EEE8AA, #FDF5E6, and #808000). I’m thinking I want to fully design this one myself. No help from Joe. No borrowing the bones from other themes. Really all me this time around. It will be a sort of celebration for making it through my web programming class. Although, I have no idea when I will get around to doing all this. I’m not going to have much time, but I am hoping it will be sooner than later.

Just wanted to share a few things that have been inspiring me lately.

Music I’ve been Listening to (well, the calmer side of what I have been listening to at least):

Mono “Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky”
Gone, Still

Art & Photography:

Lovepad’s beautiful drawings.
Splat WorldWide’s food pictures!

I found a few more blogs this week and wanted to share them:

Wardi’s Crafty Blog
Twelve22
Julieree

Hope everyone had a great weekend!