Posts Tagged ‘favorite’

Happy Birthday, jonesing for… !

One year ago today I started my blog and it’s been nothing but fun since.  This whole thing began after encouragement from friends since I enjoyed taking pictures of whatever I was cooking, and liked typing up a few words about it as well. I’ve had so much fun sharing my love of cooking and recipes, and nothing makes me happier than hearing my friends and total strangers have been inspired to cook from recipes I post.

And I have something even bigger to celebrate than my blog’s anniversary. I’m so excited to announce I’ve just accepted a position as the new Test Kitchen Assistant for a national food magazine! I’ll be testing recipes, assisting food styling, grocery shopping, and working in the test kitchen for a living – a.k.a. my dream job! Words cannot express how excited and blessed I feel to be able to do what I love for a living as young as I am. Getting out from behind a desk and back into the kitchen means the world to me, so now it’s really time to celebrate!

So to celebrate, I wanted to bake a cake – a very special cake. In a way, this entire post, blog, and really my career, is dedicated to my oldest sister, DeAnna. She honestly is the biggest reason I pursued cooking – admiring her life as a pastry chef when she was younger and always being enchanted with whatever she was baking or making. This bundt cake is one of the earliest food memories I have of being impressed with food, thinking the black and white drizzle was so fancy, the cake shape so odd, the entire thing just being special. So I wanted to go back to my roots with this one.

Unfortunately neither D nor my mom could find the recipe. They both tore their kitchens apart looking for it to no avail, which seemed almost poetic in a way. I got to just create my own version, which is exactly what I like to do here. So I took a simple chocolate bundt cake recipe and oomphed it up, adding coffee and buttermilk, using a chocolate ganache drizzle instead of melted semi-sweet chips, and I had to stay true to the white chocolate drizzle – even though I’m not a huge fan, you can’t get that stunning white color with anything else, and since the cake isn’t overly sweet, it balances out.

So thank you to my readers, family, and friends for a wonderful year! I can’t wait to see what this next year has in store!

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Quick post/Quick Friday dinner time!

I actually made this on Sunday for Easter lunch/dinner, but it also happens to be one of my favorite fast go-to dishes. My sister Valerie is nuts about this goat cheese tart and it’s the number one thing she requests when I’m home and cooking, and it’s easy to understand why. The tart is light and delicate, but also rich and satisfying, making it the perfect dish for brunch, lunch, or dinner. The dressing I threw together since I had leftover dill from the tart and buttermilk from making cinnamon rolls.

I cut time by using a prepared pie crust (which I had leftover from a previous baking adventure), but you can easily just use refrigerated pie crust and roll it out. The rest of the dish comes together in just a few minutes and then it’s just waiting for it to bake, which can be torturous but hey, just treat yourself to a glass of wine (a nice crisp sauvignon blanc is to die for with this dish) and relax. It’s the weekend!

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Merry Christmas, everyone!

We celebrate the happiest day of the year with plenty of red meat, traditional English sides, and a froufrou dessert I always like to tackle. Usually I make a cranberry upside down cake, but this year I wanted to try something different so I made a spin on a pear tatin, which was scrumptious to say the least. Plus chruscikis, cookies, hot apple cider, Holiday blend from The Roasterie and plenty of Usinger’s during the day.

Have a holly jolly holiday! I’ll be off in my food coma now, surrounded by DVDs and my family, but here’s a nice large selection of photos from our holiday. Enjoy! (recipes at the bottom if you’d like to scroll past!)

One of my biggest holiday indulgences.

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Here it is. The ultimate. The #1. The quintessential dish that is pure Christmas to me. Chruscikis.

Traditional Polish fried cookies which resemble either a bow-tie or angel’s wings (depending on your heritage/what your grandma says…) which seem simple on the surface, but in the end are some of the messiest, and somewhat labor intensive cookies ever.  Yet they’re worth every drop of splattered oil and puff of powdered sugar that ends up on the floor.

This is probably the oldest recipe we have in our family, which we know goes back to my great-grandma Jean who immigrated to the US when she was about 7 in the late 1800′s, and it probably goes back even farther than that. The ingredients are dead simple (eat your heart out, Martha) and the dough comes together very easily, it’s just all about rolling the dough incredibly thin and working very quickly once you get to the frying part. But they’re just so good warm, I cannot begin to describe it. I mean yes, they are basically fried dough, but come on – we all know how awesome that is.

So Wesolych Swiat! to my fellow Poles, and I hope you all enjoy the  most cherished part of my Polish culinary heritage!

Mommie Dearest on the hunt for the recipe…

Found!

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When I flew out to see my friend Travis in California a few years ago, he picked me up from the airport with his girlfriend and told me flat out: “Okay, we have to stop at In-N-Out before we head home. You need to experience it.” I honestly had no idea what In-N-Out was at the time… and then I was enlightened. And addicted. And lived in the Midwest. If you haven’t heard of the cult of In-N-Out yet, it’s pretty simple: perfect, simple burgers, fries and shakes, done really, really well. I mean… really well.  Like the best fast food burger you’ll ever have well.

I know a lot of people knock fast food and the evils of it and blah blah blah McDonalds breakfast will kill you. But I stand firm when I say it’s all about the production of the product which causes the bad rap. If every restaurant did what In-N-Out does, I think we’d all be singing a different tune. Yes, it’s high in calories and fat because they’re still burgers and fries, but guess what, that organic pizza or locally raised beef you’re eating? Probably has the same calories.

No freezers, no heat lamps, freshly ground beef from their own cattle, hand leafed lettuce, freshly baked buns … I mean the list goes on and on of why this place rocks. And although I now live in Colorado and only get In-N-Out when I’m lucky (oddly enough today is Friday the 13th – go figure), I still make sure to grab an Animal style cheeseburger, fries, and Neapolitan shake whenever I can.