December 15, 2009
Peppermint Fudge Pinwheels
Christmas is my favorite time of year and one of the main reasons for that is all the baking I get to do. Even when I didn’t cook much, I’ve always liked to bake and cookies are just about my favorite thing to make. Plus this time of year is the only time besides my birthday and Thanksgiving that I let myself make/eat whatever I want and I don’t feel guilty about it. Diets are what January is for. (I’ve already signed up for Recipe Girl’s Ten in ’10 challenge!) So expect a bunch of sweet recipes around here for the next few weeks because I’m in the baking mood.
I’m obviously obsessed with black and white desserts, so I knew I had to make these as soon as I saw them. The original recipe isn’t very christmas-y, but that was easily remedied with the addition of some peppermint extract to the chocolate cookie dough AND to the fudge frosting in the middle. Don’t worry though, these cookies aren’t crazy peppermint-y. The vanilla part of the cookie balances out the peppermint …
November 23, 2009
Swirled Caramel and Pumpkin Cheesecake Supreme
By far, the most popular recipe on this site is my Black and White Chocolate Cheesecake Supreme. I actually made it for the first time for Thanksgiving last year and I decided it would be our new Thanksgiving tradition to have cheesecake instead of pie. I’ll take cheesecake over pie any day!
But this year, after discovering my love for all things pumpkin flavored, I decided I wanted to attempt a pumpkin cheesecake. But of course, I didn’t want to use any other recipes because Brandon and I both think that my Cheesecake Supreme recipe is the best cheesecake we’ve ever had (other commenters agree, I’ve had a bunch of people come back after they made it and tell me how much they loved it). I also really like the concept of the black and white chocolate version and wanted to do something like that instead of having just a plain pumpkin cheesecake. In the end, I took my black and white chocolate cheesecake recipe and substituted pumpkin and caramel for the white and dark chocolates, then I topped the whole …
November 20, 2009
Honey Roasted Turkey
I’ll always remember my first Thanksgiving with Brandon when we were living in our first apartment together at the ripe old age of 20 and I didn’t really know how to cook anything except brownies. The turkey was the thing I most afraid of. I had always thought that cooking a turkey was so complicated and was surprised to find that it…wasn’t. I had much more problems with my stuffing which I completely ruined when instead of using a real actual onion (I think the only vegetables I cooked with back then were potatoes and tomatoes) I put in 1/2 cup (!!) of onion powder. You haven’t tasted onion until you put a 1/2 cup onion powder in something. To this day I really can’t use onion powder in anything, I think I used up my life quota of it.
But anyway, I think anyone can make a turkey. As long as you keep an eye on it and baste it regularly, there isn’t much thought or work involved. And the end product is almost always impressive looking and something that you can feel proud of cooking. …
November 19, 2009
Thanksgiving Side Dish Mania: Cranberries, Squash and Casseroles
This whole blogging every day thing is hard. I don’t know how some of you do it. It’s hard for me to blog even once a week sometimes (though I’ve been trying to remedy that). Anyway, a work emergency left me unable to post yesterday and I still have lots to do today, so a slight change of plans: I’ll post all the rest of the side dishes today and the turkey tomorrow. Then next week I’ll post my favorite part of Thanksgiving (or any meal, really): Dessert!
So I already posted all my sweet potato side dishes but you can’t just eat sweet potatoes (well, I actually think I could, but I’m weird). All of today’s recipes (as well as the turkey) are courtesy of my mother. I found them all in her battered, food covered, recipe scrapbook where she dutifully taped in handwritten recipe cards or cutouts from magazines.
November 17, 2009
Sweet Potatoes Galore: Soup, rolls and mash
It’s Thanksgiving week on Back to the Cutting Board, which means you get not one recipe like usual, but a ton of yummy Thanksgiving recipes over the next 4 days! This was all brought by the people at SpringPad who invited me to participate in their Springsgiving Event. My mission, if I chose to accept it, was to come up with a Thanksgiving menu consisting of five dishes: appetizer, turkey dish, two sides and a dessert. I didn’t get too much advance notice, so I immediately sprung (ohh, bad pun) into action coming up with a pre-thanksgiving meal last week. The thing is, I couldn’t decide on just 5 things, so we actually wound up eating about 3 days of Thanksgiving last week trying out different recipes (I love being a food blogger). I ultimately did decide on the five things I wanted to submit to the contest, but I wound up enjoying pretty much all the dishes I picked, so I will be posting all of them here this week.
Now that that’s out of the way, lets get on with the recipes! I love sweet …
November 12, 2009
Low Fat Pumpkin Apple Streusel Muffins
Remember when I said I wanted to try out more things with pumpkin in them. Well, be prepared because I’ve gone a little pumpkin crazy. I had a giant can of pumpkin pie mix that I used for those cupcakes and still had a bunch left over afterward so I went in search for some muffins to use up the rest. But those cupcakes were decidedly not good for you and I wanted to make something that I wouldn’t feel guilty about eating. But it still needs to taste good, you know? Well, this recipe totally satisfies both of those requirements.
Basically, I found a recipe that sounded good and I “healthed” it up. I replaced some of the white flour with wheat flour and I substituted the oil with applesauce. That might make these sound kind of boring, but it’s the streusal that makes them awesome. That’s the only part that I didn’t try to fix. In fact, I doubled the amount of streusal because it’s the best part. Even doing that, these are still only about 2 …
November 6, 2009
Tandoori Chicken Tenders
I’m always looking for new and interesting things to do with chicken. For years, practically the only thing I cooked was chicken with some lemon pepper on it. As you can imagine, I have no desire to make (or eat) boring lemon pepper chicken anymore. So when I saw this recipe, I definitely wanted to try it and I’m glad I did because I know this is going to be a new staple in our house. It’s really easy and fast to make. It’s low fat and it results in a moist, tender and flavorful chicken. That’s everything I could ever want in a dinner.
The initial recipe says to use chicken breasts, but the second time I made these I only had tenderloins and I thought they were still really good (and even faster to make because the cooking time is only about 12 minutes). If you have picky kids that would look at yellow chicken in disgust, making tenderloins instead might make them a bit more palatable.
I was initially worried that it would taste too ginger-y, but it really didn’t. In fact, I thought the flavor was pretty tame. So in my second attempt I added some more spices and flavors that I found from similar chicken recipes, which helped amp up the flavor. Also, this recipe benefits from some marinating to make the flavors even deeper, but if you don’t have the time, it still tastes great.
