July 20, 2010
I’m always up for a baking challenge so when Julie over at Willow Bird Baking challenged her readers to make croissants, I didn’t hesitate to sign up. I love croissants, but like donuts, I rarely eat them because of how bad they are for you. But there’s just something about making something from scratch that makes it seem less bad for you. I guess because you have to put actual time and effort into making it instead of just going into a store and buying it. Plus, it’s Brandon’s birthday this week and that is one of the 4 times of the year (along with my birthday, Thanksgiving and Christmas) that I let myself eat whatever I want without feeling guilty about it.
And these croissants? Are absolutely worthy of much guilt, but they’re just way too delicious and way too much work to feel guilty about. I mean, I made these croissants. From scratch. All by myself. That is an accomplishment, not something to feel bad about. These croissants taste better than any that I’ve had from a bakery or store. It could just be because I made them myself, but still, they practically ooze buttery goodness.
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July 13, 2010
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m in a food rut, making the same things over and over again, so I’m making an effort to try new things; not just new recipes, but new ingredients that I’ve never eaten or cooked with before. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is to pick one cookbook and only make recipes from that cookbook for the next couple of weeks. That way I can’t just go through and pick and choose the “safe” recipes, I actually have to try things that I would normally flip right past. This led me to choose a recipe with goat cheese in it, something I’ve liked in restaurant dishes, but not something I’ve ever bought and cooked with before. Well, that did it. I guess maybe it never occurred to me that you could buy goat cheese at a normal grocery store? I don’t know, but now that I know you can, it’s all I can do to keep from buying a package of goat cheese every time I go to the store and eating it whole.
I am completely addicted to goat cheese now and find myself dreaming of ways to incorporate it into other recipes. Which brings us to today’s recipe. I know from my giveaway question about comfort food a few weeks ago that a lot of you love macaroni and cheese. This recipe isn’t exactly mac ‘n cheese, but it definitely has that same level of warm, gooey, comfort food-ness to it. You know what else it has? THREE kinds of cheese! And instead of using boring ol’ ricotta cheese I substituted goat cheese instead. With ricotta cheese, this recipe is pretty good. With goat cheese, this is very possibly my favorite dish ever in the whole world. Brandon declared it the best lasagna-type dish I’ve ever made (and I’ve made a lot of versions of lasagna over the last few years). The goat cheese adds a unique but still subtle tanginess that ricotta just doesn’t have (I never even taste the ricotta in most lasagna, what’s the point of it being there?). Add some parmesan and mozzarella on top of that and you have a trifecta of cheesy goodness.
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July 7, 2010
I did it again. I bought a bunch of bananas and let them sit there until they looked worse and worse. Tell me I’m not the only one who does that? Please? In the grand scheme of things bananas are cheap, but still…starving kids in blahblah and all that…so I always feel bad about wasting food. I cannot tell you how much I didn’t want to make banana bread, though. I don’t even really like banana bread, I much prefer my mom’s applesauce bread. But what do you make with mushy bananas besides banana bread? I searched for alternatives but didn’t find anything interesting that I had all the ingredients for or that wasn’t a million calories.
Since I was stuck with banana bread, my next thought was that I should do something to make it less banana-y. Of course, chocolate popped right into my head. Chocolate makes everything better. You might know I’m kinda obsessed with marbled chocolate desserts, so I decided to do a marbled chocolate banana muffin. It’s just more fun that way! (Also, I wanted to use the new extra large muffin tin I recently bought.) And since my favorite muffins are the ones with streusal on top, I made a streusal using chocolate graham cracker crumbs and sprinkled it on.
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July 2, 2010
Thanks so much to everyone who participated in my giveaway, it was really fun to read everyone’s comments and learn about some of your food preferences. I’ll definitely be thinking about your answers when I’m looking for new recipes to share in the future!
Anyway, let’s get to it, shall we? I wanted to make it as fair as possible, so I made a numbered list of each comment in the order they were posted and then I entered the number range in the random number generator and got it to pick 2 numbers.
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