Beets and dill and mustard greens...OH MY!

Every Friday afternoon I pick up a box of organic vegetables from my local certified organic farm. Here's a clip from their site: "Johnson's Backyard Garden is a 20-acre certified organic farm just five miles east of Downtown Austin owned by Brenton and Beth Johnson. We have a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program which serves 650 families in Austin year-round with fresh, organic vegetables, herbs and flowers." You can visit them here.

I joined their program shortly after moving to Austin and learning how supportive the Austin area is of not only local businesses but local agriculture as well. I love the idea of the whole Slow Food movement and I wanted to join in the fun. It has been an amazing decision so far. Each Friday I feel like a kid waiting to be taken to the candy shop for a surprise bag of treats. Except I'm not a kid and these are vegetables...but, it is still a surprise that I love opening. They post a list of what might be in your box each week but you still never really know. Getting this box has really helped me challenge my creativity in the kitchen. I mean...what do you do with 2 pounds of carrots on a weekly basis? And dill...don't get me started with the dill. I've been freezing it in hopes that this summer they will deliver lots of cucumbers. ;)

This week the box had: an avocado, grapefruits, oranges, broccoli, beets with their greens, lettuce, dill, spinach, spring onions, carrots and mustard greens.


The avocado and citrus I haven't gotten too creative with. We eat the citrus and they are AMAZING...so juicy...and I used some of the juice this week to make a citrus vinaigrette for salads. The avocado so far is just getting sliced up in salads and on sandwiches.

On Sunday I made Roast Chicken with Balsamic Bell Peppers from Cooking Light and to go along with it made mashed potatoes with broccoli.


Basically, I just boiled a large baking potato (cubed up) like you do when making mashed potatoes and in the last few minutes I threw in about 1.5 cups of broccoli to cook with it. I drained everything together, mashed and threw in some sour cream, salt, pepper and 1/2 cup of shredded cheddar cheese. These were a HUGE hit with the man and I would highly recommend the chicken dish. It had some very unique and different flavors. My second favorite part of this dish, after eating it, was eating it again reinvented for lunch today. I used the chicken and leftover onion/bell pepper mixture and shoved it in some pita bread with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce. YUM.

Monday night I sauteed up shrimp with garlic, butter and lemon juice and to go with it an Israeli couscous dish with roasted beets, carrots and goat cheese. This dish took a little more time but it was well worth it. I roasted the beets and carrots in two separate aluminum foil packages (about 1.5 cups of each) in a 375 degree oven for oh...about an hour I would say. I let them cool, peeled the beets and diced everything up. Later, I cooked the Israeli couscous in some chicken stock and when it was done I simply mixed the veggies in along with 2 ounces of goat cheese. Again, HUGE hit. We had never had Israeli couscous before but boy was it tasty.


We did have one little snafu on Monday night. Sometimes when I get the vegetables I can't quite tell what they are. I make assumptions, look up pictures and go with it. Mostly this works out. However, last night I instructed Max to wash up this lettuce we got to make a big salad. He did and made his favorite balsamic dressing and brought it to the table. He took a huge bite...chewed...chewed...and ran to the trash can to spit it out. I knew the lettuce was a bit spicy but we figured it was some sort of arugula. Um, no. It was mustard greens. OUCH. Too spicy to eat raw...worse than horseradish actually. We set it aside to saute up with Tuesday nights dinner. Live and learn...now we know what mustard greens are I guess.

More dishes to come...tonight I am roasting a turkey tenderloin, tossing together the mustard and beet greens and making some sort of brown rice dish. Oh, and maybe carrot bisque for lunch today or tomorrow. Hopefully everything is edible.

Sunday Morning + Berry Scones

It's official - nothing beats a lazy Sunday and some fresh baked goods to go along with it. I woke up this past Sunday ready to bake! I had been thinking about what to try next all week and decided on scones. Why, I have no idea, especially considering that I do not even LIKE scones! Or, at least I thought I didn't like them.

In my mind scones are big, dry crumbly things that make my mouth very unhappy and my shirt very dirty. No thanks. And yet, they are at nearly every coffee shop you visit these days so I figured there must be something there that I was missing. I decided to stick with the angel on my shoulder and try out a recipe I found on weightwatchers.com. Three Berry Scones. Very simple. I can do this!

Here are the players:
2 cup(s) all-purpose flour
3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp table salt
2 Tbsp butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
1 cup(s) buttermilk (I used 1 cup of skim milk with 1 tablespoon of vinegar...let it sit on the counter for 30 minutes or so before using. Mine sat in the fridge overnight)
1 1/2 cup(s) frozen unsweetened mixed berries
2 serving(s) butter-flavor cooking spray


Here are the oh so simple instructions:
* Preheat oven to 400ºF. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
* In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Mix in butter until mixture is size of fine crumbs. Stir in buttermilk and then stir in berries.
* Shape dough into two 7-inch circles on prepared baking sheet. Cut each circle into 6 wedges and coat with cooking spray.
* Bake until cooked through and golden, about 20 minutes. Yields one wedge per serving.


I decided to use my hands this time since it was still early and I was feeling too lazy to clean the stand mixer. Not a good idea...this was a DENSE dough. Once the flour came in to the equation the whisk was utterly useless. I ended up folding it with my hands which was awful because it was so sticky! Plus, the frozen berries started to melt from the warmth caused by handling. I'm sure the chilled and small pieces of butter also did not like my hands - they're always saying on the Food Network that cold butter is the key to successful pastry. Next time I'll use the mixer, I promise.

Also, next time I won't bake from a Weight Watchers recipe. They really don't explain things enough. I had to dust some flour on the dough to work with it in order to form it in to the discs...I just can't see that it would have been possible otherwise. When it came time to cut in to 6 wedges each I kept thinking...am I meant to separate these wedges or leave them together? Due to the fact that everything was so sticky I left them together. Fail. They baked in to two large discs...NOT 12 lovely wedges. Doh. I had to slice them immediately after removing from the oven to make the wedges which wasn't a huge deal but a more detailed recipe could have prevented this.


Somehow in the end everything worked out. In fact, it more than worked out since I previously thought I hated scones and I still can't stop munching on these. They were not dry at all and though the berries mostly fell to the bottom of each wedge they offered a great tart contrast. They remind me of biscuits actually...not wedges of chalk which is what scones always were in my mind. In fact, I just did some research online and discovered that it's mainly in the US that scones are dry...in the UK and other such places apparently they are more like what I created. GOOD TO KNOW! Give them a try if you were as tricked by Starbucks as I have been!

BIG week coming up as far as baking goes. It's my dad's birthday and instead of buying him useless junk that he doesn't need I'm going to clog his arteries with sweets. That's real love. <3

Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes = Heaven

On Saturday I began my great quest to learn how to bake like a pro. We were meeting up with my step brother and his family for game night and I decided to bring dessert. I have to admit, I was slightly nervous to bring any treats that I created to a family get together seeing as it was truly one of my first attempts at baking something from scratch. I’ve made muffins before and Max and I did attempt those popovers last week but mostly anything I have ever baked came from a box. So, I jumped on the World Wide Web and found a recipe that seemed simple enough: Martha Stewart’s Cream-Filled Chocolate Cupcakes. You can get the recipe here.

Aren’t they cute? Like little homemade Hostess Cupcakes. So, I gathered all of the necessary ingredients and sat down to figure out just how horrible these things were for me. As some of you might know I participate in Weight Watchers in my eternal quest to lose weight – I’ve lost 40 pounds at this point and I don’t want my new obsession with baking to unravel all of that success! So, I used the Weight Watchers recipe builder to add in the ingredients and come up with the nutrition info. OH MY GOSH – it was horrific. First of all, Martha suggested these be made in jumbo muffin tins. With everything as the recipe stated one jumbo cream-filled chocolate cupcake was going to cost me 13 points! For those of you not following the points system that’s probably about 600 something calories. Um, no thanks. So, I got out my thinking cap and did some internet research on how to successfully substitute things without ruining what you are baking. I also decided to use normal sized muffin tins to reduce the serving size.

Since this was my first venture in to the world of cupcakes I did not want to go overboard with substitutions. I carefully examined how “worth it” some subs were and decided to stick with the full fat butter in the actual cake batter. I substituted reduced fat (NOT fat free!) sour cream for the full fat version and used 1 cup of Splenda/Sugar Blend in replacement for 2 cups of normal sugar and used cake flour instead of all purpose since I read in many places that this helped keep the cakes light and fluffy when you mess with the fat content of a recipe. Finally, I used a reduced fat margarine for the icing instead of full fat butter. I figured that wouldn’t make too big of a difference since it was on the outside of the cupcake.

So, with the ingredient decisions behind me I laced up my oh so cute apron from Anthropologie and got to baking. First you butter and dust the muffin tins with cocoa powder. What a mess I made…I’ve got to figure out a better way to do this next time. It sounded so easy to tap out the excess but um…the excess went all over the counter and not in to the bowl where I was aiming. Doh.


The recipe suggested I whisk together the dry ingredients but I recalled my magical flour sifter that I have never used…not once in the YEARS that I have owned it since my mom gave it to me. So, I sifted the ingredients together over a piece of parchment paper. I learned that trick from the good old Food Network. Use the parchment paper because you can easily add the dry ingredients slowly to the wet versus attempted to push the dry out of a bowl. It worked swimmingly and look at how pretty the pile of stuff was.



Next, though I had attempted to let my butter sit and come to room temperature the temp in my house is COLD so it just did not work. I think this was one of the big no nos of the experience – I zapped my butter in the microwave to heat it up. It wasn’t too bad...not melty or anything so the world did not end but in the future I’ll leave the butter out well before I begin the baking process. After creaming the butter and sugar together and adding in one egg at a time I started to add in the dry ingredients. My old Sunbeam mixer struggled a bit but I just helped it by turning the bowl and we were in business! The batter was DEVINE. It tasted like a light and fluffy chocolate truffle. I could have stopped there and been happy.


But, I continued on. The batter did not quite make enough for 24 small muffins so I did 12 small and 4 large in the jumbo tin. The jumbo took maybe 5 minutes longer to bake than the small. I had to keep an eye on the small ones since I wasn’t sure exactly when they would be done. They all came out perfectly moist though so YAY. Note to self: I need wire racks for cooling baked goods...the random stuff I found just barely worked!


The last step was the mix together the marshmallow fluff and butter to make the icing. Then, you use a melon baller to scoop out a small plug on the bottom and then hollow out some space for the crème. I used a plain old Ziploc bag filled with the crème, the corner cut off as a pastry bag and filled those suckers up! Then, a little squiggle on top and TADA they were done.



These things were DELICIOUS and oh so cute. Everyone loved them and no one could tell they were lower in calories (I got them down to about 8 points a cake…or roughly 400 calories).

SUCCESS! I can’t wait to bake something else this week...I’m already on the search for some new recipes. Isn't he the cutest?

Blog revamp

So...I'm pretty much settled in here in Austin so I'm going to revamp this blog a bit to just simply be about whatever the hell I want it to be about! I have a feeling it will mostly be about cooking since we all know that's my favorite hobby.

Mostly I'm really excited to learn how to bake. I've never been much of a baker...I'm impatient and tend to not thoroughly read instructions for recipes. But, I've had this dream for a while now to open my own coffee shop / eatery and I think it's important that I learn how to bake if I ever hope to make that dream come true. With everything happening at work lately I just decided to stop thinking about doing these things and DO them!

So, sorry to be cliche and join the rest of the world out there in their foodie blogs but BAH I don't care! It will make me happy and that's what counts.

Yesterday, Max and I made popovers. We didn't follow the instructions and they still came out really well. This weekend I will be making mini cheesecake bites and cream-filled chocolate cupcakes for game night with my family. Stay tuned!