sweet potatoes with streusel topping

This was my very first Thanksgiving contribution. Besides helping assemble my obsession: Green Bean Casserole. I think it turned out well!

INGREDIENTS
4 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cubed
1/2 cup whole milk
1/3 c. brown sugar
1 egg
4 T. butter, melted
1/2 T. cinnamon
1/2 T. nutmeg
STRUESEL TOPPING
1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/3 cup (packed) golden brown sugar
3/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted
DIRECTIONS
Cooking Potatoes
Place sweet potato in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and cook for 10 minutes or until tender. Drain.

Heat oven to 400 and butter a 9x13 baking dish.

Streusel
Mix first 4 ingredients in small bowl. Add melted butter and rub in with fingertips until moist clumps form.

Potato Assembly
Add cooked and cubed potatoes to a stand mixer and turn to 2. Add milk, sugar, spices and butter and mix well. Add egg and mix for a minute. Add more butter, sugar, and milk to taste. Spread mixture into 9x13 pan and sprinkle streusel over potatoes. Cover with foil and bake for 20 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 10 minutes in order for streusel to brown yummily.

(Yams and streusel can be made in advance. Cover separately and refrigerate. Let yams stand at room temperature 1 hour before baking.)

I don't think it matters how you cook the potatoes before doing this dish. I peeled, cubed and then boiled them because I didnt want to spend all day cooking 8 potatoes. (yes, I made two 9x13 pans of this stuff, bleh) Some sites said roasting them helps them keep the best flavor. If I made this again, I think I'd use a whole stick of butter. Also, some recipes called for a little bit of maple syrup. The streusel topping was really good since I decided to rebel against marshmallows.

Now that Thanksgiving has past, it's appropriate to decorate for Christmas! Check out my pics for our first Christmas decor :)

ooey gooey pumkin cake

A girl I work with made this for us and shared the recipe. I made this this week with my friend, Erin and took my 8x8 pan to our Thanksgiving meal. It can be made without the pumpkin so it can be enjoyed year round. Just google ooey gooey bars for that recipe.

Ooey Gooey Pumkin Cake
INGREDIENTS
Crust
1 box of butter recipe yellow cake mix
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 stick butter or 8 tbsp. margine, melted
Filling
1 8 oz. pkg. of cream cheese, softened
1 15 oz. can of pumpkin
3 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 stick butter or 8 tbsp. margarine, melted
1 (16 oz. ) box of powdered sugar (or 2 cups granulated sugar)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. nutmeg

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 350. Combine crust ingredients. Pat mixture in bottom and sides of a greased 13x9 pan (like a pie). Prepare filling: Mix together the cream cheese and pumpkin until smooth. Add eggs, vanilla, and butter and beat together. Add the powdered sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg and mix well. Spread pumpkin filling in the cake crust mixture. Bake for 45 minutes. Do not overcook - should be gooey. Cut like brownies and top with whipped cream.

Don't count the butter sticks!

balsamic spinach

This isn't revolutionary but was really good and fast and would be a good side dish or little vegetarian dinner with some steamed green beans and couscous. :) I bought the real spinach leaves that weren't salad bagged. Like near the romaine lettuce. The leaves are bigger than those tiny salad bagged things and much less pricey. The following recipe yielded probably about 1 to 1 and a half cups cooked spinach.

Balsamic Spinach
INGREDIENTS
approx. 3 cups washed and de-stemmed spinach leaves (or however much you want)
1 T. evoo
4 T. pine nuts*
2 cloves garlic, minced
salt, pepper, balsamic vinegar
DIRECTIONS
Heat a large pan, sauce pan or wok on medium high heat. Throw in pine nuts and let sit about a minute or 2, stir and let sit again. I covered them during this time but don't think that's necessary if your pan doesn't have a lid. Pour in olive oil, stir and then lower heat to low-medium (a 3 on my stove). Add garlic and stir. Be sure the heat is the pan is lowered before adding garlic or it will burn quickly. Add spinach in hand fulls and stir each addition about 2 minutes or until nearly wilty before adding each new addition. With a fork or tongs, remove leaves as soon as they turn uniformly dark green. Once all have been cooked and removed, empty remaining pine nuts and garlic onto spinach. Drizzle with balsamic vinegar, approx. three dashes.

*ok pine nuts were hard to find for me in the grocery store. After asking, I was directed to the baking section with the little bags of crushed walnuts etc. I would have made dish earlier if I'd asked someone one of the last 3 times I went to the store and nonchalantly milled around, quasi looking for them.

Toasting the pine nuts like this made my kitchen smell so good and, in my opinion, the balsamic vinegar was the finishing touch. It added a little tangy sweetness to the nuts and heavish spinach. Next time I'll try topping with feta cheese as one of the reviews of the recipes on All Recipes.com from which this is adapted, suggested.

About the couscous. I like it but I just made whole wheat couscous out of the box. I may try it with mushrooms and wine next time but it will have to be on a night like this where I can try froo frooy little entrees when Taylor is otherwise engaged.

For those of you looking forward to my promised pumpkin chocolate chippers here is a recipe you can try. I decided that cookies need butter or shortening to be good cookies. Those fats give them that crispness that pumpkin cookies won't have because the pumpkin, like applesauce in my snickerdoodles, was serving as the 'fat.' While probably healthier, it's not a good cookie in my opinion. SO I'm not wasting my eggs on that. BUT I do want to try this pumpkin cream cheese bake that a girl I work with made for us. So I hope to make that once I get around to buying the ingredients.

Next week I will be making sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving! Monumental. So I plan to document that endeavor.

UPDATE: I made this with sauteed mushrooms. I sliced and sauteed them first and then left them in the pan as I made the spinach. Yummers.

zimply ziti

I first made this when our friends, David and Emily, came to Austin for New Year's. Taylor about died telling me how good it was. So it returned for our first married meal, before we even had real silverware. It's modified from Real Simple: Meals Made Easy. For appropriate portion sizing, I cook the whole pound of hamburger meat and then refrigerate half of it for spaghetti or something else involving ground beef, for later in the week.

Lasagna-Style Baked Ziti
INGREDIENTS
1/2 lb. (half a box) dry ziti
1 T. EVOO
1 small yellow onion, chopped
3/4 t. kosher salt
1/4 t. ground black pepper
1/2 lb. ground beef
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 c. fresh oregano or 1 T. dried oregano powder
1/2 to 3/4 a jar chunky pasta sauce
3/4 c. ricotta
1/2 c. grated Parmesan
1 c. shredded mozzarella
DIRECTIONS
Heat oven to 400. Cook ziti according to package directions. Heat oil in large pot over medium, add onion, salt, pepper and cook for 5 min. Add beef and cook, crumbling with a spoon, about 7 min. Add garlic and oregano and cook for 2 min. Add pasta sauce and cook for 3 min. Remove from heat. Add drained ziti to pot and toss. Add ricotta and 1/4 c. of Parmesan, 1/2 c. mozzarella and toss again. Spread mixture into a 2 quart baking dish and sprinkle with remaining cheeses. Bake about 12-15 minutes, until the cheese melts. Serves 4, with leftovers. :)

Tay likes this and diced tomatoes can be added as well as spinach. I want to try it with chicken soon. Stay tuned for pumpkin cookies!!

risotto-style chicken and rice

This is adapted from my Bride & Groom's First and Forever Cookbook. It's more or less a risotto, but the first time I made it, Taylor said he didn't like risotto. So we're not calling that anymore. To change it this time, I used more water, in mixture with the broth to make it less crazy-creamy, and we put our grilled fajita chicken meat in it. I also substituted the mushrooms it originally called for, for peas. . . as suggested by a recipe on the back of the brown rice box. For the wine, I used a cute little mini bottle of Pinot Grigio. The little bottles you buy in fours. I included the mushrooms in the recipe here, since I really liked it with the mushrooms. This I would say serves 2 or 3 as a main dish, more than that, sans-chicken, as a side. I think it is SOOO good, and is totally worth the patience required by constant stirring.
The Best Risotto Ever (with chicken)
INGREDIENTS
1 -1/2 c. cooked chicken, chopped
3 T. EVOO
1/4 c. chopped yellow onion
2 T. diced garlic
1 c. brown rice (I used quick rice)
2 c. low-sodium chicken broth
1 c. water
3/4 c. dry white wine
1/2 c. chopped mushrooms
1/2 c. frozen peas
1 T. fresh thyme
1/4 c. grated parmesan cheese
1 T. butter
cracked pepper
DIRECTIONS:
Combine broth and water in small pot and bring to a simmer then keep warm.
Add olive oil to large pan and heat on medium. ( I used a sauce pan, that almost looks like a wok) Add onions and heat till translucent, about 2 min, add mushrooms and cook, about 8 min, add garlic and stir. Cook about 2 min. Add rice and stir til moistened, about 30 seconds, add wine and simmer, stirring until liquid is absorbed. Add heated broth 3/4 c. at a time, stirring until each addition is absorbed. On the last broth addition, add the peas. Should take about 20-30 min. Once all broth is added and rice is tender and creamy, add butter, cheese and thyme and pepper to taste. Combine with cooked chicken.
To make it more of a real risotto, do all broth, no water. But, I think that since I'm using quick rice, it cooks and then gets creamier faster. So you could even do half water and half broth. Also. The ladies who authored my cookbook claim, "the key is to keep stirring the whole time." I found that if I let each addition build to a simmer before stirring, it went faster and was still good. It sounds like more onerous than it is especially if you cut up and prep all the ingredients while waiting for the broth and water to start bubbling. Also, if you've cooked your chicken beforehand it's even easier. The recipe on the back of the rice called for chopping the chicken and cooking in the oil first. Perhaps that will be my next experiment. Anyway, I think this is SO good. It's like macaroni and cheese for adults. And that's the pic of Taylor's plate...

the applesauce chaos

So herein lies the debate. I'm not really sure how I feel about overhealthifying a cookie. I mean at some point you need to just let yourself have a cookie. If we eat two dozen applesauce whole wheat cookies because we think they're healthy, we may as well should have enjoyed one very-bad-for-me shortening filled triple chocolate fudge delight. But, obviously, if you can make a great tasting healthy cookie it can't be a bad thing. It just means that you shouldn't eat more than you usually would, given the knowledge that it's healthy.

All that to say, I tried it with apple sauce and it was THE messiest experience. The dough was so moist that I got it all over my fingers and all in the sugar cinnamon mixture. What I ended up doing was dousing my left hand fingers in flour, spooning the dough into my left hand and rolling it around before throwing the floury goupy into the plate with the cinsugar mixture. Here's the aftermath:

Whole Wheat Snickerdoodles with applesauce
INGREDIENTS
3/4 cup applesauce
2 T. butter
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
--
2 tablespoons white sugar
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
DIRECTIONS
Cream applesauce, butter and sugar. Add egg and vanilla. Beat well. Add combined dry ingredients. Shape dough into 1 inch balls and roll in sugar cinnamon mixture. Place 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

I don't know why I didn't try to flatten a few with the bottom of a cup. Next time I will try that, but I think I will also go back to butter. I think I will do butter, all whole wheat flour (instead of including all-purpose) and maybe a little more sugar.

Taylor liked them! But I think he was just hungry.

doodlesnickers

These were "too healthy" tasting for Taylor. My dad and grandparents raved about them. So. you win some, you lose some. I think I tried to make these first because I had a lot of whole wheat flour and wanted to find something I could make with it, besides Aunt Elaine's Pancakes

Whole Wheat Snickerdoodles
INGREDIENTS
1 -1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1 -1/4 c. all purpose flour
1-1/2 cups packed brown sugar
1 c. butter
2 eggs
1 t. cream of tartar
1 t. baking soda
1 T. vanilla extract
1 T. ground cinnamon
1/4 t. salt
---
1/4 c. white sugar
2 T. ground cinnamon
DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 375. Cream sugar and butter until fluffy. Add eggs and beat well. Combine the remaining dry ingredients and gradually beat into creamy mix. Combine the white sugar and remaining cinnamon. Roll the dough in the sugar/cinnamon mixture. Place on cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 minutes.

This isn't the exact recipe I made and I may try this one tomorrow. The one I actually made was good, but could've been sweeter and I didn't have Cream of Tartar at the time. I'm going to try substituting the sugar for brown sugar, adding vanilla and lowering the temp. from 400 to 375. So, consider yourself disclaimered. I've seen a few comments on All Recipes.com about making them with apple sauce. I think that might actually help them spread out more -to avoid having to smash them like pb cookies before baking them -by adding more liquid to the dough, and may make them lighter feeling since the w.w. flour does have a heavier feel. Again, stay tuned. I may perform a smashing versus apple sauce experiement. Regardless, adding applesauce may not give me much to wager against tay's "too healthy" excuse. More for Dad and Grandpa, I guess.