Believe it or not, I actually have a better reason than the usual, “Sorry, we’re busy” for not posting much lately. If you keep an eye on the flickr site, you might’ve noticed that food pictures have been appearing there but never migrating over to the site. Well, the reason is that I’ve had a side project going on — I’ve been making a cookbook! My good friend Jessica is getting married today, and as a wedding present for her, I gathered recipes from her friends and family and put them together in a cookbook that I had printed over at blurb.com. I didn’t have time to make everything myself, but we did test out and photograph some of the recipes, so those are what you may have seen show up on flickr. I wanted to share some of these delicious recipes with you, too, but I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for Jessica, who I think might read this here blog occasionally. But the beautiful wedding was yesterday today, so the cat’s finally out of the bag. The next several posts will be recipes shared by Jessica’s friends and family.

First up is this Irish cream poundcake from Katrin Baker, an advisor to both Jessica and me when we were in the Honors program at NCSU. I couldn’t resist adding some chopped chocolate to Katrin’s recipe, though I’m sure it would be delicious either way. As Katrin says, this cake actually gets better after it sits for a day or two. I especially liked it toasted. Thanks, Katrin!

Chocolate Chip Irish Cream Poundcake
adapted from Katrin Baker, originally from Cooking Light, she thinks

2 3/4 cups cake flour (about 11 ounces)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup low-fat or fat-free cream cheese, softened
10 tablespoons butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 large eggs
3/4 cup Irish cream liqueur
3/4 cup dark chocolate, chopped, or chocolate chip (optional)
Cooking spray
2 tablespoons powdered sugar (optional)

Preheat oven to 325 F.

Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt.

Beat together cream cheese and butter with a mixer at high speed. Beat in granulated sugar, brown sugar, and vanilla. Add eggs, 1 at a time; beat well after each addition. Beat on high speed 1 minute.

With mixer on low, add flour mixture and liqueur alternately to sugar mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mixing well after each addition. Stir in chopped chocolate, if using.

Pour batter into a 12-cup Bundt pan coated with cooking spray.

Bake at 325 F for 55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool 10 minutes on a wire rack; remove from pan. Cool completely on wire rack. If desired, sift powdered sugar over cake.

As anyone that knows us knows, we like to make pizza … a lot … mostly as a result of my parents’ wood-fired pizza oven in Raleigh.  While we miss that dearly, we’ve found that a very hot oven or, even better, a grill make decent substitutes.  I’ve posted a bunch on pizza in the past, but I decided it might be time to put everything together in one place.  I’m probably the only one that has this problem, but when I look back and try to find a combination of toppings I’ve tried before, I end up having to sift through a bunch of posts to find out which one it is.  In the future, I’ll try to keep this up-to-date so all our favorite pizza dough recipes and topping ideas are synthesized in one place.  Enjoy!  And I’d love to get more ideas in the comments!

Read the rest of this entry »

Even if I’m not feeding the blog, I have still been cooking, though a little less than usual, and definitely less-complicated than usual. Here’s a recipe I meant to share a long time ago. It’s a combination of a recipe Mom has been using a lot lately to brine pork chops (I’m not sure where she got it), and a recipe from one of the last issues of Gourmet (tear!). It’s actually super easy and fast, requiring hardly any hands on work, but its presentation and taste is much more impressive than the amount of work that goes into it.

It does require a bit of advanced planning because of the brining step, but you don’t want to leave that out. I used to never cook pork chops because they always seemed to dry out on me, but the brining keeps them juicy and tender. (Interestingly – I recently learned that the way this works has to do at least partly with the motor protein myosin, which I’m studying; if you want to know how, ask me about it sometime.) It’s similar to marinating, but in a very high salt solution. Because it’s so much salt, you only leave it for a couple hours, instead of the several hours or overnight that you might normally marinate something. I haven’t tried, but I think it would probably get too salty if you left it longer than that. (If someone tries it and it works, let me know.

Another nice thing about this recipe is it’s easy to scale up or down — I first made it for just myself when Matt was in Taiwan, but making it for several folks is easy too. The pork chops are great with some sauteed greens, perfect for this time of year!

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been a busy few months, involving a lot of writing at work, meaning when I have free time, I’m not too excited to use it to do more writing. I’m going to try to get back to blogging, but you probably know me well enough by now to not trust any promises! Anyway, here’s another recipe from Thanksgiving (eek!), but it’s really good any time, either with leftover sweet potatoes, as here, or with pumpkin. Sorry, no picture from this one!

I purposely made more food than I thought we needed to feed the six of us last Thanksgiving, since I enjoy the leftovers and finding ways to use them. Matt and I had a couple nights of just reheating the leftovers pretty much as they were originally served, but the real fun part is figuring out ways to make the leftovers into something new. I especially had a lot of leftover sweet potatoes, and decided to try adding them to pancakes. I adapted the buttermilk pancakes I usually make from The Joy of Cooking, adding my sweet potato casserole (which was topped with coconut and hazelnuts) and some spices. Since these are a good bit sweeter than normal pancakes, they were especially great topped with tart leftover cranberry sauce!

Read the rest of this entry »

I love cranberries so much I made them two ways for this year’s Thanksgiving – in cranberry salad, and this cranberry sauce. I love the cranberry salad by itself, but I love the cranberry sauce with turkey, on a sandwich, or topping the pancakes I’ll share with you soon that I made with the leftover sweet potatoes.

Honestly, I didn’t measure anything very carefully, but just tasted it and added things until I liked the flavor. But, it turned out so well, I at least wanted to have a record for next year of what I put in. I think this kind of thing is best made tasting as you go anyway, since what it needs will depend on the flavor and sweetness of your cranberries.

Read the rest of this entry »