Mediterranean Feast

This post is going to be short and sweet. We are 4 days from leaving for New York (both the city and upstate), and my time is a little limited. I wanted to share some pictures and recipes from my most recent experiment. My favorite guinea pig Michael and his partner came over for a long-awaited Sunday dinner. They are nice enough to be watching our kitties while we're away, so I wanted to make something worth their while.

The Saga of the Cookie Monster Cupcakes

I'm never working with blue frosting again. At least not with a piping bag. Below is a picture of the prototype of my sister's 40th birthday Cookie Monster cupcakes. She saw them on Facebook months ago and asked if I could make them. "Sure!" I said with so much naive enthusiasm. After consulting with some fellow bakers on Twitter, I decided to go with a buttercream frosting. I had never made buttercream, but how hard could it be?

Quick Update

The weather is finally starting to change to fall here in the Pacific NW and with it comes more nights of things like beef stew (below, made for Sunday dinner) and baking.

Our Favorite Things

No, it's not raindrops on roses (although whiskers on kittens are pretty darn cute). However, this weekend I treated our household to our favorite dinners. Mine being sour cream enchiladas, Shawn's being chicken parmesan.

Cultured Butter

My new work schedule has made me very productive in the evenings. I started culturing the cream for my butter project on Sunday afternoon, and actually had enough time to make it on a Monday evening--even after hitting the grocery store, going for a run, making dinner, and prepping Tuesday night's dinner. I'm amazed at how much I'm able to get done these days.

Camping Food, Part III

This part three of a three-part series about the greatest summer food of all: the stuff you cook by the campfire...or in this case, over the campfire. It is also my post for the America Test Kitchen's Dish It Your Way challenge. Every other week they give a dish or ingredient and two weeks for bloggers to make the dish and write about in their blogs. At the end, the social media team reviews them, posts links to the competing blogs, and picks a winner for an online subscription to Cook's Country. Wish me luck!


We spent this past weekend in Bend to celebrate Shawn's birthday (don't worry honey, I won't tell everyone how old you are). Since time and menus were running out for me to make the next dish for the second to last food blogger Dish It Your Way challenge, I had to combine efforts and make mac and cheese in the great outdoors. Shawn was really disappointed by the way. Oh wait, not at all.

Tuna Pasta (not tuna casserole)

I do my best to plan all of our meals the weekend before so we aren't tempted to go out and spend money. Once in awhile I over plan what we need, such was the case a couple of weeks ago when we had more leftovers from the BBQ than I expected. We were supposed to just have simple tuna melts, so holding off on using the tuna was easy. It came to make the shopping list last week and I figured in our cans of tuna to our meal plans, of course, to save some money.