Pear-Nana-Nut Bread and Pear Pomegranate Butter...How Peary!

Pear-Nana-Nut Bread

You ever have one of those days where you thought you knew exactly how the day was going to turn out, and then it abruptly gets switched around?? Well, today was one of those days for me. Not that that's a bad thing though! However, it all started sometime during the middle of last night. I went to bed completely confident that I was going to get a good night's rest, due to the awesomely relaxing cup of chamomile tea I had. I dozed off completely relaxed and had a good but short visit to mimi-land. Then it started. The noise. And more noise. The noise won't stop. But it's not quite loud enough to completely wake me up. So I am half asleep, half awake. Knowing that there is some noise that is disturbing me, but I am not quite awake enough to realize what it is. I lay half asleep for who knows how long, all the while becoming more and more irritated. Finally, maybe around 1am, I wake enough to realize that it's the wind. There is crazy wind outside, and my windows are old. I'm talking made in the 1920's old. And they are rattling. I also have silly paper blinds that serve as black-out blinds because I can't stand the light when I am trying to sleep. And they are being pushed back and forth. So it's the rattling of the window, boom, boom, boom. And the blinds. The swishing and swooshing of the paper blinds, back, and forth, back, and forth. Ok, who can I strangle? I must have gotten up, like, 17 times to adjust the windows and the blinds. Would someone please give me a kit kat, cause I need a break!!

Ok, so my night didn't go as planned, but that's cool. I still woke to a decently happy medium mood. I knew I wanted to do some baking this morning, as there have been some pears ripening on the counter all week. So I got right to work on that. I knew I had an important meeting with a potential new client today, so I wanted to get an early start. I put some coffee on, and pressed play on my Lilly Allen station on Pandora.

The baking actually went perfectly as planned. I followed this simple recipe found here ...funny how as I revisited that blog, I see that they too, were having an "Expect the Unexpected" kind of day! Maybe it's the curse of baking Banana Pear Bread. Uh-oh! Don't let that stop you from making this delicious bread. I liked this recipe because it is a much healthier version, compared to most others. And I did make some adjustments. I used whole wheat flour, and added about 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract, and 1 tsp of all spice. And hellllo, what is that smelll.....

 I wish I could make this a scratch-n-sniff pic for you, because the smell coming out of this big white thing is intoxicating. The aroma of the banana, the pear, the vanilla, and the all spice. Wowee!

Ding! My Pear-Nana-Nut Bread is finally done. Thank Goody!!

Yum...

Ok, that was fun. Now it's time to get getting ready for my meeting. But wait, curveball, it's been postponed. Ah well. I am actually kinda glad because I got such crappy sleep last night that I was already getting a bit, well, let's just say, not right.

So what to do with the rest of this absolutely gorgeous day?? Well, cook more of course. Duh. I decide to make a pear butter. Because I have yet more pears to deal with and send off to their peary heaven in the sky.

I search online to find an oh-my-gosh-amazing pear butter recipe. But they are all the same. Well, except for a few. But I don't have those rare ingredients on hand. So I decide to keep it simple, and use what I have on hand. I know I have pears. Check. I have sugar. Good. I have water. Yay! I have one lemon. Cool. And what else can I throw into this thing called pear butter??? Oh! Yes! I have pomegranate seeds! Fantastic. I throw the chopped pears into some water...

And I pull out these beauties...

I get them on the stove and bring all to a boil. Let it simmer together until they all just want to fall apart and become one. And here is where it got a little tricky for me. I do not have a food mill, I just have a handy little dandy ricer. So I use this to puree the pears and pomegranate seeds down to a pulp, (working in batches of course)...

Now that the skins and seeds are all out of the pool, I wanted to smooth it out as I felt it was too grainy. So I got out my immersion blender and did this...

Ok, now we are ready to get back into the pot and onto the stove again. We need to cook this all down so that it becomes what it is destined to become. Pear Pomegranate Butter. I added a nice long drizzle of honey, and about a cup of sugar. Oh, and the juice from my lonely lemon. I cooked it all down on a low simmer until it became this...

So Purty...

Pear Pomegranate Butter

This will be delicious mixed in with some greek yogurt, on ice cream, on pancakes, salads, or even on my pear-nana-nut bread. Yum...

Faux-Tatoes and Holy Fennel Frond!

Roasted Mashed Cauliflower and Garlic with Fried Shallots

It's been a roasting kind of evening for me, and I wanted to share a couple new favorite side dishes of mine. Actually, it feels like all I have been doing is roasting vegetables for a few weeks now. I just can't seem to get enough of the sweet, caramelized goodness that comes out of roasting a vegetable. Any vegetable. Last week I was compulsively addicted to roasted garlic over hummus, and roasted broccoli with balsamic reduction. I'll toast to that!

So this week I wanted to broaden my plate with something new. And then it hit me. I've been wanting to make mashed cauliflower for some time now. Because I absolutely love mashed potatoes, but feel guilty eating too much of them, and I always want to eat more mashed potatoes than any person ever should consume. But I also wanted to roast some cauliflower. So I wondered how roasted cauliflower would taste as a faux mashed potatoes.

I hit the grocery store and came home with a creamy white globe of cauliflower, shallots, garlic, and two pretty fancy little fennels. I saw the fennel and immediately imagined it in a menage a trois, bubbling and sizzling in my beast of an oven, along side some garlic and cherry tomatoes.

And so I did just that. I roasted my pretty little fennel wedges along side some garlic, and cherry tomatoes. And then tossed some grated parmesan-reggiano on top....and holy fennel frond! Oh roasted fennel, where have you been all my life??? However, you certainly needed the acid of the tomatoes to balance the anise flavor....

Roasted Fennel and Tomatoes with Parmesan-Reggiano

Next, I moved on to the cauliflower. They got a nice coating of olive oil, salt and pepper, and in to the oven they went. Along side some garlic, shallot, and fresh sprigs of lemon thyme. I did not let the cauliflower get too brown as I wanted my faux-potatoes-cauliflower-mash to be a nice creamy white color, (as to trick myself into believing I was eating real mashed potatoes!). I then blended the cauliflower, garlic, and shallot, with some almond milk (unsweetened), and butter. And salt, always more salt! I fried up some shallots for a yummy garnish, and voila. My faux-tatoe-mashed-cauliflower has come to life. I absolutely love this dish. The combination of the sweet and nutty cauliflower with the sweet roasted garlic, and the slight crunch of the sweet fried shallots are utterly enticing and comforting. And since I have cauliflower and fennel on the brain, I was thinking about a cauliflower, fennel, and pear combo next....Sip!!

Oh, Fried Shallots!

What is that, Red Velvet?!

I know that one person out there will get the title of this post straight away, and I know that most everyone else will need a little explaining.....you see one of my bestest and dearest friends and I are known to often quote random movie lines, and this is probably one of our favorites. What is that, velvet?...mmhhmm, good and terrible!

Not only am I referencing one of the best movies of all time, but I also made red velvet cupcakes this past weekend. Yes, there was another birthday among mes amis, so of course I had to make something. And this gal loves cupcakes, and it's February, so there was only one very obvious choice staring me smack in the face. Red Velvet!

So, yes, I had never made red velvet cake before. And honestly, I never understood what all the hype was about. I mean, what was the big stinkin' deal about some food coloring in regular ol' cake batter... Well, I am here to tell you that red velvet is not the red headed step child that I thought it was. Red velvet is a-ma-zing. I did some reading on the topic, and found that, as with anything, there are many different ways of making it, and many beliefs on what it should be, what it shouldn't be, and how it originated, to how it gets it's red color. The most interesting was to learn that the original recipe calls for a boiled frosting. Huh!

For my red velvets, I did not go the boiled frosting route, though one of these days I will have to try it. Instead, I did the more modernly traditional cream cheese frosting. And I did find a pretty great recipe for the cake here. I liked this recipe because it seemed to call for less fat than many of the others. The only changes I made to the recipe was that I added some extra cocoa powder as the 3/4 teaspoon just didn't seem enough to me. And I was glad that I did. They had a nice and soft chocolatey flavor.  And the only thing I will do differently next time, is to try them with beet juice instead of the red food coloring. Because red food coloring is, like, the devil. But I did love the color of these gems...

So everyone, give it up for Mr. Randy Watson, from the What's Going Down episode of That's My Momma...

So lovely...

Take me to your eater...

Blackberries and Beeches

Blackberry Vanilla Swirl Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Lime Frosting, Blackberry Drizzle and Candied Lime

Blackberries and Brown Beech Mushrooms are the topics of discussion today, as they were a few of the star ingredients I got to work with this week.

The mister and I finally made it over to the Berkeley Bowl, and I was so excited to see their bountiful produce department.  I think we counted 11 varieties of potatoes, and there must have been at least 10 varieties of mushrooms. Imagine the beauty! I don't think I have mentioned the love affair that I have with mushrooms. So let me just say, I love mushrooms.  I love their earthiness, and fun textures. I love that they are sort of dirty, and spotty, and some of them are unsightly, while some of them are almost graceful. I just adore mushrooms.

Well, I was on a budget so I had to refrain from grabbing handfuls of each type of mushroom, so at the very end of the mushroom aisle I stumbled upon these funny little packaged mushrooms. These were within my budget, so I quickly grabbed one and added it to my basket. I decided on the Brown Beech Mushroom...

I have made these before and knew exactly what I wanted to do with them....pan fry them in butter with fresh garlic and salt and pepper. And then have the best dinner ever!

Also this week, I got to do some birthday time baking for a friend's birthday. I knew that she is quite fond of blackberries, so I decided on making her some blackberry lime cupcakes. Originally I did not want a purple-ish cupcake, and I thought I wanted to use a fresh blackberry as a garnish. More often than not, I find that my original idea and end product is usually different. I guess that is ok. It's all a learning process, right?!

I did know that I wanted the cupcakes to actually taste like blackberries, so I decided to puree them. Half of the puree was to go in the cake batter, and the other half was to be made into blackberry syrup to drizzle on top. Most importantly was to remember to strain the blackberry puree to get rid of the seeds. Nobody wants seeds in their cupcakes!

I found this recipes online, and found it to work out beautifully. I still didn't really want my cupcakes to be completely purple, so I added the blackberry puree very last, and only gently folded it in so that it varied in color...

I whipped up a simple cream cheese frosting, but added lime juice to give it some zing. I think the acid in the lime was breaking down the cream cheese as I found it somewhat difficult to get the frosting to set. I ended up adding more powdered sugar to get it to set. You could still taste the lime so it worked out nicely.

Lastly, I candied some lime slices and used that and the blackberry syrup for garnish....Happy Birthday Connie!!!

Blackberry Vanilla Swirl Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Lime Frosting, Blackberry Drizzle and Candied Lime

For Grape Me Not

Arugula Salad with Roasted Grape Dressing and Pear

Red seedless grapes have been on my mental shopping list lately, and their fate was to meet my oven. Yes, the smoldering, smoking oven that is mine. Well, it's finally kicked it's smoking habit, thank god! So now it's just the smoldering, hot-as-heck oven. It really only smoked that one time, ok two times, when we set off the smoke detector and heard the mysterious woman's voice call out "fire, fire". I never knew that smoke detectors could talk, or that ovens had smoking habits....

Getting back to the grapes. I have had two thoughts on what I wanted to do with grapes. The first idea came from hearing about roasting grapes, as I have been very curious to try them and see what the buzz was all about. So I got me some grapes. I woke up my beast of an oven and set her on to something like 400, laid out some grapes on a sheet pan, drizzled them with oil, and cut some fresh rosemary stems off of my now dying mixed-herb plant, and then we let the roasting begin. Within minutes I heard bubbling and popping, I ran over to check that they weren't going to completely explode and catch fire, ( my oven paranoia kicking in), and they were just fine. The grapes were just starting to burst, and it looked as though most of the skin actually cooks away. I took them out after about 15 minutes, and let them rest for a bit before we tried one.

Once they were cool enough to handle and pop open, I took my first bite. All I could say was "wow!". They were so incredibly flavorful, tangy, sweet, and almost creamy. It almost made the backs of my cheeks tingle because it was just so... wow!

I found a recipe online, here, that sounded like a yummy dish to incorporate my roasted grapes with, so I went ahead and roasted some sweet potatoes as well. And yes, even though this is really just a side dish, it was the perfect meal for me and the bf for a late dinner...

Roasted Grapes over Sweet Potato Goat Cheese Mash

The second idea that has been rolling and clunking around in my head is a grape puree of some sort. And just yesterday I remembered that I had about a cup of roasted grapes left over, so I set out to puree my roasted grape babies. I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do with this roasted grape liquid, because I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out. But I decided to add some white balsamic vinegar, olive oil, lime juice, salt, ground sage, and dijon mustard, and make a dressing out of it. Oh yes. Yum! I had some arugula in the fridge, and finally just today one of the pears I have had sitting on the counter for days now, is finally ripe and suitable for eating. So I made this beautiful salad for lunch today... Oh, and I finally brought out my good camera today, as you can tell by the quality of this snap...

Arugula Salad with Pear and Roasted Grape Dressing