Valentine's Day Roundup!

Confession:  The Husband and I already celebrated Valentine's Day.  We hate crowds and we love Indian food, so we decided to head to our favorite spot on Sunday and celebrate the holiday, curry-style.  For the big day, I'm either going to make his mama's BBQ Meatballs or spring for a heart-shaped pizza.

That's tomorrow.  I'm not known for planning ahead.

But since I will plan for the rest of you - here are some Valentine's Day ideas from the archives.  I've listed some entrees and dessert, because V-Day doesn't scream salad to me.

The Pioneer Woman's Fancy Macaroni - that's right, bacon on top.  Bacon = love.

Pastitsio - known as Greek lasagna.  Also known as love in a pan!

Stuffed Chicken Breasts - this was a ShelleyBakes original, thought up for a friend of mine who wanted to woo a woman.

This is Giada's Farmer's Pasta - yeah, somehow in my mind I equate pasta to romance.  All I know is that this dish is goood ...

Chocolate Cherry Cake - love doesn't need to be complicated.  This cake is not - it's a cake mix and cherry pie filling.  Absolute decadence with limited amount of steps.

Again - convenience ingredients can lead to decadence ... this chocolate peanut butter cookie pizza is brilliant.

This is a little bit more time consuming, but well worth the effort - Italian Cream Cake.

Confession:  Ina and Jeffrey Garten might be one of my favorite couples on television.  I sometimes tell Ryan that he's my Jeffrey and he just rolls his eyes at me. (True love, I say!)  This is Ina's recipe for Beatty's Chocolate Cake.  And yes, it tastes as good as it looks.

And for those of you who could care less about the holiday and think it's a sham that was thought up by the Hallmark company.  This recipe is for you:

I made these cookies for my co-workers in the estimating department last year.  They were charmed.  And touched.  And they loved it.  I don't know what that says about them.  Or me.

Whether you're snarky or sappy - I wish you a wonderful Valentine's Day.

Confections and crafts: Cherry Cream Cheese Coffee Cake

It's good to have good friends - especially the kind of friends that you can be creative with and try new things that you would likely be too lazy to accomplish on your own time.

My dear friend Cathy came over this AM and we worked on a craft and I got fancy and served her some coffee cake.  It is one of those things that's ingrained in me from childhood reading books like "Little House on the Prairie" and "Anne of Green Gables."  When you have company over, you put your best foot forward and assure them through food and beverage that they are welcomed and loved.

This coffee cake comes from Taste of Home and has enough pain in the ass factor that it's the kind of cake you wouldn't make for yourself, but would save to impress someone.  Because it is tasty - but the bottom cake layer that you have to press into a pan?  Sticky and messy.  (Hint:  Get your hands damp first - it helps a little bit.)  And at 25 grams of fat per slice, it isn't something you'd should be clamoring for on a daily basis.  (Clamoring is one thing - indulging is the other ...)

As for the craft?  I've dabbled a little bit in Pinterest, but I'm still relying on other bloggers to tell me the groovy things that they are finding on other folks' boards. 

This craft came from Katy at Non-Consumer Advocate and takes Mason jars and re-purposes them into soap containers.  Confession:  I have more Mason jars than I know what to do with and have a special place in my heart for the vintage blue jars that we inherited when my husband's grandma moved out of her home. So it was nice to find an EASY craft that used up some of the materials I had on hand.  And luckily for me, Cathy came to the party with lids her husband Timm had already drilled for us.  So with a little bit of glue work, we made these:

Easy, lovely and re-used items that Cathy and I had laying around the house.

Needless to say, it was a wonderful Saturday morning.

I'm back ... kind of (Cacio e Pepe)

The cooking bug has yet to really return to me, so when I found myself seduced by a recipe this morning - I wasn't too surprised that it reminded me of comfort food from my childhood.  Cacio e Pepe is simply what the title translates to: Pasta with cheese and pepper.  It made me think of being a kid and the times my mom would make the simplest - but tastiest - dish ... boiled elbow macaroni with melted butter, a little bit of milk splashed in and plenty of salt and pepper.

  

I found this recipe at Ezra Pound Cake and tweaked the ingredients to serve one. 

Merry Christmas! And a hiatus ...

Is it lame for me to come to my blog to announce a hiatus when I haven't been blogging since, oh, October?  I love cooking.  I love looking at new recipes.  I love the challenges that cooking and baking can present and the knowledge that comes after years of kitchen experience.

But I've been working on other projects and for the time being, I just wanted to poke my head in and say hello!  Sorry I've been bastardly about posting lately.  I'll let you all know when I decide to come back. :)

In the meantime - if you're looking for some last minute homemade gifts, these items have been found in the ShelleyBakes kitchen - easy Nutella sea salt fudge and homemade Bailey's Irish Cream.  They are quick and easy.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

Freezer Tomato Sauce

Umm ... so I'm going to apologize that this blog post is about, oh ... a month too late?  Although I've heard rumor that the unseasonably warm weather in Minnesota has had some people still picking tomatoes - I made this recipe right after Labor Day weekend when my neighbor had given me carte blanche to raid her cherry tomato bushes.

 

I found this recipe on Leite's Culinaria, which is one of my favorite food blogs out there.   For those of you still harvesting tomatoes, give it a shot.  And if you're like me and dreaming of next year's bounty, go ahead and bookmark this for next year.

Soups for a Saturday: Crock Pot Turkey White Bean Pumpkin Chili

Earlier I expounded upon how food bloggers are particularly obsessed with pumpkin around this time of year.

After I tried this chili from Gina at Skinnytaste - I think I'm beginning to understand why.

There are no words to explain this chili.  Only that I Facebooked the link on my ShelleyBakes page and that I emailed no more than four people about this particular chili.  And since I used dried beans instead of canned, I actually started eating this soup when the beans were still a little crunchy.

I speaketh much truth ... this chili?  Wow.

My alterations ... like I said - I used dried beans.  No I'm not some dried bean purist who will tell you that there is some mythical difference between canned and dried beans that will result in unicorns prancing upon this earth.

There's a big difference ... there's a difference in time and convenience.  And I do think there's a difference in taste ... I prefer canned chickpeas to ones I've cooked myself, likely because of whatever funky bean liquid they've been bathing in. 

Having said that - I do think that dried beans take up less cupboard real estate in my cupboards than canned beans.  Plus, there's less waste overall (I buy beans from the bulk bins - reducing packaging/carbon footprint/whatever.).

For this recipe, I soaked my beans overnight and picked through them to get rid of any rogue pieces of whatever comes out of bean fields.  I then put in just shy of four cups worth of beans.

Since I put in soaked, but uncooked beans, I upped my chicken broth to four cups instead of two cups.

I also used ground turkey - the hot Italian sausage style, so I omitted the oregano.

Finally - I did not have chopped green chiles, but I did have a can of Rotel (10 oz.).  So I dumped that in, liquid and all.

I served with some cornbread ... and it was goooood.

Low Fat Pumpkin Bread

As sure as leaves fall on the ground during the fall season in Minnesota, the food blogs are full of recipes using pumpkin.  And who can blame them?  I mean - there's something about the warm scents of cinnamon and nutmeg that scream it's time to break out the jeans and sweaters.  And to enjoy the 50 and 60 degree temperatures, because you can pack up all of your shorts and poof!  Eighty degree weather will return for a week in the region.  That, and experience cautions me that we could very well see snow by Halloween.  Because that's Minnesota.

So to celebrate the season, I made this bread from Gina at Skinnytaste, but because I'm contrary and because I keep f-ing up bread recipes, I decided to put it in a Bundt cake pan.  And it is gooood .... it's not *as* good as some of your more traditional pumpkin breads that get some incredible moisture from an asston of vegetable oil, but the pumpkin puree does the trick.

Here are the changes I made:  Bundt pan instead of bread pan; omitted the pepitas, used Penzey's Baking Spice instead of pumpkin pie spice and sprinkled with some powdered sugar for the final product. 

If you decide to bake in a Bundt pan, cut the cooking time down to about 40-45 minutes.

This is actually the second pumpkin bread that I made this season ... the earlier one was from Rebecca at Ezra Pound Cake.  And while this one was good, the streusel decided to go rogue and dropped through the bottom of the bread.  I have no clue what I did.  But my neighbor Bonnie and my husband Ryan (and his D&D friends) did not really seem to care, so this was still a winner.