Why Hello, Mr. Benedict Is that popcorn I smell?

Merry Christmas, everyone!!

Hope you have all had a merry holiday spent with family, unwrapping gifts, and reperforming your age old traditions!

This year, I discovered very quickly there were no plans for breakfast. The feast (or dinner, as some would call it) was the main focus. So I set off to bring something entirely new & scrumptious to the table: Eggs Benedict.

I blame Highland Bakery, in Atlanta, for my fascination with eggs benedict. Something about the way the hollandaise dripped off the side of the eggs combined with my favorite 2 minute breakfast food, the english muffin, draws me in every time.

So I went to my trusted besty allrecipes.com for Home Made English Muffins, Poached Eggs, and Easy Hollandaise, and voila! Delicious brekfast.

A couple of notes:

I baked the muffins at 350 for about 10-15 minutes, rather than throwing them onto the griddle.

Shallow water, no vinegar, cover after 3 minutes.

The hollandaise was perfect!

Later, for a mid-evening / late afternoon snack, I made peanut-butter caramel popcorn:

1/2 cup uncooked popcorn (yields about 8 cups)
1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
 1/4 Cup white sugar
 1/4 cup peanut butter
12 tbs butter
1/4 cup corn syrup

Cook the popcorn as directed. Combine the sugars, butters, and corn syrup into a saucepan and cook on medium. Pour cook popcorn onto wax paper. Pour the peanut-butter caramel over the popcorn. To more evenly mix, heat in the oven on 200 for one hour. Stir and serve.

What was your favorite holiday treat this year?

A little direction..

When I was a kid, my parents had a sign shop next to a Dunkin' Donuts. As a very small girl, I enjoyed donuts - blueberry cake to be exact. Mr Carlton, a janitor at my elementary school, could never say no when I asked for a share of his morning breakfast. Thus, I became hooked on the blueberry cake donuts.

A few years later my sweet tooth became a little more numb, and I began to explore the other offerings of Dunkin'. From twists to bagels, to donut holes and boston creme, I became a pastry connoisseur. Eventually, I landed on a permanent favorite: Croissants.

There is something about a Croissant, cut in half, and toasted, that is the most delectable pastry you could ever dream of. Add a little egg and cheese and you have the perfect meal.

So this weekend, I had a few extra hours and plenty of flour, so I attempted my first batch of croissants.

The recipe I used was useless to say the least. "Mix the yeast with some water." Some water? "Add the next 5 ingredients" All at once? Slowly? Mix together first, then add?

This recipe was nothing like the bread recipes I am used to, and given my love for croissants I wanted to give it my best! I needed a little more direction..

But, I decided to follow some of the basics I know of - "some water" really meant about 1 cup at 110 degrees. The yeast water needs to stand for 10 minutes until creamy. The next 5 dry ingredients should be mixed in a bowl first, then added slowly to the yeast water, etc. etc.

Eventually, I got to a real debacle: "Roll the chilled butter flat, to about 1/2" thickness." Roll... cold... butter? Do these people realize how solid cool butter is?

I improvised, and eventually got a slightly melted layer of butter onto the dough. Later, I looked for even more guidance and learned to chill butter means this:

"Add 2 tablespoons of flour to 1 cup of butter. Beat until blended. Refrigerate overnight."

Needless to say, I am overly grateful that I purchased this semi-useless cookbook on the bargain shelf. But I think I will use the pretty pictures of tasty foods as decorations, not bona-fide recipes.

When in doubt, experiment!

A few weeks ago I bought a bag of lentils. My roommate loves them, so I thought I should have some on stock.

Searching around the internet, I finally found a recipe that caught my eye - Lentil Burgers!

But woe is me, hungry on a Monday night I could not drag myself back to the store to get the carrots that these burgers call for. 

So instead, I improvised - and spicy chili bean burgers were born!

1 can chili beans with jalepenos

1 can butter beans

1/2 orange pepper, chopped

1/2 red pepper, chopped

1/2 medium yellow onion

1 tsp cumin

2 tsp chili powder

1 egg

3/4 cup oats

1/4 cup wheat flower

1/4 cup of Stubb's BBQ Sauce

1/4 cup vegetable oil

Rinse and drain beans. In a medium bowl combine beans, vegetables, seasoning, and egg. With an emersion blender, blend ingredients until slightly smooth, but still chunky. 

Stir in oats and wheat flower until mixture. If mixture is not thick, add additional flour.  Add in barbecue sauce.

Heat oil in skillet on medium high. When a water droplet immediately steams, add in 1/4-1/2 cup of bean mixture. Use spatula to pat into a patty shape. Cook 3-4 minutes on either side. 

Whats your favorite imrpov recipe?

Tis the Season for.... Cookies!!

This week I decided to make a special yummy treat for a special someone since I denied him the $4.99 box at Publix.

Why buy when you can bake?

After loads of searching, I came across this amazing recipe for the perfect sugar cookie. Though the recipe does not call for it, I discovered you can in fact chill this dough for an hour or overnight for rolling out & using cookie cutters.

Add a few sprinkles and voila! These delicious cookies were born.

Add a little ribbon & some silver tissue paper, and you have these fun holiday presents:

Lessons Learned

Friday night I decided to throw together an absolutely scrumptious meal - Baked sour cream chicken breast,  Sour cream biscuits, and Blackberry Cobbler.

This delicious dinner cost only around $12 (blackberries were on sale - thank you Kroger!), fed three hungry people, and with plenty of leftovers to spare.

Some lessons I learned:

-Spices + something moist = delicious chicken
-Save yourself time to do baked chicken - about 2x longer than in a skillet
-Sour cream biscuits are not very fluffy, especially when you add cheddar cheese
-Blackberry cobbler is forking delicious & simple!

A couple of tweaks I did to my recipes - added 1/4 cup of cheese to the biscuits, substituted a blend of oregano, marjoram, garlic salt, black pepper, celery seed, and rolled oats for the "stuffing seasoning" the chicken calls for.

This is a meal I will definitely make again - but I plan to change up the biscuits some.

All Twisted UP

After getting off of work early today, I moseyed around my kitchen - heating up leftover broccoli casserole (yum! recipe to come), and chomping down on the salad I skipped from lunch.

Diners & Drive-ins featured a place called Foreign & Domestic in Austin, Texas. After learning what a pop-over is and seeing what they do with them & Gruyere cheese, I had a craving. No - not pop-overs.. I don't have the equipment for those.

PRETZELS!

Pretzels have been a long favorite of mine. My best friend Heather and I have been savoring them for years. One of our favorite local pubs used to serve the BEST, and I mean the BEST pretzels ever. They were so fluffy and light and reminded you somewhat of the inside of a donut.

But alas, the pub no longer serves the most amazing pretzels in the world. So I have struck out on an adventure to create my own!

Tonight I tried this recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/buttery-soft-pretzels/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=pretzel&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Recipe

About a 1.5 cups into the recipe, I ran out of white flower and opted for wheat. I believe this may have been my recipe's downfall. The dough was very tough, and I think I can lift 50 lbs weights now after kneading that sucker.

Of course I will come back to this recipe when I have the proper ingredients and give it a fair shot, but my personal twist on them only gets 3 out of 5 stars.

After that? I want to try these: http://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/rosemary-sea-salt-pretzels-with-rosemary-cheddar-cheese-sauce/

Trying new things

Lately I have tired of my budget blog - right now I am in the execution stage of my major budget overhaul, and while it's hard - its just not that exciting.

So in the meantime, I have taken up a NEW passion that goes along nicely with my tight budget - cooking at home!

Recently I have been obsessed with trying new things. First I made bread.. then I made wheat bread.. then I kept making wheat bread until finally I have found my favorite recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/honey-wheat-bread-iii/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=honey%20wheat%20bread&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Home%20Page

A new trick I learned with this gem of a recipe - microwave a bakers dish of water (about one cup) for 1 - 2 minutes. When finished, let your dough rise in the closed microwave for only 45 minutes. The result? Lighter, fluffier, tastier bread in much less time.