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Showing posts from January, 2011

Quinoa Waldorf Salad (and a great corn salad, too!)

This past shabbos, I was expecting to have guests and was trying to plan a menu which would include the apples I had in my fridge. I was considering a waldorf salad, but it seemed too boring. Then it hit me: What if I made a waldorf salad...WITH QUINOA?! I know what you're thinking. "Woah, Sara! Don't go crazy now!" But I made it. And it was wonderful. And you will love it, too. Quinoa Waldorf Salad Ingredients 1 Cup uncooked Quinoa 1 and 1/2 Cups apple juice 1/2 Cup water 2 Granny Smith apples, cubed 1/2 Cup Craisins 1 stalk celery, sliced 1 tsp oil 1 Tbsp vinegar 1 Tbsp sugar candied pecans (optional) Instructions Pour the quinoa, juice and water into a saucepan and cook according to package directions. Let the quinoa cool, then mix the oil, vinegar and sugar and add to quinoa. Mix in all other ingredients. Eat and enjoy. :) Corn Salad (Recipe from Talia) Ingredients 2 cans of yellow and/or white corn 1 red pepper, diced 1 yellow or green pepper, diced 1/2 pu

Pumpkin Gnocchi (Kinda...)

Tonight for dinner, I decided to try out a recipe for making pumpkin gnocchi. Gnocchi is another one of those blogosphere fads that's going around right now (kind of like the flu) and it looks pretty easy compared to other pastas and also sounds really tasty. I have never eaten gnocchi and have certainly never made it myself, but I decided to give it a try anyway as a starter recipe for pasta-type-food-things. My experience with this recipe was kinda "eh." The result was tasty, but nothing truly phenomenal. The texture was soft when hot and pleasantly chewy when cold, but it really didn't impress me any more than just plain ol' pasta. It's definitely denser and more filling then regular pasta, and had that subtle pumpkin/nutmeg flavor, but it just really wasn't anything to write home about. Now granted, my dissatisfaction may have come from my reluctance to pair it with a fresh, homemade sauce. Many of the recipes for pumpkin gnocchi recommend using

Butternut Squash Soup

For a long time, I've been hunting for a simple, slightly sweet butternut squash soup recipe. After hunting for a while, finding recipes with obscure ingredients and trying others that came out too savory or, even worse, too bland, I decided to create my own recipe. I took a look at some of the common ingredients used in these recipes and picked out some of my favorites, throwing in a few of my own along the way. I came up with the recipe below and tried it out tonight. The soup came out just the way I like butternut squash soup to taste. It was just slightly sweet, a little bit savory, warm and creamy. Enjoy! Butternut Squash Soup Yields: about 10 servings (depending on the size of your bowls) Ingredients: 1 tsp olive oil 1 large butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into small chunks 1 large parsnip, peeled and sliced 2 medium size carrots, peeled and sliced 1/2 small onion, diced 2 inch cube of ginger, sliced 1/4 C brown sugar 1 C pineapple juice 4 C water 1 C Sweetened Mi

Simple, Delicious, Non-Greasy Pizza

When you read as many food blogs as I do, you begin to notice food trends that everyone writes about. Around December, everyone is writing about gift-able recipes like cookies, fudge and various candies, all with seasonal ingredients incorporated in (like ginger, peppermint, etc.). You also notice non-seasonal food trends, like baking certain types of breads or utilizing newly popularized ingredients. Right now, one of the popular trends seems to be homemade skillet (or pan) pizza. This style of pizza is made using a homemade dough and is cooked in a cast-iron skillet, often with toppings like olive oil, vegetables, marinara sauce, and sparse cheese. My theory is that these have been popularized by the recent movie, "Eat, Pray, Love" which featured a scene in which Julia Roberts ate just such a pizza. Somewhere along my ramblings through the blogosphere in the past few weeks, I stumbled across a recipe for a pizza fitting the above description that appealed to me simply b

My First Chocolate Fudge and Goals for 2011

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A while back, I discovered a new substitution for heavy cream that, supposedly, can be used in any recipe where one would normally use cream. The ingredient is called Mimiccreme and is a non-dairy (and pareve) nut-based cream. Shortly after discovering it, I mentioned it to my father who checked it out online and discovered that their warehouse in Albany was changing the packaging for their sweetened version and as a result were selling the old packaging for a $1 per carton. Considering that this stuff usually sells for closer to $5 per carton, it was a no-brainer that if I planned on experimenting with this stuff, it would be useful to get it dirt cheap! So naturally, when I heard that my husband's uncle would be coming down to visit from Albany, I asked him to bring me a couple cases. Unfortunately, the week he was supposed to come he got into a nasty car accident while driving through New Jersey. While he was fine, his car was destroyed (along with one of my poor container