Christmas Morning (or any morning) Frittata

Hey folks!
I thought I'd rustle up a few photos I had from cooking on Christmas morning to share with you. After opening gifts and sipping coffee, my family and I banded together to make a delicious breakfast :) YUM. My sister decided that a frittata would be a great dish to have.
So, here is a rough recipe of what we did:


Christmas Morning (or any morning) Frittata

We enjoyed this frittata on a special occasion but there is no reason that you can't try this recipe out any day of the year! It's actually a wonderful thing to make for brunch, and it can feed a lot of people!

You'll need: (for a very large frittata)
1 dozen eggs
2-3 tbs milk
1 C shredded cheese (shredded cheddar is good)
1 tbs butter
1 tbs olive oil
2-3 red potatoes 
1/2 large onion
1 red bell pepper
8 oz mushrooms

First, wash and chop the red potatoes into small cubes. Put a large cast iron skillet onto the stove, add the butter and olive oil, and let it heat up over medium/high heat. Then, add the potatoes... they take the longest to cook. While the potatoes are cooking, chop the red pepper, and onion into small pieces and set aside. Do the same with the mushrooms. Once the potatoes have cooked a bit, add the red pepper and onion (you might want to lower the head just a tad) Make sure to salt and pepper liberally. Cook the veggies down until the onions are translucent and the potatoes are fork tender.

While the veggies are cooking, crack all of the eggs into a bowl and whisk them together. Add salt, pepper, and the milk, and whisk again. The milk helps the eggs to be light and fluffy (yay!) Now add 1/2 of the shredded cheese and give it a little stir.

Next, add the mushrooms to the veggie mixture on the stove and cook those down a bit. The reason these are added last is because they cook the fastest and are easy to overcook... they also can release a lot of water if overcooked so you don't want to water down your veggies! Once the mushrooms are soft, give the egg mixture a good stir and pour it right into the cast iron skillet on top of the veggies. Now, don't mess with it. Leave it on medium/low heat and let it cook for a while. The goal is to get the eggs cooked almost all the way through without burning. While you're waiting for that, turn the broiler on high.

Once the eggs are almost all the way cooked (the top will still be jiggly and liquidy) sprinkle the remaining cheese on top and put the whole thing into the broiler. Leave it in there until the top is golden brown and it is totally cooked. My sister's stayed in there for about five minutes. After its all broiled up, take it out, cut it right in the skillet and serve up!

food coma breakfast

It was delicious and kept us all full until dinner! I hope you feel inspired to try this recipe (it was reeeaaaalllllyyy good!) For those of you I won't see (or haven't had the pleasure to meet) I hope you have a wonderful new year!


Foodie foodie!


















Feel free to leave any questions or comments! I love hearing from you!

Christmas Baked Beans

Well hello there my foodie minions! I hope you've been enjoying the holiday numnums like I have! The holidays are a time for family, fun, and of course, food. As I pledged before, I have been diligently trying my best to keep a balanced diet through these times of gingerbread men and eggnog. I do, however, strongly believe in celebration, and Christmas is it my friends! Eating healthily through the holidays is quite a challenge, as I'm sure you know. The key, I think, is to reserve your most gluttonous eating tendencies for the actual holiday itself.  Eating your body weight in chocolate truffles on the days between just won't do!

Anyways, for the holidays, my family normally does the potluck thing- everyone contributes something yummy and we all gather together to enjoy. My sister had previously made these baked beans for another occasion, and I liked them so much that I had to try it for myself! I healthy-fied the recipe just a little bit but substituting some fatty ingredients for more healthy ones and tweaking little things here and there, but all in all my batch of baked beans turned out wonderfully (if I do say so myself)

Christmas (or whenever else) Baked Beans

You'll need:
6-8 slices turkey bacon
1 tbs olive oil 
1 large red onion
1 clove garlic
1/4 c red wine
1 can white kidney beans
1 can pinto beans
1 can red kidney beans
1 can garbanzo beans
2/3 C ketchup
1/3 C molasses
1/4 C light brown sugar
3 tbs Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp dijon mustard
1 1/2 tsp liquid smoke
salt and pepper



First, preheat the oven to 375º. Get a cookie/baking sheet, line it with foil, and place a rack onto the prepared baking sheet. Then, put the bacon slices onto the rack and put them into the oven until they are toasty brown around the edges. I prefer to cook bacon this way for a few reasons. First of all, if any of you have ever been splattered by bacon grease, you simultaneously think HOW DARE YOU, YOU STUPID BACON!? and maybe this bacon is trying to say "don't eat me!!!!" Even if you don't specifically have this thought process, getting splattered by bacon sucks.. and it's just another thing on the stove that crowds up the place. So, moral of the story- roast the bacon! It's easy, normally pretty quick, and painless. When the bacon is done, remove it from the oven (but don't turn the oven off!) and set aside.

Next, chop the red onion into fairly small pieces. Once you've got that done, put a skillet onto the stove over medium heat and drizzle the olive oil into it while it heats up. When it is good and hot, cook the onions until they are soft and a little translucent. Remember to salt and pepper liberally at this point! About halfway through the onion cooking process add the red wine, mince the garlic clove, and add to the pan. You add the garlic halfway because (in my experience) it tends to burn quickly- and the flavor/smell of burnt garlic is not yum foodie foodie...

Once you've got the onion/garlic all done, remove the skillet from the heat and set is aside. Then, drain all the of cans of beans (except the baked beans) and place them into a dutch oven/oven-safe vessel. Then, add the ketchup, molasses, brown sugar, Worcestershire, dijon, and liquid smoke... and mix it all up! Add the onion/garlic and add some pepper. Next, chop/crumble the bacon into small pieces and add it into the mix. Note: normally at this point I would tel you to "salt and pepper liberally" but the bacon that you've just added has a good amount of salt, so be careful not to oversalt! Give it one more good stir, cover, and stick it into the preheated oven.  Let the oven work its magic for at least 50 minutes, but you can leave it in there for as long as an hour and a half. My family and I prefer our baked beans to be a bit softer and "stewey", so we leave it in the oven a bit longer. It is, however, perfectly delicious after 50 minutes. Dish it out and enjoy!

I hope you all had a wonderful winter holiday! More foodie foodie to come.


Foodie foodie!




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Holiday Gingerbread Muffins

Hello lovelies! I was browsing through some of my pictures and realized that I'd totally forgotten to tell you about the gingerbread muffins I made for finals week! So, here we go!

On the Sunday night before finals week, I thought "well... Monday's normally suck pretty badly in the first place... but tomorrow is going to suck even moooooorreee! Finals start!" So, obviously, it would have been criminal to start the week without muffins (ugh! preposterous!) Someone in the studio had requested gingerbread muffins, so it was perfect: our last week before our holiday break and we needed a powerhouse Muffin Monday to get us through the trauma of finals week. Double-whammy.


Orange Gingerbread Muffins

I found this recipe on epicurious.com and made some adjustments and fine tuning. Here we go!


 
You'll need:
2 2/3c flour
1 tbs baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tbs ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick of salted butter (soft–but not melted– or at room temp)
1/2 C sugar
2 eggs
2/3 C dark molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 C water
3 tbs orange juice (fresh squeeze it!)
1 tsp sugar



First, preheat the oven to 350º and put muffin papers into a muffin baking pan. Then, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and salt. Set it aside. 



Now, take out your stand mixer or hand mixer (I used a hand mixer) and cream the butter and sugar together. Just a little reminder about the butter: it's better to leave it out beforehand if you know you're going to be baking... but if you're a bit forgetful like me and forget to leave it out, just pop it in the microwave–but beware! Don't let it get too soft in there and melt, because it could cause the consistency of the batter to turn out all wrong. You should aim for a stick of butter that is very very easy to mush when you touch it, but hasn't begun to melt yet. So, after you've gotten that all mixed in together, add the eggs one at a time. I've been told to try and get the eggs to room temperature too, but like I said, I'm forgetful. Normally I leave the eggs in a little bowl of hot/warm water while I'm mixing up all the dry ingredients and such, just to give them a little nudge toward room temp. After the eggs are all beaten in, then add the molasses and vanilla. (Quick tip: add a teensy but of vegetable oil to the measuring cup and swirl it around before the molasses goes in. It'll make pouring the molasses back out a lot faster and easier) 
Next, you'll add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients in three parts (add a third, mix, add another third, mix... you get the picture...) Then you'll gradually add the water until it goes from looking like:

<--- This
               

                       To this! ------>





Horray! Now, fill your muffin papers 3/4 full and pop those babies into the oven! The original recipe that I read suggested that you bake these muffins for 25 minutes, but like I always say learn your oven! Mine were all good to go in 17 minutes! Big difference, huh?! It's good to keep a watchful eye when you're doing your first round of muffins– just to make sure they aren't getting too terribly toasty...

While those are baking, take the orange juice and stick into the microwave just for about 20 seconds or so. You just want to warm it up just a little. Then, add the sugar into the juice and mix it up until the sugar is dissolved. When the muffins are finished baking, take them out of the pan and place them onto a rack/towel/counter/whatever. While they're still warm, spoon a little bit of the orange juice mixture onto the top of the muffin and let it sink in. Horrah! Now, just let them cool off, stick them in a container, and bring them to your very excited coworkers!

Foodie foodie! 

I hope you all have a wonderful, safe, and yummy holiday! More to come soon :)

My little Thanksgiving

Set the table! It's Thanksgiving!

Well, I'm sure you've all been just dancing in your seats to see what act of foodie foodie genius took place at my house on Thanksgiving. (harhar)
This year Thanksgiving was considerably small compared to past holiday seasons. Normally, members from several generations flock to my parents house dawning things like sushi, fried rice, turkey, stuffing, and other such things. (Sushi? For those of you who don't know me personally, I'm half Japanese. This makes for very interesting and very yummy family dinners.) BUT this year, we had just a little gathering with my parents, my brother, my sister, her boyfriend, my grandmother, and yours truly.
I'm not sure what got into my mother's head, but she decided that we should have about a zillion times as much food as seven people could eat. An AMAZING assortment of cheeses, home-made sausage, and yummy crackers (courtesy of my brother) TWO turkeys, TWO huuuuge things of dressing (stuffing that has never seen the inside of a turkey) about 100000 lbs of mashed potatoes, brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, rolls, two giant pies, and a pound cake with ice cream. Looking back, it doesn't sound like a lot of food for Thanksgiving... but really it was. I swear...
Because my grandmother on my mom's side always brings the turkey every year, and because she and my grandpa were sick with colds this year :( We were in charge of the turkey. In a family full of foodies, you'd think we'd be fighting over who'd do the turkey, but somehow, only my father and I ended up doing them. We of course, were in heaven. He did a pecan smoked 12-pounder and I did a roasted 18-pounder. It was quite intimidating... You mess up something as important as the turkey in my family, you get made fun of until someone else messes up equally as badly! Anyways.. here we go.

My First Turkey
My dear friend, Ashley, has a turkey-goddess mother, Miss Susan (who I now refer to as "Turkey Goddess Miss Susan/Mama Florida.) She lives in Florida and Ashley and I visit her roughly every summer. She, happily, had a wonderfully easy recipe that she gladly shared with me. After a taunting phone call from my sister ("YOU'RE doing the turkey?! oh my God DON'T MESS IT UP!!! hahah") plus a few additions and changes– here is what I ended up doing.

One 18 pound turkey
1 stick of salted butter
1/2 C of salt (kosher or sea salt work best)
a bunch of pepper (adjust to how much you like pepper)
2 tbs poultry seasoning
1 1/2 tbs pickling spices
1 medium yellow onion
1 honey-crisp apple (or any type of very sweet apple)
1 head of garlic
2-3 sprigs of rosemary
1 C chicken broth
1 clove garlic

Dry-rub for the turkey

Make sure to defrost your turkey before-hand. Dawn your handy-dandy latex gloves, (if you're as weirded out at man-handling a whole raw turkey as I am) remove the stuff inside of the turkey, rinse it off, and pat it dry with a paper towel. Make sure you dry the cavity on the inside. Preheat the oven to 350°. Combine the salt, pepper, poultry seasoning, and pickling spices in a little bowl. Set aside and then soften the butter so that it's just warmer than room temperature. Rub the butter all over the turkey with your hands (the latex gloves make this a little less weird..) and sprinkle 1/2–3/4 of the salt/spices mixture on the outside. Then, sprinkle the remaining spices into the cavity. Now, take off your turkey gloves and chop the onion and apple into large chunks. Put them into a microwavable bowl with a splash of water and microwave for one minute.
While that's getting nuked, get your overly enthusiastic father to whack the head of garlic in half so that it looks like this:

photo from "The Saucy Chef Notes"

By this time, the microwave should have called your name so go fetch the onion and apple and shove them inside the turkey cavity along with the garlic and rosemary. Now, get the turkey totally ready for roasting. My dad and I had to wrestle the wings and legs into the right positions so that the stuff inside the cavity didn't fall out. Put the turkey in  the oven. I wasn't so sure about the whole tinfoil thing, Mama Florida had told me to put it on from the very beginning, but I ended up uncovering it for most of the cooking time and re-applying the foil toward the end to avoid skin-burnage.

 

While that's roasting away, warm the chicken broth with the clove of garlic in a little pot on the stove. Roughly every 45 minutes, baste the turkey with the garlicy-broth. Make sure not to baste it to the point that the dry rub runs off. If you run out of broth, simply use the juices that are in the bottom of the roasting pan.

When receiving the glorious recipe from Mama Florida, she told me that turkeys normally need about 15-20 minutes per pound. This worked out to be just about 4.5 hours for this monster turkey. But BEWARE. My parents' oven must be on steroids (and takes advantage of convection technology) so instead of 4.5 hours, the turkey was done in 2.5 hours. Crazy, huh? Moral of the story: learn your oven... and keep a meat thermometer nearby. The turkey is done when the breast is about 160° and the dark meat like the thigh is around 180°. My turkey didn't hit these measurements exactly, but close enough. Take the turkey out and cover it with foil. During the first 15 or so minutes of the oven, the turkey will continue to cook. Actually, it'll probably raise 1 degree per every minute for about 15 minutes. ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN. If you cut into the turkey right away, it'll lose all of the yummy juices. Be patient.. 

Here it is, in its Turkey Glory!

I thought it was quite successful. I was terrified that it'd turn out really dry, but thankfully, it was very good! 

After doing the turkey, I helped out with the rest of the preparations like cranberry sauce and the other turkey (who's recipe I may or may not post... if I feel so inclined haha) and then ate myself into a glorious Thanksgiving food-coma. After we all stuffed ourselves, my mother's not-so-secret-plan of sending us all home with an absurd amount of leftovers panned out, and here I sit with a lovely little Thanksgiving left-over "sangwich":

Oh.. I do love leftovers!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! 

Foodie foodie!