Pear and Blue Cheese Triangles

Sometimes people can react oddly after I tell them I’m combining certain foods, usually a combination of surprise and mild apprehension. When I mentioned that I was combining pears and cheese I received more than one of these questionable looks. Then I see them preparing a cheese plate with fruit and nuts on it, or [...]

Chocolate Chip Cookie Recap

I’ve covered several chocolate chip cookie types so far and thought that now would be a good time to review how to tweak the ingredients of cookies to make different styles. The first cookie recipe we tried, the Nestle Tollhouse cookie, was a good start, and it got even better with a bit of tweaking. [...]

Hot Cocoa

I’ve long been a fan of hot cocoa. A hot bowl of this was my morning ritual for many, many years. My technique for drinking it may have been a bit odd but it was not without reason. I would use the same specific bowl each morning–never a mug. Never.
Unfortunately, this bowl is no longer [...]

Scone

Pronounced like ‘gone’, not like ‘bone’. (Though I promise note to scoff if you pronounce it like the latter.) Either way, I don’t really take issue with the way people choose to call it. Instead, I rally against what most people think of as scones.
Scones, in the US at least, tend to fall into one [...]

Toasted Ravioli

Last week I fried some left over mac and cheese, this week, I give ravioli the same treatment. Toasted (or fried) cheese ravioli actually ends up being more of a fried cheese delivery mechanism than anything else. Similar to mozzarella sticks, but with a bit more breading. The pasta exterior only serves to contain the [...]

Puffy Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies are the third and final chocolate chip cookie by Alton Brown. The first two were the chewy and the thin.
Asking me to rank these cookies is like asking a parent to pick a favorite child. Like the parent, I can’t say which cookie I love the most (but if I was the parent, [...]

Thin Chocolate Chip Cookies

I’m going to talk cookies again. No complaints? Good. Let’s forge onward.
Thin cookies are not normally a favorite. Most are dry and crumbly and lack consistency. It’s not surprising that most people gloss over thin cookies and move on to the chewy or cakey ones. Overlooking this recipe would be wrong, wrong, wrong. These are [...]

Food Obsession: Smarties

These are the British M&M style candies, not those silly candy disks that go by the same name in the US. Why am I obsessed about these? Only because they are so much better than M&M’s.
It’s the subtle differences that make these the best candy coated chocolate candy out there.
Right out of the box, [...]

Doughnuts

I love foods that fit into the Breakfast, Snack, AND Dessert categories. The way I ate these, I might as well have considered them a Main Dish.
Despite putting away over a dozen on my own, I’m not the biggest fan of doughnuts. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing bad about them, but I’m sorta [...]

Baked Jalapeno Poppers

I recently traveled to Saluda, NC for a largely non-food related vacation. A group of us went for a festival and stayed with a friend’s parents. Behind the house is a lovely garden with a variety of well tended fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Blueberries and currants can be eaten off the bushes. Even the apples [...]