Whole Wheat Pita Chips

This is a great recipe!  It is so versatile and easy to make.  You can get as creative or keep it simple, it doesn’t matter they come out tasting great every time.  These chips were gone in minutes!  They are healthy and give you the satisfying crunch you crave when reach for a chip.  They are great paired with hummus or veggie dip or even have as a side with your soup and sandwich.  I love making my own pita chips because you can control the salt and its fun to choose your own seasonings.  The possibilities are really endless.  Plus when you make them yourself they are WAY cheaper than buying them packaged and they the fresh out of the oven taste is hard to beat.  Below is the basic recipe I use, remember you can change the toppings however you like. 

Whole Wheat Pita Chips

12 Bread pita pockets

1/2 C olive oil

1/2 t black pepper

1 t garlic salt

1/2 t dried basil

 

Preheat oven 400*. 

Cut pita’s into 8 triangles.  Line on a cookie sheet

Combing Olive oil, pepper, salt and basil.

Brush on to the triangles.  Flip and brush the other side.

Bake for about 7 min.  Keep a watchful eye on them, they burn easy.

Bar Review: Coconut Cream Pie Larabar

I’m most definitely not a ‘bar person’.  It was not until I started reading food blogs that I started buying a few bars here and there.  Overall, even after trying quite a few bars, I’m still not a person that loves bars.  I think most of them have way too many ingredients (some of which I have not clue what they are), have way too many calories, never satisfy my hunger, taste like cardboard. 

One brand that I have found that I absolutely love is Larabars.  For the most part I like most of the flavors I’ve tried, they taste good, the calories are reasonable, they have very few ingredients! But honestly they don’t hold me over very long thats for sure.

Living in a small town, finding a variety of flavors is hard to come by.  But I finally made it to Whole Foods and found the Coconut Cream Pie flavor I’ve been dying to try!  I was not disappointed!! This by far is my absolute favorite bar I have ever had! 

Only downside: these bars are pretty expensive($1.50 per bar) and a bit high in calories(200 per bar), not much protien (3g per bar).

The Ingredients are outstanding:

Dates, cashews, almonds, unsweetened coconut, extra virgin coconut oil.

Coconut Cream Pie

This weekend my mom and younger brother came down to visit us for the weekend.  I decided to make them a special dessert.  Every since I was little I always remembered how much my mom loved Coconut Cream Pie.  For her birthday every year we would get her one from Cracker Barrel.  I had never made pastry cream before so this was a little intimidating to me.  I also had to search for a different topping other than the usually meringue most people use on this pie.  The thought of using raw egg white…??.. I’m sorry I just can’t eat that stuff! I felt weird enough putting the eggs in the pastry cream…I was very skeptical especially after the eggs had simmered and it smelled very egg-y!  But after refrigerating the pastry cream over night the egg aroma dissipated and a sweet creamy custard was the result.  The crust recipe is one that I have used for a couple of years now.  It was given to me by my sister and I absolutely love it; it never fails…..until this time and it didn’t really fail it just didn’t come out as perfect as usual…ha- I didn’t have any butter so I used all butter flavored crisco….barf!! I hate using crisco!!  The recipe below is the original recipe I usually use.  When I used all crisco the crust slid down the side of the pie dish when baking and I had to perform major crust surgery during the baking process.  My biggest tip for working with pie crust….make sure it is always COLD when you roll it out and never use butter flavored crisco

Coconut Cream pie

 

Pie Crust

1 ½ C AP Flour

¾ t Salt

2/3 C Butter (or ½ crisco ½ butter) chilled, cut into small pieces

5 T Ice Water

 

Sift dry ingredients together.

Add Butter, cut into flour mixture.

Add water 1 T at a time.  Tossing until small pea sized balls form.

Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 400*

On a well floured surface roll out to desired size. 

Place in a prepared pie dish.

Bake for about 15-20 min until golden brown.

 

Filling

½ C Sugar

2 large eggs

1 egg yolk

3 T AP flour

1 ½ C 2% milk (or whole milk)

3/4C sweetened flaked coconut

¾ C unsweetened flaked coconut

1 t vanilla

1/8 t coconut extract

 

Whisk ½ C sugar, eggs, yolk, and flour in a medium bowl.  Brink milk and coconut to a simmer in a medium sauce pan over medium heat.  Gradually add hot milk to egg mixture.  Return to same sauce pan; cook until pastry cream thickens and boils a bit; stirring constantly (4 minutes).  Remove from heat.  Mix in vanilla and coconut extract.  Transfer to a medium bowl and press plastic wrap down on top of the cream, to prevent formation of skin on the surface.  Chill until cold at least 2 hours or up to 1 day.  Transfer to pie crust and chill for 2 hours or overnight.

 

Topping

2/3 C sweetened flaked coconut

1 ¼ C chilled whipping cream

2 T sugar

1/8 t coconut or vanilla extract

 

Toast coconut in a skillet over medium heat until lightly brown; stirring occasionally (3 min).  Using an electric mixer beat cream, sugar, and extract until peaks from.  Spread whipped cream over the top of the pie filling.  Sprinkle with toasted coconut.  Can be prepared 4 hours ahead of time.  Cover and chill.  Serve cold.

This was a great end to a lovely weekend.

Oatmeal Blueberry muffins

I had a plethora of blueberries in my freezer that I desperately needed to use up.  So I did some searching for a healthy blueberry muffin.  I love blueberry muffins so much but considering bakery style muffins are usually loaded with butter and sugar I decided there has to be a better option. 

Much to my delight I found this recipe on allrecipes.com and with a few mondfications to make them a bit healthier these turned out to be just what I was looking for. 

These by no means are the enormous sugar/butter laden bakery style muffins I so dearly love, but they are a sweet healthy change to my usual oats for breakfast.  When paired with a warm cup of tea these lovely muffins make a great afternoon snack as well. 

INGREDIENTS

             1 1/4 cups quick cooking oats

• 1 cup all-purpose flour (reserve 2 T)
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup apple sauce
• 1 cup blueberries, rinsed and drained

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine oats, flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Mix in milk, egg, and apple sauce; mix just until dry ingredients are moistened. Toss blueberries with 2 T flour, to ensure that they do not fall to the bottom of the muffins.  Fold in blueberries. Fill greased muffin cups 2/3 full with batter.
2. Bake at 425 degrees F (220 degrees C) for 20 to 25 minutes.

These muffins were gone in a matter of days…..Jonathan and little Ava loved them.  I love how these muffins are just the right amount of sweet.  If you are looking for a super sweet muffin this is recipe is NOT for you.  They are lightly sweetened. 

My poor computer is still broken.  Posts maybe sporadic. 

My computer has crashed!! x 1000000000000000!! I’m so upset about it! I’m not sure when I’ll be back.  Soon, I hope!

Contest Winners

Goodness…With all those comments coming in this was a hard one…A quick shuffle in the hat and two lovely winners were

choosen!! 

And the Winners are…

Kelly and Emily

Please be sure to e-mail me your address information!! . 

Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce

I recently had the opportunity to try Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce.  When it arrived on my door step I’m not sure who was more excited Jonathan or me!! I’m not much of a condiment person to be quite honest.   You will rarely see me browsing this aisle of the grocery store.  Most steak/BBQ sauces are loaded with sugar and are rather high in calories.  But Country Bob’s claims this is the best.  So we gave it a try……

 

This was the BEST piece of chicken we have made in years…quite literally!!  We slow cooked it Country Bob’s all purpose sauce with some salt and pepper and a bit of mesquite seasoning (which you can also order various BBQ seasonings on their website).  This sauce was seriously so different than any other sauce we had used in the past.  Previously when we would cook the chicken in regular BBQ sauce it would be so thick and gooey like when the chicken was finally cooked through.  This sauce had the most perfect consistency-lightly glazing the chicken.  The aroma that filled the house was so sweet and rustic. 

 

As I said before most store bought condiment sauces are overpoweringly sweet and tangy (YUCK!).  This sauce has a very neutral taste with hints of tomato, garlic and molasses.  To top it all off its ALL NATURAL!! And not too bad in calories. Can’t beat that.

After last nights chicken we decided this would the perfect sauce for Jonathans Hamburgers….AHHHhhhhh finally…….I don’t have to wait hours for him to ‘create’ his own sauce!!

 

Grilled to perfection.

CONTEST: COUNTRY BOB’S

The generous people over at Country Bob’s would like to offer two lucky readers two bottles of Country Bob’s All Purpose Sauce!! How Cool!!!  Just leave one comment under this post by 2/7/09 10pm Eastern time. 

If you are looking for great grilling recipes you should check out their website.  They do have some really great looking recipes.

Broiled Grapefruit

When I found this recipe in Oxygen magazine I was super curious about it.  I had never in my life heard of or even fathomed putting a fresh grapefruit in the oven to be broiled!  But I was so excited to test this out! 

After cutting this huge beastly grapefruit in half I was astonished to find the radiant pink color!! Usually, our grapefruits are very light pink.  Ava was dying to get a bite, but I insisted that we  were going to try this broiling thing out.

 

After a long 3-4 minutes under the broiler we had the most fantastic treat imaginable!! The fruit was sooo warm and sweet with lovely vanilla soft notes and just a pinch of tartness.  As we cut into the meaty sections they fell apart so delicately, much like fresh crab meat would. 

We savored every bite of this beauty!!! I love it when Ava chooses Grapefruit over candy!  Its the one fruit she will always choose over candy!!

Broiled Grapefruit:

*Oxygen Magazine

1 grapefruit

1 teaspoon brown sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat Broiler.  Cut Grapefruit in half.  Add 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar and vanilla to one half of the grapefruit and repeat with other half if you choose to or save it for another use.  Place grapefruit in oven for 3-5 minutes until slightly brown on top and warm all the way through. Enjoy! 

Food Photography

I absolutely love food photography!! Would I buy a cookbook with out it?  Probably not, unless it came  high HIGHLY recommended.  Photos of Food just add so much charisma and substance to cook books and Magazines.  They provide such an emotion that comes with eating food.  A good photograph of food should provoke all of the senory senses.  You should beable to taste, hear, smell, see, feel the food.

  I wish so badly I was better at  food photography and styling.  But I have found these links helpful Food Photography. 

*Picture from myrecipes.com

I also found this interview with Susie Theodorou to be useful and very interesting. 

*Picture from mymamastable.blogspot.com

Buttermilk Pancakes

On Saturday morning Ava woke up and insisted that we have pancakes for breakfast!!?! Where that came from I have no idea!  We don’t have pancakes at our house very often.  So I decided to make some and I found the perfect recipe at Smitten Kitchen.  We really did not need as many pancakes as this recipe calls for so I halved the recipe.  The batter turned out sooooo soupy!!  So I just started adding a handful of flour at a time, my hand being pretty small was about 1/4 cup.  After 3 handfuls of extra flour the batter had the most perfect consistency!  These pancakes turned out so fluffy and beautiful!! To top it off they were out of this world good!! They would have been even more blissful if we had some homemade blackberry jam to top them off with!! MMMMM…..

Buttermilk Pancakes

Adapted from Martha Stewart’s Original Classics Cookbook

Yield: Martha says this makes 9 6-inch pancakes; I got about 16 4-inch ones, which are more the size I like

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, or slightly less table salt
3 tablespoons sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
3 cups buttermilk
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus 1 tablespoon extra for brushing griddle (I’ve made these pancakes with and without the butter mixed in, and can say with confidence they work either way. They’re just richer with it, of course.)

1. Preheat an electric griddle to 375°F, or place a griddle pan or cast-iron skillet over medium-high heat. Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar in a medium bowl. Add the eggs, buttermilk, and 4 tablespoons melted butter, and whisk to combine. The batter should have small to medium lumps.

2. Test the griddle by sprinkling a few drops of water on it. If the water bounces and spatters, the griddle is hot enough. Using a pastry brush, brush the remaining 1/2 teaspoon butter onto the griddle. Wipe off the excess with a folded paper towel.

3. Using a 4-oz. ladle, about 1/2 cup (for a 6-inch pancake), pour the batter in pools 2 inches apart. If you wish to make blueberry pancakes, arrange a handful over the cooking pancake, pressing them in slightly. When the pancakes have bubbles on top and are slightly dry around the edges, about 2 1/2 minutes, flip over. If any batter oozes or blueberries roll out, push them back under with your spatula. Cook until golden on bottom, about 1 minute.

4. Repeat with the remaining batter. You can keep the finished pancakes on a heat-proof plate in the oven at 175°F. Serve warm.

*Note: I omitted Blueberries, Halved this recipe and added an extra 3/4 Cup of flour.