Barefoot Bloggers – Birthday Sheet Cake & Beatty’s Chocolate Cake

Welcome to chocolate overload zone!

I made these cakes on the same day during my Ramadan blogging hiatus. The making of both is somewhat of a blur (which you are no doubt thankful for). I was so geared up to make these, especially the sheet cake because who wouldn’t want a humongous chocolate cake with fudgy icing (well, except Kayte). See, in my mind, I had turned this into a chocolate sheet cake and was euphoric about the Barefoot Bloggers selections for September. Two cakes! Both chocolate! That is, until I realized this wasn’t a chocolate cake at all. Ultimate bummer.

We aren’t huge fans of white or yellow cake, so I doctored the cake batter with a healthy dose of Vietnamese cinnamon. The end result was a subtly cinnamon cake with chocolate icing that was delicious. It’s a very sturdy cake, not a tender crumb but perfect for a child’s birthday party. Since there were no available children having birthdays, I took this to the mosque to serve after iftar (the meal we have after breaking our fast in the evening) and it was very popular.

But Beatty’s chocolate cake was a transcendent chocolate experience. I pulled out all the stops and used the “good” chocolate as Ina always suggests. It was moist, and oh the frosting, the frosting, the frosting. I iced the cake in record time (hence the awful appearance and specks of butter, which melted right in and didn’t affect the texture or flavor) before I had to leave for the evening, and left the kitchen looking like it had been used for a kindergarten cooking class. Since I was fasting when I made and iced the cake, I didn’t taste any of it until I got home around midnight. Oh my. I licked the offset spatula, mixing bowl, paddle from the mixer and the plate on which I set the paddle. Too much information? Sorry. So much for losing weight during Ramadan.

This cake is The One. My new go-to chocolate cake recipe. As in go to this website and get the recipe. Make it tonight or this weekend. Just don’t deprive yourself (or the chocolate lover in your life) of it any longer than the weekend. I told M. I was making it for his birthday (which was last month, but he was on a business trip), and then I ate more of it than he did.

If you’d like to check out what the other Barefoot Bloggers did, you can find them all here.

Dorie’s Chocolate Ganache Ice Cream

This week, my fellow Tuesdays with Dorie bakers are making the Espresso Cheesecake Brownies, selected by Melissa at Life in a Peanut Shell. She makes the most amazing creations! I tried to get these done before taking a blogging break for Ramadan, but the days and hours evaporated. I do plan to make these and will post about them after Ramadan is over.

All is not lost because one thing I did fit is was Dorie Greenspan’s Chocolate Ganache Ice Cream. I can truly say (and report from others) that this was the most chocolaty ice cream I have ever had. It starts out with making the eponymous ganache, a mixture of cream and chocolate (I used Valrhona Guanaja 70%). Then you make the custard, fold it all together, and chill it in the refrigerator until it’s cool enough to churn in your ice cream maker. Since it’s practically solid after chilling in the fridge, it doesn’t take a long time to turn it into ice cream.

Make sure you leave a little in the bowl for sampling!

If you love chocolate, you need to make this. It’s easy, incredibly delicious, and since it’s so rich, a little goes a long way. Because of its high chocolate content, it needs to sit out on the counter to soften up before serving. Although it’s tempting to sneak a taste, the flavor will be better if it isn’t frozen solid. I mostly served mine unadorned, because topping it with hot fudge was, yes, way over the top.

*******PLEASE NOTE: Lethally Delicious is on hiatus for the month of Ramadan. I won’t be actively blogging, but if you leave a comment, I will visit you. I’ll return around Sept. 22nd, refreshed after the blessed month of fasting and prayer. Peace.

Barefoot Bloggers – White Pizza with Arugula

I heart pizza. A lot. I could eat it every day, twice a day, and never get tired of it. But I have never made it at home. Until now. It took Andrea of Nummy Kitchen to pick Ina Garten’s White Pizza with Arugula for this week’s Barefoot Bloggers recipe for me to realize that pizza, like most everything, is better when you make it yourself. I bought a pizza stone for my Bread Baker’s Apprentice baking, so I baked our pizzas directly on the stone. It made the crust nice and crisp.

Ina’s crust is super easy. I substituted about 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour for some of the all-purpose flour, and it gave the dough a wonderful flavor and texture. Ina calls for fontina, fresh mozzarella and goat cheese, but I skipped the fontina. Even though we love garlic, I left it out of the oil this time as we were going out for the evening.

This pizza was incredible. It was good with the arugula salad, but I could be just as happy leaving it off.

Give this one a try, you won’t be disappointed! You’ll find the recipe here.

******PLEASE NOTE: Lethally Delicious is on hiatus for the month of Ramadan. While I have a couple of posts that I completed in advance (like this one), I will be staying away from active blogging. If you leave me a comment, I will try to stop by and visit you. I’ll be back around Sept. 20th, reenergized and ready to make bigger and better messes in the kitchen. Peace.

CEiMB – Ellie Krieger’s Thai Mushroom Salad

Our Craving Ellie in My Belly selection for the week was Grilled Thai Beef Salad. I’m not a huge fan of beef, and I’m chickened out, so I decided to take this one vegetarian and make it with portobello mushrooms. I also had some corn on the cob in the fridge so I grilled that up with the mushrooms.

The marinade/dressing was incredibly flavorful, combining lime juice, soy sauce, red chili paste, garlic and ginger. This is the second Ellie dressing in the last few weeks that I have completely flipped over (the other one was the dressing for the cobb salad, and I mixed up another batch of that one just the other night). I had a huge bunch of Thai basil from my CSA box, and it added an incredibly fragrant hit of flavor to this salad.

This salad was yet another Ellie recipe that I looked at and thought it sounded rather pedestrian, but oh my, the flavor combination was amazing! This one is going into the rotation. I encourage you to try it with the mushrooms or different grilled veggies in addition to or instead of meat (or even a nice piece of swordfish). But if you like steak, try that as it sounds like it would be great.

If you’d like the recipe, check out Jen B’s Cooking Carveout as Jen will have it, or you can find it on the Food Network site here.

This will likely be my last CEiMB post as I will be taking a break from active blogging for the month of Ramadan. I’m trying to get a few posts up before Saturday but arrrggghhhh I’m so behind! If you leave a comment here I’ll stop by and visit, but this is a good opportunity to get my rampant blog addiction under control! I’ll be back after Sept. 20th.

Peace.

Barefoot Bloggers – Peach Berry Crumble

This recipe is the best part of a food fantasy. It seems healthy, but it’s not.

It starts with a goodly volume of fruit, kissed with sugar, lemon zest and lemon juice. It’s topped with the simplest crumb mixture scented with cinnamon. I doubled the crumb topping, and increased the fruit (I used peaches, cherries, blueberries and blackberries) by about half. The crumb topping melts into the fruit somewhat, so your crumb topping ends up being thinner than you thought it would be. Don’t let this worry you at all. The merging of the fruit with the topping, particularly around the edges, creates an unctuous buttery fruit experience… Excuse me. I need a moment to collect myself.

Where was I? Oh yes. I served this crumble as a breakfast treat, and it was a hit. It would have been far better served warm with vanilla ice cream, but ice cream for breakfast seemed a little over the top, especially when you’re already eating buttery fruit.

I love Barefoot Bloggers. We make recipes from Ina Garten, and they are consistently some of the best things I cook and bake. They’re almost always calorie laden, which is why I resisted her recipes for so long. But they’re always good great. This week’s recipe was selected by Aggie of Aggie’s Kitchen. I love her blog and I encourage you to spend some time there. You can find the recipe here or here. And if you’d like to join us as we cook through Ina’s truly delicious recipes, we’d love to have you! You can find out how to join us here.

Barefoot Bloggers – Pasta with Sun Dried Tomatoes

Brace yourselves, taste buds. We have liftoff.

This is one of the best Ina Garten recipes that I’ve tried. I know I’ve said that before, but they’re all so good. Not this one.

It’s great. Absolutely delicious, fresh and bursting with flavor. Laziness made me serve it as a hot pasta dish. I cut out the salt, used less olive oil, and added the basil, garlic and parmesan cheese to the food processor to become part of the sauce. Adding the basil to the sauce made the sauce a funny color, but it was easy and the flavor was fabulous. I put the chopped olives, tomatoes and mozzarella in the bottom of a medium bowl and put the hot pasta and sauce on top, mixing the ingredients together. The pasta melted the fresh mozzarella slightly. Oh baby, was it good. It’s in the rotation, perfect for quick summer meals.

I have Cat at Delta Whiskey to thank for this amazing pick. If you’d like the recipe, be sure to check out Cat’s blog. Or you can get it on the Food Network site here.

CEiMB – Vegetable Cheese Stratta and Barefoot Bloggers make Ina Garten’s Gazpacho

This week’s Craving Ellie in My Belly selection is Vegetable Cheese Stratta, selected by Jenn of A Mid-Life Culinary Adventure (gee, that’s what I feel like I’m having!)

This one was such a pleasure to make and eat. It had loads of veggies (a great use of my CSA goodies) and was very flexible (I didn’t have an onion, so I substituted scallions; I felt like adding spinach, so I did). It was a great make-ahead, and I ate it for lunch rather than for breakfast. It would even be great for dinner. Since I’m still on my own this week, I made 1/8th of the recipe so I wouldn’t have to eat it for 8 meals.

I added some crushed red pepper flakes for a little kick and I used the last of an olive oil rosemary bread. It wasn’t whole grain, but it worked well with the flavors, and it was what I had on hand.

After having this for lunch the next day, I regretted making 1/8th of the recipe. It was fantastic! So cheesy and flavorful from the garlic and nutmeg. This one is going into the rotation.

*******

Meryl of My Bit of Earth chose this week’s Barefoot Bloggers recipe and it was perfect timing, as summer officially began in the northern hemisphere and many Barefoot Bloggers live in parts of the US and Canada that are already sweltering. We’re finally heating up in northern California, so this was still a great option to use summer’s bounty.

Thankfully, this one didn’t dirty a kitchen full of dishes, just the food processor, a measuring cup and a large bowl. I used some of my Nudo olive oil (which I learned about thanks to Nancy), but I reduced the vinegar and olive oil by half. The only ingredient that came from my CSA was the red onion, although later I realized I could have added diced yellow squash and it would have been perfect. I used orange peppers because that was what I had, and I added a diced small avocado. I ate the first bowl after I made it, and it was good and fresh, but needed more salt (I used low sodium vegetable juice, so I wasn’t surprised). I’m thinking about adding hot sauce or cilantro, or maybe both. Ina says this is better after it sits for a few hours, so I’m really looking forward to enjoying it after it cures.

Many thanks to Meryl for a great pick! If you’d like to join us as we cook and blog our way through Ina’s cookbooks (and why wouldn’t you, her recipes are easy and great!), check out how to join here.

CSA – One week, one box, many opportunities

I have been getting a box from J&P Organics, a local CSA, for a couple of months now. For those of you who haven’t heard of CSA, it stands for community supported agriculture. Farmers grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables and sell them directly to consumers in what is basically a variety pack each week. For those of us who are idealistic, it’s a way of helping family farmers survive in a nation of mega factory farms.

I like belonging to a CSA not just because we’re helping to preserve family farms, but because you get to have a personal relationship with the farmer, in addition to having organic fruits and vegetables picked at their peak.

I’m not always good about finishing all of the bounty that comes to me in my box each week (and I don’t always order weekly, I usually order every other week–because the produce was picked that day, it generally lasts two weeks). In order to spur myself to finish all of the box this week, I’m going to post the contents of this week’s box, and post updates daily on how I’m using my veggies (we get less fruit, so I generally don’t have a problem finishing that!)

Here’s what we got this week:

eggs (available if we want to order them with our box)

golden raspberries

strawberries

yellow globe squash

green squash (maybe tatuma?)

sweet potatoes

new potatoes

red spring onion

Swiss chard

oranges

broccoli

carrots

green leaf lettuce

spinach

M. is gone for a couple of weeks, so it’s up to me to finish off this week’s box! I’d love to hear your suggestions especially for the swiss chard as I’ve not cooked with it much before.

For my A.M. pick-me-up, I’m having a Green Monster with about a cup each of chard and spinach, a banana, unsweetened Almond Breeze and a T of flax seeds. Since I’m not yet sure how I’ll cook the chard, I decided to add it to a Green Monster to take advantage of its nutritional benefits (it’s high in folate, thiamin and zinc, plus lots of vitamins). I first learned about Green Monsters on Caitlin’s blog Healthy Tipping Point, and although I thought anything with pureed greens would be revolting, the banana and Almond Breeze add great flavor so you don’t even taste the greens. I loved GMs from the very first one I made. It feels virtuous to get in 2 cups of leafy greens without even tasting them!

My usual summer breakfast is muesli:

1/2 cup oatmeal (NOT steel cut)

1/2 cup 1% milk

1/2 cup fat free yogurt (I’m using plain, but I usually use vanilla)

1 T maple syrup

Combine ingredients in a bowl, refrigerate for at least two hours or overnight.

Today, I’m topping my muesli with strawberries and golden raspberries from my CSA and a couple of toasted pecans.

I usually get up around 5:00 AM and have a small snack then eat breakfast at my desk around 8-ish, so this will be all ready for me when I get hungry. With a breakfast this yummy, I’ll be ready to face whatever problems crop up (the last couple of days have been insane at work!)

Curried cauliflower and chickpea stew

I had some cauliflower, spring onion and sugar snap peas in my CSA box, and some leftover coconut milk in the freezer from our Tuesdays with Dorie Mango Bread. I had torn this recipe out of Bon Appetit after seeing Teanna at Spork or Foon? post on it. I boosted the curry powder and added garlic and sugar snap peas, though this recipe is basically a blank canvas, so you can add whatever vegetables you have available. It’s also versatile, since I used significantly less coconut milk than the recipe called for since that was what I had on hand. I served it over brown rice, and it was fantastic. We had huge servings, and didn’t even put a dent in it. I don’t know how Bon Appetit calculates how many servings are in their recipes. I can see where this might serve 4 linebackers but not 4 normal sized people with office jobs. I mean, if I just add up the solid ingredients, it checks in at almost 30 ounces per person…that’s practically 4 cups, before serving it over rice! I can’t even eat 4 cups of watermelon.

This was so good, it’s going into the rotation. When I was thinking about that earlier today, I realized there is no such thing. I say it all the time here on my blog, but truly, I don’t have a list of go-to recipes that are versatile, tasty and don’t fail me. So I’m making one! Stay tuned for that. I think it will be an eye opener for me (how does one justify the frequent use of popcorn as a “go-to” dinner??)

Curried Cauliflower and Chickpea Stew (adapted from Bon Appetit via Spork or Foon?)

Serves 4 linebackers, 6-8 normal people

2 tablespoons vegetable oil (I used olive oil)

2 /1/2 cups chopped red onions

6 cloves garlic, minced

2 tablespoons hot curry powder

6 cups cauliflower florets (from 1 medium head)

2 cups sugar snap peas

2 15 1/2 ounce cans garbanzo beans (drained and rinsed)

2 10 ounce cans diced tomatoes with green chiles (I used Ro-Tel)

10 ounces lite coconut milk (the recipe called for 14 ounces, but I only had 10; it worked out fine)

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Lime wedges

Heat oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onions and saute until golden, about 6 minutes. Add the garlic and saute for 2 minutes. Add the curry powder and stir for 1 minute. Add the cauliflower, garbanzo beans, sugar snap peas, tomatoes, and coconut milk. Stir to combine. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to medium-low. Cover (I didn’t, but you may have a cover that fits your large saute pan) and simmer until the cauliflower is tender, about 10-15 minutes (depends on how al dente you like your cauliflower). Taste and add salt and pepper as needed. Serve over hot rice and garnish with cilantro and lime wedges.

Have you entered my first-ever giveaway? I brought back a box of chocolates from Paris for my first give away. Check it out here and leave a comment on the original post to be entered.

CEiMB – Thai Style Halibut with Coconut Curry Broth

This week’s Craving Ellie in My Belly selection was chosen by Liz of The Not So Skinny Kitchen. We love Thai food, and I had a jar of red curry paste in the pantry that’s been calling to me. I picked up a pound of halibut at Trader Joe’s, and modified the vegetable selection to utilize the sugar snap peas and zucchini that came in this week’s CSA box. I also used some homemade chicken stock from the freezer. I nestled the veggies in with the halibut so they could cook in the wonderfully spicy broth. It almost took longer to chop the shallots than it did to put together this dish. Served with brown rice, it was a delicious and satisfying weeknight dinner. I wasn’t together enough to get a photo of this one when it was fully cooked or plated, but hopefully you get the idea. It was a huge hit! Even though I used less fish, I made the same amount of broth so I could stretch out the sauce and serve it with other proteins.

Be sure you check out Liz’s blog for the recipe, or better yet, bring home the book we’re cooking from, The Food You Crave by Ellie Krieger. It’s jam packed with great, healthier recipes like this one.