Author: Tracey

The Year I learn to Bake: Salted Dark Chocolate Chip Cookies

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It’s been nearly a week since moving my blog to WordPress and it has been a learning experience, let me tell you!  I’ve been so busy setting everything up that I haven’t even had time to cook!  I finally just had to tear myself away from the computer for a little while tonight and get in the kitchen!  Now, a couple of weeks ago, I introduced you to my New Friend in the Kitchen, my KitchenAid stand mixer!  Oh my goodness, I cannot believe that I have survived for so long without this machine!  For years, I’ve admired them, but never bought one because, well, I simply didn’t think I did enough baking to justify it. Well, I could not have been more wrong.  So far, I’ve used the mixer to make masa for tamales and several batches of pizza dough (we like pizzas around here) and these amazing salted dark chocolate chip cookies! I am now a true believer in the power of the mixer and I am loving it! Now New Year’s Resolutions are …

Lucky New Year Black Eyed Peas

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In my family, there are only two holiday meals where the menu absolutely, positively can’t be futzed with: Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.  With my mother doing less of the holiday cooking, Christmas has become somewhat free-form. The traditional dinner has evolved into brunch served family-style at my house. This year, the star was a lovely ham accompanied by piles and piles of bacon and served alongside a Tortilla Española.  To tell the truth, I think the star this year may have been the piles and piles of bacon–we went through 3 pounds that day!  This Christmas, I made my life a little easier by purchasing a HoneyBaked ham, and when the last slice of ham was eaten, I wrapped that lovely ham-bone and saved it for The Meal That Must Not Be Changed: New Year’s Day Dinner.  For as long as I remember, our family has eaten black-eyed peas and collard greens on New Year’s Day–those sweet and creamy peas cooked for hours with the Christmas ham-bone until the chunks of ham fall off the …

A Life You Organize: The Disaster Pantry – 2014

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I’m going to air some of my dirty laundry and I hope you won’t judge me!  The photo above was taken yesterday morning in my hot mess of a walk-in pantry!  Believe it or not, I had actually organized this pantry last January on my annual household organizing blitz, but by December, it had de-evolved into madness.  Part of the problem is that I have a Costco membership!  I love to buy in bulk, but the problem with that is I had acquired more stuff than I knew what to do with!  So, yesterday, with an entire day set aside to reorganize this pantry, I was finally able to cut through the mess and set it to rights!  And, this is what it looks like now!  I am so excited that I can finally walk into the pantry without tripping over things! Here are the steps I took in order to get it together! Last year, I invested in some clear containers to hold items like flour, sugar, nuts, snacks.  I ended up using a …

Saying Goodbye to 2013 and Photos from the Holidays

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Well, 2013 has officially come to an end.  Looking back, I think it was a pretty good year, filled with the laughter and company of good friends, eating some great food and enjoying time with our families and loved ones.  Best of all, new memories were made! The good folks at Google+ sent me this awesome look back at the photos I’ve taken and shared over the year!  It was fun to see all the things we planted, made and ate over the year! I wanted to share a few photos from our home.  Here’s a photo of the Christmas tree and that’s my cat Sophie having a snack! Christmas is one of our favorite holidays (somehow, I don’t think we’re alone in this) and I had a lot of fun decorating the kitchen this year.  Since I spend a lot of time in the kitchen anyway, it was nice to see it so festive all month long! The garland above the cabinets is one of my favorite things! I love this little topiary so …

Manchego Cheese and Olive Crackers with Creamy Radicchio Spread

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The second recipe that I tested for the Food52 website this week is this delicious little bite of some unexpected ingredients.  The original recipe is here.  This recipe took a little more effort than the kalamata olive tapenade crostinis, but I was excited to learn something new:  making homemade cheese crackers!  I had no idea that making homemade crackers would be so easy–it’s basically the same process as making a pastry crust–and it can easily be made in a food processor.  The cracker is then topped with a mixture of radicchio and cream cheese. Radicchio is a very assertive (ok, bitter) lettuce, but it becomes wonderfully mellow when mixed with the cream cheese.  What I also loved about this recipe is that it uses castelvetrano olives!  I may have mentioned my love for these olives before–bright green and buttery, they were a perfect compliment both inside the cheese cracker and in the garnish. Do yourself a favor and buy the olives already pitted–it will make the process that much easier.  I found an enormous jar …

Crostinis with Olive Tapenade and Burrata Cheese

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The holidays are upon us already!  Where has this month gone?  Heck, where has this year gone?  Even though I love the holiday season, it is really easy to become overwhelmed with all of the things that need to be done–the decorating, the shopping.  But, what I really love, is the partying!  I feel like I haven’t done much cooking since Thanksgiving, so in order to get myself back into the swing of things, I volunteered to test a couple of recipes for the website Food52.  Both recipes I tested were not only flavorful and inventive, but were very easy to put together and perfect to make or take to a holiday party.  The first one is a crostini topped with creamy burrata cheese and an olive tapenade.  The original recipe is here and since I was testing the recipe I made it exactly as written and didn’t make any changes.  I think it turned out perfectly and I really loved how well the briny tapenade paired with the creaminess of the cheese.  If you’ve never had …

Balsamic Vinegar Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Chorizo and Red Onion

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Brussels sprouts never fail to spark a little conversation.  Seems either folks love them or hate them, but frankly, I think they unfairly get bad press due in part to bad childhood memories.  Oddly, I was never in the camp of Brussels Sprouts Haters–the first time I had them as a child, I didn’t mind them, which is really saying something because back in the 1970s, people did horrible things to Brussels sprouts–namely boiling them to death, which made them very, very bad indeed.  Still, even boiled to death, I could see in my little kid mind that these baby cabbages (as I called them) had promise. I think above anything else, I thought they looked cool and it seemed like a very grown-up thing to eat.  Growing up, they didn’t appear too often on our family’s table–my younger brothers, for one, would never touch them, but over the past few years, I’ve rediscovered them–each fall, tweaking the recipe a bit and coming up with different ways to make them.  Previous Thanksgivings, I have separated …