Recipes from blogs

I'm normally a girl who takes recipes from tried and true sources. But then again, I'm also a girl who will search endlessly for a recipe that matches the ingredients available in the house, sooo…

Anyhow.

What I mean to say today is that I have been finding really delicious recipes on blogs, so then I just need to try them because they look amazing, and then they do end up being SO amazing.

On Sunday morning I made a dutch baby for breakfast after reading about it here (although I used this recipe instead because I only had two eggs, plus it actually called for vanilla sugar instead of vanilla extract).

And the same day I made this delicious salad for lunch! I switched it up a little and skipped the strawberries, and used a grapefruit instead of a blood orange. I had never sectioned a citrus before, so that was fun. I collected the juices while I was slicing and made a grapefruit + olive oil dressing.

On using recipes and my invented Spinappom Salad.

I have this idea in my head that baking requires a recipe, but cooking does not. I guess it is easy enough to make passably okay food without using a recipe, but I find that foods I make following a recipe are vastly more delicious. I might not yet have the skill of cooking incredibly delicious foods without a recipe, but I do have a fairly good eye for finding recipes we really enjoy. And that is a good start.

I also sometimes know exactly which food elements I'd like to combine, and then go searching for a recipe. If the internet fails to deliver, then I might do my best to make something up based on a few different recipes I saw. Here is one such example: SpinApPom Salad. I wanted to make a salad with pomegranate, apple, and spinach. A lot of the search results had feta, which normally I really like, but wasn't really wanting that in this salad. I managed to find one recipe that was nearly what I want, but you know what they did? They mixed a third of a cup of sugar into their dressing! Plus honey! Whaaaa? I always thought the idea of an unhealthy salad was laughable, but now I know!

So here is what I did:
pile of spinach
one chopped apple (I used a pink lady, because I like her.)
seeds from about a quarter of a pomegranate

topped with a dressing made from:
2 T balsamic vinegar
2 T olive oil
a bit of honey
a dash of salt

And it was so tasty! This was more than enough dressing for two salads, in case anyone is keeping track.

Scones!

Sometimes I see recipes posted online that are modified versions of another recipe.

Separately (but which will be related in a moment) my favorite sources for recipes come from Smitten Kitchen*, The Moosewood Restaurant cookbooks, and America's Test Kitchen cookbook(s?).

Neglecting the fact that I've been making mac & cheese from a Test Kitchen recipe without actually following the recipe (only due to laziness, not due to any crazy ideas about being able to improve the recipe), I have a really hard time understanding why you would modify a recipe from any of these three sources. I just feel like... I don't think I'd be able to make a recipe that did that.

Except when a Smitten Kitchen recipe is a modified Test Kitchen recipe. Then I get confused and end up with a lot of really delicious scones in my house. Also, the reason I was looking for scone recipes in the first place was because I found lemon curd at the grocery store and needed a reason to buy it. Now if only I could find clotted cream. Then my tea time dreams would be complete.





*I just went to the page to include the link here. Looks like I'll be making Chocolate Sables in the near future.

I'll have the sopitas.

For Christmas Greg gave me the book The Hummingbird's Daughter, which I really enjoyed reading. He got it for me because it was the prequel to the book Queen of America, which he had heard about on NPR and thought I would like. The books were both awesome. I rated them both a 5 on my goodreads, although I'd have to say I liked the first book more.

I think it was the second book that had a very funny anecdote about sopitas, which actually made me laugh out loud. So last night I decided to make sopitas for dinner, roughly following this recipe.  They were pretty delicious, and I thoroughly enjoyed the excuse to constantly proclaim, "I'll have the sopitas."