Soup to Dutts

Today is the first day of fall! I think this is my favorite season, especially since we moved to Louisville. Tom and I have come up with a list of things to do this fall, so that we can make the most of it. The list includes things like going to a high school football game, apple picking, and going for a drive in the country to look at leaves. One of the things that really excites me about this time of year (in addition to the things on our list) is thinking about all the yummy foods that are typically only enjoyed during the colder months. It inspired me to make another to-do list, specifically for fall/winter recipes. And here it is! Old favorites: chili biscotti sweet potato casserole Classics to try for the first time: roasted pumpkin seeds beef stew chicken and dumplings white chicken chili butternut squash soup baked apples pumpkin roll pumpkin ice cream apple butter Did you notice that one item was already crossed off the list? I made what will probably be th

Every time I think about poaching an egg, this scene is what goes through my mind. Well, the first 20 seconds or so, anyway. So you can imagine my terror at the thought of making eggs benedict. But I was up for a challenge! So I split and toasted the English muffins. I cooked the ham. I made the sauce. OK, yeah, I used ham instead of the traditional Canadian bacon...I couldn't find any when we went grocery shopping. And as much as I would've loved to attempt making Hollandaise sauce, I honestly just wasn't in the mood to pull out both the blender and the strainer on a Thursday night...plus we didn't have enough eggs. We did, however, have a random packet of powdered Bearnaise sauce mix. I looked it up; it's almost exactly the same. Anyway, the only things left to prepare were the eggs. No disrespect or anything, but I don't know what Julia Child was talking about when she said to turn the egg over. The key to getting a poached egg right is to leave it alo

I...love...quiche. I love it. I don't care what's in it. I don't care whether it's served in the form of a wedge or a mini-tart. If it's within my reach, I will eat it. But apparently I've been making it the wrong way my entire life, until now. Tom's brother Patrick gave us Alton Brown's Good Eats cookbook a few Christmases ago, and it had a basic quiche recipe: two eggs, a cup of half-and-half, a pinch of nutmeg, and a 9-inch pie crust. Half-and-half...? Nutmeg...?! *head asplode* I've always made quiche with just a lot of eggs for the base. I can't believe it never even occurred to me to use milk, much less half-and-half. (And we happened to have some half-and-half because we used our ice cream maker for the first time the other day!) And the nutmeg makes so much sense to me; a little bit adds a lot of warmth, very different from the results you get with salt and pepper. Anyway, Alton also provided a chart with suggestions for what t

One of my co-workers gave me an ice cream maker! I was talking about how I wanted one but kept putting it off, and she said she had one in her car, and she'd been trying to get rid of it for months! Mmm...good things to come.

Until a few weeks ago, I had made lasagna maybe three times, and each time it had come out a runny mess. But no more. OK, maybe "queen" is too dramatic of a word to use, but I feel like I have finally brought this dish into submission, thanks to my secret weapon: oven-ready noodles. I don't know what possessed me to volunteer to bring lasagna to small group, but there it was, and two pans of it nonetheless. Then I remembered my track record with it, and I was suddenly overcome with this feeling of "what have I done?!" I found some recipes online that looked promising (lots of good reviews, in other words), and we headed to the grocery store. That's when I saw them...oven-ready lasagna noodles, right next to the regular lasagna noodles, for the same price. It was one of those moments where the box looked like it was glowing, and you could hear angels singing...it sounded too good to be true! So I read the back of the box, and it turns out that there really

I started a 99 in 999 list this year instead of making a resolution, trying to accomplish 99 goals in 999 days. #1 on the list was to try 100 new recipes, and I started New Year's Day by making Fajitas Primavera (found on allrecipes ). These sounded much more interesting than other veggie fajitas I've seen. In addition to peppers and onions, these also had mushrooms, tomatoes, corn, kidney beans, green beans, and asparagus. Yes, asparagus. As far as ingredients added for even more flavor, there was Worcestershire sauce, cumin, chili powder, oregano, black pepper, garlic, cilantro, and...the juice and zest of one lime. (After I gathered all the ingredients, I thought they looked kinda purty, so I took a picture.) Having never juiced or zested anything in my life, I was a little intimidated, but mostly excited. We have a zester that's never been used, so this was its maiden voyage. Worked like a charm! Here's the finished product. Not bad, huh? And they were deliciou