Soup to Dutts

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...

The other day, Tom asked me what Christmas goodie I'm making this week. I thought it was kind of a weird question at first, but then it occurred to me that I've made at least one seasonal-flavored treat every week since the start of the Christmas season. So, in the spirit of the season, I've decided to list them and tell the story behind each one. The week after Thanksgiving, neither Tom nor I had very much going on in the way of work. Tom had finals to work on, but I was bored out of my mind. So about halfway through the week, I pulled up Allrecipes.com and tried to find something to bake with ingredients we already had at home, and I came across a recipe for cinnamon cupcakes. These were awesome, and so simple. Actually, I did end up sending Tom out for one ingredient: frosting. :) The recipe made a huge batch, so we froze them and thawed them out a few days later to take to small group. Every year, the ladies in our church do a gift exchange. Each person brings eight i...

I have a complicated relationship with bell peppers. When I was a kid, they were pretty much the one thing I refused to eat. Actually, I wasn't crazy about vegetables in general, but bell peppers were the worst. They were bitter and always seemed to set my mouth on fire. What's to like about that? So I had to laugh when I realized that I'd made three different things with bell peppers just in one week. Here's the first one. Tom had been craving cornbread and chili, so I decided to make that. Usually my chili is pretty simple: ground turkey or beef, kidney beans, diced tomatoes, maybe a little onion, and some seasonings. I figured some bell peppers could only improve it. This was by far the best chili I've ever made, and the best part was that it was also the most convenient. In the past, I had always stressed over the seasonings. That was before I discovered chili beans and chili-ready tomatoes. What amazing inventions! These were already packed with chili powd...

Notice that I used a plural? That's because we have not one, but two Crock-Pots. When Tom and I got married, we got one from each of our mothers, and that is just fine with me. What's not to love about a slow cooker? You throw a bunch of food in and turn a dial, and a few hours later you have a delicious meal. It's a magical thing. And tonight, I broke out both of them. For this week's dinners, we're trying to use up things we already had at home instead of buying a ton of groceries. One of these things was a package of country-style ribs that had been sitting in the freezer for at least a couple of weeks. Now, I've never worked with country-style ribs. Before I got them, I didn't know such a thing existed. But what I do know is that just about any meat comes out perfectly when it's cooked in a slow cooker. So I put them in with some chicken broth and some salt and pepper, and I turned it on High (because the ribs were still pretty frozen) for about four...