Things I want to try

I often find stuff around the internet or in magazines that look so simply amazing that I just want to make them. I'm kind of a sucker for a pretty picture. But then I have excuses: no time, we wouldn't eat it fast enough, ingredients are too expensive... the list goes on and on. But I figure, if I tell you what these yummy things are, somebody might try them and tell me how it came out. Fair enough? So here goes!

(Just a note, when I say ingredients are expensive, it's probably only at my grocery store, where a small bag of shredded cheese is $7 and Yoplait yogurt is $2.39 a cup... you get the point.)

I really really want to make these. And I will make a version of them when there are enough people around to eat them.
http://cookiesandcups.com/holy-heck-brownies/


This makes me happy because fewer dishes makes for a happier me. And it looks tasty. And the simplicity of it makes it Italian.
http://www.lottieanddoof.com/2013/06/one-pan-pasta/

This s'mores cheesecake looks absolutely amazing.
http://cookiesandcups.com/smores-cheesecake/

I'm very into sauces at the moment, and we have been known to eat an entire bottle of tzatziki in a couple days. Sounds like a great excuse.
http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/09/23/tzatziki-sauce-recipe/

I've made a honey beer bread, but with cheese? And then the apple butter and hard cider? Yum!http://www.howsweeteats.com/2013/09/white-cheddar-beer-bread/

These I did make... so good!
http://www.howsweeteats.com/2013/08/double-chocolate-cheesecake-cookies/

What can I say, I love cheese.
http://www.bakedbyrachel.com/2013/10/taco-mac-and-cheese-recipe/

I love peanut butter and honey sandwiches, so the cookies must be amazing. (These are for Lindsay and Hailey... they are Roomie Cookies!)
http://www.browneyedbaker.com/2013/10/08/honey-peanut-butter-cookies/#more-27722

So tell me, which one did you try?

Garlic Hummus

Yep, I did it. I made hummus. And it was good. I used a recipe I found on Brown Eyed Baker and added extra garlic, as I was making it for a fantasy football draft.  So yummy and flavorful!

Ingredients:
3 Tbs lemon juice
1/4 C water
6 Tbs tahini
2 Tbs olive oil
1 can chick peas
2 cloves garlic (feel free to use more garlic, it just gets better)
1/2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 tsp cumin

*Note: tahini is a paste made from ground sesame seeds. It can be found in most grocery stores. Don't ask me where, though. When I buy it here, it's in the bottles with only Arabic.

1) Mix lemon juice and water.

2) Mix tahini and olive oil.

3)  Rinse and drain chickpeas. Process in a food processor with the garlic, salt, and cumin.

4) Add lemon juice and process.

5) Then add tahini and process one minute, until smooth.

 

6) Pour into a bowl and let it sit for at least half an hour before serving. That lets it get super flavorful.

Buon appetito!

 

By the way, I read the most amazing article about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches here. It reminds me of the peanut butter-honey-marshmallow crème sandwiches my roommate used to make. Sometimes I wish I was still in college so I could eat ridiculous things like that again and not look silly.

Rainbows and sprinkles

I am trying to be more creative in the kitchen. The thing is, I hate washing dishes. And I don't have my kitchen aid mixer. But when it comes to the end of the year, I figure I should do something nice for the kids at school. So I decided to make rainbow cupcakes.

It was quite a bit easier than I expected and came out so cute!

Here's how to do it. I used a cake mix because I don't put forth that much effort for a bunch of 10-year-olds, but you could use your favorite white cake recipe if you wanted.

First, mix the batter like usual. Then split it evenly into six containers. Add food coloring to make the desired colors. Mix well.

Line a cupcake tray with paper cups and begin by adding a small spoonful of each color. The cake batter is thick enough that it won't combine.

Once you have used all the colors, bake.

Cool and decorate. I put a lot of frosting on so they wouldn't see until the bit into them. And because we were moving in two days and I didn't want extra frosting in the fridge.

 

Welcome to Bahrain!

Now that we're in Bahrain and are getting familiar with the place, it's time to introduce you!

I will preface this post by saying I don't really have any pictures of Bahrain yet. Only this one I took out the window of our hotel. But that's pretty much what it looks like: brown and sandy. And it's hot. Really really reallyreally hot.

I did take a picture of the Great Mosque, but we were driving and it was nighttime, so it looks more like smears with towers. I'll save your eyes.

But if you like food variety, this is the place! More than once in Italy we longed for something that wasn't Italian. See, even though we love Italian food, we also love variety. So that's why Bahrain is so great. We've only been here about a month, and so far we've had French, Persian, Thai, Papa John's (all you can eat for Ramadan!), DQ, Lebanese, Chinese, and some really good frozen yogurt. We kind of have to eat out, since our kitchen facilities look like this:

Yay hotels!

The Friday before I left for my visit home, we went to brunch. Brunch is something the hotels do, kind of like Sunday afternoon brunch. You pay a lot of money and get unlimited food and drinks for about 4 hours. It was almost too much food. So overwhelming!

We went to Lulu's (a huge grocery store) the other day and it made me start itching to cook again. We're getting into our house in a few days, and I'm excited to try new foods like hummus and things with instructions written only in Arabic.

So anyway, welcome to Bahrain!

Neopolitan Pizza

Having lived in Naples for 3 years, the birthplace of pizza, you'd think we'd had it all.

According to the pizza tower, we have.

I'm not sure if it's sad or awesome that it's hit the ceiling. What was truly sad is that we had to take it all to the recycling before moving out. We pretty much filled a bin, not to mention the back of the truck.

 

 And no, we did not match on purpose.

But I digress (and am getting kind of sad we don't live in Italy anymore), so on to the pizzas.

This spring, we ate the pizza known as "Re Umberto", or King Umberto (Humphry?).  Tell me, who is this genius who came up with a double-decker pizza?

The bottom layer was ricotta and salame, the top layer was the 4 Stagione (4 seasons). Sausage and friarelli, ham and mushroom, eggplant, and artichoke.

Fabulous. Totally worth the 16 euro.

On the Italian bucket list was to eat the hot-dog-and-French-fry pizza. It was pretty much disgusting. I mean, who puts hot dogs and French fries on a pizza?

 



I went to lunch at a famous pizzeria called Da Michele with a friend. It's the one in the book/movie Eat, Pray, Love. They only serve 2 kinds of pizza: Marinara (just tomato sauce and garlic, no cheese) and Margherita (with cheese). The restaurant is pretty small and the line is crazy long, so you take a number and wait. An hour and a half later... But the price (and the excellent quality of the pizza) made it worth it: two pizzas and two beers, 13 euro.

 

I mean, come on! It's literally hanging off the plate.

 

And finally, it was time to leave. But not before hitting Gennaro 2 twice our last weekend. After great discussions sounding like "What should our LAST pizza be? The D.O.C.? The frittatura? Marinara?", we settled for the frittatura, or the fried calzone. Delicious!

 

 

Sigh, I miss Italy. Though being American, I'm still happy to eat at Papa John's.

White chocolate no-bake cookies

In my crazy, thematic teacher mind, I've been plotting to make white chocolate no-bake cookies for some time now. I was going to make them for St. Patrick's Day and dye them green, but I bought mint oreos instead.

But what better time is there than Easter? With some pastel m&m's, they're perfect. The white chocolate ones even look kind of like bird nests with colorful eggs. The white chocolate ones aren't so overpoweringly sweet, so you can eat more of them at once. Score.

I made regular chocolate ones, too, just in case the white ones didn't, you know... turn out right.

I was on a quest to make something different. Usually, Italian/European kids will do anything for a cake-mix cupcake, but this class is weird. Only about half of the kids will eat cupcakes, so I needed to try something else.

After a poll of students from 5 countries, the white chocolate cookies are the best. There was serious gushing going on. From 5th graders. And drooling. Win.

White Chocolate Peanut Butter No-Bake Cookies

1 1/2 C sugar
1 C white chocolate chips
1/2 C butter
1/2 C milk
1/2 C peanut butter
1 tsp. vanilla
3 C minute oats

Melt sugar, chocolate chips, and butter in a saucepan, adding the milk when everything is almost melted. Cook and stir until boiling, boil 1 minute. Remove from heat and stir in peanut butter and vanilla. Stir in oats until combined. Drop by spoonfuls on a cookie sheet covered with waxed paper and allow to harden.

Buon appetito!

Some 2012 food adventures

The year 2012 had some interesting food moments, some in my kitchen, some from other places. For Valentine’s Day, I made peanut butter- chocolate brownie trifles. Layers of peanut buttery and chocolaty goodness.

 In Turkey, we ate Turkish Delight and drank copious amounts of tea. And our favorite, burek, a flaky pastry stuffed with cheese and sometimes meat and onions.

The was a Neapolitan cooking class where we made some extremely cheesy Pasta alla Siciliana.

In the summer, I really went nuts with trying to make pasta as pretty as possible with as many colorful vegetables as possible. There was also grilled pizza and apple crisp and cold tomato soup.

But the crowning food moment(s) of our summer was Eastern Europe. Burek made several reappearances, much to our delight (the Slavic countries love it, too!). Other delicacies included grape-flavored aloe vera juice, (Lake) Bled cake, Austrian Wiener schnitzel, and Chinese food (sometime you just get tired of Italian). We came home with 5 jars of Ajvar sauce, which is roasted red pepper and eggplant sauce. It doesn’t get much better than that. Oh wait, it does. That would be the 20 or so bottles of wine we had been collecting and had crammed between suitcases in the trunk.

In Slovenia, our host served us fresh trout. I now know how to debone a fish.

In Austria, we found a Vietnamese restaurant that was really good. However, we discovered that neither of us can use chopsticks. I’m pretty sure the waiters were taking pictures of us trying.

Slovakia had egg dumplings that are similar to Italian gnocchi. Very filling and very good.

I’m pretty sure the national seasoning of Hungary is paprika. It was on everything from our eggs at breakfast to the meat at dinner. And it was fabulous. At the Great Market Hall, we had the traditional Langos, kind of like a savory elephant ear with veggies, sour cream, and cheese on top.

The food in Croatia was terrible. So terrible that it wasn’t worth taking a picture of it.

The food in Bosnia and Herzegovina was much better. Whew. During the Iron Curtain era, items from Western culture were not allowed. These included Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, movies, music, etc. The Bosnians really wanted their Coke, so they made a substitute called Cockta. It was actually pretty good and it tasted like vanilla Coke.

Later in the summer, we finally got around to buying an Italian mokapot. How have we lived without it?

When Thanksgiving came around, we decided to start a new tradition and make Pasta Zucca or pasta with pumpkin. It’s the perfect Thanksgiving food! Chicken with honey-cranberry sauce and garlic green beans finished it off. It’s fairly Thanksgiving-y, right?

Stay tuned, 2013 should be just as exciting!

The Lindsays' Illustrated 2012

 What a year 2012 was for the Lindsays!

January
In January we went to visit Hadrian's Villa and the gardens of Villa d'Este outside Rome. We also witnessed some of the most amazing sunsets you've ever seen from our balcony!

February
Welcome to Istanbul, Turkey!

 



March
Tim took sailing lessons and took me along once. The lesson got cancelled, but we walked along the beach and found lots of beautiful shells.

April
In April everything was waking up again and calling us to go hiking. So we did Walk of the Gods along the Amalfi Coast one day and the rim of Carney Park (an extinct volcano) the next.

May
In May I went to Puglia again with the 5th graders, and Ron and Betsy Sears stopped by on their cruise and we took them to the Amalfi Coast.

 

June

The weather was so beautiful that we decided to take a ride on the motorcycle to Sant'Agata dei Goti, a small hill town. We happened upon the Festival del Bacio or the Festival of the Kiss.

July
In July Tim's grandma and brother came and we took them on an epic journey through Tuscany, Cinque Terre, and Rome. We also visited the Solfatara, our local sulfur vocano.

 

 

 

July and August
Then at the end of July, the epic Eastern Europe road trip began. 8 countries, 17 days, a Danube cruise, a bike ride, and a ferry across the Adriatic Sea.

 

 

 

September

Tim went out on the USS Mount Whitney, which is stationed in Gaeta, Italy, about an hour away. I went with some other wives to visit and have dinner.

 

 

October
In October, we did the Walk of the Gods again. It never gets old, though I am... my knee hurts every time!

November
One weekend we went to Sant'Angelo dei Lombardi, a town in the mountains, for the Sagra delle Sagre, or the festival of festivals. Artisians from the region brought their wares, mostly food, and set up around the town. Honorable mentions included apples, olive oil, and torrone, but first prize went to the "hanged cheese", cheese melted over a bbq and spread on bread.

December
We just can't get enough of the Walk of the Gods! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

Let's hope 2013 is as exciting!