Zucchini Bread - made with zucchini from MY GARDEN OMG

First of all, I picked a big banana pepper today and chopped it up for Dennis to put on his sandwich for lunch tomorrow. Go me.

Before that though, I grabbed that purple pepper and sliced it in half. I wasn't sure when it would be ready so I just picked one to test it out. I stuck my tongue out and barely touched the pepper and YOWZA it was hot. I have heard that the smaller peppers are hotter, but it must've slipped my mind momentarily. I'm not sure what to do with it!! I guess I can make salsa but it would be like... one of those things where people would have to sign a waiver before they eat it.

Anyways, I decided on a whim that I was going to make zucchini bread. Dennis' mom gave us some last year and I had never tried it before. I was apprehensive, but it turned out to be delicious. I found a recipe and whipped up a batch. It is in the oven right now.

Pictured: zucchini & the dissected purple pepper

The recipe I found called for 2 cups of grated zucchini but I didn't think I had enough. Mine was 7.5 inches but it only made 1 cup grated, so I halved the entire recipe.

Then I mixed all the other shiz up.

Ingredients

1 3/4 c all-purpose flour

3/4 tsp baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

1 c white sugar
1/2 c vegetable oil

1 c grated zucchini 

So whisk together the first 5 ingredients - all the dry ingredients but the sugar. Preheat the oven to 350.

In a separate large bowl, beat the eggs, then slowly add in the sugar, then the oil. Slowly add the flour and zucchini, alternating between them. PS. This tastes INCREDIBLE. The original recipe calls for walnuts and raisins, but I am allergic to walnuts and I don't like adding raisins to my bakery items, except for oatmeal cookies and that's only for my dad!!

Grease a 4x8 pan and pour the mixture in. Bake for 65 minutes.

Batter at 0 minutes in the oven...

Batter at 65 minutes in the oven!

I just realized that I was supposed to add vanilla extract, but I missed that part of the directions because it was combined with the walnuts & raisins. The batter was so delicious and the amount of vanilla extract was so small (1/4 tsp) that I don't think it is going to matter. If you want to add the vanilla extract, just add it to the batter last, right before you put it in the oven.

Update: I wanted the recipe to look greener this time, so I used a lot more zucchini, probably 1 and 3/4 cups, while leaving the rest of the recipe the same... except the mixture looked a little too runny when it was ready to go in so I added some extra flour and sugar. I probably added about a cup of flour and 1/2 cup of sugar. Next time I make it, which should be soon (my garden is blowin up, I tell you!), I'll try to get some more exact measurements. Also, I baked it for 80 minutes at 350.

Here's the recipe I used from Allrecipes.com.

My Very First Banana Bread

So I went grocery shopping this past week and bananas were on my list. I should have seen a red flag when there were hardly any bananas left, but I picked some that looked pretty good to me and moved on. When I got home and tried to put them up on the banana hook, one just fell right off. Oops. Then another one had already broken open. Then Dennis just said to hell with them and that he doesn't want to eat them, so I decided to make banana bread.

I have never made banana bread before, but I have made pumpkin bread a lot so I thought I could handle it. The ingredients were quite simple, as was the recipe.

Ingredients
3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

The recipe says that you don't even need a mixer for this & that you can just use a spoon, but that sounds like more work. So I used my hand mixer.

First preheat the oven to 350. Then mix the bananas and butter together, then add the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Once they are all mixed together well, add the baking soda and salt, and lastly the flour. OMG wasn't that easy?

Pour the mixture into a buttered 4x8 loaf pan and put it in the oven for 70 minutes. I just tried a little piece and it tastes great. The recipe is hard to screw up though, so that is not saying a lot about my cooking. Seriously though, I am a great cook and this bread is going to feed Dennis for a week. Also, I can't find my camera right now you'll have to settle for this terrible picture I took with my computer:

And yes there is a piece missing. So what?! Leave me alone!!

The original recipe from SimplyRecipes.com.

Awesome Poppy Seed Salad Dressing

Over Christmas weekend, we went up to PA to visit Dennis' family. On Christmas eve, we had an awesome dinner thanks to Dennis' dad, Doug. Ham, corn, biscuits, mashed potatoes, & gravy. Num num num!

However, the salad is what I couldn't get enough of! After I had one salad and a main course, when I went back for seconds I had to get another salad. It was spinach with cranberries and slivered almonds, but what really made the salad was the dressing. Turns out Vicki had made the dressing herself and she passed the recipe along to me. So here I am passing it along to you.

Ingredients
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 tsp paprika
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 tsp minced onion
1/2 cup vegetable oil

I'm sure there is some rhyme or reason to adding the ingredients together, but I just added them to my container in the order they were listed. I used a gravy shaker for this and it worked wonderfully.

The amounts are written on the side which made for easy measuring. Just give it a good shake right before you pour it over your salad.

Vicki's salad consisted of spinach leaves, dried cranberries, and slivered almonds. Dennis is not a fan of almonds, so our salad is a little different. We used a 50/50 Mix of bagged greens that contained spinach leaves and other greens, kept the dried cranberries, and added some goat cheese.

All I can say is... OMG. It was so good! I had a little extra dressing in the bowl when I was done, so I just kept adding greens until I was mopping it up with pieces of spinach. Yummy. Thanks Vicki!!

Pumpkin Crème Brûlée

Ugh, so many accents and whatnot. That's the last time you'll be seeing the correct spelling with all of the bells and whistles cause I simply don't have the energy for all of that copy and paste action.

I'm not sure whether I should be telling this story, but ahh here goes.

A few weekends ago, Dennis & I went to the Waterfowl Festival in Easton with my mom. We walked around and looked at stuff and it was a grand ole time. It was a lovely day outside, so we stopped to eat lunch at General Tanukis, one of my favorite restaurants.

At this point I should also mention that we had Dexter in tow. So the four of us are sitting at this table with plenty of people passing by. Some people are scared of Dexter and take a wide berth, but others are friendly and want to pet and play with him. Dexter spent his time either drinking water from a bowl on the ground or sitting under the table waiting for scraps. For a few brief moments, he was sitting in a chair but he got a little too feisty so he had to dismount.

Near the end of our meal, Dennis decided to let Dexter sit in his lap. At this point, some kindly old folks stopped to chat and pet Dexter. Oh boy, was Dexter excited!! So excited that he just couldn't help himself and he managed to pee all over Dennis' lap. Dennis yelled some expletives, scaring the old people and my mom... and probably Dexter too. So there Dennis is, covered in pee. It was sad.

The worst part (and the point of this story) is that Dennis really wanted to get some pumpkin creme brulee. We had met up with my dad at General Tanukis the year before and happened upon this delectable dessert during the holiday season. Dennis had spoken of it several times throughout the year, and the second that we got our menus that very day, he checked for and located the very same pumpkin creme brulee. However, once the urincident occurred (see what I did, I combined urine & incident!! he he!!), Dennis said the day was ruined and since we couldn't get the dessert to go, Dennis had no pumpkin creme brulee. :(

He was really bummed out and I was bummed out for him, so I took it upon myself to recreate this dessert at home. He had a terrible day today so I picked a good day to surprise him. He said it was "good." So get ready for some "good" pumpkin creme brulee!!

Ingredients

3 cups heavy cream

1 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1/2 teaspoons salt

3/4 cups granulated sugar

1/4 cups granulated sugar, additional

8 large egg yolks

1 15 oz. can pumpkin puree

The original recipe actually calls for dark Jamaican rum as well, but I just don't have those kinds of resources, people. Anyway, combine the first 4 ingredients in a saucepan. The recipe says use a 4 quart sauce pan but how big is that? I just used my biggest pan that wasn't a pot, if that makes any sense. So whisk those ingredients together and then put the pan over medium heat until bubbles form around the edge of the mixture. I didn't really know how to interpret that, especially since the bubbles formed in the middle, so I just removed it from the heat when I saw bubbles. Done deal. This would also be a good time to preheat your oven to 325.

While your mixture is heating, you should crack 8 eggs and save those yolks, yall! I saved the whites too, just because I hate waste. I save the smallest amount of leftovers and Dennis makes fun of me, but last time I saved egg whites I ate them for breakfast the next morning so, suck it Dennis. Anyway, mix the egg yolks with the pumpkin puree using a whisk. Once your first mixture is bubbly, slowly mix it into the pumpkin/egg yolk mixture. I didn't do it slowly, I just poured it all in and they still came out fine so take that as you will.

Once your mixture is well blended, you should pour it equally into 12 little ramekins. I should be so lucky. I don't own ramekins so I had to improvise. I bought 2 aluminum cupcake tins, each holding 6 cupcakes. Of course that wasn't even enough... why would Good Housekeeping lie to me? I think I could make about 6 more, so unless you have larger than average ramekins, I would guess that this recipe actually makes 18.

Now here is the tricky part - these ramekins need to be in a water bath. Have you ever heard of that? I haven't but I'm sure there's some amazing scientific reason behind it. You have to place them into a cake pan and then fill the pan with boiling water until the ramekins are about halfway submerged. This presented a problem for me because I decided to use a 9x13 cake pan (ok) and a 9x9 cake pan (not ok). Luckily, aluminum is very bendy and I was able to fit 8 into the big pan and 4 into the small one. Here's a terrible picture:

See how it's all bendy on top? Also you can't really see the water on top, but on the bottom one you can see the reflection of the oven rack above.

The recipe says cook at 325 for 30-40 minutes, but I cooked the smaller one for 40 and the bigger one for 35. It wasn't strategic or anything, it just took me 5 whole minutes to situate my "ramekins" in their water bath in the larger one. Sheesh.

The recipe says to remove the ramekins from the water and let them cool to room temperature, then refrigerate for at least 3 hours. I, of course, cut corners and put them straight into the fridge. After approximately 3 hours (probably less) I took 2 out and sprinkled "1.5 teaspoons" of sugar on top. I have no idea how much it actually was. I put the broiler on high and moved a rack up to the top space in the oven, then put the ramekins in for 2 minutes. They were pretty awesome.

Here's my finished product with a few bites taken out of it. Oops. Didn't grab my camera fast enough. The muffin pan thing worked out pretty well. I'd do it again. I'm going to take the leftover batter to my mom's house this weekend and pray that she owns real ramekins. She is like, Martha Stewart incarnate, so she will definitely own ramekins. She called Martha Stewart a prostitute a few weekends ago, but that is a story for another time.

The original recipe is from the Good Housekeeping site. Ciao!

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Dennis found this recipe in a Southern Living Crockpot cookbook. No use of the actual crockpot, not that you would know it - it may well have been seeing how long it took. 3 hours cook time, plus the prep time. Ugh! Still, it looks amazing and tastes even better.

Ingredients

1 1/4 cups gingersnap crumbs (25 to 30 cookies)

3  tablespoons butter or margarine, melted

3  (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

1 1/4 cups sugar, divided

1  tablespoon vanilla extract

6  large eggs, separated

32 oz cans pumpkin puree

2  large eggs

1  cup whipping cream

1  tablespoon powdered sugar

Combine crumbs and butter - easier than it sounds! What I mean is, I wasn't sure how to go about turning the hard cookies into crumbs until I remember seeing Rachael Ray put croutons in the food processor to make breadcrumbs. So I followed suit and put the cookies in the food processor and that worked very well!

Press the mixture into bottom of a pan. The recipe tells you to use a 12-inch springform pan. I do not own a springform pan so I just decided to use a 9x9 Pyrex pan. As it turned out, there was way too much batter left over so if you don't have the right pan you should probably halve the recipe. Set this mixture aside.

Beat the cream cheese at medium speed with an electric mixer until smooth, then add 1 cup sugar and vanilla, beating until creamy. Stir in the 6 egg yolks, then pour 2 1/2 cups mixture into prepared crust and set aside.

Add the pumpkin puree and 2 eggs to remaining cream cheese mixture. I used the electric mixer for this step.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites at high speed until foamy. Add remaining 1/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon at a time, beating until stiff peaks form and sugar dissolves. Pour into pumpkin mixture and mix with a spoon. Pour the resulting mixture over the first cream cheese mixture in the crust.

Bake at 300° for 1 1/2 hours. Then turn the oven off, and run a knife around edge of cheesecake to loosen (I didn't need to do this since I wasn't using the springform pan & so didn't need to remove the cheesecake from the pan). Let stand in oven with door partially open for 1 1/2 hours. Remove sides of pan (if you have the springform pan), then cover and chill.

Beat the whipping cream and powdered sugar at high speed until soft peaks form; spread on top of the cheesecake when you are ready to eat it. Since I knew Dennis & I were just going to eat the cheesecake one piece at a time, I kept the whipped cream in a separate container and put it on the side of the plate. If you are planning on making this for some kind of party where presentation is important, spreading the whipped cream on top would make it look lovely!

Here is the finished product. Looks kind of marbled with the pumpkin part on top. Voila! This cheesecake is DA BOMB, but make sure you set aside at least 3 hours to cook it, and a few more hours afterward to chill it. This dessert would be great for any holiday party. Bon appetit!

Here is the recipe from Southern Living. I tweaked the ingredient list slightly.

Pumpkin Bread

I discovered pumpkin bread when an old friend brought some over years ago. From the moment I tasted it, I was hooked. I never thought I would find a recipe to match the glorious pumpkin bread that I had tasted oh so many years ago, but after some experimenting with recipes I found one that has been a success. I make this bread during the holidays for friends and family. I have also used the batter to make pumpkin muffins and pumpkin cake (both of which are great with cream cheese icing, btw, but that's for another post).

Ingredients

1 15 oz can pumpkin puree

4 eggs

1 cup vegetable oil

2/3 cup water

3 cups white sugar

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp pumpkin spice

Mix the puree, eggs, oil, water, and sugar together in a large bowl until blended.

Whisk together flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, & pumpkin spice.

Slowly add the dry mixture to the wet mixture until blended completely. Pour into whichever container you are using. I have a new Pyrex pan that I usually use for this recipe, but if I am using an older pan I will use Pam, vegetable oil, or butter to line the inside then rub it down with a paper towel before I pour the mixture.

This recipe makes a very large amount of batter and I usually have to divy it up among 2 different pans. I baked a batch of pumpkin bread while writing this post and it took 70 and 77 minutes (one pan was slightly larger than the other). If you are making this as a gift during the holidays, this recipe would be good, but if it is just to snack on around the house, you may be better off halving the recipe.

Here's my bread fresh out of the oven! As you can see it rises quite a bit while baking - I filled each of these pans up to about an inch below the edge. I cut the piece out of the middle of the smaller loaf because the toothpick came out clean but I didn't entirely trust it. Don't worry the bread was fine and it tasted great. :)

Here's the original link from AllRecipes.com. My version has a few minor changes.

Fluffy Pancakes

When I first found this recipe for fluffy pancakes, I was a little turned off by the vinegar in the ingredients list but it got so many rave reviews that I decided to give it a try.

Ingredients

3/4 cup milk

2 tablespoons white vinegar

1 cup all-purpose flour

2 tablespoons white sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 egg

2 tablespoons butter, melted

Mix the milk & vinegar together. You will be adding the dry ingredients to this mixture, so make sure to use a large bowl. The directions say to let the milk & vinegar mixture "sour" which sounds gross, but stick out the recipe to the end!! It will be worth it.

Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, & salt together in a separate bowl.

Add the egg & butter to the "soured" milk & whisk. Then add the flour mixture & whisk until it is smooth.

At this point, I like to pour one pancake to get a feeling for the consistency. Sometimes if it is too thick, it will just pour into a blob and it won't spread out into a circle. I use a whisk or a spoon like I'm spreading sauce on a pizza to flatten the pancake into a circle. Then I add a little milk to the mixture to thin it out. Now that I think of it, maybe I should just adjust the milk from the beginning! I will try this and update the recipe if it works out.

Anywho, this recipe usually makes 8-10 medium-sized pancakes.. medium meaning a little smaller than a CD. I usually make a bunch of plain Jane circles, then one or two fun ones.. like so..

This pancake was for me...

And this one was for Dennis!

We have an electric skillet that I can make 3-4 pancakes on at a time, but when I use a pan it definitely takes longer and the pancakes tend to cool off a little by the time I'm done with the batter. I just pop them back on the pan or skillet for around 30 seconds on each side and they're good as new.

We usually don't finish all of the pancakes, so once they have cooled down enough I put the leftovers into a Ziplock bag and toss them in the fridge. They heat up great in the microwave!

I have tried a few different recipes for pancakes, and so far this one is the best. Here's the original link at AllRecipes.com.