Catching Up & A Big Surprise!

Hi blog friends!! It has been a REALLY long time since my last post! Sorry about that, but I do have a very good and surprising reason. My mom had another baby!!!! I'm very excited to have another little sister and to get to be a big sister again, but my mom hasn't felt very well for a very long time, so we definitely have done a lot less cooking this winter. But now that the baby is born, we're baking like crazy again and I'm happy to finally catch you up on some of the cooking and baking that we have done!

It was Rachel's birthday last fall and we wanted to make her a special breakfast before we went to school. We knew that she had really liked lemon ricotta pancakes that she used to get at a restaurant a long time ago, so we decided to make them ourselves. We made them with a strawberry syrup. The only problem that we ran into was that for some reason, we could not find heavy cream anywhere. We tried whipping light cream, and it actually worked at first, but then in deflated really quickly. It didn't matter though - this breakfast was delicious!!

See how our whipped cream doesn't look very whipped?!

We don't have a picture of it, but we also served the same strawberry syrup a different time over this Three Cities of Spain Cheesecake, which everybody loved and I highly recommend!!!! My mom first found the recipe soon after we had gotten back from Spain and so she was all excited to make it. It turns out that Three Cities of Spain is just the name of a coffeehouse in Santa Fe! But the cheesecake was still really good!!!

Another really good breakfast that we made was this cornbread. My Papa Richard used to make my mom and my Uncle TaTa cornbread a lot when they were growing up, so my mom said that it was fun to make it with us.

I think this golden brown is what a perfect cornbread should look like!

We also made some honey butter to serve it with!

Another popular breakfast was this baked oatmeal. A fun thing about this recipe is that it gives you a basic baked oatmeal recipe, but you can add to it whatever toppings or flavorings you want. We stuck with shredded coconut and mini chocolate chips, but next time I think that I'd like to try pistachios and dried cranberries!

It didn't cut into perfect squares, but it still tasted really good!

For Valentine's Day, my mom made us a special breakfast that was delicious. They were strawberry breakfast pastries, and they were easy to make and fun to eat. I liked these because the crust was crunchy and sugary on the outside, with a soft interior. Under the partially cooked strawberries, there was a yummy cream cheese filling. I don't like raw strawberries, but I do like them cooked and these tarts were one of my favorites. They are divine! Some day we're going to make our own puff pastry, but this recipe just calls for store bought. We always use Dufour, because it's the only frozen puff pastry that's made with all butter, instead of lard or shortening. It can be a little bit harder to find, but it's totally worth it!

Don't these tarts look perfect for Valentine's Day?!

A still delicious but less successful breakfast was a lemon almond tart. This tasted really good, but fell apart when we tried to cut it, even once it was cooled. We read the reviews after and a lot of people had the same problem, so at least it wasn't just us. The almonds added great texture and flavor and lemon brightened it. But clearly this recipe needs some work!

This tart definitely does not make for pretty pictures!

They aren't fancy, but we all LOVED these bran muffins. These are made with plain wheat bran, which my mom likes more than the sugary bran cereals that most bran muffins are made with.

These freeze really well and we eat them a lot on our way to school.

My dad made latkes for brunch one weekend and they were spectacular. My mom said that they were the best latkes that she had ever had. What is unusual about this recipe is that you bake the potatoes first and then grate them! Most recipes just have you use raw potatoes.

These latkes were crispy and crunchy on the outside, but soft in the middle. We all loved them!

A really good lunch that we had one day was open-faced egg salad sandwiches. We'd never made egg salad before. This recipe has pickled celery in the egg salad. I really liked the pickled celery because it was tangy. My dad liked it too, but my mom didn't like it as much as she thought she would. Overall though, we all loved this egg salad. And we did it on toast, but you could also just eat it plain or do a full sandwich.

We added a lot of dill to this recipe, which we all really liked.

Another fun lunch was deep-dish pan pizza. We made the dough and then let it rise in the pan.

This recipe has you put the sauce between two layers of cheese, so that it doesn't make the crust soggy. I thought that was really smart!

The best part about this pizza is that the crust turns out very crunchy.

Isn't this pretty? I liked that it had lots of cheese!

My dad and I have a tradition of going and buying a fresh truffle together during truffle season and then making truffle pasta. Last year we made it with sage brown butter, but this year we made black truffle butter for the pasta and then sliced white truffles on top.

We even have a special tool to thinly slice our truffles. My dad does the slicing part though because this tool is VERY sharp. And he positions it vertically on a cutting board, so that it doesn't slide around.

You can turn the knob on the left to make the truffle slices thicker or thinner.

This was our finished truffle pasta. I love truffle season!

My dad and I also made some classic French dishes together. I guess this was the next best thing since we definitely couldn't go to France this year!! The first dish that we made was beef bourguignon. Beef Bourguignon is a traditional beef stew made with red wine. It comes from the Burgandy region of France.

This isn't a very pretty picture, but it shows you how dark and rich the sauce gets. This dish is extremely flavorful and definitely worth making!

We also made coq au vin, which is very similar to beef bourguignon, but it is made with chicken instead of beef. We tried to decide which we liked better, but we really couldn't pick.

One of the first steps is to brown the chicken. I thought that we did a very good job with that part!

A very cool part about this recipe is that we got to light Brandy on fire! We should have gotten a video, but remembered too late.

The chicken is served with buttery croutons on the side, and they were amazing!

Another special dinner that we had was cioppino. Cioppino is a seafood stew that originated in San Francisco. It is similar to what they call bouillabaisse in France. My mom first made this for my dad before we were born. We made it on Nantucket and used clams, scallops, halibut and lobster. That isn't exactly what the recipe calls for, but the nice thing about stews like this is that you can change up the ingredients a little bit.

A great thing about this recipe is that you can make the base the day before. My mom likes doing that when we're having people over for dinner.

Another dinner that we had with fish and liked was sheet pan roasted fish with sweet peppers. My Aunt Meggie sent this recipe to my mom to ask a question and we ended up making it ourselves. The recipe says to use hake, which is actually one of my favorite fish, but can be hard to find. So we used a mix of halibut and cod. My dad likes halibut, but I don't really and my mom doesn't like me eating it anyway, because it has a lot of mercury. But this dish is all about the herbs and peppers, so any white fish will do.

I think that this dish looks perfect for spring!

One of my favorite side dishes to make and to eat is Maple-Roasted Delicata Squash with Red Onion. I love the maple taste and how the squash and onions come out not too hard, but not too soft. The herbs add smell and flavor it really nicely. We made this with Pork Tenderloin with Apple Cider Reduction. They go perfectly together, but unfortunately we forgot to take a picture.

This is before we cooked it. Delicata squash is my favorite because it's very sweet and it's easy to cook with because you don't have to peel it. I like how it looks like flowers when it is sliced!

Another really good side dish that we made was Melting Potatoes. I think it's interesting how you start these on the stove and then finish them in the oven. They're crispy on the outside but really soft on the inside. My dad LOVED these.

The recipe calls for rosemary, but we used thyme because we like it more.

We read this article, trying to find the best baked ziti recipe, and decided to make some. The recipe that won was this baked ziti from Smitten Kitchen. We liked this recipe because it has spinach in it, but we wanted to include ricotta, so we modified it based on this ziti recipe. I like baked pasta dishes because you can change the ingredients depending on what you like best.

We used ground meat, spinach and ricotta, which I think is a perfect combination.

A favorite dinner of mine that we had this winter was Lime Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas. Usually my mom grills everything for fajitas, but this method was very easy and we all really liked it.

We had leftovers and the next day I had a great idea for lunch! My dad poached me an egg and I put it on top of the left over chicken and vegetables. It was fantastic!!

Doesn't the poached egg look pretty? The vegetables were delicious covered in yolk!

My brother turned eleven in December (it really is ridiculous how way behind I got on blogging!) and he asked for a key lime pie instead of a birthday cake. The crust was made with ground macadamia nuts, which I really liked. Overall this pie was very easy to make and a huge hit.

My mom always gets us sparkler candles for birthdays and I love them!

We also made a coconut cream pie. We actually made this for the Super Bowl. This is a great dessert to make for an event like the Super Bowl, because it can be done in advance.

We just toasted some shredded coconut, but I think an even better decoration would be big fresh coconut curls on top!

The pie looks a little bit messy cut, but trust me, it tastes perfect!

We had another big event in our family recently. Remember back to my blog post where we celebrated my dad completing 100 consecutive runs? Well he made it all the way to 365 and so we wanted to make something special for him. We decided to make him a Fresh Berry Cream Cake.

My mom wasn't sure what size cake pan this was and couldn't find a real tape measure. So she just used a singing one that my sister plays with. It worked, but I thought it was funny!

The original recipe doesn't call for lemon curd, but we decided to add it between the layers. I'm really glad that we did. I thought that the lemon curd made the cake!

Grazzy gave me this unicorn spatula for my birthday!

We layered whipped cream on top of the lemon curd.

And then we layered on berries.

I suggested that we add the powdered sugar on top.

Usually we like cake with more traditional frosting fully iced, but we decided to try something different this time. The pictures look a little messy, but that's because we had a little accident. We assembled the cake while my dad was still sleeping in the morning, and then put it in our wine cellar to hide it and keep it cool. But when we went to get it out while he was gone on his 365th run, my mom walked into the wine cellar and saw that all the lemon curd and whipped cream and berries from the top of the cake had slid off onto the wine cellar floor. We think it was from the pressure when the door closed, but my mom was very surprised when she walked in and found a naked cake and a massive mess! We were worried about my dad coming home and so we make more whipped cream really fast to redo the cake. Fortunately we already had some leftover lemon curd. But because we were really rushing, the cake didn't turn out as pretty as it did the first time. Then of course he ended up running ten miles and being gone much longer than we expected so it turned out that we didn't have to rush, but we didn't know that until later. And the cake still was great though. My dad loved how light and summery it tasted!

I thought that the candles were a nice touch!

So that pretty much brings us up to date as of a month ago. We've baked so much since my little sister was born though, that we probably have enough for another blog post very soon, so stay tuned!!