The Joy of Baking - Part 2

I like to watch this T.V. show called "The Take Home Chef". The premise is the following: blond Australian "chef" finds an unassuming woman in a grocery store (usually Whole Foods), asks her if she will allow him to make dinner for her and whomever she is cooking for that night, the woman is flattered and says yes, he buys the groceries, they stop by Sur la Table for some must have kitchen items for that night's menu, he cooks, tells her to go change, boyfriend/husband comes home to find gf/wife at home with camera crew and tall blond dude in his home. Surprise!

Anyways, one day he made a peanut butter chocolate chunk cookie that looked fairly easy and delicious. I had accidentally bought a jar of Trader Joe's Creamy Almond Butter, and it had been sitting in my pantry for awhile, so I decided to sub that in for peanut butter and made the cookies from his recipe. The cookie was savory in a way, but also sweet. I would probably use chunky almond/peanut butter next time. I also used two bars of Hershey's Special Dark chocolate for the recipe.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk Cookie

Ingredients:
1 tsp baking soda
1 cup of brown sugar
1 stick of butter
1 egg
1 cup of peanut butter (he used chunky, but creamy would be fine)
1/4 cup of honey
1 1/2 cup of all purpose flour
1 bar of chocolate (about 1-2 cups of broken chocolate pieces)

Directions:
Mix the baking soda, brown sugar, and butter together. Add the egg. Then add peanut butter and honey. Then add flour and chocolate and fold the wet and dry ingredients together.

Roll into small/medium sized dough balls, 6 to a tray.

Then bake at 350 for 12-15 minutes.

Yield: About 28 cookies

And the result!

The Joy of Baking

Today I baked. I just woke up this morning and decided that that was what I wanted to do. I had some over ripened bananas and some left over strawberries and sought out something that I could bake them into. Muffins are usually pretty easy to make, so I found a pretty decent recipe on the internet. The recipe is below; the only substitution that I made was whole wheat flour for all purpose flour. They turned out really well; next time I will probably add some walnuts for some crunch. I'm going to have to freeze some of them to eat later.

Strawberry-Banana Muffins

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) (113 grams) unsalted butter, melted
3/4 cup (160 grams) light brown sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon (4 grams) pure vanilla extract
2 large ripe bananas, mashed (about 1 cup)
1 cup (240 ml) fresh or frozen blueberries or strawberries (cut into small pieces)
2 1/4 cups (315 grams) all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon (4 grams) ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon (2.5 grams) salt

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (177 degrees C). Position rack in center of oven. Line the muffin pan with paper liners or grease with butter or a vegetable spray. Set aside.

In a small saucepan melt the butter. Set aside.

In a medium sized bowl whisk together the brown sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and mashed banana. Add the melted butter to the brown sugar mixture and stir to combine.

In another large bowl combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt. Gently fold in the berries, making sure they are coated with flour. This helps to prevent the berries from sinking during baking. Do not over mix or the blueberries will end up coloring the batter blue. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir only until the ingredients are just combined. Do not over mix the batter or tough muffins will result.

Fill each muffin cup about two thirds full of batter, using two spoons or an ice cream scoop. Fill any unused muffin cups halfway with water to prevent warping of the pan and/or over browning of the muffins. Place in the oven and bake until a tester inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Makes 12 regular sized muffins.

And here they are!

Ok. I am procrastinating going to bed now. And since I haven't blogged about food in awhile, I will pretty much show you what I eat during the week when I'm at school. It's pretty boring.

For breakfast I usually have Wheatabix (yes that's the Anglophile in me) with banana's and milk or some such cereal/fruit concoction.



Then I usually have a salad for lunch, being the girl that I am, it is a meal for me. Today I made my lunches for the rest of the week by putting together a huge salmon salad. I used canned Trader Joe Salmon for the first time and it tasted pretty good. Other things in the salad included baby romaine lettuce, capers, red onion, green onion, tomato, feta cheese, and whole wheat pasta.



I will then have almond butter and apples for a snack in the afternoon with some Earl Grey Tea (not pictured). I also found these pistachio and almond snacks that are pretty good and tied me over til dinner.





Sometimes I eat these great little Greek yogurt things called Fage. I usually eat the 0% fat ones because I actually prefer the taste of them to the 2% fat ones (pictured here with honey mix in). This honey/yogurt thing will set you back 250 calories though, compared to the 90 calories of the 0% fat Fage's. Also they make a great substitute for sour cream.



And that about sums it up. I never know what I am going to have for dinner, but it usually involved beer and cheese and more salad. Not very interesting huh?

Wedding Buffet

Yesterday I went to a wedding where they served the food buffet style. The only other wedding where there was a buffet was Maggy's wedding in Rosarito, where it was Mexican buffet everywhere all the time, for the whole 3 days that we were there. Each morning, noon, and night we would think to ourselves...do you think we could really have the same Mexican buffet again? And we did. And it was good.

At any rate, last night at the wedding, there was a buffet which consisted of Caesar salad, wild rice, fruit salad, pasta salad, roast beef with horseradish, chicken with some weird gravy that tasted really good, and rolls. There may have been some other things, but I didn't venture out and try them. I was also, weirdly, one of the few people who went for seconds. Anyways, here was the first helping. On second round I went back and tried the chicken with gravy. But I forgot to take a picture of it.

Breakfast only

It's like I only remember to take pictures of my breakfasts. At any rate, I don't know if I will have time to eat lunch today, so I sort of bulked up on breakfast. Plus I'm super stressed out still from grad school starting, and my body is all messed up - inside and out - so I felt like I needed some fuel. And I can never make a decision between cream cheese and peanut butter on an english muffin, so I just have both. I also had a Yoplait peach yogurt and 2 cups of that coffee you see there.

Back on Breakfast

My love affair with cereal has recommenced after about 15 years of not being able to drink milk. Science prevailed and gave me Lactaid, and so I enjoy breakfasts like the one below. Kashi Autumn Wheat cereal with blueberries and flax seed. I also had a cup of tea to go with it. Hopefully later on when I go to the movies I don't eat anything too ridiculously calorie ladden. But I'll probably end up eating nachos or something. C'est la vie.

Again with the salmon

So I kind of ate a late night snack last night of Trader Joe's cheese puffs, and my stomach wasn't very happy with me this morning. So I only had a cup of coffee for breakfast and am just getting around to eating lunch. I just wasn't very hungry. At any rate, I walked with some coworkers to Whole foods and made myself my go to salad which consists of mixed greens, green onions, peas, tofu, shredded carrots, and sunflower seeds. I also bought a piece of grilled salmon to go with it. I know I had salmon last night for dinner, but a little fish never hurt anyone.