Month: November 2018

pasta e fagioli soup

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I hope everyone had a great, fun-filled Thanksgiving. If you’re anything like my family, you ate and then ate some more! And now you need to detox from all the eating. Look no further. This hearty soup is the cure. (Don’t ask me how eating more food cures holiday overeating, but in my humble opinion, soup cures pretty much everything.) One of my foodie co-workers introduced me to this soup, and I am so grateful he did. Now it’s hard for me to imagine my life without this dish in it. It’s so good with its medley of flavorful herbs, beans, pasta, and last, but not least, cheese!

There are a couple things to note with this soup. One, do not, I repeat, do not add the pasta until right before you are ready to serve the soup. In fact, you may want to add the pasta to the individual bowls right before serving. The ditalini pasta will absorb the liquid and become soggy. And two, my foodie co-worker suggested substituting Italian sausage for the ground beef, which I am going to try next time I make this. I used ground beef because I already had some on hand, but I think the Italian sausage would turn a delicious soup into an out-of-this-world, where-have-you-been-all-my-life kind of soup. But really, whichever kind of meat you go with, you can’t lose making this dish. Buon appetito!

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pumpkin spice bundt cake with buttermilk icing

Lauren5 Comments

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With Thanksgiving less than one week away, I hope everyone has their Thanksgiving menus planned and their stretchy pants ready! I am not hosting this year, and after hosting last year’s Thanksgiving, I doubt anyone will complain! Last year was Justin and my first attempt at making a turkey. Before the big day arrived, I asked all the cooks in my life how I should cook the bird, and much to my chagrin, everyone had a different strategy, many of which even conflicted!

You should baste the bird.

Oh, don’t baste the bird. It’ll dry the bird out. 

Cook the bird in a bag. It will be so moist. 

Never cook the bird in a bag. The bag will melt. 

Don’t truss the turkey. Just roast it.

Put it in the crockpot. 

Really the only thing that everyone could agree on is that some kind of stock (whether it be beef or chicken) is needed, as well as some kind of vegetable. We ended up using chicken stock and adding onions, carrots, and celery to the middle of our turkey, who we named Bertha incidentally. Justin was in charge of the bird. and well, being rather intimidated of the bird myself (and being not at all helpful in this instance), I was delegated to the side dishes (thankfully). Our cooking session started off so well—after a few hours, the thermometer said that the turkey was done, and all the side dishes weren’t far behind. But when we sliced up the turkey, the middle was bright red. Argh! So we put the turkey back in the oven, and as it has become our custom, we served our guests the holiday meal a couple hours late. Needless to say, we have not mastered the turkey yet. But I can say with great confidence, we have mastered this pumpkin dessert.

This pumpkin spice bundt cake has that delightful cinnamon allspice goodness paired with the sweet slightly crunchy buttermilk icing.  And if you’re not a fan of  Starbuck’s pumpkin spice latte, have no fear; this cake doesn’t taste like that at all. As one of my co-workers put it, the cake tastes “more authentic.” You can make this ahead of time as it keeps for three days. And it will be a great addition to your Thanksgiving feast.

As for the bundt pan, the pan itself was easy to use. My brother bought me this bundt pan for my birthday this year, and this was my first attempt using it, to great success.  With bundt pans, they recommend you wipe them down generously with butter and flour instead of spraying them with oil as it’s hard to evenly coat all the nooks and crannies of a decorative bundt pan.

Regardless how you make your turkey this year or which desserts you choose to serve, I hope you all have a safe and wonderful Thanksgiving! Gobble Gobble!

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pumpkin cheesecake bars with streusel

Lauren1 Comment

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Justin and I went to our good friends’ wedding this weekend in Lawrence, Kansas. Our friends are Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones fans so they decided to have elements from both series in their wedding much to our delight! For example, when it was time to exchange wedding bands, the groom relinquished The Ring to Rule Them All he was wearing by tossing it into a mini fuming paper mache-looking volcano two groomsmen brought out just for the occasion. And as is the wedding tradition in Game of Thrones, the groom draped his bride in a necklace and a fur cloth bringing her under his protection.  Instead of a unity candle, the couple mixed two different types of wine they had made themselves, and at the end of the ceremony, the couple got on horses and rode off into the sunset, or perhaps in this case, the parking lot. Later on in the evening, they had a wooden catapult robot made to launch the bride’s garter for the garter toss. Needless to say it was a cool wedding. The wedding was also a mini college reunion for me, as many of my college friends and their spouses and members of the fraternity house I used to frequent were there.

It was a little surreal being back in my college town after eleven years. I was astounded to see what had changed since I’d been there. Restaurants that were new when I had lived there had since gone out of business. Old staples of the town had been replaced by new trendy stores and coffee houses. Sometimes I wish I could bottle up places and people in a time capsule so that I could revisit them periodically for nostalgia’s sake. But I recognize that most of the change is for the better. Other places around Lawrence looked completely unchanged like much of the campus itself. And downtown, I saw many familiar faces of people from my past—one girl had lived on my floor in the dorms, and I ran into the man who was the assistant orchestra conductor in the short stent that I was a music major.

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Well, you can’t turn back time, but you can make this delicious multi-layered cheesecake. I took it to work, and within an hour, it was gone. The bottom layer is homemade graham crack crust, the middle layers are made up of the regular and pumpkin cheesecake, and the top is the crunchy cinnamon streusel. It’s an impressive dessert, and if you are inclined to share it with others, it travels well. I feel like you can’t go wrong with cheesecake, ever, but this version is especially good. Before you begin to combine the ingredients, keep in mind the cream cheese needs to be at room temperature and that takes a full hour. And then once out of the oven, the cheesecake needs a couple hours to set. Enjoy!

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