For the Love of Food

I have been absent – on and off – for quite a while now. I think it may be a year since I’ve been “neglecting” my blog.

We have had a rough ride with life over the past year, but I have not let it stop me from cooking or from photographing my dishes.

I think it’s time to start rolling them out. Now, I can’t make any promises – I have a 3.5 and an almost 1 year old at home – things can get hectic and some evenings I just collapse from exhaustion. But, my goal and wish is to share it all with you.

While living in my in-between-homes apartment (see the yellow plastic plates I had to eat off of for over 3 months), I came across a fantastic blog: Budget Bites. Now, I love meals that keep me from spending lots of money. And, I love them even more when they are recipes of traditionally expensive dishes in restaurants.

To make this recipe even better, it saves me the hassle of rolling – to the disappointment of my 3.5 year old son who loves sushi rolled.

I did change up her recipe slightly to fit our family’s needs. I wanted a dressing that even our little one could enjoy and came up with an avocado dressing that went great with this dish.

So, here’s my version: Continue Reading »

I am always on the look-out for a good stir fry. I’m also always making new attempts to find the perfect recipe that will satisfy my Asian-food cravings – often with little success, but this time I really hit the spot!

It’s very fresh and delicious and pretty simple. I surprise myself sometimes. Continue Reading »

Way way back in the beginning of the summer, when sour cherries were in season, I canned 2 batches of maraschino cherries. It was actually pretty simple. The “hardest” part was waiting until the sour cherries were in season because it only happens for 3-4 weeks a year!

To pit them, I took a paper clip, stuck it through the top and scooped out the pit. There are plenty of examples on how to do this online.

The 2 batches of cherries I made were different. One was just preserved in maraschino liquor and the other had some fructose added to it for sweetness. They were both canned in a water bath.

After waiting a few weeks, I opened them up and did a taste test. And, they are nothing like their store-bought counter parts, but are a much more gourmet version to impress your friends with. I had a lot of fun with this and hope that you can too next year when sour cherries are back in season.

Ingredients:
pitted sour cherries
enough Maraschino Liquor to cover them in a canning jar
2 teaspoons of Sugar or Fructose per 1/2 cup of cherries to be canned
jars of canning in

Directions:
place cherries, maraschino liquor, and fructose in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Boil for 3 minutes and pour into canning jar(s). Sea the jars and can in a water bath for 10 minutes. Remove from water carefully, set aside and leave undisturbed for 24 hours. Open after at least 1 week so flavors have time to set.

Enjoy in cakes, over ice cream, or in your favorite cocktails!

I dream of going back to Miami one day. But, not for the warm weather, sandy beaches, or delicious Cuban food. I dream of going back to my favorite restaurant: Shorty’s Bar-B-Q. I just salivate thinking of this place. They have the most heavenly tangy (not sweet) meaty bbq sauce and the most buttery corn I have ever eaten. My dream dish: an open-faced roast beef sandwich with a side of fries all covered in an entire jar of their bbq sauce that is served in glass parmesan cheese jars and a side of corn on the cob drenched in butter.

Next year will be my 10-year high school reunion, and even though I didn’t get to graduate from that high school because we moved to Texas, I would like to go back and see all my old friends…it’s been 11 years! So, if I do get the opportunity, this restaurant will not only be my first stop, but my second, third, fourth, and fifth…you get the point. And, i will probably bring a few jars of the good stuff home with me too!

So, in an attempt to recreate Shorty’s delicious buttery corn on the cob, I came-up with this recipe. It is a very simple recipe, but still needs a lot of tweaking before it is comparable to the butter-infused cobs that you can get at Shorty’s. Continue Reading »

At the end of last month I participated in Foodbuzz’s 24,24,24 event. Among many other dishes, we grilled a whole suckling pig. Having some meat left over, I was sent home with some leftovers. So, I took the opportunity to make some bbq pulled pork that my husband had been begging me to make for a while.

I didn’t follow a recipe, I just put in the ingredients that I felt would be right. Luckily, I measured everything out and wrote it all down so that I could share with you.

I also made a less traditional addition to the pulled pork by adding a can of some Heinz Baked Beans in tomato sauce that we had bought to try. They added some nice substance to the meat and next time I will double the amount of beans in the recipe. And, next time I will also just use navy beans instead of baked beans in tomato sauce. I found that the baked beans sauce didn’t add (or take away) from the recipe. So, since baked beans are more expensive than plain old navy beans, I will go with the cheaper alternative.

I served these over homemade buttermilk biscuits and with steamed corn. However, because bbq pulled pork is gooey and messy we ate it with a fork a nice and cut the biscuit into it as well. It was absolutely delicious! Continue Reading »

Well, this is the last Taste&Create I will be participating in until August. I am on vacation as of this Sunday when the in-laws arrive.

This month I was partnered with Temperance from High on the Hog. It was a tough decision deciding what to make. I really wanted to try to make her Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels, but knowing that my in-laws would be arriving soon and the tons of things I had (and still have to!!) accomplish before they arrive made me chose a dish that I could make as a meal.

I chose to make High on the Hog’s Chicken Frarej - a blackened chicken with lots of lemon, garlic, and potatoes. I figured it would be easy and very tasty.

I do have to say that the meal was very tasty, but only after some major tweaking.

I decided to take Temperance’s recommendation of baking a whole chicken (this would give us a meal for a few days and allow me to get more accomplished around the house). I prepared and baked it according to her directions, but after 1 hours in the oven, the chicken was quite tasteless, the potatoes still hard, the chicken was swimming in juice, and the skin not blackened. I am pretty sure this would have turned out differently had I used the chicken breasts because they are a drier meat and would have soaked up much more the the liquid and flavors of the marinade.

We were hungry, so we ate some for lunch, and since the oven was still warm, I decided to make some adjustments and put it back in for some more oven time. The changes I made were: I removed 3/4ths of the juices in the casserole dish, and added lots of pepper to the chicken. I baked it another 45 minutes and it came out fantastic.

I will definitely make this dish again, but with further adjustments. Bellow is the recipe I would use when I make this again: Continue Reading »

Many children grow-up eating cookies for dessert after dinner, but not me. I grew up eating Cuban cream cheese and guava pastries.

I left south Florida almost exactly 11 years ago. And, until yesterday I hadn’t eaten a guava pastry in almost 11 years.

Two years ago my best friend, who still lives in south Florida, sent me a care package, and in it was a block of guava paste. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to use it because it is made with sugar…and I couldn’t eat sugar until 6 months ago. Yesterday I finally had the chance to use it.

This was a very simple recipe to make, the hardest part is the wait: waiting for them to cool down so you can eat them!

This is a trial and error recipe. I found that I used twice as much guava as I should have and half as much cream cheese sauce as I should have.  Many of the ingredients and ideas came from here.  The recipe that follows is my revised version. Continue Reading »

Right before our trip to the US we canned a whole bunch of tomatoes from our garden (a post about that will follow eventually). We had a few ingredients left over that we needed to preserve since everyone else we knew was also going on vacation at the same time.

We decided to make a sort of pico de gallo. Now that it has a had a few weeks to set and soak in the flavors, we opened a jar to have with some breakfast tacos.

It was lacking in flavor. The lemon juice flavor was gone and it needs much more salt to taste. Everything also should have been diced instead of chopped. What can I say…after a whole day of canning, we were lazy.

What I did end up making was a great pre-salsa. This would be the great foundations of a salsa. I would pulse this in the food processor a few times. Then, just add some more tomato, cilantro, lime juice, salt, and some seasonings. Continue Reading »

Back in March I was asked to host another brunch at the preschool where my son attends mother’s-day-out. I came up with a simple spread that I could make ahead of time because of time constraints.

In search of a really creamy egg salad sandwich, I set to the web to see what I could find. And, while I didn’t find 1 single recipe that appealed to me, I cut and pasted many different recipes together to come up with my own. In the end, I had a perfectly cream sandwich spread that was gobbled-up in record time.

My only personal wish was that I could have added some dill relish for a slightly tangy flavor, which is how I grew-up eating egg salad. But, not having any dill pickles or relish available at the time, I left it out. Continue Reading »

About a year ago I came across a recipe for Buffalo Tempeh “Wings” on 28 cooks. Although it’s a vegan wing recipe, the texture of the final product really caught my eye and I decided to use the recipe as a base for making chicken wings.

Some thoughts…the flavors of this recipe were absolutely perfect, and the large bread crumbs* are perfect for soaking up maximum amounts of hot sauce….the largest problem I had with the recipe was, because of the use of milk instead of egg to hold the bread crumbs to the chicken, the bread crumbs all came off after pouring sauce on them. It is worth a second try with some tweaking to perfect this recipe.

*The original recipe calls for Panko bread crumbs, but after running out, I used some roughly processed homemade bread crumbs that I made from and old baguette. The breadcrumbs worked better on the chicken wings than the Panko breadcrumbs did. Continue Reading »