Happy new year! I cannot BELIEVE it is 2013. Don’t you feel like the year 2013 belongs in some cheesy sci-fi movie? On a related note, when I was in first grade my teacher promised we’d have flying cars by now…so…where is my flying car? If I can’t have a flying car, how about some teleportation? Dear 2013, I’m getting impatient for some badass transportation options. Get on that.
Futuristic transportation would have come in handy this weekend, when the boy and I traveled a couple of hours north to ring in 2013 with some friends. We rented a cabin on a lake and spent 3 days lounging, playing Mario Kart, and challenging each other in card games. ‘Twas quite lazily lovely.
The weekend also included a hefty amount of delicious food, as any legit cabin weekend must. We took turns cooking meals for each other, and for our turn we made two pans of lasagna (THE make-ahead-and-feed-a-group food). As the boy scoured the internet for the best meaty, tomato-based recipe, I went down a different route. Being the only vegetarian in the group, I didn’t want to present my cabin mates with a dish that would just be seen as a lowly vegetarian version of the meat lasagna, which would be unappealing to the meat eaters. I wanted to make a lasagna people would actually want to eat.
Enter cheese sauce. I’ve made no secret of my love for cheese sauces. I believe a good cheese sauce can dissolve arguments, make friends of enemies, and bring world peace. If I want to win people over, I make a cheese sauce. I’m categorizing this cheese sauce as an “Alfredo” because it’s thicker, richer, and even cheesier than other sauces I’ve made. After I assembled the lasagna, I literally used a spatula to scoop out the remaining sauce from the corners of the pan. I’m not proud of this, but I licked the alfredo off of that spatula like it was cream cheese frosting.
Although I like my cheese sauce straight from the pan, it’s even better with some veggies and pasta mixed in. Spinach and cheese sauce go together like New Year’s and champagne: they’re great apart, but together they become so much more exciting. The buttery sautéed spinach brings even more richness to the layers of pasta, while the mushrooms add depth, without overpowering the dish or scaring away any mushroom-averse eaters.
The boy’s recipe, pictured above (aptly named, “Worlds Best Lasagna“) weighed about 10 pounds, and had a completely different lasagna flavor than my alfredo version. My meat-eating cabin friends ate a mix of vegetarian and meaty slices that night, and complimented both between bites. Although each of our pans supposedly served 12, the 12 of us nearly went through 24 servings in one night. Draw your own conclusions.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not someone who simply looks forward to Christmas. Nope, I allow Christmas to color my whole world for an entire month. The anticipation, the sparkly things, the music, the food, the MAGIC – I eat all that right up. Yes, I’m that girl, and you probably hate me.
Like a little kid, I could barely sleep on the eve of Christmas Eve this year. I knew the boy and I would wake up and kick off our Christmas festivities with a cinnamon-swirl french toast breakfast, Bailey’s-spiked coffee, and the big reveal of whatever that mysterious box in the office held for me (note: in that order, but reversed – I have no patience).
I had my suspicions/hopes/dreams about that box, but those didn’t stop me from being knee-slapping, perma-smile, angels-singing happy when I saw the beautiful Kitchen Aid logo beneath the ripped wrapping paper.
The boy gave me the kitchen appliance to change all future kitchen experiences. Life would be different from now on. Life would be better from now on.
After using my new mixer to whisk up the french toast batter, I knew I needed more mixer bonding time before heading over to my parents’ house. My mixer obsession collided with my new-found biscuit obsession, and magical things happened. I usually try to healthify my carbs, but these were Christmas biscuits, and you just don’t mess with Christmas. So in honor of the season I set the whole wheat flour aside, made some fatty fatty Christmas biscuits, and did not look back.
I realize the irony that I chose biscuits, since you can technically make biscuits with no mixer at all, but let’s not scrutinize petty details. Instead, let’s talk about how easy drop biscuits are. Like other biscuits, there’s no rise time, but you also don’t need to roll out the dough, or cut out the biscuits. You really just mix and DROP. Bam, biscuit deliciousness.
The flaky, buttery biscuits have a nice dose of smoky-yet-sweet paprika, and tangy goat cheese bits throughout. Although I love whole wheat carbs, the all-purpose flour really gives these a lightness that makes them melt in your mouth. They’re the perfect side for a special dinner. Take Christmas, for instance.
Let’s talk about what happens around Christmas. Namely, let’s talk about how sugar is EVERYWHERE. Cookies, truffles, and Bailey’s-spiked cocktails line tables at Christmas parties. Families get together to make traditional goodies while licking fingerfuls of frosting. Coworkers bring treats into the office to spread the holiday cheer (guilty…).
With sugar sprinkling its love all over the place, ’tis the season to add a bit of sweetness to every meal. For instance, my dinner on Saturday consisted of tortilla chips, cashews, and frosted sugar cookies. Yesterday my planned breakfast of oatmeal sat rejected next to the large caramel roll my boss brought in for me, and today I started my day off with this magical coffee cake.
I love that coffee cake’s name even implies that it belongs at breakfast. When do you drink coffee? In the morning. When do you eat coffee cake? In the morning. Logic.
This cake brings together some of my favorite breakfast foods: banana, peanut butter, and, well, cake. Banana and peanut butter play off each other perfectly while keeping the cake moist, the cinnamon and brown sugar filling add just enough sugar and spice, and the walnuts add a bit of crunch. Totally legit breakfast.
During a high school parent-teacher conference, my science teacher decided to be straight with my folks. He said, “Katie is always on time to class. She asks for help. I can tell she does her homework. Honestly, with this stuff, some people just get it, while others don’t.” You can guess which side I fell on. Sure, sometimes in chemistry class the flame would change a different color when on a different type of substance. Cool. I had no idea why, but I appreciated the color change.
As you may have guessed, I was more of an English and Art kind of girl in high school, and still am. When my friend George and I partnered for a bridge building Physics project senior year, our teacher literally came up to us and said, “Don’t forget that you can earn quite a few points for aesthetics. You don’t have to focus on trying to make your bridge hold a lot of weight. Just something to consider…”
Fast forward several years, and I can honestly say that science never enters my ridiculously random stream of thoughts. Or it usually doesn’t, unless I’m trying to make bread. The process of bread, with the yeast interactions and the rising and the kneading and the waiting…is downright intimidating, not to mention time-consuming. Usually I just opt for some no-knead flatbread. Low-labor, not confusing, and relatively quick; that’s my style.
Fortunately I found myself with lots of time and little to do on Sunday, when Minnesota was hit with the first big snowstorm of the season. During the lovely day of hibernation, I decided to give sliced bread a go for the first time ever. The result was a hearty early-evening snack of thick-sliced bread with butter and honey. What’s cozier than that?
The peanut butter and chocolate combo has been my go-to, gotta-have-it dessert since childhood. After every dentist trip my mom would take my brother, sister and I out for ice cream (let’s glaze over this questionable order of events for the time being) and all three of us would get a tower of chocolate ice cream covered in peanut butter and fudge sauce. It was heaven. While we enjoyed the simple pleasure of being kids stuffing our faces with cold, smooth, drippy sugar, my mom would be silently-yet-sweetly disapproving of our ice cream choices.
Whenever my siblings or I grab a chocolate and peanut butter dessert, we can always count on mom to voice her opinion. “Bleh,” she’ll say with a fake gag, “Peanut butter is not supposed to be in sweet things. It’s just wrong. You know what else is wrong? Cheesecake. I mean CHEESE in a CAKE?…” The woman can go on for hours.
I know. It feels so wrong to even read those harsh words. That’s because those words are wrong.
Don’t even get me started on the cheesecake comment, we’ll have to get to that at another time. For now, we need to talk about how my peanut butter chocolate obsession escalated to an unusual level recently. After the Thanksgiving weekend food-fest, I felt tired, cranky, and sugar-obsessed, so I did a “cleanse” (of sorts) for a week. To be clear, it was not the kind of cleanse where you just eat grapefruit and drink lemonade (heavens, heavens no), but the kind where you try to eat meals with actual nutrients, avoid drinking [too much] wine, and not follow up every bite of food with a dessert.
This went really well for 4 days. Then Thursday night came, and I literally dreamed of cupcakes. I woke up Friday feeling fine, apart from feeling awkwardly crazy for dreaming about cupcakes. Later that day, my coworker mentioned her craving for cake…aaaaand BOOM, I needed sweets. I needed sweets so bad that I made the boy go on a cupcake mission with me Friday night. I needed sweets so bad that I went to brunch with my family on Saturday and ate baklava, raspberry pastry, and a caramel roll for breakfast. I needed sweets so bad that, well, these brownies happened.
I ignored the fact that my sweet craving was specific; I wanted peanut butter and chocolate, but I figured any dessert would do in a pinch. Rookie mistake. On Friday, no peanut butter and chocolate cupcakes were to be found, so I had to settle for a salted caramel cupcake (woe is me, I know). On Saturday, there were no peanut butter goodies at brunch. By Sunday things were serious, and I knew I couldn’t count on dumb luck to get me through, so I rolled out of bed and made things happen. Delicious things.
These brownies have a strong, wonderful presence. They’re unapologetically big and thick, sweet-yet-salty, with a nice crunch of pretzels that cradle that lovely brownie balance of dark chocolate and peanut butter. To summarize, they were everything I needed them to be.
