Adventures in cooking and baking.
These vanilla cookies with fudge filling are an easy to make tasty dessert. Take them to your next cookie exchange and they will be the hit of the party.
You can also make these cookies to keep for snacking at home or for an after-school treat. Vanilla and chocolate are an all-time favorite flavor combination that just about everyone loves. Pair these with peppermint sandwich cookies or custard cream sandwich cookies for serving at gatherings.
Aloo Paratha is a flaky Indian flatbread (paratha) stuffed with spicy potatoes (aloo). It's a wonderful breakfast bread that you can buy at roadside stands and eateries along northern Indian highways.
Aloo paratha are also made in Indian households as part of a hearty Punjabi-style breakfast.
Tossing together seared strips of summer squash, including zucchini and yellow squash, with a creamy and cheesy sauce and fettuccine is an easy and quick way to put together a wonderful pasta dish.
This pasta dish is so easy! You don't need a lot of pans either. You just combine some grilled zucchini and summer squash with freshly cooked fettucchine with Parmigiano-Regiano, heavy cream, and garlic, plus a little salt and pepper. Top it with a little Italian parsley and you have an amazing pasta dish.
This Pompe Á L'Huile, an olive oil brioche, is a soft and fluffy orange scented bread. It's a traditional Christmas bread from Provence, but it's so good that there's no reason you can't enjoy this any time of year.
This month, the Bread Baking Babes are making an olive oil brioche. Pompe Á L'Huile actually means "oil pump." It got its name from when olive oil producers in Provence would add flour to their oil vats at the end of the season to absorb the last of the olive oil. They then took the oiled flour to the community baker, who would create a version of this bread.
These Wicked Witch Cones are a fun project you can do with kids. I should probably put the word wicked in quotes because these cones don't look at all wicked to me!
I made these wicked witch cones with ice cream, so it took a little while to make these because I had to keep returning them to the freezer to keep them from melting. I guess I could have made "melting witch" cones!
Plov is a meaty rice dish that is considered the national dish of Uzbekistan. It is typically made with rice, onions, garlic, carrots, and either lamb or beef.
As is the tradition, this pilaf dish is made in layers, beginning with the meat, the onions, the carrots, and finally the rice. I made this Uzbek rice with beef, but lamb would be delicious too. It's sometimes made in large quantities for gatherings. If you are curious, there is a photo on Wikipedia of a huge vat of Plov being prepared.
This Mini Chocolate Almond Babka is made with an enriched brioche dough and is filled with swirls of chocolate and almonds.
This little babka is made with just one cup of flour and baked in a mini loaf pan. I love it because enriched doughs, especially ones with butter, tend to not last as long as leaner doughs (ones with just flour, water, salt, and yeast). There are just two of us, and only so much room in our freezer. Making a mini version of a babka is great solution.
