For the Love of Food

So, I am back, kind of. I finally have a tiny bit of time to share with my blog, and I really want to address this contest.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who participated! And, thank you for your patience for waiting until now for my answer. It has been a rough last 3 weeks - I have a cold again - but I am back to my blog until Thursday when I go on vacation to Ireland! I am very excited!

So…before I tell you who the winner is, I’d like to tell you what I thought about all 39 suggestions that came in: Continue Reading »

To All My Readers:
This is a long over due explanation: I will explain in more detail bellow, but first - Taste&Create for September is a bit late, but Min from The Bad Girl’s Kitchen will be helping me with Taste&Create in October, so please send her your October requests for Taste&Create.
So, this may turn out to be a long story… Continue Reading »

Hi Everyone,

Sorry for my disappearance from the blog world - especially to my Taste&Create people.  I have been cut off from the digital world for the past few days.  I will be back soon.  To those who signed up for Taste&Create for September, I am very sorry for the delay.  I will try to get a partner list out to you asap (maybe in a day or two) - more explanation (with photos) will follow too

Happy cold September from Germany.

-Nicole

The heart made of little bubbles truly formed on its own!

I don’t know if I ever mentioned in any of my posts from my trip to DC in August, but the friends we visited had so many unread and unwanted Bon Appetit magazines that they offered them to me when they so how giddy I got at the site of so much food porn.

I went through about 3 years worth of magazines over a 10 day period and tore out anything that interested me. I have started putting pages in sleeves at home and into folders ordered by season. I mean..there’s no need to look for summer recipes in the dead of winter when I won’t be able to find half the ingredients…

I have already started trying some recipes, and, so far, I am quite pleased.

This recipe for Aqua Pearl comes from the Bon Appetit issue of May 2006. This is what inspired me to make this, currently, unnamed drink.

Since I like drinking blue drinks, my husband was kind enough to add a little extra blue curacao - hence the blue at the bottom.

Continue Reading »

Way back in January I planted all my tomatoes, chilies, and tomatillos indoors so that they would be ready in May for planting.

Not many believed that I would succeed, but after seeing what I have harvested this year…there are no more disbelievers. It’s been a good year as a gardener and harvester of my small garden plot.

I decided to go with a sort-of square-foot gardening technique. I got a lot of questions and raised eyebrows. But, in the end, I was the only one with over 30 successful tomato plants and over 15 chili plants.

All of a sudden one day, everything needed to be harvested - it was all ripe - and we were all going on a trip to the US. We weren’t about to leave 4 lbs of tomatoes, 8 lbs of tomatillos (from 2 plants!!!), and 30 jalapeños to go to waste. Not when we could can them!

So, we got canning.

I had never made tomatillos salsa until this day. But, I found a recipe I was comfortable with (I was trying to find something that seemed like it would taste most like Freebird’s World Burrito’s Tomatillo Sauce) and I did!

Something else I learned from my first tomatillo plants: tomatillos can grown to be as large as a medium-sized tomato and are nice and citrusy, sweet, and tangy. Who would have known that my tomatillos would be so much better and oh so different than those I bought in a grocery store in Texas and harvested the seeds from.

This sauce is oh so very easy to make and tastes great weather you eat it all right away or can it and eat it later. The canning does take away most of the taste of the lime juice - so adding a squeeze of fresh lime juice before serving as a salsa would do it some good.

Also, since we grew our own jalapeños in Germany (which doesn’t have as many intensely hot and sunny days as Texas - heat makes chilies hotter!), when we seeded them for the salsa, we had a completely mild sauce - no spiciness what so ever. So, if your jalapeños come from a more mild climate and you want it a bit spicier, I highly suggest just leaving the seeds in.

without further adieu: Continue Reading »

This is a really fabulously easy and great tasting recipe to make any night of the week. And, it goes great with the Citrus Salted Fish I posted yesterday. Continue Reading »

When we were in the US in August we had some salmon that the friends we were staying with made. It was nice and fresh, citrusy, and perfectly salted. What had they done??

I kept inquiring about how they made it and I slowly got more details. They casually mentioned that it only had some lemon juice, olive oil, and that was it. Then, after I asked about why it tasted like piece of lemon peel on top of the fish, it was revealed that they use a seasoned salt as well. But, what seasoned salt is not packed with a gagillion different spices?? What which one of them has grated lemon peel in it??

After further inquiry, this is what I found: Continue Reading »

I am a very visual eater/drinker.

I like pretty food…as do most of you. And, I will rarely try a recipe I have never seen a picture of before - unless it’s been served to me and I know the exact final product.

So, when I told my husband that I loved blue drinks, he came up with the perfect tropical-looking drink for me. It looks like the ocean, a swimming pool, a blue sky, Spring, an Summer all at once. Although the floating crushed ice in it reminds me of floating icebergs (and the Titanic), it reminds me more of lapping waves in a tropical coral reef (yes…Fall is beginning and my mind needs to travel to a sunny tropical location).

This is a very simple drink - two ingredients - 3 if you count the ice.

But, it has no name. I couldn’t find an exact recipe online, but I didn’t scour the inernets for hours looking either. If the drink already exists in the exact recipe bellow - who cares, we will have fun anyways.

So, on to the CONTEST: I would like some help naming this drink.

What you need to do: Leave a comment bellow with a drink name by Sunday, September 14th. Continue Reading »

Some of you may remember these delicious chicken wings I made back in April of this year:

I used a dry rub that I came across for ribs on the chicken wings, and they were fabulous - with or without the added BBQ sauce at the end.

Well, this time I was in the mood for some of the spicy wings that I like to make with just some sambal ölek past and butter, so I thought I’d try a combination of the two.

They were a really big hit. Sweet and spicy - and not too much of either. Just right. Continue Reading »

The other day I happened upon a blog post about “TCHO Beta Stuffed Cookies” - chocolate chip cookies with a sort of of chocolate filling sandwiched in between. They looked really good.

The cookie recipe was pretty simple, and the batch looked like it would be small so I wouldn’t be eating a large batch of cookies in one or two days. You know…it’s just so hard with them sitting their calling your name and saying “eat me…eat me”.

I did tweak the recipe a bit by changing out some of the ingredients and adding walnut - I LOVE walnuts in cookies. But, this time I think they may have slowed the baking process of the center of the cookies. Next time, and oh yes there will be many more next times, I will try it without walnuts to see if it helps.

As some of your may know, I have not been able to eat sugar (table sugar or dextrose) in the past - it’s a long story, and if you want to know, email me and I’ll be happy to tell it again. Anyways, I am now breastfeeding much less than before and I seem to be able to handle sugar in small quantities. The first time I realized this I thought I was “cured” and got so excited I made chocolate chip cookies with real chocolate chips, fructose (no table sugar on hand), and brown sugar. Brown sugar is still a really big no-no and caused quite a bit of pain. So, this time I decided to go with all my usual substitutions, but use the real chocolate chips instead of the malt-sweetened ones that I bring over from the US.

I wouldn’t say that the sugar in the chocolate chips has no effect on me - there is some pain. But, nothing like before. And, definitely tolerable every once in a while. And, definitely worth using in these delicious cookies. The batter was very light and fluffy, but it made a nice moist cookie. I will never make Nestel Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies again. This is my new chocolate chip cookie!

The original recipe can be found here. This is my version: Continue Reading »