Mini Oreo Cheesecakes

I am unabashedly fond of Oreos. I love them. And they love me. And they are particularly good as the crusts of these mini cheesecakes. If this recipe sounds somewhat similar to another I posted on this blog... it is. These are even better than I remember. And easier than I remember. Holla at easy and delicious cheese cake!

Mini Cheese Cakes
Adapted from Martha Stewart's Cupcakes.

Here's what you need:

2 lbs cream cheese (I used two packages of Philadelphia and two store brand)

1 C sugar

4 eggs at room temp, lightly whisked

1 C sour cream 

1 t vanilla

1 dash of salt

2 Packages of Oreos. Crush up about 12 Oreos, use 36 more as crusts, and then you still have left overs to dip in milk after all the cheesecakes are gone. 

Here's what you do:

Preheat your oven to 275. Put paper cups in your cupcake pan. Pop an Oreo in the bottom of each.

Mix up the cream cheese for a few minutes and then add the sugar. Scrape the sides of the bowl and add the sour cream, then the eggs and vanilla. Toss in your dash of salt. Then hand stir in the crushed up Oreos. I like some bigger chunks in my cakes, so I just chopped them coarsely.

Bake for 22 minutes, then let them cool on a wire rack. Then put the whole pan in the fridge for four hours. They're worth the wait.

Homemade Vanilla Ice Cream

So while Nicole and I were making the strawberry jam and the biscuits, I mentioned that the jam is also really good on homemade vanilla ice cream as a topping. So we then we had to make vanilla ice cream. We sort of followed our own "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" gustatory logic for the whole evening. It was delicious. We opted to try a new recipe we found online, and decided to add vanilla bean, since I had some on hand. Here's what we ended up with. If you have an ice cream maker in your cabinet somewhere, you should pull it out and give this recipe a try.

Vanilla Ice Cream

Here's What You Need
4 Cups of Half & Half
1 Can of Sweetened Condensed Milk
2 Tablespoons of Vanilla
1/2 Vanilla Bean, seeds scraped out (optional)

Here's What You Do
1. Mix Sweetened Condensed Milk and Half & Half. Mix in Vanilla. If you're adding the scraped out vanilla bean, do that too.
2. Pour into your ice cream maker (I have this one with a cold bowl)
3. Turn on.
4. Enjoy with homemade strawberry jam or the toppings of your dreams.

Freezer Jam

New Kitchen! New cozy town house! New recipes and blog posts! The beloved Kitchenaid mixer is on the counter in its designated spot and biscuits have been made, along with strawberry freezer jam and home made vanilla bean ice cream. I forgot to take pictures of the biscuits, which were phenomenal by the way, so we'll get the blog party started with the amazing strawberry jam my friend Nicole and I made yesterday.

Little Jars of Strawberry Freezer Jam

Doesn't it look great? Strawberries are ripe and delicious out here in the bay area, and on sale at the farmer's market. I picked up a huge flat of berries (enough to make four (or more?) batches of jam) for about $10, and strong-armed my friend Nicole into making jam with me. It's easy, but it's so much more fun to do it with a friend. 

Prepping the Berries: Washing and Stemming

We washed and stemmed the strawberries, gave them a rough chop and threw them in the food processor. For one batch of jam, you need two cups of pureed strawberries, which I think is about one medium package of whole berries.

Stemmed Berries

The Big Red Box of Berries. 12 Dry Pints for $10.

Hot and Clean Jars Drying on the Counter

Strawberry Freezer Jam 

(Recipe adapted from Sure Jell Box Recipe)

Here's What You Need:

2 Cups Pureed Strawberries (You can use a blender or a food processor)

4 Cups Sugar

1 Package Sure Jell Pectin (Regular)

3/4 Cup Water

6 8-oz. Mason Jars

Pouring the Jam into the Jars (Photo by Nicole)

Here's What You Do:

1. Prep the berries: Wash, Stem, Chop, Puree. Measure out exactly two cups of puree into a medium-large bowl. 

2. Mix in the sugar. (I do it by hand.) Stir until sugar is incorporated, and then let stand for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

3. Bring pectin and water to a boil, stirring constantly. Boil for one minute, then remove from heat. 

4. After sugar/berry mixture has had 10 minutes to cure, add the pectin water. Stir for about 3 minutes until all the sugar is dissolved and it basically looks like runny jam. 

5. Pour into your mason jars. Make sure to leave about 1/2" at the top for the jam to expand in the freezer.

Voila! The whole process takes about 30 minutes, and you have freezer jam for the rest of the year. 

This jam is perfect on biscuits & toasts, or in homemade strawberry ice cream, or drizzled on top of vanilla ice cream for a delicious extra treat.

the great move

The great move is happening this weekend, which means: I've packed my lovely kitchenaid mixer and can't cook anything until Saturday at the very earliest. Let's be honest. It means I can't cook anything for at least a week. And just because my brain is mean and twisted, I am really hankering for homemade buttermilk biscuits. For no explicable reason, I really want to make them. I've never tried them before even! Why do I all of a sudden want to bake them? Who knows. But I'm prolonging the torture by searching for recipes and looking at delicious pictures. Anyone have a recipe they like?

k.

Yellow Cake

My friend jokingly said she'd trade puppy-sitting over the weekend for cupcakes. I agreed before she'd even finished her sentence because 1) I love making cupcakes; and 2) Brownie needs a play date this weekend while Lito and I are in Napa.  She requested Yellow and Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Buttercream. Done and done.

Meanwhile on the other side of the universe, a friend asked me for a recipe for Yellow Cake. Sort of. So I'm stretching this into an opportunity to share an awesome recipe for Yellow Cake and to show off pictures of hot pink butter cream. Yum!

Yellow Cake 
Recipe Adapted from Smitten Kitchen (Her blog is 100% better/fancier/cooler than mine)

Here's What You Need:

4 cups cake flour (I use the kind in the pink box, because it comes in a pink box)
2 rounded teaspoons of baking powder
1.5 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks of butter
2 cups of sugar!! [sorry I left this out! how could I forget!]
1 tablespoon vanilla
4 eggs
2 cups buttermilk

Here's What You Do:


1. Set the oven at 350 & get your pans ready. (I pretty much always use the foil, paper-lined cupcake cups)
2. Sift all the dry ingredients in a bowl.
3. In your stand mixer, whip up the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Then add the vanilla. Then add the eggs. Then add the buttermilk. Do not freak out. The batter will look...curdled is the best word for it.

4. Add the flour mixture in small batches to the liquid mixture until everything is mixed together.
5. Scoop the batter into your cupcake pans (I use a spring-loaded ice cream scooper). Bake for 17 minutes.

 6. Nom.

Cafe Rio Style Pork Salad

Yay! Okay! Pork Salad! It's Delicious!

I found this recipe online -- you can google Cafe Rio Pork Salad and this is pretty much what you'll find. My photos of it turned out to be particularly bad, so I'm stealing this one from Favorite Family Recipes...via google. Sorry for the lack of recent photography, kids. But seriously, I think successfully photographing pork is something I can postpone until later. Right? Right.

So, here's how Kristen makes a Cafe Rio Pork Salad.  

#1. Cilantro lime rice. You can be fancy and make it from scratch OR you can purchase this box from Target, put everything in the box into your rice cooker, and 20 minutes later (it's like magic) you have cilantro lime rice. Here's the thing: If it's going at the bottom of a salad with the pork & sauce and the tomatillo dressing, it could taste like gravel and the salad would still be delicious. 

#2. Black beans with cilantro and tomatoes. Recipe forthcoming. It's easy and delish. Or if you're in a crunch, just buy a can of BLACK refried beans, because they are also easy and delish.

#3. Cilantro Lime Ranch Dressing. This stuff is ridiculously good. (Recipe & Instructions Below)

#4. Lettuce. Get some. (also get cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and salsa and chips. also get some friends because this makes enough to feed about 5 people.)

#5. The Delicious Pork. 

Okay, here are the recipes:

Cilantro Lime Ranch Dressing

Here's What You Need:

1 C Buttermilk

1 C Mayonnaise (I use the olive oil kind, because it makes me feel better)

1 Package of Original Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing/Seasoning

2 Tomatillos, pealed & quartered

1 Clove of Garlic

1/2 Bunch of Cilantro

Juice from 1 lime

Here's What you Do:

Put it all in the blender. Turn the blender on. Transfer into pretty container. Or don't. You pick. 

SuperDelicious Pork

Here's What You Need:

Roughly 2 lbs of Pork (I used a packaged pork tenderloin -- I've read that other people use boneless ribs or other cuts. I honestly don't really know the difference. I'm new to cooking meat.)

3-4 Cans of Coca Cola 

1 1/4 C of Brown Sugar, separated

1 T Garlic Salt

1/4 C of Water

1 Can of Red Enchilada Sauce (I use Target's Archer Farms Brand)

1 Small Can of Chopped Green Chiles

A Crock Pot 

Here's What You Do:

1. You put the pork in a plastic bag. Pour in 1&1/2 cans of coke and 1/4 C brown sugar. Marinate overnight, or three-ish hours. I've done it in three hours and it was just fine.

2. Drain the pork, then put the meat into your crock pot. Sprinkle with garlic salt. Add another can of coke and 1/4 cup of water, and cook on high for about 3 hours. Longer is fine (great if you have, say a three hour engagement on Sunday) but you don't want it to get too dry. 

3. While the pork is cooking, put the green chiles, enchilada sauce, 1 C brown sugar, and another 1/2 can of coke into your blender or food processor and give it a whirl. After the pork is done, drain it and shred it, put it back in the crock pot (if you took it out), and then pour the sauce over the top. Cook on low for an additional 2 hours.

4. Create the salad of your dreams! Enjoy! 

Spinach: The Green Monster Smoothie

I was standing at my blender, literally thinking: This is the grossest thing I have ever made. I can’t believe people are getting away with hawking this on Pinterest like it’s some kind of dietary miracle.

I’m a skeptical person by nature, and when I see/read/hear something (pinterest-ed or not), that seems too good to be true, well I typically choose to believe that it’s just not true and move on. But for some reason food-related truths and half-truths are really bugging me right now. I feel like I’m on a crusade to debunk every pin that claims that this DELICIOUS food is also NO CALORIES and if you click on my blog and then make the hidden recipe, you will then magically be TRANSFORMED INTO A SUPERMODEL. And that is how I ended up blending a banana and four cups of spinach.

[Note: This is not my photo. I'll take one later and post it so you know I'm telling the truth.  You can find this image/blog by google searching "green monster smoothie"]

Dubious Pin: The Green Monster Smoothie (if you have a pinterest account, you’ve seen this floating around). 

Dubious Recipe Instructions: Add Spinach to your favorite smoothie and you can’t taste it even though it looks like Vom.

Back to me standing in front of my blender, salivating with delight at the thought of writing a full blown rant on how wrong everyone is. Pan out: I stop the blender, drop a straw into the blender cup (I’m not getting a glass dirty for this), and tentatively take a sip.

You can see where this is going. It actually doesn’t suck. The spinach smoothie actually doesn’t taste..bad…it’s kind of good?...it’s…good. Damn. Hot damn this is actually good. My quest was totally derailed, and I have happened upon a way to eat four cups of spinach almost painlessly. Transition shot to me happily jumping on the bandwagon.

Here’s the way I made spinach not taste like spinach. I haven’t tried all the other ways, but I probably will because let’s face it, I’m not really good at eating my greens and this seems sort of miraculous.

Spinach Smoothie

Here’s what you need:

1 banana, peeled, cut, and frozen

1 generous tablespoon of creamy peanut butter

½ Cup of 0% Greek Yogurt

1 Cup of Vanilla Soy Milk

4 Freaking Cups of Spinach (or less, if that much doesn’t fit in the blender after everything else is in).

Here’s what you do:

You can see where this is going, right. I put all the ingredients, in the order listed, in the blender and: Blend. After that you can email me and we can exclaim some more about how crazy this is. Crazy because it’s super high in Vitamin A, Iron, and Protein: All things that I’m pretty sure you need for survival. The moral of the story: if you have a blender, your survival is assured; or: maybe don’t hate on every recipe that’s “good for you.”

Here are the deets: