Macaroni and Cheese with broccoli

This one is all my own recipe, and it makes a lot, so be prepared for leftovers.
Ingredients:
6 tbsp butter
6 tbsp flour
a little less than 1/2 gallon of milk
~1 cup sour cream
a splash of half and half
2 lbs sharp cheddar cheese, cut into small pieces or shredded
2 heads of broccoli, cut into florets and chopped small
3 lbs macaroni elbows
seasoned bread crumbs

1) Fill large pot with water, heat on high. Meanwhile, melt butter in another large pot, add flour and stir.

2) Add milk, sour cream, and half and half to the pot with the butter/flour mixture. (Note: the half and half and sour cream aren't necessary, I just had a little in my fridge that needed to be used up. It's fine with just milk.) Stir, and reduce heat to medium-low.

3) By now the pot of water should be boiling. Add the macaroni in. Stir, and cook according to the package instructions. Keep stirring the milk mixture in the other pot, and try to keep it from boiling. If it starts to boil, reduce the heat to low.

4) When the milk mixture gets thick, add the cheese in and stir. Keep stirring often.

5)When the pasta is done, drain it and put it into baking dishes. Sprinkle the broccoli in with the pasta, and add sauce. Stir the sauce in. Top of with bread crumbs, and bake at 350ºF for about 20 minutes, or until the breadcrumbs are nicely browned. ( I used one big foil pan plus 8 little individual sized foil pans, and had some left over.)

This was a really tasty dinner, and it makes tons of leftovers that reheat well. Instead of baking the little pans, I let them cool and froze them. They are now homemade frozen dinners that I can pull out and bake on nights when I'm tired and don't feel like cooking, and are significantly cheaper than buying the premade frozen dinners.

Pumpkin Pie

Ok, so I stink at making pie crusts, so I just got a frozen one. I used this recipe for the filling:
http://www.rwood.com/Recipes/Pumpkin_Pie.htm
The only changes I made was that I used a Long Island Cheese Pumpkin instead of a sugar pumpkin, and I used half and half for the cream, and regular white sugar instead of the unrefined cane sugar. It came out pretty tasty, although it wound up tasting more like a custard pie and not as pumpkiny as I was expecting.
Also, I topped it off with homemade whipped cream. For this, I put a pint of heavy whipping cream in a bowl with a 1/2 cup of sugar and 2 tsps of vanilla, and I whisked it until it was thick and foamy. I started out whisking by hand, but my arm got tired, so I switched to the electric mixer, which has a whisk attachment.
The whipped cream wasn't super thick last night when I first made it, but I put it in the fridge overnight, and now it's really thick and rich. Tastes really good too.

New posts tomorrow, I promise!

I've been lazy today, and just ate leftover soup and a pb&j. I plan on making macaroni and cheese with broccoli and a pumpkin pie tomorrow, so stay tuned for the recipes.
On Tuesday, I'm going to make some kind of stir fry with red cabbage, because I have a whole head of it from my farmshare, and I don't know what else to do with it.

roasted breakfast potatoes

So I roasted these in the oven, but you could fry them instead.
Ingredients:
potatoes
olive oil
salt
garlic powder
chili powder
oregano
thyme

1. Peel the potatoes, and cut them into bite-sized pieces. I used probably 5 potatoes, but most of them were pretty small. After they were cut up, they covered the bottom of a 9 inch round cake pan in a single layer.

2. Pour some olive oil over the potatoes in the pan. Be generous, I probably used about a half a cup of oil. Toss the potatoes around with your hands, to get the potatoes all coated with oil. (You could do this with a spoon, but I love the way my hands feel after I've gotten them covered in olive oil. Makes my skin really soft.) There was about 1/8th of an inch of oil in the bottom of the pan.

3. Sprinkle the potatoes with the salt and spices, and mix them around. Put it in the oven at 350 degrees fahrenheit and cook until the potatoes are soft when poked with a fork. It should take around 30 minutes or so. I didn't measure the spices, so just put however much looks good.

Rosemary would be tasty in this, too, but we were unfortunately out of rosemary.

potato corn carrot squash soup

Ok, I know that sounds like a very busy soup, but in my defense, I wanted to make squash soup, but only had one acorn squash at the time. I did have a bunch of carrots and potatoes, though, and canned corn was on sale. So, I decided to just throw it all in together. It turned out pretty tasty.
Here's a link to the original recipe I started with:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Butternut-Squash-Soup-with-Ginger-15572
And here's what I did:
Ingredients:
1 large acorn squash
2 leeks, on the smaller side, white and light green parts
3 medium-largish potatoes
5 carrots (one was really big, but a couple were small)
1 small head of garlic, it was 4 large cloves
10 cups water
5 veggie bouillon cubes (each cube makes 2 cups broth)
2 cans of corn, drained
1 hot pepper, a thin curly red one
~1.5 tbsp minced fresh ginger
Enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the soup pot.

1. Cut the acorn squash in half. Scoop out the seeds and stringy bits and set them aside. You can toast them up later for a nice snack. Spray the cut ends with cooking spray and put it cut ends down on a baking dish. Cover the pan with foil, and stick it in the oven at 350º for 30-40 minutes, until the squash is soft.

2. Peel and mince the ginger. Peel and mince the garlic cloves. Wash the leeks, remove the outer 2 leaves, cut off the top and bottom. Chop up the leeks. (I sliced them down the middle, then chopped into ~1/8 inch pieces.) Cut open the pepper, pick out the seeds and membrane, and chop into small pieces. Pour some oil in the pot, and dump the ginger, garlic, leeks, and pepper in. Don't turn on the stove yet.

3. Peel and chop the carrots. Peel and chop the potatoes. Open the cans of corn and drain off the liquid.

4. Turn on the stove, and let the the garlic, leeks, ginger, and pepper cook a bit, stirring it around. (Note: I also put some salt in at this point, but it's probably not necessary, as the bouillon has plenty of salt in it.) Add the water and the bouillon. Scoop the squash flesh out of it's skin and plop it into the soup pot. Drop the carrots, potatoes and corn in too. Cover and let it simmer on low for an hour or two.

5. Puree it in batches in a blender. Enjoy with some nice bread. If you toast the seeds, you can also top the soup with them. 

As a side note, I toasted the seeds with olive oil and garlic salt. They were delicious!

tangerine sesame muffins

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• zest of 2 tangerines
• 2/3 cup tangerine juice
• 1/2 cup melted butter
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 cup sesame seeds
• 1 tablespoon melted butter
• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Directions

1. Wash tangerines. Using a zester or a cheese grater, grate the peels of two tangerines. Cut tangerines in half, and squeeze out the juice, using a strainer to catch the seeds and pulp.
2. Put sesame seeds in a skillet, and heat, stirring, until golden brown.
3. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, white sugar and tangerine zest. Stir in tangerine juice, 1/2 cup melted butter, and eggs.
4. Pour into 12 muffin cups.
5. Blend 1 tablespoon melted butter, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and toasted sesame seeds, and sprinkle on top of each muffin. Bake in a preheated 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) oven for 20-25 minutes, until toothpick inserted in muffin comes out clean.

So first, we should give credit where credit is due. We didn't make up this recipe, we just modified it. Here is the original recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Orange-Muffins/Detail.aspx
The reason we used this recipe was that we had a lot of tangerines, that were very ripe and very seedy. There was no way we would get through all of them before they spoiled. We needed a recipe that called for juice. We decided to add the sesame seeds as a play on lemon poppy muffins, and when we saw the recipe, we decided to add the sesame seeds to the topping.
We also had leftover juice, which gave us some fresh juice to drink with the muffins. If you don't want to deal with juicing tangerines, you can just buy juice, probably using OJ.

pumpkin spice cake

Ingredients:
1 1/4 c butter
2 eggs, beaten
1 c packed brown sugar
1 1/4 c white sugar
2 c pumpkin or squash, canned, frozen, or fresh (cooked and pureed)
3 c flour
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
3 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground nutmeg
1 tsp ground ginger

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a bundt pan.

Stir together flour, baking soda, salt, and spices.

Cream together butter, eggs, and sugars until light and fluffy. Beat in the pumpkin. Beat in the flour mixture. Pour the batter into the prepared pan.

Bake for 60-65 minutes, until toothpick inserted comes out clean. Cool before removing from pan.

honey corn muffins

Ingredients:
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 c sugar
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 stick butter, melted
1/4 c honey
1/2 c frozen fire-roasted corn (we bought this at Trader Joe's)

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Into a large bowl, mix cornmeal, flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.

In another bowl, whisk together milk, eggs, butter, and honey. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry, stirring until just mixed. Stir in the corn.

Pour the batter into a greased muffin pan, bake about 15 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

These came out really tasty, but didn't rise well. We suspect that the butter was still hot, and cooked the egg a little, when we added it to the wet ingredients. When you make this recipe, try whisking the milk, butter, and honey together first, then add the egg. This way, the milk will cool off the butter, and the egg won't get cooked.

rice, veggies and beans

The rice was pretty tasty, so here's what I did:
I cut open a jalapeno pepper, cut out the seeds and membrane, and chopped it into small strips. Then I put some extra virgin olive oil in a big pot, added the pepper, about 1 tbsp of minced garlic, some mixed frozen red, yellow, and green bell pepper strips, some frozen roasted corn, and 2 cups of rice. I heated this over medium heat and stirred it, until it started sizzling and it started smelling very good. Then I added 5 cups of water, 3 vegetable bouillon cubes, and about 2 cups of roman beans. (I had cooked the beans from dry about a week ago, and then stuck them in the fridge and almost forgot about them. You could put a can of beans in instead.) I covered this and let it cook on medium low heat until the water was mostly absorbed. It tasted good, but needed a little salt.

cheesy eggy rice bake

First, I cooked 2/3 cup of rice. I put 2/3 cup of rice in a small pot with a little over 4/3 cups of water. I put the cover on, and heated it on low heat for about 30 minutes, until the water was absorbed. While the rice was cooking, I chopped up a medium onion. When the rice was done, I cooked the onion in some extra virgin olive oil in a frying pan. I sauteed the onions for a couple of minutes, and then added the rice in with the onions. I stirred it around a bit more, and mixed apart the rice chunks. Then, I put it into a glass baking dish, and let it cool a little bit, with a cover on top, so the rice wouldn't dry out too much. I beat up 3 eggs with a little water, with sage, rosemary, parsley, crushed red pepper, oregano, and sea salt. I poured this over the rice, and stirred it in with a fork. I put some shredded mexican cheese blend on top, and baked it at 325, covered, for about 40 minutes. Then I took the cover off, and baked it for a few more minutes. When I took it out of the oven, I let it sit for a few minutes before eating it. Enjoy!

vegan squash snickerdoodles

Ok, so I did this because I had 2 delicata squashes (a type of winter squash) that I needed to use up (I actually had a third that went bad) and I felt like making something sweet. I thought something like snickerdoodles would be good, because cinnamon goes well with winter squashes. Anyway, I chose a vegan recipe because all the nonvegan recipes I found used very little pumpkin/squash.
Here's the recipe I started with:
http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=6672.0
And here's what I did. I made the dough as instructed in the recipe, but skipped the nuts and raisins, and I added the liquid ingredients to the flour mixture, rather than the other way around, because my flour mixture was in a bigger bowl. And, I used my squash instead of pumpkin. The two squashes yielded about 2 cups of cooked squash, so it worked perfectly. Then I put the dough in a gallon-sized ziplock bag and stuck it in the fridge for about a 1/2 hour. Then I poured some sugar in a bowl, and added cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger to it, and stirred it around.
I took the dough out of the fridge, pinched off bits of the dough and made little balls, about 1.5 inches in diameter. I rolled each ball in the sugar spice mixture, and then placed it on a cookie sheet. I smooshed it under a glass. Then I sprinkled some more sugar spice mixture on top, flipped it over, and sprinkled that side as well. I repeated this for all the dough. This recipe made 57 cookies. They are delicious, and my friends who tried it all agreed. :)

Explanation

I am a vegetarian, and I like to cook tasty food, and especially like baking. A while ago I started a blog about muffins, but pretty soon forgot the login for it, and honestly got a little bored with only doing muffins. So here's a new blog, that's going to be a random collection of recipes that I made and turned out really good. Often, when I bake, I find a recipe, and alter it somehow. So, when that happens, I will link to the original recipe, and then explain what I did differently.
I plan on posting my muffin recipes from the old blog, as well as a few random recipes I have put up on facebook, or have posted on the craigslist vegan/vegetarian forums. So expect a lot of recipes in the next day or two, and then one every week or two after that.