I’m a sucker for miniature food.
Bite-sized morsels taste better, somehow, and these mini-scones are no exception.
The recipe is remarkably similar to my cranberry orange scone recipe, but these are improved by, well, tininess.
If captioned cat photos on the internet were edible, they’d taste like blueberry lemon mini scones.
They’re just so cute. I want to hug them with my teeth.
Continue reading for the Blueberry Lemon Mini Scones recipe
In honor of National Grilled Cheese Month, I’m posting a different grilled cheese sandwich every single day through the month of April. You’re welcome.
I think it’s clear by now that I like grilled cheeses with a spoonful of sugar. You can candy coat your sammich with honey, jam, brown sugar, and best of all, fruit. If you start with a ripe, tender pear, the fruit will melt right along with the cheese for a soft and luscious, salty-sweet, flavor-packed filling between two slices of golden, bitter beer bread.
I’m really going to miss National Grilled Cheese Month.
In honor of National Grilled Cheese Month, I’m posting a different grilled cheese sandwich every single day through the month of April. You’re welcome.
I first decided to embark on my 30-day grilled cheese adventure last fall. That left me about six months to test recipes and resist the urge to spill the beans about my project. I failed utterly at keeping quiet. I shamelessly celebrated each successful sandwich on Facebook. Fortunately, my loose lips inspired sandwich suggestions from my pals, including today’s masterpiece.
My friend, Deb, came up with the brilliant idea of transforming beer cheese soup into a grilled cheese sandwich, with homemade bread providing the beer. She even suggested serving the sandwich with the traditional garnish of popcorn, and if I had realized earlier that I was out of popcorn, you’d see it in the photos.
So you’ve got lovely Deb to thank for this incredible, savory sandwich. The bread recipe is worth making whether you want the sandwich or not – it’s tender and pillowy with a crunchy, buttery crust and the tiniest hint of bitterness from the beer. You’ll want to toast it, smear it with butter, and dunk it in soup.
I filled the beer bread with a combination of cheddar and American cheese to mimic the creamy, orange soup. Then I topped the cheese with onions caramelized in brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce and hot sauce. The flavors were rich and strong and unmistakably Midwestern.
Oh, and I used the leftover caramelized onions to make homemade French onion dip. It was about a zillion times tastier than that store-bought stuff.
I despise banana-flavored candy. Laffy Taffy, Runts, popsicles, Lifesavers, Now and Laters, jelly beans, Dum Dums, Pez, Dubble Bubble, Starburst – I will ALWAYS toss out the banana flavored ones.
When I was a kid, my banana-flavor loathing prejudiced me to all things banana. I thought I hated bananas, and by extension, any foods baked with bananas. And so I turned up my nose at banana bread, banana cream pie, banana pudding, and sadly, banana muffins.
Thankfully, I came around to baked banana goodness on a family vacation to Toledo when my great grandma tricked me into eating zucchini bread. “Here, have a piece,” she said, with a sly smile. Wildly suspicious, my sister and I asked what was in it. “Oh, just try it. I promise you’ll like it.” And she was right – it was delicious.
That zucchini was my gateway bread. The next morning when she offered me a piece of her freshly baked banana bread, I tried it without first scrutinizing the list of ingredients, and I finally realized what I’d been missing.
While I can’t imagine duplicating my great grandma’s magical banana bread, I think I’ve found a pretty darn good banana muffin recipe. I tried to make them a little more heart-healthy than your average muffin, subbing a bit of wheat flour for some of the AP, and a bit of heart-healthy spread for some of the butter. They came out delicious – sweet and moist and buttery – and they didn’t taste like health food at all.
Continue reading for the Banana Walnut Muffins recipe
Friends, I have some very important, exciting news: today is my one year blogiversary! A year ago today, I set out to learn more about cooking, writing, and photography. On a beautiful, crisp September day, I posted my very first recipe—Caramel Apple Crisp—and Galley Kitchen was born.
I started with a very simple recipe that was not my own. In the following months, I grew more and more adventurous with ingredients and techniques, and I found that blogging was really changing the way I cook.
Thanks to Galley Kitchen, I conquered my fear of pie crust, addressed my perfectionism, made candies with Cap’n Crunch, entered a baking competition, learned to splurge on myself, and baked an apple pie with bacon on it.
I’ve had a perfectly lovely year sharing my successes and failures, and stories from my kitchen and my life.
My goals for the coming year include learning to cook fabulous dinners on an unemployed lady’s budget; learning to take decent photos after the sun has set; and learning some new adverbs. Someday I’d like to have the money to hire a designer to create a pretty, custom header for the top of my little blog, rather than the boring old WordPress default header. In the meantime, the food photos will have to suffice for decor.
For my blogiversary post, I’m sharing a recipe adaptation from my all-time favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen, with thanks to the blogstress, Deb Perelman, for inspiring me to begin writing about food. Deb’s corny corn muffins are light and crumbly, and bejeweled with sweet, chewy bits of corn. The muffins are a perfect accompaniment to the rainbow chard chili I posted last week.
Continue reading for the Corn Muffins recipe
I’m pretty sure that everyone has a goldfish food. Y’know, that one tasty treat that you’ll eat until you explode? My goldfish food is buttery, salty popcorn topped with M&Ms. Toss the candies on top while the popcorn and the butter are still hot, so the M&Ms get a little melty and slippery from the butter and I totally forgot what I was talking about.
Oh. Yes. Goldfish food. For Handsome Greg, that tasty, eat-until-you-explode treat is Cheez-Its.
If there is a box of Cheez-Its within his reach, he will plow through the entire box, no matter how small his appetite at the moment. It’s a compulsion.
When I thought about what in the world to make him for his birthday dinner this year, I considered truffle salt and imported cheeses and lobster and organic balsamic vinegar and duck fat and caviar.
Happy Birthday, Uncle Grogg!
And then I thought about what HE would like, and took a stab at making homemade Cheez-Its. I started with a recipe for cheese straws at Smitten Kitchen (I really, really love Smitten Kitchen), made one small substitution in the recipe (below), and cut them in squares, rather than straws. They’re just as addictive as the original Cheez-Its, but flaky and tender. They start with sharp cheddar cheese and truly come to life with a pinch of red pepper flakes.
I’ve made them for nearly every gathering at my place since Handsome Greg’s birthday, and they’re always scarfed up in record time.
Edited to add: I tried this recipe with orange cheddar, and I cut the crackers in one-inch circles with a biscuit cutter, and they were drop dead adorable:
Continue reading for the Homemade Cheez-Its recipe
I had a very lofty goal of working my way through The Bread Bible, one recipe at a time, but I think I’m stuck. For my very first attempt, I made the basic hearth bread, and I’m just not motivated to move on and make any others.
The basic hearth bread is so good, I want to make a fresh loaf every week. I don’t want to try other recipes, because I’ve discovered the perfect bread recipe. Perfect. I said it.
I’m sure the book is full of delicious recipes, but all I can think about is baking another fresh loaf of the basic hearth bread again next week. It’s an incredibly simple recipe – a chewy, crusty, white sandwich bread, with a tiny bit of honey and just 1/4 cup of wheat flour to warm up the flavor.
Toast a slice and slather with jam for the world’s best breakfast, or carve a coupla thin slices for the perfect turkey sammich.
The book is on loan from my friend Jenny, who dresses better than anyone I know in real life. I’m hoping she doesn’t need it back anytime soon.
Continue reading for the Basic Hearth Bread recipe
Let’s see a show of hands: who here is having a craptastic week? (I’m operating under the assumption that anyone reads my blog.)
Sometimes getting out of bed is a challenge, when you know you’re facing a putrid garbage fart of a day.
Based on the weather alone, I’d say at least a few folks out there need a pick-me-up first thing.
Starting off the work day with a cocktail is generally not advisable, so I suggest, as an alternative, a freshly-baked scone.
The dough can be rolled, cut, and frozen in advance, then thawed and baked in about 20 minutes as needed.
These cranberry orange reasons-to-live are not too sweet, and not too tart.
They’re softer and fluffier than regular hard, dry, crumbly scones. Which is fine by me.
If you’re truly inconsolable, and even warm, buttery baked goods can’t salvage the day, perhaps Professor Meowington can bring you a little comfort:
Do you need a hug?
Recipe below the fold
I had every intention of exploring the local cuisine of Houston on my trip last week. I left behind the remnants of Minnesota’s first snow, dreaming of fresh salsa, spicy chili, and sticky barbecue. As the days of the conference flew past, though, and I and my fellow conferencees consumed countless boxed lunches and buffet breakfasts, I lost hope that I would experience the authentic regional cuisine of Houston.
While I tasted no salsa, no chili, and no barbecue, my story has a happy culinary end.
One warm evening after an exhausting day of bookselling in the BigTent store, I saw an entire six blocks of downtown Houston walking to the Strip House for a fantastic dinner with a handful of conferencees. We shared decadent sides like Black Truffle Cream Spinach and Goose Fat Potatoes. I had the buttery red snapper, and managed to earn the nickname “Profiterole” over countless glasses of wine. It was a lovely evening.
I returned home late Saturday night to a stern lecture from Professor Meowington, who was very cross about being left home alone for five days in a row. I slept in my very own bed, and woke up to the last of the Honey Wheat Bread in the freezer for my first breakfast home.
This slightly sweet, dense wheat bread, toasted and slathered in strawberry jam, made a perfect welcome home breakfast treat.
The recipe is by Ron Miller, and it’s another from my new favorite cookbook, Baking with the St. Paul Bread Club. I cut the recipe down to make one loaf rather than three, but I made no other changes, resisting the temptation to add a bit more oil (the recipe calls for one teaspoon oil for three loaves!). Even with so little oil, this bread is surprisingly moist.
Recipe below the fold
Galley Kitchen 