I used regular pork sausage instead of the turkey sausage so my version isn’t quite as healthy as Cooking Light’s. I served mine with some of the Yorkshire puddings I made back in December. The recipe made a ton of soup, so I’m freezing several containers for lunches later on.

Totally unrelated, here’s a close-up shot of a scone. Because there aren’t enough of them in the world.

No, I didn't make this. But I did eat it!

Spicy Carrot Pasta

Some of the spice comes from Italian sausage — this was really good and I had enough for two dinners and lunch tomorrow. Sweet!

I’ve been making these since I was a kid. Whenever my mom made spaghetti, she usually served it with garlic bread — I’d save the bread until I was done eating my spaghetti and scoop any remaining sauce on my plate onto the bread. I think my cousin Lee showed me how to do this when we were 5 or 6.

Now, if I make spaghetti sauce and have some leftover (but not enough to boil more spaghetti), I turn it into pizza sauce instead. For what you see pictured, I didn’t make full-on garlic bread. I’m too tired for that on a weeknight.

Instead, I pulled out two frozen slices of country French bread and toasted them to thaw them out/crisp them up. Then, I rubbed each slice with half of a garlic clove, spooned on the spaghetti sauce (heated up in the microwave), shredded some Parm over top and broiled them until the sauce was nice and hot and the cheese melted.

Recently, I had some extra cranberries about to go bad and so I froze them, thinking they would look awesome alongside shredded zucchini in muffins. You know who else had that idea? Martha, as stated in the recipe that I used here (thank you, Ms. Food Librarian).

I made a few changes. Firstly, I didn’t have enough all-purpose flour, so I substituted 3/4 c. whole-wheat flour. While I was inadvertently healthifying these muffins, I threw in a tablespoon of ground flaxseed. Sip of wine. I only halved my cranberries where the Food Librarian had quartered hers. I have to be different, right?

Sip of wine.

I mixed the wet ingredients with the dry and started filling my muffin cups. And then I realized I forgot to add the cranberries. So, I finished ladling one spoonful of batter into each of 11 of the muffin cups on my tray, sprinkled in the cranberries, spooned the rest of the batter pretty unevenly among the cups and then stirred. And prayed. And sprinkled on some turbinado sugar. And put the tray in the oven.

Sip of wine. Rinsed the dishes. Ran the dishwasher.

Waited while the muffins baked. Precariously stacked pots on one half of the stove to make room for hot muffin tray on the other half.

Sip of wine.

Et, voila:

So good!

*Paying homage to My Drunk Kitchen (check out the Taco Episode).

The recipe makes a ton of soup. I have four pints to take for lunches this week and still more to have with dinner throughout the week.

Close-up of the dumplings.

It’s important to store the dumplings separately from the soup, otherwise, they’ll dissolve into it.

I didn’t have one of the corn dumplings tonight. Instead, I had a cup of the soup with a fried flounder sandwich. I used New Belgium’s Snow Day in the batter for the flounder (and omitted the nuts).

I didn’t have 12 oz. of regular chocolate chips, so I added enough mini chocolate chips to make up the difference.

Ingredients:

Two sizes of chocolate chips went into my batter.

1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1/2 c. nuts (optional)
3/4 c. sugar
12 oz. chocolate chips
1/2 c. veg. oil
2 eggs
2 ripe bananas, sliced
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. ground cinnamon

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Combine first five ingredients in large bowl; mix well and set aside. Combine remaining ingredients in container of electric mixer (I used a hand mixer) and process at medium speed for 20 seconds; stir into flour mixture. Pour into a greased 9x5x3″ loaf pan. Bake 50 minutes (or until toothpick inserted into the bread comes out clean).

Have a little banana bread with your chocolate chips.

Submitted to Sweet as Sugar Cookie‘s Link Party!

Grilled Roast Beef & Camembertish Cheese Sandwich

This sandwich incorporates leftovers from my roast beef* dinner the other night and a cheese platter I put together for New Year’s Eve. The cheese I used was a substitute for camembert whose name escapes me. It was pretty mild on its own, but really paired well with the meat on this sandwich, which also featured basil dijon mustard and Vermont sourdough bread.

* Really, bison.

Stuffing Pancake with Sliced Roast Beef* & Gravy

So delish. That may look like that’s entirely too much gravy (is there such a thing?), but the stuffing soaked it right up. The roast beef tasted more like I remember it as leftovers.

*Bison, actually.

I referred to several recipes for Yorkshire pudding, including that in Nigella Lawson’s Feast, The Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook and at Closet Cooking (I also used his guidelines for gravy here).

Since the roast I was cooking was of bison, it didn’t produce a lot of drippings to use both for the pudding and the gravy. I used bacon grease in a 12-muffin pan to make the individual Yorkshire puddings instead. I first set the pan in the oven while the bison roasted to heat it up and then added about 1/4 tsp of bacon grease to each cup and set the pan back in the oven. When the roast came out, I cranked up the heat to 450 and ladled the pudding batter (which had been sitting in the fridge) into the cups. I baked them for 10 minutes at 450 and then almost 10 more minutes at 350. They puffed up into little bowl shapes, perfect for holding gravy (I like to think of them as mini, savory grown-up funnel cakes):

Not shown below are the mushrooms, which I did remember to add to my plate before digging in. I forget where I originally found the recipe for these, but I basically tossed 6 large, sliced mushrooms in sauteed minced garlic (one large clove) in olive oil and threw in about 1/4 tsp crushed red pepper. I let them cook down while I made everything else.

I have to say that this was the first time I cooked bison and it didn’t taste like its cow-sourced counterpart. Not sure if it was the cut or not. Not that it tastes bad, just different from the roast beef I grew up eating.

January (click for larger image)

March

June

July

December

I would have loved to include recipes, but many of the photos are of recipes that are not my own. I’m considering putting QR codes with links to recipes in 2013. Or maybe I’ll have accumulated enough of my own recipes to do a calendar by then…

]]> http://freezerfull.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/2012-freezer-full-calendar/feed/ 0 baysideresearch Food2012_1md Food2012_Marmd Food2012_Junmd Food2012_Julymd Food2012_Decmd