Mother's Day Dinner and Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bites...

I'm actually quite proud of this card ;)

Happy Mother's Day! =)

In my family, we never need much of an excuse to make something special to eat.  All of us love to work in the kitchen and the slightest hint at it being a "special day" will send at least two of us into our favorite room of the house to make some goodies.  This Sunday being Mother's Day, I wanted to try out an idea I had for Chocolate Covered Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bites.  My family and I could very well live off cheesecake, and my mom loves dark chocolate, so it seemed like a good choice ;).  I couldn't find a recipe anywhere that didn't include a crust or peanut butter (Mom doesn't like peanut butter), so I made one up myself, and surprise, surprise! it actually didn't turn into a giant gooey mess like I expected it too.  In theory, my brother helped me, but in reality he was taking pictures, singing, and sneaking samples...=)

Chocolate Covered Chocolate Chip Cheesecake Bites

Ingredients:

Two 8 oz packages of Cream Cheese

1/2 Cup Sugar

Two Teaspoons Vanilla Extract

11/2 Cups of Chocolate Chips

One Tablespoon shortening

Instructions:

• Combine cream cheese, sugar, and vanilla in a glass bowl
• Mix together with hand mixer until smooth and creamy
• Fold in about half the chocolate chips with spatula
• Put bowl in refrigerator for thirty minutes
• Meanwhile, put the remaining chocolate chips with the shortening into a double boiler and slowly heat until completely melted.
•  Take the cheesecake out of the refrigerator and roll it into small bite sized pieces (if it gets too warm, put it back in the fridge for a little longer)
• Using a fork, dip cheesecake bites into the chocolate and coat well
• Place on a tray covered with wax paper (or one of these amazing silpat tray liners) and store in the fridge until you are ready to eat them (it won't be long ;)

Next time I'm going to try to make these with vanilla ice cream instead of cheesecake...if it's not a total disaster I'll share pictures of them too...=)

For dinner, I made a pork tenderloin for mom and I, pork chops for the boys, broccoli with cheese, and my first ever homemade chipotle sauce...

My dad usually buys my mom roses for Mother's Day...this year she got a whole bush ;)

(I need to find this sign for my mom...=))

I hope ya'll had a lovely weekend and a very blessed Mother's Day!

Sweetsome Sundays...Argentinean Ricotta Cake

Happy Palm Sunday everyone!

(This piece looks more flat because it broke in half while my brother was taking a picture and he just kind of squished it back together: the actual cake had a more rounded top)

The recipe for this cake came from a good friend of ours in California (Hi Faby😜!), and I would have made it a while ago if my new spring form pan had not taken over *three* weeks to get here...I'd never even heard of a normal ricotta cake, let alone the Argentinean version, so I was pretty curious to see how it would turn out, and, people, this cake was deeelicious! Imagine blending a cheesecake with doughnuts and then dusting it all with powdered sugar...and it happens to be really simple to make, so double win! We ate half this cake for my brother's feast day on Saturday and then the rest of it on Sunday (I actually ate my piece for breakfast😊); it just keeps getting better the longer you refrigerate it.

Ingredients:

Dough:

• 2 cups Self Rising Flour (for grain-free version, use 11/4th cup Almond Flour, 1/2 cup Arrowroot Flour, 1/4th cup Coconut Flour, and three tsp Baking Power)
• 1/2 cup Sugar
• 10 Tbs Butter
• 1 Egg plus 1 Egg Yolk
• 2 Tbs Milk/Cream

Filling:

• 35 ounces Ricotta Cheese
• 2 Egg Yolks
• 3/4 cup Sugar
• 2 Tbs Milk/Cream
• Zest from one lemon
• 1 tsp. Vanilla Extract 

Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.  Butter a spring-form pan.  Combine the dough ingredients in a food processor and mix till combined.   If it is too dry, you can add a little more cream/milk.  Take half the dough mixture and spread it out over the bottom and up the sides of the spring-form pan to form a sort of bowl, then set aside.  Mix all the filling ingredients together in a glass bowl with a hand mixer (or a fork; it works just as well) until combined.  Pour filling into dough.  Roll out the remaining dough into a circle and use it to cover the rest of the cake, sealing the edges as best you can.  Bake in the oven for 45-60 minutes, until top is golden brown.  Once done, dust the top with powdered sugar and refrigerate before serving.

Have a lovely week!

From the Kitchen...Homemade Sushi

Last Friday we unanimously agreed we wanted some Spicy Sushi like we used to get at Fujiyamas back in Texas.  I know there's a special Japanese name for this dish, but to us it's just Spicy Sushi.
My brother has made basic sushi before with just cream cheese and cucumbers, but I've never tried it so it was a bit of a learning experience for me.  Surprisingly enough, it was very easy and quick to put together! I don't know if I've ever mentioned this before, but I love sushi and could honestly eat it every day, but its so hard to find a good place to buy it without any MSG, and is so expensive...I'm so happy I can make my own now!

Homemade Sushi

Ingredients:

One Sushi grade Tuna Steak, raw, cut into long strips or one inch chunks

Three Sheets of Sushi Nori

Three cups Sushi Rice

One Avocado, diced

Eight ounces of Cream Cheese, cut into long strips

Sesame seeds for garnish

Tiger Sauce:

One cup of Mayonnaise

One tablespoon of Sriracha sauce (or more to taste)

Instructions:

1. Lay the nori out on a cutting board or other hard, non-sticky surface.  
2. Cover with rice, pressing down and smoothing it all over the nori.  When completely covered, carefully turn over. 
3.  Put one strip of cream cheese at the edge.  
4. Lay the tuna and avocado next to the cream cheese and carefully start rolling the nori (it helps to have your hands wet for this part so the rice doesn't stick to you).  
5. When it's rolled into a log, wet a knife and start cutting it into one inch circles.  Place the circles standing up on a platter.  Repeat until you've used up all the ingredients.  
6. In a bowel, mix the mayonnaise and sriracha together until you've reached the level of spice you want.  Drizzle over the sushi and garnish with sesame seeds.  Serve with soy sauce, Tamari, or coconut aminos.

(You really do have to garnish the sushi with something-sesame seeds, parsley, shrimp, avocado; it just makes it look fantastic!)

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Blessed Epiphany, and my 21st Birthday...

Merry Christmas! 2015 was a very busy year for my family...on top of our normal activities, we've been busy building our new home and even managed to move in by Christmas...Christmas Eve in fact! It's not completed yet; the only working sink in the house is in the kitchen, we have no fencing for our animals, the upstairs still has to be sealed and painted, and we seem to be having one problem after another with our plumbing, but we are all very happy to finally be in our own home.  We were flooded in the day after Christmas and we hadn't hooked up our internet or phone lines yet, so we were able to spend nearly a week cut off from the world, resting, relaxing, and enjoying each others company after months of constantly working and running to town for supplies.  A friend had given my brothers and I some books for Christmas, we had received some new board games and movies from our parents, and had enough treats and leftovers from Christmas dinner to keep us well fed and happy all week.

Dad and the boys did most of the building themselves, including hand sanding, buffing, and staining the floors Christmas Eve because the machine we'd rented was not working.   Mom and I painted most of the rooms...sometimes twice and in Mom's bathroom three or four times because we still can't agree on a color we like.

The kitchen is probably everyone's favorite room in the house...all of us love to cook and the kitchen in the house we've been renting was barely big enough for two people to move around in, let alone fix meals in.  Our new kitchen has enough room for everyone to cook something different in at the same time if we wanted to, and it has definitely been put to good use.  Christmas dinner was a breeze with our six burner stove and double oven, not to mention the warming drawer.


How many girls nowadays get a formal ball for their twenty-first birthday? None that I know, but our Christmas/New Years/Epiphany Ball just happened to be the day before my birthday and, though not technically held in my honor, everyone sang Happy Birthday to me and referred to it as my "Coming Out" party =).

 

All the balls we've been having this past year have been spent mainly learning and teaching the dances, but this time everyone knew precisely what to do.  When Mrs. H. and I were putting together the program, we realized that we had learned the steps to over twenty dances...and we were able to dance a couple of new ones that no one had learned beforehand because everyone knew what we meant when we called out the steps! 

This was "Jenny's Market", a dance we learned  from the 2009 "Emma"...it's one of my personal favorites...

For my actual birthday, I got to spend the whole day relaxing, which is just the way I like to spend my birthday.  The ball was amazing, but it felt wonderful to soak in a warm bubble bath (after we finally got the pipes un-frozen, that is.  My poor dad was outside almost the whole day trying to fix the plumbing so we could have running water...).  Mom made some Pink Lady Cocktails (and I discovered once again that alcohol and I don't get along well.  One glass was enough to make me too dizzy to walk very well while the rest of my family was able to have two without any side effects) and my brother made me Hawaiian pizza and a pineapple cheesecake.  And, best of all, I found some maraschino cherries at Whole Foods without any bad ingredients...it used to be a tradition for me to always have maraschino cherries on my birthday cake, but because of the dyes and artificial flavorings I haven't been able to have them in years.  We finished up the night with my new favorite movie (Winter's Tale) and a Sherlock episode; all in all a lovely day.  Unfortunately, that night we had a major water leak upstairs which destroyed the ceiling in the kitchen and my parent's closet, ruined part of the floor, and drowned mine and brother's cell phones =(.  Thank goodness the ceiling was just soaked and didn't collapse on us...

Things are always hopping around here, that's for sure! In the next few months, we'll be finishing up our house, moving the rest of our stuff over, planning our Mardi Gras dance, planning a bridal shower for a friend, preparing for Lent, fencing off some land for our livestock...and I want to start on making some curtains and various decoration for our new rooms.  I hope you all had a blessed Christmastide, New Years,and Epiphany! =)

From the Kitchen..."Sweetsome Sundays"

Okay, so today I don't have a recipe for what I made for our Sunday treat this week.  Lets just say that I have learned you can't make fried donuts when you don't have any yeast or sugar, and you certainly can't make lemon curd without eggs...annnnnddd don't ever try replacing the eggs in lemon curd with arrowroot powder.  It produces a sticky, gooey, whitish mess that no one wants eat except your little brother...and then only if it's covered with maple syrup.
Luckily, Mom had bought some candies at Natural Grocers a few weeks ago and we picked up some ice cream on the way home from Mass, so we were still able to enjoy something sweet for Sunday after all.
Note to self: make sure you have all the ingredients BEFORE you start mixing everything together.  =)

Please excuse lighting in these photos...=)

From The Kitchen..."Sweetsome Sundays"

Chocolate Chip Brownies

3/4 cup cocoa

1/2 tsp baking soda

2/3 cup butter, melted and divided

1/2 cup boiling water

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1 1/3 cup almond flower

1 tsp vanilla

1/4 tsp salt

1 3/4 cups chocolate chips/chunks

1. Heat oven to 350 Degrees F.  Grease a 13x9x2 baking pan

2. Mix cocoa, baking soda, and 1/3 cup of butter together in a mixing bowl.  Add water and stir till thickened.  Add sugar, eggs, and remaining butter and mix thoroughly.  Add remaining ingredients and fold in chips/chunks.  Pour into prepared pan.

3. Bake 35 to 40 minutes or until brownies pull away from sides of pan.  Let cool before enjoying.

 

My brother made these for our Sunday treat because I wasn't feeling well.  He also drizzled caramel on the top...mmmm... And, no, poor Skye didn't get any, though she asked very nicely.

How Was Your Sunday?

From The Kitchen..."Sweetsome Sundays"...

During Lent my family has always had a few standard sacrifices we offer up together every year (such as movies, sweets, up-beat music, etc.) in addition to what we offer up on our own. But we try to take a break to sort of give everyone the chance to catch their breath and start out strong again for another week by having a dessert on Sundays and first class feast days.  On Fat Tuesday I had attempted to make an apple pie with only about four of the correct ingredients (one of which was "apples") and ended up with a concoction that had a very strong "plantain" flavor.  It still tasted pretty good, but I wanted to make a more "perfected" version, so I finally got all the correct ingredients for us to have another pie on Sunday.

Perfect Paleo Pie Crust:

11/2 Cups Almond Flour

1/2 Cup Arrowroot Flour

2 Tbsp. Brown Sugar (or Coconut sugar)

1/2 Tsp. Baking Powder

1/2 Cup Butter

6 Tbsp. Cold Water

1 Tsp. Vanilla

Combine dry ingredients in your food processor.  Cut butter into chunks and pulse with dry mixture until it resembles course breadcrumbs.  Add wet ingredients and blend until well mixed.  Shape mixture into a ball, wrap with plastic wrap, and keep in the refrigerator until ready to use.  When ready, divide into two parts and roll out into desired shape.  Place one part in pie dish and save the other for the top.

Amazing Apple Pie 

3 Large Apples, peeled, cored, and sliced very thin

Juice of 1 Lemon

3/4 Cup Brown Sugar

11/2 Tbsp. Arrowroot Flour

1 Tsp. Each of Cinnamon, Cloves, Nutmeg (optional...we like it better without)

4 Tbsp. Butter

Preheat oven to 475 Degrees.  Gently fold apple slices into lemon juice until well coated.  Mix dry ingredients in a separate bowl.  Cover the bottom of your prepared pie dish with a layer of apple slices, overlapping them over each other.  Sprinkle one tablespoon of the dry mixture over the apples.  Repeat until apples and dry mixture is used up.  Cut butter into chunks and place all over the top of the pie.  Cover with reserved pie crust and bake for ten minutes.  Lower temperature to 350 Degrees and bake for another thirty minutes, or until golden brown.  Let cool for a few minutes, then serve with ice cream for absolute decadence.

From The Kitchen...Cherry Macaroons

Hello there! Today I'm sharing a recipe for an amazing and healthy treat that my mom and I love to munch on from time to time.  These Macaroons are very much like the Hail Merry Strawberry Macaroons you can find at Whole Foods or any other Health Food store, except I make them nut free and with freeze dried cherries.  We love Hail Merry's version but they are too expensive to consume in the quantity I would like, so I blended several different recipes and added some touches of my own to make my own, much cheaper version.  If you do not have a dehydrator, get one.  It is one of the most marvelous inventions since cheesecake.  Until then, you can use the oven to make these by baking them at 300 F. for twenty-two to twenty-five minutes, or until they are dry on the outside.

1 Cup of Coconut Butter (just blend 5 cups of shredded coconut in your food processor until smooth and creamy)

1/2 Cup Maple Syrup

1 1/2 Tsp. Vanilla

2 Cups Unsweetened Shredded Coconut

1 oz. Freeze-dried Cherries (or strawberries if you prefer)

Pulse the cherries in your food processor until they are course and well ground.  Add the remaining ingredients minus the shredded coconut and blend until well mixed.  Fold in coconut with a spatula and mix well.  Roll mixture into little balls (or use a melon ball scooper) and place on your dehydrator trays (or cookie sheet if using the oven) and place in the dehydrator.  Dehydrate on 110 degrees for 12-24 hours and try to avoid eating any until they're done (this may be difficult).  When they're done, put them in an airtight container and store them in the fridge until you finish them off (it won't be long).  Enjoy!

Print The Recipe Here


(And in all honesty, Mom actually made this batch...)