Today is National Cheesecake Day! If you love yourself some cheesecake, here are a few ideas and recipes for you to try…
Deep-fried cheesecake. Try making it yourself or buy it from someone; our local sno-cone truck sells it.
Cut up cheesecake chunks and add them to your ice cream or a bowl of fruit salad. Yum! Drizzle caramel or chocolate sauce on top if you wish. Crumble some graham crackers to go on top for extra crunch.
Here's something you can chalk up to the fact that I only started learning how to cook about five years ago: I just recently figured out how to bake chicken thighs. I eat a lot of chicken thighs, because it's the cheapest cut of meat. But for the most part I use the meat in slow cooker recipes. It wasn't until I read the label on my bottle of Frank's Red Hot Buffalo Sauce that I realized just how easy it can be to bake chicken thighs.
Got cats? We do! And we love this fun idea. I don’t think we’ll put the boxes all together in one room, but maybe we will throughout the house.
One of my goals this week is to make enough money to really stock up on groceries and make some of the delicious things I’ve been posting lately—not just because I want to, but because Wood Sprite now wants to be a chef (in addition to the current list of careers and hobbies she harbors)! She’s addicted to Taste Buds and wants to take even more cooking classes (so I need to make enough to pay for those, too!), and she wants to go to a cheese shop and try new cheeses. Sounds good to me!
I am loving the Food Replicator Tumblr blog! This Star Trek fan decided to cook their way through the franchise, preparing versions of foods seen or mentioned on TNG, Enterprise, classic TOS, and all the other corners of the Star Trek universe. Recipes are included, for those who want to follow along. It's like cosplay, but for food!
Image courtesy Tumblr/Food Replicator
I am pleasantly disposed towards Mark Bittman. The New York Times food writer not only has to work with a small kitchen (just like me!) he also has a flair for simple, practical recipes that turn out great without a lot of fuss or bother. I have made several of Bittman's recipes in the past and had great success, which is more than I can say for most other celebrity chefs. (And Bittman's recipe for popovers was kind of life-changing. So easy! So good!)
Check out these homemade pretzels and jalapeno cheese sauce… Holy cow. I usually get cheesy pretzels on my birthday, but that’s not until November. I may have to make these sooner—like today!
Create your own recipe book as a family. It doesn’t have to be special; ours is just a spiral notebook so far. Make up something new every week and add it to your book (if you like it!).
Show your kids this rejection letter to a girl from NASA to remind them about our very recent history—and how change can happen when we fight for it.
It's cherry season in North America, which means that stores are chock full of delicious cherries, and many of you have a cherry tree in the yard which is dropping fruit like crazy. (Not me, though - the birds eat all my cherries before I can get to them. Sad!) Because of the way cherry trees produce their fruit, cherries tend to hit the market in one big, short-lived flood, so you want to take advantage of them while they are here.
Every time I buy a whole chicken, it comes with this pouch of, like, stuff inside. Unless you want to play Hannibal: The Home Game, I'm honestly not sure what you are supposed to do with these things. It's always random pieces, too. Might be a neck and a liver, might be a liver and a heart, might be a gizzard (whatever the heck THAT is), might be a I DON'T KNOW IT'S SLIMY AND GROSS.
I finally resolved to figure out what you are supposed to do with this stuff besides "throw it away and try not to look." It turns out that people who love their chicken innards love them a lot.
