Chocolate Pecan Pie

Recipe Review: Great Twist on traditional Pecan Pie, filling is simple and easy to make, attempt pie crust at your own risk.

Typically my sister is the baker of the family. Sure I can whip up some great Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I'm a master of the boxed cake mix (Funfetti anyone??) but she is great at making baked goods from scratch. While its not my forte, over the past few years I have cautiously been dabbling in making pies, and have gotten pretty competent at it. At first glance a pie crust recipe looks really easy. Only 4 ingredients go into it, flour, fat, salt and water, but the techniques that go into combining these elements are essential to creating a light flaky pie crust. There's lots of debate between butter and shortening crusts- shortening makes a flakier crust, but butter makes a more flavorful crust. I do a mix of half of each, but there is also butter flavored Crisco out there which would be a good option as well.

Roasted Vegetables & Pineapple Stuffing

I like vegetables. Lots. Yummmm. Thanksgiving dishes tend to be pretty carb-y and starchy so I wanted to make sure we had some veggies to munch on too. Also I could do all my prep ahead of time, which was very essential this thanksgiving. I doubled this and made this for both of the thanksgiving's that I attended so I got two times to try different spices to come up with the right combo to blog about!

I knew I wanted to use butternut squash and Brussels sprouts as my base vegetables, and decided to throw in baby carrots, onions, cauliflower, and parsnips. (Mostly I just wanted to be fancy and say that I used parsnips in a recipe) What exactly is a parsnip? Wikipedia tells us that:

The parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) is a root vegetable related to the carrot. Parsnips resemble carrots, but are paler than most carrots and have a sweeter flavor, especially when cooked.

(I may allegedly be including this because when I was at the grocery store I thought I was purchasing turnips but they turned out to be parsnips)

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Recipe Review: Tried and True best Pumpkin Cheesecake you will ever eat. Go make this right now.

For the past few years I've been making pumpkin cheesecake for Halloween/Thanksgiving. (Basically I'll make a pumpkin recipe whenever I can get away with it. I hate how society forces us to only eat pumpkin in the fall. I've been stockpiling canned pumpkin this year so I can use it whenever. Take that seasons!) In general everyone loves cheesecake, and whenever it gets cut into and people realize that its a pumpkin cheesecake, they flip. Its actually pretty easy to make, and can be made up to a week in advance.



mine looked just like this- minus the pecans on top- I swear, I was just in a hurry and didn't get to take pictures


The recipe that I use is from Joy of Baking its very detailed and walks you though all the steps along the way. (The degree of details might make it look a little overwhelming at first, but trust me its not)

Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes

Quick Recipe Review: Easy to make, melt in your mouth decadent sweet potatoes with kick (kick provided by Jack Daniels) 

I'm still recovering from thanksgiving, and I have a whole lot of recipes to type up here. I'm going to try to make the effort to get them all posted this week, unfortunately I don't have photos for each dish, but I'll post what I've got. Starting off with Drunken Candied Sweet Potatoes.

Kevin had been subtly hinting saying that he wanted to have sweet potatoes for a few days before Thanksgiving. Each time I would say "Well should we make them?" "No no, we've got enough stuff to make already" The last straw was when we went to the grocery store Thanksgiving morning and there were some sweet potatoes improperly labeled as yam's and on sale for 50 cents a pound. (Check out this post for sweet potato/yam identity theft information) As soon as we got home and started cooking, Kevin mentioned the sweet potatoes and how good they were, again.

Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from Starting to Simmer!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends this year. I did potluck at Kevin's house and am going to a late Thanksgiving celebration on Saturday. Everything turned out really really well, and I have tons of photos to go though and lots to recipes to type up and will try to post them over the next week! 

Fancy Pants Chocolate Covered Strawberry Cupcakes

It was one of my friend's birthday's this weekend and her boyfriend decided at the last minute to surprize her by inviting everyone out to celebrate with them. He texted me and asked if I could pick up a cake, since bringing the cake himself would have ruined the surprize. I said sure and asked him what kind of cake she likes- Thinking I'd get a response like "chocolate with chocolate frosting, or yellow cake with white frosting" This is an exact quote of his reply text:

"Got the low down. Double layered chocolate cake, strawberry center with whip cream topping. NOT the regular butter cream"

Ummmm. Really??

Sweet Potato Pot Roast

Quick Review: The pot roast turned out incredibly tender, and I really liked using a crock pot for easy prep. I used a little too much wine so cut that down a little when I wrote up the recipie and next time will put the veggies in half way though cooking

Its fall and much cooler in the evenings in San Diego. Whenever this happens it makes me crave hearty comfort food. Kevin must have been on the same page as me when he brought up that he loves pot roast and brisket. I have never made a pot roast (it's actually quite possible that I've never even eaten it) and then didn't even know what a brisket was. (Turns out its a cut of meat, usually cooked slowly at a low temperature) After much googling I decided that I wanted to make the pot roast in my crock pot. I had used the crock pot to make pulled pork this summer (it was soooo yummy. I should make that again soon) but never done a whole dish, with meat and veggies in the crock pot.