Pulled Pork Carnitas & Cowboy Beans

Recipe Review: Pulled Pork Mexican style with a sweet tangy sauce. Plus Bacon makes everything better- including Pinto Beans.

This Sunday I made a late Cinco de Mayo dinner, (Ocho de Mayo?) Pork Carnitas Tacos, Cowboy Beans, and Mexican Red Rice. I've made the pork once before- from a Rick Bayless recipe that called for achiote seasoning, that version has a slightly smoky flavor, while this one has a more true pork flavor with citrus notes. "Real" carnitas involves a dutch oven and cooking for two hours but I cheat and use a crock pot, and then finish by broiling the meat to add a little crisp.

Starting to Scallop

*** I need to vent how incredibly frustrated I am with blogger. I posted this last Tuesday, and then Blogger went down. Since then they have been undergoing maintenance, and announced that they had rolled back to an older version of blogger- aka before Tuesday, aka before I made my post. They assured people that their posts would be restored. Well I've waited a week and this post didn't come back so I had to recreate it. Blogger is posting happy little updates about how all blog posts have been restored when that isn't the case. Very very frustrating. ***

Recipe Review- Bay Scallops in a white wine and garlic sauce, simple yet elegant, a perfect summer meal

"Are you sure you want to blog this one? You do an awful lot of scallop recipes..." -Kevin
"Yes! I love scallops- the more scallops the better!" -Me
"You might have to rename the blog Starting to Scallop if you keep this up" -Kevin

So- here's yet another scallop recipe- I hope that you're not getting tired of reading about scallops because I'm not tired of eating them.

Congratulations Laura & Matt!

Last weekend my co-worker got married in a small private ceremony. Since the wedding was only for 2 people, and she can't have gluten they decided to forgo getting a cake. Well when I heard that I decided that wasn't ok, and that I would make her a cake! I had never made a wedding cake- or a cake that was gluten free before, so I was a little worried about the results. I decided not to tell her my plan just in case the cake didn't work out well. The recipes for gluten free cakes were incredibly intimidating so I went with a cake mix instead. The cake turned out spongy- but not bad tasting. I baked a sheet cake and then cut small and larger circles from that. I really had no clue what I was doing as far as the decorating went. I had never covered a cake in fondant before. I rolled out the fondant and just draped it over, then did my best to even out any lumps or folds. This worked well for the top of the cake, but the sides were a little dicey. Good thing there's decorative icing and ribbon to cover up little mistakes. Overall I was pretty pleased with the results!! I want to take a cake decorating class soon so I can learn how to do this the right way.

Warm Tomato Bruschetta

Recipe Review- Classic Bruschetta- capers are the secret ingredient!

One of my hobbies outside of the kitchen is running. (Gotta work off all that food somehow!) One of the best parts of going on a long run is knowing that you can eat something amazing afterwards, and also getting to carb load before a big race. Kevin and I were getting ready for the La Jolla Half marathon, so we invited a few running friends over and made a big pot of pasta, chicken Parmesan, garlic bread, and some bruschetta as an appetizer. Bruchetta is one of my favorite things to make when people are coming over for dinner. The prep is rather simple, everyone seems to like it, and I'll take any excuse to eat some capers.

Double Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

Recipe Review: Chocolate and Peanut Butter- the perfect combination. 

I had been planning on making cupcakes for Easter every since I got into cupcake decorating. There were so many cute ideas, I wanted to make them all and I couldn't decide. Also I couldn't figure out what flavor to try and make. I started out trying to make the plastic Easter egg cupcakes featured in Whats New Cupcake. What you're supposed to do is coat the inside of plastic eggs with melting candy to make a candy egg that looks like a plastic egg. That was a great big fail. The chocolate stuck in the egg and wouldn't come out without breaking even though I had followed the directions to a T. Realizing this was just going to stress me out I scrapped that idea and moved on to the much simpler birds nest cupcakes. Although its Easter and that lends itself to light fruit flavors I decided to try a chocolate cupcake since I hadn't done one yet.

Mediterranean Turkey Burgers and Spiced Couscous

It was a beautiful Sunday, slightly warmer than its been, clear and sunny. I slept in and then spent a few hours hanging out poolside with a friend who was visiting. HBO had just started re airing season 3 of True Blood and so I was looking forward making dinner and watching it in the evening. Last summer that was Kevin's and my Sunday routine- spend the day outside, cook dinner, watch True Blood. Except this weekend my favorite sous chef was sick. I still enjoy cooking when its just me, but this Sunday made me miss our summer Sundays, I can't wait to for it be consistently nice weather so we can get back into that routine.



I went for a Mediterranean theme with turkey burgers, using whole wheat pitas instead of buns, and a spiced couscous with fennel and roasted red peppers. I'm into fennel big time right now. A few weeks back I did a fennel risotto, and just love the complex flavor that fennel brings to a dish. If you haven't had it before fennel has a mild black licorice/anise flavor, crossed with a little bit of onion, and slightly sweet. I've never had it raw before but apparently you can eat it both ways. Back to dinner... I've made turkey burgers previously using a variety of spice combinations but this is my favorite so far. It's really pretty easy to just add in a few ingredients to your burgers and it makes a huge difference in flavor.

Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Cakes

This is a very exciting blog post for me. To start off its my 50th blog post! Since I started blogging in the fall I have really come to love it and look forward to every post that I write. Blogging has lead me to try making new things that I never would have tried, and I now have new hobbies to pursue, (cake/cupcakes decorating, and food photography) that are fueled by the blog!

Second- Kevin and I invented the most delicious food! Usually I cook from a recipe, and I was making a sweet potato and spinach hash that I had seen in Real Simple magazine, Kevin was watching the process (which involves grating the sweet potatoes) and suggested that we make them into cakes and fry them like latkes. Since this was a huge departure from the recipe I let Kevin take the lead, and we mixed in an egg and some bread crumbs to the spinach mix, fried them up, and oh. my. goodness. They were amazing! We were both incredibly surprised by how great these tasted. No they aren't the prettiest, and we probably should have baked them instead of fried but wow. Just wow.