Sweet Potato Cream Spaghetti With Crispy Kale

I know this recipe sounds faaaaaar too nutritious for this blog, but we'll let it slide just for this brief moment because it's delicious.

I found the recipe over at How Sweet Eats.  The only changes I made were: regular pasta (whole wheat... gimme a break), used a regular ol' onion, and whole milk.  So there it's already more fattening than she intended it to be.

In the background is the crispy kale.  I must say I never particularly enjoyed kale until this evening when I had it all crisped up with sesame oil. So tasty, I now understand the desire for a kale chip.  In the foreground is the sweet potato cream sauce.

Holy crap, I take some damn tasty looking food pictures sometimes.  I want to dive head first into my screen right now and gobble this bowl up.  

P.S.  Between you and me, I had about 5 bowls.

Don't forget to vote for my Oreo stuffed chocolate chip cookie on Food Stories! Only 4 days left and I'm still in second place.  Click here to vote.

Birthday Cake Batter Oreo Cookie Bars

I was lucky enough to stumble upon some birthday cake Oreos recently even though I was under the impression that I had missed my chance to gobble these up.  I will also state that sadly these are not super delicious.  They are in fact, a disappointment in the grand scheme of Oreos.  That being said I decided to bake something with them.

I chose to take a recipe for chocolate chip cookies, Tollhouse to be exact, halve the recipe, subtract the chocolate chips, and throw in Oreos and sprinkles.  I also baked them in an 8x8 inch pan because I'm too lazy to make cookies sometimes.

Below are the wonderously golden brown fresh out of the oven cookie bars.

This next photo my friends, goes down in the KTC record books as one of the most incredible food photos ever!

Gasp! It just takes my breath away.

P.S. Don't forget to vote for another fantastic Oreo photo of mine over at Food Stories.

Pumpkin Brownies with Apple Butter

I made my own apple butter. Yea, I thought I'd wow you kids right off the bat. I made my own freaking apple butter.

I used this recipe from Sweet and Savory as a skeleton for my crock pot apple butter.  The changes I made were: no cloves, nutmeg instead, halfed the recipe.

Time elapsed: 0 hours.

Time elapsed: 5 hours.

After hour 5 the sugars and spices join the party.

Time elapsed: 12 hours. Done!  Sorry by the time it was done, the good kitchen lighting had disappeared.

On to the brownie portion!  Seriously above are the only ingredients.  No eggs, no oil, no water, just a can of pumpkin and a box of brownie mix.

I swirled the apple butter on top of the brownie batter once it was in the pan.

The result? Super moist brownies, and nutritious too!

Mexican Mac and Cheese

I was sort of wandering around the supermarket aimlessly when I decided I was going to make this for dinner one night.

Below are the "Mexican" inspired ingredients I chose to include in my mac and cheese.  Milk and butter were also used to make the cheesy sauce of course.

I was totally going to purchase Doritos to top this mac and cheese with, but these "artisan" chips caught my eye.  Fire roasted chipotle? I had to do it.

The chip topping was a success.  I recommend you go and top some mac and cheese with crumpled chips straight away.  I mean come on, was there any doubt that topping mac and cheese with chips was going to turn out bad?

In a word: holler.

That is all.

I Got an Award!....And Also Ate Some Tasty Things

Apparently people visit blogs and nominate them for awards.  And apparently someone thought my blog was worthy of an award.  That my friends, is quite exciting.

Check it out kids, I was awarded the Illuminating Blogger Award for illuminating, informative blog content.  CJ over at Food Stories nominated me.  It's a pretty great blog that I recommend you go check out.  Thanks again CJ!  Here is a link to the award site.  

I am expected to include a random fact about myself sooooo here goes: I'm going to Alaska in May and I'm so insanely excited about it.  Seriously counting down the days, 207 to be exact.

Now, what you really came here to see are the crazy delicious things I consumed this weekend.  For lunch on Saturday we hit up this glorious sandwich shop called Juliebelle's in Great Neck.  They have about 100 amazing sandwiches to choose from so I can't say it was easy making a decision.  Drool over their menu here.

Sandwich #1 the Rio Grande: chicken cutlet, guacamole, pico de gallo, sour cream, fire roasted peppers, caramelized onions and pepper jack cheese.

Garlic Parmesan fries.  These were so ridiculously good.  I could go on and on about them all day.

Sandwich #2 Hot Chix: chicken cutlet, homemade garlic wing sauce, lettuce, tomato, blue cheese on toasted garlic bread.

As if those sandwiches didn't look and sound good enough I wanted to inform you that their chicken cutlets are coated with panko bread crumbs and Corn Flakes! Amazing!

Don't worry, I cooked some pretty awesome stuff recently so get excited for more posts this week.

Tomato Spinach Raviolini Soup

I discovered these baby ravioli at Trader Joe's 2 years ago.  Amazingly enough it took me 2 years to go get these awesome little pastas and plop them into another soup.

This was a fly by the seat of my pants recipe.  I used 2 cans of broth, 2 cans of crushed tomatoes, and added some water.  Also, I put in about a bag of frozen spinach which I failed to photograph.

Much like every time I make soup I attempt to take photographs of it.  I should probably just give up already.  The picture below is just for shits and giggles.

The soup was rather tasty,  but I should have added more liquid.  It became quite stew-like in consistency and then the leftovers lost all soup resemblance.

I'm going to need to figure out more ways to incorporate raviolini into my cooking.  They are just too damn cute.

Peanut Butter Apple Bars

I don't feel like I really did my all to celebrate this month of apple-mania so these bars were my last chance.  This recipe for peanut butter apple bars came from Two Peas and Their Pod. 

Changes I made to the recipe: added truck loads of cinnamon because I felt like it, eliminated the frosting because I was pretending to be health conscious or more likely, I was lazy.

Look at that cascading waterfall of butter and brown sugar!

The final step in the batter is mixing in the diced apples.

Fresh outta the oven.

So good! Still wondering how the delicious factor would have been elevated with the frosting on it, buuuuuut since it doesn't have frosting on it you can have it for breakfast right? Yeaaaaaa totally.

Want more apple recipes? Check these out:

Sweet Potato Apple Soup

Apple Blondies

Apple Galette

Apple Peanut Butter Tart

Brie Apple Salad

Apple Pumpkin Streusel Cake

Homemade Apple Sauce

Caramel Apple Cheesecake

Apple Cinnamon Pancakes

I am a firm believer that anything starting with "apple cinnamon" is going to be delicious.  These pancakes came out just as I believed they would.

I just used a Bisquick mix and added diced up apples and cinnamon.  Not much going on here, but it was simply delightful.

The only issue I came across was that the apples thinned the batter a bit.  This didn't have any effect on the final taste, but it made it difficult to control on the griddle.

Also, because the apples thinned the batter, I ended up making about 30 pancakes.  Sadly I failed to capture the giant stack of pancakes because I was in a real hurry to start eating them.

I know it doesn't look like anything special, but I swear they were crazy tasty.  Now I just need to come up with another way to use apples this weekend...

Garlic Herb Pappardelle

This weekend I visited Fairway for the first time.  It was glorious, incredible, took my breath away.  Seriously, if you like cooking and/or eating, get yourself to a Fairway.  I could spend some serious cash at this place.  One of the awesome aisles I visited had some interesting dried pastas.  I had to treat myself to this one: garlic herb pappardelle.

Since the package did not contain a full pound of pasta, I wanted to make a hearty sauce to bulk up the meal.  I used 2 baby eggplants, 2 zucchini, and maybe 8 tomatoes.

Here are all the veggies sauteing in the pan. 

I will fully endorse both Fairway and this pasta.  It's going to be very difficult to eat regular pasta after this meal.  You could really taste the garlic and the herbs and the pasta tasted waaaaay better than regular dried pasta.  It tasted like fresh pasta.

Sooooo who wants to take me to Fairway this weekend?