No, I have not suddenly gone crazy and decided that road kill is vegetarian … this is just the name I’ve always known this dish by. I think the original idea is that the rice pokes out of
the ball shape a little bit when they cook, so they look a bit like little scared porcupines. I’ve never really seen it myself (who ever saw a red porcupine, anyway? Even Sonic was blue…and supposed to be a hedgehog!), but the name certainly catches the attention. Also, I can’t think of anything better that doesn’t make them sound gross, which they aren’t.
| When I think of these pretzels, I think of my friend Ginny. I don’t think I’ve mentioned her on this blog before, which is a shame, because she’s a great friend with a fascinating story: She’s among the many celiacs who get a false negative on the antibody test, but a positive genetic test. Long story short, when we met her she knew something was wrong with her, but had no idea what–and neither did any of her doctors. (We’ve all been there, haven’t we?) But the better my sister and I got to know Ginny, the more she would mention some of her symptoms, or we would mention some of ours, and we’d all start to get a little wigged out at how much we had in common . . . |  |
Traditional peanut butter cookies are loaded with sugar and fat, and that is what makes them so very tasty. Now, I’m not normally much of a peanut butter person, but the
occasional peanut butter cookie really hits the spot. Thing is, I don’t actually like all that extra sugar, and Sean can’t have it, so I had to replace it with something. Normally, the goal is to make the sweetener flavor pretty much disappear into the treat’s overall flavor. In this case, though, what is a more natural combination than peanut butter and honey? Well, you could make an argument for “jelly” or “jam,” but let’s face it, that would taste really weird, if not right out gross, in a cookie! So, I went with honey, and the light honey taste remaining in the final product really makes these cookies a treat.
| Sometimes, the best desserts are the ones you don’t have to adapt. Of course, I had to adapt this one a little; the recipe I started with many moons ago used flour to make the bottom layer, but that was easily left out.
These bars are the sort of thing that seem like they shouldn’t be delicious, yet they are. If you like coconut, but your sweetie doesn’t, they’re also a great way to get some dessert snackies all to yourself for a few days! 🙂 They don’t take long to put together and bake, but unless you want to be eating goo (hey, sometimes you do) you want to let them cool at least an hour before even attempting the arcane task of dividing such a great mass of deliciousness into something resembling bars . . . |
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Now, I have titled this post “Vegetarian Pizza,” but most of the work of the dish is the pizza crust. I thought about just posting pizza crust, but it seemed silly to give you the recipe for that and then deny you a quick and easy sauce recipe too. After all, the cheese and toppings are no trouble to come by at all, so if I just give you both recipes than you’ll pretty much be ready to go!
| The hilarious thing about all this is that I never much cared for tortillas when I was a kid. (Or dinner rolls, or French bread–okay, I liked that a little–or pizza; the list goes on!) Bread never felt like it was a big part of my culinary world until it was gone. Tortillas in particular were pasty, dense, and gross, and the fact that they were used to wrap up all sorts of squicky food I didn’t like sure didn’t help their case. It would be great to be able to look back on my early life with the foggy glass of the wisdom of years and say I didn’t care much for so many bready foods because deep down, I knew in my heart they were bad for me, nay, toxic to my very flesh! . . . but no. I was just a picky kid. 😀 Can blame at least part of that on sensory processing disorder, an unrelated malady that makes my family tick somewhat funny, but I just plain didn’t like tortillas. Tortillas were gross, and the things that went in tortillas were even grosser . . . |  |
Happy New Year!
As a kid, eggnog from the store was a holiday staple in my house. As a matter of fact, my younger brothers still get very distressed if there is no eggnog purchased at various points during the Christmas and New Year’s period :-). I liked it okay, but it was rather cloyingly sweet, and such a funny shade of yellow. I’d never made eggnog from scratch until after I met Sean. You see, though you occasionally run across a sugar-free eggnog in stores (though it isn’t common where I’ve shopped), it is nasty. Sean actually didn’t really remember what eggnog was, so I took a stab at making him some. I didn’t let it get hot enough the first time I tried it, so it didn’t thicken properly, but my attempts this past holiday season have thickened up much more nicely. So, here I share the fruits of my labor with you!
Now, traditionally
, stollen is made with some candied fruits and is covered in either powdered sugar or a powdered sugar glaze. For obvious reasons, this does not work for people trying to live sugar-free over the holidays! I do have something to confess: I had no idea what “stollen” was when my husband began to talk wistfully of the bread his family made every Christmas Eve (I realized later that I had seen the commercialized version of it that is usually sold in Germany–a German professor brought one in–but I didn’t realize it was the same thing when Sean was talking about it). However, he quite liked the tradition his family had concerning this bread, so I thought I’d give a shot to making it.
| Merry Christmas, everyone. 🙂 It’s been a busy few weeks for me; I was going to fall back on a post about tortillas, which I have all the pictures for, but I woke up the other day and the first thing I thought was, “Really, Jennifer? Really? You’re going to post about tortillas on Christmas Eve? Forget that. Post about sugar cookies.” I had not ever in my life made sugar cookies from scratch, but this did not stop me! After all, fools rush in where angels fear to tread, right? . . . |  |
I’ve heard of a lot of things called “Santa’s Thumb Prints” , and most of them are tasty. The only thing the recipes appear to have in common is that they all have a circle of jam dropped into the center of the cookie. The ones my mother makes are nutty and a nice brown color; the ones I had at a party the other day (called “Santa’s Thumb Prints” by the lady who brought them) were more like a sugar cookie dough and were mostly off-white. Both were extremely tasty, and I’m sure you’ve probably run across many other things that go by this name that aren’t quite like either of these examples. One way or the other, here is a natural-sugar version of this holiday cookie. I guess it falls somewhere between what my mother makes and the smooth sugar-cookie variety in texture and flavor. You’ll just have to give it a try and let me know what you think of it :-).
