Taking the Quest for the Best Banana Bread to New Elevations

42 Comments

The countdown is on folks! Only a few more recipes before we’re opening up the freezer, thawing the banana bread slices and having ourselves a banana bread feast all the while we determine which is our favorite recipe. Perhaps it will be this one? Only time will tell.

This next recipe wasn’t originally going to be in the mix, but we ran across it while surfing around one day, and it was enough different than all the others that we had to give it a try. We found it over at a blog called Inside the Kaganoff Kitchen and it’s called Mountain Sky Banana Bread. So what was so special about this bread that it was calling our name? Cream cheese. Yum! Continue reading →

Red Hot

42 Comments

By Mike

Miss A carpools home from preschool with our neighbor, and in a development that should come as no surprise to regular blog readers, she’s been known to express her opinion about the music selection during the car ride. Her standard request demand is for the Red Hot Chili Peppers:


She apparently picked this up from Kristy unbeknownst to me. Regardless, we’re off to New Mexico, a state that knows something about chile peppers, for our stateside adventure this week.

In fact, chiles are the subject of The Official New Mexico State Question: Red or Green? The correct answer if you can’t decide is, appropriately enough for the season, “Christmas.”

Our pick for a New Mexico meal featured red chiles most prominently, though the ones we chose were mild. We went with Costillas de Sudoeste–Southwest Spareribs in a red chile sauce. Fear not, though–we made some green chile sauce to go alongside as well. Continue reading →

Bread Bowl in a Soup

57 Comments

Tonight we’re wrapping up our little stint with Portuguese cuisine, but unlike our usual routine, we’re not going to end on dessert. I mean after all, what could really top our Pastéis de Nata?

Well, that and this house has been somewhat of an infirmary since the start of November. So we’re looking for something healthy, warming and down right comforting…soup. Soups also happen to be a main part of Portuguese meals, so tonight we chose a Portuguese bread soup called Açordas de Mariscos.

Miss A got a little relief from her fever for a few moments thanks to Advil, so she wanted to help break the bread into bite size pieces for us. 

Continue reading →

The Lighter Side of Minnesota

42 Comments

For this week’s stateside adventure, we’re revisiting Minnesota. Well, sort of anyway. We bought this squash on a recent trip to Minnesota at a local farm, but it’s really Japanese in origin. That said, we’re calling it our state night recipe this week. 

The farmer that we purchased the squash from described it as having a nutty and sweet flavor which instantly made me think that this would be perfect in a soup. You see I’ve been somewhat obsessed with soups after making Geni’s Sweet Potato Soup and I thought this squash might be a fun way to mix things up. Not to mention, after our major feasting last week, we’re looking to eat a bit more healthy – and so we bring you Uchiki Kuri Soup. Continue reading →

Spicin’ Things Up

48 Comments

We hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a great weekend. We’ve been busy eating leftovers, decorating for the holidays and even squeezing in a trip to the circus. We’ll get back to our stateside cooking adventures and Portugal later this week, but first we thought we’d share this awesome recipe for using up some leftover cranberry sauce and pumpkin puree.

Before we get to our recipe for this Spiced Cobbler, however, we wanted to quickly mention that our Pumpkin & Couscous Rocket Salad was featured over at FoodPornDaily this weekend. It was a wonderful surprise to discover today. I about fell off the couch when I found out. So now that we’re feeling all spicy…

We began our cobbler by chopping six pears. We peeled them this time. 

Then we gathered the leftover cranberry sauce (We recommend using homemade, but the canned variety will work.), the fresh cranberries, brown sugar and a bit of pumpkin pie spice. Continue reading →

Happy Thanksgiving and Giveaway Winners

38 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving! For those of you that celebrate the holiday, we hope you are having a wonderful day with great food, great family and great friends. We’re certainly thankful for all of our readers and everything that we have learned about different cultures, different countries, different states and each other in the past 11 months. Now without further adieu…

We have two winners of the recipe rock.

Mr. N shook up the bucket for the first winner. 

Continue reading →