Tag: food

Platter of Pilaf

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Now that we’ve wrapped up our Portuguese cuisine, we’re moving on to Miss A’s international pick for the next few weeks. She again got out her trusty little beach ball globe and selected the green-colored country of Uzbekistan. Both she and Mr. N have loved running around the house saying yelling “Uzbekistan!” It doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Ecuador,” but they still love saying it.

We really didn’t have any idea what to expect from Uzbek cuisine. In fact, before Miss A picked it on her globe, I wouldn’t have even known where it was. So we got out our world atlas and the kids and I did a little reading. Uzbekistan is a relatively new country having broken away from the Soviet Union in 1991, and it’s considered part of Central Asia. We also came across the website Uzbek National Cuisine from which we developed our first Uzbek recipe, Behili Palov, or Pilaf with Quinces. Continue reading →

Taking the Quest for the Best Banana Bread to New Elevations

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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

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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

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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 →

Spicin’ Things Up

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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 →

Iced Apple Stack

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We’re busy getting ready for Thanksgiving weekend around here. Fortunately we don’t have too much cooking to do as the big day’s festivities will be at my aunt’s house, but we do have a lot of things going on this weekend. So we’ll keep this short and sweet. We made this dessert a few weeks back for a friend’s fondue party. It’s a kind of apple pastry which we’re calling our Iced Apple Stack. It makes use of the Ice Syrup we ordered over the summer. Again, if you don’t have ice syrup, maple syrup will work just fine.

We started the recipe by boiling some water and sugar. 

Continue reading →