Banofee Pie for Pi Day!

Ok so I came across this can of homemade "dulce de leche" in the pantry and it brought me back to the reason that I made it - for this delicious Banofee Pie made for Pi Day!  Nerdy, I know.  But I can't believe I never posted about it!  Anyway here's the low down on this delicious treat.

First, a crust of crushed vanilla wafers.  I mixed some melted butter in here and then pressed it down into a pie pan.

Now this next part uses an ingredient that was prepared a couple days earlier.  To make this dulce de leche caramel, you take a can of condensed milk, put it in a large pan, and cover it completely with water.  I put two cans in, one was used for this recipe, and one I just discovered in the pantry, huzzah!  Anyway, you have to make sure the water is completely covering the tops of the cans.  Then put a lid with ventilation on the pot and start the water boiling.  Keep it boiling for about 2 hours  adding water if needed to make sure the cans are completely submerged at all times, let it cool, and that's it!  The condensed milk will have turned into this delicious caramel.  Now for a disclaimer:  this method can have some dangerous outcomes.  Apparently some people have had the can explode on them!  This is probably because the water level dipped below the tops of the cans, but this is why I put a lid on the pot (and actually rubberbanded it to the handles to keep in in place) although make sure it has a ventilation hole.  That way, if the can did explode, everything would be mostly contained by the lid.  Yeah, there'd still be a mess, but not as bad as if the exploding can's contents went straight up to the ceiling!

Anyway, after you've boiled it, let it cool completely!  I mean totally and completely - like wait a day or so.  That way there's no chance of explosion when you open it.  And man the wait is worth it!  Open it up, scoop out all the goodness, and then spread it on your crust!

All gone!

Now for the banana part.  Layer sliced bananas on top of the caramelized condensed milk. No need to make a fancy design - not sure why I did that actually!

Now you just have to top it with whipped cream....

...and add a nerdy decoration!

This was seriously good.  Basically the only bad thing was using the pre-made spray whipped cream which started to collapse after a few minutes.  Some stiff peak homemade whipped cream would stand up better and probably be tastier but I didn't have any on hand that day. Now I'm thinking about what to make with the other can of condensed milk that was boiled....I'll let you know if inspiration ever strikes!

Our Anniversary!

If you've been reading this since when I started it, you may remember our first annual Anniversary Cook Off.  If not, go back and remind yourself!

http://anjalisfood.blogspot.com/2010/09/1st-anniversary-cook-off.html

Basically, we do an Iron Chef style cook off every year.  The above link was from our first year.  Today is our third year!  But we aren't doing the cook off until this weekend due to some logistical issues. So instead for today, I'll recap last year's cook off (since that was during my year long blogging hiatus!)

Without further ado - 2nd Annual Anniversary Cook Off: Secret Ingredient Strawberries.

Here we are at the beginning, all smiles!

Whew the cooking is done!  Way too much chaos (and a large grease fire) to take pictures during!  But here are the menus - this was after the eating and judging so that's why they are a little beat up.

Strawberry Cornbread (Menu 2)

Flank Steak (Menu 2)

Chicken Legs (Menu 2)

Salad (Menu 2)

Steak (Menu 1)

Pork (Menu 1)

Smoothie and Mousse (Menu 1)

Gazpacho in the upper left and Strawberry tea in the mug (Menu 1), Chocolate and candied ginger strawberries (Menu 2)

I'm predicting the results here!  You can also see the sangria (Menu 2) in the right back.

So could you tell which menu was mine and which was Ruchir's?  Mine was #2!  And yes, I won again this year!  Ruchir looks so dejected :) Once again, we'll see what happens next year - or actually, since this really happened last year, we'll see what happens in just a few short days! 

Chicken Breast Roll Up

This one was born out of the need to use up random things.  I had two chickens breasts that I had just thawed the day before but now was seriously lacking inspiration.  I also had a lot of those little Laughing Cow cheese triangles, these were chipotle flavored.  So I decided to make stuffed chicken breast which I've seen before but never attempted.  I butterflied the chicken breast, put a layer of foil over them, and then pounded the crap out of them with a can of tomatoes (hey, who needs a meat mallet!!).  

Then I opened all those little Laughing Cow triangles and mashed them together with some chopped green onions - hey I needed to use those up too!  I spread that mixture on the inside of the chicken, then rolled them up and spread more on the outside.  Then I discovered some old bread crusts in the freezer, so I threw them in the generic magic bullet, and voila - breadcrumbs. I rolled the chicken in the bread crumbs and then plopped them in a little glass dish. Cover with a little fresh ground pepper and then I sprayed it all with some olive oil. Baked at 350 for about 40 minutes and taadaa!

Overall, quite tasty!  If I would change anything, I'd definitely add more of the cheese mixture and probably more breadcrumbs.  I'd make this again probably but there are probably better uses of chicken breasts (like making butter chicken!).

Stuffed Mushrooms

These actually might look kind of gross from the picture, but they were actually really tasty!  Stuffed mushrooms are always good, it hardly matters whats in them!  It definitely helps to use crimini (baby bella) mushrooms though instead of the white ones.  Recently I made some with turkey sausage and cream cheese.  But these have bacon and pecans in them.  I think the cream cheese ones were better as they had more filling.  These needed something to hold everything together - I could see cream cheese going well here too.  They were pretty tasty just as they were though, lending more proof to the hypothesis that stuffed mushrooms are good as long as they are stuffed!  

Yogurt fancified

Nothing special about this yogurt except that it's homemade and topped with fancy cut strawberries and granola is dumped on the middle.  I've been eating a lot more yogurt now that I have a huge jug of pure maple syrup.  After we visited the sugar shack (where they made the maple syrup), I had all these great ideas of what to use it on.  It's great with yogurt but the best is actually on vanilla ice cream!  It's better than chocolate syrup even!  And in my mind, I feel like it's healthier too but actually it's probably just as bad. Anyway, sometimes presentation really does matter - with food I definitely think it does!

Amul butter of the gods

Have I expounded on the extreme superiority of Amul butter yet?  Someone's (Hammertime's) recent trip to India reminded me of this gem of an ingredient.  Or rather, when it's this good, it could be a food on it's own!  Amul butter is so much better than those waxy sticks you get from the grocery store. I was able to buy a block of it from the international grocery store in St. Louis but I have yet to find it here.  The butter actually has taste! It's a little salty and has some tumeric in it I think to make it golden.  Spread it on some toasted bread - bam that's a delicious breakfast!  Nothing more needed!  Mmm, my mouth is just watering thinking about it!  The taste is just beyond belief.  It truly is "utterly butterly delicious"!

I did a google search on Amul butter and found this weird picture...

but the butter could be made in a test tube, in a bathtub, in a garbage can, for all I care, as long as it's Amul, it's delicious!

Crab pickin'

It's just starting to get nice around here so it's reminding of the great summers in St. Louis : (  The little BBQ patio that we had access to was great and we spent a lot of time out there.  One day, shortly after we came back from DC, loaded up with soft shell crabs, we headed out to do some crab picking.

This lovely plate became the center piece for some fine tasting crab omelets and some delicious crab cakes!

Cauliflower pizza mish mash freakazoid

Ok this was kind of not great, but not gross, so I'm going to talk about it anyway.  Basically I got on this random kick where I would keep buying these heads of cauliflower but I didn't know what to do with them. I made a pretty good version of mashed cauliflower with some roasted garlic but of course I forgot to take a picture of that.  Here's a picture of something that I did make though!

Basically I just dumped the cauliflower in with a bunch of other random vegetables and sauteed everything until it was kind of mushy.  Then I toasted a tortilla, topped it with leftover pasta sauce, dumped the mixture on and covered int in cheese.  It really actually tasted fine, not great as I said before, but not too bad either.  It did look pretty unappetizing though.  Oh well, some experiments turn out better than others! This was definitely in the "could be MUCH better" category.

Curried Chicken Salad

Every once in awhile I have leftover chicken and I think that it'd be a good idea to make chicken salad.  It almost never is.  A good idea I mean.  It just usually tastes gross and has a weird texture because I get lazy and don't want to chop it so I put in the generic magic bullet and then it becomes pasty.  Anyway, this one was an exception!  The flavor was good, Indian spices basically, and I chopped it into cubes instead of trying to make it all small.  Also toasted cashews.  There were lots in there.  And onions, and green onions, and tomatoes.

Serve on a lettuce leaf because there is no bread at home!

It actually looks fancier that way anyway!  

French Toast Arrangement

Ok I make french toast so often that it's basically my signature dish.  Well, it would be, but I think having a "signature dish" makes you sounds douchey.  Anyway, I love it, and I make it all the time.  It's kind of hard to dress up french toast I think, it always just looks like brown rectangles.  But witness this fanciness that I took to a brunch awhile back!  So fancy, so presentable!  So delicious.

Palak Murgh

So I'm pretty happy with the outcome of this one.  It was basically born out of a need to use up some baby spinach.  It's basically chicken breast pieces cubed, sauteed with tons of onions and garlic, and then I thre in all the usual spices.  Then all the leftover spinach and just let it stew for a bit.  No liquid was added, that pretty much all came out of the spinach.  Seriously it was good!

Close up of the simmering action!

Serve with a parotta and a dollop of yogurt.  This meal was actually pretty healthy I think and also delicious!

Cinnamon Roll pancakes

I'm baaaack!

It's been so long since I've posted, but this breakfast made me want to start it all up again because I didn't want to forget this masterpiece!  We were planning to eat at New Haven's hot brunch spot, the Pantry, but after seeing the looong line and not being up for the 1.5 hour wait, we decided to try and make our own version of the cinnamon roll pancakes that I heard someone raving about.

The recipe  was from here http://www.recipegirl.com/2011/03/01/cinnamon-roll-pancakes/ but since Ruchir made it, it was of course altered in a bunch of unknown ways.  Namely he said he added more brown sugar to the icing swirl and didn't really measure anything.   Anyway, the result was delicious but messy.

Here's a shot of the finished product.  Mmmm, cream cheese drizzle.

D'oh! Starting it back up in 2011!

I started this food blog as a New Year's resolution in the beginning of 2010 as a way to inspire me to cook more.  I actually kept up with it pretty well until November and then it trailed off.  So after some gentle nudging from Mitz, I've decided to start it back up again.  This time though I am not only trying to cook more, but cook healthier!  In an effort to keep posting, I'll be short on the words and just put up pictures as I make and eat food.  Hopefully seeing a picture log of what I eat will shame me into eating better! Here's to 2011!

Nothing healthier than homemade yogurt!

Late Summer BBQ

Ok yes, it's October now but the weather has been awesome so it still feels like summer.  This was actually done about a month ago so it really was summer then.  There was a big art fair going on in our neighborhood so we invited some friends over to check that out and then have a BBQ.  This is the food that we came up with.

First up, a salad.  I don't like salads but this combo I made up was actually good!  The greens were baby spinach leaves and there were chopped up sundried tomatoes and toasted pecans mixed throughout.  But the best part was the homemade salad dressing concocted with random things we had.  The base was olive oil and pomegranate balsamic vinegar to make a really good vinaigrette.  Also in the dressing was some minced garlic, salt, peppers, spicy mustard, and a little brown sugar.  It was really good!!

Here's the total meal with the salad, cornbread, kebabs, potato salad, and fruit.  The potato salad and fruit were brought in by friends but the rest we made.  I already talked about the salad, now for the cornbread.  I used a boxed mix but altered it a bit to make it delicious.  First off, I added more milk than it called for plus some melted butter to make it softer. Then I mixed in some jalepeno cheese and topped it with green onions. It was super good!

The kebabs were also great.  The basic structure was chicken, green pepper, and onions.  I made three kinds, one was gluten free for a friend of ours and it just had some olive oil, salt, and pepper.  Another was marinated in soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, and a bit of spicy mustard.  And the third was slathered in BBQ sauce from Oklahoma Joe's in KC. They were all great but the Asian style was my favorite.

And the best part? Leftovers to enjoy for dinner later in the week!

Seriously Good Tacos

There are two things that can happen when Ruchir gets hungry.  One: he makes a weird concoction - examples are grilled squirrel, octopus, beaver, etc.  Two: he makes something amazingly delicious!

This is chicken that has been stewing in a wonderful mix of all sorts of delicious things.

Serve with pepperjack cheese, cilantro, taco sauce, and  use Jarritos or Mexican Coke to wash it all down!