Try-A-New-Green (Fennell, Raddiccio and Endive) Salad

As I exited college, I journaled about a life vision: "Live simply (little "stuff") and naturally (eat local). Be deeply invested in serving my community and pouring into people using my gifts. A home (in the city?) that welcomes guests and friends for homemade food, fellowship, refuge, discipleship and learning..."

What does this have to do with a bowl of funky lettuces? Everything.

Five years later, these hands are a piece of my community, the produce selection a sign of knowing a friend's special diet and her desire to turn it into an adventure.

They are in my home (in the city!), the place of warmth and invitation I once dreamed of.

Texture experimentation: Success!

My ellipsis (fancy word for "...") cut off another part of that vision: some mushy words about a husband and children. Five years ago, that's what I envisioned as the ultimate in home life. What I didn't realize then is the degree to which I could so beautifully realize my hopes of everyday companionship and community through a wider body of people, especially its (insert "Single Ladies" chorus here).

The mushy part is still part of the life vision. But for now, I rest in the gift of the present. This night, it's crisp and colorful with a hint of licorice-tasting fennell. (Oh, and there was salmon to go with it. It was not local. Minor life vision fail.)

Slicing this babe resulted in oooing and ahhing over how beautiful its layers of innards are

Mini Frittatas with Feta, Swiss Chard, Mushrooms and Shallots

This is what happens when you fancify eggs for brunch with friends. I have yet to perfect a giant frittata, but making little ones in muffin tins turn out just fine. It was also easy to pull out servings for a few of us and save the rest for fast meals later that week.

Also, what are eggs without bacon?

Why cook spinach when you can get your hands on something as pretty as red-veined Swiss Chard? Like spinach, it also goes from a giant pile of leaves to a small ball of wilted green, and has a similar taste. Cooking is really quite fascinating.

Making these also reminded me I need to purchase silicone cupcake tins. Cleaning eggs out of metal ones is treacherous.

Best of 2013

My 2014 kicked off with a round of catch-ups with old friends, one of whom was baking the number one cupcake beauty below for a party tonight (and raved about the cake!). That reminded me to publish this post of my most trafficked (and coincidentally, my personal favorite) kitchen projects from the year.

Cheers to all the tastes of the past and future!

Chocolate Buttercream Cupcakes

Blackberry-Goat Cheese Pork Tenderloin Sandwiches
 

Chocolate Cream Pie Squares

Mint-Lime Fruit Skewers

Mexican Chicken-Lime Soup
 

 Not a recipe, but my most-trafficked, most beloved post of the year:

How to Make a Family Cookbook

Chocolate-Peppermint Layer Cake

Always searching for the latest greatest variation on homemade chocolate cake, I took the recipes I know work and added some peppermint flavoring. Voila... chocolate layers with peppermint buttcream innards and pepperming chocolate frosting on the outside.

In-person time with people trumped photo opps for this babe, so all I got was the whole cake in nighttime lake house lighting and then a giant slice that was left two days later. The slice only lasted like 20 minutes after this photo.

How to make this cake:

Chocolate Cake Layers
Buttercream Frosting, subbing peppermint for vanilla
Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Icing, subbing peppermint for vanilla
Crushed peppermints for garnish

Cabbage Wraps with Garlic-Peanut Sauce

If this looks like a rabbit meal, it is. My friend has to eat like one for health reasons, and so any time I happen to think of a meal that's not salad with chicken and that stays within the strictly meat and green veggie realm, I get excited and tend to cook up the meal ASAP.

Voila, Cabbage Wraps, served with Coconut Rice.

(As I type this, I can't believe I am just now blogging about about sweet, nutty Coconut Rice, pretty much the best form of white starch ever).

The serving line looked like a Thai taco bar, with more veggies and no cheese. Carrots added crunch, and the Garlicky Peanut Sauce a strong kick of spice and nuttiness.

Savoy  Cabbage looked like the prettiest wrapper to me because of its rippled texture and curly edges. It was also super sturdy, and my cabbage washing assistant discovered it can hold water, no leaks, like a cup.


If I were to make it again, I would...

• thin out the sauce with some water so it spreads its punch more evenly over the chicken.
• add another bell pepper and maybe some mushrooms and other veggies.
• double it for leftovers, and for the love of Coconut Rice.

Buttercream Play Dates

I choose making cake from scratch over making it pretty any day, and all previous decorating attempts have been pretty major failures. But in the spirit of trying new things, I found myself spending Sunday afternoons this fall with a professional cake decorator and two fellow students of confection in a very nice teaching kitchen at Samford.

Our book taught us how to ice and also how to spend a fortune on Wilton cake decorating equipment. But here's what I concluded:

1. Decorating is tedious and laborious. See that cookie? It wasn't so bad. But once we got to cakes, that meant baking cakes, whipping up icing, coloring it drop by drop, coloring another color and another, cutting icing bags, filling bags, putting tips on... and that's all before the decorating starts. And you gotta reverse it all to clean-up at the end.

Basic Sugar Cookies from Martha

2. I hate Crisco, hate it very much. One night after I thought I had cleaned all my icing instruments, my roommate ventured to our kitchen sink to find a greasy soap bottle, greasy dish brush, grease, grease everywhere. I blamed the Crisco. Seriously, it's way worse to clean than butter. And it doesn't taste like butter, just GREASE. I'm sure it helps the shape of my icing and all, but I had a hard time cheating on my true love (butter, right after chocolate) to follow class icing  recipe directions.

Yellow Cake (Smitten Kitchen) with Wilton Class Buttercream of the Almond Variety

3. Flowers aren't that scary to make. They just take about 10 years to bring to life, and then you eat them and they are gone.

4. I could write with icing for hours on end. When penmanship met confection, I had this ah-ha moment: "This is what I was made for — writing words with sugar!" My wax paper-on-kitchen-counter canvas brought me back to my sixth grade and all of a sudden I doodling my name and my friends' (now, roommates') names and random greetings. I did stop before getting to adding last names of whatever boy we would like to marry at the given moment.

5.  With writing, I can add all a new dimension to make cakes, one of thoughts and ideas I usually reserve for paper. I was hosting Monday Night Bible study dinner, so I whipped out our "theme line" courtesy of All Sons and Daughters.

(More) Yellow Cake with Hershey's Perfectly Chocolate Chocolate Icing

 6. The best way to bake a cake is to bake it, brainstorm a design with a friend with more artistic talent, do all the prep work yourself and then let her do the hard part where the icing actually comes out of the tip. And then you end up with something like this beauty below, pretty much a masterpiece minus my handwriting. She even created the "Appalachian Trail," albeit unintentionally.

Reese's Brownie Bites

For full disclosure...

Melted butter and chocolate chips erupted in my kitchen mid-afternoon one Sunday.

They were supposed to combine with peanut butter cup splendor and make it to Best Wurst Fest (think urban hipster church backyard version of a church supper with much sausage grilling).

This sequence of events did in fact happen. Like much of life, it did not happen as planned.

My Reese's babes did not want to come out of their little muffin tins until they were fully cooled.  

Cooling was taking about 10 years per brownie.
Three batches remained to be cooked.

I called in the assistance of a less cooperative nonstick tin.

 I was scooping batter. 

I was unwrapping gold foil.

 I was delicately hacking at the edges of cooked brownies only for them to melt into an ugly blob. 

I needed to shower before re-entering public. 

It was time to go.

In the end, I was clean and had half of my baked goodies to take and share. 

The kitchen was not clean. The other half of the brownies were in multiple tins, on a rack, in a container, smeared on the counter.

But my house had peanut butter chocolate decadence to keep us sane for the next few days, says the sweet-obsessed optimist in me.

This post is brought to you by Madoline's efforts to slash the idea that all things online are perfect and pretty. She knows baked goods make messes and result in imperfection. And she reminds herself that in real life marriages, children, vacations and all instagrammed and facebooked and blog prettiness are, in fact, messy, too. Oh, the lies to the contrary she subconsciously believes!