New Years happened and I have to tell you I found myself in an absolute cooking/baking frenzy at home.  To be perfectly honest with you guys, there really wasn’t much else to do.  I’m getting to that point in my life where my close friends from home are moving away save a small handful, so it’s pretty much me, myself, my parents, and my dogs.  My older brother was only home for a week for the holidays (sadface), so I left to my own devices for a few weeks.

I know it doesn’t look like it, but I pretty much didn’t stop baking/cooking/living in the kitchen.

Why is there no evidence of this? God, MEL WHERE ARE THE POSTS?

I will tell you!

I didn’t post anything because for a few straight weeks I don’t think I left the kitchen except to sleep, and curling up on the floor of the kitchen so I was right there first thing in the morning to take over the oven was tempting, believe me.  But alas, I didn’t leave the kitchen until I was forced out.  And by forced, I ran out of confectioners sugar for the first time in about five years.  So my final macaron attempt was thwarted and I nearly had a breakdown on the floor.  But there were several macaron attempts.  They don’t all have picture but I have them well documented…in my brain…and I will share, I promise!

Where was I after the powdered sugar catastrophe?  Moving back to school.  I think I’m already depressed.  I have only been to the dining hall for dinner once since I came back a week and a half ago, preferring to hole up in my dorm room making lentil soup, english muffin pizza, and green smoothies (which are my new absolute favorite thing and I will write about them even though I’ve been learning that a bright green smoothie is really perturbing to some people).

I will go back and fill everybody in on the January culinary adventures, but today I have a review.

AWKWARD STORY: my OB/GYN recommended this diner to me.  Honestly, I don’t care who knows that.  And after you eat the food there, I promise you won’t either.

Breakfast in my dormitory leaves you with a plethora of options- grey hard boiled eggs, liquified scrambled eggs, limpy floppy I-don’t-know-if-it’s-really-cooked bacon, croissants that are crumbly like toast, “buttermilk” biscuits that are actually like rocks, and runny oatmeal.  The least offensive of these is the runny oatmeal, which is what I usually have everyday before work.  During my time as an undergraduate, I could count on one hand the number of times I ate breakfast, but I’m proud to say I actually eat it every morning now.  And I’m awake before lunchtime.  Sometimes even before 8am (proud, Mom?).  Truly miraculous.

But my favorite meal?  Brunch, hands down.  Brunch is sacred.  Brunch is ritualistic.  For an entire semester The Boy and I went to the same diner every single Sunday.  The waitresses knew who we were.  One of them even knew our orders.  Suffice it to say, liquified scrambled eggs and floppy bacon do not satisfy my need for a proper Sunday brunch.

Enter the Florida Avenue Grill.  Doc described it to me as a “great greasy spoon breakfast place.”  I was sold before I looked up the reviews online, and then I was sold even more.  This past Sunday the trek was made.

It was really easy to get to from my school, a quick bus ride and even shorter stroll.  It was a little chilly, but there was a level of comfort in being able to smell the grease of this place from nearly a block away.  It could have been deep fried anything, but it smelled utterly divine.

The outside of the place didn’t really look like much.

The inside wasn’t very spacious, but at the same time it was cozy without being cramped.

Plus, Mr. T greeted us at the table!  Who wouldn’t love that?

Even the coffee was great.  No cockroaches or anything (yes, that happened last semester.  No campus coffee since.)

This place specializes in soul food when it isn’t time for breakfast, but they do serve breakfast all day.  You have a choice between toast and hot biscuits.  We went with the hot biscuits.  When they were brought to the table without any butter, I was puzzled.  Then I bit into one.

Oh my word, these biscuits pretty much are butter.  They don’t need anything on them.  No butter, nothing.  Granted, they serve them with little jam packets if you want, but I was totally satisfied eating my way through two (okay, three) flaky, buttery, happiness biscuits.  Yes, happiness biscuits.  Soul food as in: food to satisfy Mel’s cholesterol deprived soul.

The eggs and bacon don’t look like much, but they cooked those eggs in the bacon grease.  And that bacon was criiiiiispy.  That 100% makes up for the less than stellar ovum presentation.  Yum, ovum.

To my D.C friends reading this, go to this place next time you are wondering where a cheap and tasty brunch spot is.  That being said, go in a small group.  They don’t have a lot of booths for four people; it’s mostly just counter seating and small booths for two.

The one negative critique I had about this place was that they are obviously so popular that they were not so subtlety trying to get us to leave.  The server kept walking by and staring at us, brought us the check way before we were ready, and a minute later put down a to-go box when we had 1) been eating for 10 minutes 2) hadn’t asked for one.  We ignored to-go box guy and ate at our leisure.  Well, he ate at his leisure and I was done in a millisecond.  It was too good not to inhale at lightning speed.

Expect some throwback posts in the near future.  I took photos and tested recipes for about ten posts (I told you I was busy!).  Don’t fret (though I doubt any of you are fretting)!  New Years Resolution: don’t fall off the face of the planet.

<3

This recipe is like that- and since pasta is one of the easiest things ever, hopefully I can convert some of my dorm buddies to this new (new for me, not new-new) pasta sauce.

Growing up, my mother has always had piles of cookbooks, but only ever had a small staple of recipes that she used over and over.  We would experiment occasionally with something that looked particularly tasty on the Food Network, but on the whole we liked what we liked.

I should revise. I liked what I liked.  I was so incredibly picky when I was younger I didn’t really give the house a lot of opportunity for a large variety of menu choices.  Pasta with butter.  Not even red sauce.  I was an awful Italian.  Oh, and it had to be the little egg bow pasta.  No big bow ties, no elbows, nada.  When my mother and I made this pasta recipe and my initial reaction was, “Oh my god, why didn’t you make this for us as kids!?!”

(When I was really little, I wouldn’t even eat my own chocolate cake.  Because I didn’t like the frosting.  What alien planet did I come from?)

Haha that’s right, I ate NOTHING.  Looking back, I really cannot for the life of me remember when I stopped being picky and expanded my palate beyond plain pasta, milk, and double stuffed oreo cookies.  Hm.

But anyway, now, I absolutely love this pasta sauce.  It’s really light and creamy and the cinnamon is just a slight punch of spicy flavor without being overpowering or in-your-face.  You also can make extra and it stores great in the fridge.  And since every student should absolutely know how to make a dish of pasta, this is a way to keep the dorm room staple from getting too repetitive.

This recipe from the book calls for 1/2 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 tsp sugar, and 4oz fresh ricotta, but we pretty much eyeballed all of our ingredients.  The book also said to use spaghetti.  We ignored this as well (my mom is not a spaghetti fan.  Plus big bow ties are awesome.  Holla at my childhood).  In my mind, cooking, unlike baking, is all about improv.  Plus, those little measurements didn’t yield anywhere near enough sauce to get a good coating on as much pasta as we were cooking.

Really, just make sure you have a LOT more ricotta than you have cinnamon, add sugar if you feel like you need it for a touch of sweetness, and voila!  It really was that simple.  We poured the ingredients into a bowl, stirred them up, and then just kept tasting it until it was just right.

Cooking time = playtime, folks.

Oh, and that thing right next to the pasta?  That is called a salad.  I’ve been learning that I should eat more of those.  Apparently, leafy greens are good for you.  Meaning, half the plate is for my physical health (salad), and half of the plate is for my emotional/spiritual well being (pasta).

One should eat to satisfy the soul more than the body.  It makes the cooking more fun.

Until next time!

Everybody talks about the dreaded New Years Resolution, as if it’s something you are morally obligated to set up and achieve.  And if you don’t, you obviously fail at life.  I’ve never really done them before, because I didn’t need an extra reason to more stress to my already frazzled personality, but I feel that I’m at a place this year where I can lay out some goals and effectively see them through.

So here’s what I’ve got:

1) Stop biting my nails.  Stop stop stop.  Yes, I am 22 years old and I bite my nails.  I’ll work to have hands that are worthy of an ASL student.

2) Improve my photography.  I am still working with my Nikon point-and-shoot camera, and I do intend on upgrading to a real DSLR (specifically, the Canon Rebel, when I’m no longer broke/know how to use manual setting), but for now I’m using the fact that my camera does not have a manual mode as a means to really focus in on photo composition and editing.  I know for a fact that my camera can turn out fantastic photos with the right lighting.  Have some examples.

Just last week, I made my way to Niagara Falls with The Boy (I would abbreviate this to T.B, but I don’t want to equate a significant other with tuberculosis.  How La Boheme.), and before we did anything else, we randomly decided to follow some signs we saw to a butterfly conservatory not far from the falls (on the Canada side).  Oh my word, I don’t think I’ve seen anything that incredible in ages.  You leave your coat outside (because it’s humid as anything in there), and walk into this massive grass greenhouse that really is more like a jungle on the inside, and butterflies everywhere.  They are flying in your face, they are on the ground, they are landing on you (well, not me…other people).  You have entered their domain, and mostly I tiptoed around because I didn’t want to accidentally step on anybody.  There were some casualties on the ground.  I didn’t want to be “that guy.”

With my point-and-shoot camera, sans any adjustments except custom white balance, I took these:

I cropped them into squares, but they weren’t edited in any other way, shape, or form.  If I could do this with food, FoodGawker wouldn’t have issues with anything I did.  There’s nothing that a room full of natural light and the macro setting can’t do.  I will figure out how to do this with food, even if it means standing outside with a tray of cookies in freezing temperatures to get a photo.  I’m learning!

3) Don’t spread myself too thin.  I thrive on work.  Sometimes, I think I thrive on too much work.  But even Superwoman can only take so much.  I won’t to the 40 hours of work + 20 hours of class time + homework thing this semester.  I mean it this time.

I’m willing to admit that I’m not Superwoman.  But, I wish I was.  Seriously.

Those are the top three.  Now, onto the cupcakes!

On New Years Eve, I was at The Boy’s house, and two of his younger cousins came over because they wanted to bake with me.  Beforehand, I had Boy do reconnaissance work and find out their favorite flavors.  One loves everything, one does not like chocolate, and they both love blueberries.  But not lemon.  So that rules out blueberry cupcake with a light lemon buttercream.  But they both love cream cheese.  Badabing!

As we baked, three cameras whizzed around the kitchen.  Mine, their mom’s camera, Boy’s mother’s camera. You’d go to pour dry ingredients into the mixer and there would but this rush of thirty thousand clicks.  It was awesome that everybody was getting so into our adventure!  Now that I think about it, I would like to have paparazzi in the kitchen following me constantly.  Granted, they would have to endure me muttering to myself and whatever TV I have on in the background (Switched At Birth immediately comes to mind…), but perfect action shots of everything I do in the kitchen at all times?  I could live with that.

New Years Resolution 3: Get some paparazzi.  Except not really.

All I did for this excursion was take my go-to vanilla cupcake recipe, and toss in a pint of blueberries (tossed around in an eyeballed handful of cornstarch) after the batter was all mixed together.

The only cream cheese frosting recipe I will ever use ever is plain and simple.  Complements of my badass godmother (she uses this to frost her family famous carrot cake and I’ve stolen it to frost everything else that goes well with cream cheese):

• 1 cup confectioners sugar
• 1 stick unsalted butter
• 1 8oz packet of cream cheese (full fat.  YOLO, people.)
• a smidge of milk
• 1 tsp vanilla

That’s it. Bam.

It was a really fun way to start my New Years Eve.  After we nommed we went into the living room and chatted.  Getting to know the girls was lovely- honestly, they reminded me of how giggly and energetic I was when I was thirteen.  Now I’m constantly looking for when I get to have my next nap time.  Come on, I know I’m nowhere near old yet.  But who doesn’t love naps?

These took under two hours, including cooling time before frosting.  Because I’ve learned the hard way (many times) that you don’t frost warm cupcakes.  But I’m really impatient so I have paid the price of frosting all over the place/countertop/myself too many times.  Be patient.  Cool your cupcakes thoroughly!  They’ll still be there and still be delicious.

Happy New Year everybody!

Even the congestion at the supermarket and the christmas carols that are off key and the traffic and the cleaning the bathroom and puppy puddles on the floor.  But only because it’s Christmas.

My mother and I went out to the grocery, the pharmacy, and Bed Bath & Beyond, and we were able to get parking spaces without a wait.  There were also almost no lines to be had in any of the stores.  Now I call that a Christmas miracle.

After visiting The Melting Pot, I’ve fallen in love with cheese fondue.  Somehow, I convinced my mom (or maybe it was her idea, I honestly cannot remember) that cheese fondue would be an excellent dinner for tonight.  I used this recipe by Tyler Florence to whip up the recipe.  We have a little bit of time in between the Christmas vigil and the 10pm screening of Les Miz (yup, my family went there), so I was able to whip this up for everybody.

Okay, apparently you are supposed to take the garlic called for and rub it on the inside of the ceramic fondue bowl.  I did this, in spite of the fact that my mother said, “well I’ve always thought that was rather pretentious.” I said, “well screw it, it’s Christmas Even, I’ll be pretentious.”  I rubbed the inside of the ceramic fondue bowl with garlic and I must say, I don’t think it made a bit of difference.

That being said, the fondue was delicious.  Especially with ham, which I had ever tried before.  It was a great mild fondue with just a bit of a tang.

It is the kind of carbo-loading that is necessary for a late night Les Miserables extravaganza, which my family has been planning since before Thanksgiving.  I am beyond excited.

We noshed.

There were fuzzy puppies.

And a toasty fire.

And Alex Trebek (and a tree).

And there will be some Hugh Jackman in the very near future.

Plus, it just began to snow outside.  It never snows on Christmas Eve.

All in all, I’d say that this is a lovely Christmas Eve.  I hope it’s equally wonderful for all of you.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all some Hugh Jackman (and goodnight!).

I know there is always a wider variety of food when I’m home, but that’s only because my eating at school got to the point where I was living off of Honey Nut Cheerios because the cafeteria food was so unpalatable and I had a meal plan to use up.  Therefore, a varied menu, this house will have (says Yoda).

My first night home there was pizza.  I’ve gotten to know pizza a bit better this semester, and surprisingly I’m not referring to the cafeteria.  My lovely roommate spent the semester working at a really nifty artisan pizza place, and for a while she was allowed to bring home a rectangle piece of heaven (ie: a whole pizza) when she was done with a shift.  Yes, they did normal pizza, but she would bring home this pizza called the Moonstruck that I absolutely FELL IN LOVE with.  It was a mushroom truffle sauce and mushrooms and goat cheese and chili oil, and she would add some arugula to the top, to taste.  This pizza was absolutely nomtastic, so when my mother told me that my parents have been experimenting with homemade pizzas a lot recently, I knew this was something I wanted to attempt to recreate for them.

And for me.  Mostly me.  But kind of for them, too.  But still for me.

So I forgot the exact recipe for this pizza, and in the midst of a senior moment I forgot about this thing called “the internet” and “googling” so it didn’t occur to me to look it up.  So I just made up a recipe instead!  Graduate school has fried my memory along with all semblance of common sense (though I did do very well! All A’s WHATWHATPAAAAAAAAARTYYYYYY!).  But look at it.  Seriously.  It was still fantastic.  I may or may not have eaten nearly the entire tray of pizza by myself, with only minimal help from my mom.

It’s still a mushroom truffle pizza, but my way because I couldn’t remember their way.

So we grab our spinach!

and our mushrooms…

…and cook them up just a touch

Now, roll out your pizza crust!

Okay- I bet you’re thinking to yourself, “okay, so I’ll roll out some pizza crust and that will be a quick step in this process, right?”

Normally, yes.  My mom says that she normally uses the Pillsbury pizza crust in the tube and it rolls out onto the pan like a dream.  But as the grocery store didn’t have any, we went with this random brand that came as a lump of dough in a little plastic baggie, and let me tell you that I rolled that sucker for nearly half an hour.  The dough was so elastic that any time I rolled it, it would immediately snap back into place. Ack!  I beat the elasticity out of it, and it took ages.  Next time, a simpler pizza crust.  But it looked like this by the time I was through with it: nice and flat and even.

Aaaaaand time to top! YUM!  Here is a nice side-by-side of the white pizza with a more traditional pizza my mom made at the same time.  She did not feel the obsessive need to abuse her pizza crust, but it looks just as tasty!

Oh baby, oh baby.  Now I’m just starving.  Good thing we are having baked brie for noshes later.

Really, the beauty of homemade pizza is that you can top with whatever your heart desires, or whatever you have leftover in your refrigerator.  We already have more pizza crust dough (the kind you don’t have to abuse) waiting in the fridge for another night soon!

And that includes the time I had mono for nearly four months (and didn’t know until three months in).  One semester of graduate school down.  Four more to go.  Four weeks to catch up on all the sleep I missed and four weeks to solidify the mush that my brain has become.  This involves a lot of sleeping in and a lot of puppy snuggling.

But last weekend, in the throes of final project procrastination and impending mental breakdowns, my dorm’s floor threw a holiday party.  The only thing missing from the all-inclusive extravaganza was a Festivus pole.  There was Christmas music and gingerbread houses on one end of the room, and menorah lighting on the other end, and I’m pretty sure everybody had a jolly old time, even if they themselves are having a bit of trouble remembering the evening.

I was only there long enough to distribute these lovelies out to the party attendees:

I spent the entire afternoon prepping and then photographing these.  Pretty snazzy looking, right?

Cue THE BEST CHRISTMAS PRESENT.

Somebody absolutely wonderful gave me a light setup for Christmas.  It’s simple, a 500W halogen work light and a parchment paper diffuser attached to a PVC pipe frame.  Now, most girls would look at their boyfriend and go, “um…you got me a halogen work light for Christmas?”  Whereas I started jumping up and down going, “OH MY GOD A HALOGEN WORKLIGHT FOR CHRISTMAS!  THIS IS SO EPIC!!!!”

So my photography setup looked like this:

Extremely simple and extremely effective!  I’m really happy with how the test photos (including the first picture above) came out.  Onto the recipe!

Last Christmas, I blogged about my attempts at making chocolate truffles, all of them abysmal failures.  All of the business with tempering the chocolate and having it heated and cooled properly drove me to distraction, and while the ganache in the middle was always tasty, the outer shell looked like dog poop.  It was dull and squishy and it made me sad.  I haven’t touched chocolate since then.

Well I’ve touched it.  I’ve eaten it (a lot of it), I just haven’t attempted to make it.  I tend to steer clear of the parts of the baking process that cross over the line into the realm of chemistry.  10th grade chemistry was just too traumatizing.

However, I recently stumbled upon a recipe from Ree over at The Pioneer Woman.  Her chocolate truffles with sea salt were so simple!  How did she get past at the hair pulling chocolate tempering process?

MELTING CHOCOLATE! BRILLIANT!  Melting chocolate (the kind you can buy in the baking aisle of the craft store- I use the Wilton brand) does not contain the pesky milk solids that require tempering in other types of chocolate.  I think.  I mean, I am a graduate student, after all.  Obviously twenty minutes on google is an adequate amount of graduate level research to come to viable conclusions about chocolate tempering.

But seriously, look at how simple this is!

Double boil your chocolate:

Add in your condensed milk and melt melt melt:

Stir in your vanilla/whatever flavoring you choose, then let it refrigerate overnight. Roll into truffle sized bites of goodness and heaven:

Then just melt the melting chocolate and DIP.

That’s IT.  No tempering. No chemistry.  No hassle.  If the chocolate gets hardened in the dish, just melt it in the microwave AGAIN.  Seriously, that simple.  I love this.  Everybody at the Christmas party did too!

Sprinkle some salt on top for that perfect combination of salty and sweet.  YUM.

I’m definitely making these again for the holidays, experimenting with different flavors/decorations and such, so stay tuned for that

For any chocoholic, this is definitely worth a go.  Thanks, Pioneer Woman!

This is the first the first post in the “and stuff” section of the Mel Bakes…and STUFF blog.

Sometimes, there just isn’t a lot of food to blog about.

Sometimes, all you are doing is dancing around to “Gangam Style” with your roommates.  That, or shooting pistols with them.

But for now, I’m just reveling in the fact that your FIRST SEMESTER OF GRADUATE SCHOOL IS DONE YAAAAAY!

Pistols wait WHAT!?

PISTOLS!?

Yes, pistols!  Silly goose, everybody knows that the best way to cope with the stress of graduate school finals period is to literally shoot at a paper man.

My roommate Barbara and I went on an adventure, thanks to LivingSocial, to a firing range out in Maryland.  Prior to that day, I had never held a gun.  Okay, that’s a lie.  My parents let my brother and I have laser tag as kids.

Then this summer I got smacked in the face with a rifle butt while playing laser tag, but that is another story entirely.

Back to the guns.  I didn’t think I would be absolutely petrified to hold a gun, but I was.  They placed the .22 Baretta pistol in my hand and I kept thinking, “oh good god this thing couldactually kill somebody.  This is a GUN OH MY GOD WHAT AM I DOING?”  At first I was afraid to touch it, because when I tried to load the magazine bullets may have flown everywhere.  I thought they’d explode, like those little popper cap things I threw against the pavement as a kid.

They didn’t, bullets without a gun are just bullets, and a gun without bullets is just a gun.

Once I got the hang of it, however, I was like POWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOWPOW.  The adrenaline was almost as intense as riding the tallest roller coaster at Six Flags.  And I love roller coasters.  I think I may try to make this a regular thing.

Want to see how badass we looked?  I made a little movie.  The English is subtitled, the American Sign Language is not, but I promise that it won’t take much to understand the fear on my face.

I hope everybody had an wonderfully blessed Thanksgiving, full of delicious food and lots of family.  I am sitting here with a “plate of Thanksgiving” (which in my house means the leftovers- yum!) recovering from my Black Friday trip to the mall.  I didn’t go out to buy anything, but rather just to walk around and wonder: why is there a group of nine year olds wandering around the mall without an adult?  Where are their mothers?

This questions puzzles me not only on Black Friday, but on the other 364 days of the year as well.

But anyway, back to Thanksgiving.

Our Thanksgiving is only six and a half (my godson is only 5, hence the half) people, so the table is small, but delicious.

When I was in the 7th grade, my family had no kitchen for Thanksgiving.  Our house was under heavy construction and we had nothing but a hot place.  I wanted to be able to contribute something and bring food to my grandparent’s house, so I asked my mom what I could make with only a hot plate.  She said cranberry sauce, and so I’ve been making the family cranberry sauce every year since.  The recipe is generally the same, but has been slightly tweaked and modified over the years and eventually settled on a core set of ingredients.

Get together your ingredients:

Take a big pot, and bring the sugar and water to a nice boil, until the sugar completely dissolves:

Once the water comes to a good boil, put in the cranberries, but don’t reduce the heat.  Bring the pot to a boil again:

 Once the pot comes to a boil again, turn the heat down to a low/medium-low and zest in your orange.  I use a microplane for any and all of my grating/zesting needs and I absolutely love it.  After you zest your orange, put in the rest of your spice/flavors, including the liqueur.

With the heat still on low, let the pot simmer for half an hour, so the flavors can blend.  After half an hour, slice up your apple.  Stir the chunks into the sauce.

Make sure everything is thoroughly incorporated, then transfer to tupperware for overnight refrigeration.  You can serve immediately if you want to, but I think it’s better after the flavors have had a chance to get to know each other a bit better.

In a pretty bowl, it looks great on a Thanksgiving table!

PLUS, just a a side note, the 5 year old at the table, that never wants to eat anything, loved this and asked for multiple servings.  So, do with that what you will!

I hope your are all still satisfied and full from yesterday, physically and emotionally, and again, Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Thanksgiving day is quickly approaching, and I have so much to catch up on.  I’m currently out of the dorms, safely nestled at home on the couch with several dogs and a cuppa tea.  It’s quite a relief, being out of there for awhile.  Yes, I do have some homework to get done, but no excessive amounts of pressure to worry about for a bit.  Time for a much needed break.

Before I left, however, I did have time to do a little cooking and check out some sweet treats in the DC area.  One afternoon, during a period of intense procrastination, I was hanging out on the bean bag chair and watching Ina Garten.  I love watching Barefoot Contessa; she’s the chef that first inspired me to make my own bread when I was in high school.

If you’re been keeping up with me you know about my, umm, dormitory oven problem, so when I saw Ina Garten do a cold dessert, I just had to give it a whirl.  It is a fact that I am a bona fide chocoholic, but now and again I can be swayed by something nice and fruity.  I’ve also been known to eat and entire box of raspberries in one sitting so Ina Garten’s recipe for Eton Mess just fit the bill.

For those of you that are curious (I know I definitely am), here’s a little Wikipedia rundown of what Eton Mess even is:

“Eton mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, pieces of meringue and cream, which is traditionally served at Eton College‘s annual cricket game against the students of Harrow School.”

“The word mess may refer to the appearance of the dish, or may be used in the sense of “a quantity of food”, particularly “a prepared dish of soft food” or “a mixture of ingredients cooked or eaten together”.  A popular, though thought to be untrue, myth is that Eton mess was first created when a meringue dessert was dropped accidentally, but what could be salvaged was, and it was served as a crushed meringue with strawberries and cream.”

Whoops- Ina uses raspberries. That’s okay- still delicious.  Now, Ina’s recipe calls for homemade whipped cream and crushed meringue cookies.  As a college student with a broken hand mixer in addition to a broken oven, I used cool whip.  And the meringues?  I spent an hour walking through the grocery store and there was not a single cookie that remotely resembled a meringue, so I kissed it up to God and bought a box of miniature vanilla wafers.  I mean, those are similar, right?

So, here is my recipe, adapted from the lovely Ina:

This recipe is so easy and was very popular with those that got the chance to try it.  It’s super classy looking with a minimal amount of effort, but I imagine that, while it is fantastic the way I made it, it is to DIE FOR with freshly made whipped cream and real meringues.

Okay, onto the photos!

Gather your ingredients!

Whoops! Don’t forget the vanilla wafers….

Then bubble…bubble…toil and trouble…..!

Stir in the fresh raspberries and the vodka.

Insert whole pot into fridge (or, if you’re impatient, the freezer):

Get our your classy classy wine glasses:

Layer the whip cream, raspberries, cookies.  Lather, rinse, and repeat! Like so:

Share the love.  Consume.

 Seriously a winner.  Super fast and super easy.  One day, I’ll definitely make it the slower, more legitimate way.  With a mixer and some free time.

Until next time <3

I hope the first week of the month has been good to everybody!  I’m still up to be neck in papers, including one due tomorrow that I most definitely should be working on right now, but I figured a quick update here was a perfectly good study break.

Expect a no-bake dessert from me soon, but today I’ve got something special for everybody: a guest post from my mother!

Not all of you know this, but I am from New Jersey.  So, the events of Hurricane Sandy had quite an impact on my family and friends.

Thankfully, my parents (and my home) are okay, as the devastating effects of last year’s Hurricane Irene left them 100% prepared the second time around.  That being said, my parents are without electricity.

So, out of desperation and boredom, my mother e-mailed me this blog post, entitled Cooking By Candlelight.

I hope you all enjoy it!

(Plus, you’ll definitely be able to see where my writing style comes from, hehe…)

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Hurricane Sandy came and went and left New Jersey in the dark. And while I am grateful that this time there is no water in my basement or trees on my roof, once again I am left with a refrigerator and freezer full of quickly decaying and defrosting food. Having had this happen twice last year, I will be damned if I am again going to throw all of that good (and expensive) food in the garbage. So armed with only a gas cook top and a backyard grill I am going to cook it all – in the dark. Tonight’s unfrozen meat? Pork chops — prepared using as many of the other perishable ingredients in my fridge as I can. So in addition to my chops I find:

an onion,

a partial container of chicken stock

potatoes

milk (Sniff and…..yup still good)

horseradish mayo

butter

an open bottle of white wine

Misc pantry items: olive oil, flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder, paprika, white pepper

No problem. I got this.

Pork Chops with a Paprika Wine Sauce and Horseradish Mashed Potatoes

Chops

• Slice or medium dice onions
• Dredge chops in flour seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic powder
• Sauté in olive oil until lightly browned on both sides; remove from pan
• Cook onions until translucent
• Add 1 tbl seasoned flour and 1 tbl paprika. Cook about 1 minute
• Add 1-1/2 cups liquid (I used a combination of chicken stock and wine) stirring constantly
• Return chops to pan; bring to medium boil; then cover and reduce heat to simmer
• Cook 40 minutes turning halfway through

(Note: I made three chops. Increase ingredients for the number of chops.)

Mashed Potatoes

• Six potatoes, peeled, cut in small pieces (I had Yukon Gold taters)
• Place cut potatoes into a pot of cold water; bring to a boil; cook until tender when pierced with a fork
• Drain and return to the pot
• Add a little milk, a dollop of butter and couple of squirts of the horseradish mayo
• I usually prefer to whip my potatoes, but need must prevail, so whip out the handy dandy old school potato masher and go to town. If it is too dry add a little more milk and keep mashing. I also add salt and white pepper to taste.

Serve chop with the potatoes. The paprika gravy is absolutely delicious over the mashies. And if you have it (which I did not) it goes great with broccoli.

To all you college students who can’t use the smoking oven in the dorm but do have electricity, try this!