Oh wait…I forgot.

I know, I know. Your mouth is watering terribly at the thought of beautiful, glorious turkey tacos. If you’ve eaten them, you’ll understand.

I’ll start with a note: Even though I’ve gained much tastebuddy love from these lovely piles of meat, cheese, and veggies, I cannot call them my own. They belong to Nicole Peeler, who made a pot of meatz madness for a party. She’s even posted the recipe on her blog. If you’re into snark, hit hers up. It’s funnier than mine.

ANYWAY. Wanna know what is possibly the Best Thing about turkey tacos? It’s the easiest recipe ever. Remember how I said that pecan pie was the easiest recipe ever? Well, turkey tacos trump pecan pie. Yeah.

Let’s get down to the tastiness. Here’s all you need (okay, besides cheese, etc, to top). You can use any veggies you like, really. I use onion, red bell pepper, garlic, zucchini, and carrots.

First, chop up all of those tasty, tasty veggies.

Throw your veggies into a big pot with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Brown your ground turkey separately. When both are done, drain the turkey, then dump it into the pot with the veggies, and mix ‘em up.

Then, throw in your packets of taco seasoning and add a couple cups of water, ignoring the amount of water the packets say to add, as turkey tacos end up much wetter than regular tacos.

Let that simmer for ten minutes, or so – or while you wait for your taco shells to crisp in the oven, which is what I do because I always forget to heat them until the last minute.

Finally, stuff ‘em into those shells and put all of it into your face. Then go back for seconds. They also taste awesome as burritos, to which the husband will attest as he is on a super low-carb diet, and nobody makes low-carb taco shells.

I usually serve turkey tacos with some greenery (and in this case orangery), so I popped out some veggies and the ever popular (and surprisingly low-carb) ranch dressing.

Awwwwlz, yeah. Now that’s a meal. It’ll feed a crowd, and it even freezes well! It won a super-unofficial Taco Party vote a year or two ago. Now eat up!

Turkey Tacos

Ingredients:
2 lbs ground turkey
1 zucchini
1 onion
3 carrots
1 red bell pepper
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 Tbsp olive oil
3 packets taco seasoning
2 cups water
taco shells and fixins

Directions:

Brown the turkey and cook the veggies in separate pots over medium-ish flame. Put them in at about the same time, and they’ll be done in about the same time.

Drain the turkey, and pour it into the big pot with the veggies. Mix ‘em up a bit, and add the taco seasoning and water. Bring it to a boil, then turn the fire down a bit and let it simmer for a few minutes, or until a good bit of the liquid has evaporated.

Finally, make tacos (or burritos!), and shove as many as you can into your mouth. Because it’s that tasty.

When I was little, I loved to listen to my mom’s record singles on her old record player. “It’s My Party” was probably my favorite.

I remembered this song as I started to put together this blog post.

Because, you know, I like to bake. It’s really one of my favorite things to do. I even started up a little baking business called King Bakes. And I really enjoyed it for a while. I set up a Facebook page and a simple website and started taking orders. King cakes year-round. Except king cakes are temperamental and a bitch to make. Every time I made one to sell, I was a ball of anxiety. That, and each one takes three-and-a-half hours to make. Urrgh. There were also the mini king cakes, cupcakes, and cookies. (I talk about all of this in past tense, but I’m still taking orders.) That was all fine, too, until we went to the Texas Avenue Makers Fair last weekend. If it wasn’t for Palmer, his mom, and my mom, I wouldn’t have made it there in the first place. King cakes are a lot of work, and since they don’t have much of a shelf life, they all had to be baked before and iced the morning of, only to dry out in the heat of the day. Then there was the Great Cupcake Disaster, but I’m not talking about that. The day wasn’t terrible.

That said, I’m never doing it again. Once was certainly enough for me. And after that, I don’t even want to see another king cake.

Which brings me to my point. I love baking, but baking for money made it totally un-fun. Sure, if I worked constantly, I could make decent money, and I might be able to open an actual bakery someday. Except I’d rather be working on my “real” job than this second one. And that’s a problem.

So now I’m back to baking what I want when I want. Today, it’s a pecan pie, and I figured I might share the love.

For some reason, I thought making a pecan pie was complicated. How’d you get the pecans to sit so perfectly on the top of the wonderful sugary goodness? My grandmother always made them, and I didn’t even try until a year, or so, ago. That’s when I learned that pecan pie (and most pies, in general) is the easiest and tastiest thing ever. And what’s funny is everybody uses the same recipe. Think you have a super-secret recipe handed down through the generations? Nope, you don’t. Your Famous Family Recipe is most likely printed on the back of a bottle of good ol’ Karo Syrup. Everybody uses it because it’s the best, and I defy you to prove otherwise.

And as I said, it’s really easy. Here’s all you need:

You really don’t need a mixer for this one. A spoon will do. I just couldn’t help but use the shiny red KitchenAid my husband just got me (have I mentioned that he’s awesome?). Anyway, you throw everything in a bowl

and stir it up.

Then pour in your pecans and give them a stir. Don’t use a mixer for this part or you might hurt the mixer. After that, just pour it on into your pie crust. (I use rolled-up pie crusts from the refrigerated section. They always work well. A note, however: store brand crusts are slightly smaller than name-brand crusts, which causes problems for things like chicken pot pie.)

Then put it into the oven for an hour or so. You’ll end up with a steaming, shifting, bubbling pile of tastiness that needs to cool for two whole hours before you can eat it.

But once those loooooooong two hours are up,

In case you’re not using Karo brand Karo Syrup, here’s the recipe:

Karo Syrup Pecan Pie

• 1 cup Karo® Light Corn Syrup
• 3 eggs
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 tablespoons butter, melted
• 1 teaspoon Spice Islands® Pure Vanilla Extract
• 1-1/2 cups (6 ounces) pecans
• 1 (9-inch) unbaked or frozen** deep-dish pie crust

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.
2. Mix corn syrup, eggs, sugar, butter and vanilla using a spoon. Stir in pecans. Pour filling into pie crust.
3. Bake on center rack of oven for 60 to 70 minutes (see tips for doneness, below). Cool for 2 hours on wire rack before serving.

See? Baking is soooooo much more fun when the only money involved is to pay for the ingredients. So. Who wants a piece of pie?

Cookie-making season is in full swing! And I’m up to my ears. The library Christmas party is tomorrow, and I volunteered to bake cookies. I have no idea how many people work there, so I figured I should make two batches. And since I’m making two batches, why not make two different types of cookies? Yes! The original plan was to make a big batch of gingerbread mustaches, but I settled on ginger cookies (that’ll be my next post) and chocolate truffle cookies that I call Girl Crack Cookies because they’re ridiculously chocolatey. Somehow, I’m not a huge fan of them – maybe because they’re really intense, so you should eat them slowly, and I tend to cram cookies into my mouth like I haven’t eaten in a month – but I cook them for others on special occasions. Another perk: one batch makes a helluva lot of cookies. Seriously. A lot of cookies.

So! On to the makings.

First, do yourself a favor and gather your ingredients so you’re sure you have everything. Here’s what you need:

Next, melt the chocolate and butter. I use a makeshift double-boiler made out of a saucepan and a heatproof bowl. Simmer (don’t boil!) the water in the saucepan, and let the chocolate melt down slowly, stirring occasionally.

Next, use a stand mixer to whip the eggs and sugar until they’re thick and pale. As a default, whenever I’m told to do something with sugar (it usually involves butter), I turn the mixer to 6 and start a timer for 3 minutes. It worked:

After that, it’s time to our in the vanilla and melted chocolate. Yum!

Once that’s all nice and mixed, whisk together your flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and salt, then pour it into the mixer with the wet ingredients, and get everything nice and integrated. Then, add even more chocolate. Mhm hmm.

Stir that up, cover up your bowl, and pop it into the fridge for at least an hour. This dough isn’t quite as bad as the gingerbread dough, but it’s pretty hard to deal with when it’s not cold.

Once the hour is up, pull it out, and put small balls onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. I like these cookies to be small, so I use a small cookie dropper, which you can find in kitchen stores and, when you’re really lucky (which I wasn’t yesterday) Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Stick ‘em in the oven for about ten minutes, and you have lots of soft, intensely chocolate cookies. They’re not for the faint of heart!

Here’s the Official Recipe, which I adapted slightly from one on AllRecipes:

Girl Crack Cookies!

Ingredients:

Directions:

Most people find my blog by googling the title of a book and “review,” “summary,” or “paper.” They leave disappointed because my posts in no way resemble papers, contain half-ass summaries at best, and don’t talk about the books enough to be called reviews. I’m not sure what they should be called. Blurbs? My-general-reactions-to-the-few-notable-parts-of-books?

What matters to me is that people who don’t already know me generally don’t come back. Not that my ideal audience should be kids looking to cheat in school, either. I figured I’d take a new approach and add food to the books theme. At least for a bit. As an experiment.

Here’s how the idea started: My recipes are everywhere. I’ve been cooking for a few years, and since I’m bad at losing paper, I keep them in various apps and email. Note the various part. I was trying to find a recipe the other day, and I had to look through email, Evernote, and a couple iPad apps before I found it. I want to be able to find recipes when I want to use them, so I figured gathering them into one app was a good idea. After some researching, I settled on MacGourmet. I used it a few years ago, but since it doesn’t sync well with my various i-devices, I moved on. Now, though, I’m worried more about keeping recipes than having them immediately accessible, and I feel like my database is safest in the hands of good ol’ MacGourmet. It’s still an extra step for me, though, if I want to make something that’s not already on my iPad, specifically Pepperplate (which I love and would pay money for a non-webpage native Mac app) because there’s a bit of cutting and pasting involved. I can deal with that.

So! It’s Christmas season. Christmas is my favorite holiday behind Mardi Gras, and I really get into it. Around 2004, I was in a domestic phase, and I’d never made any serious cookies, so I tried my hand at gingerbread men, and they turned out awesome. I used Martha Stewart’s Basic Gingerbread Cookies recipe, which, at the time, I thought was a huge challenge. Now that I’ve done a bit of baking, it’s pretty easy. Maybe I was a bit freaked out by the sifting?

Here’s a (very unflattering) picture of me sifting the flour in my first attempt:

I’ve made the same gingerbread cookies almost every year since then. The funny thing is that, at that point, I didn’t have my Kitchen-Aid mixer, and I was about to say Don’t Try This with a Hand Mixer because I didn’t think they were powerful enough. This picture proves me wrong:

Ha! These cookies got much easier once my dad and stepmother got me a good mixer. Here’s the result:

On to this year’s cookies! For the first time ever, I’m branching out from traditional gingerbread men – into gingerbread MUSTACHES! I picked up a set of mustache cookie cutters in Houston a couple of weeks ago with these cookies in mind. And, since this is a food blog (post), I’ll show you how I did it!

First, you should head over to Martha Stewart’s site for the recipe. Or, of course, you can scroll down for my adapted recipe, which I think works better for smaller cookies.

First, I gathered all of my ingredients to make sure I had everything. I have a really bad habit of realizing that I’ve forgotten something when I’m already halfway through making it. Then I have to run to the store (which, thankfully, is less than a mile away), etc, etc. So, here’s the pile:

I combined the flour (all six cups of it!), baking soda, and baking powder in a big bowl with a whisk. You see the sifter there, but don’t use it yet even though Martha tells you to!

Then I creamed the butter and brown sugar in the mixer. The recipe says to use the butter at room temperature, but I just soften it in the microwave, and it turns out perfectly. And when any recipe tells me to cream those ingredients, I turn the mixer to six or so and set a timer for three minutes. Done.

That’s about what it should look like. Once it’s all creamy, add the egg and molasses. You’ll end up with a mess like this:

But it needs to be all liquidy since we’re about to put six cups of flour into it. Six cups!

So what about the sifting, you ask? Welllll, to avoid having to clean another dish (I live in an old house with no dishwasher!), I’ve started sifting straight into the mixing bowl. It doesn’t hurt anyone!

I add about half the flour at a time. This is the part where I didn’t think a hand mixer would cut it. Sometimes I’m surprised my stand mixer can deal with this stuff: the dough is thick. Here’s my mixer dealing with it:

And here’s what it looks like once it’s all mixed up:

So now that your dough is ready, you grab some Saran wrap, separate your dough into thirds, and wrap it up. I aim for one-inch-or-so discs. Pop ‘em in the freezer for an hour or so, and you’re good to go. Don’t skimp here: you want this dough to be cold because it’s hard to manage even then.

After an hour (or longer!), your dough should be nice and firm. Still, I usually open up a pack and break off half at a time, putting the other half back in the fridge to keep cool. Have I mentioned that this dough is hard to deal with?

Next comes the complicated part: get a nice fiancé who is willing to do the grunt work. This is a very important step in the cookie dough-rolling process, so don’t skip it. Spread lots of flour over your work surface, and roll out the dough. The recipe says to go for 1/8 inch, but don’t do that unless you want your cookies really hard. Then, start the cutting!

These cookie cutters have stamps on the top side to fill in some hair detail, making them the Most Awesome Mustaches Ever. Here’s the first sheet into the oven:

Last, but not least: the finished product!

These were lots of fun to make, and they’re not hard. It’s just a lot of them – like six or seven dozen. So keep some for yourself and give lots to your friends!

Thanks to Palmer for all of his assistance.

Gingerbread Mustaches!

Ingredients:

Directions:

My original plan for this blog was 50 novels in a year, but a friend recommended and loaned me Julia Child‘s My Life in France. It sounded interesting enough, and though I’m usually not one for nonfiction, I figured I’d give it a try. My Life in France is an “autobiography” about Julia Child’s years in France when she decided she loved cooking and went to the Cordon Bleu, etc, etc. I put “autobiography” in quotes because her nephew, Alex Prud’homme, actually wrote the book. From the forward, written by Prud’homme:

For a few days every month, I’d sit in her living room asking questions, reading from family letters, and listening to her stories. At first I taped our conversations, but when she began to poke my take recorder with her long fingers, I realized it was distracting her, and took notes instead. (x)

Yeah, that’s not autobiography, and after I read the forward, I almost decided not to read the book at all. But, even though it’s written by someone else, I really enjoyed it much more than I imagined I would. There’s something exciting about it, and after seeing Julie and Julia, which I also liked immensely, I wanted to hear the real story. It seems that lots of the bad stuff was glossed over, like tension between Julia and Louisette when the latter wasn’t really helping with the cookbook, and Julia had her name removed as an author. That said, My Life in France is an inspiring look into Julia Child’s life that made me want to drink more wine, at the very least – and keep a diary (at which I’m generally terrible) because it’d be nice to look back after many years and remember little things, like fantastic meals, that I enjoyed.

On Saturday, Palmer and I took a day trip down to Natchitoches. I went with my mom a few years ago and hadn’t been back since. Palmer drove me around and showed me some of his college haunts, then we had a really good lunch at The Landing on Front Street. We had fried alligator as an appetizer (yum!) and bread pudding for dessert. It was quite possibly the best bread pudding I’ve ever had.

Here’s Palmer enjoying his dessert:

We each had our own bread pudding, and I could only finish half of mine. Next time, I’ll have to skip the meal part.
After lunch, we took a stroll by the river that runs through the middle of Natchitoches.

Palmer even took a couple super-cute pictures of me, which, I think, requires serious talent:

After our food settled, we did a bit of geocaching to place the travel bug I found a week or two ago. Here’s Palmer being stealthy:

And here’s the cache!

Then we went home, already exhausted, to clean for the hamburger-grilling (not barbecue!) we had on Sunday. It was quite a weekend! Here’s the Flickr set.

As a side note, if you’re wondering where my next book post is, it’ll be up soon. Somehow, The Blue Sword , even though it’s technically a kids’ novel, is a really slow read. That’s not to say I don’t like it, but I’ll talk about it more once I finish it – in about 100 pages. Also: I can’t drink coffee for a bit, so Starbucks has lost its luster, and that’s usually where I read. And I’ve had an interesting last few days. I’ll stop making excuses now.

If you’ve seen my post on 2011 resolutions, you’ll already know I’m trying to cook a wee bit more healthily this year. Mind you, I generally cook stuff that’s not terrible for me. There is, though, one recipe I really had to deal with: broccoli-cheese soup. It’s one of my favorite recipes. It’s creamy and delectable – and it freezes really well. The problem is that it has two pounds of Velveeta in it, and Velveeta isn’t good for anyone. Especially two pounds of it. So I figured that of all my recipes, that was the one to contend with. And contend I did.

This soup involves real cheese. And potatoes. And an immersion blender, which I bought today for a mere $20. I think I like it even more than the Velveeta soup. The only think it’s missing is the freezability: I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t freeze potatoes. This one’s so good, though, that I don’t think freezing will be a problem.

In case you’re interested, here’s the recipe. I got it from this lovely blog. The only thing I’ve changed is the addition of a wee bit more cheese, which is inherently unhealthy but better, at least, than Velveeta.

Ingredients:

1 small onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
2 1/2 cups fat free chicken broth
1 cup fat free milk
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced small
salt and fresh pepper
4 cups (about 2 heads) broccoli florets, chopped into small pieces
2 cups 2% shredded sharp cheddar (throw in the whole bag!)
2 slices 2% American cheese
1 tbsp parmesan cheese

Directions:

1. Chop onion, carrot, celery, garlic in a chopper or mini food processor.

2. In a large soup pot, melt butter. Add chopped vegetables and sauté on low heat until soft, about 5 minutes.

3. Add flour, salt and pepper to the pot and stir until smooth.

4. Add chicken broth, milk and potatoes and set heat to high until it comes to a boil, then cover and cook on low until potatoes are soft, about 10-15 minutes.

5. Add broccoli florets, parmesan cheese, and stir well. Adjust salt and pepper to taste. Cook uncovered until broccoli is cooked, about 5 minutes. Add cheddar and American cheese, stir well and remove from heat.

6. Using an immersion blender, quickly blend part of the soup for a quick second or two. If you don’t have an immersion blender, remove about 1-2 cups of potatoes and broccoli, place it in your chopper, then add it back to the soup. This helps thicken it a bit.

I think I overdid it a wee bit with the immersion blender, but it’s soooooo good. And at least it’s healthier than the Velveeta version. Seriously: two pounds of Velveeta? No wonder most Americans are overweight.

I’m terrible at keeping New Year’s resolutions. In fact, I’m pretty sure I haven’t been successful at any of them. Ever. I’m sure that putting them on my blog won’t do any good either, but I’m going to do it anyway. So here we go.

1. Use the Nikon more. Since I got an iPhone 4 with a reasonable camera, my aging Nikon has been sitting in its bag. My interest in photography waned, and the 5-megapixel iPhone camera became good enough. But no more! The Nikon’s pictures are so much better, and even if I’m only taking pictures of food, I’m gonna use it more in 2011.

2. Cookies once a week. This’ll be the hard one. I loooove baking cookies, but I eat waaaay too many of them, so it’ll be a weekly event. I made my last batch of 2010 on Friday morning, and that one doesn’t count. Maybe I’ll choose a Cookie Day. It won’t be today. I’m making lasagna.

Which leads me to #3, which is related:

3. Cook healthier. Similar request, similar resolution. This one won’t be quite so hard because I generally cook healthy anyway. Disregard the lasagna part. The only thing I make regularly that’s startlingly unhealthy is a broccoli-cheese soup that involves two pounds of Velveeta. Terrible! But oh so tasty. I’ve already found a replacement and bought ingredients. It’s in line after the lasagna.

4. Read fifty books. Not so hard, you say. I know. We’ll see how this one works out. First up is finishing One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I’m giving myself the rest of this week to finish it because while it’s absolutely fantastic, it’s a very slow read. After that? Who knows. It probably won’t be DeLillo.

And there you have it. These resolutions seem easy enough, though I’m sure they’re cursed now simply because I’ve formally declared them resolutions. This year is a milestone: I’m pretty sure it’s the first that hasn’t included “go on a diet” or something weight-related. At this point I’ve kept up with running well enough that I don’t think it needs to be on the list. I think last year I declared that I would run three times a week, but I’ve been running once a week lately, so I guess I failed at that one too. Maybe my resolution should be to keep my resolutions.

One of my very favorite things to do is bake cookies. Sadly, a certain dude is worried about his calorie intake, so I’ve agreed to limit my cookie-making to once a week in the new year. But it’s still 2010, and I got in one last batch. What sucks is that they’re not spectacular. They are, though, cookies, and I got to spend a blissful morning baking them.

Peanut butter cup cookies. Like Hershey’s Kiss cookies, but with Reese’s. Really not interesting.

Just in case you are interested, though, here’s the recipe. I’ve adapted it a bit from the one here because the mini-muffin cup idea was a stupid one.

Ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons milk
• 35-ish miniature chocolate covered peanut butter cups, unwrapped

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Sift together the flour, salt and baking soda; set aside.
2. Cream together the butter, sugar, peanut butter and brown sugar until fluffy. Beat in the egg, vanilla and milk. Add the flour mixture; mix well. Shape into walnut-sized balls and place each onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
3. Bake at 375 degrees for about 9 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately press a mini peanut butter cup into each ball. Cool on the cookie sheet for 5 minutes or so, then move to a wire rack.

Here’s the carnage:

Once again, I learned that it’s best to read the directions before I start cooking. I discovered halfway into the dough that the recipe called for a mini-muffin pan, which I don’t have. I used a regular cupcake pan for the first batch, but they were so hard to get out that I said forget it and put them on parchment paper. They turned out just fine. They would even make tasty cookies on their own without the Reese’s.

So. Since I promised only to make cookies once a week starting in the new year, and it’s not 2011 yet, I still get to make some more this week, right? OR we can just say the week starts on Sunday. I can see it now: this will be my hardest New Year’s resolution to keep.

For the past few months, I’ve been doing some serious cooking. Most of it has been baking, but I’ve also done my share of real food. Sometimes it turns out well, and other times it totally flops. Here’s an unexciting story about it going rather well:

I have a terrible history with candymaking. A few years ago, I attempted my dad’s praline recipe. I made a double batch, and it ended up boiling over and getting into every possible crevice of my stove. That was quite a disaster. They turned out way too gooey. I vowed then never to attempt candy again.

And I didn’t for several years.

On Christmas Eve, though, I decided to make a second attempt, this time at Divinity, which I’ve had several times. I think every time I’ve had it, my grandmother’s friend Janice has made it. It had been a few years. I knew what it was supposed to look like and taste like, and that was about it, so I searched around the interwebz to find a reasonable recipe, which I found here. They turned out perfectly even though I didn’t follow the directions exactly. I put them into paint bucket-shaped tins that I’d bought at Walgreens and gave them as presents to my mom, my grandmother, and my uncle. Turns out they’re my mom’s favorite candy – she said she’d made herself sick eating them once, which makes me giggle.

Both my mom and my grandmother kept talking about how they’re hard to make, and the interwebz kept talking about how they don’t turn out half the time, so I was wondering if my success was a fluke. I decided to try them again just to see. Again, they were perfect. So much for beginner’s luck.

So my claim is that Divinity isn’t hard to make. I’m guessing the humidity is key: both times I made it, the humidity was relatively low for the deep south, hovering around 45%. I wouldn’t try making it above 60% or so because I could see it not firming up well at that point. I knew I’d make myself sick eating all of the second batch, so I only saved a little and sent the rest to Geauxsicles, where I’m sure it will be appreciated.

And there you have it: my adventures with candymaking. Totally worth your reading time, right?