Blueberry Mint Sparklers

 

Hey Friends! How is your summer going so far? I can't believe we're already at the end of July! Time is flying faster than ever it seems. Summer here has been unusually hot, sunny and dry! Which has been an amazing change. In the midst of this unusual heat though, I along with many others I know have been searching for delicious, refreshing summer beverages to make that are easy and don't take too long to whip up! (because when you're thirsty and in need of a drink, you don't want to wait all day)

 

Last weekend my sister and I were browsing through the July/August 2013 issue of Everyday with Rachael Ray and we found Blueberry Tarragon Sparklers - they looked delicious and sounded super easy to whip up. So we decided to give them a try.

 

I headed off to the grocery store with a very short list of ingredients to purchase and when I got to the produce section to look for tarragon, the fellow working in the store politely informed me they hadn't carried fresh tarragon in oh, about ten years. Say what?? So quick thinking coupled with my strong desire not to have to try every grocery store in the area resulted in me picking up a container of fresh mint instead. What a success!! These drinks were lovely!

 

Without further delay, here's the yummy recipe.

 

Blueberry Mint Sparklers

minimally adapted from Everyday with Rachael Ray

 

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup fresh blueberries
• 1/4 cup honey
• 2 tbsp. fresh mint leaves
• ice
• 1 bottle sparkling white wine (I used Yellow Tail Bubbles)

Method:

1. In a small saucepan, bring blueberries, honey, mint and 1/4 cup water to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir until honey dissolves, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat and muddle blueberries and let stand for 20 minutes. Strain and place in refrigerator until chilled.
2. To serve, spoon 1-2 tbsp. of blueberry syrup into 4 glasses. Add ice, then pour sparkling wine over top. Stir. Garnish with more fresh mint and blueberries.

Super easy, refreshing and delicious!

 

Cheers to the rest of our summer being just as fantastic as the first half.

Mixed Greens with Wild Blueberry Dressing, Herbed Goat Cheese & Spiced Pecans

Hey Friends! I'm back in the kitchen now that my exam is over and I am so happy to be here! Hopefully I'll post more regularly and have time to start tackling some cool dishes that I've been wanting to do for a while. I'll share everything with you as I go. :)

Want to eat the best salad of your life? Make this salad!!! Seriously the best thing ever. Plus, it plates up beautifully so your dinner party guests will be wowed by how "fancy" it is. While it is a bit of work because you have to make all of the components prior to assembling your salads, if you prepare the components the day before, then you just have to plate it up when your guests come over. Its an awesome dinner party dish.

All of the below recipes are from the cookbook No more Secrets - recipes from the Cow Bay Cafe by Adrienne Johnston.

 First, make the spiced pecans.

Ingredients:

• 3 tbsp corn syrup
• 1 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 large pinch chipotle powder
• 1 1/4 cups pecan halves

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 325F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Place a 30 cm piece of foil on a flat, heat-proof work surface (I used my cutting board).
2. In a medium bowl, combine corn syrup, sugar, salt and chipotle powder. Add the nuts and mix well. Spread nuts on the prepared baking sheet in a single layer and bake for 12-15 minutes, stirring every five minutes until golden brown.
3. Spoon them onto the prepared foil and cool slightly. Quickly separate the nuts and cool thoroughly. Store in an air-tight container.

Next, make the blueberry dressing.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup frozen blueberries
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup tarragon vinegar
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• zest and juice of one lemon

Method:

1. In a medium pot over medium-high heat, place the blueberries, sugar, vinegar, cinnamon stick, ginger and lemon zest and juice. Bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes. Then remove from heat and cool. Refridgerate until ready to use.

Then, make the herbed goat cheese.

Ingredients:

• 1 small log goat cheese
• 3 tbsp tarragon vinegar
• fresh basil and tarragon

Method:

1. Finely chop basil and tarragon. Combine goat cheese, tarragon vinegar and chopped herbs. Set aside in fridge.

Finally, assemble your salads when ready to serve (don't preassemble them).

Method:

1. Toss mixed greens (approx 9 cups) lightly with olive oil, some kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper.
2. Place a puddle of the blueberry dressing on a plate. Mound some of the greens onto the blueberry dressing.
3. Place a few pieces of the herbed goat cheese and some of the pecans on top.
4. Serve immediately.

Hope you enjoy this one!! We most definitely did. What's your favorite salad to make when you have dinner guests?

Happy Cooking my Friends!

Triple Berry Lemon Muffins for SRC

Well, its time for SRC's Group C reveal again (seems like that was the last time I even posted last month... shame on me). Super excited about the blog I had this month and wishing I had more time to test out recipes this month! I was assigned Mommy's Menu this month - Toni is a stay at home mom to seven children in Utah!! Can you believe that she still has time to blog? My excuses look pretty weak now! I absolutely love how creative her blog is and I loved the wide variety of recipes she had available to try. I settled on something quick and adapted it to what I had on hand, but I can't wait to come back and try out her Pumpkin Snickerdoodle Bars and her Strawberry Cheesecake Chocolate Chip Sandwich Cookies. Both of them looked amazing!!

I settled on making Toni's Lemon Raspberry Muffins (in a slightly adapted version using what I had on hand). The results were delicious! Hubby has been eagerly devouring these babies!! Check out the link for the unadapted recipe... see below for my adapted version. Both I'm sure would be equally as delicious!!

Triple Berry Lemon Muffins
Recipe adapted from Mommy's Menu

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup sugar
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• zest of one lemon, finely grated
• 1 cup fresh or frozen mixed berries (I used a mix of raspberries, blackberries and blueberries)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Grease 2 x 12 cup muffin tins (or line with paper liners). 
2. In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon zest and salt. Set aside. In a medium bowl, combine eggs, cream, water, and oil and mix until combined. Add all at once to flour mixture and stir until just combined. Add berries and fold through batter (don't over mix or you will have tough, pink muffins).
3. Spoon mixture into prepared muffin tins, filling each tin approximately 2/3 of the way full. Bake in preheated oven for 18-22 minutes or until spring back slightly when lightly pressed.
4. Let cool on a rack. Enjoy!

 So, thats that. Make these, they're amazing!! And check out Toni's blog - you'll find loads of recipes you need to make. I found her blog quite addicting - not unlike pinterest!! :) Thanks Toni for the great recipes to choose from - I'll definitely be back to snoop around some more (only this time I won't have to lurk!).

Coconut & Blueberry Mini Tarts {Dairy & Egg Free}

Lately a lot of my lovely readers (thats you!!) have been asking me if I'll share some healthier recipes with you - some have asked for gluten free, some asked for dairy free, and some asked for low fat. Well, I've been trying to find some recipes that incorporate those diet restrictions but still taste good. I have tried a few recipes that haven't made the cut to be shared here, but this one definitely made the cut - Coconut & Blueberry Mini Tarts! I found the recipe in Anna Olson's new cookbook - Back to Baking. I made one or two very slight changes and arrived at these little beauties. They are delish with or without the blueberries and you could substitute other berries if you wanted to (raspberries would be amazing!!).

And while my tarts don't look perfect, they were a breeze to throw together and tasted quite delicious too. I didn't particularly care for the texture of the custard  - so I've changed the recipe to use about half the original amount of cornstarch to thicken. So if you find your custard isn't thick enough for your liking, just double the amount of cornstarch. :)

Coconut & Blueberry Mini Tarts
Minimally adapted from Anna Olson's Back to Baking

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/4 cup vegetable oil
• 3 tbsp dark brown sugar
• 3 tbsp honey (or agave would work well too)
• pinch ground cinnamon
• pinch salt
• 1 tin coconut milk
• 1 vanilla bean and 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1/8 cup cornstarch
• 1 cup fresh blueberries

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F and spray a 24 cup mini muffin with non-stick cooking spray.
2. For the crust, stir together the whole wheat flour, vegetable oil, brown sugar, honey, cinnamon and salt until mixture has a wet and crumbly texture (like wet sand). Press crust mixture into bottom and sides of muffin cups. Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes, then cool to room temperature.
3. To make the custard, pour the coconut milk into a saucepan. Scrape in the seeds of the vanilla bean and stir in the vanilla extract. In a bowl, stir together the sugar and the cornstarch. Whisk into the coconut milk, then turn the heat to medium and whisk until the mixture comes to a simmer and thickens, about 6 minutes. Scrape the custard into a bowl, cover the surface of custard with plastic wrap and allow to cool to room temperature.
4. Once cooled, pipe the coconut filling into the mini tart shells and top each with 3 blueberries. Chill at least two hours in the tin before popping them out to serve.
5. Tarts will keep in the fridge for up to 3 days. Note: You could also make the filling up to a day ahead of time and chill until you fill your tarts. If you use this make ahead option, be sure to puree the custard in a food processor or with an immersion blender prior to piping into the tarts to ensure it has that perfect, silky smooth texture it had prior to chilling.

Pretty easy right? With minimal ingredients that you probably already have in your pantry! Isn't that the best kind of dessert? Hope you enjoy!

This post has been linked up with Mouthwatering Mondays over at the Sweet Spot. Head on over to check out what kind of deliciousness is going on in the blogosphere this week.
Happy Baking my Friends!

SRC: Wives With Knives Lime Blueberry Scones

Hi All!  Hope your holiday preparations are going well. In addition to my usual holiday preparations, it is also time for December's Secret Recipe Club reveal for group C! Each month members are assigned another member's blog at random to choose a recipe from and make it and then on the reveal date, we reveal the recipe we selected and the blog we were assigned. It is a fun project, although, some months I feel more like stalker than blogger! All in good fun though. :)

Photo by Cathy at Wives with Knives (used with Cathy's permission)

This month I was assigned the blog Wives with Knives. And wow!! What a fabulous blog - so many beautiful pictures and delicious sounding recipes. My only regret is that December wasn't such a busy month for me - I would have loved to try a couple of recipes each week from this lovely blog. Cathy writes this lovely blog from Oregon (which also happens to be one of mine and my hubby's favorite vacation spots). She has lovely recipes - a good mix of sweet and savory, beautiful scenic adventure posts, and lots of interesting farmers market posts as well. It is a great mix that is sure to capitivate all readers who happen to drop by - if you haven't already happened upon her blog, do so ASAP! You are bound to find all kinds of inspiration there. :)

So - sad news - I took photos of these delicious scones that I made and my computer crashed and I lost my photos. I was near tears so hubby volunteered to do some recovery procedures with my dinosaur of a lap top tomorrow to see what he can rummage up. So, please keep your fingers crossed. I've shared a picture of my friend's lovely Christmas cards that she makes (see my previous post regarding Handmade by Sabana). I will update this post with food pics if hubby can recover, or when I have a chance to reperform the recipe later this week. Apologies to those of you visual foodies!!!  **UPDATE: I received a very kind email from Cathy at Wives with Knives with an offer that I could use one of her photos in order to get into the SRC list for the month. So, thanks Cathy for being so kind to me! :) :)

**UPDATE #2: I wasn't able to recover these photos, but I did rebake the recipe and get some of my own pictures. :) These scones were definitely appreciated a second time by my family! Mine aren't as pretty as Cathy's, but they definitely tasted delicious.

Here is the lovely recipe - I've only made some minor modifications to the recipe - mainly due to what I had on hand. :) This seems like a pretty versatile recipe, so feel free to play around with it.

Lime Blueberry Scones
Recipe minimally adapted from Wives with Knives

Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp lime zest
• 5 tbsp butter, cold and cut into small cubes
• 1 cup buttermilk
• 1 1/2 cup frozen blueberries, thawed

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Sift dry ingredients into the bowl of a large food processor. Add lime zest and pulse to combine. Add butter and pulse until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Pour in the buttermilk and pulse until mixture comes together. Pour mixture out onto counter and mix in the blueberries gently, folding and refolding the dough a couple of times to gently work the berries in without mashing them. Pat the dough into a square and cut into 12 squares.
2. Place the scones on a baking tray lined with a piece of parchment paper. Brush with a bit of buttermilk and sprinkle with some sugar. Bake 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.

I hope you enjoy these scones, despite the lack of pictures. Please keep your fingers crossed for good ideas for recovery of lost pictures. Or if you have any suggestions, please feel free to pass them my way. Hoping for the best... or maybe this is just a hint telling me I need to make these again... they were pretty darn good.

Happy Reveal Day fellow group C'ers. Can't wait to check out your creations.

The Daring Bakers Challenge - Novemer 2010 - Crostata!!!

Wow! I can't believe its that time already - the November Daring Bakers challenge is here! I had such high hopes for this challenge - I intended to make three versions - two sweet and one savory. Unfortunately, time ran out before I got around to doing the third. So I have two sweet versions of the challenge to share with you today.

The 2010 November Daring Bakers Challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi's Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

As I mentioned above, I made two sweet versions of crostata. The first was a lemon blueberry mascarpone cream crostata. I chose to make minis of that version. Here is the pasta frolla recipe I used for the shell of the crostata:

Pasta Frolla

Ingredients:

• scant 3/4 cup icing sugar
• 1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
• pinch of salt
• 1 stick or 8 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, cut into pieces
• grated zest of one lemon
• 1 large egg & 1 large egg yolk, lightly beaten

Method:

1. Combine sugar, flour, salt and lemon zest in bowl of food processor. Pulse a few times to mix.
2. Add butter and pulse a few times until the mixture has the consistency of coarse meal. Empty bowl of food processor onto your work surface and make a well in the center.
3. Add eggs to the well in the center and use a fork to combine the mixture until it starts to come together.
4. Use your hands to combine the mixture until it forms a ball. Don't over mix here - it will be a little crumbly. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate at least two hours.
5. Remove from fridge and roll out on a lightly floured work surface. Line tart pan with dough that has been rolled out. Line the dough with parchment paper and place pie weights, raw rice or beans in the center to help the crust hold its shape while you blind bake it.
6. Blind bake the shell in the oven at 350F for about 15 minutes, then remove the parchment and the pie weights and bake another 10-15 minutes or until cooked through.
   

Now that you've baked the shell, you can make the filling! For the blueberry crostata I followed a recipe from briciole's blog. I adapted the recipe to be a little bit more lemony to go with my lemon blueberry theme.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup frozen blueberries
• 2 tsp sugar
• 3 tbsp sugar
• 250g mascarpone
• 1/2 cup chilled heavy whipped cream
• juice from 1/2 - 1 lemon

Method:

1. Combine blueberries & 2 tsp sugar in a small saucepan on the stove. Heat over medium heat until completely thawed and they have started juicing a bit. Remove from heat and let cool.
2. Mix sugar, mascarpone, and lemon juice until smooth. Whip the cream and gently fold into the mixture. Spread 1/2 the cream mixture over the crust. Top with the blueberries and then top with the remaining cream mixture. Garnish with blueberries and a bit of lemon zest.

Next version was a toasted hazelnut cream crostata. It was amazing!! I followed the same recipe for pasta frolla as above, but substituted 1/2 cup ground toasted hazelnuts for 1/4 cup of the flour and omitted the lemon zest. The crust was slightly more difficult to work with when I added the nuts, but the taste was absolutely amazing!

For the filling, I used a recipe I found on the Food Network website. I omitted the chopped hazelnuts, storebought meringues and the raspberries. But other than that I followed the recipe! It was rich and decadent and so smooth tasting. I topped the crostata with little rounds made from the leftover pasta frolla that I baked in the oven, sweetened whipped cream and some more toasted hazelnuts. It turned out beautifully and tasted delicious.

Thank you Simona for such a wonderful challenge and for sharing with us the wonderfully versatile crostata! I had never heard of crostata, let alone attempted to make it prior to this recipe and I was very excited that this recipe gave me the opportunity to purchase a much needed tart pan!

Until next time, Happy Baking my Friends!

Summer Salad

I've been absent from the blogging world for a few days because I've been away with my hubby! We went on a little trip for our 3rd anniversary to the Oregon Coast. It was beautiful! Now back to reality.


I thought I would share with you a summery salad today. If you're dreading falls approach, make this salad - you'll definitely feel summery when you eat it! The salad is also very simple and great to make on a work night. You could even add some grilled chicken or fish and you would have a complete meal!

Ingredients:

• Mixed greens
• goat cheese, crumbled
• toasted pecans (I tossed mine with some cayenne pepper, brown sugar and olive oil after I toasted them)
• croutons
• blueberries
• balsamic vinaigrette

For the vinaigrette:

Mix together 1/2 cup olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar or lemon juice, 1 small clove garlic, minced, 1 tbsp dijon mustard, 1/8 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp black pepper in a glass jar, blender or food processor. Shake, blend or whirl until smooth. Drizzle over your salad and enjoy!

Try this vinaigrette tonight on your salad! Its delicious and only takes a couple minutes to make. Enjoy!

Blueberry