Tormented Kitchen

Hello again my friends. This year is really flying by. I woke up and realized that we are one month away from Christmas! Goodness! I have to start getting seasonal decorations up! Speaking of seasonal things, it's getting to be citrus fruit season in the stores. Have you also noticed the bags of clementines and mandarin oranges everywhere? I usually see them under the brands of Cuties and Halos. They're so tiny and tasty. I had a flash of brilliance and bought a bag. They are great to send for the kiddos lunches, or drop a few in my purse to snack on at work. I've used clementines in cooking as well.  They are so easy to add since they're seedless and add a lovely and gentle sweet orange flavor. For fun, I made crepes and a sweet whipped cream- ricotta filling, enhanced with the juice and zest from clementines. They were divine! I knew I had to share the recipe with you, because they were too good to keep to myself. By the way, if you don't have access to...

Pancakes are a breakfast staple at our house. If we don't have pancakes, then we eat their cousin the waffle at least once a week. Sometimes, we even make breakfast for dinner. The kids love it when I do that. I toss some bacon in the oven (yes, I cook bacon in the oven), then whip up some pancakes. Yumm-o! Pancakes are easy. If you're used to pancake mix in a box, you really have to try these.  They are not any more difficult to make from scratch, but the flavor is so much better. You can control the quality of your ingredients and use all organic (or not). Justin remembers eating pancakes at Grandpa Tony's house as a little kid. Tony would start putting things in a bowl and they would just turn out, without measuring. Sometimes you can do that, You just know since you've made them so many times. Just so you know, we always, always call these pancakes. They are also known as hotcakes or flapjacks, but I just don't like saying "flapjacks" or ...

You all know how much I like Mexican food, right? My dear friend Kelly showed me a few things. See, she married a fellow from El Salvador. The cuisine there is slightly different from what we know as Mexican food. It's good stuff. I have not made thick tortillas like her in ages. She showed me how to make thick corn tortillas. For a while I made them all the time. Then, for some reason, I stopped. I guess we got tired of them. It took me a while to actually get around to making tortillas. Things kept coming up. I'd run out of time. I'd forget. I'd make something else completely different for dinner. Then, I finally just broke down and did it. This time, I made them with just flour, not with masa harina. Let me just say one thing about these homemade tortillas. They won't be as thin as store-bought ones. Store-bought tortillas are usually loaded with nasty preservatives to keep them pliable and free of mold, as well as chemical compounds to enhance the textu...

You know who loves breakfast? I do. You know who else loves breakfast? My kids. Sometimes I have to take advantage of the kids and their love of pancakes and waffles. I use it as an opportunity to get them to branch out. I find that often my kids will devour breakfast and then pick and snack the rest of the day, so it's a good time to get something nutritious in them. Ages ago, when I was a teenager learning the basics of cooking, I happened across a British recipe for oat waffles. They were good, but a bit more work than I was willing put out as a 14 year-old. About Thanksgiving, I ran into that recipe again. I hadn't seen it in years. I made it a few times with some changes. I tried using quick oats instead of slow-cooking oats and swapped out the buttermilk for regular milk. They were better. On a lark, I threw in some ground flax and wheat germ. It was so good. These waffles are filling. The texture is really light with a crisp edge and they are a little chewy from the...

My dear readers, you may have noticed a gap in posts lately.  Yes, it's true. I have been away from the kitchen, or hurriedly making super-easy repeats of things already posted here, or just plain old going out to eat. We also managed to sneak in a week-long vacation to Los Angeles.  It was crazy! I have only been there once before, back in 1997. Things were very different this time.  We ate at the evil Golden Arches restaurant too many times out of convenience's sake, and tried a few local diners.  One night Justin's sister provided sandwich-makings for a picnic in the park down from the hotel. Another night, we had a good-sized family dinner where Justin fixed Garlic Filet on the grill and his sister and friends made various side dishes.  Theresa made deviled eggs with minced olives mixed  inside.  Andrea made a very tasty tomato-mozzarella caprese. Christina made guacamole. It was nice for me to able to just relax and not be the cook fo...

I got this recipe from my mom, good old cooking-frenzy mom. Did I ever tell you about the time she made these at my house? Nope? It was about 3 years ago, a tad more, I think I was pregnant with Eric and we were living in the little house on Hibiscus Court. Well, she made this huge batch of batter and stuck the leftover, unused batter in the fridge. I didn't realize there was waffle batter in there. Mom and Dad went home. The next day I open the fridge door and there is this weird batter stuck to everything from your knees down, all over the shelf, down the side and back, and into the produce drawers. It took a lot of scrubbing the get the semi-dried out, freakishly puffy batter cleaned out. But other than that one freakish time, these are awesome waffles. I normally just cook up any leftover batter and freeze the waffles so I always have waffles on hand. Homemade waffles instead of Eggos...yum. I took these photos at Mom's place, hence the variation in decor. P.S...

The puffed pancake, or Dutch baby, is one of those super simple breakfast items that seems to really wow people. I got this recipe from my mom. It's another one of those she picked up somewhere that no one can exactly remember when or how or where it actually came from. It's one of Justin's favorite breakfast foods that I make. It's tasty with cut up fruit and flavored syrup, or with my creamy fruit dip, or done up simply like reular pancakes with butter and maple syrup. Eric likes it too. So if the kid eats it, you know it's good for the whole family. Ingredients for one puff pancake: ½ cup flour ¼ tsp. salt 2 eggs 2 Tablespoons sugar ½ cup milk 1 tsp. vanilla 2 Tablespoons butter or margarine Method: 1. Preheat oven to 425°. Place butter in a 9-inch pie dish and put in oven. Remove dish from oven when butter has melted and is sizzling, but not burned, about 2-4 minutes. 2. Meanwhile, beat other ingredients together until smooth. Pour into sizz...

Waffles. I love them. I love anything that is soaked in maple syrup. I've been using this recipe for years to rave reviews. A note to ensure puffiness: Make sure your baking powder is fresh and that you beat the wet ingredients separately before adding to the dry ingredients. This keeps them from going flat. Ingredients:   2 cups flour 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 cup milk 1 cup water 3 Tablespoons sugar 2 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla 1 Tablespoon oil Pinch salt Nonstick cooking spray Method: 1. Preheat waffle iron. 2. Mix dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Blend water, milk, eggs, and vanilla in a separate bowl. Pour wet ingredients into dry and blend until lumpy. Add oil and mix until mostly smooth. 3. Spray iron with nonstick spray and use about ½ cup of batter per waffle. The exact amount will vary depending on the depth of the waffle wells. 4. Cook about 4 minutes, but this can also vary depending on your iron. I usually go by smell. When they start to s...