Recipes Discovered

Sweet Red Drunken Pasta Recipe

I have a new love of beets. They are popping up on menus everywhere these days, mostly in the form of salad, and are delicious. This recipe is very simple – combining pasta, beets, garlic, and a little Parmesan cheese. The beets are shredded first, so they cooked up pretty quickly and are super sweet. The recipe calls for cooking the pasta in wine, but I don’t think that added a lot of flavor to the pasta. Most the the color the pasta picked up was from being tossed with the beets. No matter how the pasta is cooked, it’s a delicious dish. And paired with a simple green salad topped with fried goat cheese, it’s an absolutely wonderful dinner.

Fried Goat Cheese Salad Recipe

Cream Cheese Chocolate Bundt Cake

I know this isn’t the best picture, but this cake is really good. The recipe calls for a cake mix, but I love this chocolate cake so much, I will use any excuse to make it. This time, I put it in a bundt pan and then made a filling of sweetened cream cheese and pecans. The result is a rich, moist chocolate cake with a gooey, delicious ring of filling inside. There is no need for icing, but a dusting of powdered sugar wouldn’t hurt anything. The only problem I had with the cake is getting it out of the pan. Even though I sprayed the pan, the cake stuff stuck, so I suggest heavily greasing the pan. But even if the cake falls apart (as mine did), it still tastes great!

Penna alla Vodka Recipe

For my wedding shower, everyone was asked to bring a recipe to share, which I am slowly getting around to trying all of them. This recipe was given to me by my sister-in-law, who said it was one of my brother’s favorite dishes. I made it for my parents because they just didn’t understand vodka in pasta sauce. I really liked the addition of prosciutto to the sauce, although bacon can also be used (apparently my brother’s favorite). My parents really enjoyed the meal as well, which I think surprised them. But really, who doesn’t like pasta with some tomatoes, cream, and a little vodka?

Crab Cakes with Corn Maque Choux and Tomato Jam Recipe

I have a habit of wanting to make everything I see a TV chef make, regardless of the chef. I happen to catch a glimpse of Emeril Lagasse making his “famous” crab cakes that he serves at his new restaurant in Mississippi, and I knew right away I would end up trying to make them myself. Not that trying to make something Emeril makes is a bad thing, just usually a time consuming one. The crab cakes were actually fairly simple, although I found it difficult to keep them from falling apart. Pressing them firmly into the bread crumbs seemed to help, but they still wanted to fall apart in the pan. Maque Choux (pronounced ‘mock shoe’) is a traditional Louisiana dish composed of corn, bell pepper, onions, garlic, celery, and sometimes tomatoes. After the veggies were sauteed, I added milk for a little richness. The tomato jam was simply tomatoes, vinegar, and sugar simmered together until it turned into jam. All together, this made a wonderful dish. The crab cakes were a little bland on there own (maybe more seasoning?), but combined with the corn and tomato jam, they were excellent. I love corn, so I really enjoyed the maque choux, but the highlight of the dish was actually the tomato jam. It added such a flavor punch to the dish, and I would definitely double the recipe for it next time, so there is more than a small dollop. The meal wasn’t difficult to make, but it did take a lot of time. It tasted great though, so I guess that is the trade off that makes it worth it in the end.

Tipsy Turtle Cake

Since I couldn’t find a recipe that I liked for a chocolate caramel cake, I decided to combine several recipes together and came up with this Tipsy Turtle Cake. The cake layer is the Chocolate Guinness Cake that I made a few weeks ago. A caramel chocolate filling is baked right into the cake by baking half of the cake batter, pouring the filling over the cake, and then topping that with the remaining cake batter. To top the whole thing off, a sweet caramel frosting with pecans. Together, it makes a very rich, delicious cake. However, I would probably make some changes the next time I make this. The cakes are pretty delicate, so to remove them from the pans and try to make a layer cake is a bit tricky. I would probably make this into a 9×13 sheet cake next time to avoid the cakes breaking apart. The frosting is incredibly difficult to work with as well because it hardens almost immediately. Making the cake into a sheet cake would also solve this problem because you could just pour the frosting over the cake all at once, but the filling is sweet enough, I don’t think the cake necessarily needs the frosting. I think I would just sprinkle additional pecans on top of the cake batter before baking it the second time and skip the frosting all together. However you make it, the cake is sweet and gooey – a definitely keeper even if it’s not the prettiest cake.