Recipes Discovered

All In One Holiday Cake Recipe

The holidays are all about sharing and giving, and a lot of people have been asking me for my Thanksgiving recipes. On the menu this year, besides the normal roasted turkey with stuffing, and the not so normal deep fried turkey, was macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, candied yams, green bean casserole, creamed corn, and cranberry jello salad. To keep everyone happy (and quiet) until dinner was served, I made a bacon ranch cheese ball and a pumpkin cream cheese dip, which was really great with pretzels. For dessert, there was pumpkin pie, all in one holiday cake (pumpkin, cranberry, apple, and pecans), and brownies. Of course, with all the food we had, Seth and I have a refrigerator full of leftovers. I’ve come up with some interesting uses for them though, including potato pancakes, turkey cranberry sandwiches, sweet potato and black bean chili, shepherds pie, and a macaroni and cheese concoction that I don’t even know what to name. Thanksgiving was a lot of fun and hopefully there are a lot more recipes to come during the holidays.

Black Bean Chilaquiles Recipe

There is a Mexican restaurants down the street from our apartment that is always crowded and always smells really good. When looking for a Mexican dish to make for dinner, I found this recipe for chilaquiles, which I have never heard of before. After a quick wiki search, I discovered that chilaquiles are typically served at breakfast, topped with eggs. Obviously this recipe is a twist on the traditional, which is simply fried tortillas mixed with salsa and topped with cheese and eggs. That being said, I really enjoyed the dish. The salsa has a great flavor that wasn’t too spicy and it went well with the sweet corn and beans. I wasn’t sure about baking the tortillas just to put them in a casserole, but by baking them, they didn’t too get soggy and they stayed together. The dish had a lot of different flavors going on, but they all come together, and it turned out to be a great dinner.

Black Bean and Bulgur Salad

This “salad” is incredible simple, yet very tasty. It’s a nice alternative to beans and rice and to pasta salad, plus a great summer salad with no mayo. I simply sauteed a shallot for a minute before adding bulgur, water, chicken bullion, and sun-dried tomatoes. Once the water evaporated, about 10 minutes, I added frozen corn, rinsed black beans, diced red and green peppers, and seasoned it with cumin, salt, pepper, and red wine vinegar. Seth and I ate it at room temperature, and it was great. The peppers stayed crunchy, the corn was sweet, the sun-dried tomatoes were tangy. The dressing was simple, but added a lot of flavor to the bulgur. It was such a quick meal, but I thought it was pretty impressive.

Black Bean Burger with Chipotle Ketchup

I recently got a new Mayo Clinic cookbookthat had a recipe for black bean burgers. Since I really enjoyed the black bean burgers I made a few months ago, I though it would be fun to try a new recipe to compare them. The Mayo Clinic recipe was a lot more complex, but it had a lot different ingredients to add flavor. Plus, included in the recipe was chipotle ketchup, which sounded really good.

I made the ketchup first by combining fresh tomatoes, sweet onion, garlic, tomato paste, vinegar, a chipotle chili, cumin, and salt in a small saucepan over medium heat. Chipotle chilis are smoked jalpenos, and the adobe sauce is a sweet vinegar sauce the chilis marinate in. They are a fairly spicy, so I like to scrape as many seeds out of the chili as I can, so the heat doesn’t overwhelm the dish. I let the ketchup simmer for 15 minutes until it was thick enough to qualify as ketchup, and then I removed it from the heat and let it cool. >> Read more