Grilled Potato Wedges

I've never told you how I came up with the name of this blog.  I didn't even have to think about it.  Between my three kids, "Hey, Mom, what's for dinner?" has been the most-often asked question for the last fifteen years or so.  And by my three kids, I mean my son. 

I could usually expect that it would be one of the first questions of the day.  The memories are so clear:  Sean, at three years old, eating his cereal, talking with his mouth full, "Hey, Mom, what's for dinner?"  Picking him up from elementary school, and as he ran toward me he'd be yelling, "What are we having for dinner?"

Picking him up anywhere, and the first thing he would say when he opened the car door, "What's for dinner?"  And then when he got his license, he'd drive himself home but as soon as he'd walk in the door, "What's for dinner?" And then the 2.0 version of the question: "When are you starting dinner?"

Five days ago, we dropped him off at his college.  Now I'm the one asking the questions, texting him, "What did you have for dinner?"

With Caitie and Sean back at school, it sure is quiet around here.

Erin made a back to school cake today.  Chocolate cake with peanut butter-butter cream frosting.  I think she must have used three pounds of assorted Reese's cups/Reese's pieces decorating this.  I cut the teeniest, weeniest, skinniest slices I could, but I bet they still had about a gazillion calories in each.


Meanwhile, I'm trying to come up with a French toast casserole that doesn't have a million calories in it.
A while ago, a friend of mine made a French toast casserole and it was incredible.  It was Paula Deen's recipe for French toast casserole with maple syrup.  I googled the recipe and saw the ingredients--besides all the eggs and cream and maple syrup it had two sticks of butter in it--well, to make a long story short, I just couldn't bring myself to make it.

I mean, it's one thing to eat something when you are out somewhere and you think, "oh, this is spectacular!"  But when I'm preparing it myself I just can't bring myself to add two sticks of butter--not without envisioning a syringe plunging all those calories directly into my thighs.

This is what I made this weekend:

An overnight French toast casserole.  With only one tablespoon of butter in it.  It wasn't that good, so I'm going to have to keep tweaking it!

Sooooooo.........today I'm going to give you a recipe that has been my go-to side dish this summer.  Last week, I was talking with my friend, Alyse, and she said that she was having trouble coming up with ideas for side dishes.  On nights when you're going to be grilling your dinner, it's easy to throw these potato wedges onto your grill as well!

Chocolate Banana Bread

Lots of baking going on around here in the last couple of days.

Erin's been busy.  First she whipped up a batch of Easter-themed Honey Nut Chex Mix.

Her Easter baking continued, with marshmallow peeps sitting on speckled M&M eggs in their Rice Krispie treat nests.

All of these Easter treats are gone, devoured.

We're not out of baked goods, though..........thanks to a few over-ripe bananas that inspired me to make Chocolate Banana Bread tonight.

Gnocchi With Sage & Garlic Butter Sauce

Oh, what a day.

Today is Caitie's birthday!  How on earth did the last TWENTY-ONE YEARS fly by so fast?!!

My baby.......

.........is all grown up, in little more than the blink of an eye.

Erin and I spent the better part of today making a birthday cake.

My first attempt at making fondant.  Nothing I've ever made has even come close to frustrating me as much as making this fondant.  At this moment, I can politely say I am not fond of fondant.

Yesterday, when I made the fondant (or Saturday, when I made my first batch of fondant that was so cement-like all I could do was chuck it into the trash), I had nothing polite to say about fondant.

It even gave me second thoughts about the dinner I was planning on making tonight.  Another attempt at something I had never made before.  Gnocchi!

Last summer, my son went on a trip to Italy and came home raving about gnocchi.  It was sort of surprising to me, because other than potato chips and french fries, he just doesn't like potatoes.

So here we are, 8 months later, I finally decide that today is the day I'm going to make gnocchi.  After the frustration of making the fondant, I can't believe that I still wanted to take on a recipe that by all accounts, takes lots of practice to perfect.  And a recipe that is hard to use exact measurements for ingredients because it all depends upon the starchiness of the potatoes and the level of humidity and--for all I know--which side of your head your hair is parted and whether or not you listen to music while you cook.

I'm just kidding about that last part.  Sort of.

Oh, what the heck.  I told Sean that today was gnocchi day and I wasn't going to wimp out on him.

I had researched gnocchi recipes on the Internet, and sort of morphed all the recipes together and came up with this one.   The only thing the recipes agreed on was potatoes, eggs and flour.  All of the measurements were different.  All of the methods were different.  In a nutshell, this is how I came up with the recipe:

1.  Out of the six recipes I looked at, five boiled the potatoes and one baked them.  Yet they all agreed that moisture is not your friend--so I went with the lone rebel and decided that baking was best.  (I mean, the water that you would use for boiling is moisture, right?  And moisture is not good?  So why would I boil?  Am I not a logical thinker?  Should I continue to ponder this?  Why ponder, when baking makes sense?)

AND

2.  Though all of the recipes were made with at least one egg, four of the recipes said that authentic gnocchi should not have eggs.  However, since it is very hard to get the dough to bind without eggs, it's best to use eggs, just use as little as possible.  The recipe that used one egg used two potatoes.  Since I'm so competitive, I decided that I was going to try to see if I could manage four potatoes with one egg.

AND

3.  Three of the recipes only suggested an amount of flour, and said to add it a little at a time, until the dough "felt right."  Too much flour makes the dough heavy.  The recipe that used the least amount of flour suggested 3/4 cup for 2 lbs. of potatoes.  My four potatoes weighed almost three pounds, so I decided I would try to use about a cup of flour.

(Gluten-Free) Loaded Chocolate Chip Cookies

I've been experimenting with gluten-free recipes.  

Not having much luck, I admit, with anything that should be light and fluffy--like bread, muffins, cakes, etc.

Cookies, however, are a different story.  

Erin made these.  Gluten-free sugar cookies, with a strawberry buttercream frosting that is out of this world.

I baked a gluten-free version of Loaded Chocolate Chip Cookies.  "Loaded," because they are just overflowing with good stuff, and are as perfect a combo of crunchy-on-the-outside-and-chewy-on-the-inside as any non-gluten variety.

If you do not have gluten intolerance and wish to bake a "regular" version of these cookies, just follow the italicized notations!

Prosciutto/Mozzarella Asparagus Wraps, and Christmas With The Dogs!

A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering if my amaryllis bulbs were going to bloom in time for Christmas.

And here we are!

Yeah!

We traveled to Connecticut for Christmas, to my brother's house.  You may remember my post a few months ago , where I showed a clip from ConnecticutStyle featuring his restaurant.

Christmas dinner started off with shrimp & lobster, and ended with cannoli cake.  With a lot of good stuff in between.  

My kids were eagerly anticipating our trip to Connecticut because my brother has four dogs.

I was unable to corral them into a group shot on Christmas, so here's an archive photo from this summer when Hounder (front and center) was a puppy.  All of these dogs are rescues, even the pure-bred Weimaraner.

The cast of characters:

Simba (a.k.a. "old man"), who will be 15 next month.

Hounder, the 70-lb puppy, 8 months old.

Oklee, 5 years old, eyeing one of Mrs. Dog's treats .

Unfortunately, I was unable to get a good photo of 13-year-old Mrs. Dog (a.k.a. "girlfriend").  You can see her in the group photo, she's the black-and-tan dog on the far left.

Today's recipe is asparagus wrapped in prosciutto and mozzarella.  It's one of the side dishes I prepared for my Christmas Eve party.

But before I give you the recipe, I need to show you what Erin's been up to lately:

Aren't they cute?

She made them for our Christmas Eve party.

A double-batch of rice krispy treats, rolled into balls and decorated with oreos, mini reeses cups and pull-apart twizzlers.

The snowman theme continued yesterday, when her BFF Abby came over and they made this cake.

Puff Pastry Omelette Torte

I haven't been baking too many sweet confections lately.

Erin's been taking care of that.

She baked these cupcakes to celebrate a friend's birthday (hence the "K"), but made extras for us to enjoy.

I've been doing baking of a different variety.  This morning was the meeting of my "breakfast club,"  a more-or-less-monthly standing date with four of my dearest, sweetest-most-wonderful friends.  

We take turns hosting our little breakfast dates, with the hostess providing the coffee and the guests each contributing a breakfast item.

Gayle hosted this morning's soiree.   It gave me the opportunity to bake a breakfast torte, a recipe perfectly suited for any breakfast gathering, from cozy little get-togethers to glitzy Christmas brunches.

This recipe is very easy to prepare.  Total prep and baking time is about 1 1/2 hours.  You can also prepare it ahead of time, refrigerate it overnight and bake it the next day.

Erin To The Rescue

In any given week, my cooking choices are a combination of old favorites (most of which I've already shared on this blog) and new experiments.

My experiments were pretty pathetic this week.

The first involved baby bok choy.

I'm pretty much a fan of baby anything.  When I spotted a cute little bundle of two bok choys at the supermarket last week, I eagerly tossed it into my cart.

I decided I would make a nice honey/lime/soy stir fry with shrimp.

 It looked okay..........but it didn't taste as good as I had hoped it would.  Too limey.  Blecccccch.  No way will I share that recipe with you, not if I hope to keep you as a follower of this blog.

I also picked up a bag of dried strawberries in the same aforementioned shopping trip.  I had never seen these before, and I was intrigued.  I thought that I would use them to make strawberry muffins, because fresh strawberries this time of year are so tasteless.  

These were not tasteless; they were so sweet, really yummy.

But the muffins were practically impossible to remove from the pan!  The strawberries were like glue.  They were quite stuck.  It was so frustrating, trying to remove the muffins without destroying them.

I could never give you this recipe, because my hope is to make your life easier by only giving you good recipes.  I don't want to make you angry by giving you frustrating, gee-I-wish-I-could-throw-these-muffins-and-the-pan-that-they-are-stuck-in at Fran recipes.

I'm going to keep experimenting, because what remained of the muffins was really delicious.  I'll keep at it and maybe someday I'll get it right and share it with you.

And this is where Erin rescues me, and gives me something worth blogging about.  She was craving rice krispie treats, and decided to get a little creative.

I was not home when she did this.  If I were home, I probably would have taken step-by step pictures for you, instead of just the finished rice krispie/candy corn turkeys.

Zucchini Bread! And Erin and Abby were at it again.........

I love it when Erin and her friend, Abby, take over my kitchen.  You may remember their cheeseburger cake from a previous post.  This was their latest creation:

Totally yummy.

Happily devoured by the two families!

They are already planning their next masterpiece.

I'm not sure that the recipe for zucchini bread that I'm about to give you qualifies as a masterpiece.  But it sure will come in handy when those zucchini in your garden start multiplying so quickly that you run out of people to give them to.

Bake zucchini bread instead!    Moist and bursting with the flavor of cinnamon,  this zucchini bread is a big hit in my house.

Creative Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting

I love it when my daughter gets creative in the kitchen.  You would think it is the daughter who has had an "eye" for art and design since before she could talk.  Always creative, always an artist.  She's currently in college, majoring in graphic design.

If you think her artist's eye is responsible for creating these fun little cupcakes, think again! 

It's my younger daughter (the one who prefers science over art) who asked me to pick up fruit by-the-foot, colorful goldfish crackers, teddy grahams and gummy lifesavers on a recent supermarket trip.  Decorating props for her latest baking adventure.

I happily snapped my mediocre pictures while she did all of the baking.

Thankfully, she has discovered that nothing beats a good butter cream frosting, made from scratch.

The cupcakes were made with funfetti cake mix, from a box.  Yeah, I'm working on her.

I did not take pictures of the cupcake-making process.  Follow the directions on the box, yada-yada-yada.

Or make your own delicious cupcakes from scratch using an amazing recipe.   Your favorite homemade cupcake recipe, better than any box mix.

So, assuming you have your cupcakes made, here is the frosting and decorating instructions.