Easter Dinner

I just realized that I haven't posted anything on this blog for quite a long time, and I have made a lot of great stuff over the past months. My creative habits had moved from crafty to culinary over the winter mostly because I couldn't safely sand and polish resin creations inside. With the weather warming up I'm excited to get back into resin casting, but let me tell you a little about my recent kitchen fun.

This Easter I decided to create a delicious feast using recipes from the magazine Saveur that I recently subscribed to. They have some great articles about ingredients and methods used in all styles of cooking and a huge online database of recipes. On their website I found a Pineapple Chipotle Glazed Ham recipe and immediately decided that's what I would make. It was absolutely fantastic and the only thing that I changed was the size of ham used. Here's the recipe.

I took some photos of my finished product but haven't uploaded them yet, so here's a picture from the Saveur website. ;-)



My side dishes consisted of wild rice with asparagus, ginger-honey glazed baby carrots and a smokey cheddar potato casserole. The potato casserole was based off of one that my friend, Tyler, suggested we have at Thanksgiving this last year. His original recipe called for a pint of sour cream and 1/2 c of butter and was DEADLY. I modified it a bit and came up with a great comfort casserole that, of all the dishes, was the only one completely finished up by the end of the meal.

Smokey Sharp Cheddar Potato Casserole

2 lb bag of frozen hash browns, thawed
8oz of plain non-fat yogurt
1 can cream of chicken soup (it probably wouldn't hurt to use the low sodium type)
1/2 c onion, chopped
6-8 oz smokey cheddar cheese, sliced or grated

mix the yogurt, soup, and onions in a bowl. grease crock pot. layer 1/2 of hash browns in crock. pour 1/2 of yogurt/soup mix. layer 1/2 of cheese. repeat layers. cook on low about 4 hours.
-or-
mix all ingredients, except half of the cheese, in large bowl. pour into greased 9x13 baking dish, and bake at 350 for about 30 mins. cover with remaining cheese and return to oven for another 30 minutes.

For dessert, I used another recipe from Saveur magazine. It was from an article about cardamom, which is one of my favorite spices.
Once again, a picture from their site...and click here for the recipe.



These little babies are an explosion of flavor! The pound of butter used mixed with the abundance of ginger and cardamom make for a rich little treat, but I'm in love with them.

breakfast food-filled corn muffins

It's that time of year where friends are moving away after completion of grad school, which also means that we acquire more "stuff." I have only accepted useful stuff, mind you. That chest of drawers was much needed, and it never hurts to have more than one set of muffin tins. Okay so I may or may not have needed all the muffin tins, and Chris probably had the right to wryly ask if I was going to open up a muffin shop. After that very appropriate comment I actually started brainstorming muffin ideas and came up with some interesting breakfast muffin ideas.

Now, these were not the traditional fruit and cream cheese filled muffin ideas. I started thinking, "sausage and gravy corn muffins?" or, "bacon, egg n cheese?" Just before work yesterday I decided to experiment. I found a basic corn muffin recipe using masa harina, and started filling them with ham, peper jack, and eggs. The tricky part was trying to figure out how to make a barrier so that the scrambled egg wouldn't just run into the mix. I tried cheese barriers and ham barriers. The ham seemed to work the best...but didn't do exactly what I had imagined it would.

I didn't get any photos of these glorious creations because they were compled just minutes before I had to leave for work, and when I got home from work, all but two were gone - and they were not the two best examples of the batch.

At any rate, I think i'll keep experimenting with muffins. I'm thinking - Chicken Tamale muffins - or- Chili and Cheese???

here's a link to the masa harina corn muffin recipe I followed. I'd recommend it over the usual yellow cornmeal muffin.