Larabar UPdate of flavors....

I recruited erin to help me sample the Larabars and so far we have sampled two!
I knew it would be hard with all the holiday snacks to stick to healthy ones, so we opted to try them together so they didn't have to be our entire snack time.

I started off with the flavors that I have duplicates of first so that I wouldn't be as disappointed if I loved the flavor but didn't have it anymore in my cupboard. May sound strange to you but erin totally knows me and suggested the exact same thing.

So the first flavor we tried was the Coconut Cream Pie bar. This one was also highly reviewed by Tina so I couldn't wait to try it. Erin and I both really liked it!!! It had such a unique texture and the flavors were quite striking. I could really taste the coconut flavor along with an almost graininess that shredded coconut can bring to dishes. I wasn't sure how erin would fare with these because in my mind they are quite "healthy" tasting, which I love! She normally shy's away from these type of products but she really really enjoyed the texture/flavor as well. She mentioned that it was more like a chewy cookie than a healthy granola bar. Well put! (that's why she is technically the writer and I am just a humble blogger). I saw the ingrediants were: dates, almonds, unsweetened coconut, coconut oil and cashews. I mean of course it's good!!

Next we moved on to Peanut Butter Cookie. I thought for sure erin would pick this over the coconut flavor but she still says that the first one "takes the pie" so to speak :). I don't think it had the peanut butter flavor i was expecting...with that said it was still great. Honestly the textures of these bars really shine!

Which flavor shall be next....I'm thinking something festive like Gingersnap perhaps...
Stay tuned...

Thai-tastic Tuesday Dinner

Although I have been doing alot of baking and making recently I haven't really made a meal in quite sometime. Between the holidays and parties most of my cooking has been snacks and cookies! Not that I'm complaining but eating soup and sandwich can get a bit boring! So when erin suggested that i cook something for our Tuesday date night I loved the idea...now what to make.

I spent my breakfast time perusing the usual sites to see if something grabbed my interest. I quickly decided I wanted to cook an ethnic dish, but quite frankly felt that i had exhausted all my Mexican dishes lately. I moved onto Indian food (which both erin and i love) but most of these had quite a bit of ingredients that I would have to purchase. Finally I remembered a recipe from my Hungry-Girl Recipe book: Rockin Shrimp Pad Thai. Unfortunately I can't link the recipe because you have to buy the book to see this one, but it's soooo worth it.

This recipe uses Tofu Shirataki noodles, which are extremely low in calories and high in fiber! I made a few alterations to my dish adding: brussels sprouts (surprise surprise), mushrooms and I add a bit more of the sauce to ensure all the veggies were coated. I stuck to the two packages of Tofu noodles as well as the measurements for the scallions and bean sprouts. I used egg whites instead of egg beaters just because that is what I had in the fridge! I know this isn't as helpful without the recipe but seriously, BUY THE BOOK. You won't run out of things to make!


It was a HUGE success! First off the recipe serves two and we even had leftovers (I think because I added so many veggies). At first bite the chili sauce is quite powerful. Now erin loves spice so she really enjoyed it but I had to thin mine out a bit with some soy sauce. Also we both agreed that although the sauce was great you didn't get a strong peanut flavor from this as you might expect. I think next time around I might cut back on the chili and up the amount of peanut butter. Something to note however is that I read alot that when you want to lose weight to add hot spices to your food as it can cause you to slow down/limit the amount of food you eat...that sure worked last night.

It was really good though! Both erin and I commented on how nice textures of the egg whites and bean sprouts were in the dish.

I must say...It was Thai-tastic!!

Christmas cookies, crafts and cocktails (or mocktails)

What's better than cooking/crafting and cocktails with a Christmas theme? That basically sums up alot of my loves (and erin was there so that's all of them!). When erin and I were invited to a day of Christmas fun in Peekskill, NY not even a three hour car ride could stop this Rudolph mobile from heading there! Our friends Terra and Scott were gracious enough to host this extravaganza and our friend Katie joined us with her sewing machine in tow!

As the title suggests Katie and Terra had planned out a day full of baking and christmas crafts. I definitely stuck to the baking, but erin took the day to hand paint everyone individual ornaments. She also took a break to help decorate some sugar cookies...which is where my baking day begins. Terra had picked up a table full of goodness to create goodies with. We had a long laundry list of baking to do so after a quick trip to Micheal's (for crafting supplies) Terra and I began the baking. She swears by the packaged Sugar cookie mix and instead of using butter she substitutes a 1/3 cup of oil and a tablespoon of water. Because we were doing roll-out cookies I had to add alot of flour to the mix while rolling them out (thanks katie!). The first attempt at rolling out was quite frustrating because the mix was way too sticky, but after katie's tip I just kept adding flour until i got the consistency needed to keep a nice cookie shape. we had picked up a large tin of Christmas cut outs so we had alot to choose from!

I made two batches of these suckers and we all took a break to decorate them in all of our...um...creative ways :). I'm not going to lie some were kinda scary, who knew that snowmen look frightening with red sprinkle eyes? haha. And you know when you are sick of decorating when you start just adding sprinkles to everything. Oh another katie tip: if you want to make brown reindeer, red and green frosting make a nice 'reindeer brown'!

While I was making these Terra stirred up some tasty, and easy fudge using the recipe on the back of the Fluff container. who knew?! We didn't add the nuts to this and almost added twice the chocolate needed but Terra rescued it just in time. But i do wonder...could there ever be too much chocolate?

The next baking, or should I say making, task was No-Bake Cookies! I added the ! point to emphasis how much I was looking forward to helping out with this one. I might have asked Terra about five times when we were going to start these. They were so easy to make, and so easy to eat too! For some reason i always thought that no-bakes had to sit for awhile to solidify but we sampled these after only about 1/2 hour of sitting. The nice part about this too is that you can make them as large, or as small as you want. This is NO baking involved so these are good to work on while you have something else going in the oven. YUM.

After baking all these recipes I thought I would share one of my own with the group. I sorta figured that we had plenty of goodies to eat, but what about something to drink? Over breakfast i confirmed that we were all egg nog lovers, so naturally I wanted to make my HG Egg Nog. The ingredients are pretty simple and its A-MAZE-ING. You basically just combine all of these in a blender:

5 cups Light Vanilla Soymilk ; 1 small (4-serving) package Jell-O Sugar Free Fat Free Instant Pudding mix, Vanilla ; 6 no-calorie sweetener packets (like Splenda) ; tsp. rum extract or imitation rum extract ; 1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

I doubled this recipe and I also DO NOT add the rum extract. I don't partically like the flavor of rum so that was a no brainer. I also eyeball the nutmeg and always end up adding wayyyy more. It's just so flavorful! Obviously you could add real rum to this recipe. **one important step is to let it sit in the fridge for at least an hour. This allows the pudding to make the mix a bit thicker giving it that authentic egg nog creaminess.

Couldn't you just drink the whole pitcher?:

We had an amazing day! festive and fun.
We all vowed to make this a new Christmas tradition.

Amish Friendship Bread...is not my friend

I mentioned in my Thanksgiving post that erin's mom had shared Amish Bread with all of us. On top of that she also picked me as one of the "pass along" friends to continue the recipe.
I was super excited to try it and when you pass it along it comes with a page of instructions as well (i linked the recipe above because it also explains where the tradition originated).

In true fashion when it came to add in the next ingredients (you spend a few days just stirring the starter up) I wanted to try and make it a bit more healthy.

On Day 10 you:

Add 1 cup flour (I used whole wheat)

1 cup sugar (splenda)

1 cup milk.

Stir. Take out 3 cups and place 1 cup each into three separate plastic containers. Give one cup and a copy of this recipe to three friends. To the balance (a little over one cup) of the batter, add the following ingredients and mix well.

1 cup oil (applesauce)

1/2 cup milk

3 eggs

1 tsp vanilla

In a separate bowl combine the following dry ingredients and mix well:
2 cups flour (1/2 wheat and 1/2 white)

1 cup sugar

1-1/2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 - (5.1 oz) box instant vanilla pudding (the only thing I had was Fat free/sugar free)

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup nuts (omitted, erin doesn't like nuts in bread)
Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients. Mix and pour into two well greased and sugared bread pans. Bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour.

Okay so...didn't turn out as good as Mrs. K's. I think that too many substitutions and primarily the whole wheat flour caused it to be a bit dense. The flavor was okay but it just didn't seem to have the airiness that I think it needed.

Also in full disclosure I didn't use a ceramic bowl which the recipe clearly calls for!

I think i may have messed a bit too much with this one. I ended up freezing one of the loafs to take home for Christmas (it turns out my brother is a HUGE fan of this bread). I think I will see what they all of think of it as well.

At least friendships don't end over crappy bread!!

(oh and by the way I chose not to pass this one along...:)

Surprise Party Snackies

I love having house parties and erin and i were worried when we moved that no one would come to visit us :( (we live sorta out of the way for some of our city friends). But we underestimated what great friends and family we have! erin just turned 27 on the 2nd so in honor of her big day a few friends from NYC drove down to surprise her. time for our first house party!

I of course knew that people were coming so i planned ahead of time to have a nice snack table for noshing as we boozed it up! I don't eat alot of meat, as you can tell I'm sure, and our friend dan and erin's sister lizzie are both vegetarian so i wanted to have dishes that everyone could enjoy. that being said it was erin's birthday party so it needed to be good too!!

I decided to have the typical spread of veggies (orange pepper, fresh mushrooms, broccoli. and baby carrots) with hummus. We also had some chips with salsa and a platter of cheese and crackers. Oh, and a bowl of erin's famous bridge mix. I wanted to spice things up a bit a picked a dip from Eating Well that looked simple and delicious: Black Bean Dip. I had everything in the cupboard already and the assembly took all of two minutes (including opening the can of beans!). Loved it. It will definietly be a regular addition to party spreads.

Next I wanted to do something cooked, even though we weren't having dinner I think its always nice to have something hot as well. Another recipe that has been in my "to make" list is HG's Pigs in a Blanket. These also were super simple to assemble and I made them up before any of our guest arrived so all I had to do was pop them in the oven. I made two batches, one with fat free hot dogs and one with veggie dogs. I didn't quite figure out how to cut each triangle piece into four more triangles...but I managed to just roll each piece of dog up in a blanket. They were nice and cozy. YUM! These were a hit as well. Behold the spread:

For desert erin really didn't want a cake this year (she is trying to stay healthy in between holidays...that's my girl), and keeping with a party idea I thought it would be fun, and festive, to make gingerbread men/woman in this case for decoration. These were a low-fat (of course) recipe that I found. After the master plan was hatched I realized that I didn't have a person cookie cutter...so I free handed it. It didn't turn out awful!!

The rules were that you had to decorate a "woman" that looked like erin and then she would judge the winner...the entrants were quite interesting ;). Everyone had fun being creative and I think erin had fun judgingI entered with my friend Molly and we WON! (ours is the one with the red mittens)

I swear it wasn't rigged at all, but try telling that to some of the guys!

I think our friends had a great time...and more importantly I think erin had a fun filled birthday.

Pie, Pie, My oh My!

My mother is the pie queen. Her crust's are infamous in our family...and before I left home I can't ever remember having a store bought pie. Forbidden!

She made it look so easy so I never could understood why people didn't make their own crusts/fillings etc...My mom could do it in a half hour. Then she taught me, and although i still refuse to buy a pie I definitely give myself longer than a 1/2 hour!!

It's hard work. frustrating. maddening even! But making your own pie can also be extremely rewarding, for both your palate and your pride :). I will admit that whenever I make pies with my mom I have her do the rolling of the crust. She says it just takes practice, but mine have yet to turn out like hers do here:

Another shocker may be that I also use Crisco in my crust. I know...this is totally against my prior blogging but this is my MOM's recipe...I just couldn't substitute. I mean look at that flakiness...And i really only make pies a few times a year! Holiday's are always an exception to the rule.

We had three pies for Thanksgiving, apple, pecan and Gingered Pumpkin (my pick and make). This was super simple to make. I made the crust (with mom rolling it out) and then let it sit in the freezer for thirty mins. while I made the filling. I used my fresh pumpkin puree!! YUM. sadly I had to run to work before it was ready for the topping, so I trusted my favorite Sous Chef and food photographer (erin) to finish it off. i think she did a great job.

when we sliced into it you could see the different colors and the taste was Delicious as well. I think the pumpkin filling had more texture due to the fact that it was fresh, but if you like that smooth no texture taste make sure to really really puree that pumpkin (or use canned of course).

My mom's apple is right out of the Betty Crocker Cookbook and the Pecan is my Aunt Carolyn's (who passed away from Cancer a few years ago) famous recipe that she passed along to my Mom. I normally have a piece of apple and a piece of pumpkin but in honor of my Aunt I nibbled off some of the pecan top as well! I think my mom may have had to slap my hand away...desert it all a blur :).

We served the pies with fat free cool whip (come on it totally tastes the same), and then for leftovers, later that weekend, I had my apple pie with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese . Seriously if you have never tried apple pie with cheese it's amazing! erin did comment that ice cream would have really made it complete!

My First Foodie Package

THANKS LARABAR!!

I have been reading on all the blogs about the nice packages and giveaways that foodie blogger's receive for sampling. I even came pretty darn close to placing in the POTM challenge, in which i would have received a pretty cool package. So when i got home yesterday and saw a box on my Christmas table I quickly ripped it open and found these inside:

I can't believe i got so many flavors...I don't even know where to begin. (they may have sent one of every kind!!!!!!)

Now i know that I have been sampling autumn ales, but this gave me a perfect excuse to sample something a bit more health and blog friendly :). (not to mention that I have more than enough time and vacation days to sample Holiday/winter ales!).

So let the tasting begin. I already have a coconut cream pie one in my purse (I picked that one because I got two of them and I didn't want to give up any of the flavors yet). I will begin with a statement that I don't normally eat "bars". They typically do not satisfy me, however I have seen SO MUCH positive feedback regarding this brand that I can't wait to prove myself wrong!

To be continued....