Broiled tomato appetizer

A simple and delicious appetizer that is sure to be a crowd pleaser at your next soire, date night or when you feel like have something extra special with your grilled cheese. I'm pretty excited about this because it is my own recipe (!) and my mind is already filled with variations, so without further ado...

Broiled stuffed tomatoes

4-6 ripe tomatoes (tomatoes the size of plumbs are best)
4 oz soft cream cheese
4 oz crumbled feta cheese
2 TB pesto sauce
Italian seasoning

Equipment: muffin pan

Preheat oven to broil. Grease one muffin pan. Mix cream cheese, feta and pesto together in a small bowl and set aside. Using a sharp knife core each tomato and use a spoon to scoop all of the seeds and center of the tomato out. Sprinkle Italian seasoning in each tomato and fill with cheese mixture. Place tomatoes in the slots of the muffin pan. Broil for 4 minutes allowing cheese to melt but not burn on the top and tomatoes to soften. Serve while while still warm.

These were delicious! A fantastic and simple start to a meal. A great date night addition that will make it look like you tried, even when you didn't!

Taste: A+
Cost: A-
Waste: A

My crock pot and I are on speaking terms again

The crock pot and I are once again on speaking terms. Thanks to the thorough crock pot recipe research provided by Stephanie at A Year of Slow Cooking. I have now made 2 successful recipes, both soups but I have plans to branch out.

Last week, while I was home from work due to illness my crock pot made dinner. End of Summer Harvest soup to be exact (see recipe below sourced from Stephanie's blog). I had, before I got sick, chopped up all the ingredients and put them in the fridge in my slow cooker, so all I had to do was put the pot insert in and turn it on (and go back to bed). It was amazing.

My only problem was I could NOT find dry cannellini beans. I went to two different grocery stores. I could only find the pre-cooked canned variety. I thought about substituting another kind of bean but I know nothing about beans (I don't really like them). So I bought the canned ones, intending to add them toward the end, but ended up not using them (they looked gross). I just added a little extra pasta at the end and the soup was very tasty, though the beans would give it more nutritional value.

Next time, I'm adding lentils. I love lentils and they would give the soup lots of fiber, just like the beans. If you wanted to make a version with meat, I'm thinking sausage or turkey sausage would be good additions. I'm trying to be a good Catholic this Lent so I made this recipe specifically because it was vegetarian.

Single girls should keep portion size in mind. I cut the portion in half and still had about 5 bowls of soup. This soup does not keep particularly well in the fridge, I tried to eat the last bowl for lunch 3 days after making it and it was definitely a little bit questionable.

End of Summer Harvest Soup (yes I realize it's winter)

4 cups chicken broth (I used vegetable, works fine)
1 cup prepared pasta sauce
1 cup water
1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 zucchini, washed well and sliced in 1/4-inch rounds
2 yellow summer squash, washed well and sliced in 1/4-inch rounds
2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved or quartered (depending on size)
1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
1/3 cup dry white Cannellini beans (could not find them!)
1/2 cup pasta (to add 20 minutes before serving)
salt and pepper to taste
garnish with Parmesan and Romano cheeses


I used a 5-quart slow cooker and cut this recipe in half. Wash squashes well, and slice in rounds. Place into slow cooker, with diced onion and tomato wedges. Rinse your beans in hot water, and add to cooker. Add broth, pasta sauce, and water. Stir in Italian seasoning.

Cover and cook on low for 8-10 hours, or until beans have reached desired tenderness. 20 minutes before serving, stir in raw pasta. Serve with grated Parmesan and Romano cheese.

Fresh Guacamole - I'm converted!

I'm currently in KC, visiting my friend Jess - culinary student extraordinaire! We were at the store negotiating dinner options and I saw avocados on sale. While I was feeling up the avocados trying to find a ripe one, Jess was asking me what the beep I'm planning to with it. I said, just eat it. I LOVE avocado. Jess felt this was not a good plan and insisted on making guacamole, which I told her I don't like.

Apparently I was wrong. Jess makes some tasty guacamole. I'm not sure I'd ever had fresh made before because when I hear guacamole I think the goopy stuff you get at restaurants. Ew. But this was almost chunky. I ate almost all of it. Jess got like 2 chips. The following day we made it again, this time using two avocados so Jess could have at least a little bit. Oh I'm hungry just thinking about it.

Here is a link to Jess' blog with her avocado recipe. I'm working on getting a guest post from her in the future.

PS: I got in trouble for this photo because it wasn't "presentation ready." Forgive me.

Potato soup - crock pot success!

Finally, finally, finally, the crock pot comes through. After all the depressing crock pot outcomes, I was on the look out for a specialist and I was browsing around on $5 dinners when I saw a post by Stephanie O'Dea, aka slow cooker aficionado. Stephanie's blog, A Year of Slow Cooking is amazing. She has a small slow cooker obsession, but I'm grateful for it, and challenged herself to use her crock pot everyday for a year in 2008. Wow. I can't even challenge myself to cook everyday - partly because I wouldn't be able to eat all of the food.

Anyway, so after I found Stephanie's blog, my hopes were still pretty low and I thought it was perhaps best to start small. Soup seemed like a natural thing to make in a slow cooker so I looked at the soup recipes on her blog and I wasn't disappointed there are a bunch to choose from.

I made the potato soup. It was yummy. I sort of forgot to buy seasoned salt, uh, twice so I used some random mix of seasoning I had around including paprika. I tried to blend the soup smooth with a hand mixer because unlike Stephanie, I did want a smooth soup. It sort of worked but not really. She suggested using a hand blender but I don't have one and did not want to pour the soup into my standing blender.

One final note, this is not single-girl portion sized recipe, at all! Probably because Stephanie is cooking for a family. I was planning to make the whole recipe and put some in the freezer but then I started cutting up potatoes, and let me tell you 5lbs of potatoes is a lot. I would recommend you to cut it in half. If you decide to make the whole thing, make sure to use a 6qt slow cooker as the recipe recommends. My crock pot is 5qt and it was almost full with 3/4 of the recipe.

I would say the full recipe makes 10-12 servings. I was eating this most of the week...yea none made it to the freezer, probably for the best as there is still some chicken in there from the whole chicken recipe.

The recipe calls for chicken broth, but I suspect a vegetarian version could easily be made by substituting vegetable broth.

I'm planning to make the End of Summer Harvest soup next week.

Eastern Market

I'm something of a market junkie. I enjoy wandering around and looking at the stalls because you never know what you will find, be it food or craft items. I also enjoy the chaos of it all, everything mixed around.

Each market has it's own feel. Eastern market is fairly upscale. It features hard to find food items, hand made jewelry and unique furniture. It's in a cute neighborhood filled with old town houses, just south of the Capitol complex. The streets are lined with cafes and restaurants packed with brunchers eating eggs and sipping mimosas on the weekends.

The Open Market in The Hague was a completely different story. It was crowded, unorganized and a little bit dirty. I kinda loved it - you could buy anything and everything, from apples to a cell phone. Not that I'm recommending you to get a cell phone there...alright I did get a replacement charger there on my last trip to the Netherlands because I lost my cell charger in Paris. This place was an experience and completely unexpected in the tidy and posh streets of Den Haag. When people would visit me in NL, I'd always try to take them to the market, such a non-American way to shop.

I tried to go to Eastern Market on January 3rd but it was closed! Do you believe that? Apparently the 3rd is now a holiday.


I finally made it back this past weekend and the streets were full of merchants. There were lots of places selling jewelry and small homemade housewares. The fresh produce was somewhat limited, I'm hoping that when spring rolls around there will be more local and seasonal items available because things will be, you know in season. At the moment, the market looks a bit like a grocery store only featuring fresh salsa, hummus and some specialty meats, like my chorizo.

Slow cooker chicken & rice - double fail!

Right about now I'm thinking why did I get a crock pot because clearly I have no idea how to use it. Or maybe I should follow the recipes more closely until I figure out what I'm doing.

So when I first got my crock pot, I was browsing around for some recipes to try it out and on mixingbowl.com I saw a recipe for lemon chicken. Looks yummy right? Well somewhere I went awry. I did not use bone-in chicken breasts but boneless, however, the chicken wasn't dry at all so I don't see why that would be an issue. I did not like flavor the rice had, it was sort of like chewing wine. It could be the wine I used, maybe I just did not like the flavor it had and reducing it in the crock pot would have concentrated the flavor in the rice.


The taste of the chicken was also a little bland. I would have expected, it to be flavorful with the lemon, wine and spices being slow cooked into it but it definitely wasn't. I also found the cooking time to be challenging - not quite long enough to be made while I'm at work!

Despite this I persevered! I tried to make chicken and rice in the same spirit of this recipe but with different flavors, that I might like more because I like chicken and rice when other people make it! A friend of mine used to make a Latin American style of chicken and rice where she would cook the rice in the stock created by cooking the chicken. So I used all the same spices but instead of wine, lemon juice and water; I used chicken broth and a bit of water. I also switched to chicken on the bone, mostly because it's what I had around.


This was if possible a larger failure! Yes, I know it looks tasty in the photo, looking at it now kinda makes me want to eat it, but trust me it was not good. Despite being cooked for 8+ hours when I got home the chicken wasn't done! Seriously? Seriously. I took the half-cooked chicken out and pan fried it for what seemed like forever before I could finally eat it and still the rice and chicken were sort of blah.

I will find a recipe for chicken and rice that works. I will successfully make dinner with my crock pot while I'm at work. I will.

Spanish Chorizo in DC!

This weekend I went to Eastern Market near my new place in DC and what did I find? But a large selection of Chorizo, including the Spanish variety.

It was $9.99/lb. I got two fairly decent size links for $3.50. I also asked if they had any Fuet, but they don't carry it. Too bad. I suppose I will have to be happy with what I found.

The Chorizo seems to be off good quality and prepared fresh. I'm not sure if it's local or imported but I have a hunch that it was made in the US in the "Spanish style." Next time, I will ask. There were actually two meat sellers that had Chorizo at the market, I might try the other one the next but honestly, the product looked the same. One of them was also selling Lomo, another delicious Spanish pork product.

And the taste? I had one quick slice last night and it was pretty tasty. I'm going to reserve judgment until I have sampled it thoroughly.

Look for my full write-up on Eastern Market later this week (I hope).