Swirlicious Cheesecake Cupcakes

I get a lot of ideas of foods to try from pinterest.com, mostly because I am surfing it often. This makes me bound to run across tons of delicious food items. Raspberry Swirl Cheesecake Cupcakes is one of these amazing finds. It originated from a blog named Annie's Eats. I nearly died after looking at the pictures, so I went straight to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients. 

I should have taken more pictures, but it was just so darn hot in the kitchen that I wanted to make them as soon as I could (sorry to our family and friends in Texas, I know it's hotter there!).

I grinded up graham crackers, and mixed that up with some butter to create the graham cracker crust, and layered that in the cupcake pans. They had to bake for about 5 minutes in the oven at 325 degrees, but you can definitely smell when they are done. 

The filling was pretty darn easy, too. Zach mixed up some cream cheese, sugar, vanilla, salt, and eggs. After the cheese filling goodness was done, we made the raspberry swirliciousness. In the food processor went raspberries, and sugar, then we strained it to get the seeds out. I imagine it doesn't matter if you leave the seeds in, but I thought it looked prettier without them. 

On top of the cupcakes goes a few dots of the raspberry stuff, and we swirled it around to get that tie-dyed effect. This part was pretty fun!

Zach accidentally made hearts! So cute.

So, I have never made cheesecake before, and I am guessing timing is everything when it goes into the oven? Because I had some issues. Zach put the first 2 trays of the cupcakes in the oven, and we cooked them for 22 minutes, as the recipe suggested. I don't know what we were thinking, because our oven runs hot so we always take things out early. But we didn't, and the cheesecake cupcakes got a little charred on the edges. Which was fine. But then as they cooled, they sunk in the middle! We taste-tested them, and they tasted a tiny, tiny bit charred, but still delicious. With the third pan, we set the time to 18 minutes, and they came out perfectly!

You can see the difference in the two batches in the picture below. The cupcake on the left in the white paper is perfectly done, and the two on the right, not so much. I don't know that this was a cooking failure, but there was definitely a lesson learned here! 

Luckily, Zach was having a meeting the next day with his Thermoelectrics group, so he brought them with him. I guess people liked them (even the funny looking ones) because Zach only came home with a few leftover! Maybe they just ate them to be nice? Haha, no, but seriously, they are sooo good and rich and amazing. Cheesecake is such a dense dessert, and the cupcake size is just the right amount. 

Here's the breakdown of the cost and calories. 

Cost

I am not as fancy as Zach with my cost analysis, so here it is dumbed down. My bill at the store was $20 (already had vanilla on hand, though, and only used a third of the graham crackers I bought). We got 36 cupcakes out of the ingredients, and that comes to about... hold on let me get a calculator... 56 cents per cupcake. Not too shabby, I guess? I don't know, but dude, it was totally worth it!

Calories

I plugged all of the calories into a calorie counter, and it came out to 187 calories per cupcake. This is a pretty great number considering all the cream cheese packed into each cupcake! 

Yes, now it's your turn, go make these! They're so good!

Shredded Beef Chipotle Tacos

You may have thought that we were tired of tacos, but since we've been diagnosed with TNS we decided we might as well go all out. This time we decided to pull out the slow cooker and do a recipe from our Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. We loaded up the slow cooker with some thin cut round steak. Then tossed in some diced onion, fire roasted tomatoes, minced garlic, cumin, and mexican oregano. Couldn't have been easier: 10 minutes of prep in the morning, then let it cook all day. Here's what we put into the slow cooker.

We also made some great pico de gallo. We finely diced some roma tomatoes and onion. We added a dash of sugar and salt and the juice from 1/2 of a lime, and more of Wendy and Jerry's serrano peppers (thanks guys!). It was a nice, fresh topping for the tacos. Gina decided to cut a few extra calories and ate the meal on lettuce.

I, on the other hand, ate mine on corn tortillas. We both topped our tacos with some shredded Mexican cheese and some plain nonfat yogurt (sour cream substitute).

Overall the tacos were pretty tasty. We've done a similar recipe out of Rick Bayless' cookbook, Pork Tinga Tacos. While these shredded beef tacos were very good (especially with the pico de gallo), I would have to say that the Bayless recipe is much better. I really love the flavor of chipotle peppers en adobo. It adds a smoky taste with just the right amount of spice. If you've ever had the chipotle tobasco sauce at Chipotle Mexican Grill, that's right where it is. I kind of wish Chipotle actually used some chipotle peppers in their meats, but we can't have everything :(.

We're interested in adding two new aspects to our blog: pricing and calories. We figure it's something that we're concerned with, and it's not too difficult to determine.

Meal pricing
So, to do the pricing we simply added up all of the cash we spent on the ingredients. In certain cases, such as spices, we didn't use all of the ingredients. In these cases, I just calculated the cost of the spice per teaspoon and multiplied by how many we used.

Who knew, the density of dried oregano is available online in 209 different measurement units! Anyways, it works out to be 0.0357 oz / tsp.

Also, the density of ground cumin can also be estimated using online sources. 600 grams per liter, or 0.104 tsp per ounce. Anyways, forget all the mathy details, the final results works out to be as follows:

This worked out to a total of $14.13 for the whole meal, or $2.36 per serving (assuming this yields 6 servings, which may be a slight underestimate). That's pretty good when you're on a tight budget!

Anyways, any feedback on the pricing would be good. If there's something you'd like to see that I didn't show, or if you think it's totally lame: don't be afraid to comment!

Calories
We also did a quick calculation of the calories. There are plenty of websites nowadays where you can enter in what and how much you ate for the day to get a rough estimate of whether you'll lose weight (myfitnesspal.com). We were able to enter what we used in the meal into one of these engines to get an idea of how many calories each serving was. Gina came up with 267 calories (for all  when we included the yogurt, cheese, beef dish, and pico de gallo). Since she ate it on lettuce, that's all she gets. I ate it on tortillas, so add 65*3 to that and I get 472 calories for my serving. This seems pretty low, but in reality the recipe doesn't have much. Besides the beef (which is lean cut) there are only vegetables and spices. So we get loads of flavor for very few calories! This is of course good on the waistline.

Well, we hope that you enjoyed our post on tacos. I bet you guys are thinking: "How can they keep eating tacos? Aren't they sick of them?" The answer is no, we'll never be sick of tacos. We could live at Chipotle and be the happiest people in the world. And based on the number of calories that we came up with, this isn't necessarily a bad thing!

Happy cooking, everyone!

"Atleast it's edible..."

Welp, 8 of you voted on the poll (2 of the votes were Zach and I, haha), and the results were that we should post our cooking mishaps! So here's one!

"Atleast it's edible." That's what Zach had to say about the dinner I made for him last week. I literally slaved in a hot kitchen (96 degrees in Pasadena) with the oven on for 2 hours. But I agree...

I decided to make Spaghetti Squash with Spicy Tomato Sauce. I had made this last year, and it turned out wonderfully, so I was hoping to have the same results. Yeah, not so much.

Check out the size of that squash. Zach had to karate chop it to get it into big chunks.

I laid the squash face down in water (a trick I learned from my friend Katie Walker), and put it in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour.

Let me skip the boring parts, and let's just say after 2 hours in the oven, it was still not cooked all the way through. So, I scraped out the squash, and decided to boil it on the stove. I boiled it for about 20 more minutes, and it was still crunchy!

We ate it anyway alongside the spicy tomato sauce. I sauteed onions and garlic until softened, then added tomato paste, diced tomatoes, sugar, italian seasoning, red pepper flakes, and water to make the sauce.

It was fine, but not delish. Bummer. I think the issue was that the squash was too humongous. The spaghetti squash I used last year was much smaller, and cooked so much faster, and the "noodles" were soft. Eh, you win some, you lose some. Oh, and the recipe was from my College Vegetarian Cookbook. I suggest, if you decide to make this, use a smaller squash!

It's gettin' hot in herrre

So that's why I made sorbet! Now Zach and I have a refreshing treat for these over 90 degree days. My friend, Lindsey, e-mailed a sorbet recipe to me from a blog called backtoherroots. One of her main reasons for sending it to me was that it had white wine in it- which I LOVE! Ah, I miss drinking wine with her!

Anyway, I made...

Peach and White Wine Sorbet

The ingredients, since it was not ice cream, were pretty limited. And I like less ingredients because it means less cost at the grocery store. I needed about 6 peaches, 1/2 cup of  sugar, 1 lemon, 1 cup of white wine, and a 1/2 cup of water. Easy!

I just diced up the peaches...

Cooked them on medium heat for 15 minutes with the sugar and water and some lemon zest...

Added the wine and lemon juice after the peaches had cooled...

And blended it until smooth, and refrigerated overnight.

The next evening, I put the mixture in the ice cream maker for about 25 minutes.

Very stoked about the sorbet!

The texture was really great of this sorbet, unlike some of the ice creams we have made that stay hard. I am not much of a sorbet fan, and for me to like this says a lot. So good! And healthy! You know Zach loves it, he pretty much likes everything.

Chili Rellenos de Rachael Ray

Sure, when you're thinking of Mexican food, Rachael Ray isn't the first chef to come to mind. However, Gina and I have been trying to decide how to use our anaheim peppers from our garden, and we wanted chili rellenos. The recipes out there, though, aren't very healthy and are usually battered and fried.  Rachael's looked fresh, delicious, and it is not loaded with a ton of fat and calories. Find the recipe here.

First, the recipe called for fresh sweet corn: one of my favorites. I grew up eating corn straight from my grandparents' fields, and I love its nice fresh taste. We cut the corn off of the cobs, then sauteed it up with some onions and serrano peppers.

The serrano peppers we got from our friends Wendy and Jerry who grew it at their apartment (Thanks guys!). 

Here is a picture of the sauteeing step, we later added some fire roasted tomatoes and garlic to finish it off.

We also followed Rachael Ray's recipe for some cilantro lime rice. We took this opportunity to use the microplane tools that my grandparents bought me for my birthday this year. Lime zesting made easy.

We put cilantro, lime zest, vegetable broth, spinach, and some lime juice into our food processor and ground into a paste. We put it into a bowl and stirred in with some cooked rice (cooked in vegetable broth).

Of course, we can't have chili rellenos without some roasted green chilis. We used the broiler to roast some of our homegrown Anaheim chili peppers (also two store bought, because we didn't have enough ready).

We covered the chilis with the corn/tomato/onion mixture and used the broiler to melt some cheese on top. The rice turned out very well, and brought in some nice color and flavors to the rellenos. We'd recommend this healthy alternative to fried chili rellenos to anyone, again you can find the recipe on Rachael Ray's Food Network website.

YUM - O!

TNS

Hi! We've been up to some more comida Mexicana lately. We've had tacos four times in the last three weeks. As a result, we are currently suffering from TNS, better known as Taco Neck Syndrome. One well known person affected by this syndrome is Shaquille O'Neal (see below). 

Now, without further ado: Creamy Chicken and Greens with Roasted Poblano Tacos (recipe here).

Last week we were blessed with the chance to spend some time in beautiful Laguna Beach, CA. My mom brought my two sisters (Cati and Jessica), my niece Grace (20 months!), and Mason (my younger sister Jessica's boyfriend) out to spend some time on the beach. Of course, we took this opportunity to share our love for comida Mexicana, tacos in particular, with these fellow taco lovers. What's Mexican food without some yummy guacamole? See the fresh avocados?!

And the finished product with some tomato, garlic, and lime juice.

For the tacos: First, we cooked up some onions in the skillet with a bit of garlic. Once that was done, we added our greens and chicken broth and cooked until they were good and tender. We used Swiss chard and spinach for the greens.

Here are the greens once they'd been cooked down.

While all of that was cooking, we roasted the Poblano peppers in the oven (top rack, on broiler setting for ~10 mins, flipping once) until the skin was blackened. This was a good alternative to the way that we usually do, which is flame roast on our gas range. This condo that we were staying at only had an electric range, but the broiler actually worked very well.

Once the peppers had cooled, we skinned and seeded them and cut into strips to prepare for the taco filling.

Since this recipe makes a creamy chicken taco filling, we had to use some cream! Rather than use heavy whipping cream (or creme fraiche) we took Rick Bayless' advice and used some Mexican Crema, which turned out to work very well.

So we added the cream to the skillet with the greens and cooked for a while longer. We also added the peppers and some chicken. We bought a rotisserie chicken from the store, it was cheap and very convenient for this recipe. See the final step below:

And here are the TNS culprits all plated up with some chips and guac, yummy!

Of course, we did what we usually do, heated the corn tortillas in the microwave in a wet paper towel and plastic bag so that they came out nice, warm, and pliable. This recipe was pretty fast, very creamy, and super delicious. The greens gave the tacos a little more filling, and a nice texture. The roasted poblanos added depth to the dish and just the right amount of spice. Overall, highly recommended - just ask Mason! You can find the recipe here.

Here are a couple of pictures from the week:

Here's to family, we had a great vacation, and were happy to share some Rick Bayless with them!

Fun stuff.

When I was younger, I was often found doing art projects. Whether it was painting furniture, making cool collages, scrapbooking, or sewing, I enjoyed every bit of it. As life got busier, I let go of those things that relax me. I feel such gratification after finishing a project, and really have been missing that feeling! While I may not have time to do something too often, I want to try to sneak it in. Zach and I are thinking of making this food blog into a general blog, so we can use it as a way to stay connected with friends and family. So, that's why you get to see my crafts!

"Z" and "G" Art


If you haven't been able to tell yet, I am obsessed with Pinterest. It's so much fun to spend mindless time flipping through cool pictures. I like it mainly to, you guessed it, find pictures of things I would like to re-create myself!

In fact, Zach and I were looking at Pinterest, and Zach thought this one was cool. I decided we should do "Z" and "G."

The woman who made this, Elise, described how she did it in her blog here. Looks easy enough, I decided! So, I went to Michaels, again. Good thing it's only 4 blocks away! I picked up two 8x8 wood pieces, and some nails from Target.

Then I painted the two wood pieces with leftover gray paint, and waited for it to dry. Meanwhile, we picked out the letters in the size and font Zach and I wanted, and printed them out. After cutting the letters, measuring, taping them down, and marking where the nails would go, this is what we had.

Now for the fun part of whacking a bunch of nails (and sometimes a finger or two) into some wood. We used 1 inch nails, and the wood was about a 1/2 inch. Luckily, the nails were stable and pierced through the back of the wood just barely. 

"Z" is a cool letter. Zach's so lucky.

Time for the string. I chose red for my "G" and Zach chose yellow for his "Z." Then I realized they were Gryffindor colors. 10 points for us! 10 more points since Gina and Gryffindor start with "G!" We didn't use any real pattern. We just ran the string in a way that looked good.

It's fun to have art on the walls that is meaningful to us, so hanging this up will be nice. Cool, huh?

Button Tree

I found this amazing "Button Tree on Canvas" posting on Pinterest last week, and thought, "Hey, I can totally do that!" So I did. I am so excited about how it turned out and cannot wait for all of you to see it!

Check out the inspiration piece. It was created by artbywiley.

So, I went out to Michael's in the morning, bought myself a 20x16 canvas ($20), gray and brown paint ($10), and buttons ($4). The materials were kind of expensive, but it was totally worth every penny considering how much I love it. Oh, and I also bought brushes, but ended up returning them since, magically, I found brushes in my supplies.

I wanted my background to be a shimmery blue-gray, but couldn't find the right color at the store. The gray is really pretty though, and I picked a dark brown for the tree so it would stand out against the darkness of the gray. Since this was my first time painting something real on canvas, I didn't want to take risks, so that is why I didn't mix any paint.  Anyhow, my first step was to lay a towel out on my bedroom floor, and cover the canvas with the gray paint. I did two coats, and it dried pretty quickly. Then I used a pencil to draw the outline of my tree, but only outlined part of it at a time. I could have free handed it, but considering how many times I changed my mind about a branch here and there, it would have been a mess!

Here's a little more. 

Here it is all done, but it still needed a little touching up. I kept getting my hand in the brown paint and smearing it. Woops. 

My tree all touched up below. I copied the inspiration tree pretty closely because I didn't trust myself enough to draw my own tree. I probably could've done it, but oh well. I freehanded some of my branches, though, so that counts for something, right?

Next came time for the most fun part - placing the buttons! I had 130 buttons, and used probably about 100 of them, but the hot glue gun made it go by pretty quickly.

Here it is all done!

It is now hanging up! I absolutely love it. The gray is a bit dark, but the light color of the buttons helps keep it brighter. Zach is pretty thrilled with it, too!