Beautiful Views

My husband has some time off for Christmas Break, and yesterday we went on a long drive for most of the day. Our island has a few large volcanic hills/small mountains in the center, and we can see two of these from our house. We drove up on top of the smallest hill yesterday, where there are two little observation decks, and you can see the ocean on both sides of the hill. Then we drove to another little mountain, where we saw some beautiful forests with types of evergreen trees that reminded me of the Pacific Northwest. We also saw a volcanic caldera and some steam escaping out of cracks in the earth. There are cows everywhere here; even within a hundred yards of the steaming caldera! I'll have to do a post just on cows sometime; the Azoreans are so proud of their cows and they are just eveywhere. The prime real estate goes to the cows here!

I just have to mention that these pics really don't do this island justice; these things are so much more gorgeous in person!

This island has so much to offer; there are so many different things to see and do here!

The view from one side of the hill.

The view from the other side of the hill; there was an expanse of fields and pasture. The little walls you can see are stacks of volcanic rock cemented together. These square pastures criss-cross the land all over.

Our drive through the forest. It was beautiful and made us forget we were on an island. Not that I want to forget, but it was cool anyway!

Steam coming from cracks in the earth. I really don't know what else to call it!

These trees are everywhere on the island... the leaves look like huge maple leaves. They give off a wierd smell in the summer and fall.... we call them "snot trees". Yes, that's right!

Our drive home.

Spaetzle with Ham

After being gone all day, I wanted to make something for dinner that would be fast, but satisfying. My parents live in Germany, and they send me bags of (dry) famous German spaetzle. Spaetzle is really yummy if you make it yourself, but I haven't dived into that culinary challenge yet. The commercially prepared stuff works fine for me! I made a recipe that combined spaetzle with my leftover Christmas sprial-cut ham. I adapted it from a German/Austrian cookbook. If you can't find spaetzle, use any size of egg noodle, or whatever pasta suits your fancy! I imagine this would be good with bowties, too. One could use less ham, if desired.

Spaetzle with Ham

1/3 cup butter

1 medium onion, chopped

3 cups cubed, cooked ham

8 ounces spaetzle or other noodles

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground pepper

1-2 tablespoons snipped fresh chives

Boil spaetzle or pasta according to package directions. Drain. Meanwhile, heat butter in large skillet, and saute onion until soft and slightly golden. Add ham and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add remaining ingredients (including spaetzle) and toss together. Cook for 2 minutes more or until heated through, stirring frequently.

Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas! I love this time of year. We had a wonderful Christmas Eve and today we are enjoying relaxing and spending some time together. And my internet hasn't been working these past few days (this is the 3rd time in 3 days I've tried to post this....) Three days ago, I spent all day in the kitchen, making treats for our friends and neighbors. I made Eggnog Thumbprint Cookies, Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, Caramels (only cook to about 235 degrees, not 250), Chocolate Walnut Fudge (try adding orange extract to that one- yummy!), Chocolate Mint Cookies, and Peppermint Brittle. It was exhausting, but I loved it. And everything was so well-received; I got lots of nice feedback! We shared with our Portuguese and American friends. I think we gave out 13 or 14 plates, over the course of 2 days. We recieved a lovely Portuguese Christmas cake in return when we shared with our landlord.

**This post and photos are property of http://dishingwithdish.blogspot.com/ **

Breaded Garlic Pork Chops

Today for dinner, we had these yummy pork chops, with Orzo with Pamesan and Basil (scroll down to see recipe) and Lemon Garlic Broccoli. What a wonderful, flavorful dinner! We all enjoyed it, even my 2-year old. Warning: your house will smell of garlic for a few days after preparing this one!

Breaded Garlic Pork Chops

1 egg, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons milk
3/4 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons dried parsley
2 tablespoons olive oil
5 cloves garlic, peeled and thickly sliced
4-6 boneless pork chops

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F (165 degrees C).

2. In a shallow bowl, beat together the eggs and milk. In a separate shallow bowl, mix the bread crumbs, Parmesan cheese, and parsley.

3. Heat the olive oil in a large, oven-proof skillet over medium heat. Stir in the garlic, and cook until lightly browned. Remove garlic.

4. Dip each pork chop into the egg mixture, then into the bread crumb mixture, coating evenly. Place coated pork chops in the skillet, and brown abut 5 minutes on each side.

5. Place the skillet and pork chops in the preheated oven, and cook 25 minutes, or to an internal temperature of 160 degrees F (70 degrees C). I like to throw the fried garlic in there with the pork chops. If you do not own an ovenproof skillet, or it is too small to hold all the pork chops, place pork chops into a greased casserole dish (I used my glass 9x13) and proceed with the baking.

Lemon Garlic Broccoli

2 heads of broccoli, cut into florets

1 clove garlic, minced

1-2 tablespoons lemon juice

1 tablespoon butter

1 tablespoon olive oil

sea salt and fresh black pepper, to taste

1. Steam broccoli in a steamer basket until it is done to your liking- I don't like to steam it too soft.

2. Meanwhile, place garlic, lemon juice, butter, olive oil, salt and pepper into a large serving bowl. When broccoli is cooked, place in the bowl on top of everything, and toss to coat.

Another Birthday

Almost a week ago, my husband celebrated his birthday. The cake I made him had a wonderful frosting, but the cake itself was a little too crumbly for me. It was still good, but I won't bother posting the recipe. The frosting was a whipped milk chocolate ganache, topped with chopped Heath toffee bars. We've really been on a sweets overload around here lately, and I still want to make plates of Christmas goodies to take to friends and neighbors!!

If you want to make this, I suggest just using your fave moist cake recipe (yellow or chocolate), and topping it with the frosting/toffee bits. Here is the recipe for the ganache. It makes enough to frost one 2-layer cake.

Milk Chocolate Ganache

18 ounces milk chocolate, chopped fine
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

1 1/2 cup chopped chocolate-covered toffee

1.  Place the milk chocolate in a medium bowl. In a small saucepan, bring the cream to a boil. Pour over the chopped chocolate. Cover, and let stand for 5 minutes. Stir until smooth. Chill in the fridge for 1 hour. With an electic mixer, slowly beat the ganache until thickened and smooth. Be careful not to overbeat or it will separate.

2.  Frost your cake; adding some toffee bits to the inside layer of cake. Top the cake with remaining toffee.

Christmas Cupcakes

Merry Christmas, everyone! Last week, we had a family over for dinner. They have four young children, and we have three, so I thought a perfect dessert would be cupcakes. One of my Christmas presents is a great new cookbook. I needed a good cupcake recipe; one that wasn't dry or crumbly or tasteless, so I turned to that book to find one. (I got it out of it's hiding place for the occasion.... and haven't put it back yet, lol! I need to do that. It's a great book, and that is why I just couldn't wait until Christmas!) Well, this cupcake recipe is great- easy to put together, and tender, tasty and moist. We all loved them!!

I then used a simple butter/powdered sugar frosting I found in my Good Housekeeping Cookbook. Most times I dont' really use a recipe for this type of frosting, but I wanted it to be a perfect consistency. I frosted the cupcakes, using my 1M Wilton tip, and decorated them with various Christmas sprinkles, or crushed candycanes. The kids loved them! (I loved them too ;) ).

When you are making these cupcakes, the recipe calls for just dumping the wet ingredients into the dry, without mixing first. Do it (although it goes against everything you think you know about baking), but do it carefully. I dumped everything in, turned my mixer to medium, and had a flour explosion all over my kitchen. Fun times! Start your mixer out slowly, and increase to medium. ;) By the way, this is the first time I have ever weighed my flour and sugar when baking. I measured out 1 1/2 cups of flour, then weighed it, but had to add more, as it wasn't 7.5 ounces. I want to bake this way more often- I think it produces better results. I'll say it again: I love my kitchen scale!!

Yellow Cupcakes

1 ½ cups (7 1/2 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour, unsifted

1 cup (7 ounces) white sugar

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon salt

8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened

½ cup sour cream

1 large egg, plus 2 large egg yolks, at room temp.

1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract

Adjust an oven rack to the middle position and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line muffin tins with paper or foil liners. Whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in the bowl of a standing mixer. Add the butter, sour cream, eggs and vanilla to the dry ingredients. With mixer, beat on medium speed until mixture is smooth, about 30 seconds. Scrape down sides of the bowl with spatula and stir by hand until smooth and no flour remains visible. Divide batter evenly between 12 muffin tins using a 2-oz ice cream scoop. Bake until cupcake tops are pale gold and a tooth pick inserted into the center comes out clean, 20-25 minutes. Cool to room temp, about 45 minutes.

Classic Butter Frosting

1/2 cup butter, softened

1 package (16 ounces) confectioner's sugar

4-6 tablespoons milk, half-and-half, or cream

1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

In large bowl, with mixer at medium-low speed, beat butter, sugar, 3 tablespoons milk or cream, and vanilla until smooth and blended. Beat in additional milk as needed for easy spreading consistency. Increase speed to medium-high; beat frosting until light and fluffy, about 1 minute. Makes about 2 1/2 cups.

A Very White-Chocolatey Birthday

I love white chocolate, so for my birthday last week, I made myself a white chocolate birthday cake, jam-packed with 28 ounces of white chocolate. (Yes, I made my own birthday cake. My husband did offer to make it for me, but I wanted it to turn out a certain way, and the poor guy just isn't a baker. Plus, I don't get to make many cakes, so I wanted some practice. I was grateful for the offer though!) I own the cookbook Mrs. Fields Best-Ever Cookie Book and this book has a lot of cake/pie recipes in the back. From this book, I found a recipe for "White Ivory Cream Cake". You can see an online version here. Take note that it is not a cheesecake, as it says on that link, but a frosted 2-layer cake. Also, you might notice that I was playing around with my decorating tips. I looked online at the Wilton site to "learn" how to do a shell border, and I only got it right for part of the cake. Lol! Next month, I hope to take a cake decorating class, and then, hopefully my offerings will be better.

The cake was really good, too. I did overbake it a little bit, so it would have been even better had it not been for that. I need an oven thermometer. ;)

I didn't realize until after looking at this pic on the computer that the frosting looks a little sloppy on the sides. Oh well!

The Beautiful Sea

Around the end of October, we moved into our new house here. We waited almost exactly a month to get internet access, and the access is spotty. Somedays it doesn't work at all, and we still don't know why. We've done a lot in the past month. We've gotten to know some of our Portuguese neighbors, we've had lots of people over for dinner, we've discovered even more of our island, I've made lots of food, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving here at our house, we've seen lots of cows, and we've immensley enjoyed being in our house. I have two kitchens here! I'm getting reaquainted with gas cooking. And my oven (electric-yay) is so cute and tiny; I'll have to post a pic of it sometime.

I admit I have not been taking a lot of pictures lately. One day last month, we drove to the northwestern part of the island, to a town with jagged black lava formation on the beach, to watch the waves crash in. These waves were so huge (I've lived by ocean for 11 years of my life, and have never seen such big ones), and we took a lot of pics, but when we got home, we discovered that almost every single wave pic was terribly over-exposed. Darn that camera! We need a new one. We did get some cool pics of the ocean and rocks though, so I'll share those.

I love watching the ocean spray as the waves hit the rocks.

We passed this scene on the way home; the spray from the waves reached almost to the top of those cliffs!