Lauren: Summer Break is Over and We’re Officially One Year Old

Hello, and welcome back to Cooking with Copy. Our blog baby is celebrating its first birthday, so please help us blow out its imaginary birthday candle!

It has been a whirlwind/tornado of a summer and I’m glad to be back here with you. There were birthdays, and birthdays, and oh, did I mention birthdays? There were big family dinners upon big family dinners. There were holidays, anniversaries, baby showers, births, bridal showers, retirement concerts, parties, weddings, Blogshop, Ravinia concerts, trips to Portland, OR,  New York, NY, St. Louis, MO, Holland, MI, Madison, WI, and several trips to South Bend, IN, there were conventions (the National Stationery Show and the American Library Association Annual Conference), internships, and interviews, there were visits from friends and sisters and nephews and brothers-in-law, from my brother’s Argentine mothers-in-law and even from California cousins, and, most recently, there were weeks upon weeks (upon weeks, we’re still going) of packing and moving my grandparents into their new condo.

With only two weekends without plans, visitors, or travel from May until now, it’s no wonder my room looks like I’m the one moving. In between all of the plans this summer I found way too many pockets of time during which I made way too much food. This actually worked out for the best as there was almost always a guest, a workman, a party, or a special event that benefited from the food, but let’s just say I’ve met my butter/sugar/chocolate/carb quota for the year.

So, now that summer is coming to a close, are you ready to get this show back on the road with an epic 5-month-in-the-making recipe roundup? Great, let’s go!

Note: I didn’t take a photo of everything, but all of the recipes here link back to their original posts which do include beautiful photos.

Birthday baking:

• Confetti Waffles

Make the batter according to the directions on the box and throw sprinkles in right before pouring the batter into the iron.

• Cupcake Puppy Chow

Cupcake Puppy Chow (pre-powdered sugar coat) comes together in 10 minutes.

Notes: Omit butter, and add 1/4 tsp. salt and 1 tsp. vanilla extract to the melted almond bark/extract/heavy cream mixture

Grandma’s visits:

• Martha Stewart’s Crisp Coconut and Chocolate Pie

Notes: This is just an ENORMOUS chocolate bar and would be better with twice the coconut and 1/3 the chocolate.

Father’s Day:

• Martha Stewart’s Pigs in a Blanket (with poppy seeds) – also excellent for small children and were served at the baby shower as well

Baby shower:

• Smitten Kitchen Classic Sangria(s)

Things I learned this summer: Nothing makes women as thirsty as a baby shower. We had to refill the container twice.

Family dinners:

• Gourmet’s Shaved Brussels Sprout Salad with (Toasted) Fresh Walnuts and Pecorino Romano
• Red Kale and Pomegranate Seed Salad – self explanatory, just add an apple cider vinegar and olive oil dressing
• Sprouted Kitchen’s Citrus Polenta Cake with Stone Fruits (or in my case, peaches)
• Shutterbean’s Raspberry Peach Buckle

Make sure the buckle is THOROUGHLY cooked when you remove it from the oven. You may need to bake it longer than Tracy specifies. The first one had to be thrown out because it was totally raw, adding baking time saved the second one though.

• Golden Graham S’mores Bars via Celebrations at Home

I CANNOT STOP EATING THESE AND IT’S A PROBLEM BECAUSE THEY ONLY TAKE FIVE MINUTES TO MAKE

Note: Make sure to freeze the chips until the last possible second so they don’t melt. Major, major bonus points if you use Guittard Milk Chocolate Chips. Can’t say enough good things about Guittard, every chip I’ve tried has been fantastic. I am totally willing to be a brand ambassador. Guittard, get at me.

• Momofuku Milk Bar Confetti Cake

Momofuku Milk Bar’s birthday cake elevates the typical confetti cake to new heights with a richer and more complex flavor than boxed versions.

• Momofuku Milk Bar Confetti Cake Crumb

THIS IS CRACK. Consider yourself warned.

Notes: I bet a combo of confetti crumb and the confetti cake above would make kick-ass mix-ins in a homemade cake batter or vanilla ice cream…just saying.

• Thai Beef via Orangette via the book, Thai Street Food

Thai beef (here without the fried egg) has yet to meet a hater.

Notes: This recipe is easy, fast, and unique. It’s my fallback for nights when I don’t want to think about what to make.

• Two Peas and Their Pod Mini M&M’s Cookies

Let’s face it, these were just an excuse to ingest a LOT of mini M&Ms. Don’t look at me like that.

• Martha Stewart’s Peanut Butter and Marionberry Jelly Thumbprint Cookies

My sister brought us a jar of marionberry jam from Oregon which I was dying to use for these, but you can use any kind of jam/jelly you’d like.

• Quaker Vanishing Oatmeal Raisin Cookies
• Smitten Kitchen Zucchini Parmesan Crisps – these turned two sworn zucchini haters into zucchini lovers, but then, what doesn’t Parmesan improve?
• Smitten Kitchen One-Pan Farro with Tomatoes
• Smitten Kitchen Kale Salad with Pecorino and Walnuts – which I made sans raisins or panko crumbs
• Alice Medrich’s Ultra-Thin Chocolate Chunk Cookies – crunchy, caramel-y, and full of 70% cacao Sirius Icelandic chocolate (my favorite bar chocolate), these guys are beloved. Leite’s Culinaria is also home to the entertaining podcast, Talking With My Mouth Full
• Kale and Cheese Scrambled Eggs

1. Sautee the kale until slightly soft and brighter green.
2. Finish cooking and scrambling your eggs (or in my case, egg whites) and put into a bowl.
3. Sprinkle cheese (I like mozzarella) on top.
4. Get Excited.
5. Eat.

• Smitten Kitchen Peach Shortbread

Butter with peaches, what’s not to like? Plus I’m a sucker for this red/orange/yellow color combo.

• The Barefoot Contessa’s Roasted Brussels Sprouts – Make sure there aren’t any wee worms hiding near the bottom of your sprouts, I encountered this problem frequently this summer, perhaps because the sprouts aren’t a summer vegetable. Either way, peel some of the layers away to ensure no accidental worm ingestion.
• Sprouted Kitchen Granola Protein Bars
• Rachel Ray’s Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Chewy Granola Bars

A little too sweet, but worth a try with brown rice syrup instead of butter. They’re also perfect for shipping across the country.

• Martha Stewart Living Blog: {Wild Maine} Blueberry Muffins – really, REALLY GOOD. I used dark brown sugar exclusively and they were excellent. Not the prettiest muffins on the block that way though.
• Edible Perspective’s Grilled Kale-and-Cheese-Stuffed Tortillas (quesadillas) – These guys need a lot more cheese, like maybe double the specified amount. Her measurements will give you a leather-like quesadilla where the crispy kale just falls out. I know, I know, cheese is mega-caloric/full of cholesterol and fat, but we used low-fat cheese, and if you’re going to have a quesadilla, you might as well have a GOOD one. I’m definitely willing to try these again with double the cheese because the flavor is fantastic and, well…
• Martha Stewart’s Chicken, Chickpea, and Pesto Salad with Celery and Cucumber
• Middlewest magazine’s Buttermilk-Cinnamon-Poppy seed Coffee Cake

Very poppy seed-y, kinda too sweet.

• Pumpkin Cookies via My Baking Addiction

It might be 93 degrees outside but I pretended it was fall with these frosted pumpkin cookies/cakes. They’re really just glorified muffies, not cookies, and the frosting is too sweet and doesn’t fully set, but they received recipe requests from people at my dad’s office so here you go.

Happy September and welcome back.

Lauren: Kale and Pomegranate Salad

WHO’S READY FOR THE HOLIDAYS?! Well you can’t be; not until you’ve tried this kale and pomegranate salad. You get an aril! And you get an aril! See how excited I am about this bowl o’ red and green? And it’s for good reason! Pomegranates are delicious and beautiful fruits. They are also the namesake of the picturesque Spanish town in which my brother studied abroad (and yes, he chose it because he liked the fruit), see Granada. Anyway, back to business.

The edible parts of a pomegranate are its jewel-like seeds called arils. The outside of each seed is juicy and rigidly holds its form unlike another juicy fruit like say, an orange, which will squirt you in the eye at every opportunity. Once you’ve bitten through the juice, you hit the hard seed but fear not, because it will break into bits upon chewing. Arils are completely addictive and after de-seeding my first pom of the season I proceeded to eat the entire fruit’s worth of seeds in one standing just because they’re so fun to chomp. So given how fresh this fruit is, I wanted to make either a fruit or regular salad to highlight and compliment its freshness, not diminish it or dry it out by baking into cookies or something.

Enter: daily waffle’s Kale, Asian Pear, and Pomegranate Salad. It is awesome. You know what was not awesome? My Asian pear. It was watery, had zero flavor, and was so hard it was difficult to chew. Thus, immediately after trying a piece I chucked that sucker into the trash and decided to move forward with the recipe anyway, despite how wonderful the addition of pear to a kale salad sounded. If you’re up for it, buy a bosc, comice, or other ripe pear and cut that up to use in place of the Asian pear. Unless of course your Asian-pear-picking skills are fabulous, then by all means make the recipe as it is written.

Ok, so the dressing is really easy, just whisk all the ingredients together and you’re good to go. I found the early step of massaging salt into the dry leaves completely pointless as it just falls to the bottom so just forget that. And as usual, I used curly instead of lacinato kale again due to my bug aversion. Last week I found a tiny, very-much-alive slug on the back of one of my lacinato leaves and that was the end of that. My substitution involves somewhat OCD washing* of the curly leaves, followed by roughly ripping them into smaller pieces and drying them. After the leaves are ready and the dressing is mixed, do as you did with the last kale salad and get in there with your hands to massage the dressing into the leaves and ensure an even coating. When you’re ready to serve, pretend it’s New Years Eve and liberally cover the salad greens in aril-confetti.

The salad is dressed for the season, tastes quite unique among kale salads thanks to the rice wine vinegar and ginger, lasts about two days after being dressed so it can be made ahead of the holiday madness, and provides a truly healthy and fresh counterpoint to all the heavy, baked food being shoved in your face this time of year. Now go out, buy some kale and pomegranate, and prepare for an onslaught of compliments on your tasty and holiday-color-appropriate salad-making skills.

Recipe!

*I like to wash each individual leaf, rip them off the stems/away from the tough inner-vein, then swish the leaves around in a water-filled bowl, and finish by drying the leaves in a salad spinner.