The Kitchen Made

October through December is the most exciting cooking/baking time of the year.  We all associate certain dishes (pumpkin anything, turkey, stuffing, gingerbread cookies, sugar cookies) with Fall and Winter, and I failed to post anything! In fact, I didn’t even make pumpkin pie, stuffing, or any type of holiday cookie this year (or turkey…but I’m a vegetarian).  I’m putting my blogging failures behind me and I’ve committed myself to resurrecting my drowning blog, starting now.  I’ll do a catch up post or two and then hopefully steam right along at full speed, cooking my way into the new year.

I can’t remember where I got the idea to make guacamole in my food processor, but I’m sure it was from some foodie blog I was perusing.  Gone are the days of fork-whipped guacamole that took me 15 minutes to make!  I’ve ushered in the 5 minute press-button guacamole era.  My mother’s guacamole “recipe” is something I had followed for over 15 years, but threw it out in favor of something I stole from the ingredients list on the bottom of some deli guacamole.  No more mayo in my guac!  Of course there are no measurements, but I’m not really much of a measurement person…I like to taste my way to culinary greatness.

Basic guacamole ingredients: avocado, tomato, red onion, green onion, garlic (powder sometimes works better just because the real deal can overwhelm…not that it prevents me from doing it), sea salt, pepper, lemon juice, hot sauce.

Hack everything up into chunks and throw it in!

In this instance I used jalapeños and red pepper in there (and no red onion) and if I recall correctly, I lost some hair after eating it.  Next time I may take out some of the jalapeño seeds.  I recommend pulsing the food processor when you chop this…avocado puree is not guacamole.

Oh so easy!!  And oh so delicious….

Before peaches disappeared from the farmer’s market I decided to make a peach pie.  I used Martha Stewart’s Pate Brisee (Pie Dough) recipe but in my mixer instead of food processor.  Martha’s recipes never seem to fail me, and I appreciate her for that.  I will certainly be going back to this pie crust recipe in the future!  I used Joy of Cooking’s recipe for the filling, and listen when I tell you to leave on the peach skin!  I’ve never understood why people take it off, it is by far my favorite part, and provides such great color to the pie innards!

It’s the second pie I have ever attempted and I think I did a good job!  Well, if you don’t mind the edges.  I fail at edges.  Unfortunately I couldn’t think of something beautiful to cut into the top (I’m about as non-artistic as possible).  So I just wrote “Pie”.

It was heavenly.  :)

I’m not a fan of taking pictures of food yet.  I love other people’s food photos…I just don’t like to stop cooking to snap a picture, nor have I figured out how to overcompensate for the unnatural lighting (I’m not a post-processor by nature!).  I’ll have to work on this.

Speaking of Martha…this pumpkin spice cake with honey cream cheese frosting is to die for!  Highly highly highly recommend!  I’ve made it twice now and my oh my is it delicious.

The glutton living in my stomach who is related to the enabler in my eyes tells me I should double the frosting recipe, but it really is adequate as-is.  ;)  Whichever of Martha’s minions created this honey cream cheese frosting should be knighted as it is magically delicious.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Recipe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.