walnuts « DimpleArts Photography

RSS

Posts Tagged ‘walnuts’

Cook and Tell: Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread with Walnuts

12 Mar

A while ago I found a recipe for zucchini bread with walnuts. The recipe looked intriguing and I decided to try it out. Everything went well, until I realized that I put too much dough mixture into the loaf pan. The result was a minor disaster, it consisted of an oven filled with overflowing dough, which rose outside the borders of the loaf pan. I was thoroughly disappointed that I made such a rookie mistake. Thankfully, what was left in the loaf pan was still salvageable, and surprisingly was pretty tasty.

Recently I decided to try the bread again. However, I couldn’t find the original recipe (hence, I am currently working on organizing all of my recipes). Therefore, I had to start my search from scratch.

In my new search, I came upon a different zucchini bread recipe. This one was from Paula Deen, her Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread recipe.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread I followed the recipe as is. Except, (there it is again), I used mostly walnuts as opposed to pecans. Not sure why, but I am more favorable to walnuts over pecans. The bread turned out fantastically. Although it took about an hour for it to bake through, as opposed to 50 minutes (at least in my oven). Hubby really enjoyed it.

Chocolate Chip Zucchini Bread What type of sweet bread do you like to bake?

Download article as PDF

3 Comments

Posted in Food Photography

Cook and Tell: How to Use Google’s Recipe View

25 Feb

As promised in my last post, I am giving a review of the actual usability of Google’s Recipe View. I know my fast turn around is a shocker, what can I say…I try.

To get to the topic at hand. As soon as Google’s Recipe View became available, I tried my hand at it. This might surprise you, but currently my kitchen is lacking in ingredients. You’d think this would motivate me to grocery shop…not so much. In fact it has quite the opposite effect on me. It makes me lazy and causes me to want to order take out. Plus, those two feet I posted earlier, make it kind of difficult to go grocery shopping on a whim.

I decided to type in a few ingredients, I did have on hand, into Google and see what comes up in Recipe View. So I typed in “ricotta, pasta, half-and-half, Parmesan”, clicked on the “Recipes” link on the left hand menu bar, and what came up were links to recipes from different recipe sites. A link called “Noodles with Ricotta and Walnuts” from Food.com caught my eye. Glancing through it, I realized I had some, (not all) of the other ingredients it called for. But you know me, if I don’t have the ingredient, I just skip it.

So today, for lunch, I decided to test out the recipe. Of the ingredients required by the recipe, I had the following:

Ricotta
Pasta
Parmesan
Butter
Half-and-Half
Walnuts
Salt and Pepper
Dried, finely chopped parsley (the recipe didn’t specify if the parsley had to be dry or fresh)

I didn’t measure out the ingredients as was called for in the recipe, but I did follow the instructions (exclusive of those ingredients I blatantly ignored). The one thing I did add were slices of leftover steak, which my husband recently grilled.

You might have noticed that the Food.com link does not have a photo of the finished dish. (don’t you just hate that?) Well, I’ve solved that problem, and present you with the final dish…

To sum up my experience with Google’s Recipe View…I think that if you have ingredients in mind that you want to use in a dish, Google’s Recipe View is a nifty tool to use. Oh, and the pasta was rich and delish.

Have you tried Google’s Recipe View? What was your impression?

Download article as PDF

2 Comments

Posted in Food Photography

Cook and Tell – Three Cheese Lasagna

15 Dec

If you are a busy body, chances are you are always looking for ideas for nightly dinners for the family. Most likely you want a lot of bang for the time you spend cooking. Meaning, you want to get as many nightly dinners covered as possible for the time you spend preparing the meal.

I am sure this is no grand discovery for many of you but the biggest bang for the time involved is….drum roll please…. lasagna. It takes a little bit of effort, but once it’s all done, you’ve got at least 4 days of dinners. This just means that you’ve carved out 4 evenings of free time to be taken up by some other errands.

Now for the recipe of this time-saver dish. The Three Cheese Lasagna recipe came to me courtesy of Epicurious.com. Knowing me, you’re probably wondering, “how did she alter this recipe?”. I do confess, for some odd reason I couldn’t find the right kind of carrots when I was shopping for the required ingredients. What does one do in this situation? Well, I don’t know what one does, but I just left them out. The taste is still amazing, and every time I serve it, the hubby gives praises.

I serve it with a leafy greens salad, either on the bed of or on the side. In case you are curious, I mix the leafy greens with tomatoes, cucumbers, a bit of red onions and walnuts, tossed with either fat free balsamic vinaigrette or salt, black pepper and a little bit of vegetable oil. Now I present you, with a square of Three Cheese Lasagna on the bed of leafy greens salad (tossed with vegetable oil).

Three Cheese Lasagna

Download article as PDF

4 Comments

Posted in Food Photography

Chocolicious!

04 Mar

It’s almost the end of the week and I am exhilarated for the weekend. After a long day at work, I decided to distract myself and bake. Granted I am not much of a baker, but I saw a recipe for brownies in my mother-in-law’s issue of Cooking Light magazine. I was surprised to find that for once I had all the required ingredients on hand. I asked if I could rip out the page with the recipe and she graciously let me.

There is a little bit of a story with baking these brownies. They are called Black and Tan Brownies. Based on the way the recipe looked (and on how inattentively I read recipes) I initially thought that it’s two recipes in one (Tan Brownies and Black Brownies). It was only after I put the tan brownies in the oven and washed all the dishes, did I look at the recipe again and realize that in fact I only made one part of the brownies. Well, lucky for me I had most of the other required ingredients, and I was able to complete the “Black Brownies” portion of the recipe as well.

There was one hick up, I used all of the butter I had for the tan brownies. I decided to take a chance and use non-fat milk instead of butter to melt the chocolate. It was a risk, and this substitution possibly altered the outcome. But I am happy to report that even though my brownies didn’t look like those in the photo of the recipe (or like typical brownies for that matter), they are fabulous! And this isn’t just me tooting my own horn. My hubby loved them, and I brought some samples to work, and got great responses there as well.

So without further ado…here they are…

Black-and-Tan-Brownies