Chinese Chicken Salad with Honey-Sesame Dressing

Up until about six months ago, I'd never heard of napa cabbage.  Sometimes it's called Chinese cabbage or celery cabbage.

When I read the recipe for this Chinese chicken salad in my Turbo Fire recipe book, I was leery.  I don't care for cabbage in the least.  But I figured it was worth a shot.  If nothing else, I could pick out the chicken and other ingredients, and leave the cabbage for my husband to eat.

But napa cabbage isn't terribly cabbage-y.  It tastes a lot like celery, which is probably why it's sometimes called celery cabbage.

Isn't that a pretty salad?  

I thought so too, and it's so easy to make. Here's how I made mine.

Ginger Cupcakes (Cupcake of the Month Series #6)

I thought you all deserved a cupcake post riddled with success instead of frustration.  Luckily for you, I made the June cupcake of the month last weekend to celebrate my cousin's twentieth birthday.

These cupcakes are based on Martha Stewart's rose and ginger cupcakes, but I omitted the rose part for a few practical reasons.

First of all, my cousin is a guy.  I don't think he would've been thrilled to have sugared rose petals on top of his cupcakes, regardless of how nifty the idea is.  I also was a bit pressed for time. I baked the cupcakes at 9:30 at night and iced them before we left for church the next morning.

Second of all, the rosewater flavoring is only added to the icing.  And a tiny bottle of rosewater (which isn't available at my local Price Chopper or Walmart, by the way) costs like $4.  Remember my chagrin at the price of ground cardamom?  

Yeah, we weren't going there with the rosewater.

Meringue Cupcakes with Strawberry Rhubarb Compote (Cupcake of the Month #5)

So May turned out to be a bit of a wash with cooking, baking, and posting.  But there was a May cupcake.

It's a meringue cupcake with a strawberry rhubarb compote and creme fraiche.

And I was not enthusiastic about it once the process began.  It was messy.  It was frustrating.  And this is the only picture I have of the final product (taken with my Canon PowerShot ELPH because... well, we'll get to that later).

Let me be clear in stating I have no problems with meringue.  I love meringue.  I've made several pies involving meringue.

But meringue cupcakes - that's a whole different story. And these, in particular, were a comedy of errors from beginning to end.


First of all, I do have to give a huge shout-out-thank-you to my mother for making the compote and making the creme fraiche (because none could be found at the store).  I was out of town for Memorial Day weekend and had barely enough time to make the cupcakes. We'll get to that in a minute.

The strawberry rhubarb compote was delightful, actually. It would be fantastic on ice cream, pancakes, waffles, mixed into vanilla yogurt, spooned across the top of a sponge cake.  I will likely make it myself at some point this summer - and there will be directions and pictures of that process, I promise.

The creme fraiche whipped cream was pretty simple.  Whether you buy creme fraiche at the store or make it yourself (which is possible, by the way), you'll need to whip a cup of it together with half a cup of heavy cream.  Have I done a whipped cream tutorial?  Put that on the list of To-Dos as well.

But the cupcakes.  Oh. My. God.  The cupcakes.

If you've never worked with meringue before, let me just forewarn you that it is like glue. Sticky, sweet glue. And you're supposed to transfer it to a pasty bag and pipe the stuff into your cupcake cups.

Well, you know what?  It's a pain in the you know what.

When I put the first glob of meringue into my pastry bag, it pretty much glued the top shut.  When I finally did manage to get a decent amount into the bag, my attempts to force it to the snipped tip end resulted in about a third of it squeezing out of the top.  All over my hands. (Hence the lack of pictures.)

After about a half hour filled with some choice vocabulary, I had 11 of the 12 required cupcakes piped into my cupcake tins.  (Side note - I managed to have only one cupcake liner in my entire house.  Fortunately, I had some Wilton Bake Easy spray and it worked like magic.  I only had one cupcake break when I removed them from the pans.)   By this point, I think I had almost as much meringue on my hands as was in the pastry bag.

I shouted a particular obscenity, squeezed what was left in the bag into the last cup, and threw the bag away.  I then scraped the bowl clean with my spatula and pretty much just threw the remaining meringue into the cup.  I was done.

Then I discovered I was supposed to bake them for like three hours.  Which I somehow managed to overlook when I was planning my morning.  I had just enough time.

It was also a good thing my husband was home, because my hands were covered in meringue and he had to put the cupcakes in the oven for me, lest I glue my oven door shut with the meringue coating my fingers.

In the end, the cupcakes were adorable (even the one that was "slapped" into the pan).  Everyone loved them.  I told them to enjoy.

Because I am never making these things again.

If you ever consider making these cupcakes, I have a suggestion.

Don't.

Unless you have an industrial sized pastry bag that can hold all the meringue at once.  Otherwise, I suggest something along the line of meringue shells:

OXO Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer Giveaway - And the winner is....

Congratulations to JenJafer - you were the winner of the OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer featured in my baked ratatouille post!

Happy slicing!

Apple Cinnamon Yogurt Pancakes

It boggles my mind to know there are people out there who don't like pancakes. It's true!  I recently made pancakes - the Bisquik in a bottle kind - with my second graders as part of a lesson about changes in matter (we called it "matter batter").  One of my students actually didn't like them!

I generally don't use pancake mixes if I can help it.  Homemade pancake batter is very easy and, in my humble opinion, is way better than any mixes you can buy.

If you're a fan of pancakes, here is a homemade batter recipe that no only tastes good but is low in fat and really good for you.  It came out of the Turbo Fire recipe book, and is great for a weekend breakfast or a mid-week dinner.  (I eat breakfast for dinner all the time.  Don't you?)  They have a light, sweet flavor because of the honey in the pancake batter.

The original instructions say to make the batter in a blender, but I just mix it in a bowl with a wire whisk.  Because that's just how I roll.

If you don't want to use chunks of apples, you could also thinly slice them.  Interested in winning an OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer to do the job?  Check out this post for directions to enter the giveaway - the deadline to enter is Monday, May 21st at midnight EST.

Brandied Pear and Pecan Tart with Maple Caramel Sauce

So since I started playing around with  my new OXO hand-held mandoline slicer (check out my baked ratatouille post to enter for a chance to win one yourself!), I started thinking about making some sort of pretty, delicious dessert.  I got the idea for this slightly naughty pear tart, and totally went to town.

For the shortbread crust, I used the recipe that goes with the lemon squares in The Savannah Cookbook, and I halved the maple caramel sauce recipe I found at ChefShop.com.  But when it came to the pear and pecan filling, I used my standard pecan pie recipe as a base point and then sort of winged it.

This is the sort of recipe requiring "phases of baking", as you have to make and bake the shortbread crust, then bake the tart with the filling, then make the caramel sauce.  It took me about two hours in the end, but the result was worth it.

I realize not everyone likes brandy, so if you fall into that camp, just double the amount of vanilla used.

Beautiful Baked Ratatouille **OXO GIVEAWAY (U.S. Readers only!)*

A few months ago, I was combing the internet for ratatouille recipes, and came across Smitten Kitchen's version of the baked ratatouille featured in Disney's Ratatouille.  You know the one: the spirals of colorful eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash and red peppers that cause the cynical food critic to recall the carefree days of his childhood, when a dish of warm ratatouille, made by his mother, had the power to sooth all ills.

Thanks to the acquisition of an OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer (for free from OXO, I might add) and the opportunity to test said mandoline slicer as part of OXO's Healthy Eating product promotion, I had the perfect tool to make the thin slices required for this baked ratatouille dish.

I was pretty excited to get my OXO hand-held mandoline slicer in the mail.  I love my chef's knives and am very proud over my steadily improving skill with chopping and slicing.  But I'm not very good at uniformity, and had been sort of wanting a mandoline slicer for a while now.  I hope my readers are excited about this product, too, because OXO actually sent me TWO slicers - one for me to test and keep, and one to giveaway to a reader in the United States (more on the giveaway in a moment).

There are a lot of great things about the OXO hand-held slicer.  It has an ergonomic handle to reduce strain and fatigue in your wrist.  There's a non-slip edge on the top of the slicer, so it won't go sliding around your cutting surface - plus there's a little "notch" in this edge so you can set it over a bowl and slice directly into salads, sauces, or what ever else you might be making.  It has a food holder to protect your fingers.  There are three settings for the cutting edge, and you can lock the slicer so the sharp blade isn't hanging out for all and sundry to accidentally cut themselves on.

Perhaps my favorite part is the fact that it's dishwasher safe.  After my foray into ratatouille, and later sweet potato fries, there was a little bit of staining on the white plastic, but it came off pretty easily with just a touch of "elbow grease."

While the pros of this product are vast (easier to store than a traditional mandoline slicer, the non-slip features, the bent handle to reduce wrist fatigue), it's not a perfect product.  Though, to be perfectly honest, I only had one major complaint.  The food holder has plastic pegs that don't really stick very well in the food you're trying to slice, so unless you're using somewhat small pieces of vegetables or fruit, you're going to have trouble keeping the holder on the food.  It would have been a better design to have stainless steel pegs that would actually puncture the flesh of the vegetables I was trying to slice.  I had to hold the vegetables in my hand until they were small enough to use the food holder.

Check out this little YouTube video of mine (I apologize for the somewhat bad sound and video, my microphone and camera aren't the best quality) for a demonstration.

I'll get to the recipe for my ratatouille after the jump break, but first, let me tell you about the giveaway!

One lucky reader in the United States (sorry, international fans!) will become the owner of the second OXO Good Grips Hand-Held Mandoline Slicer in my possession!  All you have to do is leave a comment on this post, telling me what you like about the mandoline slicer and what you would use it for if you won.

The winner will be chosen via a random integer generator.  The giveaway will end at midnight, Eastern standard time, on Monday, May 21st.  Only residents of the continental United States are eligible for this particular giveaway.

Now, keep reading for the scoop on that ratatouille!