Best ever ice cream

Don't consider this a recipe. It's just, simply, the best way to eat ice cream in the summer during berry season.

Farm fresh strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries with vanilla ice cream.

Spanish Bar Cake

When I was a kid, my grandmother would always stop at A&P and pick up a Spanish bar cake to snack on.  It wasn't homemade, but it was spicy and savoury and a little bit sweet from the icing. It has always been my favourite.

Chicken Dumpling Salad & Doctored Ramen

Lunch time!  I was going to make a bowl of soup or some perogies and be done with it, but I had purchased a fresh head of romaine lettuce and some Chinese dumplings yesterday. I figured I'd make some use of them.

For the ramen:
Standard instant package, cooked according to directions, added to chopped broccoli, garlic, green onion, and carrot

For the salad:
Pan fried the dumplings until they cooked and served with a bed of romaine, cucumber, green pepper, and farm fresh raspberries

For the dipping sauce:
1 tsp vinegar
1 tsp soy sauce
1/4 tsp sesame seed oil
1/2 tsp sugar
pinch of sesame seeds

Bon appetit!

Chicken Kiev

Well, hubby  broke the news that he'll be late coming home, so I figured I'd spend a few extra minutes to try a recipe I've wanted to try for a very long time but never got around to doing.  I had some fresh Italian parsley in the fridge from the neighbour's garden and since the recipe called for fresh parsley, it seemed to be the logical thing to make.

The only thing I didn't have was buttermilk, so I made it. Milk, Vinegar, and five minutes. Good enough to coat the chicken before breading.  Took less time and made less mess than my standard flour/egg/breadcrumb mix. I also substituted breadcrumbs for corn flakes. Delicious.

Anyway, I cut down the cooking time by five minutes because I hate dry chicken. It's all moist and white inside without a hint of pinkness and it tastes fantastic. That's what matters, yes?

Anyway, here's the pic:

Forgive the already half eaten picture. I dug in before I even thought about taking a picture of it... but at least you get to see what the inside looks like.

Here is the recipe, if you're interested.

That cookie just had sex with my mouth

Seriously.

Chocolate chip cookies have been the bane of my existence.   I have been trying to find a recipe that works for years, now.  No matter how I'd experiment and try, they'd generally turn out flat and hard. The taste was there, but not the consistency.

I was trolling AllRecipes and found one with well over 6000 votes and a 4.5 star rating, so I figured that I might as well give it a go. Worst case scenario is another botched batch and the search continues.

Well, needless to say, I don't need to look for a new recipe.

Award Winning Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies

I used the recipe as is, for the most part. I calculated half portions for it because I didn't want to be baking all day (it yielded 4.5 dozen cookies even though I set it to yield 3 dozen) and I doubled the  vanilla the recipe called for and I used milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet.  It doesn't taste like pudding, it doesn't taste like vanilla. It tastes like AWESOME.

Seriously, I've never had a better tasting cookie.

Here are a couple of pictures:

Pork Fried Rice

No recipe to share this time. Fried rice is sort of a staple food in this house. There are a couple little tricks to making it just right.

Tuna pasta salad

I'm a big tuna sandwich fan, but it has to be done right.  I realised today that I had all the ingredients for great sandwiches but then spotted the fusili in the cupboard

And so, I decided to mix things up and make it in pasta salad form.