Foods I Like

Today I am going to tell you about some of my favorite foods. I am going to give them in the categories of appetizers, entrees, desserts,breakfast, and snacks.

My favorite appetizers are:

• Fresh green salad with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing
• Calamari
• A cup of French Onion Soup
• A cup of Clam Chowder

My favorite entrees are:

• Pizza
• Cannon-bowl (clam chowder in a hollowed out loaf of bread)
• Steak with Johnny's seasoning salt
• Salmon
• Rock Fish
• Hamburger (accept portabella mushroom burgers)

My favorite desserts are:

• Classic Creme Brulee
• Bailey's Irish Cream Creme Brulee
• Ice Cream
• Gelato

My favorite breakfast foods are:

• Bacon/sausage and eggs
• Cinnabon/Cinnamon Rolls
• Lucky Charms
• Cinnamon Toast
• Cheese Omelets
• Steak

My favorite snacks are:

• Pizza
• Cold Cereal
• Graham Crackers with Vanilla Frosting
• Potato Chips

These are just some of my favorite foods and I hope that they are some of your favorite foods to.

Pumpkin Pudding

During Thanksgiving I do a lot of cooking and I am going to give you one of my favorite pumpkin desserts. It is a pumpkin pudding recipe that I got from a website called AllRecipes. This site is allot like Epicurious and has a lot of really good recipes.

The ingredients you need are:

15 oz. can pumpkin puree
2 beaten eggs
1 cup packed brown sugar
½ tsp. salt
½ tsp. fresh grated ginger
½ tsp. ground nutmeg
2 tsp. cinnamon
12 oz. evaporated milk
1 package yellow cake mix
1/3 cup butter

Preheat your oven to 350. It's usually best to preheat your oven before you start mixing your ingredients so you're not waiting for your oven to heat up after you've mixed up your ingredients.

So to start out you need to mix your pumpkin, eggs, brown sugar, salt, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and evaporated milk until it is smooth. One your batter is smooth you pour it into a 9x13 baking dish.

Next you are going to make the topping. Now the recipe tell you to evenly spread the cake mix over the batter then melt your butter and pour it over the cake mix but I find that when I do it that way the topping is hard in some places and crumbly in other places. What I do is I take the butter while it is still cold and but it into the cake mix and then spread the butter/cake mix over the batter.

To cook the pudding you put it in your oven (that you have already preheated) for 30-35 min. until golden brown on top. When done you let it cool uncovered and then put it in the fridge so that you can serve it cold with whip cream on top.

And now you too can make a delicious pumpkin pudding that will make everyone at the table drool.

Pancakes

I don't know about you guys but I love pancakes. Today I am going to tell you how to make pancakes. This recipe is from a cookbook called "Better Homes and Garden" it is another source I use to get a lot of my recipes. So to start out you need to make sure that you have:

1 cup of all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon of sugar
2 teaspoons of baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of salt
 1 egg
1 cup of milk
2 tablespoons of cooking oil

To start out you put all of your dry ingredient into a bowl and mix them up. Now when you mix up your dry ingredients you should put it through a sifter to evenly mix up your dry ingredients but I find that this takes up time so I put the ingredients into the bowl one at a time and use a whisk to mix the ingredients up after I add each one.


Now it's time to add the liquids. There's no special way you should add the liquids but sometimes it helps if you mix up your egg before you put it in with the rest of the ingredients if they are cold.

When you're done mixing everything up it's time to cook your pancakes. Depending on what size of scoop you're using you will get a different amount of pancakes. I prefer to use a 1/4 cup scoop because I think that it makes the perfect size of pancake. Your griddle should be at about 400 degrees and if you're not sure whether it’s hot enough just drop some water on it and if it sizzles out the griddle is hot enough. When cooking your pancakes people say to flip them when all the bubbles on the top have popped but I just carefully lift one edge of the pancake up to see if it is golden brown.

These pancakes are kind of bland so if you added some cinnamon or another sweet tasting spice it should make them taste great.

You will get 8-10 pancakes if you use the 1/4 cup scoop to scoop your batter with.
 

Food Sources

Today I am going to talk about where I like to get my recipes. There are several sites that are pretty good at giving you great recipes but I am just going to tell you about my favorite site. My favorite site is called Epicurious. This website is full of recipes and variants of the same recipe. A lot of people use this site and they put put reviews of the recipes that they use and give suggestions of how to make the recipes better. I find that this site is pretty easy to use and has great recipes. Epicurous has a mobile app that's great because I can then move my recipe around the kitchen without taking up too much counter space. when you log on to the mobile app you will see different tabs that you can choose. Sometime the tabs will give you options on foods that are seasonal. Right now all the tabs are for Thanksgiving foods. I think that Epicurious is great and is a tool that anyone who is cooking should use. For most of these blog posts I am going to be getting of my recipes from Epicurious.