A Girl's Gotta Eat!

I've been doing quite a bit of cooking and baking lately, and I thought I'd share some photos of my adventures. Some of it was holiday inspired, some just for eatin'. All quite delicious.

For holiday treats I did little almond-flavored tea cookies and Almond Roca. The cookies were a particular favorite of my grandmother's and we would often have them for her birthday. I'd been thinking about them recently so decided to make them myself for the first time. Turns out the are easy and just as delicious as I remembered.


The Almond Roca is a true family holiday classic. Here's how you make it. Put a pound of butter and a pound of sugar in a large skillet over high heat and cook it till it turns toffee colored. Then pour it into a sheet pan or rimmed baking sheet and spread it around. After it has set but while it is still pretty warm, place 6 Hershey bars on top of it. When the chocolate melts, spread that around and then sprinkle sliced almonds on top. Wait for it all to cool and set, then break apart with a knife. I advise using an old pan, or one you don't care too much about, because it will end up pretty dented after all the breaking.

For a New Year's Eve dinner soiree, I was charged with bringing salad and dessert, so I did a yummmmmy Roasted Pear Salad with Watercress, Pecans and Parmesan and rich and decadent Tiramisu. Both were tasty and pretty simple.



I also recently tried new recipes for chocolate and caramel sauce. Holy smokes. I am a chocolate lover, and the chocolate sauce is good, but this caramel sauce is TO DIE FOR. It's not overly sweet and had a nice tang to it and for serious it is just delicious. I plan to make it many times in the future to top ice cream, bread pudding and just about anything else I can think of!
Thanks, America's Test Kitchen!


For Christmas, I got a copy of America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two. Being a single gal, it's hard to find good recipes that don't make a ton of food. This is a lovely solution. My first attempt from this book was Chicken with Israeli Couscous, Spinach and Feta. It was quite tasty. The chicken is super simple, and the couscous (or in my case, Orzo, because I couldn't find Israeli Couscous at Queen Soopers) really does most of the work, flavor-wise. But there's also a little lemony-garlicky sauce that you drizzle over the chicken which adds some punch.


I am not ambitious enough to attempt a project on the scale of Julie and Julia, but I do plan to try lots of recipes out of this book, so I will post about them and let you know how they turn out!

Aunt vs. Ants

So the other day I noticed a few little ants scurrying around my bathroom. Yep, that's right. My bathroom. Why on earth they chose that room I will never know. I do not keep food in my bathroom, and they did not seem to have found anything to eat. They were just wandering around.

After a couple of days, I got tired of having to squish a few ants every time I went in to my bathroom, so I bought ant traps to get rid of them. However, the package did not warn me that the bait inside the traps is sooooo tantalizing to ants that they would first bring SWARMS more ants into my house. Imagine my horror when I went to check the traps and found dozens and dozens of ants swarming around them! YUCK!

Fortunately, I'd read online that ants hate black pepper. So I decided to employ some in hopes of containing the ant swarms. Of course, being the pretentious foodie that I am, I do not keep pre-ground black pepper in my house. Nooooo, I buy whole black pepper and then grind it fresh in my pretty stainless steel pepper mill.

So I had to grind a whole bunch of black pepper for the ants.

That done, I made little walls of freshly-ground black pepper around each of the traps so that the ants would not wander too far. It worked surprisingly well! Occasionally one ant would get adventurous and try to climb up the wall and around the pepper barrier, but for the most part, they stayed far away from the pepper, and contented themselves with whatever delicious bait was in the traps.

Here's what it looked like:

And here's my silly pepper grinder temporarily in residence in my bathroom:

The trap-and-pepper setup was completed last night and I hesitantly went to bed, imagining thousands of ants taking over my bathroom in search of more traps... But when I woke up this morning, there were only a couple of ants in sight! Most of them seemed to have crawled back to their nests to die (and hopefully share their poison with their brothers and sisters). By now they have almost completely disappeared. Hooray!

Turns out the Auntie triumphed over the icky anties...at least for now!