Nutella and sea salt caramel chocolate fudge (and a failure turned positive)

June 14, 2011January 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

(Please note that I am writing this post on Sunday, June 5. I am writing this message to the future. All feelings of anguish expressed within this post will be long gone [hopefully] at point of reading. Caution)

I FEEL SO ILL.

I would not recommend my Sunday afternoon eating habits to anyone. Just in case you’re wondering, marshmallow fluff and nutella are a terrible, terrible combination.

And by terrible, I mean utterly and irrevocably delicious…until you eat several hundred spoonfuls straight from the jar.

My afternoon: Take heaping spoonful of marshmallow fluff. Insert in mouth. Take heaping spoonful of nutella (note: ensure you use a different spoon and eat the marshmallow first, as to not dirty the marshmallow spoon with melted nutella). Insert in mouth. Enjoy. Repeat for the next three hours.

…

If it was possible to die from a sugar overload, I would not have made it through the day. You can’t really blame me though – I have never in my life purchased a jar of marshmallow fluff or nutella, so I had 21 years of spreadable sugar deprivation to make up for.

So why did I break the ever-established rules of my dietician mother and get these two nutritionally void products?

To make nutella and sea salt caramel chocolate fudge, of course.

As the title suggests, this was quite the decadent dessert. So many layers. So much sugar. Enough to make any one diabetic, really.

As I often do with complex, multi-layered foods, here is the anatomy of this sinfully rich dessert:

Layer 1: Melted chocolate and nutella fudge
Layer 2: Homemade sea salt caramel
Layer 3: Chopped hazelnuts
Layer 4: Some sort of strange marshmallow fudge layer, which utilized an ENTIRE JAR of marshmallow fluff (this post is warranting so much capitalization, apologies)
Layer 5: More melted chocolate and nutella fudge.

The layer-by-layer breakdown photo (minus the top fudge layer) was inspired by my dear friend and fellow blogger Brittany. Visit her blog, it is awesome.

Now, I was originally supposed to make this fudge for an office meeting we were having on Monday.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?

The only age group who enjoys layer upon layer of sugar is the under 20 bracket. Not grown ups. Perhaps what happened next was for the best.

Yep, you guessed it. The fudge got stuck in the bowl.

It was completely my fault. The blogger whose recipe I was using said this should be made in a big 9×9 pan. Instead, I insisted on using a deep Pyrex dish (to be frank, I was too lazy to run over to my old house to get my baking pan…lame). Clearly the part of my brain that determines when rational decisions should be made was on an extended vacation.

The emotional breakdowns that resulted from this sticky situation were not pleasant, and I am embarrassed to say that I ate away my feelings. Yes, that’s right. I ate even more.

The pictures you see in this post are of the two almost-full pieces of fudge that I managed to salvage and make look presentable.

So what will I do now? Eat the destroyed fudge with ice cream, of course!

In the meantime, though, I think I need a glass of milk.

A word to the wise: if you are to recreate this recipe, please, please, PLEASE follow the actual instructions. None of this Pyrex nonsense.

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Summer salad 1: Grilled chicken and corn salad with walnuts

June 12, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, the season of summer salads is upon us!

For those of you who were around last summer, you’ll recall that almost every meal I blogged about was some sort of unconventional and delicious salad. This summer, with a newly discovered (and extremely passionate) love of quinoa, I charge back into the world of refreshingly fast dinners and cool patio meals.

Salads are like the soup of summer. Just like their warm winter counterpart, you can virtually toss in anything you want, making them the perfect meal to clear out the crisper and dispose of your cheeses (not that I ever need help getting rid of my cheese).

Case in point: In a thrifty manner, I used up leftover spinach, walnuts, asparagus and corn in this meal.

My recipe was inspired by the mouthwatering salad that appears on the July 2011 cover of Canadian Living. A few adjustments were made here and there, and voila! A new salad was born, à la Hilary Makes.

PS: I really need to get a BBQ – the original recipe in CL called for grilled chicken, asparagus and corn cobs, all of which I had to fry up on the stove. Boring! I’m actually considering whipping out my DIY skills and making my own in the next few weeks. It can be done. Barbeque dinners (and patio cooking!) may soon be within my reach. Or I might just light something on fire. Fingers crossed for the former.

PPS: I added walnuts to the salad at the last minute (which is why you won’t notice them in my pictures). I felt like there was a void in the salad that only they could fill. It was the perfect addition, resulting in a honourable mention in the recipe title.

PPPS: I’m sorry that I practically write an entirely new blog post in my postscripts.

Chicken spinach salad3 — Doesn't that slot in my patio look like a place where you would slip a pizza into an oven? I often imagine that my porch is a pizza parlour. It keeps me entertained.

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Linguine with a creamy pesto, yogurt and zucchini sauce

June 10, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 8 Comments

Earlier this week I had the most uncontrollable pesto craving.

I don’t know what happened. I was just sitting in the office one day when it struck me. It was like tiny pesto gods had inception-ed my mind.

Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, the zucchini gods were plotting a similar plan.

The incident occurred shortly after the pesto episode. I had no choice. Zucchini and pesto for supper it was.

Pesto pasta1 — The result of my afternoon cravings

As soon as the workday ended, I biked promptly to the nearest grocery store, eager to get these two foods in my stomach as fast as I could. Pesto and zucchini were purchased and happiness was almost within my grasp. I was going to buy fresh Parmesan to load on top of my pasta, before realizing that a small block cost approximately one hour’s worth of pay. One day my cheese purchases will put me in the poorhouse, but that day has not yet come.

Aside: Let me take a quick moment to discuss a very serious health condition. People with PSGSBS (painfully slow grocery store browsing syndrome) should be avoided at all costs. Those stricken with this condition tend to come out immediately during post-office work hours and insist on standing in the middle of aisles, in front of the bananas, and in the baking section. Seriously, I have no patience for grocery store pondering, and dodge the PSGSBS’ as fast as I can. I still have my helmet on from biking, so if any of them get rabid I can escape unharmed.

ANYWAYS

Since the grocery store sold out of bowtie pasta (I saw a PSGSBS carrying three bags in her cart…), I settled on making my dish with linguine. I had a whole pile of it lying around and decided it was time it made its dinner debut.

This was another one of those infamous “Hilary doesn’t really know what she’s doing” meals, hence the inclusion of plain yogurt in the sauce. It was a miracle that it worked out (to be fair, a quick Google search showed that I wasn’t completely crazy.. apparently pesto and yogurt sauce is a thing).

Dinner ended with an incredibly happy Hilary and a completely satisfied pestocchini craving. Major omnomnoms.

PS: seriously, this was so good and was so fast to make!!
PPS: I am THE WORST at estimating how much pasta I need. I made enough pasta to feed an Italian army. There is still some in the fridge that I have been picking at for snacks. Yes, I eat cold pasta as a snack. Resume head shaking.
PPPS: I really love these pictures.

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Happy Birthday Lindsay! (ft. Martha Stewart’s tiramisu cupcakes)

June 8, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Fact: every dessert is better in cupcake form.

Heck, lets just broaden that statement to say that anything is better in cupcake form.

Including tiramisu.

This past Friday was my roommate Lindsay’s birthday.

Since we haven’t been living together for very long, and because we are both lovers of good dessert, I wanted to make her something special for her birthday. She requested either ice cream cake or tiramisu. I settled on the latter, having already conquered the frozen fates when I made my homemade ice cream cake back in February.

Obviously I couldn’t just make any old tiramisu. Silly you for thinking so.

Martha Stewart’s website has a bounty of creative cupcake ideas, albeit ones that are fairly complicated (to the point that the recipes come accompanied by a tutorial video – yikes!). It was here that I discovered the recipe for these.

I have never used so many kitchen do-dads to make one batch of cupcakes. I was boiling, brewing, sifting, melting and brushing… It all worked out though. What can I say? #justcallmemartha

Having just moved into a new house with many left behind/forgotten baking utensils, I had to get creative with my methods. For example, I used a cheese grater from IKEA as a sieve and a salad-bowl-in-a-pot as a double boiler. I try to be resourceful, I really do.

The outcome of much kitchen labour was a batch of 15 pretty awesome cupcakes. The cake was spongey and light (although a tad burnt on the bottom, woops). The chocolate-marsala sauce that was brushed over the top tasted delicious (although, as Matt pointed out, it tasted a little like some sort of sushi sauce, but he is just crazy). Finally, the pièce de résistance was the mascarpone cheese icing that was so light but so rich.

ONE more thing: I splurged and bought vanilla beans for these cupcakes! A real life vanilla bean (actually, two). It cost me an arm and a leg (AKA $7), but it was totally worth it.

PS (I lied with the one more thing): can you tell that I’ve been making a conscious effort to create the “setting” for my food photos? I’ve noticed that most food blogs feature a bunch of random background items (emphasized by their sweet cameras and actual ability to achieve some sort of bokeh), so I thought I’d try doing the same thing. These shots featured Lindsay’s container of cocoa and a silk scarf I bought at a garage sale.

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Sweet potato and black bean burrito bowls

June 5, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 11 Comments

Sadly enough, this is the first time I’ve used a recipe inspired by one of Ottawa’s many fantastic food bloggers.

A few weeks ago Kelly tweeted a picture of the sweet potato and black bean burritos she made on her super fun blog, The Gouda Life.

http://twitter.com/#!/thegoudalife/status/73380409328668673

Her pictures made my mouth water. I tweeted back at Kelly in excitement of my food discovery, and almost immediately got a reply from my friend Gord over at the Savoury Starving Student. Apparently he made a dish very similar to this last summer. Two trusted bloggers endorsing a recipe? I was sold.

I filed this one away to make for later. When I found out Matt was coming to visit for the weekend, I decided this was the perfect time to use it. I always feel bad making such extravagant meals for myself, so I have no choice but to take full advantage of visiting guests. I don’t think they mind.

Since I have never once succeeded in making a wrap/burrito/taco look photogenic in any of my shots, I decided on an alternative serving method for this meal.

And so, the burrito bowl was born.

After a last-minute, neurotic kitchen breakdown sparked by me trying to bake the small tortillas into bowl form, Matt (my voice of reason, apparently), suggested we broil them. Of course he was right, and the crisis was averted in mere minutes.

One thing I will say about this meal was that it dirtied a record-breaking amount of bowls (this is an impressive statement coming from a girl who almost always uses every dish in her kitchen to make dinner) and required the carefully timed co-ordination of cooking methods. With three different meal components: the lime zested black beans, Mexican rice and sweet potato mash, not to mention the creation of the aforementioned tortilla bowls, this was quite the ordeal.

The end result was awesome, though. Happy porch eating times were achieved.

PS: did you know that cutting jalapeño peppers can burn your fingertips? Luckily I found this out just as I was about to slice in. I created tiny thimbles for my fingers using aluminum foil, and thanked google for informing me of such a thing.