Pot Luck!

Happy Friday! Today at work we are having a pot-luck retirement party for a co-worker, and I LOVE pot-lucks. I get this sense of competition where I feel like I have to bring the most creative, delicious dish that everyone in the office will rave about. This time, I was planning on bringing Chinese chicken lettuce wraps - similar to the kind you would get at PF Changs (If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's time to crawl out from under the rock you've been living under and make your way to the nearest PF Changs asap.) Unfortunately, I woke up Thursday morning to about a foot of snow and was unable to make it to the grocery store so I had to make due with whatever ingredients I already had in the house. Because I have every baking ingredient imaginable in my pantry (and no actual real food) I had quite a selection of recipes to choose from. I decided to step outside the box with a new recipe from the world famous Magnolia Bakery in NYC for blondies.

Blondies are kind of a cross between a cookie and a brownie and are very versatile. Once you've made the base, you can pretty much add whatever yummy extras you want. This particular blondie recipe called for walnuts and white chocolate chips, neither of which I had, so I opted to toffee bits, butterscotch chips, and semi-sweet chocolate morsels.

Here's the base recipe:

1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup unsalted butter
1 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
1/2 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Then just add whatever extras your heart desires!

- Combine flour, salt and baking soda in a small bowl
- In a separate bowl, cream the rest of the ingredients
- Slowly add dry ingredients to wet mixture until smooth
- pour into a greased/floured 9x13 pan
- bake for 25 minutes at 350
- let cool completely before cutting
- ENJOY!

Here's my finished product:

Pad Thai - Attempt #1

As some of you might know, I have a pretty unhealthy obsession with Thai food. It's definitely my favorite ethnicity of food and I could probably eat it every night of the week. While I was pregnant, my friend Sang (who was also pregnant at the time) and I had Thai for lunch at least once a week... perhaps that had something to do with the 40 lbs I gained...

I've been casually perusing Thai recipes on the internet for a few months now, but for some reason it's always seemed too intimidating to attempt. A few weeks ago my friend Keeney gave me a beautiful Le Creuset wok and I officially had no excuse to not experiment with my favorite Thai classic: Chicken Pad Thai. (for those of you unfamiliar, pad Thai is a traditional rice noodle stir-fry commonly served in the markets and street fairs of Thailand.)

I did a little bit of research and decided on this recipe. I swung by Wegmans on the way home and picked up a few things, but was still missing the main Thai ingredients. Thank God for the internet! Temple of Thai has tons of recipes and info about Thai cuisine, and they sell traditional Thai ingredients as well. I was able to order the tamarind, palm sugar, crushed Thai chilies, rice noodles, and fish sauce.

This is a fast moving meal, so it definitely helps to have all the ingredients prepped (like they do in the food network shows) so everything is ready to add.

 From top, clockwise: rice noodles, crushed peanuts, fish sauce, tamarind, egg, palm sugar, minced shallot, crushed red chilies, minced garlic, and thinly sliced chicken in the middle.

The trickiest part of the whole recipe is definitely getting the noodles right. You don't cook them like Italian pasta - you soak them in warm water until pliable then add to the stir-fry. Getting them to the right texture is all trial-and-error.

This whole recipe from the first thing you drop into the wok (shallot and garlic) to the last (crushed chilies) takes less than ten minutes. It's definitely a quick recipe that I will be adding to my regular rotation. Although it wasn't the best Pad Thai I've ever had, it was definitely on the right track. I think next time I'll try a more Americanized recipe that might be a little more similar to what you might get in a restaurant here. Here's my finished product!

Lessons learned for next time -

1 - definitely could use the "optional" lime wedge
2 - soak the noodles a little longer, they could have been a tad softer
3 - experiment with a new variation of the traditional recipe!

Hey Y'all!

Welcome to my new blog! Once again, my dear friend Lisa has inspired me. Last year, she inspired me to buy a house. My husband and I moved into this gem in March '10. She's a work in progress.

This year, she has inspired me to start a blog. I know, not quite as intense as buying a house - but maintaining a decent blog is serious business! Lisa keeps a great blog about healthy living and other fun stuff - you can keep up with her here, Treadmill Runner.

Hopefully next year Lisa will inspire me to take a vacation :) No pressure Lis, just a suggestion.

So you're probably wondering what my blog will be about (because it certainly won't be about healthy living...) Over the last 12 months I have managed to complete just about every major adult-life milestone. In March, we bought our beautiful home pictured above. In April, we welcomed our amazing son Jack into the world. And in October, we made it official and tied the knot. Yes, a little out of order - we consider it the celebrity route.

Here's my sweet boy when he was two weeks old. Photo compliments of my extremely talented sister, Stephanie. See more at Stephanie Scambos Photography.

And here is my husband Johnny and I on our wedding day. We had the most perfect beach wedding imaginable in Duck, North Carolina on October 16th.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I push myself on a daily basis to be "perfect" at all my life duties: wife, mother, homemaker, friend, etc. My blog will chronicle my successes and failures at striving to be the ultimate Martha Stewart meets Betty Crocker meets Super Nanny. I'll try my best to post all my best recipes, craft projects, and parenting tricks - as well as my failures, because we all know those make the best stories.