bunny bait

Happy Easter!  I hope you're enjoying the lovely sunny weather we've been blessed with and some time with family & friends this weekend.  And, of course, some sweet treats!  What would Easter be without sweets and candies?

This Bunny Bait is sure to entice the Easter Bunny to leave some treats at your place!  It's so easy to make, and impossible to resist picking-away at if it's anywhere in sight.  Also, how can you resist sprinkles?  They make all treats more festive.

Bunny Bait
1/2 cup popcorn kernels - popped
1 1/2 cup pretzel pieces, broken into large pieces
about 2 cups white chocolate melting wafers
1 bag Easter m&m's
sprinkles

First pop your popcorn - it's better to use a popcorn without oils, butter or salt.  I popped my popcorn in Paperchef parchment paper cooking bags.  It was seriously so easy, I just put 1/4 cup popcorn at a time into the bag, folded over the top and used the "popcorn" setting on my microwave.  It popped up nice and fluffy with no oils at all.  I think you could also use another type of microwave popcorn.


Get a large cookie sheet ready by lining it with parchment paper.  Break up the pretzels and toss them into the popcorn.  Melt the chocolate wafers in the microwave.  Give them 30 second intervals, stirring in between, until smoothly melted.  Pour the chocolate over the popcorn & pretzels and stir together.  Don't spend too much time stirring, because you want the sprinkles to stick to the chocolate before it cools.  Turn the mix out onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet and add the sprinkles, then the m&m's.

Recipe adapted from: Bake at 350.  Thank you Pinterest!

oatmeal orange cookies

Whooo boy...things are even busier around our place (if that was even possible!)  We're in the middle of trying to sell our house and search for a new one to move into - before we meet baby Jellybean in July.  So yeah, a bit crazy.  After an intensive round of housework and our house's photo shoot yesterday I needed some baking therapy.  Yes, I do find baking to be relaxing, even when I'm making a huge mess in my previously spotless kitchen.

Anyhow, the weather outside has been pretty good - I'm starting to feel a bit of spring in the air (ok, just a tiny bit), but it inspired me to make some orange-flavoured cookies.  I was also craving a sort of comfort-food cookie, so I decided to go for oatmeal-orange with toasted pecans.  I couldn't find a recipe  that had what I was looking for, so I adapted my own from several of my cookbooks.  The cookies turned out nicely - they're more on the puffy/cakey side, rather than chewy.  The orange flavour came through nicely and the toasted pecans added a nice nutty flavour and good texture.  The perfect flavour combo for an early March weekend.

dubrovnik, jewel of the adriatic

Our sailing trip in September ended in Dubrovnik, so we bid adieu to our yacht and returned to the life of landlubbers.  (It actually took me about 2 days to not feel the sensation of bobbing on the waves anymore)  We caught a look at Dubrovnik from it's best side as we sailed around the old port before heading to the marina.  It certainly is a stunning sight!

The city dates back to sometime around the 7th or 8th century.  It flourished as an independent empire from the 14th to 19th centuries, before being conquered by Napoleon (that guy was everywhere).  Sadly, Dubrovnik was also involved in the Yugoslavian War and was under siege for 7 months in 1991.  The past damages were obvious as we looked at the roof tops of the city from the city walls - All the brighter terracotta roofs were the replacements after the bombing.  Dubrovnik has always been a popular tourist destination.  The Stadrun (the main street in Old Town) is packed with people each day as soon as the cruise ships land (usually around 10am).  Some days there can be 4 or 5 ships there at once and we were told that there are about 2000 passengers on each one!

There is lots of ice cream to be found in Dubrovnik, I'd say I probably indulged twice a day...hey, I was on holiday, right?  We found our favourite ice cream at Dolce Vita, a short distance up a side street off the Stadrun.

double chocolate cherry cookies

I made these cookies as Valentine's day treats and they were the perfect chocolaty treat.  The cookies were soft with rich, dark chocolate flavour, flecked with chocolate chips and chewy bits of dried cherry.  So decadent!  I brought a tray of these to work and someone told me that they would go perfectly with a glass of champagne...Jellybean and I enjoyed ours with a glass of ice-cold milk instead :)

Someone at work also asked me where I get the cherries.  Usually I buy them in the bulk-food section of my local grocery store.  I've always bought sour cherries in the past, but they didn't have them when I went there this time, so I used dried Bing cherries.  I think the flavour was a bit more mild in the cookies, because the cherries were sweeter, but everyone still seemed to know they were cherries.  Dried Bing cherries are also delicious on their own - chewy, sweet, great cherry flavour.  I think I could even replace my Sour-Patch Kids cravings with these dried cherries.

Double Chocolate Cherry Cookies
16 oz. semisweet chocolate, chopped
2 cups flour
1/2 cup Dutch cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
4 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp instant espresso powder
1/2 cup + 2 tbsp butter, softened
1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup dried cherries, chopped

banana pancakes

I was craving pancakes, and what better breakfast for a lazy Sunday morning?  We had a few brown-spotted bananas on the counter, so I decided to add those in too.  I liked the banana flavour in the pancakes - it tasted like banana bread, especially once smothered in butter & maple syrup.

Banana Pancakes
1 1/2 cups flour
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
3/4 cup mashed bananas (2 medium-sized bananas)
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 tbsp melted coconut oil
1 1/2 - 1 3/4 cup milk (to desired batter consistency)

from spiders to water lilies

This is a really special cookbook that we bought in Cambodia when we were there in 2010.  It was published by Friends-International, an NGO organization that reaches out to at-risk children and families in SE Asia through a variety of programs - including a program that teaches youth to cook-for and run restaurants.  There are two Friends training-restaurants in Phnom Penh - Friends the Restaurant and Romdeng.  We were lucky enough to dine at Romdeng several times while in Phnom Penh.  It was a beautiful and tranquil restaurant set in a lush, green courtyard and specialized in traditional Cambodian dishes.  Romdeng was also where we picked up "From Spiders to Water Lilies".  (Which we then carried in our backpacks for a further four weeks in Thailand - totally worth it though.)

the streets of Phnom Penh

pages from the cookbook with notes from the students and lovely photos

The book itself is beautiful - filled with information about Cambodian cooking, ingredients and recipes, as well as information about the training-restaurant program and stories from the students about how it had changed their lives.  I love looking through the large, glossy photos and remembering my favourite dishes from Cambodia - fish amok, beef luc-lak, pumpkin curry and coconut-lime shakes.

if any of you would actually like this recipe, I'd be happy to forward it on...

As the title of the book implies, there actually is a recipe for spiders!  Yep, 'Crispy Tarantulas with Lime and Kampot Black Pepper Dip'...I don't think we'll be making that one anytime soon (or EVER). Can you imagine buying a box full of tarantulas at the pet store to cook up for appies later?  That being said...Trev did sample some deep-fried tarantula while we were at a street market - he said it tasted like teriyaki chicken - um, sure...

crispy-fried creepy crawlies at the street market

We haven't made very many recipes out of this book (maybe only 2).  I'm not too sure why that is, other than the fact that some of the ingredients would be tricky to get.  Also, I think it would be hard to have the dishes taste the same - a little something would always be missing and it would make me miss Cambodia.  Oh well - even if we don't use this book often, it's still one of favourite cook books.

thai pumpkin soup

I love a good bowl of soup when it's cold outside.  Frequently I make soup by the "little bit of this, little bit of that..." method, but this time I set out actually looking for a recipe.  In my mind I knew what I was looking for - something fairly light, but with some heat and other flavours that reminded me of Thailand.  I thought we had a pumpkin soup recipe in our booklet that we got when we took a cooking class in Thailand - but I couldn't find one there.  An internet search didn't show me quite what I was looking for either.  I ended up finding inspiration in our Cambodian cookbook (I'm planning on posting about that one next).

So I guess I still didn't find a recipe to follow, but I did find the inspiration I needed to make this soup.  It comes together very easily - a good weeknight meal.  If you want to make this soup a little more substantial you could add quinoa and diced cooked chicken (we did that with the leftovers...so good)

Thai Pumpkin Soup
4 cups chicken stock
4 cups roasted pumpkin
2 onions, diced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp chili powder
2 tbsp lemon grass paste
1/2 tsp ground corriander
1 can of light coconut milk
2 tsp fish sauce

First roast several large wedges of pumpkin (you don't need to peel it first).  I roasted mine for about 40 minutes at 350 F.  After it comes out of the oven use a spoon to scrape the soft pumpkin off the rind and set it aside.

While the pumpkin is roasting, dice the onion and garlic.  After it comes out of the oven, heat a large pot over medium-high heat.  Saute the onion in the olive oil until just softened, then add in the garlic, chili powder, lemon grass paste and corriander and cook for about 1 minute more.  Add the pumpkin, chicken stock, coconut milk and fish sauce.  Bring everything to a boil, then remove from the heat and use an immersion blender to puree the soup (alternately, you could puree it in the blender in smaller batches).  Return to the heat and simmer for another ten minutes.

Garnish with a drizzle of coconut milk and a few sprigs of fresh cilantro.