Spicy Italian Sausage & Lentil Soup

I was talking to the Chopping Block about lentil soup earlier and how we find it rather bland. So I decided to try to liven this soup up with some spice and lots and lots of meat. Okay, so maybe this is more like a hearty sausage soup with a dash of lentils, but whatever, it's all good. I made this soup twice, once with some Italian sausages from the butcher and once with some pre-cooked sausages from the deli aisle. I recommend the butcher stuff. The photo above was with the pre-cooked stuff.

Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes with Ginger Cream Cheese Frosting

Remember my last pumpkin cake post? Well I finally got myself a cupcake mold and a piping bag! Yay! Since it's still Fall, I wanted to make more pumpkin stuff! So like a few days ago over at My Baking Addiction, Jamie posted these cupcakes that sounded awesome! So that's what we have today, some awesome pumpkin ginger cupcakes.

Garlic Horseradish Mashed Potatoes

You know what I love? The Cheesecake Factory. I know, I know. The Cheesecake Factory is probably the worst food in the world, but who can resist their avocado eggroll appetizer or their delicious cheesecakes? You know what is one of my favorite things from them? Their mashed potatoes. With a little snooping around the internet, I found a little recipe (that I've adjusted) just floating around on a whole bunch of different sites. There seems to be some mixed reviews, but I can honestly say that this mashed potato recipe comes pretty darn close!

Beef Chuck Pot Roast

(Image courtesy of The Chopping Block)

The Chopping Block has been really nice to me (strange, right), so in return I invited her over for dinner along with our friend Brendan and my neighbor Chris. My sister and I went grocery shopping, and we got this four pound beef chuck, which is perfect for a beautiful pot roast!

Pumpkin Cake with Cream Cheese Glaze

Oh my god! It's that time of year again! That time of year when you walk into your grocery store, and it's stocked with pumpkins! Can you help but buy a ton of pumpkin (and pumpkin related groceries)? I think not! And if you can resist, there is something wrong with you, my friend. Last year around this time of year I made a pumpkin loaf with Iva. This time it's a cake instead of bread! Yay!

Pizza Dough

I've been baking a lot of pizza lately because it turns out that making pizza is really easy. Seriously! All it takes is time, so plan ahead. It'll at least an hour for your dough to rise. The recipes say that you can refrigerate the dough overnight and use it the next day as well.

Glutinous Rice Balls

What is a glutinous rice ball? It's a chewy ball of dough that's filled with sweet sweet awesomeness. In Chinese they're called Tong Yuen (Cantonese) or I guess Tang Yuan (Mandarin). "Tong" means soup and "yuen" means round. You can read about them in this Wikipedia page.

Mac 'n Cheese

I invited the Chopping Block over for dinner, and I made her some macaroni and cheese! I also served it with some sweet carrot mash, some cornbread (with corn kernels hidden inside), and some barbecue ribs.

White Cake with Lemon Curd and Cream Cheese Frosting

Following up on the lemon curd post, we're going to use it to make a cake! A delicious lemony cake!



I got the recipe off of Epicurious, which I made some adjustments to since their recipe was for a giant cake, and I am only making a small little itty bitty cake.

Lemon Curd

Finally! A post after an entire month! I'm sure you've been wondering what I've been up to, right? Well, I drove my little Honda Fit across country from Pittsburgh, PA back to San Francisco (with my two cats)! I reunited with Gandalf except now Gandalf and Megatron don't get along. My mom also fell in love with Gandalf (as well as Furious), and so Gandalf has become my mom's cat. So that's the update!



So what I have for today is this delicious lemon curd recipe from David Lebovitz. I've made this a couple of times, and it's always fantastic! Not a single change needs to be made. Before we start, I'm going to warn you that we're not going to use a double boiler, which I think is pretty freaking awesome. As David Lebovitz says, we're going to be dare-devils today.