Traditional Pesto

= delicious!

Very excited that I now have a mini food processor and can actually make fresh pesto. Got my recipe from Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (pg. 768) and followed his recipe pretty much exactly. I used two cloves of garlic. His recipe says to use 1/2 clove or more so I went with more because I firmly believe you can never have too much garlic.

I got some exotic looking heirloom tomatoes at Whole Foods and some yummy mozzarella and had a feast. I could put this pesto on just about anything. It was so delicious.

Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

Because everything is better with bacon!

I got the inspiration and recipe for these at the iluvpork blog. (What a great idea for a blog!)

I made only half the recipe and still came out with about 30 two to three inch cookies.  The only change I made was that I used a mix of Ghirardelli milk chocolate chips and Nestlé butterscotch chips. The Ghirardelli chips were excellent but I wasn't crazy about the butterscotch chips and would definitely forego those next time. Overall though, these came out tasty however this recipe makes hard cookies and I generally prefer soft gooey cookies. Also, there isn't nearly enough bacon. It seems like you hardly get a taste of the bacon. I used two-thirds of a 12 oz. package of bacon and will definitely use the entire package next time.  When you do actually get a bite of bacon in the cookie, the salty-sweet combo is wonderful. I plan on adding bacon to some other cookie recipes now. I think peanut butter cookies with bacon will be the next item to get porkified.

Veggie Burger

From How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (pg. 660)The Simplest Bean BurgersThe recipe calls for any beans and I used garbanzo beans (canned because I'm lazy) which are one of my favorites. However I think I was overzealous in the use of my new mini food-processor and thinned the mixture out too much so it was difficult to form the patty. But I managed to somehow get a blobby mess into the frying pan and once it started cooking it was OK. The flavor was pretty good and I think this would be an easy dish in which one could vary the seasoning and play around. Once I finished cooking the patty, I added some onions and arugula and a bit of aioli mustard that I found at Trader Joe's which is really good. The side is my favorite crispy kale which are the best "healthy" chips around. Topped off with a dirty martini because one doesn't want to be too healthy!

Zucchini Bread

From the Whole Foods website

This is delicious! I would definitely make this again and not hesitate to make it for others. The prep is fairly quick and very easy. And it made my whole apartment smell great. The only changes I made were that I didn't have any fresh nutmeg so I just used powdered, I already had a bag of pecans so I used those instead of walnuts and I wasn't sure what whole wheat pastry flour was versus whole wheat flour which is what I used. I could not find anything called "pastry" flour...

Baked Tofu

From How to Cook Everything Vegetarian (pg. 641)


I got a block of firm tofu from Trader Joe's and cut it in half, seasoning one half with just salt and the other half with soy sauce per the basic recipe and one of the alternate suggestions. I put both in glass baking dishes and baked per recipe and had a side of zucchini and onions.


The tofu was good but a bit on the bland side. The soy sauce flavored version (on the right in the photo with the darker edges) was definitely better but still needed a bit more flavor as well. I suspect this is better when added to a stir fry or some other dish rather than on its own. Next time I'll try it with either a stronger sauce or just more salt and some pepper and/or other seasoning.