Monday, February 10, 2025
ChezCindy: Weeknight Chicken Bolognese
Friday, January 31, 2025
ChezCindy: Baked Sweet Potato with Coddled Egg & Pesto
Baked potatoes become extraordinary when an egg is coddled inside the potato jacket, baked to completion and topped with pesto. This decadent dish takes a bit of planning and a tiny bit of finesse but is impressive to serve to guests.
Start by baking sweet potatoes on a sheet tray until they are nearly done baking. Remove from the oven, then split open the potato adding a raw egg to the open potato jacket. Finish baking the potato, cooking the egg inside the potato jacket. I like to finish the dish by adding basil pesto for a great contrast of color and flavor.
Baked Sweet Potato with Coddled Egg & Pesto
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
ChezCindy: Earl Grey Tea Cake with Mascarpone Cream
This delicious cake uses Earl Grey tea leaves as an ingredient in the cake batter and the mascarpone cream topping. Earl Grey is a fragrant black tea flavored with bergamot oranges. Bergamot oranges are grown in Southern Italy with the juice being used in making candy, liqueurs, and pastries. The essential oil extracted from the rind is used to flavor black tea, thus creating Earl Grey. I did not realize this beloved English tea has roots in Italy.
The cake is topped with soft peaks of whipped mascarpone cream, and the cake has bits of chopped chocolate in every bite. To finish the cake, I like to garnish with additional chocolate curls over the peaks of cream. Wonderful with your favorite cup of tea, or maybe an espresso.
Sunday, January 5, 2025
ChezCindy: Broccoli, Cabbage & Kale Chopped Salad
This is not a standard bag salad from the grocery store. I was actually looking at the availability of bagged salads at the store, but not one of them had the ingredients I wanted. So, I decided to make my own. This chopped salad includes many of my favorite cruciferous vegetables. I have broccoli stems and tiny florets, chopped kale, green and red cabbage, and pomegranate seeds. The colors were so vibrant, I had to take a picture.
If you decide to make your own, it is super easy and doesn't take a lot of time to bring it together. Use what you have in your fridge and add to it one or two vegetables sought out specifically for your chopped salad. Copycat one that you like that you normally buy as premade. With no preservatives added to your homemade mix, it will store nicely in an air-tight glass snap-top container in the refrigerator. The mix of undressed vegetables will stay fresh for at least 5 days. If you get tired of eating it as a raw salad, sauté the remainder of it in a skillet as a side dish for dinner. Or make this lovely galette as I did in a previous post, savory vegetable and mozzarella galette