Author: Canapes and Chocolate

Creamy zucchini soup with Parmesan Crisps

Creamy Zucchini and Asparagus Soup served with Parmesan Cheese Crisps

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Fall has definitely arrived – although we were treated to sunny days this weekend, you could definitely feel the chill in the air.  So Soup Season is here.  I love homemade soups and this one is simple to make and ready to eat in under an hour.    I use an immersion blender to finish this soup as I like small bits of the vegetables still in tact, and an immersion blender offers you more control on how smooth, or how chunky you want your soup, as opposed to a food processor. Me, I like it a smidge chunky!

Low Carb Parmesan Chicken

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  This is an adaption of Best Foods “Parmesan Crusted Chicken” .  I deleted the bread crumbs because I want this recipe to be low carb, and added chives and roasted garlic to kick up the flavor a notch. I roasted the garlic in olive oil on Sunday, so I can use in multiple recipes this week – roasted garlic seems milder to me yet far more flavorful.  This recipe took 5 minutes to prepare and 25 minutes to cook.  Dinner in 30 minutes and I caught up on my emails while it baked – nice!

Lo Carb Taco Salad

Taco Salad the Lo-Carb Way

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Am back on a Lo-Carb diet for the next few weeks but can’t bear to eat the same food every day (roasted chicken, steak, burgers, etc.)   So last night I made Taco Salad, which took less than 15 minutes to prep and cook – then brought left-overs for lunch today in a portable bento box. No, you won’t find a deep-fried taco shell or even tortilla chips hidden somewhere underneath, as they would take the carb count way beyond what I use in a day (which is 25 carbs or less). This recipe is very simple and quick to prepare; has an abundance of flavor, and I found I didn’t really miss having a taco shell after all.

Strawberry Tart

French Glace Strawberry Tarts

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I like to make a French Glace Strawberry Pie to kick-off summer and then again just when it’s ending, right around Labor Day.  I made the first one mid-June and decided to switch out my batch of strawberries intended for jam this weekend, to making strawberry tarts instead.  Pie crusts can sometimes be hit or miss – sometimes they turn out great and other times they are dry and crumbly – this frustrates a lot of bakers, myself included.

Crispy Hash Browns

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  Hash browns are simple to make, but sometimes they are nice and crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and other times not so much.   If you always want your hash browns crispy like those you get at your favorite pancake house, or the local diner, then you need to prep therm just like they do, and remove the moisture from your potatoes before you start to fry them.  It’s as simple as that – no mystery, just an extra step you may or may not be used to doing.

Labor Day Treat: Strawberry Shortcake with Raspberry Coulis

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Just in time for a Labor Day BBQ or picnic with friends, Strawberry Shortcake!  I picked up oodles of strawberries on the weekend and made this dessert and will be making jam this weekend too.  I love strawberries, and use them throughout the year, but in summer they almost become a staple, same as eating tomatoes on a daily basis. I have made shortcakes from scratch on many occasions – this was not one of them.  Instead I turned to Bisquick and honestly I have to say the texture and flavor is sooooo close to “scratch” that I tend to defer to Bisquick as it is so much quicker!  Also, I prefer individual shortcakes as opposed to making one large shortcake, which is what I grew up with.   Why? Cuz when I make the really large one for 8 or 10 people, it looks terrible after you cut the first slice.   The individual ones look amazing from start to finish.

Comfort Food: Sauteed mushrooms in vermouth over crusty french bread toast

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I needed some comfort food on Monday night but was not in the mood to get too involved in cooking anything that took longer than … what, a few TV commercials?  I fell back on my reliable go-to instant comfort food, Mushrooms on Toast.  This is a pretty simple recipe, but still works its magic when needed.   I try to mix up the variety of mushrooms in the recipe and I happened to have left over shiitake, button and baby bellos used in a mushroom tart on the weekend, so they became the mushrooms of choice. If I were being ambitious I would serve this with a small green salad and Green Goddess Dressing.

The Little Mermaid brings everything to a close!

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  Our last port of call was Copenhagen.  I found Copenhagen to be very similar to Seattle – beautiful waterways, lots of colorful boats in the canals, numerous outdoor bistros right on the edge of the water, and lots of very friendly locals out and about enjoying a cool summer day.  It was lovely!  We took a short tour to see the Amalienborg Palace Square, the winter residence of the Danish royal family, that forms a spacious octagonal square surrounded by four identical rococo palaces occupied by the Queen, and each of her sons.  It’s quite impressive!

Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”

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I clearly remember as a young girl when President Kennedy said “Ich bin ein Berliner”(I am a Berliner) those famous words from his 1963 speech on his trip to Berlin, two years after the Berlin Wall had been erected. To get to Berlin we had to travel 3.5 hours from the Port of Warnemunde. We chose a specific excursion titled “Berlin Past and Present”, which featured a motor coach equipped with flat-screen TVs, so we could view videos and photos which allowed us to do a  past versus present comparison, of the changes that have occurred in Berlin over the last 80 years.

To Russia with Love – St. Petersburg

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For me the highlight of the trip was a visit to St. Petersburg where we had a massive amount of history to view in just three days.   I became an avid Netflix user two months earlier, renting as many films as I could on Catherine the Great, Czar Nicholas II, Rasputin, and of course several volumes of documentaries roaming through the Hermitage Museum (still looking at those DVDs).  There is a plethora of information on St. Petersburg with a huge focus on the 18, 19, and 20th centuries history – actually too much to read/view before I left on the trip – but I did give it a valiant try!