Vegetarian Stuffed Cabbage

I've always liked stuffed cabbage. That's not a particularly novel sentiment, I know, but it's always seemed like good winter comfort food for me. The stuffed cabbage I grew up with was a rice, tomato, and meat mixture in the cabbage, I think with some tomato sauce on the side. Now, I like tomatoes, rice, and cabbage as much as the next girl, but I've never been into meat. So I've always wanted to find a stuffed cabbage recipe that was delicious and meatless, and not just a veggie version of a meat dish. I guess you could always substitute lentils for the meat in the original recipe and call it a day, but I never did get around to that, and I kept a lookout for a recipe that was meant to be meatless.

Little pockets of stuffed cabbage goodness!

Happy Birthday Cake!

Someone just celebrated a birthday (hint: it was me!) and what's a birthday without cake? Matt likes to make my birthday cake every year so that I'm not making my own cake. I usually help out, since he's still a novice baker and I like to know what's going on. My mom used to make me an angel food cake every year for my birthday. It was the only cake she ever made from a mix, and it was because we were under the impression that making an angel food cake from scratch was too hard and complicated. Man, were we wrong! Anyway, a few years ago, a friend of hers gave her a recipe for angel food cake from scratch and convinced Mom that it was actually pretty easy. Mom has made it many times since then, and kept telling me how easy and delicious it is. But I've never done it. Until now.

The aftermath.

Comfort food - Miso Soup

The Cambridge Williamsons have been pretty sick the past few days (but are on the mend now!) and we've pretty much run the gamut of basic sick comfort foods - saltines, ginger ale, and soup. Lots of soup. It's interesting to me that what you want when you're sick is whatever your mom gave you when you were sick as a kid. For me, that's ramen soup, lemon-lime gatorade, and saltines. Matt's list is pretty similar, but he prefers red gatorade and miso soup. I'll admit that miso soup has never made my list of comfort foods, and that I would never make it on my own. But Matt loves it. We've made miso soup from mixes before (it's fine - but again, that assessment is not from a miso lover), but now that we're feeling better, we decided to go a little crazy and make miso soup from miso paste.

Miso paste.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  I'm going to try to be a better blogger this year, and I'm certainly not lacking for recipe inspiration. I was lucky enough to receive five cookbooks for Christmas this year (five!!!) - either I was a really good girl or Santa's tired of my go-to recipes! I've been keeping busy in the kitchen since we returned from our Christmas sojourn to New Jersey trying out new things, with mixed (but mostly good) success. The snowstorm the other day brought absolutely frigid temperatures, as well as a foot of snow and a few extra days off work to keep up the experimentation. Which brings us to today.

Set it and forget it!

Cookie Quest - Icelandic Sykar Kaka

We didn't eat too many cookies on our honeymoon - I was too obsessed with the chocolate covered licorice to eat much of anything else. And, to be completely honest, most of the cookies we saw in bakeries and stores didn't seem to be particularly Icelandic. There were a lot of standard American type cookies, like chocolate chip and sugar cookies, which is fine but not necessarily what I want to eat if my goal is to try new things. We did stop at a bakery in the Westmann Islands and Matt had a chocolate chip cookie that was very good. I had an almond and chocolate pastry that was also delicious and, according to the girl behind the counter, very traditionally Icelandic. Which is all to say that we didn't encounter these cookies while we were in Iceland.

Lots of Little Sugar Cakes!

Cookie Quest - Moravian Ginger Cookies

When I was a kid, we used to go on school trips to Old Salem in modern day Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Old Salem is a living historic village that replicates the Moravian settlement of the area in the 18th and 19th centuries. My main memories of going to Old Salem are watching the Old Salem kids play with an inflated pig intestine as a ball and eating Moravian ginger cookies. Clearly those memories are not equal. The Moravians figured out how to make these delicious, super-thin, crispy, spicy ginger cookies that are crisper with more of a bite than your typical gingersnap. And they're so good! But I could never figure out how they got them so thin and so perfectly round. I suppose the real answer is 'robots' but that's not the Old Salem answer. Those old-timey ladies must know something I don't.

Old Salem, courtesy of Wikipedia.

Bridal Shower Bites - Aunt Carol's Panakakua

Mom and Dad were up to visit recently - we had a lot of fun going to see the Boston Commonwealth Shakespeare Company perform Two Gentlemen of Verona in the Boston Commons! I was eager to invite them over for brunch, partly to show off all our new china and partly to make this for them: Aunt Carol's Panakakua (Finnish Pancake).