Double Chocolate Crackle Cookies

Wow, this recipe is amazing. This is the kind of cookie recipe I've been looking for for a long time. The cookies are delicious, and they're SOFT THE NEXT DAY!!! Even the edges are soft. And it's not cakey soft, it's just good. They're very chocolately, and you can tell that I used dark chocolate to make them, which is delicious. These are my favorite cookies out of all of the cookies that I've made. And they only require 2 tablespoons of butter! Of course all of the chocolate in the recipe makes up for that. The recipe is here. The chocolate bar that I used had almonds in it, so I chopped that up and there were little almond pieces in the cookies. I didn't know how that would turn out but I ended up liking them in there. As Borat would say, GREAT SUCCESS!

Vanilla Frozen Yogurt

The recipe for this came from my ice cream cookbook. The ingredients are 3 cups of yogurt, 1 cup of sugar and 1 teaspoon of vailla extract. I used Fage Greek yogurt, because they said that Greek yogurt is the best for this. I noticed that one serving of that Fage yogurt, 1 cup, contains 90% of the daily value of saturated fat. That is kind of disgusting. The frozen yogurt doesn't taste like soft serve vanilla ice cream, unfortunately, because that would be awesome, but it has a sour flavor, that just tastes like the yogurt. I don't really like it that much and don't think I'll make it again.

Vegetarian "Pad Thai"

I got this recipe from here. It definitely does not taste like pad thai but I enjoyed it. It was much better the second day, after it sat around a while. I think there was too much tofu and not enough delicious filling such as spinach, scallions, bamboo shoots, peanuts and bean sprouts. I think that next time I attempt to make pad thai I will look for a different recipe.

Red Lentil and Cauliflower Curry

My roommate made this curry and it smelled really good so I decided to make it. It is from Veganomnicon (and it is vegan!). I really liked it, especially how the whole curry turned all mushy. It had parsnip in it, which I don't think I've ever had before. I do think it is missing some spices since I didn't have any tumeric or curry powder. I also think I cooked it too long since it was a little too mushy but it was still delicious.

Wheat bread with seeds

I made my second loaf of bread from this book. It involved me making two separate doughs one day in advance, then mixing them together as well as adding additional ingredients, and then letting the resulting dough sit for some time. After that I had to knead the dough some more and let it rise in the loaf pan before I could finally bake it. This bread has sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds in it. It also happens to be vegan. I like the texture of the bread even though it is a little dense, and I think it tastes especially good after it is toasted. I used the Kitchenaid for all of the kneading and mixing, which was nice. I didn't get sticky dough fingers or anything.

Chocolate chip muffins

I made muffins again, mostly following this recipe, except using chocolate chips instead of blueberries. I used 1 cup of whole wheat pastry flour and 1/2 cup white flour instead of the 1.5 cups white flour. I think it made a difference - it's better than having all of the flour be whole wheat. Also I'm not sure if the fact that it was whole wheat pastry flour made a difference, as opposed to regular whole wheat flour. I again used cracked wheat instead of wheat germ, which adds a crunchy texture. I'm not sure if I like that or not, but regardless I will continue looking around at random healthy ingredients I can throw in muffins. Overall I liked these muffins.

Pizza with Caramelized Onions and Basil

I made pizza and put caramelized onions on top because I saw it in a food blog and it looked delicious. I used Trader Joe's wheat pizza dough and instead of making 1 big pizza out of it, I made 2 medium pizzas in an attempt both to make thin crust pizza and prevent pizza stone catastrophe. I cooked the onions before hand in a frying pan with some butter, olive oil and brown sugar. I really liked the onions on the pizza. I need to find a new tomato sauce though because I think that the one I use is too salty.

Brown rice noodles with peanut sauce

I made this recipe from this cookbook that I got a while ago. I didn't follow the recipe exactly because I didn't have all of the ingredients, and I didn't have the patience to go to the store. So the sauce was missing fresh ginger, among other items. The sauce was good but it was obvious that it was missing something. I will probably try to make a better version of this in the future because I love peanut sauce and this recipe has potential.

Brownie Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

This were pretty good. This is the recipe that I followed. I put these Trader Joe's mini peanut butter cups in the cookies. I think the cookies would have actually been better if I used peanut butter chips because there was too much chocolate surrounding the peanut butter in the mini peanut butter cups, and peanut butter is delicious. The cookies were still nice and soft which is how I like my cookies.

Crustless Spinach Quiche

I made this around 2:00am one morning when I was working on a branch predictor. This is the recipe that I used. The quiche tasted good but I think it would have been better had I left it in the oven longer, even though I did leave it in there a whole 30 minutes. I also didn't use the proportions listed in the recipe and the whole thing just made me feel a little gross. I don't think I'll make this again - at least this variation of it.