I know this is a week late for a lot of people, but the Eastern Orthodox Easter Bunny (aka the Greek Easter Bunny in our house) is hopping around this weekend for a lot of us. I’ve mentioned about a zillion times before that I’m from a mixed heritage family, lovingly described as half painfully Canadian and half hardcore Greek. I love this family makeup and as I’ve married into a painfully Canadian family (a painfully Canadian family that I adore) I choose to be the hardcore Greek half, even though I’m hardly Greek enough for the role. It just means I’m a stern mama (most of the time), I insist on celebrating both Easters, both Christmases and the occasional name day – oh and I totally support the desire for two kitchens or at the very least two fridges. If you know any Greeks, that’ll make sense to you. If you don’t, too bad. 🙂

So anyhoo, Easter baskets for Eastern Orthodox Easter! Cheesecake isn’t an often requested treat in our house, but these things were way cute. They would be even cuter with Easter cupcake liners which are officially on my list of things to do next year. Maybe I wont be moving across international lines this time next year! Also, these were actually made last year.

Easter Cheesecake Baskets – adapted from Kraft

2 8 ounce pkgs cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
1/2 cups crushed graham crackers
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 1/2 cups flaked coconut, tinted green
36 small jelly beans
12 pieces shoestring licorice, 4″ lengths

Preheat your oven to 350F and beat the cream cheese and the sugar. Add the egg and beat until blended.
Mix the graham cracker crumbs and melted butter, then press into individual muffin cups.
Now pour the actual cheesecake batter over top of the crust.
Bake for about 20 minutes, then cool and pop in the fridge for at least 2 hours. The green coconut is for festive grass but my kids hate coconut so it’s a waste. However, they love mini eggs and jellybeans so I added those to the ‘baskets’ and then the licorice handles! Way cute!

So my exciting news that I was afraid to jinx by sharing with you all?

It finally happened! We have been in Los Angeles since the wee hours of last Wednesday morning and all five of us have loved every second of it. Apartment hunting here is definitely more fun than apartment hunting pretty much anywhere else. We found a place last weekend and moved in on Monday. I’ll get a desk and blog about our crazy amazing road trip this weekend. Theeen, I’ll get back to blogging about stuff I have already made and finally get back to actually cooking and baking again! That will be so nice!

Actually this afternoon I made a cute lunch and treat for myself from scratch while Skyping with my dad and I’ll try to get that up next week too.

So far, we’ve tried out a handful of American chains we are painfully deprived of in Canada like In n Out, Carl’s Jr, and Pinkberry. I’ve also discovered a handful of menu items that are totally different at Starbucks and my fave local place this week has been California Pizza Kitchen. Super good!

I will leave you with some obnoxious photos I took at the Santa Monica Pier recently before I get back to blogging on the regular again next week. Wish me luck!!!!

In my quest to cut out the fake food around here, I embarked on finding just the right recipe to give fruit roll ups a try. This one does not involve any stove top cooking or even any pureeing, it’s just good quality jam and corn starch really. That and a little patience.

The wee ones all love these and maybe I do to. They’re excellent in lunch boxes and diaper bags (and in my Anthropologie purse).

Homemade Fruit Roll Ups via Health for the Whole Self

2/3 cup fruit preserves
2 tsp corn starch

Mix the fruit preserves and the corn starch in a small bowl. Cut a length of parchment paper.
Spread out strips of the fruity goo on the parchment paper and bake at 225F for 45 minutes.
Mine all spread into each other, but that’s nothing a pizza cutter couldn’t fix!!

I wish I could remember which random ‘special interest publication’ this recipe came from. You know at Christmas you see Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping and even Martha and Pillsbury have a ‘special’ cookie magazine? It doesn’t come as part of a subscription, it has like 300 pages and is more than double the price of a regular magazine? This is from one of those from at least 5 years ago. Last year I went through my Hoarders-esque stack of closet of magazines and ripped out the pages I was holding on to them for. I put them in page protectors in a painfully organized binder. This post is proof that I actually bake some of those recipes too! So anyhoo, while that’s nice and tidy of me, there is no trace of what magazine I pulled it from. Whoops.

The recipe itself is too good for me to make on a regular basis, or at least to make without already deciding who I am gifting them too. They. Are. So. Good. They have a s’more taste to them with the graham crackers + marshmallow + chocolate, but I think the weird oaty base (and splattered on top as well) is what pulls it all together and really won me over. I first made them as part of our cookie tin the year I bought the magazine, and I’ve made them every year since for random Christmas treats but in the last year or two I’ve been making them whenever the mood strikes.

Must try! Make for a crowd!

Ooey, Gooey, Chewy S’more Bars

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup flour
1 1/2 cups quick oats
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
2 1/2 cups mini marshmallows
1 1/4 cups chocolate chips or chunks

Cream the butter, then add the sugar, eggs and vanilla and mix to combine.
Add the flour and mix, then the oats and cracker crumbs.
Line a baking dish (mine was 13 x 9) with parchment paper and press half of the dough into the dish. Bake at 350F for 20 minutes.
Sprinkle the mini marshmallows and the chocolate chips on top, now drop the rest of the dough, in tablespoon sized chunks on top of that and bake again for another 10-15 minutes.

I’m a real sucker for black eyeshadow and pink lips and this video only made it worse. Any combo of blacks and greys on the eyes with any kind of light to almost berry lips is a winner for me. So smitten with how cute this is! This is a look I wear far too often – almost always with bright pink nails.

Eyes are a blend of three shadows. I used Hard Candy’s Baked Meteor Eyeshadow in Black Hole on the lid, Urban Decay’s Eyeshadow in Gunmetal in the crease and Strip up the brow bone. Eyes are lined with Urban Decay’s 24/7 Glide on Eye Pencil in Zero and finished with Hard Candy’s Lash Tinsel Glitter Mascara (under my Quo 808 lashes of course) in Spellbound and brows are filled in with Urban Decay’s 24/7 Glide on Eye Pencil in Underground.

Cheeks have just a little Tarte’s Natural Beauty Cheek Stain in Sheer Berry Rose and lips are Too Faced’s Lip of Luxury in Cupcake.

I had been trying my hand at vegan baking for a few month when we made a friend with a pretty severe milk allergy. 2/5 of us are lactose intolerant so we are no really that big on milk anyway, but I have always left dairy in the recipes I use and it never seems to bother us the way a bowl of ice cream might. But even a cup of milk in a batch of muffins was too much for our new friend and I had made fudge for the kids that he had to miss out on.

Thankfully, I found this kick ass recipe on Averie Cooks and it was super simple to make and even more importantly, it’s delicious and free of chemicals and rando garbage store bought fudge is full of!

Vegan Fudge via Averie Cooks

1 cup vegan semi-sweet chocolate chips
3 1/2 cups icing sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 tablespoons dairy free margarine
1/2 cup coconut milk not light
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the margarine and coconut milk over medium heat until blended. Remove from heat.
In a medium bowl, combine chocolate chips, sugar, and cocoa, then pour the hot melted butter and coconut milk over top.
Mix! Mix! Mix!
Pour into a brownie pan and pop in the fridge for about an hour or two to set up.

This right here? Is husband food. Both the chicken wings and the potato wedges are far too spicy for 2/3 of the children, and I went ahead and made something different for all three of them anyway so my husband wouldn’t have to share. He has his favorites that the kids and I like too, like stew and chili and lasagna and chicken ceasers and things like that, but this kind of meal, the kind of purposely greasy but still made from scratch food you only really find in old school pubs and family restaurants, is defo his hands down number one love. Not just the combo of wings and wedges, but wings that aren’t off chickens that look like they starved to death and wedges that have been cut to actually resemble a wedge of some kind.

Next time I make these though, I need some cute pub-style baskets to serve them in!

First wash and cut your potatoes into wedges. Then mix all the seasonings in a large plastic bag (sandwich bag style).
Put the wedges in the bag, a handful at a time and shake it up to coat them. Bake them at 400F for about 15-20 minutes.
The sauce for the chicken is ridic simple. Just heat up your favorite hot sauce and add the butter. Cook it down a little, about 10 minutes or so before you toss the chicken in it.
Toss all of the ingredients except the cornstarch and water for the honey garlic sauce in a saucepot and stir till it’s almost boiling. Then reduce the heat, mix the hot water with the cornstarch and then add a little of the sauce to the water/corn starch mixture. Slowly incorporate that back into the sauce so it will thicken up nicely.
I cooked the chicken wings in a little oil in my wok, but you can deep fry or bake them if you want. Coat the chicken in the hot sauce, plate the wedges separately and serve the honey garlic on the side.

With a Greek mother and a painfully Canadian father (my grandparents from his side are from Saskatchewan and Quebec!) who was more than happy to adopt as much Greek cooking as my mother liked, we ate a lot of pilaf growing up. There is still a lot of pilaf going on over there – and now that Wee One #2 has decided it’s one of her most treasured things to eat, there is a lot of it going on around here as well.

When I was a kid I thought it was tricky, but by the time I was around 13 my Dad showed me how to do it and I’ve been making it since. Easy peasy!

6-8lb roast 2 tablespoons parsley flakes 1 tablespoon paprika 1 teaspoon chili powder 1 tablespoon garlic powder 2 teaspoons black pepper 2 cups water 1/4 cup molasses	Pilaf 1 onion 3 + cloves garlic 2 tablespoons butter 1 cup rice 2 cups water

Mix all the spices for the rub in a bowl. Rinse off the meat and massage the rub into the meat.
Mix the water and molasses and pour into the roasting pan with the rubbed pork. Slow cook this baby all day at just under 300F. I went with 270F for about 8 hours or so.
Let it sit for 30 minutes or so and the shred it.
I waited till the pork was sitting before I started the pilaf. Chop the onion and garlic and chase them around a frying pan with the butter, until the onions are clear and the kitchen smells like garlic heaven. Add the water, set the heat to low and don’t touch it for about 30 minutes. Everyone has their favorites, but pulled pork on a bun with a pilaf?! How can you not win friends with that?! Or have like, three helpings. Not that I’d ever have three helpings. Ha!

This is yet another recipe from the culinary school cook book I borrowed from my neighbor. 2011 was The Year of the Cookie and I’m still posting cookies I made. Let’s also ignore that 2012 is officially The Year of Soup and I’ve yet to show you any of the soups I’ve made thus far. Ahem.

Much like the other recipes I’ve tried in this book, I felt like a more accomplished domestic goddess as I baked these cookies. There is just something about this book that makes me feel fancy. Julia Child fancy, almost. Almost. I put on my sassy cherry apron while making them to balance out the fancy with ridic to keep the grown-upness in my kitchen to a healthy minimum.

These cookies are so smooth and buttery, as Julia would say ‘it stops your heart just to look at them’.

Sables Diamant Vanille via The Cook’s Book

1 cup unsalted butter, room temp, cut in pieces
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 cups pastry flour
sanding sugar or sugar crystals

Place pieces of butter in your food processor and process until creamy.
Then add the sugar, vanilla and salt and process to blend it together.
Finally, add the flour and process to a smooth dough.
Shape it into a ball and divide that in three. Roll each ball of dough into a 2″ wide log. You may need to pop the dough in the fridge if it gets too soft (nobody likes it when the log goes soft on you). Ahem. Slice cookies from log.
Lay cookies on a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and sprinkle with sanding sugar. Bake at 350F for about 20-25 minutes.
Voila! Look at you all fancy and French and shit. Go watch Marie Antoinette and eat them with wine.

Today, I’m linking up with Kate Says Stuff, The How To Mommy and Obviously Marvelous

There are those recipes for 11 layer cakes that wow a room full of friends or a seriously huge batch of stuffing with all the random stuff in it that makes your entire extended family reach for seconds on Thanksgiving, and those recipes are wonderful and certainty have a time and a place (you know, like a going away party or, um, Thanksgiving). But what about like, Wednesday night dinner?

Enter this recipe. This not only always pleases my crowd (all of them at once even!) but if you’re feeling lazy short on time, you can make the filling over a bed of rice for a no hassle, no dough involved meal and make them just as happy. Wee One #1 loves this so much he requests it for lunch on the regular, and I always have to make a separate ‘lunch batch’ because there are never any leftovers. Never.

Chicken Hot Pockets
1 batch pizza dough (or something similar) original recipe used a can of Grands biscuits
2 cups cup cooked chicken, chopped
2 cups condensed cream of chicken soup
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon dried onion, minced
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1/2 teaspoon rosemary
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon poultry seasoning

First, deal with the dough, however you choose to do that. Then heat your soup and add all the other ingredients to the pot.
However you make the dough, you’ll need to divide it up into individual amounts.
Then with a little flour (or parchment paper), roll out each pocket and fill with about 1/4 cup of filling.
Fold it up as carefully as you can and bake them seam side down for about 30 minutes at 375F.
Super simple, serious taste punch. I swear it’s the poultry seasoning + thyme combo combo, but really the overall combo of all the spices together with the chicken is a real winner.