cream cheese

Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts – Nance and Robyn make the same recipe

Posted on May 6, 2013 by admin

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post. The original recipe by Chef #844314 can be found over at Food.com

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was Nance’s choice, and I was like “We’re gonna stuff a chicken breast with what and then wrap it with what? Um, okay.”

“You two is some crazy, crazy bitches.”

At least the ingredient list was pretty short and simple. One of the things required was two pieces of partially cooked bacon for each chicken breast. Instead of frying up that bacon in a pan, I opted to keep the mess contained to the oven (note to self: clean the damn oven). I baked the bacon in the oven at 450ºF for 8 minutes. It was fairly thin bacon, so if you use thicker bacon, you’ll want to bake it longer.

Now please gaze upon the rest of the ingredients:

Boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cream cheese, and green onions. Pretty simple, right? Guess who has a back forty FILLED with chickens but still had to buy chicken breasts at the damn grocery store? I know, completely ridiculous.

My main gripe about buying chicken breasts from the grocery store is that they are SO FREAKIN’ HUGE. I mean, look at those monsters. Those damn things are just pumped full of hormones, I guarantee it. (I should have bought the organic, pastured-raised chicken breasts, but… I didn’t. Because HO BOY is that shit expensive.)

First step: pound the chicken breasts ’til they’re about 1/4″ thick. I put my chicken breasts in a Ziploc® bag, zipped it mostly closed, and then beat the hell out of that thing with a rolling pin ’til it was flattened enough.

See? No chicken goop everywhere. The chicken goop is contained, there’s no salmonella running rampant over my counters, all is good.

“Why you beat the chicken? Was it bein’ bad?”

Mix 2 T cream cheese and 1 T chopped green onions for each chicken breast, then spread it across the chicken breast as you can.

Then you’ve got to roll up your damn chicken breasts. I will confess to you that I didn’t so much carefully roll up each breast as KIND OF roll each breast up and then tucked in the ends.

Then I wrapped two pieces of bacon around each chicken breast and tucked the ends under, putting each piece of chicken on a baking sheet afterward. I did not, as was instructed by the original recipe, secure the bacon with a toothpick. I just figured tucking the bacon under would be good enough.

Then while the chicken baked, I went upstairs for some kitten therapy. This pounding and rolling and wrapping bacon thing is STRESSFUL.

The best kind of stress reliever.

The chicken cooked for 30 minutes, and then sat under the broiler for another 5 minutes to make the bacon crispy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the cream cheese did not, in fact, melt out of the rolled-up chicken breasts and go all over the place.

The verdict? Well, Fred said it was good and he’d never request it, but he’d eat it if it was put in front of him and wouldn’t complain.

The first bite I took, I thought “Hey, this is pretty good.” That lasted until about 1/3 of the way through the piece of chicken, and then it was suddenly gross. I didn’t really care for the cream cheese and green onion stuffing, I guess. Something about that, combined with the chicken was not appealing. I think that if it had been stuffed with something different it would have been good, but the way it was… ugh. No. I won’t be making it again.

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Nance’s take:

This is a picture of Felina Marie and Sadie Mae. AKA: The most hopeful dogs in the world. They love trying new DCEP recipes, but they have been put on a grain-free diet so our last few recipes have just made them sad. If you look closely at Felina (especially the eye to your right), you can see why I call her a googley-eyed ugly dog. Marty Feldman doesn’t have shit on her!

This is a picture of me. Shirley has a new camera and I was being a smart-ass, showing her how to take selfies and what you do if you’re a fat chick that wants to look thin (hold the camera up in the air and aim down). While I was making this chicken. Except I guess I don’t know how to do it right because I lost an eye. The reason I included these two pictures is so you can see that there was some messed up shit going on in this house. Poor deprived dogs. And a dummy that can’t fit her huge goddamn face into a camera frame. Things are not looking good around here. Not at all. And we won’t even mention how it looks like I broke my nose as a child. Or the fact that my real mother’s name was probably Barbra. Barbra Streisand.

This was supposed to be our dinner Friday night. Rick brought the chicken up from the freezer the night before and it thawed in the refrigerator over night. I could have shit when I got a good look at it. Freezer burn. What the fuck.

This was the only piece of meat that wasn’t entirely ruined (although we did have to cut a bit of it off). We put our meats, etc., in name-brand freezer bags in order to not waste food. This was an issue for a while now, but I had been on the fence about buying one of those fancypants FoodSaver™ (damn right that’s an affiliate link) things because of the cost of the bags.

You know what else is expensive? Meat (and any other food) that you’re throwing away. So yeah, I’m using my FoodSaver™ exclusively now. Those name-brand bags can be used in the canister that I keep by my sink for food scraps. Please note the pro-tip: God forbid, you might have to walk 3 feet to the garbage can with potato peels in your hands!

Okay, okay. I’ll get back to the topic at hand which is the making of this god-forsaken recipe that I picked and how I regretted it from the minute I actually took five seconds to read it. I have got to STOP just glancing at the recipes that I pick for this site! I honestly saw the pretty picture with the words bacon and chicken, figured that would make the family happy and went with it.

I had no green onions and there was a brouhaha in this house over whether or not chives are nothing more than dried green onions. It seems that Rick’s grandfather (who is a saint) told him this and homeboy was not backing down from that argument…even when google gave me ALL OF THE INTERNET to prove that he was wrong!

Them fools be fightin’ over chives and shit.

I still went with chives because there was no way I was running back into town for green onions in order to make ONE slightly freezer burned chicken breast with cream cheese and bacon.

You beat the meat, slather the cream cheese mixed with green onions (or chives, nobody really gives a shit) all over it, roll it up in partially cooked bacon and bake the hell out of it. And then when you’re done baking the hell out of it, you’re supposed to turn on your broiler and burn your damn bacon until it’s ash. Voila!

Rick and my mom tried it because they’re game for eating anything. Rick said it tasted like baked cream cheese. It was not a winner with him even with bacon. My mom liked it, but hey, she’s older and you know those taste buds are shot to shit.

This recipe was fairly simple to make, but so is a toasted cheese sandwich…stick with making one of those and you’ll be better off. And yes, the dogs did get some of the freezer burned meat after we cooked it for them. They didn’t mind it all. Go figure.

Bacon Wrapped, Cream Cheese Stuffed Chicken Breasts - Nance and Robyn make the same recipe

Prep time

15 mins

Cook time

35 mins

Total time

50 mins

: Entree

Cuisine: Trinidadian (but not Tobagonian)

Serves: 1

Ingredients

For each serving:
1 boneless, skinless chicken breast
1 T green onion, chopped
2 T cream cheese
2 pieces of bacon, partially cooked

Instructions

Partially cook your bacon - you can fry it in a pan, but it's easier to bake it in the oven, 8 - 10 minutes at 450ºF.
Pound your chicken breasts until they are approximately ¼" thick (using a large zip-close bag contains all the chicken goop).
Mix the cream cheese and green onions, and spread across one side of the chicken breast.
Roll up the chicken breast around the cream cheese mixture.
Wrap bacon around the chicken breast. You can use a toothpick to help keep the bacon on, but just tucking the ends under the chicken works as well.
Place on a baking sheet and bake for 30 minutes at 375ºF.
Broil for 5 minutes to help make bacon crispy.

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Light Alfredo Sauce

Posted on November 10, 2012 by Robyn

Okay, look. Before we get started, I KNOW there are going to be some connoisseurs out there who sniff indignantly at the idea of an Alfredo sauce that isn’t made with butter and cream and egg yolks and whatever the hell REAL Alfredo sauce is made of. This isn’t intended to be an indulgence that makes your arteries slam shut immediately upon consumption and which requires you to balance the rest of your week by eating nothing but salads and drinking water. This is a LIGHT Alfredo sauce, and it’s tasty enough that you will LIKE it (unless you’re a snob, that’s right I said it!) and it’s relatively light and healthy and won’t make a dent in your diet. Capisce?

It’s also incredibly simple (though you do have to use the blender/ food processor, and those things are a pain in the ass to drag out, and then a pain in the ass to clean, but it’s so worth it.)

Ingredients:

Skim milk (you could use 2% or whole), Neufchatel cheese (you could use regular cream cheese if you want), garlic, salt and pepper, and Parmesan cheese. The original recipe calls for parsley as well, but I hate parsley so we go without.

Throw everything in your blender.

Blend it ’til there are no clumps.

Pour into a saucepan over medium heat and cook for about 10 minutes, until the sauce thickens.

On a side note, I love that pan so very very much. Several years ago, Fred’s father and stepmother gave us a set of Scanpan pots and pans. They are absolutely awesome, and I’m not kidding when I say that I expect I’ll be cooking with those pots and pans for the rest of my life. In fact, if Fred up and leaves me for another woman, I am claiming custody of the Scanpan cookware.

(Which shouldn’t bother Fred anyway, because I’m sure that whore can’t cook.)

Anyway, a few months ago Fred’s father and stepmother got a new stove, one of those ones that boils water in 30 seconds and requires special pots and pans. Fred’s father called and asked if we wanted any of their Scanpan cookware. Fred jauntily replied “No, we’re good” and then hung up and told me what his father had asked.

You better bet your ass that he called his father back immediately and told him that he’d misspoken. One of the pieces we got from them was this deep pan (which we didn’t already have, because it wasn’t part of the set they gave us initially), and I love it so much that I’m thinking of marrying it. It is beyond awesome.

See? Getting thicker. (If you’re using parsley, you’d add most of it to the sauce at this point, and save some for garnish afterward.)

Meanwhile, prepare your meat. I always use this Alfredo sauce with shrimp and angel hair (because that’s the kind of pasta we always have on hand). If you’re using chicken, you can cook the chicken in the sauce, but with seafood you’ll want to cook it separately.

This is how thick I like my Alfredo sauce. I imagine you could keep going if you wanted it thicker. It’s all about personal preferences, y’know.

I cooked my angel hair and shrimp, tossed them together, and then added the Alfredo sauce and mixed.

Don’t be too impressed by my fancy serving dish. I always mix my stuff in a big plastic container because I know we’re going to have leftovers, and why dirty more dishes than I need to?

I use two pounds of shrimp and half a pound of angel hair with the Alfredo sauce, and it works out perfectly.

Light Alfredo Sauce

Prep time

2 mins

Cook time

10 mins

Total time

12 mins

Original Source/Author: Cooks.com

: Sauce

Serves: 6

Ingredients

½ c. cream cheese (I use Neufchatel)
1 c. milk (I use skim)
3 T freshly grated parmesan
1 clove garlic, minced or crushed
½ tsp each salt & pepper
3 T dry parsley or ½ c. fresh (I hate parsley, so we leave this out)

Instructions

Put cream cheese, milk, Parmesan, garlic, salt and pepper in blender; blend until there are no clumps. Pour into saucepan on medium heat, cook for about 10 minutes (stirring every couple of minutes). While cooking, add parsley (if fresh, chop finely) and save some for the garnish (or leave it out completely.)
Cook your favorite pasta. Pour desired amount of Alfredo sauce over pasta. Cook selected meat in sauce to absorb flavor; if using seafood, use a different pan and then add over pasta before adding Alfredo sauce.

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Laura’s Unbelievable Chicken & Pasta – Nance & Robyn make the same recipe.

Posted on October 30, 2012 by admin

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Laura’s Unbelievable Chicken and Pasta, found over at BookCooking.net. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice. I’d love to tell y’all where I found it, but once again I don’t remember. Pinterest, maybe? In any case, I’ve always got my eye out for quick and easy chicken recipes because we raise (and eat) our own chickens. The only kind of recipes that get me more excited than chicken-based recipes are egg-based recipes. I love eggs, and we eat tons of them (and my cholesterol is so good my doctor looks at me like I’m lying when I tell her how many eggs I eat on a weekly basis).

The ingredients:

Chicken, cut into 1-inch strips. The recipe calls for 4 chicken breast halves, but I used 6 because our chickens are smaller than the factory-raised chicken you get in the store. Chicken broth (which I canned myself), cream cheese (I used neufchatel), spinach, penne pasta, and cherry (Sungold) tomatoes from our garden. Those tomato plants just kept hanging in there. I think they’re about done for (it’s starting to get down into the high 30s at night), but it still amazes me that they last so far into October.

Cook your penne pasta according to package instructions.

Do you know about putting a wooden spoon across the top of the pot to stop the water from boiling over? Someone told me about it (I don’t remember who), and it works like a charm.

Meanwhile, in a big pan over medium heat, cook your chicken in your broth for about 10 minutes, until it’s done. I’m not one for fancy-bitch cooking terms, but I believe this is called “poaching” your chicken (but I could be wrong.)

Not quite done, but it’s getting there:

Stir in your cream cheese (which you cubed, if you were following instructions. I didn’t actually do that; I just tossed the whole block in there. It’s soft; it melted quickly enough. If I’d had to cube that stuff before adding it to the pan, I would have gotten it all over the place and then the obscenities would have started and probably I would have told the cream cheese to go fuck itself.) and your spinach. Stir. Return it to a simmer and cook for about five minutes, stirring now and again.

Then stir in your cherry tomatoes and cook another three minutes. Mix it together with the pasta, then throw it in a bowl and then eat.

Offer some to Petey Pickle.

“Really? NOW you offer some to me? Where were you when I was HUNGRY for just plain old cream cheese and you were tossing it in the pan? Fuck off, lady.”

The verdict? WAY too much pasta. I like pasta as much as the next gal, but how about some freakin’ protein up in this shit? I’ll probably make it again, only I’ll double the amount of chicken and halve the amount of pasta, if not quarter it. And double the number of cherry tomatoes.

I liked the cheesiness of the sauce, though, and we ate it for dinner for two nights, and then I had it for lunch one day. Definitely needs some tweaking, though.

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Nance’s Take:

Truth Game: I was in no mood to cook when I made this recipe. Everyone was talking about Hurricane Sandy and I managed to let it work my last nerve. I’m from Pittsburgh and although we do not have to deal with hurricanes, it was reported that we were going to have high winds with rain and possible snow. After having experienced the power outage and storm damage from this summer, I decided that this time I was going to be prepared.

Being prepared did not mean making a stupid penne pasta dish. I had shit to round up like candles, flashlights and battery operated radios. And I needed to make sure my iPod was filled with new podcasts! Priorities, people. Priorities. Penne pasta? Not so much on my list of things to do. And to make matters worse, I had company that was all up in my business (more on that later).

I had purchased all the ingredients ahead of time so I would be prepared to make this dish. I was annoyed when I saw cherry tomatoes as one of the ingredients because we all know how well that turned out the last time we had them. When I finally went to cook this dish I realized I was suppose to have had the spinach thawed ahead of time. Dammit!

This is me performing WWT (Warm Water Thawing). It’s a technique I perfected years ago and no housewife worth her salt should go without learning how to do this. Hee!

Diced chicken being cooked in chicken broth is kinda gross.

I threw my spinach in before the cream cheese had finished melting. I don’t know if I was supposed to do that or not, but my company was being a wee bit demanding and I couldn’t really focus on the recipe.

Thanks to my mom for cutting those damn cherry tomatoes for me! Shirley is the shits!

Make sure you have a big pasta bowl ready because the recipe calls for the entire box and GODDAMN, that’s a whole lotta pasta!

Action shot! I’m sure my company thought I was crazy when they saw me struggling to pour this mess while taking a photograph at the same time. But you know what? I’m just going to say it. I did not, nor do I ever, care about what these particular kitchen guests think of me because I am sick and tired of the way that they judge. Yeah. I said it.

Dump it. And give it a good stir to mix everything up. I think I cooked the cherry tomatoes too much because it appears they may have exploded. Oh well.

Done. The recipe was easy and very forgiving. Everybody loved it, except my company…

The ladies had just come from church and they were busy judging me harshly. From the clothes I was wearing to the food that I cooked. They actually turned up their noses and sniffed at me!

And this one, HA! The biggest hypocrite of all…thinking I wouldn’t notice that she had helped herself to extra communion wafers while no one was looking. I wonder what the church will think of her when they find out, hmmm. Me thinks that maybe Miss Judgy McJudgypants should watch her step around me or I will be glad to point the local parish to this site.

Don’t push your luck, Sister. Don’t push your luck.

Laura's Unbelievable Chicken & Pasta - Nance & Robyn make the same recipe.

Prep time

10 mins

Cook time

20 mins

Total time

30 mins

Original Source/Author: bookcooking.net

: Entree

Serves: 4-6

Ingredients

4 (6 ounce) skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - cut into 1 inch strips
1 (14.5 ounce) can chicken broth
1 (10 ounce) package frozen spinach, thawed and drained
1 (8 ounce) package cold cream cheese, cubed
10 cherry tomatoes, halved
1 (16 ounce) package dry penne pasta

Instructions

Bring large pot of water to a boil, and cook penne pasta according to package instructions.
In a large skillet over medium heat, cook chicken strips in broth; simmer until done, about 10 minutes. Stir in cubed cream cheese and spinach. Return to simmer, and cook about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Stir in cherry tomatoes, and cook about 3 minutes more.
In a large bowl, mix together cooked, drained pasta and sauce. Let stand a few minutes before serving.

Notes

Next time I make it, I'll double the amount of chicken and cherry tomatoes, and at least halve - if not quarter - the amount of pasta. (Robyn)

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Blueberry-Cream Cheese Hand Pies – Nance & Robyn make the same recipe.

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Robyn

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Blueberry-Cream Cheese Hand Pies, found over at Martha Stewart. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice. I think I saw it in Martha Stewart Food magazine, and ripped it out with the intention of making it someday. When we drive up into Tennessee, we stop at this little store run by a Mennonite woman, and she sells hand pies that are really good. I’ve been saying, for years, that I needed to try to make some -only, hers are fried in oil and I wanted to make them baked – so when I saw this recipe, I was all over it.

First things first: there’s no way on this planet that I’m going to make my own pie dough. I’ve attempted (and fucked up) making pie dough 63 (slight exaggeration) times, and when I can buy the same thing at the store and same myself the heartache, I am all over that.

So, the ingredients:

Store bought pie dough, sugar, flour, cream cheese, lemon juice, egg, 10 ounces of frozen blueberries. That Spice Islands jar with the label falling off is lemon peel. Shut up – Martha didn’t say it had to be fresh, did she? NO SHE DID NOT.

Dump the (room temperature) cream cheese, lemon zest, sugar, and egg in a bowl and then stir it together. I used my hand mixer so as not to exert one iota more of effort than absolutely required.

In another bowl, mix together blueberries, sugar, lemon juice, and flour. I used a rubber spatula because I’m fancy like that.

With your fillings ready to go, roll out your pie dough onto a sheet of parchment paper. Then cut it (the pie dough, not the parchment paper) into quarters.

Put one heaping Tablespoon of the cream cheese stuff in the middle of each quarter, and then two Tablespoons of the blueberries on top of that.

Brush the edges of each quarter of dough with cream, and then fold the sides of the dough over the filling to make a triangle. “Crimp the edges” of the dough, says Martha. I don’t know what that means, exactly, so I went around the edges with a fork and mooshed them together. Then brush the tops of the pies with cream.

And sprinkle them with sanding sugar. I didn’t have anything called “sanding sugar” and I didn’t want to go searching for it at the grocery store, so I used what I had, which was Turbinado sugar. Sugar’s sugar, right? Right. Don’t try to tell me any different. SUGAR is SUGAR.

See that pie second from the left, with the blueberry filling oozing out? That’s right around the time I started calling Martha Stewart names. The second pan of pies was even more oozy (due to the blueberries thawing, I’m sure), so I threw them together as quickly as I could, remembered at the last moment to cut a slit in the top of each pie, and then put them in the oven.

Yeah, blueberry shit oozed out, but it certainly could have been worse.

And the verdict? Fred didn’t like them – he’s not crazy about cream cheese filling in stuff. I was kind of meh on them – the crust was good, but there was something about the filling I didn’t like. It took me a few bites to figure it out, but I finally realized that it was probably the lemon peel. It had a nasty bitter aftertaste (I blame Martha for not insisting I use fresh lemon zest) and so the pigs got most of the hand pies.

I’m planning to make these again, but I’m not using cream cheese and will probably use something like store made pie filling. Fred loves all things cherry, so I’ll maybe make a batch of cherry hand pies. It was worth trying, just to see that the process of making baked hand pies wasn’t all that difficult. As always, the pigs thought they were superawesomefantabulous and would like more, please.

“GIVE MORE PIE PLEEZE.”

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Nance’s Take:

I went to the store because I needed a lemon for this freaking recipe. A LEMON. $84 later, I have a lemon. Man, this is why I hate to go to the grocery store. Note: Gourmet Basil up there is that stuff that comes in a tube and lasts forever. I bought it because I can’t keep a basil plant alive for some reason. Look at me justifying, whee!

I took the easy way out and bought ready made pie crust because I was in NO MOOD to be making blueberry pies. In fact, I will never be in the mood to make blueberry pies because blueberries should only be in a recipe that is called BLUEBERRY MUFFINS. Served cold with butter. Because I am a fat fatty and dammit that is some good shit right there. I just want y’all to know that this hand held pie business is suspect. I don’t trust it. Because it’s not a muffin. Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

Parchment paper? Oh, Martha. you goddamn rich whore! I hate it when I have to break out the parchment paper because it’s so expensive and just because I spent $84 at the grocery store that does not mean that I want to be using up all my precious goddamn paper on blueberry pies! I’ve had this box for over a year now because I AM THRIFTY, dammit (and y’all can just hush about my thrifty $84 receipt up there).

See me, saving myself from a heart attack by eating less fat. And also, I did the whole Splenda® replacement thing when it came to the sugar in the recipe. Except for the sanding sugar because I had no choice. After I found out what the hell sanding sugar was thanks to Google. Can I just say that if you’re walking around talking about sanding sugar I’m gonna be rolling my eyes at you. I totally will do it because I’ll think you are a pretentious asshole who sands with her sugar and talks about it. It’s just too much for my brain to handle. And no, I am not drunk.

This right here is a zester. Or at least I think that’s what it is called. I know you have got to be impressed that I have this in my kitchen. And jealous. Because the other side actually measures whatever the hell you’re zesting.

Except it didn’t work for shit and I had to give up and just guesstimated the amount of zested lemon I put in it.

I’m not even sure what the reason is for lemon when working with berries. All I know is that this had better not make my cream cheese too crunchy.

This is how I measured my lemon juice. I squeezed both halves and called it perfect. I’m sure Martha would have a stroke. Speaking of Martha, don’t tell anybody but I really like her. I’ll never do any of her dumb crafts and shit, but I figure she can’t be all bad if she has a bunch of animals and a clean house. And I think she’s more than a little uptight. That’s my kinda gal right there!

Why is whipping cream so expensive? $1.99 for a pint. And I only needed two tablespoons of it. Sigh.

I may have put too much zest in this. I’m hoping nobody notices. And also, I was on pain killers at the time and had to ask my mom how she would “quarter” the pie crust. It was just too much thinking for me. We finally figured it out when I noticed that the recipe says it makes 8. PATHETIC.

This is where I started to wonder if Robyn actually took the time to measure her berries. She’s such a goody-two-shoes that I bet she did.

Man hands trying to fold the pie dough over while taking a picture with the other hand.

This got tedious real fast.

Childish people take the time to twitter their complaints so the whole world knows their pain. Wah, wah, wah.

Crimped?

Coated with heavy cream and sanded with sanding sugar (insert eyeroll here).

This is what they looked like when they came out of the oven. They kind of reminded me of Pop Tarts.

A close-up look at them. I actually did do the right thing and let them cool before eating. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t really great either. They were just meh. Or it could be my issues with blueberry segregation. I probably (most likely) will never make these again. Just because it’s such a bother and it’s putting blueberries where they should not be.

Please note: This does not mean in any way that there will not be fried pies in our future. I am determined to make them because hello, FRIED PIES!

Blueberry-Cream Cheese Hand Pies - Nance & Robyn make the same recipe.

Prep time

1 hour

Cook time

25 mins

Total time

1 hour 25 mins

Original Source/Author: Martha Frickin' Stewart

: dessert, snack

Serves: 8

Ingredients

8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
¾ cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons lemon zest, plus 1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 large egg
10 ounces frozen blueberries
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Pie Dough, each disk rolled ⅛ inch thick
2 tablespoons heavy cream
1 tablespoon sanding sugar

Instructions

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Stir together cream cheese, ½ cup granulated sugar, lemon zest, and egg until smooth. Toss blueberries with ¼ cup granulated sugar, lemon juice, and flour.
Lay 1 dough round on a parchment-lined baking sheet and cut into quarters. Spoon 1 heaping tablespoon cream cheese mixture into center of each quarter. Spoon 2 tablespoons blueberry mixture on top. Brush edges with cream and bring opposite corners together to form triangles; trim if needed. Crimp edges to seal, brush tops with cream, and sprinkle with sanding sugar. Repeat with remaining dough round and fillings. Cut a small vent in each pie and bake until golden, 20 to 25 minutes, rotating sheets halfway through. Let cool completely on wire racks before serving.

Notes

The pie dough recipe is here: http://www.marthastewart.com/900624/pie-dough , but buy the already-made stuff at the store and save yourself the heartache.

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Strawberry Jelly Roll – Robyn & Nance try the same recipe

Posted on April 30, 2012 by admin

Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Family Circle’s Strawberry Jelly Roll found over at Recipe.com. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was Nance’s choice, and when I saw what it was, I was like “Yes, please!” I’ve never made any kind of Jelly Roll, and rolling up a cake seems like a life skill that would come in handy. I won’t deny, I was a bit nervous because I was sure I’d mess it up, but I was willing to give it a try!

Ingredients for the cake:

Egg whites, cream of tartar, granulated sugar, vegetable oil, vanilla, and cake flour (don’t be jealous of my fancy label. Hey, at least this one’s not written with a Sharpie on masking tape!)

Dump your egg whites and cream of tartar in a mixing bowl, and beat until foamy. Then add 1/4 cup of sugar (NOT the entire 3/4 cup, which I very nearly did because I can never manage to pay attention to anything I’m doing for more than 10 seconds) and beat until soft peaks form.

Do not be mistaken that this is going to be the quick and easy part of the recipe. I had to keep stopping the mixer to check for soft peaks, then start the mixer again, stop it a few minutes later to check, etc. When I hit the “I’m pretty sure I fucked this up and I am NEVER going to get soft peaks” stage, soft peaks finally formed.

ABOUT TIME.

Now here’s the part of the recipe that I refused to take pictures of. You’re supposed to use a jelly roll pan (10×15 inches), but I do not have a jelly roll pan, and I wasn’t about to go out and buy one. I whipped out the measuring tape and started measuring pans, and found that we had an old roasting pan the right size. So I used that, only it looks like complete and utter shit, so I’m not EVEN going to let y’all see it.

You have to spray the bottom of your jelly roll pan (or whatever kind of pan you’re using) with cooking spray, then cut waxed paper to the size of your pan, put that on the bottom, and spray THAT “lightly” with cooking spray. Here’s a tip from me to you: spray the hell out of that waxed paper or it’s going to stick to your cake. More on that in a minute.

Cook the cake for 12 minutes, then remove from the oven. Run a knife around the outside of the cake. Sprinkle 3 T of confectioner’s sugar over the cake, cover it with a clean dishtowel, cover THAT with a “slightly larger” pan (I used a cookie sheet) and flip the whole mess over. I managed it and I’m a klutz, so you should have no problems with that.

Then you’re supposed to remove the pan and the waxed paper. Except that my waxed paper stuck to the cake, and it did a good job of looking like it was PART of the cake, so I had a hell of a time getting all the waxed paper off. I think you can imagine how I did not swear at ALL.

I finally decided that since it was just Fred and I eating the cake, I wasn’t going to stress too much over whether I’d removed all the waxed paper. Obviously if I were bringing it to a party or something I would have been more careful, but in the end I think I only left a few shreds behind.

Once you get the waxed paper off the top (formerly the bottom) of the cake, start at the short end and roll up the cake. I thought for sure this was going to be where I ended up fucking it up, but it rolled up just fine. I left it seam side down on a wire rack, and wandered off to do other things while it cooled.

When the cake is completely cool, you mix up the filling. Ingredients:

Strawberry jam (from the pantry, made and canned by me, thus the fancy label), sour cream, room temperature strawberry cream cheese (I took it out of the fridge and left it on the counter once the cake was out of the oven), and chopped strawberries.

Dump the jam, sour cream, and cream cheese in a bowl, and mix it together well. Stir in the strawberries (which I chopped up in my onion chopper), then spread it on the cake, leaving about a 1/2 inch border on all sides (which I kind of didn’t).

Roll it back up, put it in the fridge for at least an hour, and then it’s ready to serve (or to stay in the refrigerator).

The verdict? It was… good. I have a serious sweet tooth, though, so I would have liked the filling to be sweeter. Fred thought it was okay, but thought a filling of whipped cream and chopped strawberries would have been better.

I probably won’t make this exact recipe again, but I can just about guarantee that I’m going to make the cake and mess around with different fillings. Maybe whipped cream, toasted almonds and… some kind of chocolate?

Even though I wasn’t super crazy about the cake, it’s nice to know that I can roll up a cake if I need to. You never know when there’ll be a cake-rolling emergency, and now you know who to call!

*******************************************************************************************************************

Nance’s take: I have no idea why I picked this recipe. There were a lot of things about it that annoyed me, but I had no idea because that would have involved me actually reading the recipe before choosing it. What? Do you think I actually research this shit? Hell, no! Robyn’s a tyrant (not to be confused with Dooce’s butler/assistant/whatever) about getting these recipes on the schedule. Don’t let that nicey-nice save all the kitty-cats in the world bullshit fool you, man. Y’all just don’t know.

The first thing that annoyed me. I hate depending on this stuff. I just don’t trust it even if it has been years since I’ve had a non-stick fail.

And then this annoyed me because I needed 8 egg whites and what the hell am I supposed to do with 8 leftover egg yolks? I don’t like wasting food and this could send a person like me right over the edge. What do you guys do with the egg yolks when you have a recipe that calls for only the whites? I will tell you that I actually stood in my kitchen and scrambled these bitches up for my dogs. And then I felt guilty. Not because I was standing there cooking food for my dogs, but because I was giving them yolks and everybody knows that the yolks are the bad part of the eggs and OHMYHELL, I may have just played a part in killing Fifi!

See that little hole in the cream of tartar jar? I needed 1/2 teaspoon and my 1/2 teaspoon measuring spoon wouldn’t fit in that little hole. I was so disgusted that I just dumped it out until my 1/2 teaspoon spoon was filled up. Oh yes, I DID! And it felt good. That’s what being an adult is all about. My mother couldn’t yell at me because I was all, “Shut the hell up, Shirley. I’m a grown ass woman who can waste all the Cream of Tartar she wants, dammit!” And that’s exactly what I did…while fretting over egg yolks at the same time. Just hush. The crazy train has already left the station.

I have no idea what soft peaks mean. Seriously. It’s all soft to me because what the hell, it’s egg whites. I just quit when it looks like this. Y’all can explain the difference to me in the comment section (and don’t forget to include what you do with your leftover egg yolks).

While my egg whites were soft peaking (or over peaking) I read the rest of the recipe that mentioned the fact that I needed to beat some other stuff together. I lost count of how many times I’ve been annoyed so far. Trust me when I say that I was pissed that I had to go find my other mixer (since the KitchenAid was busy with the egg whites).

I started out by folding my egg whites into the flour mixture as instructed, but then I decided to throw caution to the wind and just tossed this whole mess into the big bowl of egg whites and folded it all together.

This is me dumping the whole mess into my jelly roll pan (which is really only a big cookie sheet). No, I am not anal like Robyn. I do not own a jelly roll pan (that I know of) and I sure as hell didn’t go measuring any pans to see if I had a match. I decided to play the game called close enough and hoped for the best!

Please note how I work in a neat and tidy area, putting everything away and cleaning up after myself as I go. Ahem.

This is what it looked like when it came out of the oven.

This is what it looked like when I inverted the whole mess. Didn’t stick. Didn’t break. I called that a win.

I don’t have a fancy dish towel like Robyn had to wrap mine in. I just had an old flour sack towel that Shirley hates with a passion because it’s too big for drying dishes and I refused to cut them. Good thing I put my foot down, huh?

After it was cooled and un-rolled. I noticed those cracks on the right and figured it was a disaster. Then I decided that the filling would cover it and focused my fretting on whether or not the cake part would be stuck to the towel.

The filling. I could have just ate that with a spoon and called it a day, but I had an obligation.

This was what it looked like when it was rolled up. I didn’t trim the edge like it said to because I didn’t want to waste any of it. Okay, that’s an outright lie. I didn’t trim it because I skimmed the recipe (too many words!) and only noticed the trimming when I saw that Robyn trimmed her edges (much nicer picture, huh?) and read the recipe before uploading.

It was pretty good and everyone here in the house liked it, but I would have preferred more cream cheese to give the filling more creamy thickness (fat fatties unite!). The cake itself was good and relatively fool-proof (if I can do it, anyone can) so I agree with Robyn that it would probably be a good base to use with just about any type of filling you could imagine. All in all, I would do this recipe again and that’s saying something considering how annoyed I was with it. Heh.

Strawberry Jelly Roll - Robyn & Nance try the same recipe

Original Source/Author: Family Circle found at Recipe.com

: Dessert

Ingredients

8 egg whites
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
¾ cup granulated sugar
¼ cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
¾ cup sifted self-rising cake flour
3 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
Filling:
1 container (8 ounces) strawberry-flavor cream cheese, at room temperature
¼ cup sour cream
¼ cup strawberry jam
1-1/2 cups chopped strawberries (about 1-pint basket)
Garnish:
Confectioners' sugar
Strawberries, sliced and fanned (optional)

Instructions

Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Coat 15 x 10-inch jelly-roll pan with nonstick vegetable-oil cooking spray. Line bottom of pan with waxed paper; lightly coat waxed paper with cooking spray.
Cake: Beat egg whites and cream of tartar in large bowl until foamy. Gradually add ¼ cup granulated sugar and beat until soft peaks form.
Beat together oil and remaining granulated sugar in second large bowl until well mixed, about 1 minute. Beat in vanilla.
Stir cake flour into oil mixture. Gently fold in a quarter of the egg whites until completely blended, then gently fold in remaining egg whites. Spread the batter evenly with a spatula in the prepared pan.
Bake in 375 degrees F oven for about 12 minutes or until top is very lightly browned and springs back when lightly touched.
Run knife around edge of cake to loosen. Sprinkle top with 3 tablespoons confectioners' sugar. Cover with clean kitchen towel. Top with slightly larger baking sheet; invert. Remove pan, then waxed paper. Starting at shorter end, roll up cake in towel. Cool completely, seam side down, on wire rack.
Filling: Stir together cream cheese, sour cream and strawberry jam in medium-size bowl. Gently fold in strawberries.
Assemble: Unroll cake. Spread cream cheese mixture over cake, leaving ½-inch border all around edges of cake. Carefully re-roll cake. Refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
To serve: Place cake, seam side down, on serving platter. Trim ends of cake. To garnish, sprinkle roll evenly with confectioners' sugar. Fan thin strawberry slices down center of cake, if desired.

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