Pasta e Fagioli - Olive Garden style

Snow days.

Ah, how I love snow days. When I was little, snow days meant hours of reading Babysitters' Club, playing Oregon Trail, and maybe venturing out to throw some snowballs at my sister.

Now, snow days mean sleeping in, catching up, cleaning my house, baking bread, and fixing a big pot of soup.

Tomorrow is a snow day - I got a head start on the soup. :-)

I love Olive Garden's pasta e fagioli soup - it's kind of an Italian chili. This is seriously a perfect copy of that recipe. Love it!

Start by browning 1/2 lb Italian sausage and 1/2 lb ground beef.

Chop up some carrots, celery, onion, and garlic. You'll need about a cup of each veggie, and 2 cloves of garlic.

Toss these in the pot with the browned meat, and let them hang out for about 10 minutes. Good things will happen.

Pour in two 14-oz cans of diced tomatoes, one 15-oz can of tomato sauce, another 8-oz can of tomato sauce, 1/2 cup water, a tablespoon of vinegar, one can of great northern beans, and one can of red kidney beans.

Mix it all together and add one teaspoon each of basil and oregano, then half a teaspoon of thyme. Salt and pepper the soup, and let it groove (a.k.a. simmer) for about an hour.

About 10 minutes shy of the hour mark, boil some water and cook the pasta to go in the soup. The original recipe suggested ditali pasta, but HyVee didn't have any, so I just got some small shells. I used a 7 oz box.

Toss these in and stir to combine.

Mercy.

I happened to have some fresh parmesan on hand, so I grated some on top of the soup.

This is a perfect winter meal, and so easy to throw together!!

Here's the link to the original recipe.

Cookie Extravaganza!

This Christmas I made 10 dozen cookies.

Excessive, I know.

But I love giving cookies away, and I made 4 new recipes this year.

I made Pistachio Sandies (similar to Russian tea cakes or Mexican wedding cookies) - delicious!

I forgot to take a picture of these all dressed up with powdered sugar. But they were even better. :-) I included the recipe at the bottom of this post.

I made spicy molasses cookies (courtesy of The Pioneer Woman)

Also very tasty.

But then I made these.

Chocolate candy cane cookies.

Also from The Pioneer Woman.

These turned out to be beautiful. But not tasty.

The cookie kind of tasted like cardboard. But I really like the idea, so I might try to find a better chocolate cookie idea.

Pistachio Sandies

1 cup pistachios, skins removed

8 oz butter, softened

2 1/4 cup flour

1/3 cup powdered sugar

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp water

1 cup extra powdered sugar for dusting/rolling

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grind the pistachios into a course meal. Place butter into a large bowl and beat for 30 seconds. Add half the flour, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and water. Beat until blended and then add the rest of the flour. Stir in the nuts. Pinch off 1-inch pieces of dough and roll into balls. Place onto a cookie sheet and bake for 20-25 minutes. Allow to cool all the way and then dust with powdered sugar.

Lemon Butter Cookies

I have a cookie extravaganza post coming up, but I wanted to highlight this cookie.

It's light and crisp and fantastic.

I got this recipe from Sassy Radish, a cooking blog I've had been following lately.


I didn't take pictures of the dough process, so I'll just refer you to the above link. You have to let the dough rest overnight - I shaped mine into a long rectangle so I would have little square cookies. This was a great idea. :-)

After it's rested, brush it with an egg yolk and roll it in sugar until it's totally covered.

The more sugar, the better. Always.



Slice it up - this makes a lot of little cookies.


I got all 50 bazillion of them to fit on one cookie sheet, so that worked out well! Make sure you use parchment paper so they pop right off.

Aren't they cute?

They just need about 12 minutes in the oven, rotating them halfway through.

Lovely! You should most definitely make these at your earliest convenience!!

Caramel Pecan Brownies

Since I've been taking requests for treats lately, a friend requested caramel brownies.

I delivered.

And these are spectacular. I took the recipe from Bake at 350.

These aren't entirely homemade. But no one needs to know.

Mix together a box of german chocolate cake mix, 1/3 cup evaporated milk, and 3/4 cup melted butter.

Spread half of the mixture onto the bottom of a 9x13 pan. Bake for 6-8 minutes in a 350 degree oven. While it's baking, prepare the caramel mixture. I'll get to that in a second.

Sprinkle 1 cup of chocolate chips and 1/2 cup of chopped pecans over it.



Bliss. Pure bliss.




Unwrap a 14-oz package of caramels (this is crazy time-consuming....maybe enlist some help) and combine it over low heat with 1/3 cup evaporated milk.

Pour directly over the love happening in the pan.

Mercy.

Top with the rest of the brownie batter. It looks weird, but it's good to have little rivers of caramel flowing through the brownie.

Bake for another 15-20 minutes - the caramel will be bubbling, but you don't want it to burn.

It doesn't look nearly as weird when it's cut up. Wowza.

The layer of chocolate chips and pecans kick it up from delicious to ridiculous.

These brownies are ridiculous.

And totally worth it.

Peppermint Cheesecake

I've started taking requests.

I needed to break out of the things I usually make, so before a Christmas party I hosted, I asked some people what dessert they wanted.

Cheesecake it was.

I've only eaten cheesecake a couple times....I'm not a big fan, so making this was an adventure.

Start with some chocolate wafer cookies.



Grind these up into tiny crumbs and combine them with melted butter and sugar. Press them down and along the sides of a springform pan.

Do you see how close my laptop was to the pan? Probably not a good idea.



Mix up cream cheese, half and half, vanilla extract, peppermint extract, eggs until smooth and gorgeous. Stir in some crushed up peppermint candies (I used candy canes).

Pour the mixture over the crust in the springform pan and pop the pink cheesecake into the oven for about an hour and a half. This, by the way, is 45 minutes longer than the original recipe called for. Yikes.

When I pulled it out, it wasn't completely set, but I was tired of waiting on it, so I just hoped that it was good enough!

After spending the night in the fridge, it was perfectly set and ready for taste testing.

Delicious! This is a really great and easy cheesecake recipe that could really be tweaked and changed!

Peppermint Cheesecake

(serves 10)

Crust

1 9-ounce box chocolate wafer cookies

1/4 cup sugar

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted

Filling

2 lbs. cream cheese, room temperature

1 cup sugar

4 large eggs

1/4 cup half and half

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp peppermint extract

1/3 cup crushed peppermint candies

For the crust:

Wrap the outside of a springform pan with aluminum foil. Finely grind the cookies with sugar in a food processor. Add butter and press mixture onto bottom and up the sides of the pan. Refrigerate while preparing filling.

For the filling:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat cream cheese in large bowl until smooth. It is really important to start with room temperature cream cheese! Add sugar and beat until well blended. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating until blended after each addition. Beat in half and half, and then the extracts. Stir in candies and pour into pan.

Bake until filling is mostly set and the edges are puffed - this will probably take between an hour and an hour and a half.

Refrigerate overnight.

Decorated Christmas Cookies

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, I was inspired to bake some cookies. Not just any cookies.


Beautiful cookies. Decorated with royal icing. These are legit.

And the icing only require 4 ingredients (I added lemon extract, as well): powdered sugar, corn syrup, meringue powder, and water. I followed this recipe.

After sifting the powdered sugar....

You mix everything in a stand mixer (which I can do now!!). I forgot to take pictures of that. Whoops.

And I really thought I'd taken pictures of tinting the icing red and green and filling the piping bags. But I didn't! Oh well.

Moving on...outline your cookies with the royal icing (I used a #3 tip) and let that sit for at least 10 minutes so it could harden and create a space that I could fill with flood icing.

Create the flood icing by mixing water with the royal icing. I used another piping bag and filled it in with icing. I used a skewer to get it into the corners because I didn't have any toothpicks. I adore these snowflakes.

I did the same thing with these little trees.

The corn syrup in the icing makes them shiny!

Once the icing had mostly set up, I did something very sneaky.

I mixed together water and meringue powder to make a kind of glue, and I used a pastry brush to apply it to certain parts of the cookie. I put sprinkles all over it, and after I shook off the excess, which you can see at the end of the post. (Somehow my pictures got out of order!)

I did the same thing with the snowflakes - I love how they turned out!

I made dots on the ornaments, which I liked, but I'm not very good at outlining circles yet.

This one's just for you, Candice!! :-)

I found a girl cookie cutter, so I designed a few different outfits.

Here's the outcome of the "glue" on the tree cookies. :-)

This was my first time using piping bags and royal icing....you should try it!