We were in San Francisco last week and saw the following sign in a store window:

Yes, it was a cheese grater store.

Or, perhaps, with the box.

You may have seen all of the crazy “out of the box” cooking we did earlier this month as a part of the daring cooks.  It was a ton of fun, but the truth is, sometimes I want to do something easy that doesn’t require a ton of work on my part.

The other night, I really wanted some sort of freshly baked dessert, but didn’t want to spend a lot of time making something or get a ton of things dirty.

My solution?

Yes, that’s right.  I went for a boxed baked good.  And while this is something I typically don’t do, there are times that it’s really nice to just whip something up (50 strokes doesn’t take too long), bake, and devour.  And that is exactly what I did.  After all, don’t these look tasty?

Yum!

And just so you don’t think we went completely crazy with our meals, dinner was a prosciutto-wrapped fish on a wilted spinach salad with a side of sauteed green beans.

Over the weekend, I decided that I wanted to make a vegetable soup to share with a group of friends who were coming over around dinnertime.  I looked through my fridge, and wound up throwing a bunch of chopped veggies (broccoli, corn, garbanzo beans, potatoes and sauteed onions) into a crock pot.  After adding chicken broth, salt, and pepper (both black and white), I left it for a while to stir.

When I came back to try it later, it was bland.

Now, from me, this is saying a lot.  I grew up in a household where we didn’t really spice our food, and D has been trying to get me to appreciate higher levels of spice.  But this soup was… just not that exciting.  And the worst part was, I now had 9 hungry people at my house.

So, I threw open my trust spice cabinet, and grabbed the first thing I saw.  Maharajah seasoning.  It smelled decent, so I put a bit into the crock pot and stirred it in.

Suddenly, the soup was amazing!  I kid you not!  It had an Indian flavor without being overpowering, and I barely had enough left over for lunch the next day!

Now I know that the next time my food isn’t coming out the way I would like, I should head for the Indian section of my spice cabinet.

We had a quick dinner of stuffed peppers last week, and I thought I’d share!  These took about 25 minutes to prep, and another 30 minutes in the oven.  Plus, cleanup was super easy!

The peppers, hollowed out, and the vegetables for the filling (eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, and a spicy pepper).

Blanch the peppers, and cook up about 1c (final) of rice, couscous, or quinoa.

Saute the vegetables, then mix in with the quinoa.

Stuff the filling into the peppers, top with cheese and breadcrumbs, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

Delicious!

Some (like me) are learning how to like spicy food.  But, that doesn’t mean that we don’t use spices!  Back when we got married, my cousin got us a “Spicy Wedding” package, which included a lot of traditional wedding spices.  Ultimately, she got us hooked on mail-order spices.  We started out small – bulk orders of salt and pepper.  Monday night, however, we realized that we were running low on a lot of our spices, and that it made more sense to order them through Penzey’s rather than go to the supermarket.  The S/H costs were a bit higher than I would have liked, but we placed the order late Monday night, and they were waiting on our doorstep Wednesday afternoon.  That’s a pretty awesome turnaround time!

Anyways, here’s what’s spicing up our kitchen these days.  =]

In the jars (from left to right): cardamom, fennel seed, dill weed (ew, but D likes dill), nutmeg (perfect as it starts to get colder), and celery seed.

In bags (and yes, we will go through these): cumin seed, rosemary, white peppercorn (it’s going in our small salt shaker.  The big salt shaker was a Christmas gift, and we still have 2/3 to 3/4 of the salt from the original batch in the container), coriander, and oregano.

Let the delicious cooking begin!

I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason I’m in love with all forms of dough. Bread dough, cookie dough, pie crust dough, pastry dough, cooked dough, uncooked dough, whatever. You name it, I’ll eat it.

It took me quite a while to find a recipe for pizza crust dough that I really like, though — best part is that it’s super easy!

I modified this recipe slightly from the Cooking for Geeks cookbook I got for Christmas, and I give it mad props. Apparently the secret to a good pizza crust is a lot of yeast!