Would you rather have the power to snap your fingers at any time and any place and produce fresh herbs OR eat as many doughnuts as often as you want without any negative health consequences (no calories, no fat, no cholesterol)?

Clarification:
doughnuts = any type of fried, sweetened dough including beignets, olie bollen, etc.

Like my good friend mav of port2port, I have been baking like crazy lately. In the past week alone, I made brownies, apple cake and tried a new recipe…Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars.

I am prone to great nostalgia and often love eating certain foods at traditional times. For our family, it is always roast beef and yorkshire pudding on Christmas Day. I love a delicious, gooey S’more on the 4th of July made over a campfire on the beach. Candy hearts at Valentine’s Day, candy corn at Halloween and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. For almost all of these holiday treats, I am happy eating them just once a year. However, I love the pumpkin pie flavors… nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves… and want more of them more of the time!

I tried pumpkin cookies and they weren’t very good. I meant to make pumpkin soup this fall when pumpkins were in season but time got away from me. So, when my neighbor gave me a year’s worth of old cooking magazines and told me that the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars were her new family favorite, I jumped.

Since I had a number of them in my cupboard, I replaced the chocolate chips in the original recipe with chopped Naga Exotic Candy Bars (dark milk chocolate, curry and coconut) from Vosges Haut-Chocolat . Also, I undercooked the bars slightly as I prefer gooey over cakey. Finally, you will need to use canned pumpkin this time of year but there are plenty out there without any additives.

For anyone who doesn’t live in the U.S., I have found that getting pumpkin abroad is quite difficult. I bet you could use almost any roasted and pureed squash. If you try it… let me know!

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars

(recipe adapted from Everyday Food)

If you had to eat only one type of ethnic cuisine (not American) for the rest of your life, which would you choose? This is breakfast, lunch dinner, drinks AND all snacks!

For the second year in a row, my husband has decided to make homemade Limoncello which will be ready just in time for the warm weather! Limoncello is a traditional, lemon-flavored, Italian liqueur that is often served ice cold before or after a meal. I am sure it also tastes delicious in champagne, served over fruit or with soda as is sometimes suggested but like a good scotch, I didn’t dare dilute it. Last summer, we just sipped a small glass on our back deck after dinner many nights, savoring every last drop. The bright, refreshing lemon flavor makes you feel like a warm, sunny day. It just tastes happy.

Good Limoncello takes 80 days to make. Vasili is the perfect type for such an undertaking as he is measured and patient. If it weren’t for him, I would never have enjoyed the intense flavor of a good Limoncello. I am the type that gets so excited about tasting something that I cut a corner out of every fresh baked good straight out of the oven even though it is too hot to truly taste and frequently burns my tongue. I just get so excited! If this weren’t his project, you can bet I would be cracking open the jar for tastes along the way and prematurly jumping to the next steps. So, he handles the liqueur making in our family and as I watched and photographed him meticulously preparing the lemons and carefully cutting off the strips of yellow rind, I could see it has become a labor of love.

Limoncello, Part 1
15 lemons
1 750ml bottles, 100 proof vodka (You’ll need a 2nd bottle for part 2)
1 gallon glass container with tight lid

Part 1:
Wash all of the lemons thoroughly being sure to scrub the skins to remove all wax, stamps and stickers. Pour the 750 ml bottle of vodka into the glass container. Peel or grate all of the skin off all of the lemons being careful only to retrieve the fragrant yellow zest, not the white layer underneath which is bitter. Drop all rind in the jar with the vodka. Tighten up the lid and put the glass container away in a cool, dark place for the next 40 days.

Get yours started this week and prepare to tune in for Part 2 in 40 days. We will all be barefoot and fancy free sipping delicious liqueur come spring! But for now, good night sweet Limoncello. Sleep tight.

When I was little my mom often made Jell-O pudding for dessert. Four steaming cups of chocolate, butterscotch or tapioca pudding, sometimes topped with a melting scoop of Hudsonville vanilla ice cream. It is safe to say that I didn’t even know that you could make pudding without the Jell-O box until adulthood. (aside… check out this site about the Jell-O museum and history - really funny)

Over time, I have grown to absolutely love all things pudding: cinnamony rice pudding with white raisins, soft bread puddings, corn pudding, yorkshire pudding, sweet tomato pudding with roast beef, big tapioca pudding…the list goes on. I have yet to meet a pudding I didn’t like. (I like saying that which is why I have never tried blood pudding because I fear it might be the first on my dislike list.)

Now is when I get real and fess up. On this blog, I am trying very hard to admit who I am and not pretend to be the ultimate Foodie that I want to be. Until last night, I had never made regular old chocolate or vanilla pudding from scratch. Partly, I continued to make Jell-O due to laziness. The microwave directions are just so easy. I also think that I had just not considered that I could make more delicious pudding from scratch. In my world, due to habit, homemade chocolate pudding was just off my radar.

The more I began to think about my bad pudding habit, the funnier it became that I had continued on for so long. For the past four years, I worked at Vosges Haut-Chocolat, a high-end chocolate company. And, if there is anything I am a food snob about, it is chocolate. Jell-O chocolate pudding was the last remaining low-brow chocolate in my life.

So, last night, I turned a corner. Thanks to starting Whipped, I am taking the time to follow my Foodie dreams. I took a basic pudding recipe out of the Joy of Cooking and adapted it to be more chocolatey and less sweet using only the best ingredients. And the result…. wow.
I am not turning back.
Song long Jell-O.

Grown-up Dark Chocolate Pudding

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Slowly stir in sugar and 1 3/4 cups milk and salt. Heat to slight boil. Dissolve cornstarch in 1/4 cup milk. Slowly stir the cornstarch mixture into the chocolate mixture. Cook over boiling water for 5-8 minutes stirring constantly until quite thick. Turn off heat and continue to stir. When slightly cool, stir in vanilla. Pour into 4 serving dishes and cool.

Lately, I have been hungry all the time and I have finally figured out why: Too many people around me are dieting. The January health kick-off craze has had an adverse affect on me… it is just making me want to eat bad things incessantly. I love food and think of it regularly but it has become a serious distraction. I can barely work for more than fifteen minutes without fighting the urge to break off yet another piece of chocolate from the bar stashed in my drawer. The gym is crowded with three times as many people, my yoga classes are so packed we are bumping arms and I overhear people everywhere giving a rundown of their diet plans. Perhaps as a way to balance out the universe, my mind has started encouraging me to eat enough potato chips for everyone!

I recently found the newest Hands On Gourmet newsletter in my inbox which always includes a letter from one of my favorite pals and chefs, Stephen Gibbs. Since I can’t say it better myself, I will tell you what he had to say:

It’s always a difficult thing to admit to yourself when a relationship just isn’t working out. You wake up one day after all those years with “the one” to discover that you never really knew that object of desire. Ohhhh, the long painful days suffering the loss of what you believed to be a perfect match, balanced chemistry, amore! Guilt drives you to desperately try to figure out what went wrong. But in the end, you know that you just have to walk the other way and give up on all of those silly diets, right?

P.S. I forgot to mention my resolutions: to be kinder to my fellow citizens and stop late night fridge raiding (That’s what keeps my britches tight.)

Thank you, Chef Stephen. I am with you and call for the end of diets and the beginning of committments to long-term, healthy, balanced lives. And, until everyone joins me on this bandwagon, I’ll be eating enough chips and chocolate for you all….

It is always a struggle for me to eat enough fruits and vegetables in the winter. Winter fruits seem like so much work to me. Oh how I miss berries, peaches and watermelon!!! I love bananas but I hardly consider them a fruit… they are just a staple.

A few days ago, I decided I better try to eat a healthy snack and found that I had one last grapefruit. The idea of cutting the sections and dealing with digging out the fruit made me grumpy. Then, I remembered having a baked grapefruit served to me once but had never thought to try it at home. The task of looking up a recipe and cooking directions also made me feel grumpy so I pulled out some of my favorite honey, lathered it up and baked it in the toaster oven. The result did NOT make me grumpy! Mmmm… the warm sections burst in my mouth, the tart fruit contrasting with the sweet bubbly honey on top. I nibbled a few sesame coated almonds in between bites which made the experience all the more sublime. Later, I read online that many baked grapefruit recipes include butter and cinnamon. Sounds delicious but the honey was divine.

Honey Baked Grapefruit

Cut the grapefruit in half and separate sections with a knife. Drizzle honey generously over the top of each section. Place on a cookie sheet and put in the oven at 350 degrees for about 10 minutes. Finish off with a little extra broil time to make the top bubbly.

One of my favorite pastimes is playing a little game called Would you rather… One simply poses two options and participants must chose their fate. I love spending hours disucssing inane things! Often late night at parties or during long car trips, I must admit that the game dips into an ugly place when the options become more like an episode of “what’s grosser than gross?” And, I must also admit that I love that game too.

Let’s start with a tame, food-related question for Whipped readers.
Would you rather give up cheese or chocolate for the rest of your life?