Shiny Cooking

Fairytale Gingerbread Cake

When I told Mom I was thinking of making gingerbread cake, she told me she wasn’t a fan. Which didn’t surprise me a bit. She’s very spice-averse, particularly the warm spices: cloves, nutmeg, ginger. (However, she doesn’t realize that in the past several years she’s become much more tolerant of them. Don’t tell her I told you!)

Yummy Black Bean Burgers

“Naw, I don’t need anything,” I said.

Linda and I were in Panini’s Deli, a sandwich shop right in the middle of the Discount Health Foods store. I’d link you but, you know, they’re too cool to have a website. We were eating the best sandwiches you can find in this godforsaken restaurant desert of a town, but that doesn’t do them justice. These sandwiches are the bomb, made with fresh, semi-trendy ingredients like red pepper alioli or basil pesto mayo, with several vegetarian sandwiches that — surprise! — aren’t all variations of “avocado, tomato and bean sprouts.”

Read more on Yummy Black Bean Burgers…

Hot Days and Cold Ginger Tea. Cold Like Your Heart.

Things are a bit out of sorts here at Casa Shiny Cooking. There’s been computer disaster, a late, somewhat lackluster garden, repetitive cooking, and a heat wave.

Through it all I’ve been documenting dishes with my trusty little Canon A75:

Foodbuzz 24×24: Don’t Get Chocolate on My Cards! Game Night Featuring Non-messy Finger Foods

Greetings and hello from the lovely planet Venus, where it’s cloudy and rains all the time. For our purposes, Venus is also known as Michigan.

For this month’s Foodbuzz 24×24 event, I hosted a Game Night — that’s with a capital G and N — and made oodles of easy-on-the-expensive-games snacks. I’m here to show you just how easy it is to have people over and serve amazing finger foods like tropical trail mix (above), asparagus frittata bites, blueberry-vanilla goat cheese on polenta dolce, cantonese roasted vegetables, and much, much more!

this earth day, stand up for science

Holidays aren’t big on this blog. You won’t see me doing a week of Easter recipes, mainly because I can’t be arsed to make dishes beforehand. However, I’d like to put in a word for today’s secular holiday, Earth Day.

Birthday Beignets, Anyone? A Whole Wheat Beignet Recipe

Sugar beets are a communal crop. It’s rare for one farmer to have both the specialized harvesting equipment and the manpower required to harvest all of his sugar beets by himself. It’s also a busy crop: as the beets are pulled from the ground by the mechanical harvester they are dumped into a truck driven alongside it in the field, and they need to be driven to the sugar plant ASAP. As a result, several farmers work together in the fall to get everyone’s sugar beet crop in on time.

photo of the day: seedsmen to the world

Morning tea in a retro mug. My grandfather sold Funk’s seed and I’d guess the mug’s about 40 years old. Filled with Earl Grey from a health food store in Frankenmuth that disconcertingly advertises “ear candles” quite loudly on its sign.

Dazed and Confused Sesame Peanut Stir Fry, with Bonus Babylon 5 Reference

Ever run into a recipe that is so easy and so tasty that you are dazed under its spell, obeying its command to make it again, and again, and again, until two weeks later you blink and say to yourself, “Damn, that was good.”

Step 1: Open a Bag of Fritos

In honor of Snowpocalypse 2011, try this quick to assemble Mexican-style dish made from ingredients that are probably already in your pantry. Makes a yummy Super Bowl treat too!

Do you ever read something, get entirely the wrong impression, and walk around carrying that impression, like a treasured memento or a nursed wound, for ages before realizing you were mistaken?

Ziploc Pancakes?

What happens when you ~~squeeze~~ fit all the leftover pancakes into one Ziploc container? You get branded pancakes, that’s what, in two senses of the word. Other than the branding, they’re pretty neat orange cloud pancakes from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook, aka The One I Yap About All The Time. I’d write it up, but, you know, I accidentally made them without the butter. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of a description of the butter-ful version of the pancakes, you know.