Scallop Dinner

So I didn't post much last week because I didn't actually take very many pictures of food. But I found random pictures of one night's dinner on my camera so I'm going to put them up while I'm here! We had scallops sauteed in butter and lemon juice, mashed potatoes, and zucchini sauteed with parsley and thyme.

This is not the best picture of the scallops, but the others unfortunately are really blurry.

Cake Balls

I read about cake balls on Bakerella (which is amazing) and I wanted to try them. I was kind of pressed for time after making the oreo truffles, though, so I used canned icing and a cake mix for the cake. This pretty much means I have to make it again to do it from scratch.

I wanted to make carrot cake balls, but I only had baker's chocolate to make the outer shell, and I thought chocolate carrot cake would be weird. I planned to use vanilla instead and had even found some vanilla coating wafers online, but when I called Whole Foods to see if they carried them, I just confused the person I talked to ("I'm looking for melting chocolate...but vanilla?") so I gave up on that plan.

Instead, I decided to use banana cake for the center, and finish off the semisweet chocolate I had used for my oreo truffles.

Since I was rushing a little to get them done, I stuck the cake in the freezer to cool it before I crumbled it. In this picture, I'm about to mix it with canned cream cheese icing.

Little balls of cake! I don't think you can tell from the picture, but they're actually a lot bigger than the oreo truffles. I put them in the freezer for a while because the cake tends to fall apart when you dip it in chocolate unless it's frozen together.

Finished product! Sprinkles are so much fun.

And the inside.

Oreo Truffles

Last week I made oreo truffles! There's a basic recipe on the Kraft Foods website, which I used with some modification on the toppings.

We don't have a food processor, so I had to crush the oreos in a ziplock bag. I did them in batches and it took forever because I was trying to get them to crush really finely (I'm not sure now necessary this is, but I wanted them to have a nice texture). By the end, I had set the bag on the floor of the kitchen and was alternately jumping on it and beating it with a wooden spoon. Hopefully the people in 2W weren't home.

Oreos mixed with cream cheese. It's basically a delicious blob of chocolate.

The blob turned into 30 little chocolate balls.

Then I dipped them in melted baking chocolate and decorated the tops. For some reason, I don't have a good picture of the final product, but they were very attractive truffles if I do say so myself. I had a lot of fun decorating them with chocolate drizzle or oreo crumble or coconut.

I want to make this again, but I'm going to find someone with a food processor first. 

Zucchini Saute

Last night's dinner was zucchini saute! I made this before, but it didn't turn out as well because I tried to cook the rice in with everything else and it ended up getting a little burned on the bottom. We have a rice cooker now though, and I used enough veggies to fill the pan, so I did them separately and it worked a lot better.

This little machine is a wonderful invention. Apparently we have two of them. How do we have two rice cookers and no baking sheets??

 

We also have two saute pans without lids, so I used one as a lid for the other. 

Veggies are the best. These are zucchini, orange bell peppers, tomato, and onion.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies

These cookies don't need to be baked and require only seven ingredients: oats, sugar, milk, butter, cocoa, peanut butter, and vanilla. This recipe is particularly convenient for me because apparently we don't own any baking sheets. We discovered this last time we made cookies--General and I had mixed together all the ingredients before we even started looking for baking sheets, so we used whatever we could find, including cake and saute pans (hey, they worked).

Anyway, Debra and I made the cookies yesterday afternoon and they came out perfectly. And there may be only a few left now. Oops.