Family

Moments like this show how truly and deeply my family has been blessed.

We love each other and accept each other just as we are.

We are just so lucky!

Spring is here

Today started just as any other day: the alarm clock woke me up, I ran into the shower, had a quick breakfast and ran out the door. Destination: WORK. And just as I passed through the door and stepped outdoors I noticed: spring is here and isn't going anywhere for a while.

Flowers everywhere, warmer days, sunny skies. People seem to regain hope and everything seems better with flowers around us.  A new season has begun! Welcome, Spring!!

Flower God, God Of The Spring 

by Robert Louis Stevenson

FLOWER god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,

Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,

Here I wander in April

Cold, grey-headed; and still to my

Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,

Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;

Spring, flower-planter in meadows,

Child-conductor in willowy

Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:

Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:

O child, happy are children!

She still smiles on their innocence,

She, dear mother in God, fostering violets,

Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins:

Thus one cunning in music

Wakes old chords in the memory:

Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances.

One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal

Green - one more, and my bosom

Feels new life with an ecstasy.

Mushrooms pizza topping!

Well, I told you I would make it up to you during the week. And here I am! Sooner than I expected!
Last night after we safely arrived from our trip we were hungry! Really hungry! And what is quicker and yummier than cooking a pizza?! Especially if you are like me and always have the dough pre-cooked and waiting for you inside the freezer! So I only had to take the dough out of the freezer and while it de-froze in the microwave oven, I prepared the topping.
I just love this pizza topping! A friend of mine once prepared it and since then it has become a must cook whenever I make pizza. It is just so smooth and yummy!
I was tired after the trip so I only took a pic of the mushrooms. And there wasn't any pizza left for me to take a picture later!!
So, here it goes!


Ingredients:
butter
200grams fresh mushrooms
50grams scallions
3/4 cups of white wine
100 grams muzzarella cheese (cut into 1" cubes)
1 cup Tomato sauce
1 Pre-cooked Pizza dough

Preparation instructions:
Slice the mushrooms and chop the scallions. In a small wok or pan, melt the butter, add the sliced mushrooms and the chopped scallions. Cook them until almost done (about 5 minutes). Pour the white wine and cook until the wine is reduced almost completely.
Take the pre-cooked the pizza dough and spread the tomato sauce on top of it. Then add the mushrooms preparation and finish with the muzzarella cheese cubes.
Put the pizza in the oven and cook until the cheese is melted. It is then, ready to be eaten.

How the mushrooms and the scallions look after being cooked in the white wine

Hope you like it! If you make it, please come back here and let me know how it turned out!

Third!

I'm happy to say that I won the third place in this week's photography contest that my local newspaper has!
Here is the photo! I just love his expression!

Given that this weekend I had to travel I wasn't able to cook anything, therefore, I'll try to make it up to you during the week!
Hope you have a great time!

Nostalgic

Sometimes I wonder what goes inside aminals heads. Are they truly listening to our words or only just paying attention to our tone of voice?

Capturing this beautiful dog with my camera and watching his expression, I just know he must be remembering past times...

Le copycat que ne fonctionne pas

In bakeries all over my country there is a kind of biscuit called "Masas secas". I do not know what the equivalent of these biscuits in the rest of world is, if there is one. But I simply love them! So with that thought in mind, having found the recipe on hayrecetas.com I just had to try to make them. So I put it on the list.

What list?

Well, my boyfriend and I both love sweets but we sure as hell don't want to get fat by eating them all the time. So my boyfriend came up with a brilliant idea: "Treat night!". We cook a treat once a week. This happens on the weekends mostly since during the week we both work and don't have the time. And every time we find a recipe that looks amazing and that we want to cook we put it on our "Do Want" list.

And thus, last night my boyfriend and I spent our night making these delicious biscuits. But we found out that the recipe was not correct. This brings us to the title of this post: Le copycat que ne fonctionne pas! The copycat recipe didn't work! The dough was not the same as those masas secas that we buy. The texture was completely different and the taste, although similar, was not the same. We were a bit disappointed that they did not turn out to be exactly what we were after, but we cannot deny that they really are delicious anyway. 

Here I share the recipe and some amateur photos of the different stages of the cooking!

Try them! You won't regret it!

Ingredients:

2 cups all-pourpose flour

1/2 cup cornstarch

1 egg

1 teaspoon vainilla

1/4 cup milk

100 grs. soft butter

4 teaspoons baking powder

12 spoonfulls of sugar

dulce de leche (as much as you want)

white chocolate (as much as you want)

Dark chocolate (as much as you want)

crunchy almonds (as much as you want)

Preparing instructions:

Mix all the dry ingredients and then add the butter, egg, milk and vainilla. Mix well until you get an uniform dough. Let it rest in the fridge for 10 minutes. Preheat the oven at 350F. Take the dough out of the fridge and roll it until it is 1cm thick. Cut it then with any cookie cutter any shape you want. Take them to the oven and cook them for about 10 minutes.

Melt over bein marie/ double boiler, white chocolate. In another double boiler melt dark chocolate. (you can do both or just one of the chocolates)

After this you can do three things:

1.- you can simply dip half the cookie in one of the chocolates. Sprinkle with a bit of crunchy almonds and put in on a rack so the excess of chocolate drips.

2.- or you can spread some dulce de leche on top of one cookie then cover it with another cookie as in a sandwich and then repeat 1.

3.- get one round cookie make a big big pile of dulce de leche on top of it and then repeat number 1.

I recomend making numbre 2 and 3 the most. Hope you like them! If you make them, please come back here and let me know how it turned out!

This is number 3.

This is number 2.

Spring is coming!

After a very long winter full of sadness and tears, spring is coming and I took advantage of my camera to capture its beginning!!

It is amazing how much a flower can cheer a person up. They always bring a smile to my face no matter how sad I am. So, to cheer all of us up: here are some blooms I found right here at work!