This recipe came from Nick's mom's Noodle Cluster recipe.  It's simple, I just melted 1 1/2 cups each of chocolate chips and butterscotch chips together until smooth (Nick thought the recipe for the nests could use more chocolate to hold together a little better).  I then added a 12 oz bag of Chow Mein Noodles and stired untill the noodles were evenly coated.  The original recipe calls for nuts, but I leave those out for the nests.  So once everything is stirred together I shape nests onto a piece of wax paper.  Its messy and a little sticky so it can be tricky, but it's not that bad.  I was able to get 13 nests from the amount of ingredients that I used.  Once the nests were shaped I added in 3-5 blue malted eggs.  This year I also found some bright blue caramel eggs in the bulk section at the grocery store... so pretty.  Fun to make, sugary, tastey, and best of all, celebrates spring!

I like to experiment with new recipes, lucky for me Nick enjoys trying the new recipes and helping out with them too.  A few recipes that we really enjoy, stick around and are repeated. This recipe we have made 3-4 times already.  It's great!  The toppings can easily be changed to your likings, but Nick and I really enjoy the toppings it calls for.  It's great in the late summer when the tomatoes in the garden are ripe and the basil is lush.  There is something about the fired crust of the pizza, the grilled veggies and fresh basil that screams summer. 
Try it out on a summer day, or to help cure your summer fever... which we deffinetly have.

Irish Whiskey, Guiness and Bailey's... car bombs?  Nope, cupcakes.  I found the recipe on smittenkitchen.com, yum!  I tweeked it a little, by using a box chocolate cake and substituting the water with the guiness, using 1 egg and the amount of oil it called for.  The frosting was made with the Bailey's, but, a word of warning, there was no way I could fit all of that powedered sugar into one stick of butter, I got maybe 2 cups of powedered sugar in before it crumbled, the frosting was extreemly stiff and it made way more than it was supposed to... maybe I read the recipe wrong :S.  So there was guiness in the cake, the flavor mostly bakes out, the bailey's in the frosting, it was good, so where was the irish whiskey?  In the chocolate truffle filling inside the cupcake!  Need I say more?  The whole thing was delicious.  

For the truffle inside, smittenkitchen.com said to use a 1" round cookie cutter to cut a hole into the cupcake and then fill with a piping bag.  I cut out the whole with a knife, being careful not to cut too far down.  It worked well.  I think a donut cutter would also work if you have one. 

Anywas there was so much tastey frosting left over that I had to make sugar cookies to use it up.  To make the frosting thinner I just zapped in in the microwave for about 10 seconds, then stirred in some milk.  I let it cool and thicken a bit before throwing into the piping bag to decorate the cookes.  But the cookies were very tastey as well.  I added some coloring to the dough to make them a bit more spring like :D
Sugar cookie recipe:

I found this recipe on a random blog that I happened to come by when I was searching for a recipe to cure my craving for a festive quick breakfast to take on the go.  The original recipe can actually be vegan, but I used one of the options to have yogurt in it instead.  I also added some raisins and toasted walnuts, which I will deffinelty do next time as well.  I didn't make the struessel topping and they were still yummy.  The recipe does call to use coconut oil, which can be spendy but everything I have made with it so far has been very tastey.  I use the unrefined which still has the coconut smell to it, but the refined version does not if you do not like coconut.  Why coconut oil?  Well it is a saturated fat I belive, but for some reason... which you can find online it is agreed to be an oil that is actually good for you.  Some research shows it can aide in weight loss, anti ageing, anti-cancer... and the list goes on.  It is solid at room temperature below 76 degrees, and a liquid at tempeartures above 76 degrees.  I have read in other recipes that you are to scoop out the solid oil and then melt it before adding to your recipes.  Another thing about this particular recipe is that it call for you to soak your grains for at least 3 hours, if not over night.  I guess there is some purposed health benefit to this as well... I do not know what it is, nor did I soak my grains, that may be an adventure some other time in life.  But I encourage you to try this recipe if you are craving a pumpkin muffin. 

There is something about the fog rolling in in the afternoon and as it did yesterday and our trees faded from green to a foggy gray silhouette.  I couldn't help but to put an apple pie into the stove.  With the average apple pie consisting of 750 calories and 30 grams of fat I looked to see if there was a recipe out there that would reduce some of that.  Eatingwell.com had a great recipe for the pie crust  found with the deep dish apple pie recipe, which brought the calories down to 344 and the fat down to 10 grams.  They reduced the butter, subsitituted some canola oil and used reduced fat sour cream.  Because we only had normal sour cream, I used that... but the crust turned out great (hopefully it will still be great with the reduced fat sour cream).  I also think that this crust recipe would be good to use for quiches and any other non-sweet meal as well.   When using this crust for the pie they had you brush the top layer of the crust with egg white and then sprinkle it with cinnimon surgar... it looked great and tasted even better. 

When you roast garlic it actually softens it's taste, so it isn't as strong, and it makes it sweeter too.  You can roast several heads of garlic at a time and store them in a jar of olive oil.  Then you can use the oil in the jar for salad dressings and sauces... yum.  As I mentioned before, roasting garlic in the oven makes your house smell like you are a gourmet chef, and it's simple.  I really encourage everyone to give this a try.  I got this recipe from the cookbook that Nick got me for Valentines day Cooking with Vegetables and Fruits in Season, by Sarah Raven.

This recipe is from a cookbook titled Cooking with Vegetables and Fruits In Season, by Sarah Raven.  The first time we made it, we were blowen away, it tasted great.  Because my tomatoes were not ripe yet I bought roma tomatoes from the store to use (even though that is not what the recipe calls for).  The second time we made it we used some of the tomatoes from the garden, it was still good, but tasted different.  What I like the most about this recipe is roasting the garlic, it makes your house smell like you're a gourmet cheff.

This recipe is pretty tastey!  Nick and I have explored a lot with different zucchini recipes this summer, and this one is a keeper.  We left out the capers (we don't like them), but there was still plenty of flavor.  We really recommend making the homemade marinara sauce with it, we don't think it would be as tastey without it.  I found the recipe on our local news website... King5news.  I will add the link to our "links" page, you may have to become a member (which is free) to view the recipes.  I do believe that all their recipes are by one lady who lives in the Seattle area and they seem to stay with what is in season.  However, I don't think the focus of their recipes are to keep them "healthy" but at least they are with ingredients that should be in season so if you can't pull them out from your garden you should be able to get them for a good price at the grocery store.  

This is the recipe for the sauce that we really recommend making with the zucchini parmigiana recipe.  It made plenty of sauce to freeze after we used what we needed for the other recipe.  We bought roasted red peppers from the store, it was cheeper than buying the red peppers and doing it ourselves.  (Even though we have two red peppers in the garden right now, I'm just saving them for some homemade pizza)  The roasted red peppers from the store came in a jar.  We used our heirloom tomatoes from the garden for ours.  If you don't mind the skin of the tomatoes in your sauce, I wouldn't bother going through all the work to skin them.  Our sauce turned out pretty chunky so I don't think the skin on the tomatoes would have distracted from the sauce.  We also did not seed our tomatoes, thats the good stuff anyways.    Again this recipe is by Lynne Vea.