♦  CatChat  ♦

Misty shows you what you’ll find in this week’s salon

♦  TIDBITS – new nutrition site / best chicken preps {M – I’ll take one of each  please} / storage tips for leftovers  ♦  CS MARKETPLACE SPOTLIGHT – chocolate on your shirt / funny doggies on your shirt  ♦  FEATURED RECIPE – delectable layers of vanilla & chocolate cheesecake on yellow cake  ♦  TIP – besta pasta  ♦  THE WEEK – a totally soup-ed up week including an oh-oh video {M – the words are no worse than I say with my eyes}

Misty’s History  ♦  Misty’s Gallery

♦  TIDBITS  ♦

Newsy, schmoozy stuff for cooks 

♦  Healthy help. The Center for Nutrition Studies has a new website with new features and recipes too. It focuses on a plant-based life but looks to me like it could be equally  helpful for anyone who just wants some perspective for the veggie side of their palate.

♦  Chicken! Such a tasty blank canvas, so many ways to prep. How to choose? This might help. Food 52 tops its current newsletter with their “10 Most Popular Chicken Recipes Of All Time.”

♦  Meanwhile, “Well Done”  helps us minimize waste with some smart tips on avoiding mistakes when storing leftovers.

♦  CS MARKETPLACE SPOTLIGHT  ♦ 

Chocolate on your shirt . . . in a good way

I sort of love the new commercials for Reese’s peanut butter cups with the tag line “Not sorry.” It captures the pleasure/guilt dichotomy of chocolate – and then in just two words blasts away the latter.

So if you’re a chocoholic, don’t hide it. Shout it.

Or let my shirt do it for you, with not only the bold words, but also chocolates right inside the letters. Other colors, many sizes.

“CHOCOLATE/CHOCOLATE/CHOCOLATE – everything else” Priorities, my friends.

Crafted by Michigan company SunFrog

At CS Marketplace: “Especially for . . .” – “Cooks”  “Readers”  “Dog Lovers”

Extra for Dog Lovers – if that’s you, you might want to add another kind of shirt too. This roundup features dog centric tees with funny sayings. Funny dog shirts for humans

♦  FEATURED RECIPE  ♦

Cheesecake AND chocolate – BOTH!

OK, you’ve been warned: “Taste of Home” can make you buy more notebooks, cabinets or bytes . It’s one of the few sources, whether the hard copy mag or the online newsletter, where I want to make just about everything they show and tell, and accordingly my recipe files runneth over.

And this look-out-teeth dessert is no exception – Double Layer Cheesecake Bars. As the descrip says, “Can’t choose between chocolate or vanilla cheesecake? Have both when you make this bar recipe with two distinct layers.”

Something interesting in this recipe is the addition of a dry ingredient to a creamy layer. I had not see anything like this until recently and now twice – here and also the chocolate peanut butter bars mentioned in last week’s salon and coming Nov 9 as our Featured Recipe. One note – I used Butter Cake for the base.

Recipe  ♦  Taste of Home  ♦  Taste of Home cookbooks  

♦  TIP  ♦

Pasta, we gotcha

So an old yellowed clipping – maybe from the Tribune in my Chicago days? – excavated from my food file, yields some quite helpful tips about the noodle.

How much to cook? So for 4 oz: for small pasta, about 1 c uncooked, 2 1/2 c cooked, 2-3 servings . . . for med size pasta, 3 c uncooked, 3 c cooked, 3 servings {this seems odd, but so it says} . . . for long pasta, 1″ in diameter, 2 c cooked, 2 servings {may want to re-calculate servings to personal appetite}.

Cooking: for 4-8 oz pasta, 3 quarts water, 1 t oil, 1/4 t salt, bring water to full rolling boil before adding noodles, add a little at a time so the water keeps boiling, simmer uncovered until done.

Done? Bite into it – the outside should be tender with a little firmness on the inside, in other words, al dente. Drain, rinsing only if destined for a cold dish. If you need to keep it hot, place the strainer of drained pasta over a pan of boiling water.

We don’t-waste-food-ers like this: Any leftover noodles can be frozen. Reheat for 1 min in boiling water. {Pasta image by Stilfehler}

♦  A PEEK AT MY WEEK  ♦

Please join  me in my kitchen &  parlor

♦  Oh-Oh! There’s a video in the article cited below that I actually watched after reading the story. But I’m mentioning it first because it could be offensive to some folks. It’s a compilation of food videos that ranked on social media, and with one exception they’re pretty good. The oh-oh comes in with the narrator who uses, ummm, quite colorful language, but on the plus side he’s also rather funny.

♦  Are you like this too? I prefer some foods in fairly pure form – e.g., guacamole, deviled eggs, hummus – while others I think benefit from some added pizzazz. We already talked about this for salads and oatmeal. Now I found this gussy article from “Bon Appett” about soup toppers. Soup toppers! What a good and versatile idea. Here’s my take, starting with pasta in a creamy chicken broth.

♦  A couple of things I discovered about using soup toppers. First you want either feather light toppings or dense soup so that your pretty display doesn’t sink to the bottom. Also, heat any that you can so as little of the stuff as possible cools off the soup too much – for the one I did that you see here, I heated the shrimp and the olives and the peanuts in a skillet over low heat – I also had let the avocado, green onion, and cilantro sit out for a while at room temp.

So far next week: rim glasses like a pro, festive chill for bottles, scraps on tv, celeb bowl, bowl tips

Cook with passion and a party spirit, whether for a crew, or for two, or just for you