A lovely dinner date with my best friend Krupy Patel

I love that when I come back to school, there is always someone to bake with! And subsequently many hungry or just plain sweet-obsessed friends that are willing to eat some sweet goodies. From lazy cold afternoons to stress-induced exam baking, there have been many an occasion for baking up sweets for a crowd.

My first bake-out back at school consisted of baking some banana oatmeal muffins with my lovely baker friend, Arianna Parsons. While my strengths lie in full pantries and recipe searches, she holds the key to one of the most important skills in baking: measuring ingredients.

With a few almost-rotten bananas, oats (my fave baking ingredient), sugar, flour, milk and eggs, we whipped up some delicious muffins that are good as breakfast or dessert.

Here’s the banana oatmeal muffins recipe for ya. Enjoy!

As I’ve said before, using the pasta machine takes way more than a few rolling-pin rolls and definitely requires some help. In fact, it’s been the perfect bonding experience for my mom and me when I’m home over break. 

My dad does this thing where he takes all the leftover vegetables and makes awesome pasta sauces with them. So, it turned out to be a family cooking affair that for once didn’t result in too many cooks in the kitchen. I actually got this recipe from an old pasta cookbook we’ve had since I was little, but you can really find homemade pasta recipes anywhere! 

Starts with some drained, thawed spinach (you could also use fresh!) Here, it’s important to squeeze as much of the excess water out as possible

This food processor has been a great resource for making doughs. Here’s our main components: food processor, pasta machine, eggs, and the flour is somewhere over there.

Combine your flour, eggs, a bit of salt, and spinach in the food processor, pulse until it forms a sticky ball. At this point you can refrigerate for a few hours if you want before you prepare the pasta. 

Once you are ready for greeny goodness, break up your dough ball into 3-4 pieces to work with. LIBERALLY dust your surface with flour, and by that I mean create a flour beach on your countertop. Keep rolling out your dough, folding it in thirds over and over again, until its ready to go through the machine. If you don’t have a pasta machine, no worries, you’ll be getting the rockstar arms after your rolling pin workout!

You’re going to keep rolling the strips through the pasta machine, narrowing the settings after about 2-3 times through each. After your roll is as thin as you want it, go ahead and slice it through the cutting section of the machine. While the strands are waiting to go in the water, place them on a lightly floured baking sheet. Then, when your salted water is boiling, drop in the pasta and cook for a mere 2-3 minutes.

These pictures don’t really do the pasta justice, but it turned out to be delicious! Happy Italian! 

This year, I decided to have a “New Year’s Eve Party.” Why the quotations? Well, not entirely sure it was a traditional definition of an NYE party bc it consisted of 2 people’s houses, 3 carpools, friends, surprise friends, and GREAT FOOD of course!

My lovely friends Sarah and Cessie helped concoct homemade sweet potato gnocchi, which was delicious AND a sticky mess, and we made walnut jam cake from our fave, Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen.

To be honest, I think all sweet potato gnocchi recipes are more fake-it-til-you-make-it than an actual scientific recipe. They all have different ratios of potato to flour, and we ended up just continuing to add flour to our cheese-potato mixture until it resembled a dough. Even then, I think we shoulda added a bit more flour.

I decided that since it was NYE, we needed to sing happy birthday to 2013, so we did. And we also decided that it was completely necessary to SEW a newspaper greeting with sewing thread and two kebab sticks. One of our guy friends walked in during a climactic sewing moment, and I think he probably considered leaving what may have looked like a knitting party. (Srsly though, it was more exciting once more people got there). Here’s some pics of our cake!

My mother knows a thing or two about being classy and she drinks ALOT of tea. So, my sister and I decided we’d throw a tea party for her and my Aunt Francie (mother to 5 boys, needs-some-estrogen-in-her-life aka tea party extraordinaire).

We sipped away at black tea from my mother’s gorgeous silver family tea set and ate mini curried chicken salad sandwiches. A long Sunday afternoon, it was a rarity to be able to have my sister, my mom, and my other mom gathered around the table talking freely for hours.

Though Queen Cathi did not bring her two Welsh corgies, the affair was still quite regal. I’ve been dreaming of scones for months now, and these cranberry-orange scones turned out quite delicious. Apparently, they are called “cream biscuits.” They key to any biscuit-type sweet or baked good is barely mixing the dough. A few quick pulses in the food processor and then a quick marriage of dry+wet  ingredients. Other variations that sound delish to me: chocolate almond, maple oat, lavender honey, lemon thyme

Usually if it’s a bit dry, I just liberally dust my cutting board with TONS of flour to make the mess more doughy!

who needs sandra lee tablescapes when I’ve got Marie and Mom?

I think this is my “sup, i’m proper” face

picture on the table is from my parents and the Quigleys first Christmas as friends

lady quigley with us!