Croutons

What do you do with stale bread? Well I decided to take advantage of my French Bread ends that were hard as a rock by turning them into croutons.

I chopped up the end of a stale loaf of French bread, drizzled them with olive oil and then sprinkled on garlic salt and oregano. Apparently I should have brushed the sides with oil first before cutting, since tossing the bread in oil didn't work as well as I had expected (it wasn't very even.)

I put the bread pieces in the oven at 400 degrees (F) until they started to brown. Voila! Simple and fast croutons... what an easy salad solution.

The croutons, just out of the oven.

My salad.

My Birthday Cocktail Parties

I love to host cocktail parties on my birthday. I find it only fitting to celebrate my half birthday by sharing pictures of highlights from past parties.

For the longest time, the only cookie cutters I owned were heart shaped. This meant that I created a lot of Valentine's Day cookies for every occasion!


The only layer cake pans I owned were also Heat Shape. Keith is the king of making layer cakes.

Can you have a fancy cocktail party without chocolate covered strawberries?

I made chocolate covered peanut butter eyeballs last Halloween and they were a hit. I made simple chocolate covered for the holiday party.

Sometimes store bought cookies (in this case macaroons) make it into the mix.

Peanut butter kisses, banana bread, mocha chocolate crinkle cookies and my grandmother's famous pinwheel cookies.

After I covered all of the strawberries, I used the remaining chocolate to cover some pretzels.

I've shown you the sweet, here is some savory.

I'm going to end with something that wasn't part of the cocktail party, exactly. Keith made me a chocolate souffle for my birthday while I prepped for the party!

Epic Fruit Salad

I was going to a tropical themed dinner party, so what would be more appropriate to bring for dessert than a beautiful fruit salad? (Although it was a pain to bring to the destination on the subway!) I was VERY lucky that I ended up with just enough fruit to fill up the salad, and very little extra. I hope to have more excuses in the future to create other epic fruit salads.

Caprese Salad

When I was in Italy, when you ordered a Caprese Salad, you got almost a whole ball of mozzarella! For a dinner with friends, I decided to follow the same approach.

This delicious salad is amazingly simple. This photo was from the fall, so I was able to layer the fresh mozzarella with different varieties of heirloom tomatoes. I sprinkled the dish with chopped fresh basil and extra virgin olive oil (I used special olive oil that I picked up in Croatia - Chiavalon.)

The final touch was a drizzle of a balsamic vinegar reduction. I made this reduction by slowly simmering balsamic vinegar with constant stirring. (Watch out for splatters!)

The resulting salad was so beautiful, and I can say that it was an absolute hit at my dinner party!