Last Minute Thanksgiving Apps + Tried and True Recipes!

It's Thanksgiving week!!

I loooove Thanksgiving! I can't think of any better way to reflect on everything you're thankful for than with a bunch of really tasty food.

Of course, sometimes the idea of whipping up a big huge meal that is the center of attention for a whole day with close family and friends can be a bit stressful. Things fall through the cracks - this is natural. But trust me! Just a little bit of planning can make this day completely foolproof!

Today, I put together a round up of my favorite recipes that have seen plenty of Thanksgivings, Friendsgivings, the works! These are the recipes that have never let me down and are classic, delicious. and easy to whip up. But before we get to those, I also want to share two last minute, super simple appetizers for you to keep guests satisfied but not too full before the main meal! Pre-meal snacks are the one thing that can definitely fall by the wayside while you're focusing on the main event. These recipes take no time at all and won't steal any of your oven space day-of!

Thanksgiving Appetizers!

If you've been around Gas Stove Girl before, you know that I have a borderline unhealthy obsession with goat cheese. For my first quick and easy app, I am taking a humble log of goat cheese and jazzing it all the way up with some festive treats. You barely need a recipe for my Pistachio Cranberry Goat Cheese, but alas, here it is!

1 4-ounce log of goat cheese, at room temperature
3 tablespoons chopped pistachios
3 tablespoons chopped craisins
1 tablespoon finely chopped fresh rosemary
crackers for serving

On a small plate, combine the pistachios, craisins and rosemary. Take the goat cheese and roll it in the pistachio mixture until the outside is completely coated. You may need to roll it through a few times, pressing firmly to get the toppings to stick. Place on a decorative plate and chill until ready to serve. Set out with salted crackers and serve alongside a glass of champagne! 

The next appetizer I want to share with you is the best kind of party appetizer - so whether it's Thanksgiving or some other holiday gathering, you're going to want this in your arsenal! It's Cheddar and Chive Mini Quiches, and why is it the best, you ask? There are a few reasons: first, this recipe is delicious either warmed up or at room temperature. Second, it uses a grocery store shortcut which allows us to pull the dish together in no time at all. And lastly, you can make it ahead, freeze it, and warm it up when you're ready! Win, win, win.

1 14-ounce package pie dough (there should be 2 sheets per box)
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup chopped onion
3/4 cup half and half
2 eggs
2 tablespoons snipped chives
2 tablespoons shredded cheddar cheese
salt and pepper to taste
cooking spray

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray a 24-cup mini muffin tin with cooking spray. Unroll the pie dough and cut out 24 rounds using a 2 1/2 inch round cookie cutter. Press the pie rounds into the cavities of the muffin tin.

Heat the butter in the small skillet over medium heat. Add the onions and cook until softened and golden brown, around 5 minutes. Spoon the onions and remaining butter into a large bowl. Add the half and half, eggs, chives, cheese, salt and pepper. Whisk until completely combined. Transfer the mixture to a vessel with a pourable spout. Pour the eggs into the muffin cups, filling just to the top of the pie crust. 

Bake for 15-20 minutes until the quiches are puffed up and turning golden brown along the edges. Remove from the oven to cool. Serve warm or at room temperature. If freezing, cool completely before transferring to a freezer-sized zip top baggie. To re-heat, place on a baking sheet and bake at 350 for 7-10 minutes until warmed through.

Tried and True Recipes!

So, you're doing it - you're hosting your first Thanksgiving! You're going to do an absolutely amazing job! But, if you're still looking for a few last minute recipes to pull the whole meal together, here's what I like to have handy.

Turkey - I did a step by step breakdown of my approach to the bird here. You can use this approach for a full-sized turkey or a bone-in turkey breast for a smaller party (just cut down the cooking time as needed).

Stuffing - I don't stuff the bird, but I do make the Pioneer Woman's Cornbread Dressing, excluding the cornbread and using a tad more of sourdough and french bread. It's just right. No need to mess with it.

Mashed Potatoes - for potatoes, I don't really use a specific recipe, but my #1 tip for super creamy mashed potatoes is to use yukon gold potatoes instead of the classic idaho variety. They are sooo smooth and easy to mash. Try boiling about 5 pounds of peeled gold potatoes until tender. Then, mash them up with 4 ounces of cream cheese, a few spoonfuls of sour cream, 1/2 cup or less of milk, plus lots of salt and pepper. Spoon the mashed potatoes into a baking dish, and warm them up with all the other sides while the turkey is resting!

Cranberry Sauce - I am team homemade cranberry sauce! I like this chutney recipe, and sometimes I will replace the orange juice with orange liquor for an extra kick! Yummy!

Other Sides - If you're looking for something a little different that still has the tried and true flavors of Thanksgiving dinner, consider my Pearl Cous Cous with Caramelized Mushroom and Sage Brown Butter. It's a little lighter (NO heavy cream, yay!!) but the flavors are rich and meaty - a perfect pairing for turkey!

Pies - Look, if you want to make a pecan pie, just make The Pioneer Woman's recipe. It is delicious, decadent, perfect. And if you love pumpkin pie but are looking for something a little crazy to wow your guests, may I recommend this S'mores pumpkin pie?! Classic pumpkin pie filling atop a buttery graham cracker crust, topped with golden brown gooey marshmallows and a dreamy chocolate ganache.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone! I am thankful for YOU!!

Fourth of July Firework Cookies

Everybody just loves the Fourth of July, myself included. This wonderful celebration of our country is chock full of poolside barbeques, beach trips, cold beers, and good food. It's the ultimate summer celebration!

As excited as I am for the actual holiday, I'm pretty sure I'm even more excited about these seriously festive cookies. Let's just say I channeled my inner Martha Stewart. Mostly because these were inspired by a Martha Stewart recipe...

These cookies are decorated using Royal Icing. This icing takes to food coloring really well and is often used to decorate cookies that are given out as favors for showers, birthday parties, baptisms, etc. The icing dries overnight and becomes hard, making it the ideal icing for decorating sugar cookies.

Our round cookies are flooded with white royal icing, then circles are drawn on top. Then, a few quick strokes of a toothpick flare out our circles so that we get the iconic image of a firework on our cookies! How clever is that?!

Although these cookies are a time consuming labor of love, you will be the coolest cat at your Fourth of July celebration when you show up with a batch of these. They are tasty and fun and I cannot explain just how accomplished I felt when the cookies were finished. They are so photogenic!

Disclaimer -- the step by step was just too expansive to photograph. If anything isn't clear just drop a comment down below and I will do my best to clarify--Happy Independence Day!!

How to: Cook Steak Without a Grill

I write this blog from a third floor apartment in Jamaica Plain, MA. As such, we don't really have space for a grill or barbeque. For many college students, recent grads, and young professionals, I imagine this problem does not just affect me.

Turns out there is a foolproof way to cook juicy, delicious steak without lugging charcoal up 4 flights of stairs.

It starts with a very useful and extremely heavy kitchen appliance. That is, a cast iron skillet.

I got my cast iron skillet for Christmas (THANKS MOM!) and I use it  multiple times a week. Although it is a bit heavy and requires from TLC after using it, it really is a fantastic piece of equipment to add to your kitchen. Here's a link to the one I have.

Cast iron is a natural non-stick surface that gets better with age. People have cast iron skillets for years and years. Because the cast iron gets so hot, it creates a perfect crust on meats and vegetables while keeping the inside tender and moist. It can also go into the oven, which allows for easy cooking.

Because of these properties, cast iron is the perfect solution to our steak needs.

Here's how to cook steak on a cast iron skillet

Heat the cast iron skillet on the stove top on medium-high heat. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Pat your steak of choice dry with a paper towel to get rid of excess moisture. Rub your favorite steak seasonings into the meat.

Drizzle the cast iron skillet with 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. Swirl to coat. Arrange steak in pan. It should make an irresistible sizzling sound when it hits the heat. Cook for 4 minutes (do NOT poke and prod at the steak. Just let it do its thing).

Flip the steak and allow it to cook 1 minute more, then transfer the skillet to the oven. Allow the steak to cook in the oven until desired degree of doneness (or slightly below). For medium, this was about 6 to 7 minutes. Time will vary depending on how you like your steak cooked as well as how your oven behaves.

Remove steak from the oven and transfer to a cutting board. Allow to sit 5 to 7 minutes so the juices redistribute. Serve with your favorite steak sides.

So there you have it - yummy, juicy, steak with a crispy crust. And it takes no time at all. Enjoy!

How To: Make Hard Boiled Eggs

Hard boiled eggs were such a mystery to me until about 1 hour ago.

They always magically appeared in our refridgerator the day before Easter. We would dye them all sorts of festive spring colors. Then we would smash the shells and eat them the next morning. Pretty typical, right?

Sometimes, when I order salads at restaurants, a few pieces of hard boiled eggs would be scattered about. Extra protein. Neat!

I don't know why I was so scared of making hard boiled eggs, but I was. I could just imagine my clumsy self putting some eggs in a pot of boiling water and being left with a broken shell, yolky mess. I don't think I could have handled it. I left well enough alone and never hard boiled any eggs.

After a few days of research, I finally just went for it. I was being silly. Hard boiling a perfect egg is SO simple (despite being so intimidating....were others intimidated during their first time?!) What's wrong with me?

Well, if you have been putting off hard boiled eggs due to fear, lack of knowledge, or any other weird reason, I'm here to help. If I can do it, I know you certainly can do it, too. Patience and technique is all you need! Below is the technique, I'll leave the patience up to you.

Here's what you need for Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs:

6 eggs, in the shell
1 5-quart pot*
1 large bowl
 Tap water

Here's what you do:

Gently place your eggs in the bottom of the pot. Fill the pot with enough cool (not hot) tap water so that there is about an inch of water above the top of the eggs. This is about the distance from the tip of your thumbnail to the first knuckle.

Place the pot on a burner and turn the heat to high. Bring the pot to a full boil.

This is not enough of a boil. You want it rocking and rolling...

Like this!

Next, turn the heat completely off (and, if on an electric stove, remove the pot from the hot burner). Cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid and set your kitchen timer for 17 minutes. Walk away and let the eggs do their thing.

17 minutes!

This is that whole "patience" thing

In the meantime, fill the large bowl with cold tap water. Add an ice cube or two if necessary to cool it down.

As soon as the 17 minutes are up, use your search and rescue spoon to CAREFULLY transfer the eggs into the cold water.

Let them sit for 10 more minutes or until completely cooled. Dry off the shells and store in the fridge until they are ready to be used (safest way to do this to make sure they don't crack is to re-use the original egg carton). 

Eggs are of course a wonderful breakfast option, and hard boiled eggs happen to go great with grilled kielbasa. You can also dice some up and toss them on top of your salad for lunch!

Check out this great new recipe that calls for a hearty helping of hard-boiled eggs! 

*Note: if you want to hard boil a dozen eggs, a 5 quart pot should still be fine. You just want to be sure the eggs have enough room to roll around without constantly smashing into one another.

How To: Flip a Perfect Omelette

I absolutely love the weekend for a number of obvious reasons. Perhaps the best part about a relaxing weekend in my eyes is that I finally have time to cook up a nice big breakfast.

I usually like to kick start a weekend with eggs! Eggs are awesome as we know. There is so much you can do just for breakfast with these delightful pockets of protein.

Perhaps my favorite way to use eggs in the morning is in a veggie-packed Omelette! For a while though, my omelettes always turned into scrambles. I couldn't master the damn flip!

Alas, as with most things, practice seemed to make perfect and I could not be happier. The perfect Omlette flip allows you to get a taste of your entire filling in every bite--awesome!

It takes a little bit of finesse and the right equipment to flip an omelette beautifully--but trust me, it can be done!

The equipment you need is a flat-bottomed frying pan with a diameter no bigger than 12 inches (10 inches is ideal) along with a thin spatula.

For the omelette itself, start by whisking 2 or 3 eggs with about 2 tablespoons of milk. Lightly spray the pan with an olive oil spray or cooking spray. Heat it up slightly over medium-low heat.

Now, take your scrambled eggs and dump them into the pan. Pick up the pan and tilt it so that every part of the pan is covered by the egg mixture.

On one half of the pan, add your filling of choice along with a 1/4 cup of cheese of your choosing. Leave about half an inch between your filling and the edge of the egg to prevent spillage!

Let the eggs and fillings cook for about 5 minutes or just when the egg starts to rise and separate slightly from the pan. Take your spatula to lift up slightly the half of the omelette that does not have the filling cooking on it. Using your thumb and pointer finger, gently pull this half of the omelette over the filled half, covering completely.

Reduce the heat to low and cook another 1 to 2 minutes. At this point you should be able to cleanly flip the entire omelette, cooking the other side for another minute.

The result should be a half-moon shaped, slightly browned and golden delicious omelette with warm and oozing insides! If you don't want your eggs to become too browned, cook the entire omelette over low heat. This will obviously increase cooking time but it will prevent the olive oil from burning.

I stuffed my omelette with sliced cherry tomatoes, spinach, chopped mushrooms and Parmesan cheese. It was delicious! And beautifully flipped!

Chopping Garlic and Onions

This past weekend, I hosted my parents and younger sister for the weekend while my sister was touring some colleges in the New England area. I was kindly asked to make a meal from my young blog and wanted to keep it a little fancy. I made my Polish Girl Chicken Parmesan and it was hit! It was a great meal to feed a fairly large crowd because it was easy to double and entertaining for people to watch in action!

Anyway, I am sure you don't care to hear about our whole weekend but I just wanted you to know why I have been somewhat off the radar this weekend (as a 9-5 working person, the weekends offer a great opportunity to cook more challenging meals).

In order to make up for that, I thought I'd offer you a couple of quick tips that took me a while to get right.

If there is one thing I hate, it is a big, face-puckering chunk of onion or garlic in an otherwise outstanding meal. Getting an onion or clove of garlic cut up finely enough to enhance a meal rather than take away from it can be fairly challenging for a new cook. So these aren't some great big best kept secrets, but just some beginner tools you might find helpful -- especially if you are going to try some of my dishes...I LOVE ONIONS AND GARLIC! And for both of these tasks, make sure you have a nice, sharp knife! This will really ease the entire process.

How to: evenly chop an onion
First, cut your onion in half, like so:

Lay each half flat side down. Parallel to your cutting board, cut the onion in half again (BUT DO NOT cut the whole way through)

Now make between 4 and 6 cuts (depending on the size of your onion) perpendicular to the cutting surface. Again, do NOT cut the whole way through. The top of your onion is going to serve as a grip during the cutting.

Make small slices in the opposite direction of the previous cut so that you have wonderful little nuggets of onion, perfect for sauteing, soups, slow cooker recipes, etc.

How to: Finely mince fresh garlic
Peel your garlic clove and place on a cutting board.

Lay your knife flat and gently pound the garlic to mush it down. Pound gently 4 or 5 times, putting a little muscle into it once you get comfortable with the feel of it.

Once your garlic is smashed, run your knife through it to create tiny cubes of garlic.

I really love fresh garlic because it is a little more flavorful than the minced stuff. It's also very cheap! So save a little bit of cash and do the mincing yourself!

Happy Cooking, Everyone!

How to: Caramelize Onions

As I started cooking more, I came to realize the value of a good old onion. They can add so much flavor and are the base of so many good recipes (sauces, soups, stir fries...).

I first started being obsessed with onions when my mom caramelized them and had them at the table of our family barbecues. Those babies with some barbecue sauce on top of a char grilled burger made my mouth water. When I started cooking more, every time I made steak, all I could think about was how outrageously good caramelized onions would be dripping on top of a medium rare slab of meat.

BUT I COULD NEVER EVER DO IT. They either burned into oblivion or still had the harsh raw onion bite. I tried. And I tried again.

Finally...I MASTERED THEM.

I don't want to toot my own horn, but after tonight's onion experiment, I could have eaten just the onions on a plate and been wildly satisfied. Let me share my fool proof way of HOW TO CARAMELIZE ONIONS.

Here's what you will need:
2 tablespoons butter
1 onion (or whatever sort of leftover onions you have)
salt and pepper
honey

And here's what you do:
First, cut your onion in half then cut into about 1/4 or 1/2 inch thick slices.
Completely melt the 2 tablespoons of butter into a skillet over low to medium heat (I did this entire process on LOW heat because pans get hotter a LOT faster on gas ranges).
Add the onions and sprinkle with salt. Your pan should not make an intense sizzling sound when you add the onions. You should only barely hear an undertone of sizzle. This will allow the onions to sweat out their water content without sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Give the onions a gentle stir, about once every 2 minutes.
When the onions become more translucent and have a yellow hue, once again sprinkle with salt and a relatively generous amount of black pepper. Stir again.
Now! What I have come to regard as the secret to perfection (or, at least perfect caramelized onions). Drizzle, in a slow stream, a bit of honey over the onions. It should only be about as much honey as you would put in a cup of tea. Stir and evenly coat your beautiful onions with the honey and seasonings.
Continue to simmer until they are at the level of caramel goodness that you desire. Here are my heavenly bites of joy:


And that's it! It is a little timely because you are doing more of a slow cook. But these beautiful, delicious onions are well worth the wait! And in between, you have plenty of time to prep your meat and any other side dishes you are making that night! Good luck, and happy eating :-)