Awesome Cake

We celebrated Captain's birthday a while back.

I made a very awesome cake that was yummy to eat.

I made a pound cake with strawberry mousse and an old fashioned chocolate glaze.  The pound cake was great, the strawberry mousse was good and the glaze was amazing. Next time I will make the pound cake in a bunt pan, glaze it and have the mouse on the side. The mouse as a filling wasn't strong enough to hold the pound cake up.

Chewy Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:
2¼ cups (9 5/8 ounces) all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1½ cups (10 1/2 ounces) sugar,
2 ounces cream cheese, cut into 8 pieces
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
⅓ cup (2 1/3 ounces)  vegetable oil
1 large egg
1 tablespoon milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
sugar for rolling


Directions:
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Line 2 large rimmed baking sheets with parchment paper, or use a silpat.

2. Whisk together flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in medium bowl. Set aside.

3. Place sugar and cream cheese in large bowl. Pour warm butter over sugar and cream cheese and whisk to combine (don’t worry about lumps). Whisk in oil until incorporated. Add egg, milk, and vanilla; continue to whisk until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix.

4. Portion out cookie dough with a small scoop, or use a rounded tablespoon. Roll into a ball, then roll in sugar. Place 12 per cookie sheet. Smoosh with a glass cup to about 2.5 inches in diameter. If you want to go crazy, then sprinkle some more sugar on top.

5. Bake, 1 tray at a time, until edges are set and just beginning to brown, 8 to 10 minutes, Cool cookies on baking sheets 5 minutes.

Notes:
*These cookies do not bake as well if you need to chill the dough. They will be tasty, but not as pretty.
*They keep well for 3 days in air tight containers, after that they start to dry out.

To print, right click on image and open in new tab or window. Then print a full size page.

Petite Cake

For christmas I recieved 2 6" cake pans. Now, instead of making 1 large cake, I can make 2 small cakes. 

I have been having fun making some fancy cakes.

For these 2 I used this recipe, and added about 10 minutes to the recipe to have them baked all the way through. It was really tasty, and I will use that recipe again.

Oatmeal Creme Pies

Makes approximately 2 dozen cookies.

Ingredients:
1 tsp baking soda
1 Tb hot water
1 1/2 cups  flour
3 cups oatmeal
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup butter
1/4 cup honey
1 cup light brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract

Directions:
Preheat oven to 375°.
Dissolve baking soda in water.
Combine flour, oats, cinnamon, and salt together in a medium bowl and set aside.
Mix butter and brown sugar till fluffy. Add in honey, egg, and vanilla. Mix till combined.
Add baking soda to mixture.
Slowly add flour mixture to butter until fully combined.
Spoon  rounded tablespoon sized balls of cookie dough onto parchment or silpats; no more than 12 to a jelly roll sized sheet. These cookies spread.
Bake 8 -10 minutes or until center is no longer pasty.
Let cool for 2 minutes on sheet before moving to a cooling rack.
Cool completely before frosting, about 30 minutes.
Sandwich buttercream between 2 oatmeal cookies.

American Buttercream
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup crisco (or more butter)
3 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tb milk or cream

Directions:
Beat butter and crisco till combined.
Sift in powdered sugar in 2 batches. Mix and scrape downs sides of bowl between batches.
Add in vanilla. Add milk till buttercream reaches desired consistency.

Notes:
I made these for National Pie Day. They are very  delicious. Feel free to increase the cinnamon. You can substitute corn syrup for honey if you are out of honey, but they taste better with honey. Also, I tried baking these at 350, tried smashing the balls flat, and chilling the dough, but nothing really seamed to change how they baked up.

Enjoy!

Daring Bakers: Panna Cotta & Florentine Cookies

The February 2011 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mallory from A Sofa in the Kitchen. She chose to challenge everyone to make Panna Cotta from a Giada De Laurentiis recipe and Nestle Florentine Cookies.

So I was a little put out by the fact that they wanted us to make two different desserts this month. In fact, I had decided to skip this month, but boy am I glad that I change that decision. I haven't tried the panna cotta yet, but the floentine cookies are amazing.

Recipes here

I honestly haven't eaten this yet.. but it sure is pretty! Its basically a milk jello topped with fruit jello.

The cookies started like this.

The Florentine cookie dough was wonderful, and as an added bonus there are no eggs in it so you can lick the bowl as much as you want
The cookies ended like this.

For some reason, my cookies got progressively more burnt, even though I reduced the baking time for each batch. The ones with no browned edges were the yummiest, but the others were easier to work with. The cookies are suppose to have a chocolate backing on them, I may or may not get to that. It's been kinda a crazy day.
Harvey couldn't wait for the cookies to be done, and he really liked the dough, even though it is mostly oatmeal.

Sorry for the weird breaks, but I am new to this editing thing.

Brownie Stuffed Cookies

I recently read a recipe over on Picky Palate for brownie stuffed cookies. Co ahead and click that link, they looked wonderful. Anyways, I was determined to make them. However, I decided to use my favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, and then discovered that we didn't have enough flour. This was the result.

Very flat cookies. The dough I had chosen was too soft to stay shaped up around the brownies. I tell you what though, it didn't stop anyone from eating them. They were still very yummy. These things are huge though. Harvey took 3 days to eat his cookie.

Yoplait Delights Giveaway

I was recently asked to review Yoplait Delights by My Blog Spark. I love yogurt so I went for it. Yoplait, through My Blog Spark provided me with a free sample of their Yoplait Delights, and to be thorough, I picked up a second flavor to test and review for you all.

So here it is.

I tried the Chocolate Raspberry and the Triple Berry Creme. My first impression of both was that they were overly sweet. Which was odd for yogurt, so I checked the sugar content and low and behold the Yoplaits Delights contained more sugar than my son's Gogurt. That being said, they aren't bad so long as you expect them for a desert. They only have 100 calories and are individually packaged which is nice. You know, cause it's hard to measure out exactly 100 calories of say... ice cream.

Chocolate Yogurt takes a little getting used to, but the Triple Berry Creme tasted like berries and cream. I liked the berry one the best, but my friend like the chocolate one. So really, what you will like will depend on your tastes.

All in All, I probably wouldn't purchase this product again, but If it is something you might be interested in Yoplait & My Blog Spark are offering a $0.50 off coupon for you to go out and try some.

Now the Giveaway.
Not only did Yoplait & My Blog Spark provide me with free yogurt, but they sent a fun little gift to go with it. AND you all can have one too.

The Yoplait Delights "Indulgent Escape" pack contains:

• chocolate scented Candle
• Insulated tote bag
• Aroma therapy eye pillow

If you want one, all you have to do is leave a comment saying which flavor of Yoplait Delights you would be most interested in trying. The Flavors are: Chocolate Raspberry, Crème Caramel, Triple Berry Crème and Lemon Torte, plus their 2 new flavors (which I didn't see at the store) Chocolate Éclair and Cherry Cheesecake. Also, make sure when you leave a comment I have a way to contact you, e-mail is preferred. Contest will be open for exactly 2 weeks from the posting time stamp. The winner will be randomly chosen. One entry per person please.

Daring Bakers: STOLLEN

The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book.........and Martha Stewart’s demonstration

Stollen is basically a fruitcake in wreath form. Its is really easy to make, and smells wonderful.

Full Recipe HERE

I followed the recipe almost exactly with a few exceptions:

• Cherry herbal tea instead of mixed fruit peal. Seriously is that stuff even edible?!
• Coconut instead of candied cherries cause I didn't have any.
• No Rum.

So the results were, if you like fruit cake you will like this recipe. If you don't like fruit cake you won't like this. I, never having encountered fruit cake before ever, found that this recipe was overly dense. I like my breads to be lighter. Also, while i enjoyed the smell, I apparently don't like fruit and nuts in my cakes. Also it is HUGE. This will feed 12 peeps easily. So be warned.

Daring Bakers: CROSTATA

The 2010 November Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Simona of briciole. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make pasta frolla for a crostata. She used her own experience as a source, as well as information from Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well.

Well better late than never right? Due to our computer dying on us this is now up about a week late. If you want to read the entire recipe you can find it here.

We were asked to make a crostata, which basically a pie. I'm not quite sure why people were so excited about this challenge, cause who hasn't made a pie before? but it worked out well for the holiday. I chose to use the 2nd recipe and fill my crust with... you ready for this... pumpkin filling. Yep, original I know. Anyways The dough was tasty before being cooked, but afterwards it still tasted like crust to me. That's just how it goes I guess. Either way there is currently have no pie left in my fridge, which I suppose is the point.

So without further ado, here is the recipe I used, it is very easy.

Pasta Frolla aka Pie crust.
Ingredients

1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup almond flour, or almond meal, or coconut flour
1/4 cup whole-grain barley flour or unbleached all-purpose flour
a pinch of salt
6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract (beaten into the egg)

Instructions.
Basically mix your flours, food processor or by hand whatever floats your boat. Add your chopped butter and work it in till its all crumbly. Don't worry if its not all cohesive. Then pour the butter/flour mixture out onto your counter and push the center down. Kneed in the egg/vanilla mixture into it till the whole thing sticks together. Chill for at least 2 hours.

Thats it. It's just pie crust. This will make one 9" pie or 10" tart. enjoy!

p.s. I've decided tart pans are nicer to use than pie pans.

Daring Bakers: Doughnuts

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

Yeast Doughnuts:

Preparation time:
Hands on prep time - 25 minutes
Rising time - 1.5 hours total
Cooking time - 12 minutes

Yield: 20 to 25 doughnuts & 20 to 25 doughnut holes, depending on size

Ingredients
Milk 1.5 cup / 360 ml
Vegetable Shortening 1/3 cup / 80 ml / 70 gm / 2.5 oz (can substitute butter, margarine or lard)
Active Dry Yeast 4.5 teaspoon (2 pkgs.) / 22.5 ml / 14 gm / ½ oz
Warm Water 1/3 cup / 80 ml (95°F to 105°F / 35°C to 41°C)
Eggs, Large, beaten 2
White Granulated Sugar ¼ cup / 60 ml / 55 gm / 2 oz
Table Salt 1.5 teaspoon / 7.5 ml / 9 gm / 1/3 oz
Nutmeg, grated 1 tsp. / 5 ml / 6 gm / ¼ oz
All Purpose Flour 4 2/3 cup / 1,120 ml / 650 gm / 23 oz + extra for dusting surface
Canola Oil DEPENDS on size of vessel you are frying in – you want THREE (3) inches of oil (can substitute any flavorless oil used for frying)

Directions:

1. Place the milk in a medium saucepan and heat over medium heat just until warm enough to melt the shortening. (Make sure the shortening is melted so that it incorporates well into the batter.)
2. Place the shortening in a bowl and pour warmed milk over. Set aside.
3. In a small bowl, sprinkle the yeast over the warm water and let dissolve for 5 minutes. It should get foamy. After 5 minutes, pour the yeast mixture into the large bowl of a stand mixer and add the milk and shortening mixture, first making sure the milk and shortening mixture has cooled to lukewarm.
4. Add the eggs, sugar, salt, nutmeg, and half of the flour. Using the paddle attachment of your mixer (if you have one), combine the ingredients on low speed until flour is incorporated and then turn the speed up to medium and beat until well combined.
5. Add the remaining flour, combining on low speed at first, and then increase the speed to medium and beat well.
6. Change to the dough hook attachment of the mixer and beat on medium speed until the dough pulls away from the bowl and becomes smooth, approximately 3 to 4 minutes (for me this only took about two minutes). If you do not have a dough hook/stand mixer – knead until the dough is smooth and not sticky.
7. Transfer to a well-oiled bowl, cover, and let rise for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
8. On a well-floured surface, roll out dough to 3/8-inch (9 mm)thick. (Make sure the surface really is well-floured otherwise your doughnuts will stick to the counter).
9. Cut out dough using a 2 1/2-inch (65 mm) doughnut cutter or pastry ring or drinking glass and using a 7/8-inch (22 mm) ring for the center whole. Set on floured baking sheet, cover lightly with a tea towel, and let rise for 30 minutes.
10. Preheat the oil in a deep fryer or Dutch oven to 365 °F/185°C.
11. Gently place the doughnuts into the oil, 3 to 4 at a time. Cook for 1 minute per side or until golden brown (my doughnuts only took about 30 seconds on each side at this temperature).
12. Transfer to a cooling rack placed in baking pan. Allow to cool for 15 to 20 minutes prior to glazing, if desired.

They turned out beautifully. I made a half batch cause cold doughnuts aint no good.


We glazed some, filled some with lemon curd, and covered some in cinnamon and sugar.

Lemon Filling
makes about 2 cups

1 0.25 ounce packet unflavored gelatin
1 1/2 cups warm water
2 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon butter
1/3 cup fresh-squeezed lemon juice

In a medium bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the warm water and let it sit for a few minutes to soften. Beat the egg yolks in another small bowl and set aside.

In a medium saucepan combine the sugar and cornstarch, then gradually whisk in the water and gelatin. Heat over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and boils. Boil for about a minute, then remove from heat and pour a little into the egg yolks. Beat together then gradually add back into the gelatin mixture. Return to the heat and simmer for about a minute. Remove from the heat and beat in butter and lemon juice until smooth.

This will keep for a few days in the fridge.

Cooking with Peaches

I picked up some peaches from the farmers market, so our desserts recently have been peach themed.

First up we have the Honey Peach upside down cake by hotpolkadot.

It was delicious. (And I'm saying that when I don't typically like fruit) My only concern is that my beautiful cake sunk when i took it out of the oven. Maybe I over mixed/ under cooked it?

Next up we have some Peach cupcakes. I made this recipe myself mostly because I'm tired of makeing 12 -24 cupcakes when There are only 2 of us eating them.

Peach-Almond Cupcakes
Makes 6

1 1/2 tbl butter
1/4 c. sugar
2 tbl brown sugar
1/4 tsp almond extract
2 peaches, skinned & pureed (3 tbl reserve excess for glaze)
1 egg lightly beaten
1 tbl plain yogurt or whole milk
3/4 c. flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda

Cream sugars and butter till combined.
Add yogurt, 3 tbl pureed peaches, egg, & almond extract
Combine Flour, baking powder & baking soda
Sift flour into butter mixture.

Bake 18-22 minutes.



Comments on this cupcake are, Next time i'm going to try and leave out the milk and add more peaches. It just didn't taste enough like peach. Also I'd like it to be more moist. This tasted more like a muffin than a cupcake to me, So I'm going to cut back on the flour.

Anyways I'm sure both of these recipes could be substitute d for any in season fruit. Play around with them and enjoy!

Daring Bakers: Decorated Sugar Cookies

The September 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Mandy of “What the Fruitcake?!” Mandy challenged everyone to make Decorated Sugar Cookies based on recipes from Peggy Porschen and The Joy of Baking.

Recipe Here

So the challenge this month was to make cookies in "September" theme. I really don't have anything special for September. I thought about doing button cookies for national sewing month, but that seemed kinda boring. So I thought about what September meant to me and I thought of going for walks, and school field trips, which led me to puppies and dinosaurs. I know its a stretch, but seriously September? Other than football and apples there really isn't anything very September-y.But anyways, I added a bag of cherry herbal tea to the recipe but other than that is stayed the same. Next time I will add 2 bags to try and bring the flavor out more. The recipe is REALLY easy to do. Not terribly tasty, but not terribly icky either. It's a good conduit for frosting.

I used a basic butter cream frosting that I had leftover from some cupcakes on some of the cookies. The recipe is:

1/2 C. salted butter
1/2 C. vegetable shortening
4 C. Sifted powder sugar
2 TBL. Milk
1 Tsp Vanilla or Almond Extract

Cream butter and shortening. Add sugar. Add milk and Extracts.

it's pretty easy. And pretty tasty. If you can let it set for a day or two before using, the powdered sugar breaks down even more and you have this yummy cream frosting. If anyone knows how to make buttercream frosting smooth on a cookie please let me know.

For the dinosaurs I used the royal icing recipe in the recipe. It was fun to decorate with. Kinda like a grown up coloring book. Pretty tasty as far as royal icings go.


There is just something cheerful about pok-a-dotted dinosaurs. It might not be the most September-y thing out there, but It reminds me of the days we went to the science & field museum.

Garden Fresh Salsa

It's time I showed you all what i have been doing with the produce from the garden. I love homemade salsa, but am kinda lazy and don't want to precook the tomatoes and peal them so I tried it with leaving the skins on and it turned out quite fine.



You will need:
3 tbls olive oil
5 qts Tomatoes (about 16 cups chopped)
4-5 cups chopped Peppers (your choice)
2 Large onions (3 cups)
1 whole bulb garlic
2 tbl salt
1 tbl cumin
1 bunch cilantro
2 Lemons (juice & Zest)
Fresh Basil (opt.) to taste
Fresh Oregano (opt) to taste

* keep in mind these are approximate measurements it doesn't need to be perfectly proportioned. The basic ratio is twice as much tomatoes as onions peppers and seasonings. (i.e. 2 cups tomatoes, 1/2 cup onion, 1/2 cup pepper)

Throw everything into a food processor and grind to desired consistency.

Saute onions and peppers in oil and saute about 5 minutes over medium heat.

Add remaining ingredients, bring to a boil then reduce heat so that it simmers. Cook to desired consistency (about 1-2 hours) Adjust seasonings as needed. Feel free to throw this back into the food processor, or use an immersion blender if you want it to be extra fine.

makes 4 quarts

I've read that this needs to be eaten within 2 weeks. I haven't tried preparing it for food storage as I've never had it last that long. But if anyone has advice on how to seal these for long term storage i would appreciate it.



Serve with chips and enjoy!
Printable Recipe

Watermelon Wonder

Here in IL, our gardening season is coming to an end, at least for tomatoes. So i thought you might like to have a peek at how things are turning out.

There are a few stranglers hanging on to the vine still. But mostly it is dying for the excessive August heat. One lil guy is hanging in for all his might though.

My watermelon thinks he's a tomato.

Daring Bakers: Baked Alaska

The August 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Elissa of 17 and Baking. For the first time, The Daring Bakers partnered with Sugar High Fridays for a co-event and Elissa was the gracious hostess of both. Using the theme of beurre noisette, or browned butter, Elissa chose to challenge Daring Bakers to make a pound cake to be used in either a Baked Alaska or in Ice Cream Petit Fours. The sources for Elissa’s challenge were Gourmet magazine and David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop”.

So i was all on board for this, I mean what's not to like, homemade ice cream, cake and some meringue. Unfortunately this dish, at least for me, wasn't all it was cracked up to be.



Firstly the ice cream... tasted like ice cream. YEAY i did that right. I was however a little disappointing because of how much people brag on home made ice cream over store bought. I really couldn't taste a difference. Still it turned out perfect so its a good recipe.

My big problems were with the cake and the meringue. The cake was very dry, and would have been awful on it's own. The meringue was in my opinion, yucky to the taste. I may have made it wrong and in retrospect I certainly didn't whip it long enough, but either way it tasted like eggs.



On top of everything, The ice cream wouldn't harden all the way. It made putting it together very hard, and everything kinda just slopped around. But i persevered and we ate this sucker for my birthday. Captain liked it just fine, but for the work that was involved I will not be making this again... or if i do something similar I'm coating the sucker with marshmallows and not meringue.


Recipe here


I did however LOVE July's challenge which I finished this month also.

The July 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Sunita of Sunita’s world – life and food. Sunita challenged everyone to make an ice-cream filled Swiss roll that’s then used to make a bombe with hot fudge. Her recipe is based on an ice cream cake recipe from Taste of Home.-



The cake was spongy and tasty and very easy to make.



The whole thing turned out very pretty as well.



We had a melting incident during transport so the layers kinda combined a bit, but still i think it turned out nicely.

Recipe here.

Daring Baker: Chocolate Pavlovas

The June 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Dawn of Doable and Delicious. Dawn challenged the Daring Bakers’ to make Chocolate Pavlovas and Chocolate Mascarpone Mousse. The challenge recipe is based on a recipe from the book Chocolate Epiphany by Francois Payard.



This challenge was delicious. Yes, I had execution problems and it wound up to be not the prettiest dish ever, but it was still a win in taste.

So What happened:

This dish is basically a chocolate meringue cookie with a chocolate mouse filling and a drizzling of a cheese cream over the top.

I tried to turn it into one big Jelly roll type dessert. Unfortunately When cooking the meringue the edges became crispy before the center was fully cooked so i was unable to roll it properly. AND it fell apart when touched. So i decided to turn it into a trifle, then realized i didn't have a trifle bowl, so it became just a layered yummy dessert.

The recipe can be found here. The only changes I made were to add a bag of herbal raspberry tea to the meringue and omitted any of the alcohol.

Again, I can't emphasize enough how this for the most part was a fairly simple thing to make and was SUPER yummy.

Exciting Cakes and Things

A few weeks ago I made this cake.

It was super fun to do, and I definitely will be doing this again.

Some advice when you are making the cake, the faster you work the more crisp your layers, or stripes, will be. Captain kept calling me outside to look at stuff while I was making this so the black and white blurred together in spots.

The cake in actuality is kinda dry and bland. I think I'll try adding some more flavor, or just using this technique with a different recipe next time.

OH if you want a SUPER YUMMY cake recipe, go over to smitten kitchen and try her root beer float cupcakes. I made these and they are by far the best cupcake I've made in a while. I did add a dram of root beer flavoring to the recipe but other than that it was exact. I don't have any pictures because we ate them too fast. I just made them and ate them with ice cream. Next time i'll jsut make a cake and slice it rather than doing cupcakes.



Harvey wants to know what cakes YOU ALL have made recently.

Daring Bakers: PIECE MONTÉE

The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.




Find the recipe here.

These were by far the tastiest thing we have made so far. A few notes:

• This desert was surprisingly easy to make, and very forgiving when mistakes were made.
  
• If you forget to add ALL the eggs to the cream filling, take it off the heat and pour the hot batter into eggs and whisk like crazy then return to a boil. It works just fine.
• I found that scooping the pastry batter with a Mellon-baller actually resulted in taller puffs compared to piping the batter.
• This recipe makes about 30, my hubby and I ate them ALL in 24 hours. Make a double batch if you want extras after a party.
• the vanilla cream is more yummy than the chocolate version.
  

Enjoy!

How does your garden grow?

Captain and I (with the help of some friends) are currently fixing up the gardens around our house. I just wanted to share a pic of some of the flowers that have been growing.



What been growing in your gardens?

Ground Beef Tacos

Some of you may know this already, but I love too cook. I'll make dinner 4 or 5 nights a week, and the other evenings are usually leftovers. So while Harvey is currently having a hiatus in growing and a long term engagement with a runny nose I'm going to be having more cooking posts and less of Harvey's cute but snotty face. So without further adieu I give you a family favorite, Ground Beef Tacos.

First, chop up an onion and 3 cloves of garlic. Heat oil in skillet over medium heat till shimmering but not smoking. Fry onions and garlic stirring occasionally till translucent, about 2 minutes.
Add ground beef, and chop repeatedly till beef has desired consistency.
Half way though frying the meat, about 5 minutes, drain the excess grease. If you don't have extra grease, skip this step.
I like to drain it half way rather than at the end because it helps the beef brown up rather than just boil in its own juices.
When ground beef is finished , about 10 minutes total frying, add in remainder of ingredients.
Stir till combined and simmer till liquid has reduced and thickened, about 5 minutes. Mixture will not be completely dry, but will not be runny.
Enjoy! Feel free to add in whatever you want. Sometimes I will add beans or peppers.

Ground Beef Tacos

2 tsp vegetable oil
1 whole onion chopped
3 cloves garlic minced
1 lb ground beef
2 tbl chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp oregano
1/4 cayenne pepper
1/2 cup tomato sauce
1/2 cup chicken broth
1 tsp brown sugar
2 tsp apple cider vinegar.

First, chop up an onion and 3 cloves of garlic. Heat oil in skillet over medium heat till shimmering but not smoking. Fry onions and garlic stirring occasionally till translucent, about 2 minutes. Add ground beef, and chop repeatedly till beef has desired consistency. Half way though frying the meat, about 5 minutes, drain the excess grease. If you don't have extra grease, skip this step. When ground beef is finished , about 10 minutes total frying, add in remainder of ingredients. Stir till combined and simmer till liquid has reduced and thickened, about 5 minutes. Mixture will not be completely dry, but will not be runny.

Enjoy!
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