Key Lime Pie

Holy Mother of Fruity Desserts. I am a chocolate person hands down. I always want chocolate if I'm having dessert. If there's no chocolate, it's a waste. Not anymore. Key Lime Pie! New love of my life, you have arrived. For Father's Day, we made a Key Lime Pie for my boyfriend's dad. I hadn't even tried it for years so I didn't really remember much about it. I just made it and he took it over for dessert. He came back with a few slices left and was like you neeeeeed to try this. That's the moment when my realization of my love for Key Lime Pie happened. It was really hard not to finish all those few slices.

Key Lime Pie

Yield ~8-10 servings

~10 graham crackers, crushed

4 tablespoons butter

1 can sweetened condensed milk

4 egg yolks

1/2 cup key lime juice

In a food processor, crush graham crackers to crumbs. If you don't have a processor, you can place them in a bag and crush them with a fairly solid or heavy object, such as an ice cream scooper. Combine graham cracker crumbs and melted butter and mix together. Press into a pie dish. In a separate bowl, mix ythe sweetened condensed milk, egg yolks, and key lime juice. Add some lime zest to pump up the flavor, then pour mixture into pie dish on top of crust. Bake 15 minutes. Let cool, then refrigerate ubtil ready to serve. Add whipped cream if desired.

Corn Tomato Slaw

Welcome back! Now you finally get to see the recipe that goes oh so well with the crab cakes. It's really just right. I hope you all had a good weekend. I got to go to DC this Friday for dinner at Lincoln. It is pretty darn neat because the floor is covered with almost 800,000 pennies. How crazy is that? The restaurant is really fun with all Lincoln/1800's themes. All the cocktails are named after things in that era like emancipation punch and the lady lincoln. I'd say the best part of that dinner though was the salted caramel ice cream with caramelized bacon on top! I know this whole bacon in dessert phase has been around while but I still had never experienced it. I begged my boyfriend not to get dessert because we all know I wouldn't be able to resist it but he did it anyway. It was heavenly, now if only I could figure out how to make salted caramel ice cream and caramelized bacon bits. Then maybe more people would actually read my blog AND make comments. That would be the day! :)

Corn Tomato Slaw
Yield ~ 4 servings

2 ears corn, cut off
1/2 package grape tomatoes, halved
2 tablespoons butter
15 leaves of basil, chopped
salt and pepper

Pour a tablespoon of oil in a pan and bring to medium heat. Place corn in, seasoned with salt and pepper. Saute for about 5 minutes, then add in the tomatoes. Saute for another 5 minutes, then add in the basil. Keep on heat for a couple more minutes, then serve.

Maryland Crab Cakes

Rewind 2 years ago. I didn't eat any seafood except for shrimp. That's it. Fast forward to now, I eat a lot of seafood including but not limited to shrimp, crabs, cooked fish and raw, especially sushi. That is quite the increase of seafood vocabulary to add to my diet. One of the first new additions were these crab cakes. I was never even a fan of crabs until I had one of these. My boyfriend introduced to me his version of the crab cake and I never looked back. He was pretty proud of this recipe and there is a reason why. So many crab cakes here have a ton of filler aka bread crumbs that you barely get any crab meat anymore. These babies are pure crab and it's awesome. I can honestly say it's the best crab cake ever. I went down to Charleston to see my amazing aunt and uncle and we made this for them. My uncle fell in love as well and they have asked me for the recipe 3 times! The sauce really compliments the crab cake well, as well as the side which will be the next recipe to come. 

Maryland Crab Cakes

Yield ~4 cakes

1 pound crab meat

2 tablespoons yellow mustard

3 tablespoons mayonnaise

1 egg

juice from 1/2 lemon

1 teaspoon Old Bay

handful of fresh parsley, chopped

dash of pepper

~1/2 cup instant potatoes

Sauce

3/4 cup mayonnaise 

3 tablespoons chili garlic sauce

Mix all ingredients except instant potatoes in a bowl. Add in 1/4 cup instant potatoes at a time until your preferred consistency and form 4 crab cakes. Pour about a tablespoon of oil in an oven safe pan or skillet and bring to medium heat. Place cakes in the pan and cook on each side for about 4 minutes or until slightly browned. Then place pan in the oven for 15 minutes to finish cooking.  For the sauce, just mix the mayo and chili garlic sauce in a bowl. 

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Moon Pies

These were our dessert for Father's Day after we had that awesome BBQ and Corn Dip. Dad has always always loved moon pies and oatmeal cookies. He's just a big fan of all those candies and baked goods he grew up with. In fact, for Christmas I gave him a box of all the candies he grew up with, including Turkish Taffy, Mallow Cups, Clark Bars, Bit-O-Honey, and so on. If you have a parent who is into that kind of stuff, let me tell you it will be a big hit! He loved it and I'm sure yours will too. So that was my inspiration and we  now have the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Moon Pie. 

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Moon Pies

Yield ~15 

3/4 cup flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 cups oats

1/2 cup pecans, chopped

1/2 cup chocolate chips

6 tablespoon butter

3/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

2 teaspoons vanilla

3/4 cup marshmallow fluff

1/2 cup butter

1 tablespoon vanilla

1- 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cream butter and brown sugar together, add in the egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl mix together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour the liquid mixture in to combine. Last stir in the oats, pecans, and chocolate chips. Bake for 9 minutes. Let cool. Meanwhile cream the 1/2 cup butter and powdered sugar together in another bowl. Mix in the vanilla, then the marshmallow fluff. When your cookies are cool you may assemble them. Just spread a layer of the fluff filling on them and place another cookie on top and they're ready!

Spicy Corn Dip

Good Morning! Hope you all had a great Father's Day! I spent part of mine on the Black Pearl. It was pretty awesome. It was actually the HMS Bounty but it was used as the Black Pearl in Pirates of the Caribbean. When you see it in real life it doesn't look so much like the one in the movie though because they completely changed out all the masts and did a ton of cosmetic work to it. Then they changed it back. I think they should've left it the way Black Pearl was intended to be but that's just me. It would've made for a much cooler tour.

After that I started on dinner and made my Dad some Carolina BBQ and some Spicy Corn dip to have before we dug in. It was pretty tasty and a nice change up from the every day salsa although I still love salsa with all of my heart. It is hands down my favorite snack of all time. I could drink the salsa at El Toro Bravo in downtown Annapolis, maybe even bathe in it... Is that weird?

Spicy Corn Dip
Yield ~ 3 cups (enough for 5 people)

1 can corn
1/2 green pepper
1/2 onion
1/2 red pepper
handful of cilantro, chopped
2 tablespoons sour cream
1/3 cup mexican cheese blend
1/2-1 teaspoon chili powder (to your desired spice level)

Saute peppers and onion in a pan on medium high heat. Add them to corn, cilantro, sour cream, cheese, and chili powder. Refrigerate until ready to serve with some fritos!

Asian Crunch Salad

I'm fresh out of awesome stories to tell you. Maybe I just can't think of any right now. All I can think about is that it's Friday. Aruba vacation spoiled me. It seems that's all I look forward to every week anymore. Then it comes and the weekend goes too quickly. This won't be too different either especially since I am helping my family with their moving sale and packing everything up! There are only 2 weeks left! Yikes! One awesome thing I'm doing this weekend though is seeing my friend play at the new Green Turtle in Annapolis. Know how my super talented friend made my logo for my site? She also sings along with being super artistic. Pretty darn cool!

So this salad was one of the first ways my boyfriend really got me to stick around. It was part of one of the first meals he ever made for me and it sucked me in. This peanut dressing is seriously amazing. So amazing I just take spoonfuls of it and eat it. It may not be so healthy but it's heavenly. They may say the way to a man's heart is through his belly, well it's the way to my heart too! 

Asian Salad

Yield ~ 4 salads 

1 pound shrimp

1/2 Napa cabbage (they are pretty large)

2 carrots, julienned 

1 cup bean sprouts

1 cucumber

1 red pepper

handful of cilantro, chopped

toasted almonds

Peanut Dressing

1/2 cup oil

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 inch piece of ginger, chopped

4 tablespoons rice vinegar

1/4 cup peanut butter

1 teaspoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons soy sauce

dash of pepper

 Bring the oil, garlic, and ginger to a boil in a saucepan for about 10 minutes. Take off stove to cool. In a separate bowl mix together the rice vinegar, peanut butter, sesame oil, soy sauce, and pepper together with a whisk. Once the oil mixture has cooled some, whisk it into the peanut butter mixture. Pour the dressing on the salad (when prepared) as much as you'd like. To prepare salad, cut up the napa cabbage, carrots, cucumber, and red pepper. Mix it all together in a bowl with the bean sprouts and cilantro as well. Set aside. Last bring a pan to medium high heat and spray with cooking oil. Prepare your shrimp with any spice you prefer. We sprinkled some Chinese five spice on ours to give it some extra flavor. Place them in the pan, they won't take more than a few minutes on each side. Prepare your salad and add your shrimp and toasted almonds on top!