Stuffed peppers!

Since it's summer, and it's hot outside (hooray!) I thought I would make some stuffed peppers. I've never made stuffed peppers before but we always had them as kids. I would only eat the inside of my pepper and leave the poor pepper shell heaped up in a pile on the side of my plate. I searched online for many different recipes (there are some crazy ones out there!), but when it came time to it, I just sort of went with what I remembered Mom doing. Some hamburger, turkey sausage, rice, diced tomatoes (in garlic/olive oil - YUM), and bunches of seasonings, stuffed in a pepper and baked until delicious. The results were sooo good:


All in all, pretty tasty. I probably won't make them very often (too much work): browning the meat, cooking the rice, boiling the peppers, blending the stuffing, stuffing the stuffing, and baking the finished product. Tasty, but a little too time-intensive for a busy girl like me.





We had some mushy strawberries so I decided to use them for dessert. Guess what we had? STUFFED STRAWBERRIES! Ooh and they turned out perfect! I cored the strawberries, "stuffed" them with a few chocolate chips each (this would have worked a lot better if I had those huge strawberries), then baked them in the oven until they got warm and the chocolate got gooey. I took them out and gave them each a dollop of reddi-whip... Chris basically inhaled the things and immediately insisted I make more. So for the second round I heated them even more then served them with a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Goodness.


Chris was a very happy boy :)

And yes, after all this delicious food, I did go for a run today. 4.2 miles, to be exact. I ran most of the way, but thanks to allergies, I had to take a couple walking-breaks. It's a start, though, and that's all I need.

Baker Katie

Note: I decided to make a new blog to show all my pretty pictures. That, and the "AOL journals" site is kind of lame, so I wanted a grown up journal here on blogger. Just for the record most of my pictures I haven't taken - I have to give all the credit to Chris and his artistic/creative skills. (He's pretty good with a bowstaff, too.)

Studying for the USMLE has turned out to be a lot less fun than I thought, so I have decided to drop out of med school and open a cupcake shop. Everybody likes cupcakes, right? Well, if I'm going to become a cupcake-maker, I first need to practice (and I guess I will study for boards as a back-up plan).

I have a little knowledge about cakes and decorating since my mom took all of the Wilsons' Cake Decorating Classes when I was a kid - she practiced making/decorating cakes until NO ONE in our house would eat cake anymore...not even for birthdays (I had a few birthday pies, cookies, etc but no cake for quite a few years).

Anyway, I thought that cakes would be a great outlet to get away from so much studying. So, last week I borrowed my mom's cake decorating supplies and went to town. I baked and baked and baked - full size cakes, mini cupcakes, little bread cakes, chocolate, vanilla, chai, peppermint, nutella - and lucky for me (but not for my waistline), everything turned out ultra-delicious.

Cake #1 was a white cake (a box mix, I had to do something to get started!) and turned into this adorable little "wedding" cake covered in fondant. (I've never used fondant before and I think it worked out pretty well!) I also made "flavored" cupcakes by adding chai mix, peppermint extract, and dabs of nutella.

The rest of the batter made the bottom half of my "glucose" cake. Don't judge - I have been studying biochem REALLY HARD and at the time I thought it was a hilarious idea. (Trust me, I don't get out much) Half of the cake is the white mix, the other half is a blue/white swirled homemade cake - it was really dense and SO tasty.

Finally, it was a friend's birthday so I decided to make happy little mini-cakes for everyone to take home. I think they turned out adorably, if I do say so myself.

















I have been thinking that maybe I should do something to counteract what all this baking was doing on my waistline. I want to run a 10K on July 4. This definitely will not happen unless I run (a lot) until then, so beginning tomorrow I am training to run 6.2 miles in a row. (I say beginning tomorrow because I'm too full of cake at the moment - !)