I started another blog. See, I kept writing all of these posts on Figs&Wigs and then feeling like I need to apologize for them, because I know you ladies don’t really give a rip about the Jonas Brothers or my workout regimen. My new blog is called The Beholder, and it’s basically where I write about anything that pops into my blonde little head. American Idol, getting in shape, pretty pictures that I took, life as a romance writer’s daughter, etc. Hope to see you over there! I’ve got a pretty hefty little following now, so you’ll be in good company.

Teeny tiny goat cheese polenta pizza!

And what’s more, it’s only got four easy-to-find ingreeds!

Polenta, goat cheese, tomatoes, and basil

All you have to do is go grab a polenta log (usually by the pasta in the grocery store), whatever type of goat cheese you prefer, tomatoes, and fresh basil.

I’ll admit, the polenta log is a bit…weird. It comes out of the plastic and…still looks made of plastic.

It's not plastic! I promise! It's just cornmeal.

Unwrap it and slice it into discs. Put the discs on a cookie sheet (and don’t worry about leaving much room between each; they won’t spread at all. Also, now is probably a good time to turn on your oven’s broiler.

Next, dice your tomatoes.

See my new white knife? I made Dave buy it for me while we were registering. Hee hee.

 Next, chop your basil.

Can you smell it?

From there, it’s easy. There are two methods for assembling your mini-pizzas: a) Grab your boyfriend and make him do the rest, or b) put a couple of tomatoes and some crumbles of goat cheese over each one, and sprinkled basil on the top. (I did option B today.)

Aren't they pretty?

I was able to fit all of them onto one cookie sheet, which made a good light snack for 3-4 people (okay, Dave and I ate all of them in one sitting, but we’ve both got this problem where we can’t stop eating if there’s still food left).

I'm putting my Oneida baking sheets to good use

Stick ‘em under the broiler for 5 minutes, or until the cheese is brown and awesome-looking, and WHAMMO! Impressive hors d’oeuvres in MINUTES!

You KNOW it.

I’m having some ladies over tomorrow night and I plan on serving these little dudes. I plan on insinuating that I slaved all day in the kitchen over them.

The artist is Oren Lavie.

Annnd…from a slightly different angle (I need to not take so many pictures):

Apparently something I did made the colors all saturated. So in real-life, the napkins are actually very soft-looking and gorge. But you get the aubsome idea.

So you can imagine how I felt when I saw this post on The Kitchn. I never imagined I could make REAL potato leek soup! And that it would be easy!

So, okay. The recipe on The Kitchn….just didn’t do it for me. Maybe I’ve had my potato leek palate destroyed by instant powdered soup, but when I first tasted the soup after following their instructions, I was…okay, I’ll say it…I was appalled. So watery! So bland!

Luckily I had a few tricks up my sleeve, and I ended up making something totes delish and, if I do say so myself, far better than the Safeway shizz I used to eat.

Here are MY ingredients:

• 4 small potatoes or so (but if you’re me, you get nervous that 4 isn’t enough, so you make sure that one of them is abnormally larger than the others
• A leek. Some leeks? I don’t know if “leek” refers to the individual leaves, or if it’s the whole giant green-onion-looking thing. Put it this way: I went to the grocery store and grabbed the biggest leek (or bundle of leeks) they had. You’ll see what I mean below.
• Soy milk creamer, or real cream, or if you’re lame then just some regular milk or soy milk
• Chicken bullion
• About an eighth of an onion
• Some garlic, in whatever form you like (mine was paste, as usual)
• Salt, pepper, and olive oil

Okay, so let me just say that I modified the recipe AFTER I made the one from The Kitchn, so I’m sure there’s a much better way to make it. Still, when all was said and done, I had spent about 15 minutes in my kitchen – just enough time to chop the leeks, peel and dice the potatoes, and puree the soup. And it’s good. REAL good. The other awesome news is that you probably already have everything you need to make this, minus the leek and potato.

So the way you do this is simple: just chop the leek, discarding the tough green part at the top (yes, that’s like half of it, but trust me, I tried eating that part and the giant cut on the roof of my mouth is a reminder as to why that’s a terrible idea).

To chop it, just slice the leek into thin discs and roughly cut through those. If you’ve got a blender or a hand blender (like me!), the way you chop it doesn’t matter. But if you’re going to be hand-mashing the soup, then I would make sure that the pieces end up being as thin and small as possible. On a side-note, how gorge is that color? Celery green can suck it; leeks are WAY prettier.

Once the leeks are sliced, stick ‘em in a colander and rinse well. You’ll probably find a bit of dirt as you chop, but it’s easy to wash off.

Yes, I know my colander is gross. I bought it for 25 cents at a garage sale. Anyhoo. After the leeks are rinsed, dump ‘em in your soup pot with a goodly glurg of olive oil and turn the heat to medium.

Keep an eye on the the pot, stirring occasionally, while you peel and dice your potatoes. Normally I don’t peel potatoes when a recipe tells me to because it’s somewhat annoying, but I knew I wanted this soup to be creamy and chunks of potato skins would probably eff that up. A word of caution: peel your potatoes over a bowl; NOT over the trash can. Those little buggers get slippery once you get going on them, and they might jump out of your hand and into the trash. And then you’ll have to glance around surreptitiously to make sure nobody is watching, fish the potato out of the trash, rinse it, tell yourself that because you’re boiling it what you’re about to do isn’t foul, and put it in your soup. Shhhhhhhhh. That’s just a hypothetical. I didn’t make soup out of a potato I dropped in the trash. Shhhhhh.

Also, be careful not to accidentally peel off a strip of your left index finger. Also a hypothetical.

Add everything to the pot.

Add just enough water to cover (be very conservative with the water, or the soup will be pretty bland). Set the pot on the stove and bring to a simmer, uncovered, for about 30 minutes. Make sure to check on it at least once during this time to make sure that the water hasn’t reduced too much.

Now, had I known that my soup was going to be bland, I would have added the rest of the ingredients earlier (certainly before blending everything together). But here’s what actually happened: when the soup was done cooking, I added a goodly amount of salt and some pepper and used my hand blender to puree it together. Bitter disappointment ensued.

Scavenging through my kitchen, I dumped some soy creamer into the pot (maybe 2-3 tablespoons) along with a small scoop of Better than Bullion and some garlic. But I wanted more onion flavor. The trouble was that by this point, I had already washed and put away my hand blender. So you KNOW I wasn’t going to get it dirty again. I didn’t want to add chunks of raw onion to the soup, though, because they would take too long to soften.

Then, my friends, I was hit by a flash of brilliance. In the periphery of my vision, a metal gleam caught my eye. My cheese grater! I’m sure I’m not the first person to do this, but I grabbed an onion and began to grate it into my soup! I don’t think I added that much; maybe the equivalent of an eighth of the entire vegetable, but I’ll be damned if it didn’t fix the flavor. The onion bits were small enough that they just melted into the still-hot soup. For good measure, I left it on low heat for another 10 minutes (which is why putting all of the extra crap in before cooking the soup would be a good idea).

Et voila, a delicious, easy lunch with enough leftover to feed me and Dave tonight.

I was lamenting not having any turkey bacon on hand, though. The next time I make this recipe, I’m going to cook four slices of turkey bacon in the pot before sauteeing the leeks. Then when the soup is done, I’ll put a slice or two of bacon into each bowl, sticking out so that it looks pretty. Oh well. Shoulda woulda coulda. This was still amazing, and I’m glad Dave will finally be able to eat something creamy without turning into a lactard and getting all F&B.

So…which category do you think Dave falls into? He says “Prepster at a function;” I say “Wacky, fun guy” mixed with a little “Throwin’ a hand sign.”

The only one she left off was the “Picture of me when I was four” shot. Whenever someone has a picture of themselves as a little kid, I assume that they grew up to be awkward-looking.

And yes, I am aware that my profile picture is of me when I was four, and no I don’t think I’m awkward-looking….except when I’m doing shake-face.

My friends, I present to you Smitten Kitchen’s Car Bomb Cupcakes. I was so excited that I took an annoyingly large number of pictures, so you’ll have to bear with me.

First, let me just point out that any recipe that begins like this is sure to be grade-A awesome (and I didn’t even have the whiskey in this shot):

I followed Deb’s instructions very closely because I was terrified that I would royally eff up my first KitchenAid experience. So I don’t have a ton to add. Just pictures and obsessive drooling. In fact, I feel bad re-printing the ingredients because I didn’t really alter anything. Just head to her website if you feel like making these.

I made these during Chicago’s freak warm weather this week – so I got to cool the cupcakes by the open window! Trust me, it was exciting. You don’t even know. My whole condo smelled even MORE cupcakey than I ever dreamed possible.

Unlike Deb, I do not own (nor could I find) a one-inch round cookie cutter. So I pulled out my grapefruit spoon, and it worked pretty darn well. Maybe the holes I dug weren’t as uniform, but in the end, that didn’t matter. I went even deeper into each cupcake than she did – I could almost see the cupcake wrapper through the bottom on some of them.

Once I dug out the middles of the cupcakes, I made the ganache. The most satisfying part of making the ganache was chopping the chocolate. It was so crunchy!

I (obviously) took Deb’s optional suggestion of adding a teaspoon of whiskey to the filling. It ended up tasting like a dream (and that’s saying a lot, since I don’t like chocolate). I could just taste the whiskey at the end, and it made my throat the teeniest bit warm.

Earlier in the week, I stopped into Crate & Barrel, aka my personal Nirvana, to update our registry. I knew I would be making these cupcakes, so you can imagine my excitement when I found these little squirt bottles with different piping attachments. I picked up two different-shaped nozzles; one for the ganache and one for the icing. This picture’s colors are off (annoying) so it’s not that pretty, but you get the idea.

Here’s a prettier picture of the ganache (I KNOW, I’M ROLLING MY EYES AT MYSELF TOO). One thing to note: I ended up having to make a second batch of the ganache because the first round only filled half my cupcakes. I don’t know if this is because I made the holes too big or what. But they turned out perfectly and I would do it the exact same way the next time.

After that, I hand-washed Salma’s bowl and whipped up the buttercream frosting. I don’t think I ended up using more than three cups of powdered sugar, although I wasn’t really measuring. Also, I accidentally put the Bailey’s Irish Cream in before I added the sugar (instead of after the frosting was made), but the icing was still amazing.

When that was done, I laid my cupcakes out on plates and used my cheese grater to shave some leftover chocolate over the top of them. I think they’re so pretty.

The recipe made enough frosting to cover the top of each cupcake in one layer (you can probably tell that I did a spiral on each one, starting at the outer edge and moving toward the center). Deb said she didn’t want more than that, and I can see why – but since I’m not a huge fan of intense chocolate, I wouldn’t have whined if there were a mountain of buttercream on top of each cupcake.

And the result? Holy crumb. So good. I’ll definitely be making these for you this summer.

Click here to read more about the teensy baby seal who doesn’t like fish.

That’s a happy relationship right there.

Here’s a video of a spoof he did on Katherin Heigl. Yeah, the above video has got to be a joke. I feel sheepish. I STILL think he should do the Arrested Development movie, though.