1. 31 January 2012 · 08:09 PM ·
    Super Bowl Recipe Week: Mini Corn Dog Muffins | Iowa Girl Eats
  2. 29 September 2011 · 11:19 AM ·
    Pork Bolognese served with creamy polenta.  For Pork: 2lb boneless pork loin roast 1 jar tomato sauce or 3 cups of your favorite recipe. 1 large onion Season the roast with Salt and Pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil in a pan and sear the roast on all sides. Line the bottom of a crock pot (or dutch oven) with half of the onion. Place the roast on top. Put the other half of the onion on top of the roast, and cover with 1/2 cup of tomato sauce (I used Rao’s Arrabiatta sauce to save time but you can use your favorite recipe or jarred sauce). Cook on low 8 hours (if using a dutch oven, preheat the oven to 225 and cook for around 8 hours). Remove the pork and cooking liquid. Reserve 1/2 cup of cooking liquid. Shred the pork, and place back in crock pot with remaining tomato sauce (about 1 1/2 cups) and 1/2 cup of reserved cooking liquid. Cook on high for 30 minutes.  For Polenta:  4 cups of water (or chicken broth) 1 cup of coarse ground polenta 1/4 cup of milk 3/4 cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese Salt and Pepper to taste Bring water seasoned with salt to a boil. Stir in polenta, whisking for about one minute while water is at a rolling boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes. When polenta is cooked to desired consistency, stir in milk and parmesan cheese. Remove from heat and serve with Pork Bolognese. 

    Pork Bolognese served with creamy polenta. 

    For Pork:

    2lb boneless pork loin roast

    1 jar tomato sauce or 3 cups of your favorite recipe.

    1 large onion

    Season the roast with Salt and Pepper. Heat 2 tablespoons of Olive Oil in a pan and sear the roast on all sides. Line the bottom of a crock pot (or dutch oven) with half of the onion. Place the roast on top. Put the other half of the onion on top of the roast, and cover with 1/2 cup of tomato sauce (I used Rao’s Arrabiatta sauce to save time but you can use your favorite recipe or jarred sauce). Cook on low 8 hours (if using a dutch oven, preheat the oven to 225 and cook for around 8 hours). Remove the pork and cooking liquid. Reserve 1/2 cup of cooking liquid. Shred the pork, and place back in crock pot with remaining tomato sauce (about 1 1/2 cups) and 1/2 cup of reserved cooking liquid. Cook on high for 30 minutes. 

    For Polenta: 

    4 cups of water (or chicken broth)

    1 cup of coarse ground polenta

    1/4 cup of milk

    3/4 cup of fresh grated parmesan cheese

    Salt and Pepper to taste

    Bring water seasoned with salt to a boil. Stir in polenta, whisking for about one minute while water is at a rolling boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes. When polenta is cooked to desired consistency, stir in milk and parmesan cheese. Remove from heat and serve with Pork Bolognese. 

  3. 15 March 2011 · 11:19 AM ·
    Dear mom people who read my blog, It has been a while since my last post. While I was away, I’ve become a legitimate human being, with a paying job, a new dog, and a sweet little apartment (that I pay for almost completely by myself). I’ve been a little busy, and quite frankly, you would not want me to post what I have been eating to get by. Lots of pasta, ground turkey and frozen dinners. Classy. Anywho, last night was my first big meal in a while. and by meal I mean I roasted a chicken. Big fuckin’ woop.  Initially I was going to make a roasted chicken over a salad kind of meal, but then the chicken took too long so I just ate a salad and 10 cookies while I waited and then just ate straight up meat when the chicken was cooked. My sister Whitney and I hovered around the carcass like a pack of rabid hyenas. No wonder we both have so many male suitors.  Anyway, here’s the rundown for a 2 1/2 hour long chicken roast. Normally, I would rub that bad larry bird down with tons of butter, slip butter under the skin with seasonings, but I’m doing this thing where I pretend to diet, so I just rubbed the chicken down with some olive oil, then seasoned him with some seasoned salt, and pepper, and shoved some onions and rosemary in his cavity. I need to stop referring to the chicken as “he”, it’s kind of gross. We did have a special bond though, as I refused to get a shopping cart at the grocery store, proceeded to buy 1,000 things and made Whitney haul the chicken around on her shoulder as we walked through the isles. Whitney kept calling it her pet, and consequently we ended up talking to an old crazy lady about gnomes for 5 minutes too long. I digress. Place your chicken in a roasting pan. My chicken weighed it at around 7.5lbs, and it was recommended that I cook him for around 2-2 1/2 hours.  I used my le creuset baking dish thing, and it worked out wonderfully. Put chicken in a 350 degree oven and wait for the little button to pop. I check the temp frequently, because I don’t trust that little plastic button. Can someone explain to me the technology that goes into that thing, because it just looks like plastic. This was the juiciest, most flavorful bird I’ve ever met. I have one photo of after. My raw chicken hands weren’t snapping too many pictures during the process.  Word to the wise: Do not start this chicken at 8pm if you want to eat at a reasonable hour.  Enjoy! Hopefully this post will just be the beginning of my refueled blogging life. 

    Dear mom people who read my blog,

    It has been a while since my last post. While I was away, I’ve become a legitimate human being, with a paying job, a new dog, and a sweet little apartment (that I pay for almost completely by myself). I’ve been a little busy, and quite frankly, you would not want me to post what I have been eating to get by. Lots of pasta, ground turkey and frozen dinners. Classy. Anywho, last night was my first big meal in a while. and by meal I mean I roasted a chicken. Big fuckin’ woop. 

    Initially I was going to make a roasted chicken over a salad kind of meal, but then the chicken took too long so I just ate a salad and 10 cookies while I waited and then just ate straight up meat when the chicken was cooked. My sister Whitney and I hovered around the carcass like a pack of rabid hyenas. No wonder we both have so many male suitors. 

    Anyway, here’s the rundown for a 2 1/2 hour long chicken roast.

    Normally, I would rub that bad larry bird down with tons of butter, slip butter under the skin with seasonings, but I’m doing this thing where I pretend to diet, so I just rubbed the chicken down with some olive oil, then seasoned him with some seasoned salt, and pepper, and shoved some onions and rosemary in his cavity. I need to stop referring to the chicken as “he”, it’s kind of gross. We did have a special bond though, as I refused to get a shopping cart at the grocery store, proceeded to buy 1,000 things and made Whitney haul the chicken around on her shoulder as we walked through the isles. Whitney kept calling it her pet, and consequently we ended up talking to an old crazy lady about gnomes for 5 minutes too long. I digress.

    Place your chicken in a roasting pan. My chicken weighed it at around 7.5lbs, and it was recommended that I cook him for around 2-2 1/2 hours.  I used my le creuset baking dish thing, and it worked out wonderfully. Put chicken in a 350 degree oven and wait for the little button to pop. I check the temp frequently, because I don’t trust that little plastic button. Can someone explain to me the technology that goes into that thing, because it just looks like plastic. This was the juiciest, most flavorful bird I’ve ever met. I have one photo of after. My raw chicken hands weren’t snapping too many pictures during the process. 

    Word to the wise: Do not start this chicken at 8pm if you want to eat at a reasonable hour. 

    Enjoy! Hopefully this post will just be the beginning of my refueled blogging life. 

  4. 15 March 2011 · 11:01 AM ·

    Candace is Hungry for Stuffed Zucchini

    We all know that summer leads gardeners to a bounty of zucchini and squash. OK, well maybe we ALL don’t know that, but growing up with a large garden at my house, I can remember literally forcing zucchini on our 90 year old neighbors just so we could get rid of it we had so much. Then they would make us zucchini bread, and I was the only one of my sisters who would eat it because I just loved to be fat, and would legit eat anything at anytime if it was offered. Call me the chubby kid who never grew up. Zucchini bread is a revelation, and if I had the patience to bake, my freezer would be stocked with it.

    Anyway, this is a short one because I am posting from work (tsk tsk, but it’s a slow day…). This recipe is super simple, and I actually made it a while ago and just never posted it. I do not have step by step photos because sometimes that is just too much to handle.

    This was a test experiment that came out delicious, so I’ll give you a brief run down of ingredients. Adjust them as you see fit.

    I used jalapeno chicken sausage that I ground up in the food processor with bread crumbs, mushrooms, cilantro, some cayenne pepper and parmesean cheese.

  5. 29 December 2010 · 11:42 PM ·

    This is all I have to sum up my feelings for the past couple of months.

  6. 21 October 2010 · 03:26 PM ·
    Does anyone remember the falafel stand on Church Street? It was there for like, one night only, called NYC falafel, the biggest joke of my life? Anyway, I stumbled across this photo from over the summer of my friend Jessica (left), myself (middle), and Katherine (right). I think it is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll explain anyway. Jessica was beasting that falafel like someone was holding a gun to her head, I was clearly trying to get in on that, and katherine had just taken a bite of said falafel, and was about to murmer “I didn’t know it would have so many onions”.  I have not seen the falafel stand again, but it coincidently was there when my friends from NYC were up. Ah memories.

    Does anyone remember the falafel stand on Church Street? It was there for like, one night only, called NYC falafel, the biggest joke of my life? Anyway, I stumbled across this photo from over the summer of my friend Jessica (left), myself (middle), and Katherine (right). I think it is pretty self explanatory, but I’ll explain anyway. Jessica was beasting that falafel like someone was holding a gun to her head, I was clearly trying to get in on that, and katherine had just taken a bite of said falafel, and was about to murmer “I didn’t know it would have so many onions”. 

    I have not seen the falafel stand again, but it coincidently was there when my friends from NYC were up. Ah memories.

  7. 30 June 2010 · 01:12 PM ·
    HELLO CRUEL WORLD! So, it’s been quite a while since my last update. I’m alive, don’t worry. I know you were all waiting anxiously for my next post, so here it is. Don’t hate me for how lame and short it is, I’ll give you a little recap of what has been going on since my last post. First and foremost, graduation! What an event. Champlain even has some sort of theme song that mentions the word “harken” about 50 times. My parents came up for the weekend and I’m pretty sure I ate steak every meal of the day that weekend, and by pretty sure I’m positive I did. Once at the Windjammer, and the next night at the Kitchen Table Bistro. Steak salad for lunch one of those days. God I’m skinny. THEN after graduation I started a job in the real world (thanks Switchback Brewing Company!). I literally go to work 5 days a week. Who would have ever thought a little gal like me would end up with a job after graduation? Luck is not even a factor here, straight skill got me this one people. LOLERZ. OK ADD kicking in. THEN we moved. Not only did we move, but we totally UPGRADED our lives (thanks Don Harrington, you da man). My landlord of 3 years showed me a new place once I graduated. He was all “I’ve only shown you places close to campus, but now that you graduated let me show you what a shit hole you’ve been living in compared to what I have”. ENTER STAGE RIGHT: Mansion! What a sick joke my life has been up until now. Literally living in slums. Anyway, our new pad has a HUGE kitchen, and by huge I mean more than one person can fit in it at a time, no more galley for this gal. We also have a full sized GAS STOVE (yup, my heart is soaring as I type this). Our baking sheets actually fit inside said oven, and we can control the heat when cooking things. I literally thought I sucked at making rice until making it on this gas range. Now I blame the electric coils of doom for all my cooking fails in the past 3 years. Anywho, Here’s a pic of the new kitchen. Check it out. Try not to drool with envy aka laugh at how lamely excited I am about a stove. More to come soon, I have not forgotten about my love of this blog.

    HELLO CRUEL WORLD! So, it’s been quite a while since my last update. I’m alive, don’t worry. I know you were all waiting anxiously for my next post, so here it is. Don’t hate me for how lame and short it is, I’ll give you a little recap of what has been going on since my last post. First and foremost, graduation! What an event. Champlain even has some sort of theme song that mentions the word “harken” about 50 times. My parents came up for the weekend and I’m pretty sure I ate steak every meal of the day that weekend, and by pretty sure I’m positive I did. Once at the Windjammer, and the next night at the Kitchen Table Bistro. Steak salad for lunch one of those days. God I’m skinny. THEN after graduation I started a job in the real world (thanks Switchback Brewing Company!). I literally go to work 5 days a week. Who would have ever thought a little gal like me would end up with a job after graduation? Luck is not even a factor here, straight skill got me this one people. LOLERZ. OK ADD kicking in. THEN we moved. Not only did we move, but we totally UPGRADED our lives (thanks Don Harrington, you da man). My landlord of 3 years showed me a new place once I graduated. He was all “I’ve only shown you places close to campus, but now that you graduated let me show you what a shit hole you’ve been living in compared to what I have”. ENTER STAGE RIGHT: Mansion! What a sick joke my life has been up until now. Literally living in slums. Anyway, our new pad has a HUGE kitchen, and by huge I mean more than one person can fit in it at a time, no more galley for this gal. We also have a full sized GAS STOVE (yup, my heart is soaring as I type this). Our baking sheets actually fit inside said oven, and we can control the heat when cooking things. I literally thought I sucked at making rice until making it on this gas range. Now I blame the electric coils of doom for all my cooking fails in the past 3 years. Anywho, Here’s a pic of the new kitchen. Check it out. Try not to drool with envy aka laugh at how lamely excited I am about a stove. More to come soon, I have not forgotten about my love of this blog.

  8. 04 May 2010 · 10:42 AM ·

    Candace Is Hungry for Mint Juleps

    More like Candace is Thirsty! First, no one drinks mint juleps that isn’t a) from Kentucky b) at the kentucky derby or c) a 50 year old man, but here at Candace is Hungry, we never turn down a good bourbon drink.

    Lets rewind a little shall we. When I was growing up my parents had a pimp ass garden growing all kinds of things. MINT was one of them. Mint, if you do not know, is an invasive plant and now grows literally on every acre of my parents property at home.

    I didn’t realize how lucky I was to grow up with a garden until I was older, and not being forced to pick green beans while getting murdered by mosquitos, or take out the compost, or being yelled at for not composting something, but that is besides the point. I have vivid memories of mint leaves from the garden (that I most likely picked) steeping in bourbon on the counter for a week before the Kentucky Derby. My dad was a big fan. I was 8, so I didn’t realize what I was missing out on, UNTIL NOW!!!

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  9. 26 April 2010 · 03:18 PM ·

    Candace is Hungry for RESULTS!

    This blog was created for two reasons. One, I clearly love food and cooking, and two, my marketing management class required we plan and execute a personal branding strategy to set us apart from our competition when we graduate. I was excited to get this assignment because I had always wanted to start a food blog, and I love writing, and what better motivator than school to get it done? When I first started, I thought, “Ok, getting 100 followers on twitter is my goal.”. Well that goal came and went, but I realized throughout the course that followers on twitter really don’t mean anything. I have to gauge my results in interactions, not numbers. I started out by creating a twitter account and putting out content about food, and following industry related people. I am still shocked to this day how many people I am now in contact with because of twitter, that I otherwise would not have been.

    Now lets get down to the nitty gritty. I run google analytics on my blog to see how many people are coming to my site per week and where they are coming from. Through tracking this information, it’s really interesting to see the corelation between my activeness on twitter and the number of people visiting my blog. In this case, you really get results from being active on the social media scene. The past month or so I have been pretty detached from my twitter and blog because of more pressing issues (aka graduation), and my blog visits have decreased SIGNIFICANTLY directly because of this.

    Here is a screen shot from my analytics page. The first blue dot on the graph indicates that from March 28th, 2010-April 3rd, 2010, CandaceIsHungry had 35 visitors. As you can see, that keeps going down, in direct correlation with my decreased online activity. Now the last line, indicates that on April 25th I had 3 visitors. My bounce rate has increased significantly since I have been absent from blogging, it’s almost 20% higher than it was 2 months ago. That was a big shock to me, but still, expected.

    I was surprised to see that such a high percentage of visits were directed through search engines. This is good to know because I intend on continuing this blog after I graduate, and if I buy my domain name and need to think about purchasing keywords, I know that most people who searched for my blog searched “candace is hungry”, “candace hungry”, and “candaces hungry”. When I look deeper into referring sites, I was surprised that “stumbleupon” was one of the highest. I had registered my website with them to increase traffic, so I guess it worked. However, the bounce rate for those visitors is still pretty high, so I’ve got some work to do.

    During mid semester, I created a survey to find out what I was doing right. I was surprised to see that people registered my posts as almost 100% authentic, and could tell my personality through my posts. While many of the people admitted they aren’t there for the food, they said that the content and writing style was enough to keep the interested. People wanted to see more of me (I don’t know why, I’m a hot mess), and more cooking targeted at the college demographic. I have a lot of work to do, but I am excited to keep this blog going.

    All in all, I think that so far my blog has been very successful. I have gotten great verbal feedback from people on campus who read my blog, as well as lots of helpful criticism from my peers. I am taking everything in at this point, and hopefully in the future you will see more photos of me eating, some video blogs of me cooking, and some guest blog posts from my friends who live much more exciting lives.Candace is Hungry for more, and once I have more time on my hands I am very hopeful that my blog will only get more successful as I go.

    Comments

  10. 26 April 2010 · 02:31 PM ·

    Candace is Hungry for BBQ Pulled Pork!

    Don’t worry people, my lack of blog postings doesn’t mean I’ve stopped eating, I’m still alive. This past month has been hectic to say the least. Let me update you. I am now an employee of Switchback Brewing Company (Eff yes), and will be graduating from Champlain College on May 8th. I know, I know, it’s all happening. No need for me to stress out and have 90 anxiety attacks. It’s only the real world.

    Anyway, looking back on the past few months I remembered Mardi Gras. Well, I use the term remember loosely because, it was Mardi Gras, and girl can drink. HENCE why what I cooked on that fateful day was the PERFECT day drinking meal (my parents will be so proud). There is really nothing on earth as delicious as a pork shoulder, and I’m not even exaggerating. Cooked properly, heaven. Cooked poorly, you might as well eat a piece of dry leather.

    Enter stage right: CROCK POT. aka my BFF.

    Being the math whiz that I am, let me break it down for you with a simple equation.

    + = MAGIC

    I know, it looks complicated, but really, with the right ingredients, it’s hard to mess something up in the crock pot.

    Back to the pork. I put the pork shoulder in the crock pot on low temperature at probably 10AM that fateful morning, and when I returned home in a drunken stooper at around 6pm, it was mine for the taking. and by mine I mean I barely remember eating it, but that’s besides the point. I know in my heart of hearts it was delicious, mostly because I ate leftovers the next morning.

    Here’s all the ingredients you need to make this a smashing success:

    Ingredients:

    1 pork shoulder (around 5 pounds)

    3 Onions, count em, 3

    1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar

    1/3 cup of prepared BBQ sauce (we used Sweet Baby Ray’s, bc it’s cheap and good)

    3/4 cup of chicken stock

    2/3 cup of water

    Chop up the onions into chunks, and spread them on the bottom of the crock pot. Season the pork shoulder with salt and pepper. Place the pork shoulder fat side up, on top of the onions in the crock pot (this means that the fat of the pork will baste the meat while it’s cooking, meaning, less work for you!). Pour all the liquid ingredients over the pork, turn the crock pot on low, and as they say, set it and forget it! About 7 hours on low should do it, but more never hurt. Remove the pork shoulder from the crock pot and shred it. Serve atop mini potato rolls with some slaw or you can just eat it. Whatevs.

    Bring on the photos.

    My beloved Crock Pot. AKA it’s the BF’s but I adopted it and take care of it as if it were one of my young.

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