Last Thanksgiving Morgan was introduced to my aunt’s "sticky rice" and it was love at first bite! Since then we’ve been pestering her for the recipe but to no avail. So instead of waiting for Thanksgiving to roll around this year we decided to do a little online research and replicate the dish the best we could. After several tries this is how we’ve faired.

Oh chocolate mousse, how I love thee.

Actually, let me amend that statement. Oh chocolate, how I love thee.

Here’s one truth about me: I love chocolate. It doesn’t matter what it’s in, I love it.

My latest craving is craving chocolate mousse.

I’m always hunting for the best and tastiest chocolate recipe and both Alice and I were happy with the way this one. For this version, I tweaked a Tyler Florence recipe to make a double serving (because if I’d made the full batch, I would have eaten three servings, and I didn’t need that post-eating guilt).

Check out the recipe!

This week I had a hankering for polenta, so I added it to our menu (yeah, I typically write out a weekly menu for us, I’m a bit of a nerd).

Rather than just plain ol’ polenta (which is tasty, don’t get me wrong), I wanted to add something with a little sauce on it, which immediately made me think of a ragout.

Knowing that Alice is a big mushroom fan, I decided to go with a mushroom ragout and viola, our Wednesday night dinner: polenta with sausage and mushroom ragout.

Sadly, I used some wine in making the ragout, but it wasn’t the whole bottle. That meant Alice and I had to drink the rest of it.

Real shame that.

A while back, Alice and I had some leftover rice, so we decided to make fried rice (with the possible exception of rice pudding, there are few better uses for leftover rice). Typically, we use ham or some other pork product as the protein; but this fateful day, we didn’t have any and were too — let’s say unmotivated — to go to the store.

However, we did have bacon. Hello inspiration.

Adding the bacon added a nice smoky note to the fried rice and kept us happy with its porky goodness. Seriously, is there anything that bacon can’t do?

Unlock the keys to discovery for Bacon Fried Rice!

With the passing of October and Halloween (you did check out our awesome pumpkins, right?), I had officially declared the holiday season open.

Since it was now the holiday season, I knew it was time to get ready to bake some fruitcakes.

Without knowing how many people we were going to give fruitcakes too, or how many we might want to eat ourselves, I decided to quadruple the recipe I unusually use. This means that we now have 15 mini fruitcakes and one larger one (which we subsequently split in half and are eating little by little).

In all honesty, the fruitcakes themselves are pretty easy — let a bunch of fruit soak overnight in rum (Captain Morgan, natch), the next day cook with some sugar and unfiltered apple juice, add the dry ingredients and finally bake (then spritz with brandy every few days until you eat them, the longer you wait, the more complex they taste).

The only issues we were having were because it was such a big batch! Still though, it wasn’t too tough and we persevered.

One of the real losses was that I tried to play some Christmas music streaming through my 360, but the music wasn’t on my computer anywhere to stream. If you know me, or have heard about my luck with computers, you know they often like to die around me (especially hard drives).

Thankfully, I put all of my Christmas music on an external Western Digital hard drive, which seems to work great, but I then lost the power cable for it!

Since this is my one and only Western Digital external drive, I don’t have any spare cables and couldn’t get any music playing for us.

Even though Bing Crosby couldn’t serenade us while we were baking, everything still turned out fantastically!

Recently, Alice told me about some cookies that she had once, never again, but that she would love to try again. As she recalled, they were called flourless chocolate chip cookies. Immediately when she told me this, visions of flourless chocolate cakes danced in my mind (I know, I know, everything isn’t always about chocolate).

However, when she started describing them to me, light, airy, crumbly, only one thing came to mind: meringue. I now knew what I had to do, hunt down a meringue chocolate chip cookie recipe and try it.

For those of you who don’t know, or just care to listen to me blather on about food stuffs (seriously, I can go on and on), a meringue in its simplest form is egg whites beaten until stiff mixed with sugar and then baked until done. Uncooked (I’m not saying you should eat it uncooked, there are a bunch of different places saying that raw eggs aren’t good for you, but I’m a rebel ), this is rather like marshmallow cream.

I did some research, found a few recipes I liked, tweaked them slightly and made some flourless chocolate chip cookies.

Alice seemed like she really liked them, but they weren’t exactly as she remembered them. The texture wasn’t quite right.

With meringue, there’s two ways of cooking it, hot and fast or low and slow. I went with a middle, not quite hot, but warmer and slightly quicker. After she had them and I was able to dissect further how she remembered them being, I’ve determined that the next time I make these, I’m going to go with a higher temp to cook.

If you’re interested in the difference of the two cooking styles, the hotter and quicker you bake meringues, the more crackly and crumbly they’ll be with more of a hollow center. Taking the other method, low and slow, they turn out more soft and fluffy.

Still, I’m happy with the way they turned out, Alice had three before dinner and I think we’ll be trying them again shortly.

Best of all, for all of you who like such things, these are 100% fat free! I mean, fat free chocolate chip cookies that taste good, really, how can you go wrong?