cooking ala mel

healthy recipes and the occasional craft

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Bête Noire (Flourless Chocolate Torte)

Valentine’s Day is usually pretty low-key for us.  This year, with House of Cards season 2 being released on Netflix, we decided to have a marathon.  Equipped with Chinese takeout, pink sparkling wine, a huge fuzzy blanket, and some very cuddly kitties, we had a very relaxing Valentine’s Day.  Of course, I had to make a dessert.  Alex requested bête noire, one of the absolute most decadent desserts I make.

I usually just make the cake itself, as it’s as rich as the inside of a chocolate truffle, but I perused different recipes this year to see if I could change it up at all.  Bon Appétit added chocolate ganache to theirs.  How could I resist even more chocolate?!  Oh, that’s right.  I couldn’t. [Read more…]

Chicken and Gnocchi Soup

I’ve been to Olive Garden for their unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks lunch more times than I can count.  How can you go wrong with that combination?  I tend not to choose creamy soups when I’m out for lunch, as they’re usually so full of calories that I feel bogged down for the rest of the day.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t had the chicken and gnocchi soup, though, because hello, gnocchi!  My favorite.  Upon deciding to make some at home from scratch, I had to make it a good bit healthier, of course!

I started out with homemade whole wheat gnocchi (recipe can be found here).  Homemade gnocchi is pretty easy to make, as long as you have a little bit of time, and it’s so worth it.  The resulting gnocchi are light like pillows.  If you don’t have time to make your own, you can just as easily use a package from the store, but try to make sure it’s fresh (found in the refrigerated or frozen section) [Read more…]

Double Chocolate Banana Cookies (Gluten Free)

Over the weekend, I spent just about the entire time transferring this blog from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress.  Lovely Stephanie from Inspired Flow Web Design did the whole migration for me and set up my basic design so it would look just as it did before.  We ran into a few little problems as we went, and she was so patient about all of my silly questions (I am not a coder by any means).  If you want any design work done on your site, I definitely recommend her!  She was awesome.  Now that I have all of the basic elements in place, and the site works (we had a little bit of downtime – I’m sorry if that affected you!), I’m working behind the scenes to make sure everything is formatted properly.  Luckily, Alex has been willing to help me with a few coding issues I’ve had, although we still have a couple things left to figure out!  If you have any issues with the new site, please let me know, as we’re still working out all the kinks!

With all of the blog stuff I did this weekend, I kept forgetting to eat.  This is something that I never do, and I’ve always made fun of Alex for doing it, as he almost always forgets to eat if I don’t physically set the food in front of him during the weekends.  I’m convinced it’s all the staring at code, which is obviously why Alex always does it, too.  😉  Luckily, I had these cookies stashed away, so when I would mosey into the kitchen finally, I’d just grab one of them.  They’re pretty darn healthy, so I’m glad they were sitting around, rather than digging into our chip stash! [Read more…]