cooking ala mel

healthy recipes and the occasional craft

facebook instagram pinterest RSS Feed email bloglovin' goodreads

Pumpkin Spice Granola

Well, I survived the fall semester of my second year (P2) of pharmacy school!  And you better believe I’ve been busy in the kitchen since I finished!  With the holidays coming, I’ve been trying to round up all my goodies as quickly as I can while still trying to keep my kitchen from looking like a tornado (or a snowstorm of powdered sugar) went through it.  So far, so good.  But I still have a few recipes to go..

I won’t be sharing any of the goodies I made for Christmas until after Christmas so I don’t spoil the surprise, but I do have some recipes that can help you out if you are at a loss when figuring out last minute gifts!  This granola recipe is great for a last minute gift – it’s quick and easy to make, you probably have most of the ingredients, and it’s delicious!  My sister, Lauren, requested granola for her birthday (which was in October), and so I took two kinds home to her over Thanksgiving, since I wasn’t home before that.  I chose the pumpkin spice because I had some leftover pumpkin in the fridge that I wanted to get rid of.
[Read more…]

Hot Fudge Sauce

The semester is winding down, and all I can think about is what goodies I’m going to make for Christmas and what gifts I still need to buy.  With four tests coming up next week, I need to shake that as soon as possible.  I’m taking tonight to catch up on some TV shows and [hopefully] relax my brain enough that I’ll be able to hunker down with studying tomorrow.  A night of TV shows means I need some ice cream to go with it, and ice cream isn’t complete with a good sauce, preferably chocolate.  In comes this rich hot fudge sauce.

For all the chocolate lovers out there on your Christmas list, this would be lovely for homemade Christmas gifts, too!  Add a cute label, some ribbon, and you’ve got yourself a delicious gift.

Oreo Stuffed Chocolate Chip Cookies

I have an, er… interesting (and slightly unbelievable) story to tell you today.  I broke my foot.  Well, fractured my foot.  And how, exactly, did I fracture my foot?  Nymeria (you know, that baby kitten I introduced here) sprinted and, well, slammed into it.  It was hard enough to make me fall, and you know, fracture my foot, but all it did to Nymeria was scare her a bit (poofy tail and all), thankfully.  After calling across the apartment to Alex from my sorry spot on the floor with pain coursing through my foot and having him find her to see if she was okay, I parked back on the couch to study for the test I had the next day.  But then my foot got a sort of blue goose egg looking thing on it, and it didn’t stop hurting (if you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen the photo).  So I went and got an x-ray.  And I was the person that burst out laughing when the doctor came in to tell me it was fractured.  Because my kitten broke my foot.  And then I proceeded to continually check Nymeria for a concussion the rest of the night.  But she was fine, of course, the hard headed little dear.  All ready to play as soon as I got back.  It’s a good thing she plays fetch, cause otherwise she’d be pretty unhappy at my brokenness.  But that’s my story.

Because I have a broken foot, I had to make cookies.  Sometimes, that’s all you can do.  And really, it’s made me feel quite better (even if my foot does hurt a bit from all the standing I shouldn’t have been doing while making them).

[Read more…]