Williams Sonoma pumpkin bread pan!

I love when things come out like they are in the picture! I used the recipe on the back of the label, and it was fantastic.

chorizo and potato tortilla

steamed napa cabbage with sauteed bacon

This is a simple and easy way to enjoy cabbage. Simply steam the cabbage until it's crisp-tender, saute the bacon in a separate pan, and toss the two together right before eating. This way, each of the two have different textures instead of cooking together and meeting somewhere in the middle. =)

Moroccan-style slow-cooked beef stew

For New Year's Eve, my fiance and I made a delicious Moroccan-style beef stew inspired by the lamb stew made by Michael Chiarello on a recent episode of Easy Entertaining. We started by searing the beef (we used boneless chuck) on the stove with a little flour, salt and pepper. We pulled the beef off and stuck it in the crock pot. In the same pan, we sauteed a mix of cippolini/yellow onions and carrots (both from my family's Pete's Greens Good Eats Localvore CSA) with gourmet baby yukon golds. We threw in paprika, chili powder, cumin, coriander, parsley, and cinnamon. We tossed the veggies in with the beef and deglazed the pan with some delicious cabernet sauvignon. We added the wine to the beef and veggies along with some chicken stock, a giant rosemary sprig and a few tablespoons of thick pomegranate sauce (Narsharab from Azerbaijan), and let it go for the rest of the day (maybe 6 hours?). The result was a deliciously fragrant stew -- perfectly tender veggies and melt-in-your-mouth beef.
We served the stew alongside an Israeli couscous salad with chickpeas, celery, and quick-preserved lemons, dressed with extra virgin olive oil and fresh-squeezed tangerine juice. We mixed the salad in as we ate and the combination was fabulous. The only pitfall here was that our crockpot is small. =)