Stuffed French Toast with a Homemade Peach Syrup

So, I'm still getting used to this whole blogging thing, and I'm not too sure how many times to post or what to post.  Am I only allowed to post about food? I don't know, many I'll some of my random ramblings.  But for now, I present to you....

Brunch addition!!! I love all things breakfast and brunch related.  Give me pancakes, eggs, bacon, and homefries every meal and I'll be happy for the rest of my life.  I found this amazing recipe on allrecipes.com, which has so many good recipes contributed by the readers.  What I really like about this website is that all the contributed recipes can be rated and everyone leaves a lot of comments of how they tweaked the recipe to make it better.  The original recipe is actually pretty fancy, here's a link.

Mascarpone Stuffed French Toast with Peaches

Instead of following the exact recipe, I changed up a few of the ingredient to make it

A. more affordable, and

B. more affordable

Let's face it, good Mascarpone cheese can get pretty expensive.  Also, I don't think I was able to find it at my local grocery store.  Maybe I didn't search hard enough.  Anyways, here's my version

Ingredients

Homemade Peach Syrup

2 Fresh Peaches

4 Tbl of Sugar

Pinch of Nutmeg

Pinch of Cinnamon

Stuffed French Toast

6 Slices of bread

3 Eggs

1/4 cup of Milk

1/2 cup of Cream cheese

1/4 cup of Sour cream

1/2 teaspoon of Pure Vanilla Extract (of 1 teaspoon of imitation)

4 Tbls of Sugar

Homemade Peach Syrup

1. Peel and slice peaches over the sauce pan to catch all the juices.  Put the sauce pan over medium high heat. 

2. Add sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon to the sauce pan and stir in with the peaches. 

3. Turn the heat down to medium/low and continue cooking for about 10 minutes (stir occasionally), until the mixture resembles syrup.  Remove from the head and set aside for later. 

Here's a picture of the syrup in the pan

Stuffed French Toast

1. Add Cream cheese, Sour cream, Vanilla extract, and Sugar into a bowl.  You can add more or less sugar depending on how sweet you would like your filling.

2. Beat all ingredients on low until everything is blended and creamy.  Set aside for later 

3. Whisk together milk and eggs in a shallow bowl.  Make sure it's large enough for a slice of bread to be easily dipped into the bowl. 

4. Heat up the pan and add a little oil or butter on the pan.

5. Dip the slices of bread into the milk and eggs mixture, and cook in the pan until both sides are brown.

6. Put a scoop of the cream cheese filling in between two slices of bread, and top off the french toast with the warm peach syrup sauce

This was really easy to make, even though it was a few components.  It was definitely a nice way to use peaches that were starting to over ripen.  The filling substitute reminded me of cream cheese icing on red velvet cakes, so I think it was very successful.  I definitely want to try this with the original recipe, with nice bread and Mascarpone cheese.  But that will be for another time.

I'll be going to Ocean City, Maryland with a few friends this weekend, so I'm not too sure if I'll have another recipe up.  But I will definitely have some pictures of the food that I eat in Maryland this weekend.  I'm hoping to have crazy amount of Maryland Blue crab with lots of Old Bay seasoning!!! So stay tuned!!!!!

First official post!!

Welcome to my blog!! This is my first official post and I’m actually really excited about this. Ever since I moved back home from college and started working, I always told my parents that I would cook them a meal on the weekends. It’s already been a year since I’ve been home and let’s just say that I have cooked dinner maybe twice for my family. I thought that this blog would be a good way for me to keep up with my cooking and it’ll be a convenient place for me to store my recipes. I’m hoping to be able to post once a week or so with a new recipe. This blog will also probably contain little ramblings of mine too. Life can’t always be about just food.


But yea, welcome and come hang out.

First recipe post ever!! Here goes….

Grilled Chicken Sandwich with slices of Avocado, Roasted Corn and Tomato Salsa, and a Garlic Herb spread.

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it? Actually it was really really simple to make. I ended up buying all the ingredients for about $18 and was able to make 6 servings. That equals about $3 per person, which I think is really reasonable (this is the accountant in me, bear with me through this). The great thing about this recipe is that you can prepare a lot of the components ahead of time. I made the salsa and also the garlic herb spread a few hours before. I was eating the salsa with pieces of toasted bread and dipping chips into the garlic herb spread all day.

Ingredients

Chicken breasts
Loaf of Italian Bread
Avocado

Salsa

1. Tomatoes (2 big ones)
2. Red onion (half)
3. Jalapeno (1)
4. Cilantro (few sprigs)
5. Lime (half)
6. 2 ears of corn
Garlic Herb Spread

1. Sour cream
2. Dried herbs (basil, oregano, parsley)
3. Paprika
4. Garlic (minced)

Salsa recipe

1. For the salsa, dice the tomatoes, red onions, and jalapeno and put it into a bowl. Mince a few sprigs of Cilantro and place it into the bowl with the rest of the ingredients. Squeeze the juice from half of a lime over the mixture. You can use your discretion with the lime and the cilantro. Some people really like the taste of cilantro, but me, I only like enough to taste. Sometimes I feel like it can be a little over powering. If you accidently use too much lime and it’s too citrusy for your taste, let the salsa sit for a few hours and the citrusy taste should diminish (a little tip from my boyfriend, since the first time I made the salsa, I put way too much lime in it). Let the salsa sit in the fridge for a little for all the flavors to mingle together. Next, prepare the corn for the salsa.
2. Place clean, unshucked (funny work, I know) ears of corn in a bowl of water and soak for about 15 minutes. This makes sure that the “skin” of the corn doesn’t burn before the corn is fully cooked.
3. Put the drained ears of corns on a medium heat grill and close the lid. If you don’t have a grill, you can also do this is a toaster oven. Just put it on 350 Fahrenheit and bake it for 20-30 minutes. Turn the corn as needed. Let the corn cool before you mix it in the salsa.
4. Add salt and pepper to the salsa to taste.

Garlic Herb Spread

1. Mix a teaspoon on each of the dried basil, oregano, and parsley and half a teaspoon of paprika.
2. Mince half a clove of garlic and mix it with the dried herbs. Try to mash the garlic into a paste when you mix it with the herbs. I did this by using a smaller spoon and “squishing” the garlic to the side of the bowl.
3. Add in a cup of sour cream to the dried herbs and garlic, and mix!!
4. You can add additional herbs/garlic to adjust to how you like it.

Sandwich

1. Rub olive oil, salt, pepper, and allspice onto your chicken breasts. I also had to cut the chicken breasts in half because they were pretty thick.
2. Heat up a pan/grill to medium hot setting and cook the chicken for 4-5 minutes on each side, depending on the thickness.
3. Cut the loaf of Italian bread into slices and toast the slices.
4. Spread the Garlic Herb spread to the slices of bread.
5. Add chicken to the bread and lay slices of avocado and the salsa to the sandwich.

Enjoy!! Just to warn you, this sandwich is pretty messy, there was salsa everywhere. This would actually make a really good open face sandwich if you don’t want to deal with the mess factor.