Presto Pesto!

Our little basil plant got his (or her?) first major haircut last week. I have been wanting to make pesto for awhile, and now that our little basil is all grown up I could finally make a decent sized batch. This classic pesto recipe is fresh, extremely easy to prepare, and requires few ingredients. All you need to do is pull out that blender or food processor that you probably bought for making margaritas which is now collecting dust.  I dusted off my good ole Magic Bullet blender(remember those corny infomercials?). If you don't have a blender, you can be making your your own pesto with only 3 easy payments of just $33.33! Presto Pesto!

Homemade tapas, go fig-ure

Roasted Prosciutto Figs Stuffed with Manchego

I've been eating a lot of tapas recently, and frequently finding figs wrapped in some sort of ham on the menu. Figs are in season, so when I saw some at Whole Foods I figured I'd give it a whirl. My first attempt at a manchego-stuffed baked fig didn't work out so well. Chuck will eat anything, but he took one bite then conveniently had to do something in the other room, leaving me to eat the entire plate. I don't deal well with failure, so I decided to go back to the drawing board to properly recreate the tapas dish that I love. After some intensive internet research, I finally found this prosciutto wrapped, manchego-stuffed, baked fig recipe by Tyler Florence. This time, my roasted figs turned out great. Even Chuck liked them.

See recipe after the jump!

The most wonderful time of the year

It’s that time of year again, the heat and humidity are subsiding, a new TV season is fast approaching, jeans are being pulled out of storage, the kids are headed back to school, and most importantly football is here to save us from the summer sports doldrums.

September brings with it the first crack of the pads, non-conference warm-up games (sorry Virginia Tech), fantasy football drafts, and the eternal hope of 32 undefeated teams and their fan bases. But, along with the good September also brings some of the football bad like early season ligament tears, explaining down and distance to your girlfriend and, of course, NFL commercial breaks. It’s always a shock to the system during week one when Fox goes into their first touchdown-commercial-kickoff-commercial-3 and out-commercial sequence.

The typical three hour NFL broadcast contains only 11 minutes of actual game play and a whopping 60-75 minutes of commercials. So what is the diehard football fan to do with all of this downtime? Much like the kids who are back to class, its time to get back to the ABC’s: alcohol, bathroom and concessions. Since this is a food blog TWSF will focus on the concessions and provide a few easy recipes to fill the void between snaps.

Mexican Caviar Dip

Mexican caviar, sounds weird right, especially since fish eggs are not one of the ingredients. My mother makes this for most parties, and my friends and I have started doing the same (scary when you finally start acting like your mother). It's one of those fresh, healthy dishes that is really great as an appetizer at an outdoor gathering. This weekend, my good friend Julie brought it to our 4th of July celebration and it was a hit, the fireworks lasted longer than the dip did.

Tomato Basil Squares

I made tomato basil squares last weekend as an appetizer for my birthday. My aunt typically makes this dish for every family party, and it has become one of my favorite savory "family recipes". It is really easy to make, and requires few ingredients and little prep time. And it is oh so delicious.