coconut oil

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Easy and sweet, how life should be

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Cannoli always make me happy

A small selection of things I love:

  • cannoli
  • ice cream
  • when things are easy

Any one of these alone would make me happy, but when I found a recipe that combined all three to make no-churn cannoli ice cream? I was over the freakin’ moon!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big fan of Plated, the weekly subscription service that sends me detailed, easy-to-follow, illustrated instructions and the ingredients that go with them in the exact quantities needed to turn out delicious and impressive meals. They’ve recently started offering dessert options, which I usually skip because I’m lazy and making dinner is enough effort for me, but when I saw cannoli ice cream I could actually make myself, without a crazy ice cream maker, I had to try it.

I’ve never felt confident enough in any recipe to say I could duplicate it without reading the original directions.  I still consult the box when making mac and cheese and have to Google how long to boil eggs every single time I make them.

But no-churn cannoli ice cream? I now have it down pat!

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I made this! And it was so good and so easy that I’ll do it a million times more!

Crush a bunch of pistachios and break up a couple of cannoli shells. Then whisk a cup of heavy cream for about 5 minutes until it forms little peaks and you feel you’ve gotten the most intense arm workout of your life (or you can use a hand mixer), then add in a mini container worth of sweetened condensed milk and a creamy blob of ricotta cheese and blend together. Next, toss in the pistachio bits and crunchy shell chunks and pour into a mold (like the 8×8 disposable aluminum one Plated so kindly sent me). Cover with a sheet of parchment paper (which Plated also sent me, almost like they know I don’t own any of this stuff and would be lost without them) and pop in the freezer for about an hour until it sets.

Right before you decide to eat your creamy concoction of frozen deliciousness, melt some chocolate and coconut oil in the microwave, or if you’re like me and don’t own one, in a small pot on the stove, and pour the delicious smelling chocolatey syrup all over your ice cream.

So. Incredibly. Eeeeeasy. Why can’t everything in life be so simple and delicious? I want to make this again and again, and have it with every meal and for every person who ever steps foot into my apartment.

Things are hard enough these days if you ask me. We all deserve this.

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Tasty and healthy and I made it myself!

Anyone who knows me also knows good and well that while I definitely love food (duh, this blog), I’m way more about eating it than I am about cooking it. (Growing up I always just assumed that by the time I was as old as I am now, I would be so filthy loaded that I would have a personal chef to cook all my meals and therefore, would never have to actually learn how to cook. Needless to say, things did not pan out the way I’d hoped as a child.)

However, every once in a while, the spirit moves me, and I decide to put what few kitchen skills I have to use. Tonight, for example, was one of those times.  Following a recipe from one of my favorite blogs, The Londoner (about a London girl who has my dream life), I made a guilt free egg fried “rice.”

And whaddaya know, it came out pretty damn good! Tasty and healthy? A double win! So here’s how things went down:

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Everybody’s here for the party.

First, I gathered my ingredient and styled them for your viewing pleasure: coconut oil, sesame oil, cauliflower, garlic, scallions, peppers, eggs, cilantro, peanuts and soy sauce (not pictured above.)

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Note to self: invest in a food processor. Grating sucks.

The magic trick to making this dish healthy is that instead of rice, you use cauliflower. Now, on The Londoner she just popped all of her cauliflower into a food processor to break down into crumbly bits, but I don’t have one of those so I took a cheese grater to my cauliflower and grated it all down to teeny tiny bits manually. This, first of all, takes way longer, and second, is a hell of an arm workout. You laugh, but I’m sore.

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Fizzing, foaming and smelling my kitchen with tasty smells.

In a pan (which should’ve been a wok, but again, didn’t have one of those), I poured the coconut and sesame oils along with some garlic. Everything kinda fizzed up into a beigey foam and the smell filled my kitchen (whole apartment really) with awesomeness. At this point, The Londoner added shrimp, but I wasn’t feeling them so I proceeded without.

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Adding a little color and flavor with some soy sauce.

Once that got going, I dumped all of the grated cauliflower inside, stirred it around, then added the chopped scallions and fresh peppers. A little pour of soy sauce (low sodium of course, cause why not cut calories when it tastes the same?)  turned everything a nice golden brown.

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Fact: adding an egg to anything will always increase the deliciousness factor.

Then, I made a little hole in the middle of the cauliflower mix and cracked an egg right into it, letting it simmer and cook up for a bit, before scrambling it all in with everything else. I did that again with a second egg, let everything cook and get nice and toasty, and then finally turned off the stove.

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Behold! Egg fried rice with not a single grain of rice in sight!

I sprinkled some crushed peanuts on top, garnished with fresh cilantro and added a couple squirts of Sriracha sauce, and BAM! A delicious meal I hoovered down with not the tiniest bit of guilt. Now, that’s the kinda cooking I can get into!