Glazed Julienne Carrots

Since we've been making all of Jeremiah's food, we've definitely had more fresh produce in the house. I was in need of making some more carrots for Jeremiah and I figured, why not make some for us too? I considered just doing honey glazed carrots as I usually do but my mandolin caught my eye. As much as I love that thing, sometimes I steer clear of it just because it's somewhat intimidating with its sharpness. So with new found motivation, I started to julienne the carrots before I even had a recipe in mind :op

Thankfully there's google which led me to Cooking Light. Which is funny because I'm not quite sure what's "Light" about this recipe with the brown sugar and all. Perhaps it's because they call for margarine rather than butter. Because it was a spur of the moment thing, I don't think I had enough carrots because my carrots looked way more glazed then their picture did. But either way, they were delicious. I really need to break out that mandolin more often.

Glazed Julienne Carrots
by Cooking Light, Nov 2006

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons reduced-calorie margarine 
• 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 4 cups (2-inch) julienne-cut carrot 
• 1/4 teaspoon salt 
• 1/4 teaspoon pepper
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley

 Directions

1. Melt margarine in a large nonstick skillet over medium heat; add sugar, stirring until melted.
2. Add carrots, salt, and pepper and cook 10 minutes, or until carrots are crisp-tender, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat. Stir in parsley.

The soft opening of Flirty Cupcake Dessert Garage

This Friday my mom took the train into Chicago to spend the weekend. The night before, I just happened to see on my newsfeed that Flirty's new storefront was getting set to debut the following day as their soft opening. What timing! I knew my mother would be more than willing and would love to go which made the excitement even greater!

We have been frequenting Flirty's vans for almost a year now. Well, perhaps frequent isn't the right term. It's more of whenever we were at the same food truck event as well as whenever they are in Bridgeport. I just love their flavor combos and their creative names for the cupcakes.

Another love? That I can get a cupcake essentially whenever I want now without having to track down the truck and that it's in our old neighborhood (Ah, Little Italy, how we miss you). Yeah, didn't take too many photos though since I was pretty excited about just being there. Whoops!

Flirty warned on their facebook that there might be a couple of hiccups but everything was perfect. The smell of cupcakes baking wafts in the air and their display cases were tantalizing. Everyone was super helpful and quite cheery for it being their first day of business at their garage and there being a steady stream of customers coming in and out.

We tried their limited Valentine's Day edition of "For the Love of Chocolate" which was a Nutella chocolate cupcake and a "It's so new it hasn't been named because it just came out of the oven" coconut cupcake. The Nutella cupcake was nice since it actually had a Nutella center, unlike other cupcake shops and my mom couldn't stop raving about the their coconut concoction.

Ahhh, cupcakes, you have stolen my heart.