Strawberry Pretzel Cheesecake

You know that jello salad that appears as just about every summer picnic in Southwestern PA? You know the one...the one with the usually stale & not quite busted up enough pretzels under that waxy under-whipped layer of cream cheese & cool whip that is topped with a gelatinous layer of strawberry jello & frozen strawberries. The one that as it sits on the picnic table the pretzel pieces start to get soggy and pink from weeping strawberry jello? The bright red center piece of a Yinzer Buffet!!

Yeah...its a favorite of mine too. Always has been. I have had fabulous versions of it and I have had abominable versions of it.....but I always try at least a little. There is just something about the salty crunchy pretzels, sweet cream and tangy strawberry that taste like summer to me.

I do love it in all of its 1964 jello salad with fruit floating in it glory. BUT. It could be much better. Its potential plagued me. The flavor combo & textures are excellent. The jello aspect less than desirable in my opinion.

Aside: I suck at making Jell-o. Yes. Really. Stop laughing. Jell-o. Well, if you ask to me make jello shots I will exceed all expectations and they will be the very best you will ever have. But if you want just normal jell-o, ask someone else. Mine never sets, it gets that hard ookie layer, it separates. Whatever. It used to bug me but Ive learned to accept it. Since its apparently confession time I also cannot make instant pudding - it always comes out super runny & gross. Im so odd.

Since I was unwilling to fight with jello & wanted to perfect this picnic staple it needed to be reborn. And it was. As a cheesecake. A custardy, light, creamy, melt in your mouth vanilla bean cheesecake on a graham cracker pretzel crust topped with crushed strawberry preserves.

Oh yes. This kicked strawberry pretzel jello's ass and made its mother apologize for it ever being born.

Some notes before I get to the recipe ~

I abhor dense cheesecake so this one has no thickeners or starch in it on purpose. It is closer to a dense cream cheese custard than a heavy brick-like cheesecake but it will still cut & plate gorgeously, just be gentle. I also am not a sweet freak so the cake itself doesnt have a crap ton of sugar in it.

Use a Spring Form pan. This is a WRECK to unmold if you dont and wont layer prettily either.

I use vanilla beans in it because I have a bazillion of them in my freezer (make my own extract w them) and I think its divine, but hardly necessary - just up the extract by 2 tsp & it will be just as good.

I used fruit pectin to thicken my fruit. It is a vegan jelly thickener that is at the grocery store - you could also just use a package of jello - but I fear the jello & also didnt want that artifical flavor when strawberries are so awesome straight this time if year. If I were making this in October I may feel much differently.

Cooks Disclaimer: I am not a measurer, I am a taster & a looker, even with baking & pastries when I can be and with cheesecake I can be.

Crust:

• 2 cups crushed pretzel pieces
• 1 package of graham crackers, crushed up
• 1/2 cup dark brown sugar
• 2/3 stick unsalted butter, melted

Preheat oven to 350. Put all of the dry ingredients in a food processor & pulse until broken up & combined. Slowly drizzle in butter and mix until its all together. Press into the bottom of a 10" spring form pan and bake at 350 for about 20-25 minutes. Crust is done when golden & smells all toasty. Set out to cool. Reduce oven to 300.

Filling:

• 2-8oz packages Cream Cheese
• 1-8oz package Neufatel Cheese
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 1 whole egg
• 4 egg yolks
• 2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 each cut & scraped vanilla bean
• 6oz Greek yogurt (plain, honey)

Put both the cheese in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle and mix on medium until combined & softened. Scrape bowl, add the sugar & mix on medium high until light and fluffy. Scrape the bowl.

While mixing on medium add the whole egg than egg yolks one at a time beating well between additions and scraping at least once in the middle.

Add the remaining ingredients and mix on high until light, glossy and thickened.  Pour on top of cooled crust and smooth the top out. Pace on a sheet tray, put in middle of over and fill tray with at least 1/2" of water.  Bake at 300 for 45 minutes.

Test at 45 minutes. Give it a wiggle. The center should be set like jello, jiggly but set. It may require another 10 or so minutes at this point, set timer for 5 minute intervals and keep an eye on it.

When done remove it from the oven & set at room temp until pan is cool enough to touch then transfer to refrigerator to completely cool.

Strawberry Topping:

• 2 pints fresh strawberries - hulled & quartered
• 3/4 cup sugar (more or less depending on taste)
• 4 Tbsp Fruit Pectin
• 6oz water

Put the berries in a bowl with 1/4 cup sugar & toss to coat. Let sit at room temp until they start to get saucy, smash with a fork.  Put the water, remaining 1/2 cup sugar & fruit pectin in a small pot on stove & bring to a boil stirring constantly. It gets weird thick because of the pectin. When it is thickened pour over macerated berries and continue to fork smash to get a nice consistency. Let sit at room temp until ready to use on cake.

When cake is TOTALLY cool & set spread the preserves over the cheesecake, return to the fridge to let it all set up completely.

When ready to unmold run a paring knife around the edge to loosen the preserves & I use a blow torch to release the cake from the side of the pan, but you can just use a cake spatula or knife if it suits you better.

I served it as is. I didnt think it needed much else to be honest. Garnish wise you could do lots - choco dipped pretzel pieces or strawberries, whipped cream, fresh berries sauce....whatever blows your hair back.  If you like your cheesecake thicker or want one that is more firm add 4 Tbsp of flour in with the  sugar & cream cheese.

Hope you dig & let me know how it turns out if you make it!!

I also have made this in the mega muffin cups with the muffin cup liners, I just dont parbake the shells. Really cute individual dessert idea.

Happy baking!!

OMG IT DIDNT RAIN!!!!

Ive been determined to not let this wet & gloomy weather get me in a funk. I have seen a crap ton of somewhat justified bitching on the interwebs about all the muck outside and had no desire to take part in it. I get why parents would be hating this shit - my dogs have been all stir crazy not being able to get outside so I can only imagine the level of suck when its small humans all wired for sound and able to actually speak and stuff - but more or less its weather. Bitch all you want - its not going to change so suck it up is generally my feeling.

But I was off this weekend on a fluke. And for the first time in MONTHS it didnt rain. ::knock me over with a feather::

A couple weeks ago I decided to fuck Mother Nature and her bipolar temper tantrums and go ahead and plant all my herbs, tomatoes, window boxes and porch planters. They all looked fabulous. But there was still this black hole of overgrown SUCK that was going to take some time & energy to deal with - and some dry - it was a freaking SWAMP in the garden.

Last year we tried a vegetable garden - and it was moderately successful...if you define success as getting to harvest like 65% of the veggies before they were eaten by fuzzy woodland creatures or rotted, having the whole area go until almost August before it was over 50% weeds or that I was able to get it all cut back before winter so it wasnt a TOTAL wreck this spring. (I am rather generous with my definition of success when it comes to gardening) I, again mind you, made it abundantly clear that I have not inherited my parents' green thumbs and have been left asking the question, again, as to WHY I keep trying. Im sure The Mister asks himself that question, too, but he gamely goes along with whatever harebrained scheme I concoct for the yard each spring. I havent decided if he does it to humor me, if he harbors the same delusions of farmerhood as I do or if he realizes the futility of arguing and pointing out the insanity of my desire to garden. I guess it could be all 3, really.

So this year started the same. I AM GOING TO HAVE A VEGETABLE GARDEN DAMMIT! And I planted all the little seedlings and got them under a grow light and watered them, read them self help books to boost their confidence and all that bullshit for about 5 weeks then did what Mindy's almost always do - one night I said Id water them the next night. The next night I said Id do it in the morning. The next morning I forgot. The next evening I watered them all so much they almost swam away. The next night I figured Id watered them so much the night before they really didn't need the water....and so on and so forth until these poor seedlings were in need of vegetable therapy due to abuse & neglect.

UNCLE! I admit defeat. Plans changed. I decided that I needed to own my complete inability to stick with a gardening regime. That instead of trying to make myself be the farmer that I feel I should be for some unknown reason I need to just  deal with the fact that I am not ever going to grow zucchini like my dad, that the idea of having to "weed" anything 3 or 4 times a week is more of a commitment than I am willing to make and that the CSA we signed up for and a few farmers markets will give me all the veg I need minus the complete feeling of failure when I pull up to my house and see the sad sad sad patch of land I called a garden.

So with no further ado I present to you...BEFORE

Those spikey things in the front right are asparagus. I kept those, just trimmed them down. And that monstrous green thing in front of that meter is cilantro. Yeah. Seriously. Cilantro. And there are some mutant strains of lettuce and the weeds that thrive in my neighborhood. Its it lovely? My window boxes and herbs are all up there too, so from the porch side it looks happy - but from the street ~ train-mothereffing-wreck!

And then the sun came out. And the ground became less swampy. And I wasnt at work. And neither was The Mister. Angels sung!!

So we spent the weekend ripping shit up. For the first time since I have had a yard every single perennial (and annual) that i have bought has been planted, in its home, BEFORE it has wilted and died.

I know! Right! The ones on the wall are to go under a hose on the side of the house, but everything else is planted, the mulch is down and my house looks nice again!!!

I still have to trim that stupid carpet piece I keep forgetting about and will probably add some more plants as the season progresses - I already have homes picked out for some mums I havent even bought yet and some ground cover pieces that I want for under the dwarf Japanese Maple, but holy hell it looks like a different house to me!

I just want to go sit in it.

This was 1 of 2 bitch projects outside this summer. The other one isnt one that I can help much with ~ The Mister has to tear down and rebuild a retaining wall that holds up the patio. I doubt it will be much fun, but with the birth of this garden I was able to move the 3 big azaleas that were in that planter so when it is done I can plant it with strawberry plants. Oh yes - homemade strawberry jam FTW!!

Which reminds me I am going to post a Strawberry Pretzel Cheesecake recipe here in the next day or so. It was so good my mouth is watering just thinking about it. And it was EASY.

Aside: Yesterday was week 6 of non-smoking. Yep folks. SIX Weeks! I am taking the pills when I remember too, but that isnt all too often. Still dealing with the occasional want to have a smoke, but they are fewer & further between than before and ever so much easier to dismiss.

I am LOVING this summer start so far...rain or no rain!

May 1st, 2011.

It was a remarkable day for a few reasons, a couple just mine, another for the whole world. When I was originally composing this post in my head yesterday it was much more lighthearted than the one that ended up here today, but thats ok.

I checked my Twitter around 10pm last night and its blowing up with PotUS is have a press conference at 10:30pm. My first thought - Fuck. This cant be good. So we wrapped up watching the Simpsons and flipped to CNN to see what was going on.

Aside: the talking heads on the news channels are sooooo fucking annoying. Obama didnt speak for about an hour after he was supposed to and for a portion of that hour of waiting I listened to every jackass on staff at CNN go from saying "we will not speculate" to "Osama is dead". Why is it so fucking difficult to shut the fuck up and let the President tell us what he has to? After about 20 minutes I turned off the audio & waited to turn it back on when the President started to speak. They all kept saying the exact same fucking thing over and over and over again. I dont know how people watch these jackasses all day every day. I would jump off a bridge.

So the end story - Osama Bin Laden was found and killed. Yes. This is tremendous news. We've hunted him so long there was definitely relief in my heart. I vividly remember 9/11. Who doesnt? It was terrifying to see that kind of destruction on our own soil and that overall sense of "holy shit we arent invincible and someone actually brought this to our front door". It felt like our worlds were collectively flipped upside down. I was insulted and offended to see them celebrating in the streets in the Middle East. I didnt then and dont now understand their hatred. I cant even imagine hating anyone so much that I would celebrate destroying that many lives and striking fear into the hearts of so many.

And I never would. I'm not wired the same way they are. I place a value on all life, I dont have the same kind of twisted faith that makes them think what they did was justified, I dont think that killing thousands solves anything ~ it just breeds more hate. I was disgusted with them, but at the same time pitied them. I would never understand the hate that motivated them to fly planes into our buildings and dance in the streets at our misery ~ and I'm ok with that. I dont ever WANT to understand that kind of hate & pity them because that encompasses their entire existence. 

I drew strength from the fact that we drew together and helped each other piece it all back together. I felt safer knowing that no matter what else happened we would stick together and fight for what we believed in. I felt stronger knowing that you may knock us down, but we will get back up.

Obama told us all last night that he paid. The man that led the AlQaeda to level that crippling blow to our nation was found and killed. I am proud of the men & women who fight for us, those who went in to get him and all the people that were involved in finding him. He deserved whatever he got and I am proud that we got to deliver it to him.

Then I start to watch our nation react. People take to the street, dancing, singing, hollering and waving flags. Chants of USA USA USA everywhere. Couches are being lit on fire at WVU, the Penn State campus erupted, outside the White House there is an atmosphere like New Years Eve. I shook my head. After all that we have been through all we learned was to hate the way they do? That wasnt the message I took away from 9/11. This felt like the celebration of our revenge. The death of one man makes up for the thousands we've lost in the last decade to this war?

One man. One man of thousands that still hate us to the core. He was a symbol of the terror we felt, he was a person to blame, he was the embodiment of all of the fear we have felt for the past decade.

But he was still only one man. One SYMBOL.

I was as ashamed of people celebrating his death as much as I was of them celebrating the destruction of the WTC. Death and war are not things to celebrate. His death doesnt mean we can walk away from the shit storm we have spearheaded in the Middle East. This is not a war we are ever going to win and we sure as hell didnt win it by killing Osama Bin Laden. There will be another extremist taking his place at the head of Al Qaeda. We killed a symptom, not the disease and I am not so naive to think that this is even the beginning of the end in that part of the world.

I guess I had hoped that we learned something from our brash confidence pre 9/11. That we learned how valuable our freedom is because of how quickly that value was shook to its core one day ten years ago. I had hoped that we learned that hate is never the answer. I dont think we did.

Progress!!! (a.k.a the post I really wanted to put up today :-)

So this was my original post for today before the world erupted late last night...

Yesterday at 9:30am marked a full 3 weeks of me being a nonsmoker. Three weeks, 21 days, 504 hours. To some this may not seem like all that much of an accomplishment. I feel safe in assuming they also have never had a pack a day plus habit to battle out against no one but themselves. I can definitely say this is by far the longest I have ever made it in a stop smoking campaign and I am still finding it hard to believe that I'm almost to the 30-day mark.  That whole 30 days to relearn a habit is a benchmark I have set for myself hoping that it works and I will have broken the habits of when I smoke and the random "I want a cigarette" moments will be fewer and further in between.

The Zyban has helped. A lot from what I can tell. It is somewhat hard to judge though; this is the honest to goodness first time that I have felt at peace with my decision to quit so that may also be playing a role. I havent had any adverse side effects that I can tell from taking the medication. Part of me wants to test it and stop taking them - I am not a huge fan of taking medication - but the other part feels that they wouldnt prescribe it for 12 weeks if it wasnt necessary to take it for 12 weeks so I should probably shut the fuck up and do as I was told...which is probably what I will do. Not worth risking falling off this wagon when Ive been on it for so long.

I am still having the random urges to smoke. Its strange because there is no pattern to why I have the craving, but it happens at least once a day that I have the overwhelming urge to find and inhale a cigarette. Doesnt help that I also have a really bad lil devil that likes to help me rationalize all kinds of bad decisions. The lil angel seems to be stronger than lil devil so I am still winning the battles and havent cheated. I wont consider the war as won until Im off the meds.  Talking to a bunch of ex-smokers they tell it kind of similar to an alcoholic, I will just be a smoker who doesnt smoke. I sincerely hope this isnt true. But I can totally see that it may be. Kinda sucks...but if I never wanted to crave nicotine I should have never started smoking...so I cant be all that bitter, really. My choice, now I get to reap the rewards of being an amazingly dumb 17 year old. Lucky me :-)

My other big deal was the completion of the painting of the steps.  The Mister & I are in week 3 of a major home improvement project - we are completely redoing the foyer & upstairs hallway. I decided, and whether this was smart or not will remain to be seen, to paint all of the wood work in those areas. This has been a major undertaking in that there is a metric fuck ton of wood in both of theses spots - an entire stair case, banisters & steps; the whole foyer which is one of those wicked leaded glass, side windows plus door; 3 bedroom doors, 2 closet doors, 1 bathroom door & a window frame to round it all out. Im doing it all in two colors so its not just as easy as tossing some paint on them and walking away.

I started with the hardest part first and yesterday afternoon I put the final touches on the staircase and all of its bullshit. I LOVE how it turned out, I did NOT love the sheer amount of tedious detail work involved with it. The doors upstairs are going to be a pain, but NOTHING compared to these steps with all the shit on them. They have been so bad that I have only been working on them a couple hours a time because I get so bored by the tediousness I get stabby, hence its taken this long. So when I got it done finally I did the happy girl dance. I see the light at the end of this project. Finally. Woooo!

Not a bad weekend, really. And finishing up that hard part means more motivation to complete the rest of it so the Mister can lay the new floor.  Ahhhhh....the joys of home ownership. Tell me again why I dont just fucking rent?!? Oh yeah...because I decided to buy a house at 23 and didnt realize until I was 28 that 1) that was a horrible idea, 2) I got completely FUCKED on the deal and 3) buying a house isnt all its cracked up to be when you dont have kids & a school district to worry about. Moral of the story kids: when your much older parents try to tell you something, like not to buy an old house at 23, think twice before not listening. Some shit just isnt so easy to get out of...a mortgage on a house is a dying neighborhood is one of those things.