Bring Your Child to Work Day and How You Can Help Support Your Favorite Food Bloggers

Today is Bring Your Child to Work Day. This is a wonderful opportunity for children ages 8-18 to see what it is we as adults do each day and find a possible career path for themselves. Whether it be working in an office, working in the great outdoors or even writing your own food blog; teaching our children by being a positive role model with a good work ethic is important for them to succeed in their future. My older daughter had the opportunity to work at my husband's office last summer and though she really loved the people, she realized that working in an office environment wasn't something she would like to do as a career path. She will be a senior in high school next year and is currently researching colleges that would allow her to follow her love of sports and continue on her academic path as an Athletic Trainer. 

So today, I'm "bringing" my youngest daughter Gabrielle to work with me. Well, sort of! To start, I thought I'd share a little bit about what it takes to be a food blogger as I'm sure many of you do not realize how many hours go into writing just one post. Most bloggers are generally operated by one person doing the following tasks and still manage to run a household or work outside of the home.....multitasking at it's best!

• Researcher
• Recipe creator
• Shopper
• Cook
• Recipe Tester
• Dishwasher
• Photographer
• Food Styling
• Prop Styling
• Photo Editor
• Managing Editor
• Writer
• Editor
• Marketer
• Publicist
• Accountant
• Information Technology

You know how I'm always saying how easy it is to create a restaurant quality meal at home? Well my daughter Gabrielle is proof! Not only did she come up with this recipe idea, she prepared it, wrote the post and helped photograph some of the pictures. AND, this was last summer when she was only 10...see I told you it was easy! I'll have to ask her create another recipe for the blog again soon as she really has some great ideas of her own. Click on the link under the picture to see Gabrielle's recipe for Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese....

Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese

On another note...

How you can help support your favorite food bloggers:

If you see a facebook group or website that posts my photos and writing onto his or her page instead of linking to Carrie's Experimental Kitchen directly, they are in violation of both the Federal DMCA Act and Copyright Law. The reason why this is bad is because it costs a great deal of money to operate Carrie's Experimental Kitchen and other websites where content is illegally taken from. When people take content that others have written and developed and put it on their sites, it makes it harder for those offering the content to pay for services that they provide free of charge to you. Hours, sometimes days, are put into creating one post, that all the offender’s do is copy and paste in order to drive traffic to and  promote their site and/or facebook page. Once our content is stolen, we are also penalized for having duplicate content on the internet, and our recipes receive lower priority in search engines as well.

Often when this happens, it isn’t meant as a violation of a federal law and is just someone who wants to share a recipe that they really liked. But sometimes, this is done by people and even companies who repeatedly copy and paste content from those who have worked hard to develop it, willingly and knowingly.

Often, these people say “You can’t copyright recipes”.  While you can’t copyright a random list of ingredients, our writing (descriptions, introductions, instructions, etc) and photographs are copyrighted – and each post represents hours of work that these folks steal in under a minute and use as a platform to build their sites on.

However,  just about everyone reading this who shares recipes do so with no malicious intent, and bloggers realize that. This is intended for those who willingly violate federal law despite having received complaints, and having been reported, by knowingly and repeatedly stealing content from sites to place on their own.

If you see a site or facebook page with repeated complaints, a blogger who has to build new sites because their old ones are taken down, these are clues that such sites and pages are being run by repeat offenders who fully understand that what they are doing is illegal. A lot of people don’t realize that the websites we enjoy free of charge cost a great deal of money to operate. These sites and pages that run primarily off of stealing content from other sites take all food bloggers one step closer to not being able to afford to continue.

It’s easy for us to share a recipe. While photos are copyrighted, all of the bloggers I know welcome sharing photos as long as a link to the recipe is given to the recipe rather than the entire recipe reposted. See my example below where I use a photo from another blog:

I love Stacey Little’s Sweet Cornbread Muffins! Here is a link if you want to check out the recipe! http://southernbite.com/2013/01/09/sweet-cornbread-muffins/

Thank you so much for helping all of the bloggers who provide free sites around the web for all of us to enjoy and a special thanks to all of the Carrie's Experimental Kitchen friends who have made me aware of this growing problem. Without all of you, there wouldn’t be a Carrie's Experimental Kitchen!

*A special thank you to Southern Plate for creating this document for fellow food bloggers to share. If you are a food blogger who would like to repost the above statement, changing out your url for Carrie's Experimental Kitchen, please feel free to do so. 

Guest Blogger-Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese Sauce from Gabrielle Farias (Yes, that's my baby!)

I know. I don't usually post on Sunday's, but we had a last minute request for a Guest Blogger and I HAD to fit her in somewhere! Please join me in welcoming my youngest daughter, Gabrielle, to CEK today. Her real name is Gabrielle, but she also goes by Gabby or Gab. As you will see, we definitely picked the right name for this one. She really created a fantastic recipe. Take it away Gab...

Hi this is Gab, Carrie’s daughter! I am going to talk about some things that my Mom has made in the past year and how she got me to eat real food; as well as share a recipe I created and prepared myself (well, with a little help from Mom!). It all started last year when all I ate was chicken nuggets. Then one day I came home from school and I wasn’t feeling well because my stomach wanted real food. My mom was making steak on the grill marinated in horseradish, salt, and pepper. At first I thought it would taste gross, but my Mom made me try it so I did. I loved it and for once I didn’t want chicken nuggets!!! That was the first real meat I had had all year! (She's exaggerating of course! She also ate real chicken or shrimp. She just didn't like beef or pork because she didn't like to chew it. Ok we'll continue now...)

Then she made lime bars for dessert one night with lemon lime chicken for dinner. It was really yummy. The lime bars were very sweet and tasty, the lemon lime chicken was tasty, spicy, adventurous in your mouth (yes, she came up with this adjective all on her own!) and matched perfectly with the dessert.

One of my favorite deserts is her famous apple pie in our family. It has a little cinnamon spice to it and she uses the sweetest apples picked right off the trees. I also love all of her granola bars, like the White Chocolate Apple Walnut Granola Bar with crushed up walnuts and white chocolate. Yum!!! I made it too..YAY me!!!!  In the winter she makes peppermint hot chocolate. It's like the same thing as normal hot chocolate, but minty and extra chocolatey. For Christmas she lets my sister and I decorate the homemade sugar cookies for Santa. She also makes peanut butter cookies with a Hershey kiss on top it tastes like baked peanut butter cup with extra goodness on top. Finally, my favorite meal for dinner is her corned beef. First she boils it in beer and water then takes it out and spreads Dijon mustard on to and bakes it!

I also wanted to make something to share with you and came up with this recipe idea on my own. It was so irresistible and my mouth was watering after I tried it. It kind of reassembled my personality perfectly. (Yes, I know...I'm in big trouble with this one!) Here is Gabrielle's first recipe creation...Enjoy!

For preparation, I recommend boiling your potatoes first, then while they are cooking, prepare your sauce so you can let it simmer while you roll out the dough. We made this entire meal from start to finish in 1 1/2 hours (and I might add we didn't even start to prepare this until 5:15pm!)

Mashing the potatoes with the fork.

Homemade Gnocchi with Sausage Bolognese Sauce

For the Gnocchi:
4 Medium Sized Russet Potatoes
1/3 Cup Eggs, beaten
1-2 Cups All Purpose Flour
2 Tbsp. Pecorino Romano Cheese, grated
1/2 tsp. Kosher Salt
Prepared Sausage Bolognese (see recipe below)

Boil the potatoes with the skins on until they are fork tender. Do not cool the potatoes. Remove from the hot water one at a time, peel off the skins (carefully, they'll be extremely hot!) and using the tines from the back of a fork, gently mash the potatoes. Repeat for each potato, add to a bowl, then let cool 10-15 minutes. Form the potatoes into a ball shape, form a well and add in the cheese, egg and salt. Next add 1 cup of the flour and gently keep folding all of the ingredients together until it is all incorporated. The dough shouldn't be too sticky. If it is, gradually add more flour as needed. (It all depends on the actual size of your potatoes)

Cutting and "forking" the gnocchi.

Cut into ten pieces. Take one of the pieces and turn it onto a floured board. Gently roll lengthwise forming a log shape the thickness of your thumb. From there, cut into eight pieces (about the size of the tip of your thumb to the first joint). Gently using the back of the fork, make an indentation on the top. 

Gnocchi before it's cooked.

Repeat for all ten segments of dough. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Gently drop in the Gnocchi. They are done when they start floating, approximately 2-3 minutes. Drain the water  or pull them out using a slotted spoon and add the gnocchi to the sauce, gently mixing so not to break the pasta. Makes approximately 11-12 dozen.

(If you aren't going to cook them right away, place them in a single layer on a floured cookie sheet in the refrigerator until you are ready to do so or layer them with parchment paper sprinkled with corn meal and place in a shirt box in the freezer.)

She was just posing for effect(she's a ham that way.
She actually used a separate spoon to taste it. :)

Sausage Bolognese Sauce

1 tbsp. Extra Virgin Olive Oil

6 Links Italian Sweet Sausage, casings removed

1 Scallion, chopped

2 Cloves Garlic

1 Tbsp. Fresh Basil, chopped

3 c. Marinara Sauce (I used homemade but feel free to use whatever you wish)

2/3 c. Asiago Cheese, shredded

Kosher Salt, to taste

Fresh Ground Pepper, to taste

In a large, non-stick saute pan, heat the oil and add in the sausage. Break the sausage apart by using the back of a wooden spoon as it cooks. Once sausage has cooked and there is no longer any pink center, add in the garlic, scallions, basil, sauce and cheese. Mix well, reduce heat to low and simmer for approximately 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. 

The finished product!

Sorry if I made you read too much! I just love food so much my motto is eat sleep and eat again. I hope you enjoyed my guest blog tune in for next time for *Gabby’s guest blog oh yeah* (say in tv singing voice). 

Well I’m out, peace...

Thanks Gab~Love you honey! 

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Pumpkin Sage Cream Sauce

For the last several years, I have made some kind of pasta using this Pumpkin Sage Cream sauce recipe except this Thanksgiving where I decided to make soup as a starter instead. Well, I thought I was "ok" with it until I kept seeing cans of organic pumpkin in the supermarket on sale and REALLY inexpensive. So I decided I'd make this sauce, even if it wasn't a holiday. Isn't it funny how we only want to eat certain foods during a specific time of year? Why not treat yourself year-round, as long as it's in moderation of course since this isn't the healthiest recipe to eat!  


I had never made sweet potato gnocchi before, only the regular potato kind so when I decided to make this recipe this past weekend, I wanted to try and make it a little more healthy by using whole wheat flour. MISTAKE and kitchen experiment gone awry! Though it looked good, I had to add so much flour to make the dough non-sticky that it tasted horrible. SO, back to the drawing board. I tried it again, this time using all-purpose flour only and these are the gnocchi I know and love! The combination of the sweet potatoes, pumpkin and fresh sage flooded my brain with memories of fall, even though it was 20 something degrees outside, and the taste was even better than a regular pasta or ravioli, which is how I've made this before. 

Sweet Potato Gnocchi with Pumpkin Sage Cream Sauce

For the Gnocchi:
2 Medium Sized SweetPotatoes
1 Egg, beaten
1 1/2-2 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1/2 tsp. Kosher Salt
1c. Prepared Pumpkin Sage Cream Sauce (see recipe below)

Boil the potatoes with the skins on until they are fork tender. Do not cool the potatoes. Remove from the hot water one at a time, peel off the skins and using the tines from the back of a fork, gently mash the potatoes. Repeat for each potato, add to a bowl, then let cool 10-15 minutes. Form the potatoes into a ball shape, form a well and add in the egg and salt. Next add 1 cup of the flour and gently keep folding all of the ingredients together until it is all incorporated. The dough shouldn't be too sticky. If it is, gradually add more flour as needed. Cut into ten pieces. Take one of the pieces and turn it onto a floured board. Gently roll lengthwise forming a log shape the thickness of your thumb. From there, cut into eight pieces (about the size of the tip of your thumb to the first joint). Gently using the back of the fork, make an indentation on the top. Repeat for all ten segments of dough. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Gently drop in the Gnocchi. They are done when they start floating, approximately 3-5 minutes. Drain the water and put the Gnocchi in a serving bowl. Heat the sauce, pour over the Gnocchi and gently mix together. Serves 4.

*If you aren't going to cook them right away, place them in a single layer on a floured cookie sheet in the refrigerator up to 24 hours ahead of time.

Pumpkin Sage Cream Sauce

2 tbsp. Butter

2 tbsp. Fresh Sage, chopped

1-7 oz. Canned Pumpkin

1 pt. Heavy Cream

¼ c. Pecorino Romano Cheese, grated

Melt butter in a saucepan and add sage; simmer 1 minute allowing butter to turn slightly brown. Add pumpkin, heavy cream and cheese. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Makes 2 cups.

Enjoy!