Global Cooking

Strawberry Muffins Revisited

2012-02-10T16:16:00.000-08:00

With Valentine's Day approaching, I decided to bake some strawberry muffins. Once again, I had leftover batter to make a little loaf of bread.

However, I also experimented with some of the ingredients to see if healthified alterations would work. It's the same recipe as before, but with the following changes:
Instead of butter, I used 6 Tbs. pureed pumpkin and I used all white whole wheat flour. Although I can tell that they aren't buttery, the muffins taste exactly the same! Strawberry definitely disguises the taste of pumpkin.

Buckwheat granola

2012-02-10T16:00:00.000-08:00

Not the prettiest picture ever...

I got the idea for buckwheat granola here. So I tried out the soaking buckwheat groats overnight and then another 8 hours the next day, then drying them at 250F for about 1 hour. They turned out nice and crispy, with a good taste. Like the post I found, I am sure they would be good even by themselves. But I thought I'd make granola with them since I like granola :)
I had about 2 c. buckwheat groats
1/4 c. ground flaxseed
1 c. coconut
1/4 c. sesame seeds
1/4 c. wheat germ
1/4 c. walnuts
Whisk together:
2 Tbs. water
1/4 c. honey
2 Tbs. coconut oil
Then mix everything together in your 9x13" pan and cook them at 325F, stirring every 10 minutes for about 30 minutes. Mix in dried fruit after you're done cooking (or it ends up burned - believe me, I've done this and it is not tasty).

Roasted Chickpeas

2012-02-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

They look lovely, but they are almost as hard as rocks...

I coated them in a little olive oil + sugar + salt and baked at 375F for about 45 minutes. I read you were supposed to cook until they were hard in the middle. They kept being soft in the middle until 45 minutes, but then turned super hard as they cooled. So I'd suggest maybe only going 35 minutes!

Pizza Monkey Bread

2012-02-06T18:49:00.000-08:00

No, no sweetness in this monkey bread. But it was very fun...and tasty.

I made my dad's famous pizza dough, which you can find here. Let the dough rise 1 hour, then pull it into about 48 pieces. Flatten the pieces and put a cube of cheese inside and whatever other ingredient you might like. Wrap the dough around and seal it well.

We had a little cheddar cheese left and then used mozzarella for the rest, but I liked the cheddar better. Once you have all the pieces ready, roll them in a little melted butter and place them into a pizza stone that has been sprinkled with some cornmeal. Bake at 400F for 35 minutes.

Serve with good tomato sauce for dipping.

Healthy Chili and Bread

2012-02-06T18:30:00.001-08:00

I decided to sneak in some extra nutrients to our chili this time, which Anthony was very skeptical about...until he tasted it. Amazingly, it was extremely good. I managed to add in local summer corn, butternut squash, tomatoes, and beets. Whoo!
So:
2 c. cooked black beans
1 c. other cooked beans
1 can chili beans
1 can tomato sauce
1.5 c. corn
3 c. diced tomatoes
2 c. pureed beets
1 c. pureed butternut squash
1 c. TVP
2 tsp. cumin
1 tsp. chili powder
All in a crockpot on high all day.

Also, I like this pretty way of slashing bread.

Imitation Mounds Bars

2012-02-06T18:18:00.000-08:00

Mounds bars are my favorite candy! So I was very excited to find this recipe for make-your-own here. I ended up making them twice because the can of sweetened condensed milk was enough for two batches. What I learned from the first time was that there really was not much point to putting the coconut and sweetened condensed mixture into the freezer and cutting it into bars. The picture below shows what happens when you do that - they fell apart and it was pretty tricky coating them with chocolate.

Instead, I suggest making that mixture, then squeezing scoops of it into balls with your hands, which worked well for me. They didn't fall apart in the chocolate that way.

Black Walnut Solution

2012-02-06T17:42:00.000-08:00

I finally decided to whack my black walnuts with a hammer to crack them open. It worked, but it was loud, messy, and lots of work! Definitely would be better to do outside on the sidewalk...

Cookies in the Lab

2012-01-26T18:18:00.001-08:00

My freshman science class had an enjoyable time working on this "cookie" lab this week. We are learning about energy and different ways that we get the energy we use in our daily life. And so we got to experience "mining" for fossil fuels.

The cookie is your land, raisins = coal, nuts = oil, and chocolate chips = natural gas. The basic idea is to mine out these resources (without looking at the bottom of the cookie for deposits) with a toothpick and to generally try not to damage the land.

Some students were very meticulous in their fuel extraction. Others, not so much. This is what the land can look like after you mine it for coal, natural gas, and oil:

Fossil Fuel Cookies:
Beat together:
1 stick butter, softened
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 egg (2 Tbs. water, 1 Tbs. oil, 2 tsp. baking powder)
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla
Next, add:
1 c. + 2 Tbs. flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
After that is all mixed together, stir in:
1 c. chocolate chips
3/4 c. raisins
3/4 c. chopped walnuts

I was concerned that this wouldn't make enough for my class of 21, until I added all the fossil fuels and the dough grew a lot. (I ended up with 26 cookies)

Bake at 375F for 8 minutes. Cool, then mine away!

Cranberry Everyday Cake

2012-01-26T18:17:00.000-08:00

My sister always loves making everyday cakes and since they are very good, this has kind of rubbed off on me. When I had to make a cake for our church soup supper, I looked through the freezer and found cranberries. So, why not make a cranberry everyday cake?
I adapted my recipe from Smitten Kitchen here.
Beat together:
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 1/3 c. sugar
1 tsp vanilla
Then beat in:
2 eggs (or 6 Tbs. water + 2 Tbs. ground flax)
1 c. milk curdled with 1 Tbs. vinegar
Mix in:
2 c. flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Grease a 9x13" pan and pour the batter in.

I put about 2 c. cranberries on top.
Then sprinkle with 2 Tbs. sugar. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes.

Snickerdoodles

2012-01-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

Snickerdoodle cookies somehow remind me of my childhood, maybe as one of the possible German foods my family made.

Since I had cream of tartar and I wanted to bake cookies, this came up. You can find the recipe on p.829-230 of "Joy of Cooking."

And if you need an egg substitution,
2 Tbs. water + 1 Tbs. oil + 2 tsp. baking powder
Has been very effective for me in cookies.

They were good, but I have decided that I prefer cookies that don't flatten out like this because I like very soft, nearly unbaked cookies :)

Birthday Monkey Bread

2012-01-26T17:39:00.000-08:00

Anthony requested monkey bread for his birthday, so I searched around until I found a trustworthy recipe here. Because I like making real bread dough. And it looked really great. But no cream cheese glaze because that would maybe scare Anthony and it was for his birthday. Also, I have no bundt pan, so I made this in two bread loaf pans, which turned out just fine.

We both thought it tasted great. BUT, since we were so anxious to eat it after it came out of the oven, I did not wait for long before putting candles in. This was not such a good idea because the part that was stuck in the bread melted and kind of disappeared in the bread. In other words, there were no chunks of wax to pull out (like when candles drip onto your cake) because it soaked into the bread! Anthony wouldn't eat those parts yet I don't like to throw food away...so I ate them. I know there was wax in there, but I couldn't taste it and I'm still alive, so all is well, right?

Seitan Pizza

2012-01-26T17:28:00.001-08:00

Remember that homemade seitan? Well, when I made it (kind of a long time ago), I froze half. And then what to do with it? I have to confess that this happened before Christmas and here I am now posting a picture... Teaching keeps me pretty busy.

Anyway, how about seitan pizza? I thought it would be kind of like pepperoni because the seitan was spicy when we put it in couscous and fried rice. But intriguingly it became very mild and not spicy at all when the pizza was done.

I don't even eat pepperoni on pizza anyway, so I'm not sure why I wanted to substitute something for it, but I liked this. The seitan was nice and crispy on the edges and a nice flavor and texture.

California rolls

2011-12-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

We celebrated the Christmas season with California rolls on our Christmas-y plates. I had to share because they were so lovely!

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

2011-12-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I love maraschino cherries, but ever since I found out that they are bleached and dyed that bright red color, I just can't bring myself to eat them anymore. So I just filled in the middle of the pineapples with little pieces of pineapple.

Obviously I also made this for myself because Anthony would definitely not eat pineapple.

For the recipe, I looked at a bunch of recipes online and combined what I liked from them to make mine.
1/4 c. butter
2/3 c. brown sugar
sliced pineapple
1 c. white flour
1/3 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. sugar
1/3 c. shortening
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 c. milk
1/4 c. pineapple juice
1 flax "egg": 1 Tbs. ground flaxseed + 3 Tbs. water

Melt butter in a 10" cast iron skillet. Sprinkle the brown sugar on top and put pineapple slices in whatever pattern you want.
Beat everything else together for 3 minutes, then pour it over the pineapple.
Bake at 350F for 40-55 minutes. Put a plate on top of the cake, then flip it over and leave the pan on top for a few minutes for the pineapples and brown sugar to come off. Remove pan and serve!

More (never home)maker food

2011-12-18T17:47:00.001-08:00

Here are two great recipes that I discovered from one of my new favorite blogs, (never home)maker:

Potentially vegan French onion soup (I say potentially because the cheese on top is certainly optional). I thought it was very authentic and definitely something out of the ordinary for us to make.

Great black bean burgers! I have tried to make several different vegetarian burger recipes, but these are most definitely the best. The main aspect that I appreciated besides the taste is that it is actually the texture of a burger and holds together when you cook it.

Check out that homemade bun, avocado, and homegrown sprouts! (Also the Christmas decorations hiding on the other side of the plate)

Christmas Baking

2011-12-18T17:42:00.000-08:00

So I found this link to make salt water taffy - super easy recipe! And I was excited because I thought it would make a good gift for my mom since she loves taffy (I'd enjoy it too). Unfortunately, it was apparently not so easy for me. It was stretching happily along when all of a sudden (as I was getting sweaty and blisters all over my hands), the "taffy" started getting hard. I frantically tried to salvage it by breaking it into manageable pieces and semi-candy cane shapes. Anyway, I ended up with peppermint hard candy rather than taffy. Tasty, but very unexpected.

"The Joy of Cooking" gingerbread "men" (mine are angels and trees and a mini house)

Wild food

2011-11-25T13:34:00.001-08:00

I went to the hard work of collecting wild black walnuts, scraping off the pulpy outer coating, soaking them in water (discarding the ones that float), scrubbing them, then letting them dry for two weeks.

When I finally tried to crack them with one of those metal nut crackers, I couldn't. Hmmm, now what?

Garlic Pumpkin Knots

2011-11-25T13:28:00.000-08:00

If you are interested in some really tasty, garlic-y bread, look no further. This recipe comes from the (never home)maker blog like the seitan, but is here.

Anthony agreed to give it a try (even though it had pumpkin in it) because it had garlic too. In the end, he liked it a lot and so did I. Just so you know, though, it was still good after the day I made it, but definitely best right away, rather than re-heated.

My only alterations were to use half whole wheat and half white flour. I also wanted to make it after work, so I made the dough the day before, let it rise 1.5 hours, then put it in the fridge overnight. The next day, I took it out and let it rise for just half an hour before baking.

Homemade Seitan

2011-11-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps you are reading this because you want to make seitan. But more likely many of you are really curious about what weird thing I am making now. Well, it is imitation "meat" made from wheat, and that rhymes. Actually, it is like imitation sahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifusage and it was pretty darn convincing, I have to say. Also spicy. Maybe that was all the pepper I put into it.

This is the place to find the recipe that I followed. I like these people (though I've never met them) mainly because they like cooking, running, and The Office - I was hooked on their blog when I saw they had a recipe for Mose's beet muffins.

Anyway, this is what my seitan ended up looking like:

We chopped up half of it and sauteed it with carrots, onions, garlic, and kale. Then we mixed in couscous, soy sauce, and Worcestershire sauce.

Anthony's vote for the other half is to make pizza and use it as "pepperoni."

Thanksgiving Dinner

2011-11-25T12:59:00.000-08:00

This year we are far from our families for Thanksgiving, but that doesn't mean no celebration! Instead we had over two different neighbors for a special meal.

We are so thankful for all of the unexpected things God has done in our lives, bringing us to Minnesota and giving us lots of interesting learning experiences.

Instead of turkey, we had our last frozen chicken that we bought from a local farmer this summer.

The cranberry salad was also special - it included cranberries that my parents bought from a cranberry bog on their way out to visit this month!

Cranberry Salad
1 (12oz) bag cranberries (I used a full quart-sized Ziploc bag)
1 or 2 oranges
3/4 c. sugar
2 stalks celery
1/2 c. walnuts

Chop cranberries in food processor. Peel and chop oranges. Add them and sugar to the cranberries and refrigerate. Before serving, add chopped celery and walnuts.

Additionally, the pumpkin pie was made without eggs and yet tasted like normal pumpkin pie. I used 1/4 cup pureed silken tofu in place of each egg. This seems to have made it take longer for the pie to bake, but it turned out fine. (I also forgot to tell my guests about this secret ingredient - I don't think they noticed).

My mom's pumpkin pie
2 eggs (or 1/2 cup of pureed silken tofu)
2 c. fresh, cooked pumpkin, pureed (or a 16oz can - but real pumpkin is much better!)
3/4 c. sugar
1 can (12oz) evaporated milk
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ginger
1/4 tsp. cloves

Whisk ingredients together in order. Pour into an unbaked pie shell. (You will have some extra that doesn't fit in a 9" pan, so make a mini pie in a 5" dish) Bake at 425F for 15 minutes. Turn oven down to 350F and bake 45 more minutes. At this point, it shouldn't be jiggly in the middle, but mine was (again, I think because of the no eggs). I put it back in for 15 more minutes and the top was browned and the pie almost completely set. I had to leave for church, though, so I took it out and it firmed up completely as it cooled.

Grow Your Own Mushrooms

2011-11-20T14:12:00.001-08:00

Woah, I have been absent from blogging for a long time! I have been cooking because we have to eat even when I'm busy, but I prefer to read when I am busy, rather than work on the computer. But I will catch up over Thanksgiving break! Here's something fun to consider until then. I bought a kit to grow your own chanterelle mushrooms and it was amazing to watch:

How cool is that?

This is approximately Day 3:

Day 5:

Around Day 7:

Vegan Rhubarb Custard Pie

2011-11-20T13:59:00.001-08:00

Remember my grandma's amazing one-crust custard rhubarb pie? Well, this is it, but in vegan form! I have no local farmer to buy eggs from during the winter, so I have no eggs, but I have frozen rhubarb from the spring. I wanted this pie again, so I thought I'd give it a shot with 1/4 cup of pureed silken tofu in place of each egg. Amazingly, it turned out tasting no different than the egg version! Now, I was impatient to eat some when it came out of the oven, so I didn't let it set, and this happened:

However, by the next day, pieces came out nicely set, with no such issues.

Emergency Food Rations

2011-11-20T13:52:00.000-08:00

Recently, as part of Christian Reformed World Relief Committee (CRWRC)'s World Hunger Campaign, we had some special events and offerings at our church. Part of the campaign involved sending a bag containing a ration for one person for one day that CRWRC gives out to people who are starving. As you can see in the picture, it is 50g of dry beans, 450g of a whole grain flour, 50g of oil, and 5g of iodized salt.

I wanted to see what that looked like as prepared food (and I hated to see food go to waste when we had just been looking at it as what starving people are eating, so after the events were over, I took everything home and cooked it. I was able to make 4 pita-like breads with the flour, oil, and salt, and cooked the beans to go with them. Between me and Anthony, we ate them for two meals each and I was satisfied, so I can see how it would be enough food for one person for a day.

Pumpkin Brownie Pumpkin Pie

2011-11-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

This is a recipe I found here. I've been enjoying trying vegan baking recipes since I am not using eggs this winter. It is fun to discover new replacements for eggs and feeling safe from salmonella when I eat uncooked dough or batter!

This pie has a no crust. It starts with a layer of pumpkin brownie on the bottom, then a layer of pumpkin pie filling, and finally crumbly pecan/cookie topping.

I was really surprised by how much the topping grew and spread over the top of the pie, but it turned out looking very nice. Personally, I like the pumpkin pie part best, though some people I know, but will not mention :) don't so much. The pumpkin brownie underneath makes this a good compromise!

Lemon Poppy seed Muffins

2011-11-20T13:40:00.000-08:00

I made these muffins using the recipe found here, but I made quite a few alterations, including putting in all of the poppy seeds I had (because I wanted to use them up). Personally, I thought it could have been more lemony, but they were still very good.

Poppy Seed Topping:
2 Tbs. oil
6 Tbs. Sugar
1/4 c. white flour
2 Tbs. poppy seeds
2 Tbs. lemon juice

Muffins:
1 c. whole wheat flour, 1 c. white flour
2/3 c. sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
2-3 Tbs. poppy seeds
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. plain, fat-free yogurt
2/3 c. lemon juice
1/4 c. oil
2 tsp. lemon zest
1 tsp. vanilla
1.5 c. frozen blueberries

Preheat your oven to 375F and grease your muffin tin.

Mix together the topping ingredients in a small bowl. In another bowl, mix together the muffin dry ingredients. Then, add all of the wet ingredients and the blueberries.

Fill 12 muffin cups, then sprinkle the topping on them. Bake for 16 – 20 minutes. It took mine around 19. But you know what? They have no raw eggs in them, so even if they aren't fully cooked, they're still safe to eat!

Dad's Chex Mix

2011-10-07T20:08:00.000-07:00

Every winter, my dad makes this special party mix to enjoy on bird watching trips and during Christmas and New Year's celebrations. It sounded good to me the other day when the weather started getting cooler, so I decided to make some out of season!

Ingredients:
2 12-oz boxes of Crispix or Chex cereal
About 1 cup each of almonds and cashews

Heat the following in a saucepan until the butter melts:
4 Tbs. butter
4 Tbs. olive oil
7 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
2 Tbs. garlic salt
2 Tbs. lemon juice

Divide the cereal into two 9x13" pans.
Drizzle 1/3 of sauce on Chex and nuts, and bake at 300 F for 15 minutes. Take out, stir, add 1/3 more of the sauce and bake 15 more minutes. Take out, stir, and add last 1/3 of sauce. Bake about 45 more minutes mixing every 15 minutes. Try to let it cool before you eat any!

Pot Pie

2011-10-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

So I think I planted plenty of carrots to last us a LONG time (tomatoes too). We've been eating garden carrots for the past months, I froze several bags, have a bunch sitting in the fridge, and I still have large quantities to harvest. So pot pie seemed like a good way to enjoy a fair amount of carrots.

Roast the following at 400F for 30-40 minutes:
1-2 cups cubed carrots
1 cup cubed potatoes
4 chopped onions

In the meantime, I made the buttermilk biscuit dough from "The Joy of Cooking."

When the veggies are done, combine the following in a large saucepan:
1.5 - 2 cups milk
1 Tbs. olive oil
4 Tbs. flour
Once it makes a kind of sauce, add in the veggies, a cup of frozen shelled edemame, and 1 cup of shredded cooked chicken.

Pour it all into a 9x13" pan and spread the dough over the top.
Bake at 375F for 30-35 minutes. I put a cookie sheet on the rack underneath the pot pie because my pan was pretty full and it did drip a little bit while cooking.

Millet and Tofu

2011-10-07T20:04:00.000-07:00

Again, since I have this silicone baking sheet, I wanted to try marinating tofu and baking it. I sliced the tofu and let it sit in a couple tablespoons of soy sauce for about 15 minutes. (I think it would have been better if I let it marinate longer) Then, I spread the slices on my baking sheet and baked them at 375F for 30 minutes, flipping them over once after 15 minutes.

So then I thought about what to make that would go with tofu. My zucchini lasted an unusually long time, so I sauteed slices of zucchini and about 4 cups of chopped kale. I cooked 1 cup of millet (simmered in 2 cups of water for about 25 minutes). Then, I mixed the millet and vegetables together. I find that pretty much everything is better with feta cheese, so I put it all together with some feta cheese on top. It was really tasty and still good as leftovers for the next couple of days. The millet did seem to get kind of dry after a few days passed, but it was a good meal nevertheless.

Homemade Baked Fries

2011-10-07T20:02:00.001-07:00

I have been enjoying using this silicone baking mat on my cookie sheets - it makes it so much easier to clean up anything that I bake on there! I've used it to bake cookies, tofu, and now fries.

I chopped up a bunch of potatoes into fry shape, then drizzled them with a couple tablespoons of canola oil. Then, I spread them out on the baking sheet, sprinkled them with garlic salt, and cooked them at 400F for 50 minutes. Mmmmmm.

Apple Tart

2011-10-07T19:59:00.001-07:00

I am very excited that it is apple season because I love homemade applesauce and eating apples every day. I also love apple desserts (and Anthony doesn't so I don't have to share!) Unfortunately, I baked a disappointing apple crisp where the crisp wasn't so crisp and I used apples that did not get soft after baking. So I ate the whole thing, but didn't enjoy it as much as I was hoping to.

This apple tart, on the other hand, was great. The recipe was in my latest issue of "Organic Gardening" magazine. I changed the dough a bit by taking out an egg yolk and making half the recipe (which is enough for one tart)
The dough is:
3/4 c. white flour
1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 Tbs. sugar
6 Tbs. cold butter, cut into small cubes
3-4 Tbs. ice water
Mix the dry ingredients, then cut in the butter. Mix in enough water to make the dough stick together. Refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes.

Roll out the dough into a big circle on a silicone baking sheet if you don't want it to stick. Peel and slice about 4 large apples into thin pieces. Arrange them nicely on the dough, leaving about an inch of dough around the outside, then drizzle 1.5 Tbs. of melted butter over them and sprinkle on 1 Tbs. sugar. Fold the edge of dough over the outer ring of apples and bake at 375F for 40-45 minutes. Mine took a little longer than that, possibly because the silicone sheet made it get less browned? I'm not sure.

Mmmmm sauce

2011-10-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

This is a recipe that I found on the "Peas and Thank You" blog here.
While we were getting all these fresh vegetables during the summer, we made quite a few vegetable quesadillas. This was a tasty sauce that went with the quesadillas really well. It is kind of a funny color due to the curry powder in it, but it does taste great (Anthony kept calling it "Yum Yum sauce")

First, I chopped up 1/4 c. almonds in my food processor until they were powdery.
Then, add the other ingredients and blend together until smooth:
1/4 c. canola oil
1/3 c. water
1/4 c. chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1/4 c. nutritional yeast
2 1/2 T. lemon juice
1 t. minced garlic
1/4 t. salt
3/4 t. curry powder
1/2 t. dried oregano
1/2 t. dried cilantro

Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies

2011-10-07T17:48:00.000-07:00

It is sort of fall in Minnesota (though it was in the 80s the past week...) Since our dear friends who have been letting me use one of their gardens this year have ridiculous amounts of butternut squash, among other things (I kid you not - they probably had over 100 each of squash, cantaloupe, and watermelons!), I have been cooking and freezing a butternut squash every week. It is similar enough to pumpkin for baked goods and my favorite black bean pumpkin soup, that I figure I might as well substitute it in.

I did, however, cook up a little pie pumpkin to make these cookies. I like pumpkin things a lot, but I was looking for a recipe that turned out cookies which were more cookie-like and less cake-like. And I found one! Not only that, but these are even vegan, which is great, since I haven't been able to buy eggs from our local farmer lately.

The recipe can be found here
I did, however, leave out the walnuts and raisins and added about a cup of chocolate chips. And I baked them for about 12 minutes.

Vacation

2011-08-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

When we visited Michigan for vacation, I had the fun opportunity to be watched by one of my nieces while I was baking in my in-law's kitchen.

I also got to pick blueberries with my mom!

Refrigerator Pickles

2011-08-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

Since we have such an abundance of vegetables in general, I've been doing lots of freezing of things. But can you freeze cucumber? Not really. I thought I would try out some refrigerator pickles since I've never done that before. So I bought a packet from the store which is everything you need, other than water and vinegar. I followed the directions and now have a few jars of homemade dill pickles in my fridge!

Obviously I didn't have a lot of jars to choose from...

Stuffed Zucchini

2011-08-21T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have fond memories of how my mom always made this when we found monster zucchinis lurking in our garden, missed for a couple of days.

Well, I found six of them in my garden after being on vacation... I managed to give most of them away (I already have many cups of shredded zucchini frozen for winter zucchini bread), but I kept one to make into stuffed zucchini.

First, you cut out the middle of the zucchini. If it has hardening seeds, scrape those out and either save them to plant next year or throw them to the chickens. Cook the zucchini shell in the microwave.

In the meantime, soak 1/2 cup of TVP in 2/3 cup of boiling water.
Saute diced onions, the middle part of the zucchini which you have chopped up, and some corn. Add a can of tomato sauce and the TVP once the veggies are cooked. Put the zucchini shell into a pan, fill it with sauce. Bake it at 350F for around 30 minutes. Then, top it with some slices of mozzarella cheese and put it back in until the cheese melts.

Pluot

2011-08-05T09:54:00.000-07:00

I tried a new fruit!

Part apricot and part plum. It was very pretty and had the taste of apricot with the texture of a plum.

Anthony tasted a new fruit recently too - a blackberry.

Random baked goods

2011-08-05T09:53:00.001-07:00

First, some semolina bread - this is, of course, from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" and it is made from semolina flour. Semolina is wheat flour that is usually what your pasta is made from. But it turned out some great bread too!

Chocolate Cherry Vegan Cookies from here. Leah and I made them together when she visited. They were good, but I was a little disappointed that the cherry flavor was not more obvious than it was. Mostly they tasted like chocolate cookies.

Cookies made from leftover crisp topping. Leah and also I made strawberry crisp and we had way more topping than could fit into the pan without it overflowing. So we added an egg and chocolate chips and made the leftovers into soft oatmeal cookies.

Yukon Gold and White Bean Burgers

2011-07-21T21:01:00.000-07:00

These turned out less firm than I expected, but still tasted good. Even Anthony was surprised to enjoy them.

The recipe is from Peas and Thank You here.

If only I had thought to get pickles before I made them. But I did have some of my "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day" dough in the fridge, so I made homemade bread buns!

Zucchini Pizza

2011-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

Yet another recipe from my Artisan Bread book friends...

Make your bread dough, roll it out, and sprinkle with sauteed zucchini and green onions, feta/Parmesan cheese, and pine nuts. I think I could eat this every day.

What to do with so many vegetables?

2011-07-21T20:57:00.000-07:00

Have a salad with every meal.

Just eat lots of peas on their own and then roast beets and potatoes with sausage (or no sausage if you don't want meat).

And there is always stir fry, another one of my personal favorites.

Another Strawberry Cake

2011-07-21T20:55:00.000-07:00

This strawberry cake was even better than the last one! It is an upside down cake. I've always liked upside down pineapple cake, so why not try upside down cake with strawberries?

I found the recipe here and only changed it a bit - no cardamom because I didn't have any and a 10" cast iron skillet since I don't have a 9" cake pan. It was a good thing I used the skillet because look how full it got when the cake baked and grew:

It looked pretty amazing when it came out of the pan and tasted as good as it looked!

Garden Proceeds

2011-07-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

I like to roast beets in the oven with other root vegetables like sweet potatoes and carrots. In this case, my beets are mixed with other veggies and seasoned with fresh cilantro from the garden. Weirdly enough, these beets (the variety is called chioggia) are supposed to be concentric circles of red and white when you cut them open, but most have been almost completely white when I harvested them, no matter what size. I can't figure this out.

For weeks, we ate salads pretty much every day - until the lettuce started to bolt and became too bitter to enjoy.

I also just harvested the first potatoes

And beautiful purple dragon carrots:

Another cheese and spinach muffin

2011-07-21T05:07:00.000-07:00

Well, these muffins were definitely an experiment. Usually I like to follow baking recipes exactly, but in this case, I was going to alter it a bit, but ended up not having some of the ingredients I thought I did and so I altered it even more. It was supposed to be pumpkin feta muffins, with chunks of fresh pumpkin...

This is what I used:
½ c. canned pumpkin
½ c. Colby jack cheese, cubed
½ c. Parmesan
1 cup fresh spinach, chopped
2 Tbs. fresh cilantro, chopped
2 Tbs. whole flaxseed
2 Tbs. mustard
2 eggs
¾ c. milk
1 c. whole wheat flour
1 c. white flour
4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
Mix all the ingredients together (Colby jack cheese, spinach, and cilantro last). Put it into twelve greased muffin cups. Bake at 400F for 20 minutes.

Rye Raisin Bagels!

2011-07-21T05:06:00.000-07:00

I love bagels! My sister and I tried making them one time with buckwheat flour and they were good, but not the perfect bagel taste and texture that these were.

I used my rye bread dough from "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day". You should be able to do this with pretty much any dough, though.
Flatten about a pound of dough out and sprinkle it with:
1 Tbs. sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
6 Tbs. raisins
Roll up the dough and shape it into a ball.
Pull off peach-sized pieces, dust with flour, and shape them into balls. Poke a hole in the middle and stretch it out to a diameter about 3x the width of the bagel wall. Put them on a cutting board sprinkled with cornmeal and let them rest 20 min. Then, preheat your oven to 425F with a baking stone or cookie sheet in there. Meanwhile, simmer the bagels in:
4 quarts boiling water
2 Tbs. sugar
1/2 tsp. baking soda
Simmer for two minutes, then flip them over and simmer another minute. Drain them and put them on the hot baking stone. Put a pan with water on the oven rack beneath the one with the bagels as a steamer tray. Bake 20-25min.

Focaccia Bruschetta

2011-07-21T05:04:00.000-07:00

I have made focaccia before, but I found this more complicated recipe that I wanted to try...mainly because it was more complicated. I might have been able to bake it a little less time because it turned out really chewy and a little crispy at the edges, but overall, it was quite good. Depending on how salty you like, you could use less salt than is called for.

Ingredients:
3 1/2 c. flour
1 3/4 c. warm water
1 tsp. dry yeast
1 Tbs. coarse salt
1/4 c. plus 2 Tbs. olive oil

Mix flour, water, and yeast, cover bowl and let rise in warm place until mixture tripled in bulk and sponge-like, about 2 hours.
Add salt, mix it in well. Dough will be wet, slack, and very sticky.
Turn out the dough onto a well-floured surface and keep your hands and tools well dusted. Gather and fold bottom edge of dough about 1/3 of the way up toward the center, pat down lightly to deflate slightly. Fold top edge down 1/3 toward center – the two folds should overlap slightly. Repeat with right and left sides, tap off excess flour as you go. Gently scoop up the dough and flip it over. Place in lightly floured bowl, smooth side up. Cover bowl and let rise in warm place about one hour.
Return dough to well-floured surface and repeat the folding process. Lightly flour mixing bowl and return dough, cover again and let rise another hour.

Preheat oven to 450F. Pour 1/4 cup of olive oil onto a 9x13” baking sheet, coating bottom completely. Return dough to well-floured surface and roll it out a bit. Place dough on prepared sheet. Flip dough over to thoroughly cover both sides with olive oil. Push dough to edges of sheet, cover with plastic wrap and let rest for 10 minutes. With plastic wrap, continue to press out dough to fill the pan. Drizzle remaining olive oil over the top of the dough and sprinkle with salt.
Bake, rotating sheet halfway through, until focaccia is evenly browned on top: 25-30 minutes. Slide it onto a wire rack and pour any oil left in pan on top of it.

We also made bruschetta to go with the focaccia. This is chopped up tomatoes, basil, and fresh mozzarella, drizzled with just a tiny bit of olive oil and mixed together. It was good, but we had to use store-bought tomatoes. Make bruschetta this summer with fresh tomatoes and it will be much better!

John Calvin's Strawberry Cake

2011-07-11T15:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was John Calvin's birthday. Despite the fact that I am most definitely not a die-hard Calvinist, I am amused by celebrating funny things like Calvin's birthday or Guy Fawkes day.

Since I work on a strawberry farm, I have been enjoying the wonderful strawberries during this short season. So with the combination of strawberries and John Calvin's birthday, I thought it was a good time to bake a cake.
I searched around and found lots of interesting recipes. But I ended up using the recipe from here. Except of course, I used strawberries rather than raspberries and I doubled the recipe then divided the batter between a 7"x11" pan and a bread pan.

Happy (belated) birthday, John Calvin.
I am very thankful that God made strawberries.

Fresh produce

2011-07-07T19:07:00.000-07:00

Strawberries from Brouwer Berries.

Yellow Snap peas with purple flowers from my garden.

Cashew Chicken

2011-07-07T18:11:00.000-07:00

This is one of the foods that I remember fondly from growing up. Perhaps you could say that it is a comfort food, but I don't know if it is unhealthy enough to be a comfort food...

2 cups of chopped cooked chicken (or uncooked)
Marinate in:
1 Tbs. soy sauce
4 Tbs. water
2 Tbs. sesame oil
4 tsp. cornstarch

Stir fry in 1-2 Tbs. oil:
6 sliced green onions
mushrooms (optional)
celery (optional)
(chicken if uncooked)

Then add the chicken (if already cooked), 1 cup of cashews, 2 cups of green peas and about 1/4 cup of water to make a light gravy. Cook for a few more minutes.

Starting with uncooked chicken gives you more authentic cashew chicken, but it still tastes good if you use chicken that was cooked already!

Chickpeas and Dumplings

2011-07-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

I followed this recipe and it was excellent. Even Anthony thought it was good. He was worried that it wouldn't be very flavorful, but yes it is!

Kale Chips

2011-06-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I love kale! Ever since I first tried it about five years ago, I have tried to put kale into as many recipes as I could. Kale with pasta, on pizza, in smoothies (really), in stir fry, as an all-around spinach substitute, etc. So when I heard about people making kale chips, I thought I had to try them.

These are kale leaves from my garden. They are still relatively small with a very thin middle vein/stem, so I chose not to cut that out and to include it in the chips. I cut the kale into pieces (next time I think I will use whole leaves because that would be much easier), drizzled maybe a teaspoon of olive oil on them and rubbed it over the pieces with my fingers until each piece was pretty much covered. Then, I sprinkled salt on the pieces and spread them out on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350F for 4 minutes, flip the pieces over (this is why whole leaves would be easier), and bake another 4-5 minutes.

And there are your kale chips! They really are crispy and addicting. A very good way to get some of your daily iron and calcium without even realizing you're eating something healthy.

Homemade Fettuccine

2011-06-20T17:03:00.000-07:00

Making homemade pasta has been on my list of things to do for the past year or so. Finally, I decided that a day I wasn't working and had lots of eggs was the day to attempt it.

I used the recipe out of the Joy of Cooking for whole wheat pasta.
1 c. white whole wheat flour
2 1/2 c. flour
5 eggs
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. olive oil

It took adding about 1/2 cup of water to make the dough stick together. Honestly, I was worried when I added the water and kneaded it because it seemed very sticky and not smooth at all. Letting the dough sit for half an hour, however, was amazing because it was the perfect consistency by the time I was ready to roll it out.

Anthony gave me the creative idea of hanging the pieces to dry on our clothes drying rack. It worked fabulously and looked pretty cool in our kitchen.

We prepared some that night with pesto:

And then a topping of spinach, tomatoes, and tofu:

This one meal obviously was only a small portion of the extreme quantity of pasta that I made. Next time - if there is a next time - I think I will make half or maybe less than that since you aren't supposed to store it for too long. Anthony was rather amused but at the same time slightly appalled as I kept bringing out more dough and cutting so many pieces of fettuccine.

So anyway, I dried the leftover part thoroughly (like for five hours) and then put it in a ziploc bag for three days. When I cooked it at that point, it was still dry and just as good. But after all that work, I didn't want to risk storing it longer and having it become moldy or something terrible like that.

Yogurt-sicles

2011-06-20T16:52:00.000-07:00

Since hot weather is finally here, I decided it would be fun to have something like a homemade popsicle, but with yogurt and fruit instead of juice. Since I only had plain yogurt on hand, I mixed in some vanilla extract and honey to make it into vanilla yogurt. Then I pureed strawberries and layered them between spoonfuls of yogurt in a skinny plastic cup and froze it:

I used a chopstick for the stick :)

They turned out really well, but I think I will try a smaller cup next time since these ended up being a larger snack than I initially intended!

Homemade Nutella

2011-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

This is a very easy spread to make and it is a good substitution for nutella. However, I must admit that it doesn't taste exactly the same, so don't expect a perfect imitation.

1 cup roasted hazelnuts
4 Tbs cocoa powder
6 Tbs maple syrup
1 Tbs. vanilla extract

Roast whole hazelnuts at 350F for 10 minutes. Let them cool, then rub off as much of the skins as you can. Grind nuts in a food processor until they form a paste. Add the other ingredients and process until smooth.

Put it into a container and refrigerate.

I personally think that the best way to eat this is on a nice warm homemade croissant like these, some of which I froze and can take out and eat with homemade nutella even now!

Rhubarb Tarts

2011-06-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

These are based on this recipe, which I found because my sister made them and posted about that on her blog.

However, I did adjust the recipe a fair amount because I didn't have all of the correct ingredients. For example, I simply cooked my 1 1/2 pounds of rhubarb with 1/2 cup of white sugar. And I used white whole wheat flour in place of the corn flour, milk instead of heavy cream, and one egg instead of two egg yolks (okay, that isn't because I didn't have two eggs, but because I was lazy and didn't want to separate the eggs...)

Additionally, I shaped the tarts before I put the rhubarb into them. I tried putting the rhubarb on the dough and then folding it up around the edges, but that was kind of difficult with the rhubarb trying to leak out all the sides while I shaped the dough... So instead, I made a little tart shape and then filled it with cooked rhubarb like so:

At this point, you put them in the freezer for a while and then bake them straight out of the freezer. They were nicely shaped when I took them out of the freezer and my pre-folded tart shells seemed to have worked very well...until I took them out of the oven.

Oh, well, what can you do? As far as I can tell, it didn't affect the way they tasted.

Potato Cakes with Poached Eggs, Greens, and Horseradish-Mustard Vinaigrette

2011-06-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

This is a recipe that I got out of the Organic Gardening magazine and wanted to try. I figured that Anthony would also be willing to try it because it has the words "Horseradish" and "Mustard" in it. It actually turned out very tasty, though my poached eggs were not pretty like they're supposed to be. But at least I tried.

The original recipe for the potato cakes called for pot roast, but I used chicken because that is what I had.

Potato Cakes
3 potatoes, cooked and mashed
1 cup shredded, cooked chicken
1 small onion, minced
1 egg
2 Tbs. flour
1 Tbs. parsley
salt and pepper

Combine all of the above ingredients and form them into 4-5 cakes about 1/2 inch thick. Refrigerate for 15 minutes. Melt 1 Tbs. butter and 1 Tbs. olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the potato cakes and cook them about 5 minutes per side, until golden brown and a little crispy.

Poached Eggs
Fill a large skillet with 2 inches of water and bring to a boil. Add 2 tsp. vinegar and a pinch of salt, then turn the heat down to simmer. Add the eggs and cook for about 3 minutes. Use a slotted spoon to remove them from the water.

Place the potato cakes on some lettuce and an egg on top. Here are the not so pretty poached eggs I made:

Then there is the horseradish-mustard vinaigrette to top it all off:
1/4 c. olive oil
2 Tbs. balsamic vinegar
1 minced shallot
1 Tbs. horseradish
2 tsp. mustard

Fattoush

2011-06-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

After making this a while ago, we decided that fattoush should be on our schedule of commonly made meals. It's a good, tasty salad and happens to include ingredients that pretty much all will be growing in our garden this summer!

Salad:
Lettuce
Cucumber, cubed
Tomatoes, cubed
Green Onions, sliced (I would put in one per two servings, Anthony would put in more like 5 - it's up to you)

Dressing:
1/4 c. olive oil
3 Tbs. lemon juice
1 Tbs. dried parsley flakes or you can use fresh
1 Tbs. garlic
salt and pepper

Mix the salad dressing well, then toss it with all of the salad ingredients. Top with pita chips.

Boston Cream Pie

2011-06-10T18:39:00.000-07:00

I remember my dad making my mom a Boston Cream Pie for her birthday one year (I won't tell you when) and I knew I liked it. So when we were having company over, I thought I should try it too.

Cake
1 ¼ c. flour
1 c. sugar
1/3 c. butter, room temp.
¾ c. milk
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. vanilla
½ tsp. salt
2 egg whites

Make cake: Heat the oven to 350°F. Grease just the bottom of a 9-inch round cake pan. Separate eggs and save yolks for the filling. Beat all cake ingredients with an electric mixer on low speed 30 seconds. Beat on high speed 3 minutes. Pour batter into the pan and bake about 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on a cooling rack 20 minutes, then remove onto cooling rack to finish cooling completely, about 1 hour.

Cream Filling
2 eggs
1 ½ c. milk
1/3 c. sugar
2 Tbs. cornstarch
1/8 tsp. salt
2 tsp. vanilla

Make filling: In a small bowl, beat the egg yolks with a fork or wire whisk until mixed. Stir in 1 1/2 cups milk; set aside. In a saucepan, stir sugar, cornstarch and salt until mixed. Gradually stir egg mixture into sugar mixture. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils. Boil and stir 1 minute; remove from heat. Stir in 2 teaspoons vanilla. Press plastic wrap on surface of filling to prevent a tough layer from forming on top. Refrigerate at least 2 hours until set but no longer than 24 hours.

Split cake horizontally in half. On a serving plate, place bottom layer with the cut side up. Spread filling over bottom layer. Top with top of cake, cut side down.

Chocolate Frosting
3 Tbs. butter
3 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate
3 Tbs. water
1 c. powdered sugar
¾ tsp. vanilla

Make frosting: Melt the butter and chocolate in the microwave for 1-2 min. Stir in the powdered sugar and 3/4 teaspoon vanilla. Stir in 3 tablespoons hot water.

Spread frosting over top of cake, letting some drizzle down the side. Refrigerate uncovered until serving. Store any remaining cake in the refrigerator, covered.

A couple more cookies

2011-06-10T18:36:00.000-07:00

Chocolate Chip Molasses Cookies
I thought that these were great cookies because I like molasses and chocolate and, above all, they were chewy (in my mind, I'm not sure that crunchy cookies even deserve to be called cookies...) My dear husband doesn't like combining things like molasses and chocolate, however, so he let me eat most of them. How can I complain about that?

I found this recipe here, but I halved the recipe and used regular flour rather than bread flour. This halving also involved just using one whole egg instead of half an egg and half an egg yolk (how would you do that anyway?). And I did not put parchment paper on my baking sheets and the cookies came off just fine.

Chocolate Cookies
I've been wanting to try making cookies that had some whole wheat flour in them, but since I'm such a fan of soft, nearly unbaked cookies, I was a little afraid. These, however, met my expectations for cookies and not only have some whole wheat flour, but are also egg-less (so I can feel safe eating the uncooked dough! This isn't to say that I've never eaten dough with raw eggs...I was just raised to be very concerned about doing such a thing :)

3/4 c. butter (use a butter substitute to make this recipe vegan)
3/4 c. powdered sugar
1/4 c. sugar
1 t. vanilla
3/4 c. unbleached flour
1/2 c. whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 c. cocoa powder
1 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/3 c. chocolate chips (or, should you so desire, vegan ones)
Beat together butter, sugars, and vanilla, then mix in the rest of the dry ingredients, stirring in the chocolate chips last. Chill 30 min. - 1 hr. Bake walnut-sized balls at 350F for 11 minutes. Let them sit on the cookie sheet for a minute before transferring them to a cooling rack.

Complicated Bread Using a Starter

2011-06-10T18:33:00.000-07:00

I'm not even going to try to post in here all the directions for making this bread, since someone else already did that here.

I will tell you that I made 1 cup of starter that worked just fine for the recipe.
1/2 tsp. yeast
1/2 c. warm water
3/4 c. flour

Let the yeast dissolve in the water for 5 min., then stir in the flour for 2 minutes. Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let it rise overnight in the fridge. Use it the next day and make sure that the water you use for the bread is warm since the starter is coming out of a cold fridge.

This is what your bread will look like as it is baking in the oven:

When it comes out:

And then when you're about to enjoy the rewards of your hard work:

Homemade Crackers

2011-06-10T18:30:00.001-07:00

Because apparently I do not have enough to do, I decided to make some homemade crackers. But I think I will be doing this more often because they were really not all that complicated, nor did they take much time. Not to mention the fact that they taste great!

Rye crackers:
1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1/2 c. rye flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. honey
1/2 Tbs. caraway seeds
3 Tbs. olive oil
2-3 Tbs. water
Mix all the ingredients together - add more water if it doesn't stick together enough. Let the dough rest for about 10 min. Roll it out to 1/8 or 1/16" thick, cut it into whatever shapes you want, and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet at 350F for 15-20 min. (I went for the temperature and time in the middle of various recipes I found so I could bake both of these kinds of crackers at the same time)

Flax crackers:
1/4 c. flaxseeds
1/4 c. ground flaxseeds (flaxseed meal)
3/4 c. whole wheat flour
3/4 c. white flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
4 tsp. olive oil
1/2 c. milk
Mix everything together, chill it in the fridge for 10 min., roll it out and do the same as for the above crackers.

Polenta

2011-06-10T18:28:00.000-07:00

Polenta has about the least amount of ingredients imaginable, but you can make cooking it more complicated if you want :)
6 c. water
2 c. cornmeal
2 tsp. salt

Slowly pour the water over the cornmeal in a saucepan, stirring until you get lump-free paste. Add the salt and cook on medium-low heat, stirring frequently, for 20-30 min. This requires patience; I held a book in one hand and stirred with the other. It's done when the whole thing pulls away from the sides of the pan and a spoon can stand up in the middle. By the end, it was rather a pain to keep stirring, but I had a little friend come visit and help me a bit with the stirring.

When the polenta is done, you could eat it with a sauce over it just like that, but I spread it out on a cutting board, smoothed it out to about 1/2 inch thickness, and let it cool for half an hour. Then, I sliced it into squares, put it in a glass baking dish and sprinkled 3 Tbs. of melted butter and some Parmesan cheese over it and baked it at 450F for 20 minutes.

For a sauce, I cooked up a package of mushrooms, a can of diced tomatoes, and some vegetable bullion. Just so you're prepared, it makes for a pretty filling meal.

Unique Peanut Butter Cookies

2011-06-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

Anthony was a little concerned when he heard that these were flour-less cookies and he teased me about it afterward, but he enjoyed them just as much as I did. They're super easy and a good thing to make if you don't have too many ingredients around.

Mix together:
1 c. peanut butter (you can use natural or otherwise - I used half of each)
1/2 c. brown sugar
1/2 b. sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. baking soda
1 c. chocolate chips

Bake at 350F for 10 min.

Mike's Famous Pizza

2011-06-02T05:55:00.001-07:00

Have I mentioned how amazing my dad's homemade pizza recipe is?

I thought I had put the recipe on the blog already, but it seems I did not.

Dough (makes enough for 2 pizzas)
3 cups flour
3/4 cup cool water
2 Tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
1 package yeast (2 1/4 tsp.)
1/4 cup warm water
1 Tbs. honey
Sauce
1 can tomato paste
1 can tomato sauce
garlic
oregano

1. Mix yeast with warm water. Allow to proof 10 minutes.
2. Mix cool water, honey, oil, and salt in separate bowl.
3. Mix both 1 and 2 with flour. Knead until smooth texture.
4. Let rise at room temperature for 30-60 minutes.
5. IMPORTANT! Cool dough in fridge for at least 2 hours, up to overnight.
6. Leave dough out at room temperature for 1 hour before cooking.
7. Roll out dough. Put corn meal on pizza stone (or you can also use a cookie sheet if you don't have a pizza stone) to keep dough from sticking. Before putting sauce or toppings on dough, spread a think layer of olive oil on top of rolled out dough.
8. Bake at 450°F for 15 minutes.

This is a spinach and feta cheese pizza with cheddar cheese on top.

Strawberry Surprise Muffins

2011-06-02T05:55:00.000-07:00

6 Tbs. butter (I used 5 Tbs. plus 1 Tbs. applesauce)
2 eggs
14 strawberries, mashed
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 cups flour (I used 1 1/2 cups white and 1/2 cup whole wheat)
1 Tbs. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
12 Hershey's Kisses (if you don't have any, 1 cup of chocolate chips)

Cream the butter and sugar, then mix in the eggs, milk, and strawberries. Mix flour, salt, and baking powder and stir them in with the strawberry mixture. If you don't have Hershey's Kisses, now is the time to mix in the chocolate chips.
Grease muffin tins, fill halfway, put a Kiss in, then top with more batter (that's the "surprise"). Bake 20-25 minutes at 350F.

I had extra batter, so I put it in a greased bread pan and made a little flat loaf. This took about 30 minutes to be done.

A New Cookie Recipe

2011-06-02T05:18:00.000-07:00

While my sister was visiting, we made these wonderful Brown Butter Toasted Coconut Chocolate Chip Cookies (say that ten times fast):

She took this lovely picture, while I obviously took the one of her. The cookies were quite the hit and we had a great time going around and distributing some to our neighbors. Hmm, maybe now you wish you lived next door or across the hall.

Personally, I would bake them for 10 minutes and take them off the pan right away after that. But that's just me; I like mine half-baked :)

Pear Puff Pastry

2011-06-02T04:09:00.000-07:00

So I had some pears which did not taste so good (perhaps because it is not pear season?) and I needed something to do with them. Since I also had about half a cup of crushed pineapple sitting in my fridge, I came across the idea of cooking the two together and putting them into a store-bought frozen puff pastry and baking it.
I cooked together:
4 Tbs. butter
3 pears, chopped into pieces
1/2 cup crushed pineapple
1 Tbs. brown sugar
1 tsp. minced ginger
1/4 cup cinnamon (this was an accident - I opened the wrong side of the container and it poured instead of sprinkled in...nevertheless it still tasted good)

After the above ingredients were sufficiently cooked, I let them cool, then placed them in the middle third of a puff pastry and folded the outside thirds over the middle one, sealing the edges all around. I baked it at 400F for 20 minutes (25 would have been better).

Thankfully, this tasted much better than the raw pears.

But even better than this pear pastry, I made one with frozen cherries, cooked with three stalks of chopped rhubarb, some coconut, 1 Tbs. butter, and about 1 Tbs. honey. I put this on the pastry and sprinkled some semi-sweet chocolate chips on top before folding it up and it was pretty amazing.

Rhubarb!

2011-05-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

The first local "fruit" (technically vegetable) of the season is always very exciting and I was especially excited about rhubarb this year after a very long winter. And so, when two of my friends offered me tons of rhubarb, I decided my first recipe would be rhubarb bread (actually more like rhubarb cake made in a bread pan :)

Here is my lovely sister helping me harvest rhubarb (my third time this month).

My dad's favorite part of rhubarb bread was always the gooey, sugary topping - which I must say is very tasty - but my favorite was always the rhubarb. Since I like the rhubarb so much I thought I'd put in extra, which turned out tasting great, kind of like rhubarb custard, but made it very difficult to get the squishy bread out of the pan... So I will put down the recipe for you with my changes in parentheses for you to try if you dare. This is how they came out all gooey and soft:

3/4 cup white sugar
3/4 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup oil (I did 4/6 cup of applesauce and the rest oil)
1 egg
1 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla
2 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cup rhubarb (or if you're feeling adventurous 2 1/2 cups)
1/2 cup chopped nuts (I didn't have any so I left them out)

Blend sugar, oil, egg, vanilla, and buttermilk. Add dry ingredients and mix it all together. Stir in your rhubarb and nuts. Then, you can put it into 2 greased regular sized bread loaf pans and bake it for 50 minutes at 350F. But I decided to use 4 mini loaf pans that I have (since Anthony won't eat rhubarb and little loaves sounded fun) and baked it at 350F for 40 minutes. But before you bake, mix 1/4 cup of white and 1/4 cup of brown sugar and sprinkle it over the tops of the loaves.

Additionally, I made a bunch of rhubarb sauce, both on my own and with my sister. This involves the extremely simple process of cooking 5-6 cups of chopped rhubarb in a pot with 1/2 cup of sugar until it becomes sauce. Maybe it takes 15 minutes... How can you eat rhubarb sauce? On ice cream, with yogurt and granola, or even just plain!

Lemon Meringue Pie

2011-05-07T06:24:00.000-07:00

I have always enjoyed lemon meringue pie, but I had never made it (partly because Anthony won't eat lemon-flavored things). Since we had company this past week, though, I decided to give it a try. It turned out really well, but it wasn't terribly easy to make. I used the recipe from "The Joy of Cooking" with "Meringue #2." This meringue uses cornstarch to stabilize it so it doesn't get wet and mushy after you put it in the fridge and this worked out great, but making the whole thing involved me trying to do 3 things at once (the cornstarch mixture, lemon custard, and meringue)... Nevertheless, I survived and here's what I ended up with:

First, you're supposed to put the meringue around the edge first so the lemon filling doesn't slide around and I thought this looked really pretty.

And then a few pictures of how it came out of the oven:

And the final tasty product:

Easter

2011-04-24T12:06:00.000-07:00

Along with the celebration of Jesus' resurrection at Easter, my family always had traditional foods that we ate on this special day. Being the one in charge of planning the meals (not to mention having access to certain foods that we couldn't get in Uganda), I got to make those special foods for me and Anthony this year.

Asparagus salad, twice baked potatoes, croissants, and Canadian bacon (in case you hadn't figured this out, I'm not a vegetarian, but this is kindly raised, antibiotic and hormone free meat - unfortunately not local, but hopefully that will come with the summer).

Croissants:

These require a bit of work, but for some reason, they seemed easier to me this year than they have other times I've made them. But hey, when they turn out like this, it's totally worth it.
7 cups flour
1 envelope yeast (2 1/4 tsp) dissolved in 1/4 cup very warm water
2 cups milk
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup sugar
2 sticks butter, softened (1 cup)
1 egg
1 Tbs. milk

1. Measure 2 cups of flour into a large bowl, make a well in the center and put the yeast/warm water mixture in it. Let stand 5 min.
2. Add milk, salt, and sugar; beat until smooth. Beat in flour 1/2 cup at a time to form a soft dough - knead dough about 3 minutes, then press it into a large, lightly greased bowl. Cover and let rise 1 1/2 hours.
3. While dough is rising, knead the butter until soft, but not melted.
4. Roll the dough into a 12x10" rectangle on a floured surface, let rest 10 min. then spread the butter on the lower 2/3 of the dough. Fold the top third over the butter, then the bottom third up over that (layers: dough, butter, dough, butter, dough).
5. Roll dough to a 14x8"rectangle and fold it in thirds like a letter again. Let rest 10 min.
6. Give dough a quarter turn and roll it out to a 14x8" rectangle and fold in thirds again. Repeat this step once more, then wrap dough in a moist cloth and refrigerate for 1 1/2 hours.
7. Roll dough into a 25x10" rectangle. Divide it into two long strips, about 5" wide. Let dough rest 5 minutes, then cut each strip into 6 pieces. Cut each square diagonally to make 24 triangles.
8. Roll each triangle from base to point to make a large, thin triangle. Roll it up from the base to the point and curve ends slightly to make a crescent shape. Place them on a baking sheet.
9. Beat the egg and milk in a small cup and brush it over the croissants. Let them rise 30 minutes, then brush again with the egg/milk. Let rise 30 more minutes and repeat the brushing.
10. Bake at 385F for 18 minutes.

And of course, there's always carrot cake for dessert:

Ingredients:
1 cup applesauce
1/2 cup oil
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. salt
3 cups raw, grated carrots
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1/2 cup raisins

Directions:
First mix together the oil, sugar, and eggs. Mix in the dry ingredients, then the carrots, walnuts, and raisins.
Bake at 350F for 45 minutes in a well greased 9x13" pan or make half the recipe (this is what I did) and bake it in a 9x9" pan.

Cream cheese frosting:
4 oz. cream cheese
5 Tbs. butter, softened
2 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Beat together until smooth consistency - not runny.

Spinach and Cheese Muffins

2011-04-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

This is a recipe that I found on the Stonyfield website and adjusted to fit with what I had around the house. I thought that they turned out really good, but Anthony didn't like the texture of the spinach (Personally, I don't understand what was weird about it).

Ingredients:
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup plain yogurt
1 egg
1/4 cup olive oil
3/4 cup cornmeal
3/4 cup white flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup cooked, drained spinach (I used one frozen package)
3/4 cup of grated cheddar cheese (I used colby jack, so it might have had a stronger flavor if I had used cheddar)

Mix all the ingredients together (this is the way I do it) or if you'd rather, mix the wet ingredients and sugar together, mix the dry ingredients separately, then combine them and fold in the spinach and cheese. Divide them into 12 greased muffin tins and bake at 400F for 15-20 minutes.

Olive Bread Attempt 1

2011-04-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ever since my sister and I went on a trip to Providence, RI and Washington DC, I've been wanting to try to make my own olive bread that I had from a bakery in Providence. It was a nice crispy loaf with kalamata olives inside. So in my "Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes a Day" cookbook, I found an olive bread recipe and decided to try it out. I used the white bread dough, flattened it out, spread olives on top, then rolled it up and made it into a round loaf. It was a nice, tasty bread, but not quite what I was looking for. Hence, "attempt 1."

Also, European Peasant Bread in a fun shape:

I thought that if I put enough space between two small loaves on the pizza stone, they'd turn out fine. But...you can see what happened. Maybe it's a hot air balloon?

Cream Puffs

2011-04-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

This was an attempt for a fancy dessert when we had guests over and it was actually surprisingly easy. First you make "choux paste", which is kind of fun.
Combine in a saucepan:
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup whole milk
8 Tbs. butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 tsp. salt
Bring the mixture to a boil over medium heat, then add 1 cup of flour all at once. Stir until the mixture pulls away from the sides of the pan (this is very cool - it makes dishes easy). Continue to stir and cook for about 1 minute. Put the mixture in a bowl and let it cool for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Beat in 4 eggs - one at a time; make sure the paste is smooth before adding the next one. Now, you can shape the dough into round balls on an ungreased cookie sheet. Get your fingers a little wet so the dough doesn't stick to them. I made 12 from this much dough.
Preheat the oven to 400F and bake the puffs for 15 minutes.
Look how cool it is that they puff up just like they're supposed to:

Reduce the oven temperature to 350F and continue to bake about 25 more minutes. Turn off the oven, poke the bottom of each puff, turn upside down on the baking sheet, and let them dry in the oven for 10 minutes.

When you're ready to serve them, cut off the tops and put some filling in the middle. I served them with pudding, though I think you're "supposed" to make whipped cream as the filling.

Thumbprint Cookies

2011-04-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

As you may have noticed if you have read a lot of my blog posts, I really like keeping up family traditions that relate to food. One of those traditions is thumbprint cookies. My mom always made them in the spring and so since it is sort of starting to be spring, I wanted to follow tradition and bake them. The funny thing is that my mom did the same thing and mailed me and Anthony just a few cookies right when I was about to make my own.

Here is the recipe:
1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup softened butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 egg yolks (keep the whites in a separate bowl)
Cream together the above ingredients, then add 2 cups of flour and 1/2 tsp. salt.
Form the dough into balls and then dip them into the egg whites, then roll them in chopped walnuts.
Bake at 375F for 5 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet.
Take the cookies out and make a dent in the middle with your thumb.
Put them back into the oven for 8 more minutes, then cool.
Fill the thumbprint with pastel-colored frosting.

The only reasons these cookies are spring-like are the fact that this is when my mom always made them and because you can make the frosting in the middle be spring-like pastel colors. Now, I don't have food coloring and I don't want to buy any because I would so rarely use it, so I used a little blueberry juice to make pinkish/purplish frosting. The rest I left white because Anthony doesn't like fruit and didn't want to eat frosting that had been dyed with a fruit (even though it just tastes like regular frosting...)
These are my mom's:

European Peasant Bread - Two Ways

2011-04-09T07:34:00.000-07:00

This also comes out of the "Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day" so I was able to make the dough ahead of time and put it into the fridge until I was ready to bake.
The first half of the dough, I made into loaves, which were wonderfully crusty. Apparently I didn't slash the one loaf correctly since it kind of bubbled up, but it tasted just great anyway.

The second half of the dough, I made into giant "family-sized" pita bread. This means that Anthony and I split one!

It was very tasty pita bread and look how much they poof up:

Caramel Rolls

2011-04-09T07:11:00.000-07:00

There is a place near Renville where you can get extremely tasty caramel or cinnamon rolls and I have recently been wanting those caramel rolls, but not wanting to get up early and drive to another town to get them... However, since I got the book "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day" and it had a good-looking recipe for caramel rolls in there, I thought I would give it a try.

This involved making Brioche dough, then rolling it out, spreading the filling on it and on the 9" cake pan, then making it into a roll, cutting it into eight pieces, and placing it into the pan. I let it rise for 40 minutes, then baked it at 350F for 40 minutes.

They came out beautiful and tasted great, but unfortunately, I didn't think about how the caramel might bubble up and trickle over the edges of the pan until I started to smell something burning about halfway through baking. This is why the above picture is kind of blurry - I felt a little stressed out when I took it. So that you don't have to spend lots of time cleaning your oven after making these like I did, put aluminum foil or a baking sheet or something under the cake pan while you're baking these rolls.

Soba

2011-03-16T17:47:00.001-07:00

We occasionally eat soba noodles plain with soba sauce. But I thought it might be nice to try something different. We had cabbage and miso base for making miso soup, so we boiled the cabbage in a little water, divided it up and mixed in some miso, then put the cooked soba noodles on top with some chopped walnuts. It was a good change of pace.

Squash/Pumpkin

2011-03-16T08:41:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, my mom brought me some squash that I had cooked this fall and left in her freezer. As much as I do enjoy squash, this type (unidentified) was not my favorite, so I had to come up with ways to use it. I decided to make some pumpkin recipes and substitute the squash for the pumpkin. To make the squash be a similar consistency to canned pumpkin, I processed it in the blender.

First, I made Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
The only adjustment I made to make them more healthy was to substitute in 1/3 cup of whole wheat flour instead of using all white flour. Maybe I'll try adjusting something else next time, but they're just too good to mess with the recipe much.

Combine:
1 2/3 cup flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chocolate chips
In a separate bowl, whisk:
2 large eggs
3/4 cup canned pumpkin (or, in my case, squash)
*one 15 oz. can of pumpkin is the amount to double the recipe
1/2 cup melted butter
1/4 cup milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla
Stir the ingredients all together and spoon into 12 greased muffin pans. Bake at 350F for 15-20 minutes.

Okay, so I chose to use those paper muffin cups since I had some and wanted to use them up, but apparently this was bad idea:

I never had them stick to greased muffin pans like they did to the wrappers, so I guess you should follow the recipe rather than my example...

Now this did not use up the mystery squash, so I also made Pumpkin Bars.

Here, I did more alterations, but I will include the non-altered version too.
Beat together:
4 eggs
1 2/3 sugar
1 cup oil (I used 1/2 cup applesauce, 3/4 cup ground flax, 1/4 cup oil)
1 1/2 cups canned pumpkin (I used squash)
In a separate bowl, stir together:
2 cups flour (I used 1 1/2 cups white flour, 1/2 cup whole wheat flour)
2 tsp. baking powder
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
Then, mix everything together, pour into a 15"x10" pan and bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes. I don't have that sized pan, so I used a 9"x13" pan and it took about 35 minutes.
Cool and frost with cream cheese icing:
3 oz. cream cheese
1/2 cup softened butter
1 tsp. vanilla
2 cups powdered sugar

So although it still tastes good, I think that I would prefer this without the flax seed. It would probably be better with a full cup of applesauce for the oil (or just with oil if you're going for tasty over healthy :)

My Birthday dinner

2011-03-06T12:39:00.001-08:00

For my birthday, we had Double Broccoli Quinoa - a new recipe (I like trying new things while Anthony prefers to stick to the good old known-to-be-good recipes). This turned out to be a success, though, and both of us enjoyed it.

The recipe can be found here but I did make a few changes. First, I used red quinoa, which was fun since it made the dish look very pretty. Secondly, I used milk instead of cream because I had no cream and it still tasted great.
You can see that we had feta cheese and avocado to go with it.

Homemade Granola

2011-03-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

It is fun to make granola since you can kind of make up the recipe as you go. Mainly, I make it with mostly oats, then I mix in various chopped nuts, coconut, ground flaxseed, and wheat germ. Then, in a small bowl, stir together 1/4 cup of oil (I used olive oil and it tasted great), 1/4 cup of honey, and a couple tablespoons of water. Mix that in with the other ingredients, and put it in a baking pan. If it seems too dry, you can add more oil, honey, and water in about the same proportion.

Bake it at 400F for 40 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. When you take it out, you can mix in dried fruit (so the fruit doesn't get burned - I've made that mistake before) and let it cool.

Baguette

2011-02-13T12:59:00.001-08:00

This is a recipe for a very tasty and easy, no-knead bread that I got from my sister-in-law.
1 1/2 cups warm water
3/4 Tbs. yeast
3/4 Tbs. kosher salt
3 1/4 cups flour
2 tsp. chopped garlic
Mix all the ingredients together, then let the dough rest for 3 hours, covered with a towel. Sprinkle some flour on the dough, flour your hands, then divide it into two pieces. Stretch each piece into a loaf shape, then let it rest on parchment paper for 20 more minutes, covered. After this, score the tops of the loaves with a sharp knife.

Preheat the oven and a cookie sheet to 450F. Once the loaves have risen and the oven has preheated, transfer the parchment paper with loaves to the cookie sheet. Place a pan half filled with water on the rack below it. Bake for 20 minutes or until the crust is lightly browned. Let it cool for a little while before slicing.

You'll notice that my loaf is a little bent - this is because I didn't use parchment paper; I just picked the loaves up off the counter and set them on the baking sheet and it stretched out in the middle between my hands...

Happy Valentine's Day!

2011-02-13T12:57:00.000-08:00

Anthony and I celebrated by making these sugar cookies that my mom always made for Valentine's Day when I was growing up.

Another TVP meal

2011-02-06T10:06:00.000-08:00

In order to continue to enjoy the TVP that I bought in a large quantity, I decided to try it out in chili as a substitute for ground beef.

And it was great! The TVP doesn't make chunks of meat like ground beef does, but it definitely has the same texture and taste as beef in chili.

Peanut Bars

2011-02-06T10:02:00.000-08:00

Peanut bars are a family tradition, which I recently discovered does not belong to my extended family alone. I thought it was since I had never met anyone else who knew what they were, nor had I ever seen them anywhere. But, I recently saw something called "mocha bars" in the Renville, MN grocery store which looked pretty much exactly like my family's peanut bars. When I investigated this online, I discovered that is another name for the same thing and that it is a German tradition which I suppose is more common in this part of the country than in a place like Michigan where I grew up. So imagine that; I'm a part of a tradition that springs from my ancestral background.

The first thing you have to do is make this really excellent cake from scratch. Scary as that might sound, it really isn't all that difficult.

Grease and flour a 9x13" pan.
Beat 2 eggs for 5 minutes, then beat in 2 c. of sugar, 1/2 tsp. salt, 2 tsp. vanilla.
Then, beat in 2 Tbs. butter that have been melted in 1 c. of boiling hot milk.
Beat in 2 c. flour mixed with 2 tsp. baking powder.
Bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes.

After baking the cake, let it cool, then cut it into, oh, about 36 rectangular pieces and frost them on all sides with this frosting:
1.5 sticks of butter
1 Tbs. sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. salt
Powdered sugar (somewhere around 3 cups)
Add enough milk to make it easily spreadable.
Then, roll them in chopped peanuts and you're ready to eat! They also freeze just fine - take them out of the freezer half an hour before you want to eat them or eat them cold like my dad.

Quinoa and Tofu

2011-01-22T07:05:00.000-08:00

For this meal, I baked the tofu in the oven. I cut it into cubes and put the cubes into a baking dish with 1 Tbs. sesame oil, 2 Tbs. soy sauce, and 2 Tbs. water. I baked them at 350F for 35 minutes, stirring them about every 8 minutes.

In the meantime, I sauteed an onion and some garlic in a big saucepan and cooked 1 cup of quinoa (with 2 cups of water) in a separate pot. When the quinoa was done and the onion was cooked, I mixed them together with a package of frozen spinach, thawed and with the water squeezed out. Then I added the tofu and some sun dried tomatoes.

Okay, so it tasted a lot better than it looks in this picture.

Scones

2011-01-22T06:34:00.000-08:00

Both of these scone recipes are from "The Joy of Cooking". This first one is the Oatmeal Scones with Raisins and uses butter:

The second one is the Classic Current Scones - cream variation and uses cream rather than butter:

I also used raisins instead of currents and added 1/2 cup of dark chocolate chips. Oh, and I substituted 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour for some of the white flour.

Both of the recipes were really good, but I would probably make the oatmeal one more because I don't ever buy cream for anything except for making cheese, which I don't do very often.

TVP

2011-01-21T06:59:00.000-08:00

I found this intriguing recipe for meatless meatballs here and I wanted to give it a try. So I ordered a bag (which happened to be big) of TVP, textured vegetable protein. The recipe actually is quite good and I plan to make it again, but I will have to come up with other ways of using the TVP too since I still have so much. I'm thinking chili, lettuce wraps, etc.

I was having some trouble with taking good pictures this day, so if you want to see better pictures, the pictures on the blog where I found the recipe are much better.

Bread and Biscotti

2011-01-21T06:39:00.001-08:00

I had never made a loaf of bread that had only whole wheat flour in it and no white flour at all. So I found a recipe for whole wheat bread with either ground flax seed or olive oil in it. This time I tried flax seed, but next time I think I will do olive oil because it was very good.

Here is the recipe (I made half - the whole recipe makes 4 loaves):
7 cups whole wheat flour
1 ½ Tbs. yeast
1 Tbs. salt
¼ cup vital wheat gluten
3 ½ cups lukewarm water
½ cup ground flaxseed (or olive oil)

Mix the dry ingredients, then stir in the wet ingredients. Cover the dough and let it rest for 2 hours. Then, refrigerate it, covered. You can now use it over the next 7 days.
You can then find instructions on how to bake it here.
You can see from this picture that the loaves aren't that big, but they do make a very tasty bread and that's what really matters!

And this is how they look when they come out of the oven:

These are pine nut biscotti. I added a little packet of dried cranberries to the dough, which was so good in the biscotti that actually ended up with a cranberry in them, that I'd recommend actually adding half a cup or so to the recipe. The recipe isn't super exciting on its own, so with dried fruit or chocolate chips I think they would be much better.

You need:
3 cups flour (I make 1/2 cup of that whole wheat)
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. water
1 tsp. vanilla
3 eggs
Combine all the dry ingredients, then mix in the water, vanilla, and eggs, until the dough is crumbly. Knead it together until it makes a ball - you might need to add a little more water. Divide it in half and put them onto a greased cookie sheet in 8" long, 1" thick rolls.
Bake at 325 for 30 minutes, then take them off the baking sheet and let them cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Cut the rolls into about 15 slices each, then put them back on the baking sheet, cut side down. Bake them for 15 minutes at 325. Turn them over and bake another 15 minutes. Cool them completely on a wire rack.

Anthony's Birthday Dinner

2011-01-07T07:04:00.000-08:00

For Anthony's birthday, we ate some special French dip sandwiches - made with grass-fed, free-range, local Michigan beef. And boy was it tasty! Anthony got the special plate since it was his birthday.

We also broiled broccoli, which is amazingly good. This involves cutting up the broccoli, putting it in a single layer in some sort of pan, sprinkling with olive oil, salt, and pepper, then putting it under the broiler on high (on the top rack of the oven) for about 5 minutes, stirring, then putting it back for another 5 minutes.

Welcome 2011

2011-01-07T07:01:00.000-08:00

For the beginning of this new year, we spent a relatively quiet evening with my parents and a few small snacks. These pretty almonds were one of the snacks:

I thought it would be cool to take a picture of the bubbles in this glass of sparkling juice and it just happens that Anthony is popping out behind it. This is a bit ironic since he doesn't like such drinks anyway.

As a New Year's treat, we made these tasty meringues which my sister made first. You can see her better pictures and the recipe here.

Sushi

2011-01-07T07:00:00.000-08:00

Homemade raw fish-less sushi is really not terribly hard to make, especially when you have four people working on it all at once. Of course, when there are six people eating, you have to make more, but it is worth the effort. On this day, Anthony and I were cooking with my sister and her boyfriend. We had lots of fun as you can see.

First you make rice and chop up all the ingredients. We made California rolls with cucumber, avocado, and fake crab. Then we made others with various mixtures of cucumber, avocado, fake crab, egg (made like an omelet, then sliced into strips), sweet pepper, and asparagus (cooked in a little olive oil).

Spread a thin layer of rice on the seaweed, put a strip of filling on one end, then roll it all up into a tight tube.

Slice the tubes into little pieces and you have beautiful sushi:

And look how happy we were once we got to sit down to eat the sushi!

Potstickers

2011-01-04T19:54:00.000-08:00

Chop up about half a cabbage (I used purple), 2 carrots, and a bunch of green onions in the food processor. Add:
tiny cubes of firm tofu (one package)
1 Tbs. ground ginger
2 Tbs. soy sauce
1 Tbs. sesame oil
and 2 Tbs. corn starch.
Mix all that together and put spoonfulls on the potsticker wrappers. Seal them together by putting a little water along the edge of the wrapper.
Brown one side of the potstickers with a little oil in a skillet, then add 1/3 cup of water, cover the skillet, and let them steam until the water is cooked off.

Quiche

2011-01-04T16:22:00.000-08:00

I prefer to make quiche in a deep-dish pizza stone rather than in a pie pan because you can fit the filling in without having it overflow. It also seems to cook better.

Quiche is great for many reasons, but one of them is that you can do all sorts of fillings. I have done one with bacon and swiss cheese, but this one was with cheddar cheese and broccoli.
I cut the cheese into small cubes and covered the bottom of the crust with it. The broccoli is cut into small pieces, drained well, and sprinkled over the cheese. Then I mixed 1 cup of milk with 5 eggs and poured it over the cheese and broccoli. I baked it at 350 for 45 minutes. You can tell it is done when the middle wiggles like jello when you shake the pan gently.

Amazing Soft Pretzels

2010-12-11T19:51:00.001-08:00

I have always loved soft pretzels. The best part about going shopping for school clothes with my mom and sister when I was young, was getting a snack from the pretzel place at the mall. And so it was an exciting day when I learned that my mom had received a great pretzel recipe from a friend. It was definitely time to make them.

Here are the ingredients:
1 cup + 2 Tbs. water
3 cups flour
3 Tbs. brown sugar
1 1/2 tsp. yeast

Mix these ingredients together, then knead the dough until it gets very smooth. At that point, grease a bowl, but the dough in it, cover the bowl with a towel, and put it in a warm place to rise for about an hour. After that, divide the dough into 8 pieces.

Roll each piece into maybe a 12" snake and twist it into a pretzel shape like this:

In the meantime, boil 2 quarts of water mixed with 1/2 cup of baking soda.
Drop 2 or 3 pretzels at a time into the boiling water and leave them there for 15 seconds.

Take them out and let them drain on a paper towel for a couple minutes. Then, put them on a greased baking sheet, sprinkle them with coarse salt, and bake them at 425F for 8-10 minutes.
Eat right away!

Open-faced Eggplant Sandwiches

2010-11-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

I really like eggplant and I think this is a great way to eat it (probably partially because I also really like cheese).

You slice the eggplant into circles, then dip them in egg and then a mixture of flour and cornmeal. Bake it on an oiled pan at 475F for about 25 minutes, or until they're slightly browned. In the meantime, put slices of good bread (French bread or wheat) on a cookie sheet. When you take the eggplant out, cover the tops of the bread with eggplant pieces. Cover the eggplant, then, with tomato sauce and put slices of mozzarella cheese on top. Put that back into the oven for 5 or so minutes - until the cheese is melted and bubbly.

Pumpkins are Food

2010-10-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

Yes indeed, you can eat pumpkins - they aren't just decorations. However, today I used a pumpkin for a decoration. This is John Calvin carved into a pumpkin (I found the pattern on Calvin College's website but I added the hand because of a painting of him at Calvin Seminary). In case you didn't know, Halloween is also Reformation Day, and John Calvin was a reformer of the Christian church in the 1500s.

Sour Cream Raisin Pie is Surprisingly Good, Actually

2010-10-25T11:12:00.000-07:00

I grew up hearing stories from my dad about how my grandma, when she made pies, always made a bunch of them. And with lots of siblings, for those who did like sour cream raisin, the strategy was to eat the pies everyone liked first, then wait until they were gone to eat the sour cream raisin pie, which they only had to share with a few people. Devious, weren't they?

I had never had sour cream raisin pie, though, until just this month. I made it with my grandma when we visited her and it was actually quite good.

Here is her recipe:
Make a double pie crust, put the bottom half in a pie pan.
Mix together:
1 ¼ cup raisins (then soak them if they’re dry)
1 cup sour cream (can’t use low fat) thinned with cream
1 cup sugar
¼ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vinegar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. vanilla
Pour into pie crust, then put another crust on top.
Bake at 375F for 1 hour.

While we were at it, we made a pecan pie too, for good measure.

Not food, but something I made

2010-10-25T10:02:00.000-07:00

I am only posting this because I am amazed that I managed to sew something so cool. My mom, of course, gave me lots of advice and showed me how to use the sewing machine, but I did do the work myself!

This is so I can carry jewelry with me as I travel all over the place.

Enormous Quantities of Cookies

2010-09-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

So my mom and I made this gigantic batch of cookies from my grandma’s recipe. I am quite sure that everything I have ever eaten made by my grandma is good.

These cookies are great and I have never made so many cookies at one time in my life! There was the one time when Anthony and I made a triple batch of hazelnut cookies, but I’m not sure there were even as many as this... Anyway, it involves lots of ingredients:

You need a giant bowl if you want to make the full recipe and here it is:
Hobo Big Batch Cookies

Mix in the order given.
1 cup butter
2 cups white sugar
2 cups brown sugar
6 eggs

3 cups peanut butter
1 ½ Tbs. corn syrup
1 ½ Tbs. vanilla

9 cups oats
4 Tbs. baking soda

12 oz. package semi-sweet chocolate chips
12 oz. package plain M&Ms
2 cups soft raisins

Shape into Tbs. sized balls and bake at 350F for 9-10 minutes.

Strange food

2010-09-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you saute purple cabbage with olive oil and then add some eggs and scramble it together:

Blue eggs and purple cabbage...try that Sam I am!

Fruit Pancake

2010-09-23T12:26:00.000-07:00

This is a great recipe for breakfast if you like fruit and egg-y pancakes. It is also pretty easy. Again, it is something fun that I made with Leah.
Melt 1 Tbs. butter in a pie pan while pre-heating the oven to 400F.
Then, cut up a apple or some other kind of fruit (we used peach) and put the slices on the butter in the pan. Bake this for 5-10 min. Then sprinkle it with 2tsp. sugar and some cinnamon.

Meanwhile, mix together:
3/4 cup milk
2/3 cup flour
2 eggs
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla
some cinnamon
Pour all of this over the fruit and bake it for 20-25 minutes.

It gets all puffed up and then sinks down when you take it out of the oven.