A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Weekend Breakfast Blogging Round-Up

Our theme for this month's Breakfast Blogging event was "Ethnic Dishes with a Twist", the "twist" being create a breakfast dish from a culture, country, or ethnicity other than your own.

We had a great turn out of folks and variety of dishes.  Be sure to check out all of these wonderful foods and their creators' blogs.

Candy of Eat Here Get Gas made:

Norwegian Potato Lefses, a Scandinavian cross between a tortilla and a crepe, to celebrate her Norwegian grandfather's immigration to the States.  She says this is a common flatbread that can be used as a general bread but she likes it best for breakfast.

Lisa at Food and Spice serves up:

Shahi Egg, a classic North Indian cheese curry cooked Moghlai-style in a vegetable gravy.  Lisa says the recipe she gives is one of many available but that this one is particularly flavorful and time efficient to prepare.

Kevin at Closet Cooking prepared and eats several days a week a traditional Japanese breakfast of green tea, yogurt with berries, fermented soy beans over rice, and miso soup.  He gives several miso soup recipes in his post, several of which I personally plan to try.

Mansi, at  Fun and Food gives us two breakfast choices: Italian French Toast and Strawberry Colada Smoothie.  They both look excellent, the Italian French Toast is especially interesting since it's savory instead of sweet. I'm think breakfast for dinner sounds good, how about you guys?

Nupur at One Hot Stove brings us a  Mid- Eastern breakfast platter she enjoys that includes a lovely onion and parsley omelet served with pita bread and "fixin's" on the side.

Asha at Aroma does sweet up nicely with Cinnamon Apple Pancakes, sausages, and savory hashbrowns.  I love the way it covers both the sweet and savory tastes.

Susan from Food Blogga also chose to make hotcakes with fruit, only she chose peaches.  These hotcakes are made with ricotta, a staple of Australian breakfasts and a recipe from Nigella Lawson.

Nandita of Saffron Trail, who started this event called Weekend Breakfast Blogging brings us Tunisian Farka, a north African spicy breakfast porridge traditionally made  from cous cous.  This particular farka is made with broken wheat and looks delicious.

Madhuli of My Foodcourt also chooses breakfast from north Africa and decided to "eat like an...Egyptian" with ful medames which is a fava bean dish served with wedges of pita bread and accoutrements. Read to hear about her interesting search for fava beans that ended with red beans but a joyous dish, none the less.

Nags of For the Cook in Me chose chicken sausages, "indianizing" them by serving them in onion gravy and alongside fried potatos and bread.  Sounds wonderful and exotic to me.

Sher at What Did You Eat?  created a twist on the twist. While thinking about Mexican huevos rancheros, eggs and salsa on tortilla, she decided to spin that into eggs on top of jalapeno corn pancakes with black beans on the side.

Aarti from Aarti's Corner brings us two breakfast entrees for our round-up:  Thai Donuts and Belgian Waffles.  Both look fantastic.

Bazu at Where's the Revolution made a delicious breakfast of buckwheat almond pancakes and aren't they pretty? I love the color of the pancakes set on the color of the serving platter. Very appetizing.

Jenni at Milk and Cookies made another interesting flavor choice in the hotcake/pancake arena:  coffee hotcakes with rosy red oranges.  We have several recipes to choose from now. I have no idea where to begin. They all look fabulous.

Kunika of Sofemimine brings us a beautiful garden vegetable frittata that looks so good to me I'd eat it for any meal of the day.

Mmmmmmm....look at this.  Ashwini of Food for Thought gives us bagels with mushrooms and taleggio cheese.  I'll definitely be trying this one.

Bee and Jai over at Jugalbandi serve up some gorgeous Thai Black Rice Pudding for breakfast.  That black rice is also known as "forbidden" rice makes it even more exotic.

Raaga at The Singing Chef baked up some of the most heavenly fluffy, rich  Almond and Raisin muffins for her celebratory weekend. Be sure to drop by and congratulate her.

And for my own contribution, I made Swedish St. Lucia saffron buns with raisins. 

Again, I'd like to thank everyone who participating in August's Weekend Blogging Event.  I am so impressed with the creativity and enthusiasm everyone showed.  We all have lots of great new breakfast recipe ideas. 

If I have left anyone out, please know that it was a mistake and if you'll write to me at Marie9949 (at) sbcglobal (dot) net and I'll add you in.

Thank you so much to everyone!

And a late add. Sorry to Brian of Recipes for the Future who got overlooked:

Mexican Baked Eggs

Ingredients: • 8 Eggs • 8 Oz Sour Cream • 2 4 Ounce Cans chopped green chilies (mild or hot) • 1 Cup shredded Monterrey or Colby cheese • 1 1/2 cups diced 1/4" diced ham • 2 TBS Butter • 4 Gratin dishes

Instructions: Butter each gratin dish. Layer the bottoms with diced ham, then chilies, 2-3 dollops of sour cream, and some shredded Jack. Crack 2-eggs for each dish, and pour over sour cream. Continue building layers until everything is used, then spread the remaining shredded Jack cheese on top. Cover each gratin dish with foil, and bake at 350F. for approximately 15-minutes. Remove foil, and bake for another 10 minutes at 350F. These can be assembled a day ahead of time and refrigerated. If they are assembled a day ahead of time and refrigerated, the eggs may take a little longer to fully cook.

Note about Weekend Breakfast Blogging

Thank you to everyone who participated. I'm working on the round-up now. I'm hoping to have that posted by tomorrow morning.

Daring Bakers: Milk Chocolate & Caramel Tart

I found this challenge to be just that: challenging.  While I have an extensive background in baking cakes, tarts I'm not as familiar with so this was fun in a slightly stressful way, let me put it that way. I've never before made my own mousse or caramel. I've always wanted to do both but yesterday was a first for both. I learned a lot, mostly from my mistakes. But that's the whole point of being in the Daring Bakers group. I wanted the challenge of exploring new baking territory.

For a list of all the challengers, click on Daring Bakers for links.

Not to continue complaining about my knees but I'm going to anyway. Still having problems with them. Still miserable at work (from my knees only) and had a doc appt yesterday about them.  We're going to try a new painkiller that's non-narcotic, thank God, and maybe some joint fluid therapy.

In the meantime, I admit, even though cooking is still relaxing for me, I have to be careful on my days off not to spend too much time standing or it makes it worse for work.  This little project was four hours in the kitchen!  I'd put off making the tart until right at deadline time so there was no doing one little thing a day crap. It was a straight on onslaught with putting things that needed cooling into the freezer and cutting out all the middle man of time I could.

Let me walk you through my experience with this little recipe.  For one, the first thing it says is that the shortbread pastry will make three tarts. Well, I didn't need bulk, I needed ONE.  But instead of dividing everything by three, since dividing two eggs into three parts, gets dicey, I divided everything in half and went from there. I think I ended up with a little too thick of shortbread crust but it's good and we'll survive the trauma of having a thicker crust, you know?

I did make two alterations to the recipe. We're supposed to run the recipe as is but I had a couple of problems. For one, this really was a hit and run this time so it was one trip to one grocery store and one afternoon. So when I couldn't fine the hazelnuts on my pass through the grocery store, I chose to read "hazelnuts" as "almonds".  And I left the cinnamon out of the crust completely.  My husband, Gene, hates cinnamon and since I'm counting on him to eat a goodly portion of this thing, it made no sense to alienate my audience from the beginning.

Quick Baked Potato Post

A couple of people have asked for more details on how to make microwave potatoes that taste like real baked potatoes:

Super easy.  Just scrub the potato and put it in a baggie, freezer bags work the best in my opinion, along with about a quarter cup of water:

Hard to see the water but, trust me, it's in there.

Place in the microwave without sealing the top. Just sort of wrap the top over it so the water doesn't spill out or place the potato flat in the bottom with the bag sitting almost upright but you need to leave a steam vent or it will get ugly.  Again, really. TRUST me on that one. :-)

Microwave on high for about 8 minutes (on mine) and test for squishability.  Microwave longer if needed.

Now here's the really important part. Leave the potato sitting there for about five minutes to steam.  I've found that almost all of the water will be absorbed and leaves the skin nice and moist.

Voila.  Split and dress as usual.

Weekend Breakfast Blogging: St. Lucia Buns (Lussekatter)

Well...hell...

Okay, for breakfast blogging I made the theme to be "Ethnic Dishes with a Twist", the twist being that everyone should make a breakfast recipe from another culture, country, or ethnicity than their own.  Everybody else has been doing a great job with this event and I finally had time tonight to complete mine. I couldn't decide what to do at first.  One of my ideas was to make congee just because I see it on the menu of every big city hotel we stay in where there's a high percentage of Asian tourists.  Then I read a recipe and found that it's basically a rice porridge. That's fine. Actually, I love rice for breakfast with just a little butter and milk on it. I know that's not the same thing but somewhere along the line I lost my enthusiasm.

My other idea was to look up into my own family tree.  I'm Swedish/Norwegian on both sides but we have no Scandinavian hand-me down food traditions and that makes me a little sad.  I decided to make my own. Ever since elementary school when I first heard of St. Lucia Day, I've been been wanting to wear lit candles in my hair.  After all, I am the oldest girl of family.  But amazingly, Mom and Dad weren't real hip on that whole fire on my head in the wee hours of the morning while I'm baking bread thing.  I don't know why.

But I'm an adult now so I can wear lit candles in my hair if I want to. The problem is that now that I'm adult the idea has lost its appeal.  But not the thought of the St. Lucia buns.  I don't have a lot of practice with saffron but I do use and love cardamom, my favorite Scandinavian spice.  Put the two together and I call that Good Eats or Yumm-o or some other phrase that isn't already in the lexicon by people who might possibly sue me for using their trademark phrase.

St. Lucia (Sankta Lucia) Day marks the beginning of the Christmas season on December 13th. Sure, I'm a little early but let's call this a practice run. The tradition is for the eldest daughter in the family to serve saffron buns to her family while wearing a white dress with red sash and a crown of candles. It's a romantic tradition if not particularly approved of by Smokey the Bear.

My saffron buns didn't come out exactly as I would have liked them. They're a little overdone but they still tasted good.  Thankfully, Gene smelled them and pulled them out of the oven for me. You know that children's book "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day"?  Well that was my day yesterday.  I made the lussekatter tonight to try to distract myself from the fact that I'm having big trouble with my knees (now both) again in the form of some very wicked fluid retention on both and pain going with it. But, I was able to get into my primary care doc today so hopefully he'll be able to figure it out and fix it.

This is what the buns are supposed to look like:

Quite a bit lighter than mine and without the weird plumped up black raisins. I have NO idea what that was all about but the buns still tasted good once we knocked the demonic looking raisins off so what the hell.  We'll eat these up and next time, like December 13th, when I make them again, I'll be less distracted and pull them quicker from the oven.

The recipe follows.

BOUNCING EMAIL MYSTERY SOLVED!

To anyone who has not already sent me their link, another participant clued me in to the problem:  I had my email address followed by .com instead of .net. 

My deepest apologies everyone. I didn't catch it at all even after reading my post several times.

Anyone who is still sending in or who wants to resend to make sure I've gotten it, my true email addy is Marie9949 (at) sbcglobal (dot) net.

Again, I am so sorry for the confusion and bounced emails but to be honest I'm glad to know it was this rather than that my server wasn't delivering my mail.

Let's extend the deadline for a couple of days through Wed the 29th and I'll do the round up on Thursday the 30th.

Ahhh...Leftovers Two Ways

When you only have two or three people in your family, sometimes leftovers can become a problem. We all love to roast whole chickens or beef or pork roasts, but what do you do with them after the initial meal?  There's always so much leftover. I found two new ways to treat leftovers.

I cooked a beef pot roast in the crock pt the other night.  At work I was thinking out loud about how to transform that into a completely different meal when a coworker said that for her family, she chunks the roast in it's gravy and serves it over baked potaotes.  Sounded great to me so that's what I did tonight.  I separated the beef from the gravy and while I warmed up the meat with a little of the drippings, I put the rest of the liquid, potatoes, onions, and celery into the blender and blended until smooth.  This became a very flavor-filled gravy that needed no thickening agent.

The potatoes I "baked" in the microwave by putting them into a unsealed freezer bag along with about a quarter cup of water and cooking on high until soft.  Then I cut them in half, smooshed the halves, and spooned over the chopped beef, gravy, and peas. It was delicious.  A one plate down home meal but delicious. We all enjoyed its different incantation.

Tomorrow night I'll take the leftover beef chunks and gravy, add some sour cream and nutmeg, and serve that over buttered egg noodles for a leftover down home version of beef stroganoff.

That's what Gene and his sister, Linda, will be eating dinner of. I've alreayd pack some of the potato, beef, pea leftovers from my plate into my new pink bento box for dinner tomorrow night. We'll all be happy withour meal.

Quick Lunchbox post

Hmmmm....this doesn't look as appetizing as it was in real life but it was, I promise, yummy.  The top part is matzo ball soup, the bottom is whole wheat pita strips with spicy hummus and a few edamame from the freezer.  Something different and very carby while still having tons of protein and fiber.

Two New Cakes and a Lesson Learned

Before I get to the cakes I'm going to wax philosophic for a  moment because I know there have got to be people who relate to this. My whole adult life I've suffered from a triad of needs:  the need for perfection, the need to people please, and the need to feel like I gave my best or it doesn't count. Nothing wrong with any of those things theoretically but in practice what happens is I used to be one tired, resentful woman most of the time.  Up until the last couple of years whenever I did anything for anyone, like a birthday party for my nieces I'd go apeshit, quite frankly. I'd plan too much, spend too much, do too much work. I'd spend hours and hours worth of my time and energy that didn't need to be spent OR I'd lose perspective on what was appropriate.  Nothing wrong with giving of the best of yourself. That's good. But what I had no concept of was how to give appropriate based on MY NEEDS too and I fell into a very wasteful way of thinking that if I didn't kill myself creating something perfect then my effort didn't count. All of nothing.  The flaw in my logic is obvious now but for many years all I could see were those three needs for perfection, pleasing people, and giving until my fingers bled (figuratively).

Also, up until a couple of years ago when it came to favors and anyone asking anything of me, I didn't know how to say "no". It just wasn't in my vocabulary.  Not only would I say yes I'd put all other considerations aside.  I'm trying to think of some good examples. I think there are so many my brain can't come up with details.  Let's just say the situation has repeated itself many times and usually goes like this:  a friend asks for a favor of a cake, for example.  Not only did I say yes even though I didn't really have the time, I decided that it had to be from scratch even though the person wasn't asking for or expecting it to be from scratch.  Then the decorations would be complex and over the top instead of just something simple that would be fine. The end result was that by the time I delivered the little favor, I would be exhausted, had used up every bit of free time I had away from work, and I resented the person for MY CHOICES while the person who asked the favor had no idea that I was angry at myself for saying yes, had no idea how much time or money I'd spent on the thing.  The person was just happy to have a cool cake.  So the next time they needed a cake favor, who did they call?  And who now unreasonably felt obligated and the need to do something even more complicated and "cool" and resents that person even more just for asking?

It's a bad cycle and I have only myself to blame. A couple of years ago I finally started taking responsibility for myself and started saying "no" when I didn't have time or simply didn't want to and guess what? I found that the world doesn't stop revolving and nobody hates me because I didn't bake a cake or do some other kind of favor.

Don't get me wrong. I still like to do things for my friends and family.  I'm not a toad.  I like doing things for other people but what I've learned is restraint and appropriateness, and that it's okay to give what I have available to give in terms of my time and energy, not to mention that it's okay to say "no" just because it's not convenient for me or I simply don't want to.  Not every favor has to be granted, not everything has to be "the best" or "perfect" in my eyes.  I don't have to be completely worn out to feel like I accomplished something and saying "no" doesn't make me a bad person or an ungenerous one.  Those have been hard lessons for me to learn and, to be honest, I'm still learning them. It's very easy to slip into the old way of a lifetime of thinking.

That brings us to the new cakes.  Last spring we had the family birthday party for my niece and nephew, Jordan and Isaac, whose birthdays are within days of each other. The party was lots of fun and because I was off work with my knee I had lots of time to play with. Their cakes were incredible, if I do say so myself.  I spent at least 25 hours on the two of them combined and I was very pleased with the results.  Because I wasn't working, I also had that time to spend. Great.

But that's not the case this time for the other two nieces', Sydney and Kaylee's, birthdays.  I've worked all week and my knee has been killing me. Really.  I've spent the last week not sleeping well because of my knee and spending most of my free time icing it down just so I could work. I literally did not have the time or the physical strength to put into these two cakes like I did Jordan and Isaac's, but you know what I learned?  It's okay.  The world didn't fall off its axis and nobody died of embarrassment over how these two cakes turned out.  Not even me. 

So here are the cakes and then I'll tell you how I did them.  You'll know my secrets, even the one that had the whole family laughing out loud and fighting for one particular piece of Kaylee's cake.

By the way, the presents in the background covered in newspaper? Family joke. When my siblings and I were little we were so poor we couldn't afford to buy wrapping paper so all of our Christmas and birthday gifts were wrapped in the Sunday papers mom had friends save for her.  I admit that as a kid I was embarrassed and jealous of the glossy wrapping papers of my friends but now as an adult we all laugh about it and call it "recycling".  When I wrap in the cartoon pages, our kids love it. They think it's novel and fun and when we say the magic word "recycle" it becomes a badge of honor to them.

QUICK NOTE ABOUT BREAKFAST BLOGGING

Anyone who's having trouble getting my mailbox to accept your link emails for breakfast blogging, please feel free to post as a comment on this post or the original WBB post at the first of the month.  I apologize for the inconvenience. I have no idea why my mailbox is rejecting some senders but not all.

Thanks so much!

Glenna