A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Doctor's Kitchen Monday: A New Year with Home-made Granola

It's a new year and although I did lose 15 lbs. last year it feels a hollow victory.  Does it really count if I lost and gained and lost and gained the same 10 lbs over and over and over again, barely inching my way down the scale throughout the year?  Maybe so but I really had higher hopes for the beginning of '08.  Sigh.  But such is life and there's no going back, only going forward.

The two things I'm really trying to tackle this month are the all important B and B's: Breakfast and Beverages. 

Let's start with soda.  I go up and down with my consumption but it's a constant battle against the addictiveness of Coke. Just love the stuff. If I have the choice between Pepsi and water, I'll choose the water, but if Coke is the choice, I'll drink it. The weird thing is I drink more of it at home than at work.  I'd think that would be the opposite but at work I'm moving around so much that I get dehydrated, know it, and crave water.  At home, nothing like an ice cold Coke. Right?  Okay, so I'm a product of effective advertising.

To fight my addiciton I've limited myself to an 8 oz serving a day and turned my attention to water, iced herbal tea, and Crystal Lite when I really need something flavored.  In the meantime I printed out this article and pasted in to the shelf above my desk and will read it every day and even change it out for articles in the same vein to keep myself reminded of just how healthy soda is. Not.

Take a look at this HEALTH BOLT: WHAT HAPPENS TO YOUR BODY EVERY TIME YOU DRINK A SODA --  and we wonder why diabetes is so rampant in our culture. Armed with that bit of depression I'm drinking lots of iced herbal tea today with lots of water tonight at work.

Moving on to breakfast I thought  long and hard.  One of the mistakes I've made in past January gung-ho moments is to think that I'm suddenly going to change everything about myself in one fell swoop.  From past experience I think I can safely say that's not going to happen so instead I think I'll try to work with my natural inclinations.  For breakfast, I like carbs mostly.  I can do eggs but in my least healthy moments I'm more of a biscuits & gravy and hashbrowns kind of girl.  Well those are out, obviously, but what I did come up with was granola.  I like cereal but it usually leaves me starving by lunchtime, which is no surprise since most commercial cereals are little more than sugar held together by refined flour.

I decided to make my own granola, which I happen to love. It's hearty, delicious, and if I make my own I can control the ingredients 1) to shape it to my tastes or whims of the week, and 2) which means I can control the sugar.  That's a win-win.

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.

Weekend Breakfast Blogging #14

I'm proud to be hosting the Weekend Blogging Event #14, created by Nandita over at the Saffron Trail blog.  This has been one of my favorite events since I started blogging.  I have a friend, Jean, who says one of the nicest things about staying at a friend's house is having someone cook breakfast for you.  I totally agree.  Sometimes we glide over breakfast but it's the best meal of the day.

Our breakfast theme for the August is Ethnic Dishes with a Twist. The twist is to make a dish from a culture, country, or ethnicity other than your own.  I see recipes all the time that I've heard of but never tasted and I think this month is a good time to take a little walk out to the edge and try something new.

The deadline will be Monday, August 27th 10pm central time and I'll post the round up on Tuesday, August 28th.

To participate, please send me:

Your name:

Blog Name:

Recipe:

Permalink:

Photo if you want one included:

My email is Marie9949 (at) sbcglobal (dot) com.

I can't wait to see what new recipes we all try this month!

Happy Birthday, Sis

Today is my baby sister's 37th birthday. I'm not sure if the 37 depresses her more or me more by way of the fact she's my little sister.

But aside from realizing we're sliding into middle age, her birthday is a wonderful thing. The girls had asked me a few months back if I'd help them make a cake for their mom. We decided to make it a full out lunch party.  So Jordan has been quietly arranging behind the scenes for Suzanne's boyfriend, Andrew, to make sure Suzanne was at my house at 11:30am yesterday for lunch/party.

I picked up the girls Wednesday night after I got off work at 11pm so we'd be together first thing in the morning. Well, we meant to get up early but that didn't exactly happen. Sydney passed out fairly early considering it was almost midnight before we got home, Jordan got caught up in a movie, and my nose was deep in the new Harry Potter book (fabulous!). So it was more like 10am before we were up and cooking.  Did I mention they were coming for lunch at 11:30am?

Thankfully, the cake layers were already baked. So while the Paula Deen's French Toast casserole was in the oven, the girls and I made buttercream and the they did it all.

I think they did a fantastic job. The cake is a layer of coconut sandwiched in between two layers of lemon with lemon buttercream and deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep purple fondant flowers and green leaves.

So we weren't awake yet and didn't get pics of the casserole but I do have the recipe after the jump. It was pretty popular. I'd never made anything quite like that before but it's a nice brunch dish.  We put the casserole together the night before so it was easy to slip it into the oven the next morning while we were still in our jammies.  The girls also served fresh cantalope and sausage links that they baked in the oven.

 

From bottom left:  Ann, Aunt Miranda, me, Sydney, Jordan, Andrew, and the birthday girl: Suzanne.

We all went in together and got Suzanne a family-sized crockpot that she's been needing for a while. She has a crockpot but it's too small. We knew the bigger one was a hit when Jordan said "Yay! Now when we have beans we can have ham TOO! And when we have roast we can put vegetables in with it!"

So what did I do after they left?  I was a big wuss and collapsed into the chair with an ice pack on my knee for most of the afternoon and read Harry Potter.

Yesterday was a hard-knock life but today it's back to the grind.

Cake and Pancakes Weekend

More pics from over the weekend.

This Williams-Sonoma pan

Became this cake. At least this is how we delivered the cake.

 

The kids and I took it over to the neighbors' house on Sunday so Samuel's mom, Sarah, and grandma, Sarah, could finish decorating it with candy to look this for the Monday party (I missed it since I had to work). Gene went to the party and took some pics for me. Unfortunately I still had the camera on extreme close up and he was trying to shoot normal people pics and a cake pic from a few feet back so they didn't come out as clear as we would have liked but you can get the idea.  He said Samuel was extra adorable. 

Isn't the cake cute? I think they did a fantastic job on decorating it with the candy. Love the little gumdrop bushes out in the middle and the rock candy smoke plume.  Really cute. 

While I worked on the cake that morning, Jordan, who is a fantastic helper for me when I have the kids, and for her mom too, took this King Arthur Flour

And made great pancakes for the whole family. No one knew they were from whole wheat because they weren't dark and super grainy. I have to like whole wheat but my husband the nieces and nephew, not so much.  I'm not an expert on this but my understanding is that most of the wheat we produce is red wheat but they're starting to produce more and more white wheat which, when milled produces a lighter colored whole grain flour. It's what's being used in bread these days when you see packages marked "whole wheat" that look like a cross between white bread and darker whole wheat bread.  The pancakes were the same way. They weren't as tongue-dissolving as regular white flour pancakes, they had more heft, but they didn't cast fear into the eyes of my family either so I secretly reveled in suckering them into eating whole wheat.

The recipe we used is from The New Best Recipe Cookbook from Cook's Illustrated.  When you look at the crumb in this picture, they look a little soggy on the bottom.  Keep in mind this pancake had been sitting on the cabinet for about six hours before I took this photo. I'd been busy before with the cake and had forgotten to snap the pancakes until then. Right after I broke this up and took the pic, I smeared a little peanut butter on one of the pieces and ate it and it was still very good. That's pretty impressive for a pancake in my book.

Daring Bakers Newbie--My First Bagels Ever!

One little thing to talk about before I start the bagel post--for those of you who missed the ending about the cake I mailed to Sher of What Did You Eat, the cake did arrive by 10am the next morning and it traveled really well, better than I thought it would. The only visible sign of having been shipped is that the plastic wrap left a faint pattern in the top of the fondant. That's it.  Sher said she and Bob really enjoyed it and so did her friend Nancy, who dropped by after work.

To see the cake, how it arrived, and what it looked like cut into, click HERE to go to Sher's weblog.

What a great experiment! I was really pleased with the results. So now we know: you really can mail cake and get it there in one piece (bad pun) and edible.

To the Daring Bakers founders, Ivonne of Creampuffs in Venice and Lisa of La Mia Cucina, thank you for including me into the group.  I love the whole concept of challenging ourselves to new baking heights, especially the whole idea of mixing it up between sweet and savory, cakes to pies to breads to whomever's-turn-it-is-to-name-it.  Because my--cough cough--expertise--cough cough is in cakes and decorating cakes, I was thrilled to try my hand at bagels, something completely different from my norm. 

I do make loaves of bread and dinner rolls all the time for our meals, by hand at times and by having burned through three (yes, THREE) bread machines over the last 15 years of my marriage (the first was a wedding gift), but I've never tired bagels or pretzels. I've thought about it but the DB group and this challenge gave me the proper motivation I needed to take the plunge, pun intended.  For those of you who don't get the joke in "take the plunge" you will as soon as you read the recipe and see the pics.

This month's challenge was created by Jenny of All Things Edible and Freya of Writing at the Kitchen Table and the recipe's title is:  Real Honest Jewish Purist's Bagels.

I'll tell you what my very first thought was when I printed off the recipe and it printed off to 3 1/2 page--"(Screw) me! I wanted to be in this group why?!"  I then mentally added and "Oy!" just to stay in theme. 

Well, you know what? A couple of the techniques were different from anything else I'd done before but it wasn't really "hard".  Putting them together, following the recipe, and coming out with a usable product at the other end was not difficult, BUT, what was really difficult was getting them any resemblance this side of heaven to each other.  I know, and the recipe reaffirmed, that a real bagel is formed by hand and that they're not completely uniform, but let me show you something that explains my personality and why that lack of uniformity bugged me--

This was my hors d'oeuvres table from the Pampered Chef party I hosted the other night. See my cheese tray in the front?  Let me make it a little easier for you--

There are three layers of cheese slices in each row, lined up to perfectly fill edge to edge.  My husband walked up behind me while I was carefully slicing each piece as evenly as possible and using a ruler I keep in the kitchen to line up the front edge exactly.  He stood there for a while. Of course he was admiring my precision, I thought.  Nah.  He looked at me with the same look of disgust he'd have if he found a booger in his coffee and said "You are the biggest control freak I know and THAT'S the proof, right there."  And then he walked away LAUGHING at me. Not WITH me. AT me.

I was a little put out by that comment, especially since he disrupted my concentration on making my cheese exactly even on every side.  How could he say such a thing just because I like inanimate objects to do what I want them to and to do it in as uniform a manner as possible?  Is that so much to ask from a world that revolves supposedly on the chaos theory? 

I didn't think so either.

So my point of that story is if you are like me and you're a big control freak one of those people who likes everything to be prettily perfect in every way... this recipe is even more of a challenge than Jenny and Freya had any idea it would be because those little buggers do not like to be the same size, shape, consistency to each other no matter how much you poke, roll, shape, slap, dunk, or swear at them.  And believe me, I tried all of those things, especially the swearing, and they still came out an attractive bunch of bagels on the whole but not even close to consistent and perfect. Sigh. So look at the recipe as an exercise in humility and plow through anyway because the end result will forever ruin you for a grocery store-bought bagel.  I think Gene and I each ate four a piece the first day.  Hmmmm...maybe making them often isn't such a good idea.

To see how the other members of the group fared, click on any of the blog names in the list on the left, titled "Daring Bakers".

So if you don't like cinnamon...

...how do you make Fench Toast?  Actually, it's not me, it's Gene. Not that not liking cinnamon is a bad thing, it's just such a common spice that avoiding it is tricky sometimes.  Don't let me give you the wrong impression.  He doesn't hate cinnamon and he would never be a jerk and  say anything rude even to me but the truth is given a choice between cinnamon and no cinnamon...he'll go without.

I started thinking about that as I prepared for Nandita of Saffron Trail's Weekend Breakfast Blogging Event.  This month it's being hosted by Trupti of The Spice Who Loved Me and she aptly picked the theme of "Spice up!" your breakfast. She didn't mean necessarily spice as in hot, just spice as in a new view, she said.  Well my view was locked onto French Toast, which I adore.  I like it 's rich egginess and the combinations of sweet and savory, rich from the milk and eggs along with light from the spices, usually cinnamon.

The first time I made French Toast at home for my brothers and sister was when I was about eight, maybe younger.  I was in the kitchen serving up simple meals pretty young but 30-cough-cough years ago that was just the way it was when you were the oldest of five kids.  You got drafted as the mommy aide-de-camp at a young age and you did what was expected of you. 

The recipe I learned to make French Toast from was an  egg mixture of milk, vanilla, and cinnamon.  Gene doesn't dislike that but it's not his favorite.  Today, I thought I'd mix it up a teeny tiny bit by subbing cardamom for the cinnamon and Gene approved. He said it was the best batch I'd ever made.  Funny, he had no idea what spice he was eating or that no cinnamon graced his plate, he just knew he liked it.

Fair Enough.

It was an All Bread kind of weekend

First, Gene and I had a late lunch on Saturday so when it came to be dinner time and I was in the mood to make homemade donuts but not in the mood to make dinner....We're adults, right?  We don't have to follow the meal rules so we had donuts for dinner.

Then Sunday, I put a roast in the crockpot and threw bread dough into the bread machine, fully intending to make mashed potatoes and the whole Sunday all-American dinner but by dinner time the bread was ready but the roast wasn't even close.  Hmmm...what to do, what to do.  Thankfully, Corbin and Jennifer called to see if we wanted to run out for sushi before the Soprano's finale came on so we ditched the roast and ate sushi.  Jenn's going to email me some pics. It was YUMMY!

The roast finally got tender about 10pm so I guess we'll be having roast, potatoes, and bread Monday night.

UPDATE: Recipes are posted now. Click below.

But, Mom, Everybody Else is Doing It

I've heard this called a couple of different things, Toad-in-the-hole is the most commong but I've also heard it call Campfire grilled eggs.  The premise is easy. Take a piece of bread, tear out a hole in the middle, butter both sides, grill it with an egg in the center to whatever degree of doneness you want, flipping it once.

I had some really nice home-made bread leftover, and since I didn't sleep well, this seemed the perfect thing to start my day. Plus, I've seen at least two, if not three other blogs making this and I simply craved it. 

The only difference I have in the way I make mine is that the little perfectionist Glenna comes out of me and forces me to use a small juice glass to twist the hole out of the center, as if I were cutting out biscuit dough. What can I say? I like the perfect edges. Then I grill the center piece of bread along with the rest.

One of the blogs I read cooks the egg hard (I hope) because she uses this as a breakfast sandwich to eat in the car.  I like my fried and poached eggs as soft as the yolk can be if the white is completely cooked.  I can imagine me walking out to the car with my version...or more accurately, I can imagine the first bite of my soft cooked egg sandwich in the car. And then the act of turning around so I can go home to change clothes for the day.

Weekend Breakfast Blogging: Ozarks Country Benedict

Weekend Breakfast Blogging is sponsored by Nandita at Saffron Trail.  Be sure to check out all the other great things to eat for breakfast from all over the world.

This is my favorite lazy day at the lake breakfast. We used to have a little cabin down on a nearby lake, Taneycomo, and we loved to take friends down for the weekend.  That is the perfect time to make this dish because it does take a little time and patience and it's not something you really want to go to the trouble for, say, just for yourself.  For four, it seems worth the time and effort of making cheese sauce even if you are on vacation.

Loosely based on a breakfast served at a hotel I worked at and the classic Eggs Benedict, this is more MY version of those things.  I know. I just can't leave recipes alone. When tomatoes are in season, I swear, I'd eat them on chocolate cake.  Fresh garden tomatoes are sooooooo good with eggs and my lovely neighbors keep supplying me with them this summer since I didn't have time to put out my container garden this year.  I'm making the most of it. When I see Dave walking across the street with a bag in his hand, I meet him at the door, offer to let him have a seat, put his feet up, get him something to drink, and then snatch the bag out of his hand, saying "Oh I guess we can eat a few more" and quickly hide it before he can change his mind.

Well, I do say thank you even if I am blatantly tomato greedy.