A FRIDGE FULL OF FOOD...

Apple Pie Baked Oatmeal Squares

There's nothing like warm, chewy, full-blooded (so to speak, yikes!) oatmeal dense enough to eat off of a napkin along with a cup of ginger lemon tea while reading a good book on a cold winter's morning.  No wimpy packets of water-soaked microwaved oatmeal here!

Pumped up for extra protein with 2% milk and 3 eggs, these oatmeal squares are a full meal of oat-y yumminess and chunks of apple in every bite. After my second bite I jumped up to grab my  camera and blog again after a (like my age, not gonna say numbers) hiatus from my camera and food words.  

So good the extras will be cooled down, cut, wrapped in waxed paper, and placed into a container for the freezer so Geno and I can grab and heat them up in the microwave any morning or any time they sound like the perfect breakfast or snack.

Peanut Butter, White Chocolate, and Cashew Energy Bites

I kept seeing "energy balls" or "energy bites" all over Pinterest and wondered what was up with that. Well, now I know! They are 1 ounce bites (which actually means about 3 bites) of sweet and savory deliciousness wrapped around a lot of nutrition, if you do it right.  In texture and taste, they're a cross between a no-bake cookie, candy, or an old-fashioned sugar plum. Remember the Christmas poem "...while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads..."   I made those one year for Christmas and wonder why I never did again. An all natural chewy bit of carb happiness, I mean, energy. Will definitely be keeping these in the rotation. They will be great for at home but even more perfect for work when I need to grab something quick and easy to nibble on because it's too easy to get busy and end up going 8-10 hours without eating anything and that low blood sugar nausea feeling that comes on doesn't do me or my patients any good.

I will make up other flavors but my first foray into the energy bite world was kind of a rebellion against all things chocolate.  Every recipe I've ever seen has chocolate chips or cocoa in it.  There are some of us out here in the world, I confess, who are not chocoholics.   Loved watching Bobby Flay (old eppy) over the weekend where he made French toast sticks with white chocolate/orange ganache and said "White chocolate has always been my favorite chocolate. My Mom still brings me a white chocolate bunny to the restaurant every year on Easter."  Ahhh!  And yes, a fellow white-a-holic! 

 

Happy Valentine's Day 2017

Happy Valentine's Day to all but most especially to my patient, loving, patient, funny, tolerant, fun, patient hubby, Gene aka Generino! 

After 24 (25 in 2 weeks!) years, I still you very much.  Thank you for being the Mark Darcy to my Bridget Jones (I know you won't get that but the chicas will.)

 

Bananas Foster Oatmeal for the Rice Cooker or Slow Cooker/Crockpot

 

 Mmmm....so tasty any morning but especially for us this morning when the forecast called for a wintry mix with maybe an inch of snow but what we got was....I'm not sure but a lot more than that!  Thanks to Jason and Samuel next door for clearing our walkway and driveway!

What a nice day to putter around the house and maybe sneak a few chapters of the book I'm reading!

Copycat KIND Bars

These are absolutely dynamite! Seriously, I can't say enough good things about them.  Not only do I love them so much I'll be making them every few weeks for my work lunchbox, everyone I gave them to at Christmas loved them, and I took a bag of remnants, little clusters of nutty goodness that fell apart a bit when I cut the bars, into work one night and shared them with the nurses and aides on 3West and was asked for the recipe multiple times.

A huge Thank You to Monica Matheny of The Yummy Life blog for these recipes. I'm not going to try to reprint the recipe here because her post includes step by step pics and eight different flavors of KIND bar copycat recipes.  My first batch was the Fruit & Nut Delight. My next foray will be the Almond and Coconut--YUM!

Click here:  Copycat KIND Bar Recipes

 

Carrianne's Pumpkin Bread

 This is one of those great recipes passed on by a friend. Carrianne brought a loaf of this pumpkin bread to work one night and, with one bite, I had to have the recipe. One of the things I like about it was that it's less sweet than most sweet breads.  Does that make sense?  I mentioned that and Carrianne said she'd knocked the sugar down by at least a third.  Made a huge batch of this in different pans and froze some to have for the upcoming holidays.  So good!

Interestingly, it's put together in a different method than I've seen before, although it was very easy. The pumpkin and spices are heated in a saucepan on the stove and the rest of the ingredients stirred into it in one at a time.  It works really well, just make sure to start out with a pan large enough to hold the whole batter.  This is my go to pumpkin bread recipe now.  Thanks, Carrrianne!

 

Blueberry Thunder Muffins from Persimmon Hill Berry Farm

  For those of us lucky enough to live in the southwest Missouri Ozarks, yes I am prejudiced!, we have access to great berry places like the Persimmon Hill Berry, Fruit, and Mushroom Farm.  And I was lucky enough to have an Auntie who shared with me a baggy of blueberries, a couple of wonderful muffins, and the fabulous recipe from the farm.

I seem to be on a bundt cake kick this year, she said chuckling.  Well, in my defense...Okay, I have no defense but I really like bundt cakes. They look pretty and taste yummy without being high maintenance like layer cakes.  They're the cake friend you invite over for dinner who doesn't need to be impressed because they love you just they way you are and you know you love them.  You know what I mean? 

Check out Persimmon Hill's web site for directions, picking seasons, gourmet products, and additional recipes.

Butter & Honey Angel Biscuits

 

  When I was first married and still trapped in the idea of being "the perfect wife", not that I was ever perfect, just that I tried to be what I thought  would make Gene think I was the perfect wife... boy, was there ever a more loaded psychological statement than that one?  Yes, I know.  I'm still not perfect but I do, at least, realize with 23 years hindsight that Gene loved me for who I was, and am, not because of some baggage in my head.  Anyway, back then one of my goals was to make a gorgeous, perfect, from-scratch meal every single night including homemade bread. I did it most nights but it required hours of planning in advance and a couple of hours in the kitchen every day.  And that was just for dinner!

 While I loved, and still love, to cook real life came crashing in and I soon realized that even though real food, from-scratch cooking, is always the ideal, to accomplish that even for a majority of time requires a few kitchen hacks.  Back then I had two for bread:  the bread machine and the angel biscuit. 

The beauty of angel biscuits is that you can make a huge batch and just pull off what you need for dinner, roll them out, let them rise for 20 minutes to come to room temp and bake them off.  Using both the leavening action of traditional bread: yeast, and that of the biscuit:  baking powder, plus baking soda and buttermilk. 

Baking soda is activated by acid which is why most biscuit recipes call for buttermilk.  A kitchen hack I learned in my Mom's kitchen is to use "sour milk" when buttermilk isn't available.  You simple add 1 Tbsp of vinegar or lemon juice to each cup of regular or what my Nannie (Grandma) would have called "sweet milk". You simply mix the two together and let stand for a couple of minutes until it thickens and curdles:  buttermilk!

The one real drawback to angel biscuits that we didn't know about 23 years ago is shortening.  My Mom was a cake decorator, back in the dinosaur days of no other option but Crisco and powdered sugar frostings, so we had huge, multiple cans of shortening at our house.  I have a confession.  Even though I know shortening is a heart attack waiting to happen, we all know the evils of trans-fat, I think I actually drooled on myself a little in the theater when we went to see The Help and Minnie fried that lovely chicken in that big cast iron skillet full of Crisco.  Yes, ignorance was indeed bliss. I miss that shortening fried chicken!

But I wasn't willing to completely write off the angel biscuits.  You can make traditional biscuits with butter instead of shortening, they're just a little more finicky, a little more crumbly if you're trying to knead and roll them out by hand.  But with angel biscuits I don't have any problems at all.  I cut the butter in by hand (and use half the amount of it than called for in most biscuit recipes) and then put the dough together in the mixer, using a two bowl method, wet and dry, and it comes together quickly and beautifully. The texture that bakes out is tender, with a crumb exactly midway between a biscuit and a dinner roll.  Perfect for any meal but very convenient for work night dinners.  (Great with sausage gravy for breakfast too!)

Apple Pie Old-Fashioned Oats in the Rice Cooker

I love oatmeal. I've always loved oatmeal.  No offense to those who love the little packets with the bits of dried fruit in it that you make with hot water but I love "REAL" oatmeal, the kind you can really sink your teeth into, that stays with you for hours, that's a total pain in the butt to cook because you have to do it on the stove.  I did try to make it in the microwave once.  Once.  I think it took me a week to clean all the oatmeal "glue" gunk out of the nuker.

I have two solutions: 1) small slow cooker, the kind you would put an appetizer dip for a party in, or 2)  the rice cooker.  Both are super easy but the rice cooker wins hands down, to me.  All the ingredients get thrown in together and when the lights turns off, the oatmeal is done. Voila!

9th Annual World Bread Day: Cherry Almond Sweet Rolls

At our house, the only thing better than cinnamon rolls are warm, drizzly cherry sweet rolls. Filled with cherry pie filling, cream  cheese, and almond paste, they're just as yummy for breakfast as they are for dessert or even a midday coffee break.

Sharing bread recipes from around the world, come back later in the month to be linked to all the breads in our world basket from this year's 9th Annual World Bread Day.  Sharing foods, sharing cultures, sharing breads that adorn all of our tables!