Summer Mornings and Perfect Pancakes

I have always been an utter failure when it comes to making pancakes.

They don't seem that difficult, do they?

This shouldn't be something I can't do.

Yet I gave up on making pancakes years ago.  They just never turned out correctly no matter what recipe I used.

When my son turned seven a few weeks ago he asked me to make pancakes for breakfast.

What was I going to do, tell him "no"?

Of course not.  Especially not with this kiddo who is normally so picky about food.

Pancakes are something he was never open to eating until recently, so if pancakes were what he wanted, I was going to make pancakes.

Quick Breads and Easy Gifts

I've baked a lot of bread in my life.

Loads of it.

It started in middle school and the trend has continued well into adulthood.

While I have made many types of bread over the years, I honestly don't make many quick breads.

The entire concept of working with yeast- that living, consuming, gas-producing, stuff- is just fun for me.

The one time of year I tend to get really into quick breads is over the holiday season.

Quick breads differ from yeast breads in that they typically use baking soda or baking powder as a leavening agent (the ingredient that causes them to rise) rather than yeast.  They can be sweet or savory (think cornbread or biscuits) but over the holidays I like to go a little nuts with the sweet varieties.  Not only are they delicious, but they're kind of perfect for giving as gifts.  Last year I found a great deal on a set of 50 mini loaf pans and baked mini loaves of that amazing, moist Eggnog Quick Bread I wrote about a few years ago.

It's seriously delicious, you should definitely try it.  Trust me.

Happy New Year and Trying New Things

Happy New Year!

We had our fun early last night with rounds of Beanboozled and lots of laughter on a chilly evening.  My daughter's friend spent the night, and in true pre-teen fashion they huddled away together upstairs, laughter spilling from her room for hours.  My younger one stayed downstairs with us, an uncontainable ball of energy zooming around the house as he anticipated the coming of the new year.  Though I'd already made an early dinner, as the night wore on I decided to order a pizza for the kids and as it arrived we'd just bundled up and headed outside so they could (briefly) frolic in a short-lived flurry of snow.

The young pizza guy took in the joyful, frenetic scene and just laughed as I met him at his car.

It's about the little moments, though, right?

Oatmeal Sourdough Rolls and Learning New Tricks

This weekend I was talking to my sister-in-law about our mutual love of sourdough bread.

Not just any sourdough, though- the really tangy good stuff that lives up to its name.

The stuff I really haven't had outside of California, to be honest.

Crusty, chewy, air hole-filled, sour sourdough bread.

For all of middle school my lunch consisted of a turkey breast sandwich on sliced San Luis Sourdough bread with yellow mustard and a Snapple Peach Iced Tea.

Every day.  Because perfection.

Anyway, never having baked sourdough bread myself I really don't know what it is that makes most commercially produced sourdoughs outside of California so different from what I grew up with- I mean, of course there's a difference in yeast.  There's probably also a desire to tone down the flavor for a larger audience?  I don't know.

Quick and Easy Pizza Crust For Hungry Kids

My daughter loves slumber parties.

She loves throwing them, she loves attending them.

What girl doesn't, right?

It's not until you're a boring adult that the thought of the insanity that is a a house full of excited, noisy, crazy girls gives you a bit of a headache.

So what is a mom to do?

Herd them.  Herd them like cats.

Keep that energy channeled folks!

At least that has been my philosophy.  Keep those little munchkins busy!

A few fun games with dollar store prizes are a given- both a wonderful time-killer and a great way to redirect the kiddos when things get a little crazy.

Personally, I like crafts.

Crafts are fun.

Crafts are time-consuming.

Crafts double as favors the girls can take home.

Generally speaking, crafts are fairly inexpensive (woohoo!).

Let's Talk Pie Crust

This is one of those posts that I have been wanting to share for a long time- a very long time.

There have been a couple of things getting in the way of that- first of all, when I make pie crust for desserts I am generally serving it to a crowd.  While some of my close family know I'm a crazy picture-taker that doesn't mean that I want to stop the festivities and make people wait for their pie while I get that perfect shot.

The second problem is that when I make pie crust for savory pies, like Chicken Pot Pie, I generally serve it for dinner- which might sound irrelevant but for a large portion of the year that means the sun has already gone down...which means the lighting isn't great for picture-taking either.

Ah, the problems of a crazy photo-taking blogger. :-)

Anyway, when my husband asked me to make an apple pie for a family gathering this past weekend I decided to go ahead and snap some pictures before we brought it.

I might have even cut out a slice of pie for picture taking purposes and replaced it before we left.

It's family...I'm sure they don't mind.

English Muffins, Mastered

There are two types of bread I've tried to make over the years that have failed miserably: pita bread and English muffins.

It doesn't help my pride that every time I read a recipe for either one of those it's being touted as the absolute easiest kind of fail-proof bread to make.

Sadly, that hadn't held true for me.

Well, a month or so ago I started noticing regular (read: daily) charges from McDonald's.  Obviously my husband had developed a new habit on his way to work!

Turns out two Sausage McMuffins and a Diet Coke had become his latest go-to breakfast.

Setting aside the obvious issue of how unhealthy it is to eat a breakfast like that every single day, I immediately decided that if he was going to eat sausage breakfast sandwiches every morning I would at the very least save some money and make them at home for him to take with him.

I'm frugal.

The Best Hamburger Buns I've Ever Eaten

I've never EVER been as impressed with a roll recipe as I am with this one.  I've made a lot of bread recipes over the years, so it really takes something special to get that kind of a response out of me.

Honestly, I don't make hamburger buns very often, unless I really don't feel like going to the store and I'm running short on time, in which case I have my go-to 40 Minute Hamburger Buns.  It's far more likely that I'll just grab a cheap bag of buns from the grocery store.

I'm not sure what it was about this recipe that caught my eye, maybe I was just in the mood to try out a new bread recipe- it's been awhile since I worked with yeast other than my favorite white bread recipe.  Whatever the reason, I set to work on these yesterday afternoon so I'd have them ready for dinner last night.

Blackberry Muffins and Weird Coincidences

I was lucky enough to be gifted a couple of quarts of homegrown blackberries recently that have been hanging out in my freezer, patiently waiting for me to do something with them.

I was itching to make something with those little gems (blackberries are my absolute favorite berry!) but there were so many choices.  I thought about making blackberry BBQ sauce, pie, cobbler...eventually I settled on muffins.  I'd never actually made blackberry muffins before, but when I saw this recipe I knew I needed to give it a try.  :-) That may have had something to do with the fact that I already had all of the ingredients on hand and I love being the first to photograph a new recipe on Allrecipes, but whatever.  I went with muffins.

Do you know who else went with muffins, I would later find out?  My dad, in a completely different state, also made blackberry muffins- also for the first time- on the same day that I did.

Dreamy Light Wheat Rolls

Thanksgiving this year was a pretty special event.  This has been an exciting year for our family and we have so much to be thankful for- not the least of which was the ability to have family with whom we have never before had the chance to celebrate the holidays come visit our home.

It was wonderful.

I bought a 22 lb turkey (again) because I have serious issues.  My husband shook his head and asked me why we needed that much bird.

Um, go big or go home when it comes to Thanksgiving, dude.  That's my philosophy.

Anyway we decided that we would smoke the turkey and in the interest of saving on cook time I suggested that we spatchcock the beast- that's really just a fancy way of saying that you remove the backbone and butterfly it.

I have zero experience spatchcocking anything muchless 22 lb poultry specimens.  Not to mention the fact that touching raw poultry is pretty much my least favorite thing to do ever.  Thankfully my sister-in-law is a good sport and she decided she was up to the task.  I pulled up spatchcocking directions (isn't that just a fun word?), handed her the kitchen shears, and stood back.

Way back.

Who Knew Making Tortillas Was So Easy?

Am I the only one who has a mini heart attack when she sees the price of sweet bell peppers?

Overpriced, undersized peppers mocking me from their pre-packaged plastic bag in the produce section, knowing I'm going to fork over the money even though I really don't want to.

Totally makes me long for summer when my garden is throwing them at me faster than I can cook with them!

Last time I went to the grocery store I noticed that sweet bell peppers were on sale for $1 apiece- about half their normal cost- and they were good quality to boot.  Big, firm, not packaged in a plastic bag.

Homemade Mall Pretzels and SO Much Snow

My daughter's favorite thing in the world are soft pretzels from the mall.

They are her favorite.

As in last summer I took her on an honest-to-goodness shopping spree because she had outgrown ALL of her warm weather clothes and the thing she cared about most when I told her we were going to the mall was not that she was going to get a bunch of new stuff- it was that she was going to get a pretzel while we were there.

Anyway, last week we went to the mall to grab some new jeans and I was in such a hurry to get home that we couldn't stop by Auntie Anne's- she was crushed.

I promised that I would do something even better than buying a mall pretzel- we would make our own!

Julia Child's White Sandwich Bread

I know, I know, I've shared some pretty excellent bread recipes with you before- but none like this.

This bread is a game changer.

This bread is amazing

This bread is just ridiculous.

We've talked before about my love of baking and that I generally make bread rather than buying it.

We've talked before about bread that my family has simply fallen in love with, like that Light Oat Bread I wrote about not all that long ago.

This guys is...well, this bread blows those breads out of the water.

It's perfect on every level.

It's soft, but strong.

It's just sweet enough.

It's buttery, light, delicious, yeasty, goodness.

There's just no going back- not after you've tried this stuff.

The Best Cornbread In The World

It wasn't until I moved to the South that I realized what a divisive subject cornbread is.

Here, it is baked in a cast iron skillet.  The crumb of the bread is more coarse than I am used to, it is slightly more dry in texture, and it is far less sweet.

Not to say that there is anything wrong with that!  It's fantastic with soup beans or chili, since that dry crumb really stands up to pretty much any broth.

It's just not what I grew up with.

I've made several varieties of cornbread over the years, but the one recipe I keep returning to is my mother's.

EVERYONE loves it.  It's a little addictive...though it wasn't until I grew up and started making it myself that I realized why.

Apparently This Is The Best Sandwich Bread Ever

Yesterday started out uneventfully enough.  I was out of bread.  I searched for a new bread recipe.  I baked bread.

Woohoo, right?

Nothing special.

Anyway, after the bread had cooled to that magic slightly-warm and sliceable state the sound of my electric knife drew my son to the kitchen.  He watched intently as each yeasty slice of bread fell to the side as I cut into the loaf.

When I was done, I handed him a piece.  Well, we know my son can be finicky about food, so I wasn't sure how this warm, soft slice of bread would go over.

I turned my head for a second...when I looked back at him his mouth was stuffed and in each hand was a tiny bit of bread- the only remaining evidence of the slice I had handed him.  He DEVOURED it!  I was impressed.

Easy Low Carb Pizza Crust That Actually Tastes Like Crust!

First off, let me apologize for not taking better pictures of this one.  The days are already starting to get shorter, dinner was running later than usual, and I was so excited to try this that I really didn't feel like setting up my crazy Winter-time setup for taking pictures of dinner.

Despite my poorly lit photo (yes, the others were so bad that I didn't include them at all!) this is a recipe well worth sharing.

I'm sure you've seen recipes for low carb cauliflower crust pizzas before- I've made them several times, and yep, they can be tasty!  But there is absolutely no mistaking them for pizza crust and they have to be eaten with a fork- at least the versions I've tried.

Whole Wheat Sweet Potato Pizza Crust

I've mentioned it before in passing, but my little guy has High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorder.

He is awesome.  He's sweet, cuddly, hilarious, and can both read and write (well beyond his comprehension of language) already despite having just turned 3 last week.  He appears to be hyperlexic, which is crazy fun to observe.  That being said, he obviously has some issues and his sensory issues are probably second only to functional language delays.

He's slowly improving when it comes to tactile sensitivities, but he has so many weird issues with foods he can't/won't eat.  I'm constantly trying to figure out ways to sneak extra nutrients into the foods he will eat.  Lately he's been stuck on pizza.

Like STUCK on pizza.  He walks around asking for it all of the time.

Pizza isn't exactly known for it's nutritional value, and I can't just load it with veggies because he will only eat cheese or pepperoni pizza.

Pull-Apart Soda Bread Rolls

In keeping with my recent St. Patrick's Day theme, I was looking up recipes for soda bread.  I stumbled across the idea of Pull-Apart Soda Bread in Martha Stewart's magazine...but unfortunately I've had pretty bad luck with her recipes.  In my experience they tend to be off in lots of ways and I'm a little wary of them.

 

The idea, though, was great!

I started with this recipe for Amazingly Easy Irish Soda Bread and it definitely lived up to it's name!  I did have to add a little extra buttermilk, but that's ok.  I liked that it was basic- a lot of recipes dress the bread up, and I wanted to keep it simple to go with dinner.

Homemade French Bread

I've mentioned before that I absolutely love baking bread- it's probably one of my favorite things to make.  Sandwich breads, quick breads, artisan breads, rolls, biscuits.

One thing I often leave to the store?  French bread.  There's just something magic about French bread that I've never really attempted to capture at home- until today, that is.

Let me just tell you- I don't know why I waited so long.  It's seriously one of the easiest yeast breads I've ever made in my life!  AND it turned out perfectly- chewy, crusty goodness outside and soft, yeasty goodness inside.  Absolute perfection.  This recipe comes from Jill at The Prairie Homestead, and its wonderful.

Did I mention it only takes 4 ingredients if you don't count the water?

Eggnog Quick Bread

I'm not going to lie, I'm not a big lover of eggnog.  It's not a flavor thing, it's the consistency.  I just don't like thick, creamy drinks- ugh.  No eggnog or piña coladas for this girl!

Now, take the flavors of those drinks and put them into a baked good, and I'm a happy girl!  My father-in-law's wife makes one of the most amazing piña colada cakes I've ever had in my life *drool*- think I can get the recipe from her for a future post?

Anyway, I love the FLAVOR of eggnog too, and this eggnog quick bread really captures it perfectly.  I found the original recipe at Allrecipes.com, but- like I pretty much always do- I had to change it a little.  I've made it a more moist loaf, added a little flavor, and made it more manageable for making in large batches for gift-giving.  The original recipe makes one 9x5 loaf, but I've found that- in my mind at least- an 8x4 loaf is the perfect gift giving size.  If you divide this recipe in half you'll bake one 9x5 loaf, if you prefer...

This recipe also freezes very well if you want to make gifts ahead of time or just save some for yourself to enjoy later!

Enjoy!!