Raspberry Bread

Has anyone noticed that I like making bread? I like making bread. Here's one I made recently:

I used this recipe, but instead of just splitting it into two for two loaves, I split it into four. I put half of each loaf into the loaf pan, put a layer of fresh raspberries down the center, kneaded crumbled pecans into the remaining halves, and then set the second half on top of the raspberries. I had no idea how the loaves would turn out, because I've never used fresh fruit in bread before, but I decided to go with it. 

It was pretty tasty :) Especially toasted! I don't know what it is about homemade bread, but when you toast it, it gets nice and crispy on the outside, but delicious and soft on the inside :) I love!

Pineapple Jam

I wasn't sure if it was possible to make jam from pineapples. Turns out it is, as long as you use canned pineapples :)

I used a recipe given to me by Nick's grandmother. 1 can of fruit, 3 cups of sugar, a tablespoon of lemon juice and a packet of pectin boiled for a few minutes and then ladled into jars. 

The pineapple decals were a gift from my boss. It makes the jam look very happy to me :)

Fail Muffins

So remember how I made that bread with a little Teff flour and it was amazing? Turns out replacing all the wheat flour with teff isn't so hot. Meet Fail Muffins:

Fail muffins were so dry that even when I split one in half and filled it with homemade cranberry spice jam, it was inedible. Yuck.

Teff Flour

Teff is really great stuff. "Teff flour is made from the grain teff, and is of considerable importance in eastern Africa (particularly around the horn of Africa). Notably, it is the chief ingredient in the bread injera, an important component of Ethiopian cuisine" source. It's a pretty healthy flour, and I bought some to try to make injera.


And when I realized that making injera isn't something I wanted to spend a lot of time doing, I tucked the flour away and forgot about it.


Until I recently wanted to bake some bread (because baking bread is fun) and found the little bag of teff flour in the back of my pantry.


I substituted 1/4 cup of teff flour for 1 cup of wheat flour in the recipe, and the bread was delicious.

Dutch Oven Bread

I made bread with this recipe.

And it was delicious.

Gingerbread Grandfather Clock

My gingerbread didn't come out quite the way I wanted it to. Not particularly surprising, but sad nonetheless. Here's some pictures:

You can see the clock face through the glass here

Here's the whole thing. Yup, tilted.

There's a pendulum in there. Even if you can't really see it through the yellow-ish candy glass.

Next year I've got to do something more simple. 5 pieces or less is my goal.

Cat Treats 2

I made more treats for my cat, using a different recipe.

This is cornmeal, flour, and tuna. It's like, a cup of cornmeal, a cup of flour, and a can of tuna. And my cat wouldn't eat them. That's the last time I bake for her picky behind.

Tea

Mr. Nicolas and I really like tea. Really really like it. And as a treat to ourselves on holidays and special occasions we buy ourselves new special teas :) Here's one of the last ones we bought (for Christmas :)

This is kiwi strawberry..."tea". Cuz there's actually no tea involved. It's just fruit. But it's delicious! Especially sweetened by honey :).

We get all our loose leaf tea (and "tea") from Far Leaves Tea on College Ave. in Berkeley.

Gingerbread Cookies

I made the gingerbread for my sculpture, but I had some left over, so I made cookies. To make them, I rolled my dough flat and then sprinkled peppermint and butterscotch pieces in them, rolled them up, and then sliced them.

They were pretty good, but they're the type of cookie that is constantly droopy/sticky, so if you stack them they become permanently stuck together. Lame. I have this weird idea that food should be both tasty AND pretty :p

These were made with this gingerbread recipe.

What do you do when you don't own a rolling pin?

You use an empty wine bottle, of course :)

Ginger Bread Walls

This eventually became a grandfather clock (albeit not a very good one). Do you see it? I used the same recipe I mentioned yesterday, but I used stick butter instead of tub :)

It still wasn't as strong as I wanted it to be :(

Ginger Bread

My family has had a gingerbread competition for two years in a row now, and when I was planning this year's design, I had to find a recipe that I thought would work. I used this recipe, and got...

It was kind of the recipe's fault, and kind of mine. I tried to use margarine. Out of a tub. Huge no-no for buildings. 

On the bright side, this stuff was delicious :)

Cranberry-Banana-Walnut Bread

So I'm pretty sure this is the best loaf of bread I've ever made.

Except for the part where I was worried about a soft spot in the middle and re-baked the rest of the loaf, only to leave it rock hard and inedible.

But before I ruined it, it was amazing.

And I had a loaf that my mom made from the same recipe, which was equally amazing.

Here it is (and see the recipe here):

Before I decided to make this one, I considered this one instead...if anyone makes it, be sure to let me know if it turns out better.

Cranberry Spice Jam

Yikes, I suck. Please forgive me?

Here's something else I made for Christmas: Cranberry Spice Jam. I was already buying cranberries for Cranberry Vodka, so this is what I used the rest of them for.

The recipe is here:

Cranberry Freezer Jam

I don't need to give you directions, because that's what the link is for :)

But I suggest going with the spiced version. It's super yummy. We gave a lot of it away, but I have two 16 oz jars of it reserved for us. We're a little greedy :)

For Christmas Nick's grandmother gave me another jam recipe, some jam jars, pectin, sugar, and fruit to make more jam. I love my family :) (I like to claim them for my own. Nick doesn't know. Don't mention it to him, k? Awesome, thanks).

So you'll be seeing more jams soon :) But here's the Cranberry for now:

MMmmm six cups of sugar :)

Candied Fruit

Talk about a learning experience. I didn't exactly use a recipe for this, it's more like I researched four or five recipes and figured it out from there. What I did read is that some fruits are well suited, and some are poorly suited. For example, citrus does excellently. Berries do fairly poorly. Apples and pears do meh. Mango, and apricot do pretty well.

I chose to do orange, mango, and pineapple.

Pineapple was a terrible, terrible idea.

But here's the "recipe".

Ingredients:
Simple syrup, sugar, fruit.

Boil your fruit in a simple syrup for an hour. Yup, an hour.

Lay on a baking sheet, after coating in (uh, huh) sugar. Bake at 250 degrees for an hour.

Coat in (you guessed it) sugar.

Bag, and give.

If you dare. I'm actually really unhappy with how these turned out. But they're really pretty :D

P.S. I think it's only fair to say that the only reason I'm so unhappy with these is because the smell of sugar still makes me sick after making them. I'm sure they taste fine (Nick assures me they do) but I just can't stand to try them.

And don't tell me sugar doesn't have a smell. It does. Even if I can't exactly remember it at the moment.

Menu 12/14

Wednesday: Tangy Chicken Breasts from More Than a Cook Book: The reason this was supposed to be "tangy" was because of lemon or lime juice. Which we forgot to add. Not surprisingly, this was fairly bland. We're pretty much world class cooks.

Thursday: Hot Bean Dip from Taste of Home: We fairly frequently eat appetizers as meals. This was beans plus meat plus cheese, plus taco sauce, and we ate it with chips some days and in tortillas with more cheese and sour cream other times and oh man. It was delicious.

Friday: Asian Mango Chicken from Taste of Home Magazine December/January 2010: I wasn't really fond of this, because the salsa over it included bell peppers...but it also included mango and cucumber, so I just picked out the nasty bits.

Saturday: Quesadilla de Wisconsin from No More Than 5 Ingredients: This was the weirdest meal. We baked cheese, and sausage onto a tortilla in the oven. Pretty dull. It was supposed to have jalapeño on it, but neither Nick nor I like it...oh well.

Sunday: Cheese, Mushroom, and Bacon Pie from Taste of Home Magazine August and September 2010: This is a quiche. I don't know why they called it a pie, but it's a quiche. And oh man, what a quiche. I love love quiche, I think it's the most amazing food in the world. If you don't love quiche, well maybe you didn't have a very good childhood. You never know.

Monday: Italian Sausage Grinders from Taste of Home Magazine October and November 2010: You know how the last recipe was a quiche, but they called it pie? Well they're calling these "grinders" but let me just tell you, folks. These are chilli dogs. (Delicious, delicious chilli dogs).

Christmas Gifts

Gosh, did I just disappear for over a week?

:) I can't possibly be upset about it though, because aside from Christmas fun, I also unloaded and re-organized the craft closet (it made me scream and pull my hair out every time I opened it) and took down Christmas!

Mom and I discussed it, and Christmas decorations are awesome (really) but at the end of the whole thing, taking them down is a little liberating.

Anyway, on to Christmas gifts :)

These are flavored vodkas :) The peppers one is (clearly) just peppers, but it's meant for Bloody Marys. My brother tasted it and said it's very spicy. To make it, you just fill part of the bottle with dried peppers (these ones are from my Aunt Linda's garden, but you can find them with the Mexican spices) and then pour the vodka over. The longer it sits, the more pepper flavor is in the vodka, so be careful!

The red one is cranberry. This one is a little more time-intensive. First, you crush the berries using either a blender (just for a couple seconds!) or you chop them. Then you add just a little simple syrup. The amount you add is completely up to personal taste, so it might take a couple batches to get it just right. Just give away the batches you end up not liking, because someone's bound to like it :) You also have to be careful with what  fruit you're using. Cranberries are fairly sour, but if you were using strawberries you would want to use less (or maybe none at all?). It just takes some experimentation. After you put all the ingredients in a big jar together, you leave them for 5 days or more (depending on how much flavor you're going for) shaking occasionally, and then you strain out the chunks into a different jar.

The one in the brown bottle was another easy one. It's half a vanilla bean and a cinnamon stick. If you wanted more of one or the other, you could use a whole vanilla bean or two sticks, but I was going simple. We gave this to one of Mr. Nicholas' cousins, and he thought it was awesome and made everyone at the party taste it!

Because they're not difficult to make, flavored vodkas make good gifts, especially because most people can't believe that you flavored your own vodka. Other ideas: peppercorns (wouldn't they be pretty floating in there?), star anise (I see no reason why you couldn't leave it in star form), or orange (probably using the rinds, but be careful to cut off the pith). Your options are pretty much limitless :)

This, this my friends, is flavored coffee. Home-made, flavored, delicious coffee. I started with grounds for this batch, and added cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, brown sugar, and a pinch of salt (yup, salt). The salt helps cut some of the bitter of coffee, so it's just a way to get a super-smooth brew. The way me and Nick decided what we wanted is we made one cafe-press batch and then when we liked what we had we made the big batch. Be sure to keep good notes of what you add, you want to make sure you get the proportions right. There's some recipes out there if you want some guidelines, but I kind of recommend you just take it a step of a time starting with what you like.

If you're into grinding your own beans, you can add cinnamon sticks, allspice seeds, nutmeg chunks, or whatever you want to the beans before you grind them. I think it would be awesome to add a couple cocoa beans to the mix, too, but where you do find cocoa beans?

Just a note regarding store-bought flavored coffees: usually they're flavored with oils that are added to the beans to give them flavor. This is a way for you to add natural flavor to your coffees :)

Of course this one was probably obvious. Those are cocas. You can find recipes for these all over the place. I used powdered milk, powdered creamer, cocoa powder, sugar, and added a layer of peppermint chunks or marshmallows while jarring. I think they turned out cute, and we kept some here for us to try, and it's pretty tasty. The recipe I used said to put 1/4 of a cup of mix in each cup, which is just stupid. I used a mounded tablespoon and thought it was plenty strong. That person must have been writing his recipe for the taste of six year olds. We used two different flavored dry creamers: hazelnut and french vanilla. It added a nice secondary flavor to the cocoas :)

This is a meat rub :) You can find recipes for these everywhere, too. I would like to say that I knew enough about meat rubs to have just figured it out on my own, but I picked a recipe. I don't really know anything about cooking meat. I do know that this recipe took a heck of a lot of cayenne pepper, though. And it made me sneeze. We kept a little of this to try ourselves, so hopefully it's yummy :)

These are another obvious one :p Cookies in jars! I love these because I feel that at least half of the fun of cookies is making them with someone else! So yeah. You can find the recipe here. The recipe calls for chocolate chips but I switched it up with walnuts, butterscotch chips, peanut butter chips, and pecans. It was fun picking which person would like which recipe best! We gave the chocolate-peanut butter one to Nick's brother and his girlfriend because he likes peanut butter, but she likes chocolate...it was perfect :)

Other gifts we made included a Tunisian crochet panel, a knitted bag, a sewn hot pad, and a few beers. The beer was for my brother. He's the black sheep of the family because he's not a wino. I promised him a knitted sweater for Christmas and instead gave him beer. Am I a bad person?

Menu 12/7

I've decided it makes more sense to blog after we make a meal than before. So...

Wednesday: Chicken Marsala from More Than a Cook Book.

Yeah, I liked this one so much I took a picture. Crazy.

Thursday: Mozzarella Eggplant Bake from Taste of Home. I love my taste of home cook book. I love eggplant. So much love :)

Friday. Over the Border Enchiladas from Taste of Home Aug/Sept Magazine. Have I recommended you subscribe to this magazine yet? Because if I haven't done that, I really should.

Saturday: Bacon Cheese Fries from No More than 5 Ingredients. These are technically an appetizer, but we rarely care about such arbitrary categories. 

Sunday Baked Fish with Cheese Sauce from Taste of Home Magazine Oct/Nov. I over thickened this sauce, and therefore didn't like it. I hate it when recipes say to "cook until thickened." Thickened to what consistency?? I can get it so thick it won't come out of the pan, or just thick enough that I can tell the difference. These are widely different, see what I'm saying? So frustrating.

Monday: Baked Creamy Macaroni, my great grandmother's recipe (that she cut out of something and glued into her old cook book). Nick and I have used two types of macaroni and cheese; the one where the uncooked noodles get cooked during the baking, with cheese layered between and the dish filled with milk, or the one where you cook the noodles and cook a cheese sauce and then bake it...

I like the former, Nick likes the latter. When we sign the divorce papers, the reason for separation will be "macaroni."*

But first we have to get married.

Tuesday: Golden Parmesan Potaotoes from Good Cookin with Good Friends. We expected this recipe to be really bland: it was potatoes cut into slices, battered in salt, pepper, flour, and Parmesan cheese, placed in a casserole dish with a 1/3 cup of melted butter at the bottom, and baked for an hour, covered. But it was tasty!! Weird :)

*We do not actually plan on getting divorced. Who plans on getting divorced? Ridiculous.

Menu 11/23

Tuesday: Chicken Casserole from More Than a Cook Book. This was terrible. 'Nuf said.

Regarding the cook book, though...every once in awhile we've come across a recipe that rocks our socks off. But the rest are either meh or nasty. So I wouldn't recommend buying it.

Wednesday: Shrimp Chowder from Taste of Home. We really liked this recipe, but I've noticed that most creamy soups I make call for WAY too much butter. I think I just have to make a general rule to cut the butter in half when I cook them.

Thursday: Hot ham and cheese slices from Taste of Home Magazine October-November 2010. These were like...home made hot pockets. Minus the microwave. And the frozen chunk in the center. Pretty cool, basically.

Friday: Hamburger Noodle Bake from Taste of Home Magazine August-September 2010. This was SUPER yummy. We have literally never picked a recipe out of this magazine that we don't like, so that's pretty impressive. Basically, I recommend you subscribe to this magazine. :)

Saturday: Chicken Stanley from the Rumford Complete Cook Book (circa 1931). This cook book is really hard to use. It is way outdated and the measurements stink and ick. But it was my great grandmother's, and it has her handwriting in it and I honestly just can't bear to not use it. So we made this and hey, it turned out ok. So there's all my complaining for nothing.

Sunday: Two Step Lasagna from No More than 5 Ingredients. This was the stupidest recipe. It called (seriously) to cook the whole thing in the microwave. Yeah. So since we thought that was ridiculous we just used the ingredients list and made our own simple lasagna.

1 lb ground beef, browned mixed with 2 jars spaghetti sauce (you can be cool and make your own or buy it in jars which can be reused for storage woo!)

1 box of lasagna noodle, al dente

14 oz ricotta mixed with 2 cups mozzarella

layer: noodles, meat, ricotta, noodles, meat parmesan cheese

bake for 25 minutes at 350.

We picked bad spaghetti sauces to use (that's what happens when you use what's on hand instead of buying new :/ ) but we were pretty happy with it. I think we needed a couple more cheeses-- maybe some cottage. Needs some tweaking, that's all.

Monday: Rice dinner

Menu 11/23

So this was a really short menu (because of Thanksgiving) but we still spent a lot of money...

Tuesday: Sicilian Meat Roll from More Than a Cook Book. Now, maybe I'm a food snob or something, but I like my food to LOOK good as well as taste good. Really, I think it's possible to ruin a perfectly good-tasting meal by having it look like it was thrown up out of a angry cookie monster on steroids. Sicilian Meat Roll was Uuhg-ly. So I hated it. Even though it tasted half-way decent. (But only half way).

Friday: Manicotti. We made this dinner for my future Mother in Law and her boyfriend, my future brother in law and his girlfriend, and the two of us. And it was so much fun :) Everyone was super appreciative and thanked us over and over...I love cooking for people :) (Especially when what I cook doesn't look like Sicilian Meat Roll). This is why we spent so much money-- cooking for groups gets expensive :/

Monday: Lazy Lasagna, from Taste of Home. I would like to rename this dish "Baked Pasta Dish." Because it was not lasagna. I have a theory (stop me if I'm wrong) that if you try to get lazy with lasagna, you're no longer working with lasagna. Just a personal theory though, you know.