A Week of Breakfasts After a Week of No Blogs

I have to offer a quick apology for my lack of blog entries in the past week – things got a little busy with a baby who wouldn’t take naps and a trip to Austin, Texas to visit my brother Seth with my Momma. My trip to Austin has inspired me by the food we ate while we were there, so I am back to blogging with a lot of fresh ideas.

…I love weekend breakfasts – you know, the kind you make when you have had enough sleep and you have enough time to actually cook. Back in my partying single days I would take a shortcut with my roommate, Jojo and head to the IHOP down the street for breakfast. Every Saturday she would wake me up by jumping on my bed and chanting “IHOP SATURDAY!!!” over and over until I finally got up and got dressed.

Now that I have a baby it’s a little different. I am usually awake a lot earlier, and it’s usually a baby who wakes me up – and she is not chanting “IHOP SATURDAY!” But I still make an effort to have a nice breakfast once a week. And since my daughter makes sure I am awake earlier than everyone else, I have plenty of time to make breakfast while my daughter watches from her high chair.

So, prepare for a week of breakfast recipes!

Below is the best recipe I have found for cinnamon roll dough. Use either bread flour or the added gluten to get the nice chewy texture right. All purpose flour will make a very cakey roll.

I love to knead dough as a stress reliever, but who actually has the time to knead dough by hand once you have kids? Personally, I don’t. Sure, my arm muscles don’t get the workout they used to when I was a baker, but I don’t need to arm wrestle anyone anymore. Solution – use a bread machine to make the dough, and then bake it yourself. I used to hate bread machines, but my opinion has recently changed… I don’t use my bread machine to bake bread, but I do use it for the dough application.

Cinnamon Rolls
(makes about a dozen rolls)

1 egg plus enough hot water to make one cup
¼ c oil
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
3 ½ c bread flour (or 3 ½ c all purpose flour plus 1 ½ tbsp gluten)
1 ½ tsp yeast
½ c softened butter
½ c sugar
¼ c cinnamon (or more)
¾ c chopped pecans
¼ c melted butter
½ c brown sugar
½ c white sugar

Add all ingredients to the bread machine, set it on the dough setting and let it run. Once the dough is done, roll it out into a rectangle. Spread it with ½ cup of softened butter, sprinkle with ½ c white sugar and ¼ c cinnamon. Roll it up into a roll and cut into 1 inch rolls.

In an oblong cake pan melt ¼ c butter – cover this with the remaining sugars and the chopped pecans. Place the rolls on top of this mixture. Let rise until double in size. Bake at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Turn the pan upside down to release the rolls.

Once the rolls are in the pan you can put the pan in the refrigerator covered in plastic wrap and then bring it out an hour before you want to bake the rolls. This works really well if you want to do all the work the day before.

Another Foray into Gardening

Maybe I should put a new subheading about how this blog is also about gardening... but then again, gardening is all about food for me, and it is spring. And technically the article I am so excited about is in the dining and wine section of The New York Times... so it's still about food.

THIS is what I am so excited about. The Obamas are planting A VEGETABLE GARDEN on the White House Lawn... not only for the tasty goodness of something fresh from the garden, but to encourage the whole country to eat locally grown food, and to show their own daughters where their food comes from, something I am a bit passionate about. In my opinion, everyone should be aware of how their food comes about, be it vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, or fowl.

I had the luxury (luxury?) of growing up in the country, of being a part of raising my own food. Besides just the vegetable garden and some fruit trees, we had goats, chickens, pigs, geese, ducks, and rabbits. And as my cousin Brianna says (her facebook page is where I swiped this article) I believe animals can be friends and food (not that I would eat my cat - I would have to be pretty hungry for that to happen... and I have a feeling she'd be pretty tough... just kidding, my cat is safe.) Anyway, I have a certain respect for my food and what it took to get it on my plate. And it makes my food taste better. I want to pass that respect on to my daughter, so that she can understand and respect the life of the thing she is eating, whether it is meat or plant.

The Native Americans believe that all life is connected, that we should show respect for the earth and the way it provides for us. This is the respect I am talking about teaching my child, and something that I believe allows me to prepare my food well. I heard one chef describe it as "respecting the ingredients." I try my best to respect my food, and to show my love through whatever I prepare.

The article is well worth the read. And so is any work you put into a garden... and if you can't garden, take the time to find a farmer's market in your area.

Heirloom Tomato Bruschetta
1 large baguette, sliced
1 clove garlic
4 heirloom tomatoes (use good ones, please! The grocery store variety will just taste like water. I like to use a variety of colors - yellow, red, green, purple.)
1-2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
3 tbsp olive oil
salt to taste

Toast the sliced bread in the oven for about 5 minutes at 200 degrees, or throw them on the grill to get them toasted. Cut the garlic clove in half and then rub it on the bread slices - it will kind of grate itself on the hard bread. Cut up the tomatoes into small chunks. Dress with the balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and salt. Serve on the bread slices.

By the way, the White House chef is the one overseeing the garden, so I think I'm pretty safe in adding this to the blog.

My Mother, Queen of Substitutions

That's a picture of my Momma and me as a baby. Isn't she beautiful? She still is today... in fact, if you know any nice single men, let me know.

I learned to cook from my mom and my dad, but mostly from my dear Momma... which is funny, because I don't think she likes to cook all that much. But she let me play with the pots and pans on the floor when I was very little, and she made sure we all ate together as a family when dinner time came around every night. She managed to feed a family of six plus any stray neighborhood kids on a shoestring budget. The kids I went to school with were always kind of amazed we ate together around a table every night without turning on the T.V.

I have a lot of memories of my mom in the kitchen - she used to grind her own flour with a grinder that clamped on to the kitchen table, and I remember she had a hand grinder for coffee beans. When we would go to the grocery store she would let me have one coffee bean from the bulk containers so that I could smell it. Maybe that's why I love coffee so much - I associate it with my mother.

She also taught me substitutions for recipes when I would try to cook something and we were out of an ingredient... Mayonnaise can be substituted for egg; allspice for cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves (I think Momma actually thought that allspice was made from "all spices" but it's not. I learned that a few years back and was actually quite amazed that it was a spice in and of itself.) I think all of "substituting" had a pretty big influence on my cooking - I can make something out of a bunch of nothings... oatmeal for breadcrumbs, yogurt for sour cream, lemon juice and milk for buttermilk... even coffee creamer for powdered milk.

Here's the most recent thing she taught me to make. It's good, and I wouldn't make any substitutions:

Turkey Wraps

Tortillas (or rice wraps)
Turkey
cream cheese
cucumber slices
alfalfa sprouts
cranberry sauce

Just wrap everything in a tortilla and eat it. Simple enough.

Glazed Corned Beef

Happy St. Patrick's Day almost a day late! Here is my version of the typical corned beef dinner for St. Patrick's...

Anna's Corned Beef
1 corned beef brisket with seasoning packet
2 tbsp spicy brown mustard
2 tbsp brown sugar or honey
1/8 tsp ground cloves
4-5 potatoes, cut up
1 large onion, cut in large chunks
2 or 3 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
1 small head of cabbage, also cut into chunks

Preheat oven to 250 degrees. Place the brisket in a roasting pan or dutch oven. Mix together the mustard, seasoning packet, brown sugar, and cloves together in a small bowl. Use this to cover the brisket. Add the potatoes, onion, and carrots around the brisket. Cover, and bake for 3 hours. When the brisket is done, transfer the contents of the dutch oven to a serving dish, and put back into the oven once you have turned it off to keep the meat warm. Pour the reserved liquid into a pan, add the cabbage and cook on medium high heat until the cabbage is cooked through. Enjoy.

A Sidetrack into Gardening

Nature is a constant source of amazement for me. Everything runs in a cycle, one thing taking care of the next which in turn nourishes the first. It’s really quite beautiful.

Every spring when I start my garden I am reminded of this process, especially when I look at my beautiful compost… yes, beautiful compost. I love it. I take the pieces of food that we cannot use – egg shells, potato and banana peels, coffee grounds, along with grass clippings and some paper from my shred pile, and it turns into this wonderful rich dark fertilizer for the next batch of plants I grow (and it would be even better if I could get my hands on some manure, but that is just wishful thinking on my part!) So, the food we don’t use (and that the animals eliminate) ends up nourishing the food we grow the next year. On first glance, this might seem like a disgusting process, but in reality it just shows the wonderful cycle of nature and how one thing takes care of the next.

When I was growing up my family always had a garden, and a very large compost pile. We grew tons of vegetables every year – tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, radishes, beets, squash… by far my favorite was the tomatoes. There is just nothing like a home grown tomato. Those pathetic little hydroponic things you get from the store can hardly be recognized as a tomato once you have had the real thing.

As much as I love to garden, we don’t have any land on which to plant or even have a compost pile. But I don’t let this stop me. I have a compost pile – it’s in some old five gallon buckets that originally contained a bulk purchase of kitty litter. It still decomposes just fine – I just leave the lids slightly askew so those bacteria can get oxygen… and to turn the compost I just put the lids back on tight and shake the contents a bit every couple of days. And as for my garden, it grows on our deck in containers – which I get for next to nothing, because you can plant in anything that holds dirt, for the most part. I get my planters from garage sales and thrift stores… Everything from popcorn tins and lunchboxes to laundry baskets lined with plastic and old mixing bowls. I have a pile of potential planters in the garage right now just waiting for the last frost to pass.

And my tomatoes are already sprouted, along with my thyme, some basil, and a chile pepper or two. Can’t wait for summer and all those yummy tomatoes.

Serendipity and Pizza Snacks

Serendipity is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for."

Sometimes things that shouldn't combine well combine so well it is surprising. And the result ends up being a much greater than the sum of its parts.

Most of my really great friendships are like this. My friend Liz and I became friends in high school because we were both involved in the speech team... and both of us had good personal hygiene, which was more than could be said about most of our teammates. We figured it was in both of our best interests to become friends so we could share a room on trips and not suffer through body odor. She thought I was kind of weird, I thought she was kind of preppy. Turns out we had a lot more in common than we thought. A great number of the great adventures in my life have involved Liz. We were roommates and party girls in Las Vegas for a few years, we were in each other's weddings. Somehow we even ended up living in Missouri at the same time (her husband, a Marine, was stationed here, and my husband's family lives here, too!) I also had the great privilege of being present when her son Caleb was born. After twenty (twenty??) years and several states, we are still the best of friends. And all we were looking for was someone who wore deodorant!!

Well, onto the topic of food... (you knew I would get around to it, didn't you?) My Grandpa used to make these wonderful little appetizers called Pizza Snacks. I loved them until I learned the recipe. The recipe involves ingredients I would never combine with each other - rye bread, Mexican Velveeta, and hot sausage... It was just weird.

But they sure taste good. Even though they don't have much in common with Pizza. I never have figured out why they are called Pizza Snacks. I guess I should just stop thinking about it and just enjoy it for what it is... Serendipity.

Pizza Snacks
1 lb hot pork sausage
1 lb ground beef
1 lb mild Mexican Velveeta cheese
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp oregano
1 loaf of party rye, sliced.

Cook meat together, drain well. Add cheese and seasoning, mixing well until cheese is melted. Spread mixture on party rye. Bake at 400 degrees until centers bubble, about 10 minutes.

To freeze: do not bake. Freeze snacks on a tray, once frozen pack in Ziploc bags. 15 minutes before serving, place frozen snacks on a lightly greased cookie sheet and heat in a 400 degree oven until centers bubble. Serve hot.

A Leftover Kind of a Day

This was just one of those days for me... My daughter was up every two hours last night crying because she is teething. The cat gave us a wake up call by knocking over the contents of my desk onto the floor and then running around the bedroom like a mad thing... then my computer wouldn't connect to my work's server, and when it did it ran as slow as a turtle going up hill. I spent most of the day on hold listening to terrible music or talking to automated systems which were slightly more intelligent than the actual people I got when I hit zero.

My daughter didn't want to take her morning nap because she I let her sleep late... and when lunchtime came she smeared her prunes in her hair, which caused an impromptu midday bath. It was one of those days.

And then it was dinner time. Did I want to cook? No. And I love to cook. But today was one of those days. I wanted nothing more than to head out the door and let someone else do the cooking. However, in this economy we were not going to eat out unplanned. What to do, what to do?

Leftovers. But my husband despises leftovers. I have therefore devised ways to re-invent leftovers with only minimal labor. That's what I did tonight. There are a lot of ways to do this - here's some ideas:

Leftover pot roast can be cut up and thrown in the bottom of a baking dish and covered with mashed potatoes - bake it and it's Shepherd's Pie.

Leftover chili becomes burritos if you add some cheese and wrap it in a tortilla. Or pour it in a baking dish and cover it with some cheese and cornbread batter. Bake it and you have chili pie.

Leftover chicken - cut it up, add your leftover veggies from the night before, throw it in the bottom of a pan with some chicken stock. Cover that with some store bought biscuit dough and bake... or take the cold meat and thow it on leftover salad with some cheese.

Leftover rice becomes fried rice pretty easily. Fry up some onion and garlic in a pan, add the rice, a scrambled egg, and some soy sauce and you've got fried rice.

So tonight was a night for chili pie... and on the way out the door to the gym to work out my frustrations with the day my daughter spit up down my leg. Tomorrow will be better.