Archive for In the Kitchen
Last Day for Deliciously Organic Sale – and – Check Out My Boys’ Incredible Salad!!!
Posted by: | CommentsI have been out of town all day long doing some much needed shopping and visiting a friend who just had a baby (yay!). Matt and the boys have been on their own, finishing some projects and a few final pages of math.
On my way out the door this morning, I suggested that maybe they open up the Deliciously Organic cookbook and create one of the salads featured. After all, we have a lot of of beautiful spinach coming up in our garden, and I knew that Deliciously Organic would have great ideas for how to use it.
Well, not only did they find a great recipe to make, they took some beautiful pictures to show me when I got home. (They also saved a few bites of the salad for me to eat when I got home - it was awesome!)
Let us all pause a moment to reflect on the fact that my family understands and appreciates the need to take pictures of food before practically every meal, whether Mom is home or not. Have they been living with a blogger for several years or what? Love my fam!
Check out this lovely “before salad” shot:
Matt was excited to find a recipe that uses such simple ingredients – ones we typically have on hand. And, for such simple ingredients to create such a flavor-packed salad…we were very impressed!
Next, we have pictured the final product:
Then, as if they were on a roll…they placed some of my Mother’s Day flowers by the salad to add even more color. How sweet are these men in my life?
You may also be interested to see that I also came home to pictures of lego projects that Malachi has been working on:
It appears that we have a Lego Blogger in the making. :)
I couldn’t be more pleased with the Deliciously Organic cookbook. Thursday, May 17 is the final day to purchase this cookbook and Carrie Vitt’s menu plans at a big discounted price. Be sure to check out the details here and don’t miss out on this fantastic deal!
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Raspberry Almond Muffins from Deliciously Organic
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Yesterday’s new recipe try-out from the Deliciously Organic cookbook was Raspberry Almond Muffins.
How did my family like them? Well, the recipe made 18 muffins. I pulled them out of the oven, left to go take a walk, got back, and there were only 5 left. I guess we now know how my family liked them. ;) At least they left some for me to try. (I loved them too, by the way!)
Be sure to read more about Deliciously Organic here and take advantage of the great deal Carrie Vitt is offering us here for just a few more days.
Freezer Cooking During the Week of the Chicken
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If you had any doubts that this truly was the Week of the Chicken, after this post, you will know for sure and for certain that I have encountered chicken madness at my house. I kind of had a hard time letting go of the fact that the chicken was such a good price at the store. Thus I kind of had a hard time not going back to the store multiple times to buy more chicken. Which means that I kind of had a big chicken party in my kitchen for several days in a row, working up some chicken recipes for the freezer.
In the meantime, we’ve been eating a lot of chicken too. So chicken crazed have I been, that when for lunch one day this week I actually fed my family something with leftover hamburger meat in it, my husband – supportive guy that he is - paused before taking a bite and said, “Wait! It’s the Week of the Chicken! Are you sure we’re allowed to eat beef this week?”
Ha! I love living with comedians.
Speaking of comedy…Why did the chicken cross the road?
I can’t even finish it. That joke is totally over-used and not at all funny. Oh, but my family made this one up a couple of years ago: What do you get when you cross a brick with a chicken?
Bricken Nuggets!!!!
Okay, I’m done now. I’m sure I’ve got you all completely worried that I’ve lost my head this week while cooking and prepping pounds and pounds of chicken for the freezer, but truly, you can relax. I’m fine. I promise. And also, I’m out of chicken. It’s all socked away in the freezer. Now I’m planning to move on to asparagus!
Yes, next week will be the Week of the Asparagus.
Except for not really. ;)
Okay…chicken. I’m here to tell you about my Week of the Chicken.
Right after getting back home with my first round of chicken packages, I made loads of Chicken Nuggets. I cooked some up for lunch…
But more importantly, I put together oodles of pre-made chicken nuggets for the freezer. See - here’s my chicken-nugget-assembly-line. I filled cookie sheets with nuggets, froze them, then baggied them up to pull out in the future.
The following isn’t very exciting, but the next day, I cut chicken into bites, cooked it in olive oil, and baggied it up for salads.
Day Three: Chicken cooked in bbq sauce. That will be great for sandwiches next week.
I grabbed one more round of chicken from the store (about 9 more packages), and put together several pounds of Crunchy Ranch Chicken. This is probably our favorite way to eat chicken. The recipe is not featured here on the site, but it is in the What To Do With the Chicken in Your Kitchen ebook - which can still be purchased for $1.50 if you hurry.
I am now officially ready to chicken out. What I mean is…I’m tired of chicken. I don’t want to look at chicken again for a long time.
Or at least until tomorrow.
Hey, leave a comment on this post for another chance to win one of our Week of the Chicken $10 Heavenly Homemakers Gift Certificates!
Should You Invest In a Toaster Oven? If So, Which Toaster Oven?
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To invest in a toaster oven…or not? After 16 years of marriage, a choice had to be made. To clarify, our toaster hadn’t been married for 16 years. Matt and I had been married for 16 years. We had been given the beloved toaster as a wedding gift. It lasted for precisely 16 years, four children, and 5,702 pieces of toast. Then, it decided to retire and its heating coils failed to ever turn orange again.
Thus we found ourselves faced with this very difficult decision about whether we should simply buy another regular toaster, or if we should invest in a nice toaster oven. This ranked right up there with other decisions we have faced over the years like, “should we purchase a house?” and “should we home school our offspring?”.
Okay, totally not really. Not even close.
But we did have to figure out how, pray tell, we were going to make toast. Grim reality hits when you’re standing in the kitchen with your butter knife and jelly, and you are suddenly faced with absolute toastlessness. Emotions can run amok.
Okay, totally not really. Not even close.
In actuality, our family doesn’t really even eat very much toast anymore. But shucks, wasn’t it fun to picture my husband and me standing sadly with our un-toasted bread in the kitchen, heads bent over in deep contemplation, as together, we looked through toaster catalogs?
We finally did decided to go ahead and purchase a toaster oven to replace our regular ol’ toaster. Because we no longer use a microwave, we have found our toaster oven to be a wonderful addition to our kitchen for warming up leftovers quickly. In addition, we chose a toaster oven that was big enough to bake a small pan of brownies or cookies, bake a small pizza, or warm up several burritos at once. We use it all the time and absolutely love it. I would not want to go back to regular toaster now that I’ve experienced how great and versitile a toaster oven is.
Many of you have asked which toaster oven we have and recommend. Well, it would appear that the toaster oven we own, a Euro-Pro Convection 6-Slice Toast R Oven, is no longer available at Amazon (which is where we purchased it a year ago). It seems that the Oster 6-Slice Convection Toaster Oven is comparable to what we purchased, and if I needed to buy one for my family at this point, that is likely what I would choose.
So how about you? Do you use a toaster or a toaster oven? If you have a toaster oven, in what ways do you use it?
Oh, and in case I forgot to mention it and in case you were wondering, our toaster oven does also make toast. Yes indeed. We are no longer toastless.
How to Warm Up Food Without a Microwave
Posted by: | CommentsOur family stopped using a microwave about six years ago when we began our healthy eating journey. We still have a microwave, because it is a permanent fixture above my stove and would be a pain to take down. Guests do use it occasionally, which means that I should probably actually clean it every once in a while. But in general, I’ve pretty much forgotten that it exists.
Why do we not use a microwave?
I’d like to write an entire post about why you may want to consider avoiding the use of a microwave oven. But I’m not a girl who uses big words or who can write informative sentences about the dangers of microwaves, imparting knowledge like, “The apparent additional energy exhibited by the luminescent bacteria was merely an extra confirmation.” Shoot, not only can I not write a sentence like that, I can’t even read one and come away feeling like I have an actual working brain in my head. Therefore, if you’d like to read all the big words and reasons for avoiding a microwave, I encourage you to check out all of the helpful information in this article.
Otherwise, in Laura’s simple and non-big-word language: We don’t use a microwave because we think that it makes our food yucky.
The question I receive often then is: How do you warm up leftovers if you don’t have a microwave?
Easy. I warm up our food on either the stove-top, in our oven, or in our toaster oven.
Pardon the fairly ugly picture, but really, how cute can leftovers in a saucepan actually be?! ;)
I usually add just a shot of water to the saucepan with our leftovers to keep the food from sticking. I have also found that it is a good idea to keep the heat at a medium setting and to stir often. If I’m rewarming Creamy Mac and Cheese or something else milk based, instead of adding a shot of water, I will add a shot of milk, which keeps the food creamy!
To warm up Pizza, Taco Corn Fritters, Popcorn Chicken, or Burritos and such, I’ll use our oven or toaster oven. We LOVE our toaster oven! We pop the food in, put it on “toast” or “bake” depending on what we want, walk away and do something else for a few minutes, then our food is perfect.
While a microwave might take one minute to warm up your food, I’d say the stovetop takes about two minutes. A toaster oven might take five. Those few extra minutes really don’t hurt my feelings very much. It’s not so hard to wait. My food tastes better rewarmed this way, plus I don’t have to worry about it losing it’s nutritional quality. Those are a few extra minutes well spent.
What are your thoughts about using a microwave? How do you warm up leftovers?
Getting Ahead in my Kitchen
Posted by: | CommentsIt is a fact that participating in an occasional cooking/baking marathon is very therapeutic for me. (It is also a fact that I had no idea how to spell therapeutic, which is why I am very thankful for spell check options. You should have seen how I spelled it when I sounded it out. Let’s just say that I can cook better than I can spell.)
My spelling issues aside, I receive great pleasure from mixing up four or more recipes at once, getting most of my dishes dirty all at the same time, and covering every inch of counter space with a cooking project. I failed to take a picture of the kitchen chaos. Sorry about that. ;) But I did manage to take a few pictures of what I accomplished during my baking day. Looking at pics of chocolate chip cookies is much better than looking at pics of my crusty cookie sheets, so let’s focus on the chocolate, shall we?
I made a double batch Chocolate Chip Cookies to serve at high school huddle. Our family also did a little taste testing because quality control is our specialty. :)
While the cookies were baking, I mixed up a double batch of Honey Whole Wheat Bread.
While the bread was rising, I started cooking a double batch of Taco Corn Fritters. These refrigerate or freeze well and reheat easily in the oven or toaster oven.
And last but not least, I made a big batch of Sloppy Joe Meat and some Sloppy Cornbread Muffins.
Although we’ve already eaten a good portion of the food I made to try and get ahead for this week, I do feel much better having a few extras on hand to warm up quickly for meals. Healthy convenience foods rock. :)
What are your favorite healthy convenience foods to have on hand?
Fun {healthier} Holiday Baking
Posted by: | CommentsWhat with all the butter I hear you’ve been going through lately, it sounds like there’s a lot of fun Christmas baking going on out there! I actually haven’t even started doing my baking yet, but I will start soon. Oh yes, the butter and sucanat are going to start flying around here.
As I began to make my baking plans, I put together a list of some of my favorite holiday cookies and treats. All of these are made with healthier flours and sugars (usually honey or sucanat). I won’t be making all of these treats, but I’m really hungry right now, so I just kept adding to the list.
Christmas Graham Crackers
Orange Cream Cheese Cut Out Cookies
What’s on your Christmas baking list this year?
The Most Comforting Comfort Food
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s what I want when I’m cold. It’s what I want when I’m tired. It’s what I want when I’m sad. It’s what I want when I’m happy. And this week, it is what I wanted when I was sick.
Warm Vanilla Soother is packed full of nourishing, stick-to-your-ribs comfort. And if you need comfort with a side of chocolate, well, there’s also Warm Chocolate Soother.
Thanksgiving Preparations
Posted by: | CommentsJust in case you’re interested in my cooking plan for our holiday meal, here’s a little look inside my brain at how I have organized myself to get the meal on the table for Thanksgiving. I figured I needed to make the lists anyway – might as well bore you with them. ;) Thankfully, everything from the Saturday through Wednesday lists are completed!
Saturday - Cook Thanksgiving turkey
Monday – Finish all Thanksgiving meal shopping
Wednesday -
- Make Pumpkin Pies
- Make Chocolate Pie
- Make Cheesecake
- Put together Green Bean Casserole (recipe found in Holiday Hospitality eBook)
- Bake sweet potatoes, mash and have ready to rewarm tomorrow
- Prep Stuffing (recipe found in Holiday Hospitality eBook)
- Peel potatoes and put in water for tomorrow
- Get cooked turkey out of freezer to thaw
Thursday Morning -
- Make a double batch of rolls (recipe in Holiday Hospitality eBook)
- Set out butter to soften
- Cook and mash potatoes – put into crock-pot to keep warm
- Cook corn for Cream Cheese Corn (recipe in Holiday Hospitality eBook)
- Bake stuffing
- Rewarm turkey
- Bake Green Bean Casserole
- Rewarm sweet potatoes
- Make gravy
- Whip cream for desserts
- Have boys set up tables and prep plates, napkins, etc.
- Do whatever else I’ve forgotten to do….
{I’m not really trying to be annoying by putting (recipe in Holiday Hospitality eBook) several times in the above lists, but many have asked about those recipes and I thought I’d curb more of those questions by letting you know where to find those recipes. If you’re interested in that eBook, great, but - wink, wink - wait until at least Friday to purchase so that you’ll save a few bucks!!}
Here are my cooking and baking pictures from today. I had lots of fun and my feet are a little bit tired from standing so much. ;)
Below, it looks like I made six pumpkin pies – but really, there are just three. I have a big mirror in my kitchen, and I thought it would be fun to take the picture there to make it look like I got carried away with pumpkin pies.
Pictured with the cheesecake in the following picture is a batch of chocolate chip cookies. One college girl that is around town this week isn’t able to come for our Thanksgiving meal, but she really (really) likes my chocolate chip cookies. I made some to serve at lunch today (Wednesday) when she joined us.
It’s not likely that we’ll run out of desserts. I made this chocolate pudding recipe and poured it over a graham cracker crust for a “chocolate pie”. It ended up in a rectangle dish because I was out of pie pans. :)
I am so excited to eat this healthier version of Green Bean Casserole! Why don’t I make this more often?
Peeling and prepping our potatoes ahead of time is a tip I learned from my former hair dresser many eons ago. I love getting this chore out of the way a day early!
I baked three small sweet potatoes and only ended up with a small dish of them to serve tomorrow. I don’t think this will be the most popular part of the meal anyway, so a small amount will hopefully be fine.
Last but not least, I made dressing – for what I believe is my very first time! My sister-in-law has a wonderful recipe, which she shared for my Holiday Hospitality ebook. It is so easy, I’m not sure why I haven’t tried it before.
And now, I look forward to a good night’s sleep before I get up and tackle my Thursday list. How are your holiday preparations coming?
I’m thankful for all of you and pray that you have a wonderful, blessed Thanksgiving holiday!
How to Cook a Whole Pumpkin (to make pumpkin puree)
Posted by: | CommentsEvery year, the boys and I visit a pumpkin patch. Every year after visiting the pumpkin patch, I bake a few of the pumpkins we bring home so that I’ll have plenty of pureed pumpkin in the freezer for pies, breads, muffins and other treats throughout the year. Every year, in order to bake the pumpkins, I slice them in half to put them into a baking dish.
Ever tried slicing a raw pumpkin in half? It’s horribly not enjoyable or easy. Now don’t make fun of me, because it is a fact that I have very wimpy muscles. Therefore, I find that cutting a pumpkin in half makes me a little cranky -and also a little bit scared that I’m going to lose a finger.
This year, I decided to rebel - mostly because after the trip to the pumpkin patch with six boys (I took extras), I was a little tired and in no mood to lose a finger.
I’m not sure why I haven’t been cooking the pumpkin in its whole form all along – but now that I know it works so well, I will for sure be doing it this way from now on. Or at least on the days I don’t feel like losing a finger.
How to Make Pumpkin Puree from a Whole Pumpkin
First wash your pumpkin so that there will be no chance for soil or squished bugs to be mistaken for raisins in your muffins on a cloudy, autumn morning.
Next, give your pumpkin 6-10 nice stabs with a knife. There’s no better way to say it – there’s no such thing as gently poking a fork into a raw pumpkin. It must be stabbed. Although, I’m the one with the wimpy muscles, so what do I know?
Third, place your pumpkin in a baking dish, then into a 350° oven. I had to remove one of my oven racks to make this happen, but I figured I’d just saved at least three fingers, so this five second bit of labor was worth my time.
Bake your pumpkin for about an hour and a half or until poking it with a fork has become effortless.
Now slice the pumpkin in half – see how easy that is? Allow pumpkin to cool for 15-30 minutes.
Use a metal spoon to scrape out the seeds and the stringy stuff. Save the seeds for making roasted pumpkin seeds if you’d like.
Someone tell me what the real name of that stringy stuff is. It probably has some technical name like ”glutinous threads”.
Scoop out the soft pumpkin – or turn the pumpkin over and easily slice away the rind.
All done:
Place a few slices into a food processor and puree until smooth.
Continue pureeing pieces of pumpkin until you’re finished, because that is the point at which you will be done. (Sometimes it’s fun to simply state the obvious.)
Freeze pumpkin puree in jars or freezer bags. I like to freeze it in two-quart portions for easy measuring while baking.
With my pumpkin puree, I make Pumpkin Pie, Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins, Pumpkin Bars, and Pumpkin Pie Squares – plus a delicious Multi-Grain Pumpkin Pancake/Waffle recipe my friend Angie shared with me that I will in turn be sharing with you tomorrow.
How do you make pumpkin puree (or do you buy it already canned)? What do you like to make with pumpkin?
Disclaimer: No fingers lost while making this pumpkin puree. Let us all rejoice.
