Easy, Fancy, French Toast

I am not really a sweets person in the morning, most of the time. But once in awhile I feel like having a giant piece of french toast with peanut butter slathered on top. Since it is so easy to make, I don't really see the point in going out to have someone make it for you.  My "recipe" isn't really a recipe but it's how I generally throw this together, and I am pretty sure just about anyone who can use a spatula can make this.

First thing is first though, you need a nice loaf of challah bread. Many of you will be able to find this in the bakery section of your well-stocked grocery stores. Even better you may find it made locally at a bakery. My favorite to use is the challah bread from The Bread Farm in Bow, WA. Challah is an eggy, braided loaf, similar to brioche, that is traditionally served in Jewish communities on Sabbath and holidays. This rich, sponge-y bread lends itself quite well to French toast as well. If you cannot find it, feel free to use some other form of fresh loaf such as French Bread or Farmers Bread if you still want to try this out. Feeling ambitious? Find a recipe and make a loaf yourself on Friday and you will have it ready for breakfast on the weekend.

Here is what you will need:

1 loaf challah bread
milk (any fat %)
eggs
cinnamon
nutmeg
vanilla extract

The amounts you use will all depend on how much you are making. But start with this batch and just make more milk/egg mixture as needed if you need more. This recipe is suited is suited to my personal taste, feel free to adjust the ingredients as needed.
1. Heat a skillet or griddle to medium heat.
2. Mix 1 cup milk with 2-3 eggs (sub egg whites for some or all eggs if you wish), dash of cinnamon and nutmeg and about 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract. Whisk to mix well.
3. Slice the bread, on the diagonal, into 1-2 inch thick slices.
4. Soak one piece of bread in the milk mixture, on each side, for about 10-20 seconds. You want it to soak into the bread, but you don't want the bread to be mush! also, remember that this bread already has plenty of egg in it, so you don't need to worry about the flavor getting all the way through.
5. Spray skillet/griddle with cooking spray or a tiny pat of butter to coat.
6. Cook bread on each side until browned and heated through.

If you need to keep the french toast warm while you finish cooking all of the bread, use a large skillet cover to cover the plate with the finished pieces.

tah dah! Fancy French toast. I don't really know what the precise makings of french toast are, but this is mine and we love it. Two pieces is more than enough, challah is filling, and don't be afraid to try it with peanut butter on top!

Crispity Crunchity Blueberries.....

ahhhh well I am usually an eat-them-in-the-garden type of blueberry eater. I don't really feel the need to add much or anything to them. I like to fill a bowl of them with milk and eat them like cereal. It's good. But a friend of mine recently reminded me that sometimes it's fun to dress your blueberries up a bit and I forgot how great they taste when you do that!
 I ended up with quite a few blueberries again this year and because I still have a surplus of blueberry jam from last year's harvest, I decided to make a dessert. I was in a fit of munchies and grabbed my "Passionate Vegetarian" cook book and after some hemming and hawing I chose this and I couldn't be more pleased that I did. The swap of honey for sugar in the berry mixture results in a flavor that still tastes like fresh berries when it's baked. I think next time I will add more cinnamon and maybe some nutmeg as well before serving with ice cream, also I added about 2 tbls of fresh ground flaxseed to the crumb mixture (i find that it adds a nutty flavor). Definitely serve this with some vanilla ice cream or lemon ice cream.



Blueberry Crisp (from the Passionate Vegetarian Cookbook)
Serves 6 to 8 amply

8 cups fresh blueberries, rinsed and picked over
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup unbleached white all-purpose flour
1/4 butter, softened
2/3 cup brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup rolled oats (regular cooking oatmeal)
1/2 cup whole wheat flour 1/8 tsp ground cinnamon
2 TBLS to 1/4 cup walnuts or pecans, chopped after measuring(optional)
Cooking spray

1.Preheat oven to 375 degrees
2.Spray an 11 x 14 inch baking dish with cooking spray, set aside.
3.Toss the blueberries, honey, and white flour together in a medium bowl; then put your hand in and squeeze one fistful of blueberries to release the juices. Toss again. Place the blueberry mixture in the prepared baking dish.
4.Combine butter and brown sugar in a food processor, first pulsing to blend, then buzz to combine, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the vanilla. Add the oatmeal and pulse, pausing to scrape the sides of the bowl, until the oats are slightly chopped but not completely powdered. 5.Transfer to the bowl. Add the whole-wheat flour and cinnamon, blending with a spoon to make a crumbly mixture over the blueberries. Bake until the blueberry juices are thickened and bubbling and the top is crisp & brown, 35 to 40 min. This is MINE bubbling in the oven! now go make your own !

Cleaning my Disgusting Refrigerator, the natural way

OK, being a chef at home has many perks for my husband and my dogs... and my friends.. ha ha but one of the not good things is that my fridge is a mess. I hate to clean and after hours of cooking the last thing I want to do is clean the fridge. My husband is fairly lazy about cleaning things himself and he seems to think the kitchen is my domain so he is afraid to throw anything away. This leads to many things lurking in the corners of our fridge for a long time and then the other stuff that drips, sticks and floats around in there after time... well you get the idea, it's not pretty. Not pretty at all.
I've been procrastinating cleaning it, or I should say WE have been but a recent email from the Gorgeously Green guru with a recipe for a natural fridge cleaner motivated me (and if you sign up on her page you get a weekly recipe too!) . I just happened to have the ingredients in my home, but they are surely not hard to find for most people. What i found interesting was that the oils together smelled very similar to pinesol! It was so funny to me, but not as strong smelling and the smell does not linger after you done cleaning.
The other thing is that after 3 hours of cleaning the fridge with this stuff, my husband doesn't recognize our fridge. He said "it's bright and I can't find anything" because so much stuff got tossed, recycled, etc... our fridge is now user friendly to outside world. So I can say with great confidence that this stuff rocks and you should try it. I think they included the tea tree because of the antiseptic properties and I am not sure why the grapefruit is there except on a hunch that it also has them. Either way, try it out, I think you will be very pleased as I was.

FRIDGE CLEANER

1 cup white vinegar

1 cup warm water

1 tbsp baking soda

10 drops grapefruit essential oil*

10 drops tea tree oil

In a large 4-cup measuring jug, combine all ingredients. Simply dip a rag into the fridge cleaner, wring it out and get to work wiping out all those nooks and crannies.

*You will be able to find these essential oils at most health food stores, or you can order excellent oils from http://m1e.net/c?87069779-RmUPGNYGCCJfw%404289599-6IVX3PuBIhvhE

Garlic Scapes! How do I love thee? Let me Count the Ways

Garlic scapes are these curly things that grow from the tops of your garlic in the garden. They usually pop up early-to mid summer and they are actually how the garlic "seeds". The best time to cut them is about as soon as the start appearring, but be sure to gaze at them often, because they blend into the foilage and are hard to notice at first! I had to sit and stare at mine a few minutes before I noticed they were everywhere. Though if you don't plant more than a few garlic plants, you won't have to look so hard. I have two big patches of garlic growing in the garden right now as we love garlic and the flavor is SO much more amazing when you grow your own than buy that garlic at the store. There's no comparison.

But I really look forward to when the scapes are ready to harvest. Even if you choose not to eat them, it's best to cut them off when they start growing as they take away energy from the plant growing the bulb underground. You may be lucky enough to find these at your local farmers market. There are plenty of recipes for garlic scapes out there, but not many very unique ones. You will see a lot of the same ones out there, sauteed with butter and salt, pepper is most common and easy. Since they are mdly garlic flavored, but with texture of asparagus, they are good that way. I have a bag full of them to eat right now and I have been adding them to soup but last night I decided they would make a great pizza topping and I am glad I tried it! They were AWESOME on pizza! Here are the two recipes I tried and both were really good. I was nervous that the red sauce would overpower the flavor of the scapes but they blended beautifully and tasted out of this world.

We bought the inexpensive pre-made pizza dough at Trader joes, but any crust you prefer would work fine. We baked one on the pizza stone and the other we used a grill method, first baking it for about 5 min at 400 degrees, then sliding on the top rack of the grill (on low) and putting the cover over it. Keep an eye on this though, if it gets too dark on the bottom move it back to the oven to finish it. But it adds nice flavor and cooks it like it's in a woodfire oven. :)

Pasta Bolognese My Way

Earlier this year my parents came out to visit us in Washington state. We went to Seattle for dinner one night and ate at this wonderful place called The Pink Door http://www.thepinkdoor.net/ . I ordered some homemade spinach lasagna, Jarrod ordered some sort of pork chop, and upon the servers reccomendation my parents both ordered pasta bolognese. I don't eat beef but of course I've heard of the dish, it's pasta with meat sauce I thought. BIg deal. But all my parents kept saying was "this is so good" and had Jarrod give it a try which had him saying the same thing.
   So ever since I've been wondering the big deal is. This weekend I whipped out the ol pasta machine and decided to make my own version to see if it was any good. The recipe sounds so simple I couldn't imagine what was so great about it. So first I made a wheat noodle version of tagliatelle, since that's the type of noodle the dish was served with at the restaurant. Tagliatelle is a wide egg noodle, wider than fettucine.
Then I made my own version of the sauce after reading several different highly rated recipes of the beef version, I adapted them to make my own recipe. The sauce smelled wonderful cooking and the noodles were a pain to make, as is all homemade pasta, but well worth the effort as always.
While you don't have to make your own noodles, I highly reccomend you buy fresh made noodles or at the very least, get those fettucine noodles in the refrigerated section to make this dish. The results were out of this world yummy, I don't know why because the ingredients are very simple. I do admit that the use of milk in the sauce seemed very weird to me and I was skeptical, but not anymore. From now on this will be a treat in our house.

Cara's Pasta "Bolognese"
Serves 4-6

For the Noodles Makes 1 1/4 pounds.
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus extra for kneading
1 cup whole wheat flour
5 large eggs

Mound flour in center of a large work surface, and make a well in the middle. Crack eggs into the well. Using a fork, beat eggs; slowly incorporate flour, beginning with inner rim of well. When flour is incorporated, gather dough together to form a rounded mass. Begin kneading dough with the palms of your hands. Once dough comes together, scrape up any dried bits of dough; discard. Lightly flour work surface; knead dough until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Wrap dough in plastic wrap; rest for 30 minutes at room temperature before using. Divide dough into 4 pieces; keep 3 pieces covered with a slightly damp kitchen towel. Flatten dough to a shape somewhat narrower than pasta machine opening. Lightly dust dough with flour. Feed through machine's widest setting. As pasta emerges, gently support it with your palm and guide it onto the work surface.
Fold dough in thirds; roll out again. Repeat process 5 times. Pass pasta through the next finer setting, repeating the folding and rolling process 6 times. At the third setting, repeat process only 3 times. If pasta sheet becomes too long to work with easily, cut it into 2 pieces. Dust pasta lightly with flour to prevent sticking, if necessary. Roll dough through progressively thinner settings, without folding, until you have reached the thinnest or next-to-thinnest setting. Using the widest-cut attachment of the pasta machine, cut pasta sheets into 1/2-inch wide strips. To cut pasta by hand, cut each pasta sheet into 10-inch lengths. Brush lightly with flour, roll up sheet, and, using a sharp knife, cut into 1/4-inch-wide strips; unroll. Use tagliatelle immediately, or dry on a floured work surface and store in an airtight container for up to three days.

For the Sauce
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 large onion, chopped fine
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
3 carrots, chopped fine
3 celery ribs, chopped fine
1/2 pound ground lean turkey
1/2 pound Hot Italian Turkey Sausage, removed from casings
1 cup milk (any FF, 2%, whole, whatever you prefer)
freshly grated nutmeg to taste
1 cup dry white wine
 28- to 32-ounce can whole tomatoes including juice
 1/2 cup tomato sauce

**To make a vegetarian (lacto/ovo) version use Gimme Lean Veggie Sausage grounds and/or Veggie meat grounds in place of the turkey. I am sure it will be just as tasty!

In large heavy saucepan heat oil over moderately high heat and sauté onion, carrot, and celery, stirring 2 minutes. Add turkey and turkey sausage and cook, stirring, 2 minutes, or until meat is no longer pink. Season mixture with salt and pepper.
Add milk and nutmeg and cook, stirring, until most milk is evaporated, about 10 minutes. Add wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until liquid is evaporated, about 10 minutes.
In a blender or food processor coarsely purée tomatoes with juice and stir into sauce with tomato sauce.
Cook sauce at a bare simmer, uncovered, stirring occasionally, 1 hour and 15 minutes (sauce will be thickened) and season with salt and pepper. Sauce may be made ahead and cooled, uncovered, before being chilled, covered, 2 days or frozen 1 month. In an 8-quart kettle bring 7 quarts salted water to a boil.
Cook pasta until al dente (about 6 minutes for fresh, longer for dried) and drain in a colander. In a heated large bowl immediately toss pasta with sauce. This is essential to toss the pasta with sauce because the noodles will absorb some of the flavor.

After making this I've decided I need to get an electric pasta machine. That hand cranker is quite a pain in the ass after awhile!