Cranberry English Muffins

Lately, I've just been sticking cranberries into everything I cook.  I really miss fruit this winter, and I got tired of apples pretty early on.

You could make this without the cranberries, but then I'd have nothing to contribute to the literature, because there already is a perfect recipe for English muffins.  I've been trying to do this for a while.  I hinted at it 14 months ago (!)  It turns out that everyone uses the same recipe anyway, and it's Alton Brown's.   "My" recipe is *so* Alton Brown's that I'm not going to post it at the end, really, this is someone else's work.  

The only changes I made were:

1. Cranberries!
2. Earth Balance instead of shortening
3. Mix of whole wheat and AP flour

When I say everyone uses Alton Brown's recipe, I mean that most of the first page of Google hits on "English Muffin Recipe" is either that version or something based on that version.  I mean that when I searched for video guidance on making English muffins, the most useful video is based on Alton Brown's recipe.  Also, I've made English muffins not using Alton Brown's recipe and they were less than awesome.  These, however, are awesome, so let's do it this way.

Spiced Applesauce Breakfast Cake

I'm just starting out honestly, with "breakfast cake."  I know there's a fine line between bread and cake - (banana bread and carrot cake?) and this is a non-dessert cake.  It's not a bread.  It's also not super sweet.  It's breakfast cake, but you can have it for dessert if you want.

I was looking to make applesauce cake for two reasons:
1. I had too many apples, and am not interested in things like crisps, crumbles, pies, tarts; and
2. When I was a teenager, there was this orchard/farm market by the mall and they made amazing applesauce cake.

So working off the idea that cake can be made of applesauce - and not just in the swap-the-oil-for-applesauce-in-the-Duncan-Hines-mix-way - and that I needed to use some apples, I went to work.

Except, it's hard for me with desserts.  I don't like really sweet things.  Also, I have no idea how that applesauce cake I grew up with was made.

But it worked.  A very lightly sweet cake (dust it with powdered sugar and you get a bit more sweet in every bite) that's not really CAKE in the plan-your-other-meals-to-account-for-it way.

Cranberry Orange Bread

I make a lot of "quick breads."  I try to always have banana bread or blueberry bread in the freezer for a quick breakfast.   Blueberry bread is just blueberry muffins without the worry about whether they'll come out of the tins properly.  I buy extra berries in the summer and keep them in the freezer for as long as I can stand it.  I keep whole bananas with their skin on in the freezer (stash them just when they're too brown to eat raw).  But sometimes, the season catches up with you and you're out of nanners and blueberries and you're *so over* things like pumpkin and apple.  What then?

Cranberry bread.  Cranberry orange bread.  Seasonal but not squash.  

Garlic Knots and Bread Drama

What I need to start doing is just bringing the camera with me to the kitchen no matter what I'm doing in there, in case something *really important* happens that I need to tell you about.  But I didn't do that, so we have no process horror pictures.

I think that means this isn't a fail, but is instead a hot tip, since I won in the end, but whoa was it a fail early on. 

Sour Cherry Brownies

At least in this part of the country, folks with CSA fruit are getting overloaded with cherries.  Sure, you can make pies and crumbles and tarts, but those are totally not my thing, so I've just been eating sour cherries by the handful.


It got to be too much, and Sous Chef Brian won't touch them, so it was all on me.  We finally resorted to inviting friends over (not that we wouldn't have invited them anyway) because we knew they liked sour cherries. We sent them home with a doggy bag. 


But wait, you know what's better than staging a dinner party to use up fruit?  


Brownies.

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

I've been lax about making bread.  November - January is so busy anyway, I haven't been making the time.  I very intentionally don't order bread through my buying club, because I'm planning on making it myself, and then I don't and everything is on a tortilla.   Just the other day I went to the supermarket for fruit and a couple of staples and I was drawn in by the bread and bought some sandwich rolls, since I knew I wasn't going to make them this week.  

Well, it's a new year. Let's make some bread.  Not just bread, either, let's make some sweet and warm and cinnamony bread. 

This recipe makes three loaves, which I think is perfect because you get one to freeze, one to give away and one for right now.   If you don't have three loaf pans, do cut down the recipe. 

Soft Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

There are four types of chocolate chip cookies:  Flat n' chewy, hard, soft, and icky.  Everyone has their cookie camp.  I make mine soft.  If you want to make them chewy, use the Tollhouse recipe.  Everyone else does.  It's a good cookie.  I'm all for it.  Also, other people like them hard.  I don't know what's wrong with those people.  And then some cookies are icky.  Like the hard "chocolate chip" cookies made of chalk dust that people get at Italian bakeries.  Ugh.


I was a Soft Batch kid, not a Chips Ahoy kid.  But I had some Soft Batch cookies a couple years back and there is some sort of acidic sweet chemical flavor that is no longer working for me. And they're dusty too.  I don't know what happened.


Either way, I've been working on a whole wheat recipe for a while.  I think whole wheat will only work with the thicker, softer cookies, because they're cakier to start with, and if you think too hard about it, muffin-ier.  So whole wheat works here.


Anyhow, I made you some cookies. 


I buy good chocolate chips, because I'm a spoiled girl.  I don't know, a couple years ago I had a [candy] bar and it was like wax and I asked myself what I was doing eating chocolate.  Sous Chef Brian had never been a chocolate fan, and I started buying "good" chocolate and all of a sudden he was all nomming on my secret stash, so I'm a convert, and I eat a lot less chocolate because I can afford a lot less chocolate.   So start with something you really like.  

Light Brioche-style Sandwich Rolls

I'm a sucker for rich breads.  Somehow, croissants, challah and brioche are excluded from my general disdain for pastry and such.  The line has to fall somewhere.  So, I got it in my head that I was going to make brioche.  I had a sandwich in mind.  Brioche is tender and barely sweet, and full of butter, eggs and milk.   So, I got to Googling.


Julia Child's recipe has 12 tablespoons of butter and four eggs...
King Arthur Flour is great for bread recipes.  But wow... ten tablespoons of butter and three eggs... 
Epicurious uses just eight tablespoons of butter...


All of a sudden it was time to re-think.  I'd make something brioche-ish (say that three times fast!).


So I Googled a bit harder.  There was a less-rich recipe that had gotten around a bit.  NYT had published a light brioche sandwich roll.  Smitten Kitchen recreated it.   This was it.  Not only did I have a *much* lighter recipe, but of course it was going to work, because it got passed around and there were pictures.  Any fool (read: me) can post a recipe up on the Internet, but that doesn't mean it's going to work.  I felt good about this one.


So we start like we start, with yeast foaming up.  

Oatmeal Cookie Fail

I say that I don't bake and then take it back when I make bread or crackers.  I can't be trusted with sugar.  That's the thing. Sugar doesn't work for me.  A pinch here or there, sure, but once I'm using a measuring cup, it's all out the window. 


But, I cook all the time, and that gives me this false confidence that I can just handle whatever comes my way in the kitchen.  


So maybe we're on the couch watching the Hulu at 9:30 PM and Sous Chef Brian asks if we have cookies.  No, we don't have cookies because I haven't made any.  I make a pretty mean chocolate chip (I know this is contradicting the above) and I tend to keep the dough in the freezer but there's none on hand.  Sometimes I keep the cookies in the freezer.  But no, nothing.  I offer him frozen blueberries.  


He sighs.  I jump into wife mode.  I will make cookies.  Then he says he doesn't want chocolate chip.  I start rattling off cookie types (none of which do I have a reliable, go-to recipe for).

Whole Wheat Honey Yogurt Biscuits

Well, that's a lot of words, isn't it?  But it's not complicated and totally worth it.  I'm a fan of biscuits.  When I'm driving, it's a serious effort to avoid pulling into some awful fast food place and just buying one.  Barring that sort of weakness (and I can clearly remember a time when I was on the road for work last year and I got one at a Roy Rogers), I don't experience biscuits that I don't make.  I don't know when I'd encounter a biscuit.  Restaurants I go to don't have them, and I'm not frequenting the sort of picnics and backyard parties that have fried chicken and homemade baked beans and biscuits (please invite me to your backyard picnic).  So when there's biscuits, it's because I made them.  Several months ago I made some cheddar biscuits, which were awesome, but this time I was looking for something half-healthy, and a bit less luxurious than the Red Lobster style.  

Garlic Naan

Yesterday, I posted the faux-tandoori chicken from last night's dinner, as well as the greens.  Today I'll put up the garlic naan and acknowledge that there was also rice. 


There are a ton of naan recipes floating around there, with wide-ranging ingredients and prep methods.  I read  a lot of them.  Some call for just flour and water, others are more complicated.  They're cooked in frying pans and on pizza stones, over open flames, etc.  The goal is fast high heat.

Raspberry Buttercream Frosting

In 87 posts, not once have I made dessert.  And it's not like I'm whipping up cakes in my free time and not posting about it.  I'm not dessert oriented.  A cookie here or there, and a piece of good chocolate now and again and I'm all set.  I don't care for pastry, and there's something that upsets me about glazed and cream-filled things.  Doughnuts make me queasy.

I'm not opposed to cake, but I don't seek it out.  I tend to make a cake a year, for Sous Chef Brian's birthday.*  It's not good or anything, but it's cake.  I did this six months ago, I'm all set for the year.

But I had reason to make a cake this weekend, and I went with some Internet recipe. I can't find the source, but I do have it written down.  Mine now.  But I'm not here to post how to make a cake.  I can BARELY make a cake.  

Whole Wheat Mac and Cheesy Crackers

OMG.

When I first saw the goldfish crackers recipe on Smitten Kitchen, I was like, "Yeah lady, that's great, but the rest of us have day jobs."  I mean really, who is going to sit around cutting out tiny crackers like this?  And I'm certainly not going to order a goldfish shaped cookie cutter to make it happen.  And then I read the cheddar cracker recipe at Home Cooking in Montana and read The Kitchn's recreation of it, and I started thinking I could do this.  Maybe it wasn't some precious ridiculous thing to make tiny delightful crackers.  And really, if they're that delightful...

Basic Sandwich Rolls

I'm pretty much set for bread.   I have pita in the freezer, along with two and a half loaves of the quinoa-flax bread, and some bread ends for croutons or breadcrumbs.  I'd like to totally avoid buying storebought breads.   But sometimes, you want to make something, maybe something quick, and there's this perfect bread for it and you don't have the 4-5 hours to pull it together.  Sandwich rolls are like this.  I don't want to eat a hamburger, or a sloppy joe on quinoa bread or on pita.   And I had big plans for Banh Mi.   So I needed to get some sandwich rolls going. 

Here's the thing though - I have mild plague.  Is it just a throat tickle, or an actual thing?  I don't know, but I'm not about to go touching on all the foods.   I have to be pretty sick to want to forego chewing and switch to soup when I'm sick, so the Banh Mi stayed on the agenda, but who would make the bread?  

Cue Sous Chef Brian.   In what I'm sure was a truly stressful feat, with me standing over his shoulder trying to convey the specific finger movements I use when kneading and shaping bread, my husband stepped in and took care of sandwich rolls.  My husband - the one I worry about when I leave on business trips, because he might not think to defrost something - the one who, when I had classes all day Saturdays, would tell me at 4 that he "didn't know what to eat," and thus had not.  He made the bread. 

Quinoa and Flax Bread

This is inspired by (Never home)maker's recipe and a bet from my mother.  Not a bet so much as a dare.

Me: "I'm going to make bread tomorrow, what kind should I make?"

Mom: "Rye." 

Me: "I don't have any rye flour, and I don't like rye bread." 

Mom: "What do you have, wheat?  I guess you're going to make wheat bread."  

And I listed off a few of the range of breads that I had the ingredients for, including quinoa.  And she said, "Quinoa, really?"  And I was all, "Challenge accepted."

Falafel Dinner - part two - whole wheat pita bread

I spend a lot of time talking about how I don't bake.   Part of it is my disinterest in most sweets (can we have french fries for dessert instead?) and the other part is the precision and the measuring.  I like to cook by smell.   And yet, I made pita bread.

This was part of this weekend's big time falafel dinner - yesterday I posted the falafel, and tomorrow I'll post the hummus, and the rest will come as it comes. 

I read through maybe 20 pita bread recipes to get here, and many said that you can't really make pita at home and that the traditional way required an oven hotter than home ovens were capable of getting.  I figured if it didn't work, I'd have some sort of flatbread that would be just fine, and if it REALLY didn't work, I had tortillas in the fridge.   Spoiler alert - it totally worked.

Thyme and Onion Wheat Crackers

Crackers have been a hot topic at my house lately.  My favorite whole wheat cracker seems to have been discontinued, and I've seen a variety of recipes in the past few months, but I barely bake, and I certainly don't make crackers - right?  Well, it turns out they're fairly easy to make.

I like a cracker that is robust enough to be eaten independently, but not so much that it might clash with my hummus or the ridiculous feta-spinach spread I've been into lately, or whatever other application I might want to use it for.  This cracker does that.   I also want a cracker to be made of real food - this cracker does that too.

It's based on a number of recipes that have floated by lately, plus enough savory flavor to stand on its own, with some extra wholesome mixed in.    

Banana Flax Pancakes

 

Brian is a pancake fan.  I've mentioned that I'm not much of a baker, and I consider pancakes to be part of baking.  My pancakes were a running joke for a while.  I couldn't even do it with Bisquick.  When we were young we live in a house with a million people and I remember weekend after weekend trying to prove I could do this and failing.  In front of a crowd.  

I swear, once we bought our own house, I learned how to measure and mix.  Not that I like it, of course I prefer to add a dash of this and a bit of that and see what happens, but once there's baking powder involved, I'm not qualified to mess around with the ingredients.  So now, occasionally, I make pancakes.

Collards and Beans and Rice and Such

A warning for those of you who need it - bacon ahead.


We've discussed my disinterest in recipes - spoiler alert - no recipe today.  How long do I simmer it?  Until you're done with that other thing you're doing.  Seriously.  How much onion do I add?  I don't know, how much onion do you have handy?


That's how I cook most things.   As is convenient.  Baking is different and I don't do much of it.   The lack of planning and disdain for mise en place does get in the way sometimes, but I can't imagine I'm the only one who cooks up a half-crappy dinner now and again.   Do I want to stress myself out to do that slightly less often?  Probably not.


So dinner is as it comes together.  Oh, we have some more of that?  Add it in. 

Pulled Chicken on Cheddar Biscuits

I'm new to the blogging thing, and along with it, the twittering thing.  Seriously, I feel like somebody's Grandma, new to the internets.   But through the twittering thing, because we both use office supplies in the kitchen, I found On Blank.  I actually just looked at it for real for the first time yesterday, and it's awesome.   It's about food made of food, and about freezing things.  It looks like we have a lot in common, but she's more hardcore than I am - like, she goes on about how it's not a big deal to make your own bread.  (um, it IS a big deal.  Sure we should do it, but it's a thing.  It takes time.  You do it wrong, and you've lost all that time and have no bread.)   But anyhow, her blog looks awesome, and so when looking for dinner ideas today, I came across her herb and cheese biscuits.