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 Rice Pudding

Sure, I try to write about using the fresh, seasonal, local produce bounty to create dinner.  But sometimes, it's about upcycling.

I don't make white rice, but I do sometimes acquire white rice.  Sometimes it comes along with General Tso's Tofu.  And it sits in the fridge.  Sometimes I have the common sense to freeze it and make fried rice with it later, other times it sits until we have to give it the old sniff-n-toss.

Let's face it, not every meal is a home-cooked treasure.  But just like I add spinach or chard to my leftover Chicken Tikka Masala to stretch my takeout into a three day experience, cooked takeout white rice can be turned into a creamy dessert that pretty much comes free with your delivery meal.  Recycled rice = instant dessert. 

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.  

Orange Monkey Bread

If you've been playing Saturday's Mouse: The Home Game for any amount of time, you know I don't make desserts.  It's not something I'm interested in and not something I'm good at.  I rarely want dessert.  And that's not some sort of personal restraint thing, I don't have any personal restraint, so I just eat a lot of cheese instead of sweets.  I break even.  

It's hard to cook things you don't care much about.  So dessert just isn't a thing. 

But as I perused the interwebs and the cooking shows and the food magazines over the past year or so, I kept seeing monkey bread.  I've never eaten monkey bread, and I've never seen it in person, but it's been everywhere lately and I'd like to think that the issue is not that I'm following a trend, just that I needed to try this. As soon as possible. 

I read 47 recipes for monkey bread.  Here's the gist: make white bread.  Roll it in balls.  Sugar and butter. Bake.

Most of the recipes I read used canned biscuits, but that's not my style and Cooking Light made their own bread so I made a bread a lot like their bread too.  They also used a cream cheese glaze and that's also not my style, so I just went with the bread. I didn't do it word-for-word, but it was close.  Their bread had OJ in it, and I wanted to take that nine steps further, so I added orange zest and orange extract and orange liqueur (a word I can't spell without Googling). 

Pancakes and the magic of home cooking

I've said before that pizza was the start of our personal cook-at-home revolution, and that's pretty true.  Once we realized we could make our own pizza, making our own [fill-in-the-blank] wasn't far behind.  If pizza was part of the solution, then pancakes were the problem.

A million years ago, pancakes were the big joke, because I couldn't successfully operate a box of Bisquick. There was a distinct tone of: "Rose can't even make pancakes," around here. I said it too, all the time.  

And even once I felt like I could handle myself in the kitchen, once I was making all my own salad dressing and nearly all my own bread, I still wasn't trying to make typical pancakes.  I loaded them up with flax and wheat germ and said, "No, they're not supposed to be soft and light, they're different from those pancakes." 

Scrambled Eggs and Arugula - what to do with all the veg?

Remember how I had all those eggs?  Also arugula?

Peppery arugula is great in eggs. 

In the past, I've listed off the sorts of things we like to do to use up farmshare veg.  This isn't a farmshare, but I still like to look into the fridge once a week and figure out what has to get used up.  Some of that gets frozen, given away, packed into a salad, and some of it we figure out how to eat quickly. 

As CSA season starts to get close, let's talk about what to do with fridge miscellany (this list is for Sarah, who's doing her first share this year, and for all of us who have just a month or two until we're overwhelmed with produce):

Quesadillas (like this, or this)

Pizza (like this, or this, or this, or any of these)

Stir Fry (like this, or this, or this)

Pasta (for anything but potatoes, in my mind.  Like this or this, or really, go all out and do this)

and of course, eggs, like this or this, or hey, just make up some scrambled eggs. 

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. 

Same Dinner Different Day: Ricotta Quiche Muffins

Ricotta quiche muffins?  Seriously, I had a hard time figuring out a name for this that made even that much sense.  It's muffin shaped, and has a lot of ricotta, and it's sort of the texture of quiche.   You're welcome to call it whatever you want. 


A few days ago I made the eggplant rollatini for an event.  Only I misjudged in the doubling/tripling, and ended up with way more ricotta and swiss chard than I needed.  Nearly two cups more.   It's about a cup of ricotta, a quarter cup of mozzarella, a half cup of swiss chard and a bit of black pepper. 

Thoughts on Strata and Doing it Right

*


I wasn't planning to tell you about Sunday dinner this week.  We just had some friends over for a casual meal, and the plan was to cook pretty simple foods and just have a nice time.  The half-vegan was originally planning on coming, and so the menu was set to include some foods she could eat.  We made up the buffalo seitan, and a kale salad, and I made some of David Lebovitz's blue cheese dressing,** and wanted to make another entree.  And I had all those farmshare eggs.  And I wanted to prep in advance as much as possible. 


Oh yeah, strata.   Sure, it's not for the half-vegan, but she didn't come anyway so we were able to use cheese.  So, like I said, I wanted to prep in advance.  Classic strata is made the night before, but last time I made strata I made it  a few hours in advance and it came out fine.  Classic strata is made with a ton of eggs, but last time I used just three eggs and two whites and it came out fine.  


So, I wasn't going to tell you about Sunday dinner this week, which totally confused MSNDG.  Midway through prep, she asked where the camera was.   She knows what cooking in my house usually looks like.  But I was all, "Oh, I've written about all this before, nothing special here."  

Challah French Toast

Last week we went to Trader Joe's and we were debating buying some bread.  I haven't made bread for a while* - first it was hot out, and then I just didn't do it.  I thought I was done with storebought bread, but it's frustrating not having bread, so we went and looked at the breads and all of a sudden I was like, "OMG, Challah!"  


I've never owned challah** and never made it.  The last time I had it was at a naming ceremony for my friend's second kid, and he's on his third now.  Challah has historically been something I've encountered at celebrations, at other people's houses.   We grew up in a place of challah and good bagels.  We don't have good bagels here.  


So I don't know why, in that moment, it seemed to make sense to buy this rich, eggy bread that's closer to the texture of a croissant than the whole wheat bread I make, but it sounded awesome.  And it was. 


But that's a big loaf, and we really don't eat that much bread.  So it served all of our carb needs for the week.   Having Indian food?  Don't make naan, bust out the challah.  PBJ?  Challah.  Breakfast at work?  Pack a thick slice of challah.  BLT?  Feels sacrilegious on challah, but sure is delicious.  Need a snack?  Holla Challah. 


And still, after a week there was a good amount left, and this bread wasn't going to go to waste.  But we all know what challah is best at, right?  French toast.   It's legendary.  

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.  

Summer Squash Frittata

I had a lot of squash, and I had a lot of eggs.  So I used the oven.  And it was worth it.


I may be stretching the word frittata here, but "egg casserole" sounds fairly disgusting.  Like something you'd see on The Gallery of Regrettable Food. 


The thing with me and "frittata" is that I don't have a skillet that goes into the oven.  Basic frittata is eggs with food in it, on the stove til set on the bottom, then into the oven.  When I say, "I made frittata," I either mean, "I made a big omelete," or what you see here.  Eggs, veg, cheese, oven. 

Lighter, Quicker Strata with Asparagus and Bacon

When Sous Chef Brian came home and asked what we were having, I said, "asparagus strata."  He said, "Erik Estrada?" I should note that I'm far too young to have watched CHiPs, but Sous Chef Brian is not.  Also, I know Erik Estrada from Sea Lab 2021, which was, for a very intense two-week span nearly 10 years ago, my favorite show.    I enunciated more clearly.  "Asparagus Strata."  He looked at me like a confused animal, which makes sense.  He doesn't get out to a lot of brunches or baby showers, and I had no clue what strata was before I started making it.


I had a vegetable strata at DiBruno Brothers about six months ago.  I didn't know what it was, but it looked pretty and it was vegetables.  It was tall, and had many layers, and it was delicious.  So this week I started looking for recipes.   I was surprised it was a brunch food, I would have called it "casserole" when I had it and been done with that. 


When I started researching recipes, I was shocked at how much egg it contained.   Over and again I saw easy-to-measure recipes that called for 12 ounces of cheese, 12 slices of bread and 12 eggs. 


I can't do that.  I can't put 12 eggs into dinner.  I can't halve it and put 6 eggs into dinner.  It just doesn't feel right.   I can, however, put less egg in, especially in order to justify bacon.  Also, these recipes called for sitting overnight, and that's not my thing.  And so lighter, quicker strata happened.

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.

Whole Wheat Banana Bread

Banana bread.  I'm posting this for Michelle, since she's getting tired of all the meat.

I think there are two basic styles of banana bread: breakfasty and desserty. This is breakfasty. It's sweet, but not supersweet, and it's hearty and a little heavy. It's a meal.

Oven Home Fries

I can't make breakfast first thing in the morning.  I want to eat within an hour of waking up, but I can't cook then.  So I do other things, but that means that when I'm hungry, breakfast isn't ready.  This is why I never make crepes anymore.  The idea of mixing up ingredients while I'm still groggy, letting the batter sit for an hour and then cooking them doesn't work for me.  So during the week, breakfast is oatmeal, and on weekends we typically have eggs. 

But you know what's great with eggs? Home fries.  But the bitch about home fries is the same thing as with crepes.  They're not ready now.