eskay

Cookies! Fruity oatmeal cookies. I had mentioned to a friend that I had a hankering to make oatmeal cookies, and in short order I found myself with a recipe that looked promising. I added a bunch of different kinds of dried fruit (cranberries, cherries, apples, apricots) that I had lying around, and I think they turned out pretty well.

Thanks, anna and andie. Much less confused now

I shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a stove in the mornings.....I always put milk&water on to heat for oatmeal, and stick the lid on so it heats faster. Then I turn away to wash a dish or so and next thing I know the pot is BOILING OVER OH NO STOP IT QUICK. Yeah. And really boiling over too, you lose like 1/3 of the liquid into the stove The really stupid thing is that I've done this exact same thing (even down to washing dishes) like 4 or 5 times in the last month or two. Oh, this morning's breakfast was oatmeal with dried cherries. I switched it up a little, instead of brown sugar I added honey. I think I prefer the brown sugar, but I might give honey another try.

Whats the difference between a crock pot and a slow cooker? I thought they were the same thing...

for non pareil: 'Nohn pah-ray' is the closest I can think of that, but it's a little like millefeuille in that the eil and euille have a slight 'ee' sound at the end (it's pretty faint though). I think the technical term is a diphthong--a combination of two vowel sounds to produce a new one. An example in english is 'loin' If you say 'loh-een' a little quicker and mush the vowels together you get the 'oi' sound. So non pareil is sort of like 'nohn pah-rayee' except you don't really pronounce the ee as much as just add the flavour of it at the end. I hope that helped out a bit, sorry if it didn't--this is hard to do in just text! dragée or dragee is pronounced drag-ay

I occasionally seperate my list into store areas, but most of the time it's short enough that I don't need to. That said, I'm horrible about forgetting to buy things, even sometimes when it's on the list.

I like them a little riper than most people here--just before they start getting black spots is perfect for me. But it's not a huge big deal to me. I can't stand really truly underripe bananas, but any point after that is probably ok. I like them that much And if they're too ripe, into baked goods they go! I love bananas.

Freezing will destroy the texture. They're perfectly fine for cooking (and in fact it makes it really easy to get the skins off), but don't plan to eat them raw or in a salad.

I measure flour by volume

More muffins! I made acorn squash ravioli last week and had some roasted squash puree left over, it was so delicious and sweet, and emboldened by my recent success in baking with beets, decided to make squash muffins Well, technically they're squash, maple, and walnut muffins, but the maple was rather overlaid by me going pretty overboard with the spices They're delicious though, super tender and moist. They taste somewhat similar to pumpkin pie, which makes sense. Here's the amounts I used. I don't know how useful it will be to anyone who doesn't have random squash lying around but hey you never know. It came out a little short of batter, I was only able to make 10 muffins. Values are semi approximate. dry: 1-1/2 cups + 1 TBS flour (I used whole wheat) 1/2 tsp baking powder 1/2 tsp baking soda 1/2 tsp salt 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves 1/4 teaspoon allspice freshly grated nutmeg wet: 1/2 cup dark brown sugar 1/4 cup maple syrup 1 cup pureed squash 1/4 cup vegetable oil etc: 1/2 cup walnut pieces 350 degrees Fahrenheit, 30 minutes, but I don't trust my oven further than I can throw it. blurry webcam photo:

Blurry picture of this morning's breakfast...ham, egg, pita bread, and grocery store strawberries

I'm going to add my voice to the people who really enjoy grocery shopping. Sometimes it's even the best part of my day, which is sad in so many ways My shopping habits change pretty drastically every 4 months -- my school has a co-op thing which means I alternate terms of classes with terms working in the industry. When I'm at school, grocery shopping tends to be very irregular, and I rarely get to the farmer's market (although I'm going this morning..yay). But I find when I start work I settle pretty quickly into some sort of routine, whether it's a weekly grocery shopping trip on saturday mornings (in the winter), or weekly farmer's market trips, with random supermarket trips to fill in the holes (in the summer). I don't do costco...no way I'd be able to eat it all, and I can't keep anything for longer than a few months anyway (see above )

Please do! ← You asked for it: This is breakfast, most mornings (although there's usually fruit in it). Looks pretty unappetizing, but tastes good, and gets me through my morning classes

I made Pille's beet cake! Well, sort of. Altered the recipe a little: halved it, whole wheat flour, extra ginger, (powdered and crystallized), added a little nutmeg (my favourite spice lately) and some milk when it looked too dry. And I kind of eyeballed the amount of beet to use. But it turned out really well!

I would so buy a combination crock pot/deep fryer/rice cooker/pressure cooker (those are really the only functions I care about really...) That is, as long as all the functions worked relatively well

Sorry to say I haven't, but next time I'm making pastry I will...that may not be for a while though, I'm sort of pied-out

I'll step up. Thanksgiving here this weekend and that means apple (and pumpkin, but that's another bakeoff ) pie. Apologies for the webcam pictures, I'm at my parents' house for the weekend and thus cameraless. What's left of what I'm told was a half bushel (but it seemed more than that... ) bag of cortland apples after...I think 5 apple pies were baked yesterday. Mine today makes 6. I also added a couple McIntosh apples for flavour, but they don't stand up to baking the way I'd prefer. One thing I love about pies is you can play pretty fast and loose with the filling. I didn't measure anything, which was refreshing after messing around with the pastry. I like mine heavy on the spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) and light on on the (brown) sugar. Some flour too, because there was a lot of juice. I used the Cook's Illustrated liquored-up pie crust recipe for my crust. Can't reccommend it enough. Easy to work with and it makes the best pie crust I've ever baked (which, mind you, isn't saying a lot but it is good.) And I can attest to the fact that it turns out just as well if you mix it by hand. I swirled some egg white in the bottom of the crust to try and seal it against the apples, I have no idea if that makes much of a difference but I was brushing the top with egg white anyway so why not. The finished pie. Sorry, no inside shots as I brought it to my grandparents' house, but rest assured it was very very good.

Rapeseed and canola are the same thing. Well, sort of. Canola is a variety of rapeseed low in erucic acid, which is apparently mildly toxic. Wooo. It's also canadian More info on wikipedia.

Don't forget the awesomeness that even a simple poached pear can be. I found a variety of pear I'd never seen before in the store a couple weeks ago (searched around but I've forgotten the name and couldn't find it anywhere....they were the largest pears I've ever seen, the 'narrow part' in particular was as long as the 'wide part' on most of them. Green and brown/red in colour.) so I bought one and poached it in a ginger syrup, served with vanilla ice cream. mmmmm. Huge bang for your buck (time wise and I suppose monetarily), in my opinion

BekkiM you are an inspiration. I bow to your mad excelorganizational skills. Ok, I scrounged around and came up with a few bits a pieces. On the top we have some sort of apple baking recipe...I think it might be the apple cake from Pille's foodblog but I'm not sure. Didn't end up making it though, my apples went into pies. Then there's a couple of notes from my bread baking experiments (although oddly not the latest one, I think that one's been thrown out). Note the temperature values--was having issues judging when things (in general) were done so I bought an instant read thermometer (which isn't all that instant...what the heck, really). Then in the lower right there is a list of stuff I wanted to cook this week, I got it all done except I was supposed to make squash ravioli tonight, but I stayed late at school to work on an assignment instead. I apologize for the chicken scratch that is my writing The last one is just a grocery list. I was bored so I drew little pictures of the different things beside the names. Reproduced below cause it's hard to read: onion garlic eggs milk mushrooms cheese ? parmesan olives spinach (crossed out because I changed my mind about getting it) yogurt ham wonton wrappers

Alton Brown did a show trying to solve the turkey-stuffing dilemma, I think the method they used was to heat the stuffing before it went into the turkey so that it would hit the final temp at the same time as the turkey. Ah here, found the recipe. That said, I suppose it's the technique that's the important part.

I should take a picture of my morning oatmeal sometime, the cinnamon (or something) makes it a kind of brownish grey colour, and oatmeal isn't that attractive to begin with

I used the recipe off the Cook's Illustrated site -- here. I used plain vodka, 2 TBS (along with the 2 TBS of water) except I doubled the batch so it was 4 of each I didn't notice it tasting like anything weird. EDIT: also, I should add the usually, the crust isn't my favourite part of a pie, I like the filling better, but I was licking up the crumbs from this.

I keep a couple pads of postit notes on my desk. Lists go on those--grocery lists, todo lists, lists of things I want to cook, recipe scraps copied from the internet. These accumulate on my desk and in my pockets until I throw them out I envy all you people with notebooks and stuff, I could never keep that going. And I have a sneaking suspicioun it's going to come around to bite me in the rear end when I try and find that recipe for that thing I made 6 months ago...for now there are so many different things I want to try that I rarely make anything reasonably complicated more than once.

I found my camera cord! Ok, so here's the apple honey muffins: As you can see, they're pretty moist, but I thought there was too much apple in them (2 cups for 12 muffins!) which made them fall apart a bit They were good enough for lunches though, there's only one left. I also made some sort of experimental chocolate ginger muffins, which turned out well, I think. No pictures cause they're ugly, but I started with an oatmeal muffin recipe (I like the texture that oatmeal gives, since I wasn't adding any fruit or anything for texture variation), reduced the flour just a bit, and added cocoa, powdered ginger, and chopped up candied ginger. I really liked the flavour combination, but I thought they could have used a little more sugar. I wasn't going for very sweet, but I think I overdid it. Either way, I'd make them again. Now I just have to finish eating these so I can make more