My constructive use of a Sunday night

This was the scene in my house tonight when I finally cracked open Good to the Grain in hopes of finding a muffin recipe that would relieve me of my abundance of blueberries. I am trying gallantly to work through the pounds of frozen blueberries that I picked along with my fiance's family in northern Michigan. At the time I was adamant that I bring home enough berries to last me through winter which, to me, meant frantically dumping my purse for additional blueberry receptacles. It was a scene that I think finally drove home to the fam what kind of maniac I can be about certain things.

In the best possible way, of course!

The recipe is found in the book and I mostly did not stray. Lacking butter and milk I used vegetable oil and powdered milk, respectively. Not to mention I made my own oat flour but sending some quick cook oats through the blender and using blueberries instead of peaches and ginger.

These muffins are amazing. I keep reading about how great the recipes from this book are, and keep thinking "yeah right". Yet here I am extolling the goodness of this book and the wheaty, oaty, sweet and amazing muffins it just produced for me.

OH! And I further strayed by topping them with slivered almonds. Which was genius and I highly recommend it. So: thank you Kim Boyce! You've just helped me secure awesome and healthy breakfast for my household for this week.

Who doesn't like brussel sprouts?

I love them!!!!! And luckily for me, I live with another person who loves them too. And to put the cherry on top of the ice cream, brussel sprouts are actually a vegetable I can find at my local grocery store in-the-middle-of-nowhere. For me, boiling and then sprinkling with salt and pepper will suffice in tempting me to consume TOO many of these sprouts, but because I was making macaroni and cheese for the first time from scratch, I had to dress the brussel sprouts accordingly. Check it out...
Dressed-up Brussel Sprouts

1/2 pound brussel sprouts
1 T olive oil
2 garlic cloves, minced/smashed/pressed
1/3 cup pecans, chopped
Kosher salt and pepper to taste
Squeeze of lemon


1) Bring pot of water to boil. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

2) Prepare ice bath for after boiling brussel sprouts. Cut the flat end off the brussel sprouts. Halve the sprouts, then slice the halves into small chunks. Drop into boiling water. Boil for 2 minutes. Drain and immediately drop into ice bath to stop boiling and shock green. Drain brussel sprouts.

3) In medium bowl, mix brussel sprouts with 2 T olive oil, 2 smashed garlic cloves, pecans, and 1/4 t kosher salt and 1/8 t black pepper or to taste. Roast until tender, 10-15 minutes. Squeeze a bit of lemon over the top and add salt if needed. Stir and serve.

Sourdough English Muffins

I've been on the quest for the perfect english muffin recipe for about a year now. My dad is always asking my mom to make them from scratch, and this has been incentive to find the best, most pocketed muffin a recipe can produce. I've gone through about 5 different versions, and I'm learning that Thomas and Bays had a talent for making muffins with nooks and crannies, and that it is not an easy achievement. At least in my failures to make nooks and crannies, I tend to end up with something still tasty but more like an Australian toaster muffin.

Anyway, I bought Sourdough Starter about a month ago and have been trying all sorts of recipes with it, including pizza dough (http://www.breadtopia.com), a modified version of Finnish bread (Bread Alone: Bold Fresh Loaves from Your Own Hands), and now english muffins (http://www.wildyeastblog.com/2007/09/11/sourdough-english-muffins/). Here's what I did...Sourdough English Muffins (from wildyeastblog.com)

Sponge Ingredients:
110 g sourdough starter
160 g all-purpose unbleached flour
100 g whole wheat flour
276 g milk

Final Dough Ingredients:
75 g all-purpose unbleached flour, plus more as needed for mixing
3/4 t salt
1 t baking soda
1.5 t honey
all of the sponge

1) In medium bowl, mix the sponge ingredients until just combined. Cover and let rest for 8 hours.

2) Add the final dough ingredients in stand mixer and mix roughly to combine. Let mixer go on low for 7-8 minutes, adding flour as needed. Note: this is where my mistake happened. I think I should have continued to add flour until a firmer dough occurred. Because I had read "to resist the urge to add more flour," my dough was super sticky and unmanageable, and I ended up letting it rest in this wet state, instead of forming into dough balls as instructed in the wildyeastblog. My theory is that if the dough is able to rest in the dough ball form, it will likely form more nooks and crannies during this rising period, so I would even suggest flattening the dough balls into english muffin-like discs before this last rise. Cover and allow dough to rest 45-60 minutes.

3) Lightly oil frying pan or griddle over med-low heat. I tried to use muffin rings (Fox Run Set of Four English Muffin Rings) on the first batch because my dough was so soft and sticky. This was unsuccessful, so I then oiled my hands to form balls, which I flattened. I then covered the frying pan with a cookie sheet to get a baking effect. Allow to cook for 7-9 minutes, flipping periodically until lightly browned and cooked through (firm to touch).

The end result tasted good, but once again, more like an Australian toaster muffin than an English muffin. In any case, I will be trying this recipe again and applying what I've learned this first go around. Stay tuned for an update on the outcome of my next attempt.

The day after Pizza Hut...

Where I live (aka the-middle-of-nowhere), the nearest Pizza Hut is an hour away. The nearest movie theater is an hour away. The nearest Wal-Mart is an hour away. Not the worst thing in the world, especially if you don't want to support big box stores and all that comes with them. But John and I do like to get our Pizza Hut fix, which we did yesterday, and today we followed with our own healthy version, Pita Hut! Sorry, that's terrible, and I wish I could say it wasn't my idea.

In the quest to use up hummus and to buy feta cheese, I made pitas for the first time. I followed the recipe found here. My only changes were to halve the recipe and use 1/2 whole wheat flour and 1/2 all-purpose. I was very pleased with how they puffed up, but next time I need to get them out of the oven a wee bit sooner. Over all, not bad for my first attempt.

And then we filled them with chopped tomatoes, kalamata olives, artichoke hearts, feta, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and lemon juice. Deeeeelious!

Next year, I'm heading to the store...

By Susan

I realized this weekend why some food is simply bought at the store and not made-from-scratch at home.

Saturday was National Corn Chip Day. No, not my favorite chip, but I forgot about this in my excitement to try to recreate the ultimate corn chip, the Frito (http://www.fritolay.com/our-snacks/fritos.html). Step one, google "corn chip recipe." In the results, I found what looked like a doable, solid and very Frito-like corn chip recipe. Yay!!! Got the ingredients together; couldn't believe I had them all on-hand. Was thinking, it was a sure sign of good things to come. So, here they are just before I popped them in the oven, and this is pretty much what they looked like when they came out of the oven. After one little nibble, straight into the trash. Not good.

Luckily, Sunday was National Croissant Day. No better time or recipe than chocolate croissants to try to redeem myself from the disaster of National Corn Chip Day. Perfect, I have a cook book with just the recipe. Of course, I didn't really read through the recipe before heading to the store for all the important ingredients, aka BUTTER. Really wish now that I was still ignorant to just how much butter is in a croissant but oh well. Got home at 11 a.m. and dove right into the mixing.....


Butter "massaging." Yes, that is 3 whole sticks of butter.


Folding the butter from pic 2 into the butter dough from pic 1.....


Then rolling and folding and chilling and rolling and folding and chilling the butter/dough block again and again and again.....


Hours later (6 to be exact), I was finally able to roll out the final dough layer, cut them, fill them with chocolate, and fold them up to be baked.....

Here they are. Look delicious, right?

WRONG! After all that, they were certainly edible, but seriously, for all the work, I expected amazing. End result, next time I'm going to get on the internet and buy these (http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/chocolate-croissant/?pkey=e%7Ccroissant%7C8%7Cbest%7C0%7C1%7C24%7C%7C3&cm_src=PRODUCTSEARCHNoFacet-_-NoFacet-_-Feature_Recipe_Rule-_-) Williams-Sonoma's chocolate croissants, or run to the store and buy these (http://www.fritolay.com/our-snacks/fritos-chili-cheese-corn-chips.html) Frito's chili cheese fritos. Sometimes it's best just to let someone else do the work for you.