You know it's a good meal when...

...you eat it twice in as many days. Exhibit A: hard-boiled eggs, and cut veggies with hummus. It turns out I like hummus; who knew? It's been my go-to lunch the past couple of days. One of the nicest things about: once you start the egg-boiling process, you usually have to wait about 20 minutes to eat, but this gives you something to do. Peel and chop the veggies, dip them in hummus and munch away until the timer goes.

Exhibit B: Shepherd's pie. This was another surprise. I always hated it growing up and until I got this recipe from my friend Erin, I had never made it before. Something about dry ground beef topped with mashed potatoes never appealed to me. Erin adds corn and BBQ sauce to the beef, and it makes such a difference! My mom told me that I would come to love shepherd's pie because it's easy, fast and hearty fare. I first made it the weeks my in-laws arrived (they are gone now, and we miss them terribly), and then again last night. Hubby and I ate it all up by lunchtime today.

[Not a meal, not even a shepherd, but very cute]

Make your own: it's highly adaptable, although (sorry) short on instructions!

1 lb ground beef
1 small onion, chopped
1 cup BBQ sauce
1 cup corn, cooked
4 potatoes or so
milk
butter

Preheat oven to 375
Brown the ground beef, add onions and soften.
Stir in BBQ sauce and cooked corn. Pour mixture into casserole dish.
Boil potatoes for about 20 minutes; drain, mash, and add milk and butter to desired consistency. Spread potatoes on top of beef mixture.
Bake for 30 minutes or so.

This freezes very well, but if you go this route be prepared for a longer cooking time: about 2 hours.

Post-script to my last entry: we rounded out the day by contracting a nasty stomach flu bug that made its way through all five adults in the house, although the girls were spared. Not the best end to the in-laws' visit. However, we're very grateful that they were there to help with the girls when we were too weak to get out of bed. Also not my favourite way to lose the remaining baby weight, but then neither was cutting out lactose.

[Hey, look who's almost 4 months old!]

A granola and beans kind of day

Another day with simple goals: making granola bars (not for Christmas, it's just sensible to keep them on hand at all times) and trying out a slow-cooker recipe for baked beans. And can I just say, the internet is an amazing thing! I didn't have bacon, so I couldn't make traditional Boston baked beans, and when I realized I didn't have tomato paste, I checked for an alternative. The first item that came up in the search bar as I was typing in tomato paste? Tomato paste substitute. I reduced a can of tomato sauce and used that. The granola bars are cooled and cut, and the beans have another couple of hours to simmer. I'm interested to see how they turn out; I think we'll have them on baked potatoes, or with eggs and toast.

While all this kitchen business was taking place, D was mainly entertaining herself. Now, a quiet toddler generally means one of two things: either something disastrous is taking place, or something hilarious is taking place. Fortunately for me and my sanity, it happened to be the latter in this instance. D had just asked me to take off her nightdress, and she proceeded to remove her matching "night-pants"on her own. Here's what wandered into the kitchen to greet me:



Yes, she dressed her own self in fleece monkey pyjamas from the dirty laundry hamper. Here's a transcription for those of you who don't speak D's particular dialect of toddler.

Me: Daphne, what did you just do?
D: I put them on.
Me: What did you put on?
D: This on, and this on.
Me: And what are those?
D: Pyjama pants, and my night shirt and my night pants.
Me: Very good. It's too bad they were from the dirty pile, right?
D: They're not dirty.
Me: They sort of are, because you already wore them this week. But that's okay, you look really good.
D: Can you pull this-
Me: Can you say "Thanks, Auntie Morgan"?
D: Tanks, Auntie Mogan!

In case you're interested, here's my granola bar recipe, adapted from my good friend Mrs. Mac.

2 1/2 cups oats (rolled or quick)
2 cups other grains (spelt flakes, wheat germ, oat bran, ground flax)
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups mix of chocolate chips, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, coconut
2/3 cup melted margarine
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup molasses
1/3 cup peanut butter (skip this in case of allergies, and add more honey or molasses)
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Mix dry ingredients together. Add wet ingredients.
Grease a rimmed cookie sheet, spread out granola mixture and pat firmly with a spatula. Bake for 20 minutes, remove and pat down with spatula again. While bars are still hot, cut them with a pizza roller, then pat down the messy edges with spatula again. Cool completely, and remove from sheet.

I keep mine in a cookie tin, separating the layers of granola bars with parchment paper so they don't all get stuck. These make a great afternoon snack with a cup of tea!

A hearty meal for early fall

There's this recipe I had been meaning to ask my mom for, and I kept forgetting. It's for a simple chicken dish that we had growing up. This summer, a couple of my cousins put together a cookbook of family recipes for another cousin who got married, and I found the chicken recipe in there! One of my aunts had submitted it, so it's obviously something my grandma served to my mom and her sisters when they were growing up. Chicken thighs were on sale this week (6.50$ for ten!), so I decided to give it a go, seeing as all the other ingredients were also on hand. I used a pack of bone-in, skin-on, which is why they were so cheap; next time I'd opt for boneless skinless to avoid the time-consuming process of de-boning the thighs, although I'm using them to make stock. Also, instead of serving it with rice, we had mashed potatoes.

Chicken Thigh Sauté

2 lbs of chicken thighs
2 Tbsp flour
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
1 Tbsp oil
1 medium onion, chopped (in the food processor if you have picky eaters)
5 large carrots, sliced (originally called for two, but we love carrots)
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 cup hot water (I doubled it because I like the broth)

Stir together flour, salt, pepper, and thyme. Dredge thighs in flour mixture until lightly coated.

Heat oil in frying pan over medium heat; cook thighs for about 5 minutes per side, until golden brown.

Add onion and carrots to frying pan and cook for another 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add soy sauce and hot water, and stir.

Simmer for 15-20 minutes.

Serve with rice or mashed potatoes. Steamed broccoli or green beans would also make great sides, if you have them on hand.

Amazing rhubarb recipe

Last week, I picked my first rhubarb crop of the year. I used 2/3 of it to make a pie (that night) which was finished within about 24 hours. (I had help- guests, not Hubby and D). The remaining third languished in the fridge until today, when it was transformed into the greatest homemade muffins I believe I've ever had. I still think pie is the best way to showcase rhubarb (even if you cut it with strawberries), but if you only have a few stalks, this is a close second. Do yourself a favour and check out the recipe. I made it this morning with two toddlers playing at my feet.

Bread, soup, and Jane Austen

It's a cold, rainy day, so with no hope of going to the park, we've settled into a nice day inside. I've made two kinds of soup: a cheese vegetable soup for lunch, and a roast tomato soup for dinner. The latter is from a cookbook I got for Christmas from my mother- and sister-in-law, and although it's Australian, I think it will translate well. I had an amazing homemade tomato soup this weekend at a wedding, and I'm hoping this one will be comparable.


I'm also making bread today, in a further effort to keep our grocery budget down. I calculated ages ago that, based on ingredients, it costs me 41 cents to make a loaf of bread, whereas to buy the cheapest one would be 1.99$. When you consider that we go through a loaf of bread a week, if I were to make a batch of bread twice a month, that would work out to 1.64$. To buy the equivalent in loaves would cost 7.96$, so 6.32$ more. If I made bread for a year, I'd save just over 75$. Also, I decide exactly what goes into my bread, and it would be made without preservatives. I'm trying out a new whole wheat recipe that I found, of all places, in the manual for my 5-year-old Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The dough hook attachment means no kneading, and that suits me for the moment.


The mood of the weather was matched by one of my favourite movies, which is on Global's website this week: Sense and Sensibility! I check the video section of their site every now and then, and they put up 6 or 7 movies at a time. It's a great free activity, with an admittedly limited selection. And they do recycle the ones they choose to play. I think this is the second or third time Sense and Sensibility has been on. The ending always gets me: "so you are... not married?" "My heart is, and always will be, yours." Baby D sat through a fair amount of the movie with me, enthusiastically pointing out any horses she saw and waving when Hugh Grant was onscreen.

Stew for a winter's night

If I were Gordon Lightfoot, I would write a song about it. If you're in the mood for beef stew, this is the one to make. It was the one I had growing up, usually in the winter. It was so good that I almost feel bad for you if your childhood didn't include a similar version (sorry, vegetarians). As a result, I have no time for any other beef stew, especially flavourless or watery ones. You need a bunch of cheap ingredients, a crock pot, and about 8 hours. Make that 10.

Oil or shortening
Stewing beef
8 cups water
4 packets beef bouillon
1 packet onion soup mix
2 cups chopped potatoes
2 cups chopped carrots
1 cup peas
1/2 cup flour

Heat the oil or melt the shortening in a pan over medium heat. Add the stewing beef and lightly brown it, turning with tongs to make sure all sides are browned. Transfer to crock pot, leaving fat in pan. Add 4 cups of the water, the bouillon, and the onion soup mix. Cover and cook on high for 6 hours.
Peel and chop carrots; scrub and chop potatoes; add carrots and potatoes to crock pot, along with 4 more cups water. Cook on high for 2 more hours
Using a ladle or turkey baster, draw out 2 cups of the stew broth. Add to a bowl with 1/2 cup of flour, and whisk until smooth. Pour into crock pot. Cook another hour or two until broth has thickened to a gravy-like texture.

Serve with bread.


I polished off my share of the stew too fast to take a picture, so I quickly called Hubby and asked if he could photograph whatever was left of his.

Incongruous items of interest

The item the first: brownies. We had company over for bagels after church, which was our traditional lunch growing up. I hadn't planned anything for dessert, so I just looked in the cupboards and decided to make the easiest thing. Only we didn't have enough chocolate squares, so I adapted the recipe to be 2/3 the usual amount, which also worked out well when I discovered that my 9 x 13 pan wasn't here. We ended up with thick brownies baked in an 8 x 8 pan. Here's the original recipe.

Source: a typewritten sheet in my mom's kitchen
Great for: dessert
Serves: 12 people, or 6 people over two days.

6 squares unsweetened baking chocolate
1 cup butter
5 eggs (yes, five)
1 tsp vanilla
2 1/4 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups flour
1 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a small saucepan over medium heat, melt butter and chocolate together. Remove from heat and cool slightly.
Beat in, one ingredient at a time, the eggs, vanilla, and sugar, beating thoroughly after each addition.
Sift together flour and salt, and add to chocolate mixture, beating until just combined.
Pour into greased 9 x 13 pan and bake for 20-25 minutes.

Note: we are fans of less-baked brownies, and my dad, while being the biggest chocolate fan in our household, has been known not to eat even slightly overbaked brownies.

The item the second: baby D has been getting terrible diaper rashes lately, and I can't tie it to any particular food. It seems to crop up most often when she wears her cloth diapers overnight, and then it takes days of copious diaper cream and wearing disposables to get rid of it. I was starting to think we would either have to stop using cloth, or get some special cream to use with her cloth, since you're not supposed to use creams that contain zinc oxide, petroleum, or anything else you'd find in the diaper creams we happen to have at home. These ingredients can apparently hinder absorption, which I personally would not want to do.

Anyway, it turned out that there was a simple solution, and we had it at home, too. A few weeks ago, a friend gave us some cloth diapers that her grandkids had outgrown, along with several rolls of biodegradable, flushable diaper liners. This would go between the actual cloth of the diaper and the bum. When I checked the website for our cloth diapers, this is what they suggest using if you want to also use regular diaper creams. Problem solved! Baby D is back in cloth diapers as of today. Speaking of which, she needs a change! As a joke, we're teaching her to hold her nose if she stinks, or to say "mouffette" (French for skunk).

My very own marinade

Hubby and I celebrated Valentine's Day with steaks and sides cooked at home. Restaurants are too crazy for the likes of us. I went hunting for a marinade recipe, and ended up putting together one of my own, based on what I had around. I did have to borrow soy sauce from my mom. It's shocking, the things we don't have in our fridge sometimes.

My Marinade
1 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp steak spice

Blend and marinate steak in covered glass dish for at least an hour. We did an hour and a half, and it soaked up a good amount of flavour. It's really the steak spice that makes it.

I made a half batch, since we were only marinating two little steaks, but when I was typing it out, it seemed absurd to be writing 1/6 of a cup of anything.

The accompanying sides were a potato soufflé and oven-roasted carrots. Baby D, sadly, had to content herself with leftover mac & cheese, and peas. She was okay with it.

My go-to Mac & Cheese

Hubby forgot to bring his lunch today, so in anticipation of his rumbling tummy arriving home, I made two of his favourite dishes: oven fries and, more importantly, mac & cheese. The recipe I use is a mishmash of "Macaroni and Cheese Not From a Box" (Clueless in the Kitchen) and Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious Mac and Cheese I. Here's how it goes:

The best healthy Mac and Cheese*
Source: aforementioned mishmash
Great for: lunch or dinner
Serves: 4-6, depending on appetite (Hubby and I usually have generous first helpings, and there are leftovers for both of our lunches the next day)

3 cups macaroni (ideally whole wheat or enriched in some way)
boiling water
1/4 margarine
1/4 cup flour
2 cups milk (we use 1%)
2 cups grated cheese
1 cup vegetable puree

To make your life easier, make a bunch of veggie purees ahead of time and stick them in the freezer. Cauliflower's an easy one to do, but we've also used roasted squash and sweet potato. Start by steaming the cauliflower for 10 minutes, then throw it in a food processor for 2 minutes or so, until it's smooth. Freeze in 1/2 cup portions. Defrost in the microwave.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large pot, boil the water for the macaroni, and cook the pasta for about 10 minutes. This is, conveniently, about the same amount of time required to make the cheese sauce.

In a smaller pot, melt the margarine over medium heat, then stir in the flour and cook for a minute or two. Blend in the milk and leave it to thicken, stirring occasionally. Once it starts to thicken, keep it on the heat for about five more minutes. Remove from heat, stir in cheese and veggie puree.

When the pasta's done cooking, drain it thoroughly, then put it into a greased 3-quart casserole dish along with the cheese sauce. Mix it up right, and put it in the oven (or toaster oven, if you are also making oven fries) for half and hour. Or don't bake it at all if you're really hungry. Haven't I always said I love a forgiving recipe?

*Yes, I will take you on, KD Smart. Expect a sound trouncing on nutrition and cost per serving!

And now, an unrelated picture of me and a very sleepy toddler. This was following a Sunday afternoon walk in the freezing cold, during which she lounged cozily in her stroller under a plastic cover.
I. love. this. kid.

New month's resolution

It seems I'm a little late to the party with my New Year's resolutions this year. Maybe it was being away for the first week of 2011, or just recently readjusting to our schedule and time zone here, who knows. The point is, I just paid my credit card bill, looked at my bank account, and decided I want to do a whole lot more home cooking. Like instead of going out for meals, even just fast food.

The one thing everyone looks for in a great dinner to add to the rotation is actually three things: easy, cheap, and healthy. And tasty. Four things. And people, do I have ideas for you! Some of them come from my favourite cookbooks, others from blogs, and still others are experiments. I'd like to share them over the next month or so, doled out in bi-weekly servings. So as not to infringe on copyright, any recipes I post here will include my own modifications.

Here's my first offering: Spinach and Chickpeas
Great for: appetizer, lunch, dinner, potluck
Qualifies as: easy, cheap, healthy, tasty and toddler-tested (by this, I mean that I've fed it to baby D and she liked it)
Serves: 4

Recipe source: smittenkitchen.com

½ lb spinach, washed
3 tbsp oil
2 cloves garlic
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp paprika
Pinch of red pepper flakes
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 can chickpeas (19 oz), drained
680mL tomato sauce (I use Primo pasta sauce)

Cook spinach in oil til tender; remove from pan and drain in colander

Mix together in still-hot pan: garlic, cumin, pepper flakes, vinegar and paprika. Cook for a minute

Add cooked spinach, tomato sauce and chick peas, and heat through

Serve with toast, nachos or warm flatbread.

Chicken stock for dunces

And I include myself in the dunce category when it comes to chicken stock. I love me a good roast chicken (or beer can chicken), especially when it only costs me 6$. You can get at least two meals from the meat alone, and maybe one or two more from any stock. Every time I've tried to make stock from the carcass of a leftover chicken or turkey, I mess it up. Either it's too watery, or the pot boils dry, or something like that. Well, no more. I enlisted my crockpot, stuck the old bag of bones in it, covered it with water, and set it to high for 4 hours. My crockpot is kind of for dunces, too: the settings are 4 hrs on high, 6 hrs on high, 8 hrs on low or 10 hrs on low. In case you were wondering, here are some of the many uses for chicken stock:

-flavouring soups (and soup season is upon us, people! Bring on the root vegetables!)
-making chicken pot pie filling
-cooking rice/barley
-making gravy (for hot chicken sandwich leftovers, or homemade poutine)
-anything involving cooking something in water that would taste more delicious if chicken were involved

Also works for turkey, except it yields way more stock. I will be freezing mine once it's done in an hour.
Here's a cuter chicken that I would never roast:

More delicious deception

Continuing the cookbook testing, I've now made several of the recipes from Deceptively Delicious. These include:
-mac & cheese (actually, Hubby made it and used two different veggie purees, cauliflower and butternut squash)
-grilled cheese (with butternut squash, and I don't like squash but you can't even taste it. Probably my most favourite so far.)
-chocolate pudding (with avocado; very rich, but somewhat off-putting in that the green avocado oil seeps out of the pudding. And I like my pudding cold, not warm)
-chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese icing (the cake was pretty dense but dry, so I'd use oil instead of margarine next time and add more melted chocolate; the cream cheese icing was really good but also very thick, so I'd thin it out with margarine or something

Overall, the savoury items are beating the pants off the sweets. I'm hoping to test out a few more of the desserts to find something suitable for baby D's upcoming birthday (not for another couple of months, though). I also need to craft some manner of invitation if I want people to show up to this thing.

Deceptively delicious!

On a day trip to the States last week, I happened upon a copy of Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious cookbook in Kohl's for a scant 5$. I knew a bit about it and a couple of friends of mine have used it. Basically, it's a collection of recipes that sneak pureed fruits and veggies into picky eaters' meals. I had also talked with Registered Dietitian Sister about it, and I agreed with her point that kids should be directly given vegetables and fruit in order to consciously make good nutritional choices later in life. At the same time, I think it would be wise to supplement snacks and side dishes with fruit and veggie purees baked into things. Hubby even leafed through the cookbook with me and pointed out several recipes he'd like to try out.

So I bought the book on Wednesday, went grocery shopping on Friday, and started making purees on Saturday. Each recipe calls for at least half a cup of a certain puree, so I figured I'd get ahead of the game. I steamed cauliflower and roasted squash, and froze each in 1/2 cup amounts. Leftovers went to baby D's meals, so I now have several reserve jars of baby food. I appreciate that she has an entire section that explains the prep and cooking times for various produce, as I usually have to look that up.

Today I tested out my first recipe: mozzarella sticks. It's a fairly simple; sift together bread crumbs with a little flaxseed meal, mix together grated cheese, cauliflower puree and cornstarch, and roll the latter in the former. Then you freeze them for a bit before pan-frying them. Think about how delicious cauliflower is with cheese, and you'll get an idea of how good these sticks are. There are 8 sticks in a batch, and I ate them all for lunch, with a bowl of soup.

Other recipes I can't wait to try out:
-mac & cheese with butternut squash
-mashed potatoes or twice-baked potatoes with cauliflower
-pita pizzas with spinach (hidden under the tomato sauce)
-quesadillas with squash (admittedly not that different from my sweet potato-black bean ones, but less time-intensive)
-creamy potato soup with cauliflower and squash
-sloppy joes with sweet potato and butternut squash
-doughnuts with pumpkin and sweet potato
-frozen yogurt pops with various frozen fruits
-chocolate chip cookies with chick peas (I know, weird, right? But I want to know what they taste like)
-lemon raspberry cupcakes with squash and beets
-blueberry cheesecake cupcakes

And we're having mozzarella sticks with chili on nachos for dinner tonight.

Roast vegetable and bean stew

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a bunch of vegetarian dinner recipes and I've been trying them out this week. We had Tomato Clafoutis on Sunday, Cheesy Linguine Stuffed Peppers yesterday, and then tonight we had the best one so far: Roast Vegetable and Bean Stew. It's so good that I can't keep it from you. Healthy, hearty, savoury, frugal, and surprisingly quick to make for a stew- everything I look for in a dinner recipe. We hadn't even finished eating when Hubby gave me a high five and approved the new addition to our menu rotation. (Did I mention he's a highly selective eater?)

Original source: Best Health magazine (shout-out to Alicia!)

I adapted it a little so that I didn't have to buy anything out of the ordinary, and I'd encourage you to do the same. Also, I had a terrible time finding vegetable stock! Food Basics did me wrong. It wasn't with the regular bouillons but rather in the international foods aisle.

1 sweet potato, peeled and chopped
2 potatoes, scrubbed and chopped
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 parsnips, peeled and chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp Italian herb seasoning
2 Tbsp vegetable oil [my dietitian sister would tell you olive oil isn't heat stable and shouldn't be used for cooking]
2 cups vegetable broth
1 19oz can of beans (pinto, navy, garbanzo, whatever you've got), rinsed and drained

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
In a large bowl, toss vegetables with oil. Spread out on a 9x13 baking dish or roasting pan and sprinkle with herbs and garlic.
Bake for 20 minutes, then broil on low for 10 minutes. (This is instead of baking for 30 minutes and flipping them halfway through. I don't like flipping.)
Add beans to baking dish and pour vegetable broth over top. Bake for another 30 minutes or so. (Alternatively, turn the heat down to 350, take a nap, and have dinner ready when you wake up.)
Serve with whole wheat toast and cheddar cheese planks to make it a complete meal!

Seriously good. It would probably adapt nicely to whatever vegetables are in season where you live. Do yourself a favour and make this next time it's cold and dreary. And maybe listen to Glee's version of Hello while you're at it.

For the love of produce

It's always a good idea to have fresh produce on hand, but a challenging idea in its execution. Particularly if you shop once every two weeks and are averse to working with spoiled fruits and vegetables. Well, at least I've found a few ways around this. I never know how much you all know about given topic, so forgive me if I morph into Captain Obvious every now and then.

The other day, my mom mentioned an idea to me that I've since tested out and have discovered is awesome (but then, so is my mom). We both happen to be married to men who only like onions if they are finely chopped, so we both make copious use of food processors. Mom recommended that the next time I chop up an onion, I should do several at a time and freeze the excess in approximate single-onion servings. I did, and I have to say, I much prefer it to hauling out the food processor multiple times just to hack up one onion. I ended up doing the same thing the last time I bought green onions, keeping them in one bigger container, and shaking out however many I needed for what I was making (i.e. tuna melt, omelet).

Another way to keep produce fresh is to chop it up, but instead of freezing it, you store it in the fridge in a covered contained filled with water. I do this with celery, and sometimes carrots. The idea actually came from my husband (who despises celery), who worked at a group home a few years ago where this was the practice. I find that when I don't chop up celery right away, it gets relegated to the back of my fridge and goes bad before I can use it.

Finally, because fresh produce doesn't keep forever, it's a good idea to branch out and buy canned or frozen fruits and veggies as well. My personal faves are canned mandarins, canned beans (I know, I know, it's cheaper to buy dry and soak them, but I find it too time-consuming and inefficient for the amount we use), and frozen corn, peas and berries. We throw frozen corn and peas into lots of things, like casseroles, soups, macaroni and cheese, etc. And I just cobbled together a recipe for a compote made from frozen berries, which goes a little something like this:

In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stir together:
2 cups frozen berries
1/3 cup white sugar
2 tablespoons cornstarch (to thicken it up)
1 teaspoon lemon juice

Bring to a boil and cook for one minute. Remove from heat and cool in the fridge before serving.

I've made this three times in as many weeks, with different berry combos (raspberries, strawberries on their own, or with cranberries, and a frozen mix that included berries of the straw, rasp, blue and black varieties). I've had the compote with scones, pavlova/meringues, cheesecake, and (tomorrow) ice cream. It would probably be just fine on its own as well.

Anyway, I encourage you all to eat tons of fruits and vegetables as they come into season! This is the easiest and most delicious time of the year to get 5-10 servings per day.

The "hostess" (cupcakes) with the mostess!

My parents came over for dinner this evening, and since they were kind enough to bring some delicious steaks to BBQ (cooked and seasoned to perfection), I figured they would like a nice dessert to accompany it. Awhile back, I ran across a recipe on my favourite food blog (Smitten Kitchen) for homemade Ding Dongs (or their Canadian equivalent, Jos Louis) and just LOVED the look of them! I knew it would be unwise, though, to make them for just the hubby and me, so I seized the opportunity to test them out.















A couple of modifications: I didn't use the recipe for chocolate cake that was listed because I have a really good one that's super easy to make. I also made cupcakes rather than one giant cake, since it lent itself nicely to portioning out. The marshmallow fluff-like frosting was unbelievable! The hubby, who loves all foodstuffs unnatural, asked me if I could make a batch of this just for him to eat sometime. And although I mixed the ganache ingredients in the wrong order (and used table cream instead of whipping cream), it still turned out! I really appreciate a forgiving recipe.


You'll notice in the photos that hubby made a modification of his own. While I was assembling the cupcakes, he requested extra marshmallow topping rather than ganache. As you'll also notice from the last photo, he was quite pleased with the result.

The moral of the story is threefold:
1) When you want cooking or baking inspiration, look no further than Smitten Kitchen.

2) If and when you make this, cleanup must occur within a very short time frame, as marshmallow frosting is the culinary equivalent of super glue.

3) Don't make a delicious dessert unless entertaining many honoured guests. We're bringing leftovers to Easter lunch tomorrow. If they last the night.

In life and in death

It's been a rather serious week here at OSH, and as a result, I'm searching for an all-purpose sharing dish. A close friend of mine lost her Opa last week, and the visitation and funeral were this week. In addition, an acquaintance from church (whose kids I've looked after in the nursery) is pregnant and due in April, but is on bed rest because she was having copious contractions. Imagine bed rest with two little boys running around!

Anyway, when life begins and when it ends (and I guess at many points in between), the sharing of food is always appropriate and needed. Back in the fall, when I had little D, we had some great friends and family who brought us meals to eat right away or to freeze, and it was invaluable. My criteria for practical meals: they have to be delicious (something we ourselves would enjoy), free of common allergens (i.e. nuts), made from readily available ingredients, and, ideally, something that shows we care for the people on the receiving end. After much research, there are two dishes I've found that would work well, one sweet and one savoury.

The dish the first: Monkey Bread, brought to my attention by Deb, the genius behind Smitten Kitchen. It's like many tiny cinnamon buns that you pull apart. As an experiment, I made it with regular cinnamon bun icing (icing sugar + milk) instead of cream cheese, since it was easier. It does take awhile to prepare, but that fulfills the criterion of showing care. The only ingredient that you may not have readily available (unless, like me, you have a breadmaker) is yeast. I test baked it, and then made it again to bring it to dinner with some friends visiting from the States.

The dish the second: Cheesy Chicken & Rice Casserole. I came across a version of this recipe several years ago, and it's nothing original, but it's a good, hearty meal. I'm planning to test cook this before I send it out, because it's been awhile since I last made it.

Baby Dee is exclaiming quite loudly, so I'll have to sign off now.