Butter Makes Everything Better

I feel slightly sheepish about posting after having had my epic meltdown earlier this week. I'm compelled to note that nothing catastrophic happened to me, so my breakdown was nothing more than me cracking a bit under pressure - shameful I know. But I fully believe that a little crack up is ok every once in a while. Otherwise I will bottle all that up and it will most definitely make me grumpy. Or force me to eat more chocolate. 

Once Monday was over, however, the week improved significantly, literally overnight. I was doing a lot of really new, fun things at work, aced my Cost Control exam, was able to spend all day today baking and cooking for my clients, and am even planning a trip to visit my sister this weekend. Great right? So aside from the rough start to the week, it's going swimmingly. I hope yours is just as successful.

Which actually leads me to a very legitimate question: what do you do when you are at your breaking point? Everyone has one, and everyone has their own way of dealing with it. As for me, I usually cry a lot and there is a nap involved. What do you do when life seems to be a little too much for you to handle?

This question led me to an interesting exploration on stress and different coping mechanisms that are best for certain personalities. I, being the Type A Personality kind of person, am able to cope best with a mile long to-do list by prioritizing and making plans on how to get these absolutely necessary items done in the time allotted. More ecsentric, artsy types, however, would deal with stress more effectively if they changed up their routine, by possibly moving to a different location in order to focus better on the task at hand, or changing the medium they are working in in order to refocus their efforts. Being the huge adorkable nerd that I am, found this all fascinating.**

And in all of this I learned that one of the uniquely "me" ways I deal with stress is to cook. Just get in the kitchen, where I am comfortable, outcomes are predictable, and products are edible, and just forget about what's bothering me for a few moments. I used this coping mechanism a lot in college, which is why a lot of my quick breads, muffins, marinades, and jams were made between the hours of 10pm and 2am. This little rendezvous to my culinary sanctuary gave me just enough time to refocus, take a breather, and come back refreshed... and usually with a tasty snack in my hand.

Mommaw was so proud when I showed her this picture - I remembered those canning lessons she gave me!

That being said, I follow many of the same habits today and last night, at, you guessed it, 10:30 at night, I was making pear butter. I was gifted a whole box of heirloom pears from my Grandma Banks as a house warming present, and had been snacking on them pretty religiously with no visible indication of having put a dent into the box. So what's the best way to use up excess produce? Can it! As pear butter in this instance. Warm and comforting, a breeze to put together, and it made my whole house smell like autumn.

Here my pear butter canning set-up: sterilized jars, primed and ready for piping hot pear butter.

Pear Butter

20 small-medium pears

1 cup brown sugar (or to taste, depending on how sweet you would like your butter to be)

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp fresh nutmeg

Par down the pears by coring and peeling, if desired (I didn't bother.) Process your pears in batches in the food processor to make tiny bits of pear, bordering on the consistency of pearsauce (like applesauce, only with pears.) Transfer your pearsauce to your slow cooker; still in the seasonings. Taste (this is an important step!) Your pearsauce should taste slightly under seasoned, and that's ok, because as your pear butter cooks it is going to intensify in flavor and sweetness. And remember, you can always adjust the seasonings later. Cook on low, covered, overnight, or at least 12 hours. Remove the lid and cook on high for an additional 2 hours, or until the liquid was evaporated and the pear butter is at the desired spreadable consistency.

If you are planning on canning your pear butter, make sure you sterilize your jars and lid components in boiling water, and then fill them while the jars are still warm. Wipe the rims and seal tightly, leaving them sitting on the counter until they "pop," which means they are sealed.

My perfectly canned pear butter, ready to be given as gifts that keep on giving. See that bigger one on the right? Yeah, that one's mine.

** Want to read more? Here are the articles I dove into:

• http://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/stress-management/personality-types-impact-on-response-to-stress.htm
• http://www.sparkpeople.com/resource/wellness_articles.asp?id=499
• http://stresscourse.tripod.com/id166.html

A Ying and Yang Kind of Morning

You know those mornings when you can't decide what you want to have for breakfast, but skipping breakfast is never an option? Yeah, me too.

So why not have a little bit of everything?

I knew I needed some protein because I have a long, hot day of work ahead of me, so some fiesta scrambled eggs were in order...

But, but, but...I really wanted to have some of the blueberry preserves that I made a few days ago. Not having any bread on hand, I went with the next best thing - cornbread! Sweet and spicy, not a bad combination. 

Top it all off with a peach fresh from the farmers' market, and I am good for great day at work!

How to be a Baker in 2 Easy Steps!

Long time, no blog y'all! I wanted to share with you my latest adventures attempting to really make bread for myself on a regular basis. I know, crazy escapade to take on, but it summertime, and what is summertime for if not to try things you never thought you would do. Isn't that why we all attempt to sleep outside in a tent at least once in these hot months, even though we know that we are going to wake up sore and cold?

I won this amazing cookbook from TasteSpotting, a blog that I religiously follow that have beautiful noms and great suggestions for other blogs you might like to boot. (Check it out if you haven't already clicked!) They have give away's every now and then and I always enter, not necessarily expecting to win, but just to play the game. But lo' and behold, I won! "Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day" is now mine and I have been devouring it ever since (pun intended.)

What a great addition to my ever growing cookbook collection!

I highly recommend this book if you are even remotely interested in baking your own fluffy, fresh, and healthy bread! The authors, a baker and a doctor, teamed up to come up with methods and recipes to make scrumptious bread without breaking the bank and without draining you energy. With a little planning, you can have bread baking in the oven while you shower and get ready in the morning (as I am now.)

Place holder of champions!

I chose to start simple and easy, mixing up a batch of the 100% Whole Wheat Bread. Now, I have done quick breads all my life, and I can somehow manage to make a decent dinner roll or cinnamon roll for the occasional Thanksgiving or brunch, but I really am not that talented of a baker. I find that I am way too impatient for all that rising and waiting, simply because there is no action! I have a few recipes which I have perfected, such as my Whole Wheat Pizza dough recipe that I grill outside, or the banana bread recipe I have imprinted on my brain from constant use, but yeast and I are still getting to know each other. I have a feeling that this book will help us get though the awkward introductions. 

This is basically just a mix and dump kind of recipe. Mix your wet and your dry (this book has some great tips and fascinating insight on the true life of yeast, liquid, and dry ingredients) and let raise.

Here is my dough right before it went into the oven!

 In the end, I was left with a not-too-terrible loaf of whole wheat pecan honey loaf, which was delicious when slathered with my homemade Strawberry Jam. I have been anxiously awaiting another day when I can again dive into this book and pick something else out that I want to try.

So here are my two steps to becoming an expert baker:

1. Buy an awesome book to help you out! (such as this one)

2. Be patient. (and be willing to start over...)

My Favorite Meal of All Time

I get this question a lot - What is your favorite meal of all time? Tough question, as there is so much delicious food out there, but I have a simple answer. 

Stewed pinto beans with ham hock and cornbread. Preferably accompanied by fresh garden tomatoes and cucumbers. It goes to prove that the best things in life are simple.

The best things in life are also eaten with Scuba Steve spoons...

In the spirit of a simple dinner, I shall keep this post short and simple.

Here is the simple recipe. Happy Country Cooking!

Stewed Pinto Beans

1 pound bag dried pinto beans

1 left over ham hock (no ham hock on hand? Diced thick cut ham will to the trick also)

Wash and pick through the beans to remove any superfluous stones or debris (get rid of any flavor packet that may or may not come with your beans - ick.) Place dried beans in large-ish stock pot and cover generously with water. Let soak on counter overnight. Drain and rinse again, cover beans with water, add ham hock, and cook on low for 5-6 hours or until tender, stirring occasionally.

Told you it was simple.

Roasty Toasty Banana Bread

Happy Leap Day (yesterday) y'all! A whole extra day in the year which is essentially a freebie from Father Time as a reward for making it through the past three years. "Oh! I see that you endured 2009, 2010, AND 2011 without an extra day in February. Well this year, because you were SOOO good, I will gift you a whole extra day. Use it well and keep up the good work!" Yes, that is in fact how I think Father Time would talk too. All jovial and saint like, much like Santa Claus.

So what did I do to celebrate this extra day (disregarding the tornado warning and torrential downpour that soaked me to the bone for the rest of the day)? I made banana bread. But not just ANY banana bread, roasted banana bread. I know! Get back Jack, this stuff is good! I had read on one of my various food blogs that roasting bananas before adding them to banana pudding is a great way to develop natural sugars in the fruit and thus make it taste more banana-y. So, as I am not a huge banana pudding fan, applied this technique to banana bread. 

Bananas before the oven...

... and roasted bananas after the oven.

After mashing and adding to the rest of my wet ingredients, which included a lot less sugar because of the banana's now more pronounced natural sugars, I tossed it with some flour and nuts and threw it in the oven to wait the excruciatingly long 40 minutes for the loaf to be done. I have already decided that whatever is left of this beautiful loaf will soon turn into roasted banana french toast - more on that later!

Wet and dry, moments before marrying and making beautiful banana bread babies.

Roasted Banana Bread

Wet:
2 medium bananas, with their ends cut off
2 TB agave nectar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 cup low fat buttermilk
1 tsp vanilla extract

Dry:
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup old fashioned oats
1/4 cup wheat germ
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup toasted and chopped walnuts

Place bananas on a baking sheet and roast at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes, until skins are browned and inside fruit is warmed and fragrant. Peel bananas and mash with a fork. Mix in a bowl with all wet ingredients, mix completely. Set aside. Mix all dry ingredients in a separate, larger bowl. Pour wet into dry and stir just to combine. Pour in a greased loaf pan and bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes, or until center comes out clean when poked with a toothpick.

Our 2 Days of Christmas

I hope this blog post finds you and yours happy, healthy, and simply tickled with the satisfaction of having a few days off for the holidays. I know I certainly am; what could be better than sipping a mug of your favorite tea while painting your nails with a new Essie nail polish Santa left in your stocking (called "Damsel in a Dress" - by far the best nail polish brand out there) and looking back at the past few days' pictures and reflecting on the memories made this year? Nothing, nothing is better than that.

To top it all off, my family's health seems to be on the up and up as well! We have all been struck by either the stomach virus or winter cold throughout the past week, and have taken turns fulfilling the duties of Christmas preparation while the others are nursed back to health. After all, the show must go on. Thank goodness I wasn't sick until Christmas Day, meaning that I, along with the irreplaceable help of my sister, was still well enough to prepare all of the Christmas feasts, which includes Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day brunch.

As you go about your day, most likely picking up where you left off last week at the office or in school work, please take a moment to savor the feeling of family togetherness and kinship, and try to sustain that throughout the year.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year everyone!

Tarragon honey glazed baby carrots

Parmesan, orange, and toasted walnut salad

 Homemade balsamic orange vinaigrette

My Nannan's (my mom's grandma) pillowy soft sweet rolls. I think I finally managed to get close to her  baked masterpieces.

One of my Dad's favorites: scalloped potatoes, straight out of the Betty Crocker cookbook.

Checking for a perfect 140 degrees medium rare on our beef tenderloin...

...rubbed with olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, and lots of fresh rosemary.

Our Christmas Eve dinner table, set oh so beautifully by my sister

Yeasted is the Best Way

Now that I am home safe and sound upon the conclusion of my (final!?) fall semester, I finally have a moment to post some of the yummy foods I made throughout the semester but didn't have time to blog. This will be the first of many "catch up" posts I have to share with you all, so buckle up and get excited!

This bread is a traditional yeast bread, complete with the double proof and kneading, and I love breads like this. You mix it up, do a bit of kneading, place it in a big bowl and let it raise for an hour (and in my case, work on some homework while finishing my laundry - queen on multitasking right here.) Come back, roll it into the loaf pan, loosely cover again and walk away one more time, then throw in the oven and fifty minutes later, you have wonderful soul-warming yeast bread!

So what is so special about this one? It doesn't use the traditional warm milk or olive oil liquid addition, this recipe uses pureed pumpkin and the traditional pumpkin pie spices to give this bread the great traditional fall and winter warmth you come to expect from pumpkin bread, but with a much lighter texture than a quick bread due to the yeast. 

I used this thinly sliced bread for a twist on turkey and cranberry sandwiches, toasted with split pea soup and spinach salads, and smeared with peanut butter and drizzled with honey for breakfast. I was immensely sad when I toasted off the last slice for dessert one evening (smeared with Nutella of course!)

With a little smear of cream cheese and some homemade cranberry chutney and you will think you died and gone to heaven.

'Tis the Season for Cinnamon

Rolls that is! I have been wanting to make cinnamon rolls for WEEKS now, allured by the sugary stickiness of melted brown sugar and cinnamon, the tender flake of the homemade yeast dough, and the fun that is eating them layer by layer as you pull them apart, leaving you with an almost too heavenly to be true center. But I was faced with the same conundrum I am always faced with when it comes to making a batch of something I have been craving... if I make it, I will eat it. Hence why I am always trying to pawn baked goods, remains of hearty casseroles, or slices of desserts off on people, so that they do not sit in my refrigerator and mock me every time I reach in there for something a little higher on the health scale, such as an apple or some hummus. Fortunately for me, I had an apartment full of willing and able eaters this past Tuesday night. They claim they came to watch the UK basketball game, but I suspect the promise of freshly baked Cinnamon Rolls topped with Cream Cheese Icing might have had something to do with their wanting to visit as well.

If tempting my friends with sugary treats is what it takes to 

1. finally bake something I have been craving for weeks, 

2. get my girlfriends to come over to visit when we are all so busy we can't seem to find the time, and 

3. saves me from having to flaunt my gross ignorance of basketball (I really am attending the wrong school, to LOVE football and not know a darn thing about basketball) then so be it! 

I topped each person's cinnamon roll with the cream cheese icing individually, so that it would melt down into the roll  perfectly as it was being eaten. Here's mine!

Re-purposing Leftovers

This weekend was ridiculously busy, one of the busiest ones I've had since classes started in the fall. Warm weather meant squeezing in all my favorite outdoor activities, like walks downtown and football games, before it gets too cold. So needless to say, some very basic weekly duties such as grocery shopping, laundry, and cleaning, fell by the wayside a bit. Call me a college kid, but I am sure rolling with it, cleaning little bits here and there, and using whatever is in the fridge so make a meal. 

So tonight was my first experiment with "creating meals on the fly" was to use up some french style steamed green beans, steamed edamame, and potatoes. By leaning on a few pantry staples I ended up coming up with a really satisfying and healthy dinner that gave me leftovers (making them leftovers of leftovers?) for tomorrow!

Plus it's almost Thanksgiving break (thank goodness!!!!) so this is a great way for me to use up what I have on reserve. Yeah, that sounds much better than "I was too lazy and tired to go to the store."

Pictured is a green been, edamame, tomato, and roasted onion stew, paired with chipotle chili scented potatoes and cornbread. And the last piece of pumpkin pie for dessert (I beat my roomies to it!) Happy leftover-ing!