Lessons Learned

I learned a few lessons this week while in my kitchen. I thought you could benefit from my misfortune. Keep the following lessons in mind while you're cooking or baking.

Lesson #1: Make sure the cookie dough has enough flour or you will end up with M&M cookie goo after baking.

I was making the M&M cookies for the bake sale at work. The recipe calls for 2 1/2 cups of flour but I have a note next to it that looks like this: 2C? meaning maybe only 2 cups of flour is needed. The note is wrong and I need to take it out. I added more flour after the first pan and the cookies turned out fine.

Lesson #2: Saturday morning is a great time to pre-chop veggies.

We've fallen behind on our menu plan this week and I wanted to catch up yesterday. I didn't get the meals made but I did chop most of the veggies needed.

Lesson #3: If the recipe for banana bread calls for baking soda, it's crucial that you remember to put it in.

The banana bread still tastes ok but it's kind of cakey and didn't bake all the way through. There's a few gooey spots. If you ever doubted the need for baking soda, here's your proof that it really makes a difference.

Lesson #4: When adding the ingredients to your bread machine, make sure you add the correct amount of sugar.

That, my friends, is what happens when you add 2 teaspoons of sugar instead of the 2 tablespoons of sugar the recipe called for. There wasn't enough food for the yeast. I threw away that loaf after Steve got home from work. I waited so he could see it because it was too funny not to share. I was going to make Baked Apple French Toast with it. I'll just have to try again today.

Lesson #5: When making fried broccoli, don't accidentally inhale the crushed red pepper when it hits the frying pan.

Nothing really bad will happen but it will make your throat hurt a little. Just don't do it. A side note: Fried broccoli is really easy. A little olive oil in a hot skillet (maybe a teaspoon or two), 1 teaspoon (don't use a tablespoon) crushed red pepper flakes and broccoli. Push broccoli around until it's coated with the oil and the red peppers.

Lesson #6: Crack open a Mike's Cranberry and put your feet up if you learned the majority of these lessons on the same day.

Chow for the Puppies

I'm at it again. We're having another bake sale at work. This bake sale is a benefit bake sale for one of our doctors. This doctor was diagnosed with cancer last fall and had a below the knee amputation on one leg. While most people would give up hope or take their anger about their illness out on others, he hasn't. He has presented a can-do positive attitude through out this whole ordeal. I'm not saying he doesn't have his moments of sadness or maybe even anger but he doesn't show them to his co-workers or patients. The man is truly an inspiration to be around. And because he's been such an inspiration and because I like to bake, I'll be going overboard for this bake sale. Last night I made puppy chow. I'm really hoping that the puppy chow will sell like it did at the bake sales when I was in grade school. (We'd practically fight over it.) I had decided to make it before I had a recipe so I did a quick search on allrecipes.com. (one of my favorite sites, of course) The recipes featured the same ingredients with a few variations: peanut butter, butter, chocolate, Chex cereal and powdered sugar.

I measured out the peanut butter, butter and chocolate chips and started them melting. I dumped the cereal into 2 big bowls and poured some powdered sugar in a paper sack. Stirred the chocolate mixture a few times and it was ready to pour over the cereal. I had made puppy chow in the past and made the mistake of pouring all of the chocolate mixture onto the cereal at once. Remembering my previous mistake, I poured a little chocolate on the cereal and stirred it to coat. I repeated that process until all of the cereal was coated with chocolate and then dumped all of the cereal into the paper sack. The most fun of making the puppy chow is the last part: the shaking of the paper sack to coat the cereal with powdered sugar. Word to the wise: a mist of powdered sugar will hit you in the face when you open the bag... be prepared, it's not as pleasant as it sounds. I put the puppy chow in little baggies and it's good to go!

I'm also going to make peanut butter fudgy bars and M&M cookies for the bake sale. I've enlisted Steve's help for tomorrow's baking.

Do you know the Muffin Man?

Saturday was a baking day for me. I made Best Ever Muffins. (That's the title.) I got the recipe from my hometown church's cookbook. Shout to Holy Family Catholic Church in Emmetsburg! The recipe is fairly simple. I had been wanting to make muffins for quite awhile so we'd have something different to eat in the morning. Lately my breakfast has consisted of a mandarin orange and string cheese. While that's nutritious, it gets a little boring. Muffins are usually healthy and quick. These muffins were ridiculously easy to make:

Best Ever Muffins (courtesy of Diana Parisi)

1 3/4 C flour

2 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 C sugar

3/4 tsp salt

1 well beaten egg

3/4 C milk

1/3 C oil or applesauce (I used oil because I didn't have a

pplesauce.)

Sift dry ingredients in a bowl. Beat egg; add milk. Pour

this mixture into bowl of dry ingredients. Stir quickly only until dry ingredients are moistened. DO NOT overmix. Bake at 400 degree preheated oven for 25 to 30 minutes. May add chocolate chips, fruit, etc. For variations, about 1/2 to 3/4 C each.

Easy, right? I used my Kitchen Aid mixer to sift the dry ingredients together. I also added blueberry craisins after mixing the dry and wet ingredients together. This recipe literally came together within 10 minutes and the best part is: it's delicious! It made about a dozen muffins, which for us is perfect. We each had one yesterday. I kept out two for tomorrow's breakfast and put the rest in the freezer. The crust is crunchy but the inside is very fluffy and light. And the blueberry craisins were a nice addition. Side note: I bought craisins, cherry craisins and blueberry craisins all for this recipe. I was that sure it would be good.

I also made bread with my bread maker.

I had planned to make whole wheat bread using the recipe from the bread maker's manual. No one tell my mom I didn't use her recipe. I will eventually but I'm still learning. And no one tell her that I bought bread flour by mistake. Friday I was standing in the baking aisle looking for whole wheat flour. I wanted the Gold Medal brand because I've used it before and it's usually not expensive. I saw Gold Medal all purpose flour and better for bread flour. There was another brand of whole wheat flour but it was over a dollar more than the Gold Medal flour. I didn't want to pay a lot for the flour. I checked the ingredients on the Better for Bread flour and it says: Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin (A B Vitamin), Iron, Thiamin Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Folic Acid (A B Vitamin). I saw wheat flour and my brain stopped right there. I thought Gold Medal had changed the title of their whole wheat flour because there wasn't any on the shelf. I didn't figure out that I bought the wrong flour until yesterday. But I do plan on making bread quite a bit so the flour will still be used. On the side of the flour, it says that it can be used cup for cup for whole wheat and all purpose flour in recipes so I went ahead with the whole wheat recipe. And you know what? The bread still tastes good. It doesn't take like whole wheat bread; it doesn't take like white bread. But it's good. It's a little darker than your average white bread because it contains molasses.

I also wanted to make granola. My older sister sent me the recipe and it looks good. But I forgot about it. I might make it this afternoon or I might save it for next weekend.

Shaking Up The Menu

I'm changing how I do my menu plan. It's a small change but one that I think will provide us with better nutrition. Each week, I'm going to try to have 2 chicken meals, 2 beef meals and 1 vegetarian meal. The other 2 meals can be whatever we want. I had noticed that if our menu was heavy on chicken or beef we would get bored half-way through the week and not eat it. Steve and I sat down yesterday with some cookbooks and wrote down meal ideas. Coming up with 16 meals is not easy and I had been slacking on the grocery list part when I was making the menu by myself. (Steve would be at work while I making the menu and grocery list.) I'm hoping that by bringing Steve back into the mix, I'll get a more accurate grocery list. Our list of meals so far is this:

Beef Meals:

enchiladas

tostada casserole

meatballs

Runza casserole

Chicken Meals:

crockpot buffalo chicken sandwiches

chicken pasta alfredo (I forgot to buy alfredo sauce for this week!)

Vegetarian Meals:

baked apple French toast

Other Meals:

biscuits and gravy

dumplings

left-overs x2

sub sandwiches

hot dogs

I need 2 more chicken meals and 1 more vegetarian meal. I also need to find recipes for the biscuits and gravy and the dumplings. We're not going grocery shopping until Friday or Saturday so we have plenty of time to figure it out. We also started a list of sides we'd like to include on the menu:

glazed carrots

fried broccoli

pudding

fries

I'm also trying to eat more fruits and vegetables. It's easier said than done but I'm hoping that by writing it here, I'll have more motivation to actually do it.

My birthday present

My birthday was this past Sunday. I had a great day of relaxing. Steve took me out for lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings. He had been hinting about my birthday present for awhile. He ordered it online at Target.com but it wasn't supposed to arrive until the 12th. It actually arrived on the 11th but the office for our apartment complex was closed when I got home and Steve was at work. I did get to open it yesterday. He got me a bread maker! I had been wanting one for awhile and figured I would buy one at a thrift store or a garage sale. I am so excited! My sister had given me a mix for Gluten Free Cinnamon Raisin Bread which will be the first type of bread I make with the machine. The mix has bread maker instructions on the back so I'm confident it will turn out.

Menu Re-cap

A couple weeks ago, I posted my menu. It was the menu for right after Christmas. As usual, we didn't eat everything on the menu but we had a good reason. An epic flu hit my grandma's house and we ended up staying a day longer than planned. (I couldn't ride in a car the day we were supposed to go back.) The items that we did not eat were: Crockpot Cheesy Chicken Spaghetti, Boneless Beef Ribs, Vegetarian Chili and Chicken Noodle soup. Some of these made their way onto our current menu; others did not. The Crockpot cheesy chicken spaghetti did not make its way onto our current menu. Our previous menu was my second attempt for it. We've had it in the past and it tastes good but if something is on two menus in a row and we don't eat it, I figure we don't really want it and move on. The beef ribs was a lack of planning on my part. I didn't have a recipe and thought I'd figure it out when the time came... I didn't and I was still feeling a little weak from the epic flu. I'm not sure why we didn't have the vegetarian chili but I put it back on the menu. Chicken Noodle soup was another instance of not planning ahead. I hadn't taken the chicken out of the freezer before Friday. We're supposed to have it today but once again, the chicken is still in the freezer. It will get made at some point this week.

We did have the ham and the ham soup. I didn't care for the soup. It's alright but not great so I threw away the recipe. I don't keep recipes that we're not crazy about. It took 11 hours in the Crockpot. And no, I'm not kidding, 11 hours. It ended up being more mush than soup. I did add more chicken broth to our left-overs but it was still weird when I took it to work for lunch.

A couple of things that went well were: ground beef with rice and Rotel tomatoes and the hodgepodge sloppy Joes. The ground beef with rice and Rotel tomatoes was so easy. Cook rice, brown ground beef and drain, open two cans of tomatoes (with green chilis) and there you go. It made me want to prep all of our veggies for the current menu plan in advance. I haven't done it yet but am going to. This will make it easier to make supper when I'm dead-tired from work. (Something that's happening more often.) The hodgepodge sloppy Joes were the best I've ever had. I found the recipe on myfrugalfunlife.com and it is a Crockpot recipe.

In hind sight, the Crockpot was used three times which is still great. Steve did help cook through out the week which is great. I'm hoping we stick to our current menu plan a little better than we did our previous one.

Two-week Menu Plan

Steve and I have been making menu plans for over a year now. There are many reasons we do this:

1. to save money
2. we always have ingredients on hand
3. we don't have to think about what we're having for supper

Before we started making our menus, we realized that we were eating out a lot at the beginning of our marriage. This may not sound bad to some people but we had a very limited budget. I was working full-time. Steve was working part-time while looking for full-time work. We realized we couldn't continue to eat out. We were eating out for a variety of reasons:

1. We were too tired to think of what to cook for supper.
2. If we did think of something, we didn't have the ingredients on hand to make the dish and didn't want to go to the grocery store.

I had read online about making a menu plan and decided to give it a shot. We made a menu plan for one week. I didn't pay attention to the Fareway ad and just wrote down what we wanted to eat and made our grocery list from that. After spending $80 a week on groceries for awhile, I decided that was ridiculous. I think that's when I started the two-week menu plan. I would glance at the Fareway ad but not base my meals around it. It was still cheaper than our weekly grocery list and I started incorporating left-overs and using all (ok, most) of the produce I was buying. Sometime during my menu-planning adventures, I decided to make a menu plan for a month. We would write down 36 meals and then write our grocery list. We would buy all non-perishables and the first two weeks' perishables. The third week we would buy the last two weeks' perishables. This sounds great in theory and as I'm writing this, I'm thinking We should do that again. But I remember why we stopped doing it. It is very hard to sit down and decide what we're going to eat for the next month. It takes a good hour to make the menu plan and then it takes about an hour (more or less) to make the grocery list. It did save time in the long run but we decided to switch back to our two-week menu plan. I've finished writing our menu plan for the next two weeks. I'm pretty excited because it re-uses a lot of ingredients and I'm using my crock-pot at least 5 times. Without further ado, here is my menu plan:

Sunday Dec. 26th

gone

Monday Dec. 27th

grilled cheese, tomato soup

Tuesday Dec 28th Crockpot Day

Crockpot Cheesy Chicken Spaghetti, fruit and veggies

Wednesday Dec. 29th

boneless beef ribs, fruit and veggies

Thursday Dec. 30th Crockpot Day

Ham, Knorr rice side, veggies and fruit

Friday Dec. 31st

Shredded meat sandwiches, veggies and fruit

Saturday Jan. 1st Crockpot Day

Ham and Lentil Soup, veggies and fruit

Sunday Jan. 2nd

Orange Chicken, rice

Hot Ham and Cheese Sandwiches, veggies, fruit

Monday Jan. 3rd Crockpot Day

Three Bean Vegetarian Chili, Texas toast

Tuesday Jan. 4th

left-overs

Wednesday Jan. 5th

ground beef with rice and Rotel tomatoes

Thursday Jan. 6th Crockpot Day

Hodgepodge Sloppy Joes, veggies, fruit

Friday Jan. 7th

Chicken Noodle Soup

Saturday Jan. 8th

left-overs/catch-up meal