Diner Breakfast

     So I realized that most of these posts have been either about dinner, or dessert. While we did have breakfast for dinner in the form of pancakes, it seems only appropriate that I actually do a post on what we eat for breakfast also. With most of us working standard hours, the idea of getting up earlier to make a large breakfast everyday is laughable. We make do usually with cereal, toast, or yogurt (the breakfast basics). On the weekend, our break from the monotonous scheduling of work, we get to make large breakfasts that I like to think of as diner style!
On this Saturday's menu: bacon, fancy scrambled eggs, home-style potatoes, toast, and watermelon!

Extra crispy bacon, watermelon, delicious potatoes, and drool worthy eggs. 

The trick with breakfasts like this is the timing. Its hard to have every be done at the exact same time, and if its not you run the risk of having cold eggs for brunch. We have gotten this down to a science. 


Step one: start the bacon. We got the pre-cooked bacon for a few reasons. First off, uncooked bacon comes in large packs and we don't eat it that often. Secondly, the amount of grease in uncooked bacon cause create extra smoke that sets off fire alarms, or just a hot mess of fat that can burn you and make a mess in the dorm kitchens. It's much easier just to put a few pieces of precooked in a non-stick pan on medium heat, and let it heat up! 


Step two: make the potatoes. When we put the bacon in to cook, we also began to melt butter in another pan for the home-style potatoes. We got little potatoes from the farmers market and sliced these pretty thin but not too thin. We want potatoes not chips for breakfast. Once they are sliced, throw them into the melted butter and add seasoning. Stirring is important so that the potatoes cook evenly, the season spreads around, and you don't have to scrub burned potatoes off the bottom of your not a non-stick pan. 


Step three: break the eggs. Bacon will be done way before the potatoes, and that is for a good reason. The bacon grease that accumulates in the pan is already hot and perfect for sauteing any vegetables that you want in the eggs. We had a mix of mushrooms, green pepper, and scallions. Once they were cooked, we threw in four well scrambled eggs.  Once the eggs were mostly cooked, we added in cheese that melted into the scramble as a finishing touch. 


By starting the eggs after the bacon, the eggs finished just as the potatoes did. Both can be served hot on to the plate. As one person is cooking up the eggs, the other can cut up the fruit, and through sliced bread into the toaster, (if you don't have a toaster or are to lazy to run between the lounge and your room, the broil setting on the oven will do the same thing if you have the rack in the highest position). 


So its all perfectly timed to serve! 

Vegetable Baked Zitti

Pasta is super easy, especially something liked baked zitti where it is pretty much just sauce, noodles, and cheese thrown in a casserole dish and baked for almost an hour. The basic style of the recipe is also what makes it fun to play with when you have vegetables from your CSA laying around your fridge. 

Picnic with baked zitti

Our baked zitti ended up being layers of rigatoni, tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese, garlic, onion, zucchini, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese. The trick here is to make sure you keep enough sauce around the pasta that they can keep in the moisture. 


Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and allow the zitti to cook about 40 minutes covered, and then 20 minutes uncovered to allow the cheese on top to cook a little or brown depending on preference. 


It is really good when served with garlic bread or salad. We choose garlic bread in order to ward off vampires. (Just kidding...)


The best of this meal is that it comes in a single dish with almost no clean up required. This means it is perfect for a picnic dinner outside! We spread out a blanket on the lawn outside the dorm, breathed in some good ol' fashion fresh air, and ate a deliciously simple vegetable baked zitti. 

Pancakes anyone?

   We have a ton of blueberries again. The result of going to a pick your own blueberry place out near Tamarak Lake. At only $2 a pound, we spent $26 dollars and emptied out a minifridge to make room for our 13lbs of blueberry goodness! This means that we had to brain storm on what to do with all these berries.
   The normal suggestions came up, like pies or jam. But we made those with our last batch of blueberries. One suggestion kept popping up though, that we couldn't ignore. It is the one food item that almost every person loves, and almost any person can make. Thats right, its a PANCAKE post!
      Pancakes are fantastic just based on the fact that they require minimal equipment and ingredients, and even less culinary specialty. The best part of pancakes though is that you can add just about anything to them. Chocolate chip pancakes, bananna pancakes, strawberry pancakes,whole wheat pancakes, apple cinnamon pancakes, blueberry pancakes, cinnamon roll pancakes... I think you get the idea.
     But why stop at just pancakes? Sure, blueberry pancakes are fantastic just as they are, but this summer is about experimenting and exploring. We have so many berries that we figured we would make BLUEBERRY SYRUP to top them with!
   We made our syrup ahead of time, and canned most of it so we can enjoy it all school year long. The recipe comes from the Ball canning cookbook, although we left out the lemon zest they suggested.

BLUEBERRY SYRUP
Ingredients:
8 cups blueberries
3 cups sugar
6 cups water (split 2/4)
2 tablespoons lemon juice


We started by measuring out 8 cups of blueberries into a flat bottomed bowl, or in our case, our dutch oven. From there, we went crazy smashing up the berries with a good old fashion potato masher. Its harder than it looks as we found out, but with enough muscle the blueberries start looking more like a soupy puddle. An easier way to do this would probably be in a blender, but we went oldfashion (and non of us have a big blender).


You then simmer the blueberries with two cups of water for about 5 minutes. Then it is time to strain. You can use any type of cloth that has enough weave to allow juice out, but thick enough to keep seeds and skins in. We used the thicker cloth you find in first aid kits to wrap wounds or make slings. Slowly but surely, we ended up with a bowl of berry juice. The dark shade of the juice made it so that even after we scrubbed our hands, we were still red handed!

Homemade bowl of blueberry juice!

As we were juicing, the other half of the group got the syrup going. The syrup is a mix of 4 cups water and three cups water brough to a boil until all the sugar is dissolved.


Once the syrup is ready, we poured it into the dutch over along with the juice, and brought it to a boil for about 5 minutes.

At this point, we ladeled the syrup into prepped half pint jars (washed and sterilized in boiling water for at least 15 minutes) and then placed the bottles in their hot water bath for 15 minutes (because we are at a higher elevation). The syrup that was left over we put in a jar that went straight into the fridge for pancakes this week.

Soo many jars of syrup!

PANCAKES!
Ingredients:
1 cup flour
2 T sugar
1/2 t baking powder
1/4 t baking soda
1/4 t salt
1 cup milk
2 T oil
1 egg


Mix together the dry ingredients, and then add the wet. The batter should be lumpy. Heat a greased pan or skillet until water dances when sprinkled on it. Pour on a spoonful of batter, flip it when bubbles appear throughout.


We made blueberry pancakes and banana chocolate chip pancakes. We heated the syrup and thickened it with corn starch. We served it with home-style potatoes (thinly sliced potatoes spiced with salt, pepper, chili and garlic powder and cooked in oil over medium heat to soft) and freshly scrambled eggs.

There would be a picture here, if it wasn't for the fact that before we even set everything on the table it was being nibbled at and eaten (the result of being hungry students!). It wasn't until we had finished off every last bite that we realized we had no picture to show you! 

Spinach and Chicken Pasta

Despite our tendency for things less than healthy (cookies, smore's brownies, pancakes), we can still make quick and healthy dinners. From prep to finish, this dish only took about 30 minutes, and fed three girls with leftovers.

Served in a bowl or topped with parmesian, this dish could be aesthetically amazing.

Ingredients:

   2 chicken breasts, sliced into thin strips

   lots of spinach

   2 cloves garlic

   half an onion

   mushrooms, cut up

   worcestershire sauce (how do you pronounce this?)

   pasta (we did a mix of penne and rigittoni, using up open boxes)

   oil/butter for cooking

Bring water to a boil in a pot, add in the pasta.

Heat the butter or oil in a nonstick pan. Throw in the garlic and chicken, cook it, add a dash or four of worcestershire sauce. Throw in mushrooms and onion. Let it cook for a bit, before throwing in the spinach. Once the spinach has cooked down, add more worestershire sauce depending on personal taste.

Drain the pasta, and top with the chicken and vegetables.

No matter how exhausted you are after work, this will taste so much better than just eating instant oatmeal or that leftover slice of pizza that you forget how long its been in your fridge. Trust us, why do you think we all cook together.

Not Just Smore's

Smore's, the epitome of summer. The idol by which we honor camp outs, bonfires, and the month of July. Being on a campus, however, impedes our ability to build up a nice set of flames and go roasted marshmallow crazy.  So we had to adapt, and we might have gone a little crazy.


The best invention of the summer!

PEANUT BUTTER BROWNIE SMORE'S 

Ingredients

Box mix of brownies

baking powder

vegetable oil/canola oil

mini marshmellows

peanut butter

graham crackers

How to make themStep one: Mix up brownie mix, we did not have any eggs, so to replace the two eggs, we added 4teaspoons of baking powder and extra vegetable oil and water.

Step two: Bake the brownies, BUT prior to putting the pan in the oven generously sprinkle the batter with mini marshmellows. These will melt and brown ontop of the brownies as they bake.

 (Maybe it was the no eggs, or maybe it was the crazy humidity and weather that we tried baking during, but the brownies remand moister than usual, and didn't develop the glazed top that you usually expect from box mix.)  

Step 3: While the brownies are cooling, put a 1/2 cup or more of peanut butter in a glass measuring cup and heat in the microwave until spreadable.

Step 4: Break graham crackers in half, putting a hearty spoonful of melted peanut butter ontop of them. This is the glue to hold the piece of brownie on it. Once the chocolate and marshmellow middle of the smore is in place, top with another graham cracker half.

Step 5: Enjoy!

I can honestly tell you, that when we made these we had friends quite literaly run from their rooms to join us in the lounge. It is hard to stop at just one, and I have to confess, my roommate and I each had a leftover one for breakfast this morning!!!!!

Tacos and Salsa

So here is just another quick update. So last week, we decided that we needed some good old fashion from a box dinner. Hard shell tacos are not something we have attempted homemade, and we figured we would have a nice lazy evening. How wrong we were! It seems that after cooking so much and making so many delicious meals, we couldn't just take the processed way out. 

The result was we made our own form of Mexican rice (with black beans, jasmine rice, and the sauce packet that comes in the taco dinner) and to really top it off, HOMEMADE SALSA. 

   This recipe is simply a mash up of great tasting stuff. We chopped up tomatoes, onions, and cilantro (fresh from the garden). We then sprinkled in lime juice and salt and pepper till it tasted right. A little extra kick can be added by cutting in some jalapeno peppers. 

Our Salsa! With bits already snitched from it! 

 We loaded up our tacos with seasoned ground turkey breast (its healthier and tastier than ground beef), cheese, our rice, and of course, the fantastic salsa and just... well, I think in this case a picture really is worth a thousand words. 

Canning: Blueberry Adventures

I grew up with a Mom who canned. It was not surprising to have cans of homemade apple sauce or jam sitting in our pantry or gracing the shelves of our refrigerator. So of course, I had to try it for myself. 

As a first time canner, I had a lack of supplies. Thankfully, Lehman Brothers understands what a newbie like myself requires. They sell a starters kit at a great price that comes with everything you need to start canning right away. The Beginner's Home Canning Kit arrived shortly after I ordered it, and besides the strange looks I got carrying the huge box across campus, I was so excited to get it in the mail. The best part of the kit is that it includes the Ball Blue Book Guide to Preserving that I read before bed and during my lunch break a few times through before attempting anything on my own.  

My first adventure in canning came down to four half pints of blue berry jam, and one quart of blueberry preserves. Of course the blueberries were local, I picked them while visiting my parents for a weekend. Can't get anymore natural than blueberries from wild bushes that are handpicked and brought back to campus only a day or so after they were gathered. 

Waiting to see if the jam sealed...IT DID!

What I learned: 
1) Dormitory kitchens only have three burners on their stoves, and you really need four when you are canning. One to cook on, one to heat the canner, one to sterilize the jars on, and one to sterilize the lids. 


2) Don't can in a dormitory when it is over 90 degrees out. Not only will you get warm and toasty, so will the  rest of the lounge, and there are no fans in the windows there. Luckily, I had friends who hung with me and braved the heat to supply moral support and make dinner when I was done. 


3) Wear an apron. I wore one, and thank goodness I did because there is no neat way to can. 


4) Pot holders are your friends. Boiling water = hot things. Don't burn your fingers thinking anything will be cool to the touch. 


5) Don't expect perfection. Canning is an art, and it has a learning curve before you can become a master. My first jam tastes good according to my friends, but I know it came out a little thicker than I would have liked. They joked that at least this way it won't melt and mix with the peanut butter when they make PB&J sandwiches for work. 

What do I do with what's in the fridge?

Some times, when we all dig into our fridges to see what we can contribute to group dinner the results are an odd mixture of vegetables and food. Its on those days that we get creative. So far, there have been three alternatives we turn to in order to use up random ingredients. 

First, there areTORTILLAS. We make these completely from scratch. Using only cornflour and water, we roll out thin pieces of dough and quickly fry them in a regular hot nonstick pan (No oil or anything). Its mostly a mix and cook until it looks right process since the humidity and heat causes a constant need for adjustment. 

This one has zuchini, peppers, mushroom, onions, and garlic, topped with cheddar cheese

We top them with sauteed vegetables, and them place them under the broiler with shredded cheese until melted. The way you eat it from there is up to you. Some of us topped it with another tortilla to make a quesadilla, others rolled it into a mock burrito, and others just added sour cream or salsa and ate it open faced. 

Second, there is PIZZA. The dough was just standard pizza dough, though we exchanged one cup of all purpose flour for one cup of cornflour. Everyone has their favorite recipe for pizza dough, and depending on how much time you want to spend you can find different recipes on line. We used a basic flour, yeast, water recipe that needed time to rise before being rolled out and topped. 

The toppings are very much whatever you have in your fridge. We started with the basic tomato sauce and mozzerella, and then just threw on whatever we had. For us, that ended up being things like artichokes, eggplant, garlic, mushrooms, fresh basil, and green peppers.  It was kind of like a supreme vegetable pizza. 


Bake it in the oven at 350 degrees until the cheese is melted and the crust is lightly browned and baked. Then you can cut them up, and in the time it takes to find your camera amid the cooking supplies, a lot of it will be gone! 

We made two pizzas, and between 4 of us, they disappeared completely

Third, or lastly, there is FRITTATAS. This was something I had never cooked before, but one friend really wanted to make. Pretty much it is a super fancy egg omelet that you don't flip and that has all the ingredients cooked into it. For two people, you need 4-5 eggs, though if you are really hungry or want to feed more people you can easy make it more. (I should also point out it 4-5 eggs to feed two hungry college students lunch, lets face it, we don't do normal portions) 

You can also salt and pepper it for personal taste, but I did without, it was delicious enough on its on.

What you want to do is crack the eggs into a large bowl, and whisk them with a little milk until they are super whisked. This isn't the consistency of scrambled eggs we are going for, but for a nice and fluffy omelet. You can throw the egg mixture in a pan (over medium heat) with whatever you wish to use up. We put in Swiss chard, basil, zucchini, mushrooms, and topped it once it was done with a little cheddar cheese that melted right into it.  The result is not only as fancy to look at as its name would suggest, but tastes incredible too. 

Black Raspberry Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

     The best part about summer is how you can quite literally walk outside to pick your own fruit. Yesterday, we invaded the local black raspberry patch and picked all the ripe ones we could find. (Trust me, the purple stains on our fingers confirmed that we were busy.) While most of the picking was done bush to mouth, we did end up with about 6oz of berries or about 3/4 cup. 
    The question became, what to do with the berries? We were severely tempted to just eat them raw, but the bakers in us saw an excuse to break out the bowls and wooden spoons. We tossed around a few ideas, like making black raspberry muffins, before deciding that the only thing to be done was to make cookies. However, we were then faced with the decision of what type of cookie. Should we use a sugar cookie base? A chocolate chip cookie type dough? Shortbread? And then it came to us, if there is one food that instantly makes anything baked something delicious, it would have to be oatmeal. We would make black raspberry chocolate oatmeal cookies. (Why chocolate? The real question is WHY NOT!) 

Here is just a small sample of our batch

 Isn't the blueish color awesome?

The dough base was taken from Better Homes and Garden oatmeal cookies, with a few minor adjustments. 


Ingredients: 


3/4 cup butter (we did a mixture of 1/2 cup butter, 1/4 cup margarine) 
1 cup packed DARK brown sugar (while the recipe doesn't specify, we all know dark is better than light)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (It is not optional in our book, and we tend to make it a heaping 1/2 tsp) 
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 3/4 cup all purpose flour
2 cups rolled oats 
(we added about two extra tablespoons of flour and oats to combat the extra liquid from the chocolate and black raspberries) 
3/4 cups black raspberries (the fresher the better)
1 cup chocolate chips melted (we may have added a few extras beyond that... chocolate is delicious)


Directions: 


Heat your oven to 375 degrees.

Put all the butter and margarine (minus one tablespoon with which to melt the chocolate) in a mixing bowl and beat it on medium speed for about 30 seconds.

Add the brown sugar, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and cinnamon to the butter, and beat until all mixed.

Add the egg and vanilla and beat until combined.

Add the flour slowly, by the end of the 1 3/4 cups you will be using a wooden spoon and good ol' fashion man power to mix the ingredients.

Add the 2 cups rolled oats and stir thoroughly.

Slowly and gently fold in the black raspberries (they will break and stain the batter a cool blueish color).

Melt the chocolate either via microwave or double boiler. (We just left ours in a bowl on top of the oven in the dorm, and it melted while we mixed everything else. Sometimes college cooking has its perks) Stir in the liquid chocolate until it is evenly distributed through the whole batter. It might have a strange color, but trust us, it will taste good.

 Depending on the size of the cookies you make, they will take anywhere from 8-12 minutes. When they are done, you will see the chocolate in the batter start to almost create a cracked glaze on the top (like what you see on brownies) and they will look pretty solid.

Allow to cool, and then munch! Half our batch disappeared right after baking them from all of our friends stopping by to see "what made the hallway smell so good."

Summer Borscht

There was so much good food in our C.S.A. (Community Supported Agriculture) share this week. We got blueberries, swiss chard, beets, potatoes, zucchini, cabbage, and basil! Some of the produce went into frittatas (fancy omelets), bits went on homemade veggie supreme pizza, and a lot has just been snitched slowly out of the fridge and eaten by the handful (like the blueberries!). 

Somehow though, when we looked at the ingredients we had left, we had all the ingredients we needed to make borscht. Now I know what you are thinking, and I can tell you for a fact that not only can borscht be served warm, it is delicious, and it is indeed made with beets!!! 

(We took the picture before topping it)

Our recipe is a vegetarian version of the soup, inspired by Ukrainian borscht (which is incredibly tasty, and something I have been craving since I came back from the Ukraine). Most borscht recipes are based on meat broths or cooked with beef, but we left this out since part of our group is of the vegetarian persuasion. They are also served with either garlic or onion rolls, but since we didn't have time to make rolls from scratch we decided to go with dumplings instead. A perfect dessert to top it all off with is vanilla ice cream with fresh blue berries. 

Ingredients: 
For the Borscht
8 cups water
Vegetable broth bullion cubes (about 4)
beets (chunked)
carrots (chopped)
cabbage (shredded/finely chopped) 
potatoes (chunked like the beets)
onion (thinly sliced)
garlic (finely chopped)
Like the college students we are, we didn't really measure anything out when it came to the vegetables. We pretty much just used up whatever amount we had in the C.S.A. That ended up being about seven small beets, 5 average farmers market carrots (smaller sized store ones), a small head of cabbage, about eight little potatoes, half an onion, and four cloves of garlic.
For the dumplings
1 cup sifted All Purpose Flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt 
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons oil
These ingredients we did measure. The recipe is the same one my mom uses when she makes beef stew. Needless to say, they are tried and true dumplings, so we didn't mess around with the recipe. 

To make the batter, simply combine the dry ingredients, and then add the milk and oil at the same time, mixing it only until everything is moistened! Then you can set it aside until later.
Toppings:
Sour Cream
Dill

Steps


Step 1: Bring the water and bullion cubes to a boil, stir occasionally until the cubes have dissolved into a nice broth.  *Make sure you keep stirring the soup occasionally as you progress through the rest of the steps!*

Step 2: Add the beets and onion. Boil until the beets loose their color and become a bit tender (approximately 15 minutes) 

Step 3: Add the carrots and potatoes. Boil until they become softened. (about 10-15 minutes)

Step 4: Throw in the cabbage. Drop in spoonfuls of the dumpling batter right onto the soup. (They will expand, so you should get about 8-12 dumplings out of the batter depending on how big you make them.) Cover the pot and lower it to a simmer for about 12 minutes. 

Step 5: Serve it with a dollop of sour cream and a sprinkle of dill (ours was freshly dried from the garden). You can add salt and pepper to each serving individually for preferred taste.  


*This made about six servings. Four of us ate it for dinner, and both guys went back for seconds and extra dumplings. Its a great meal for a cool summer evening, because its fresh tasting, but also satisfyingly filling. 

Homemade Pickles

You never know what you are going to find at the farmer's market. Last Saturday, we made a lucky discovery in the form of pickling cucumbers. Needless to say, we had to get them, and we had to make pickles.

These small cucumbers cost us only $2 dollars, and the rest of the ingredients weren't much more. We also got a bulb of fresh garlic for 50cents, sprigs of dill free from our garden, and already had an onion back in our rooms.

The first step to making pickles, according to the dozen or so websites and recipes we looked at, is to find a big jar to pickle them in. If you don't have a large jar readily available (we didn't),  then a bowl works just as well.

Step one, chop up the garlic and dill and place it in the bottom of the bowl. No measuring involved, we just put stuff in until it looked like enough.

Step two, add about half an onion chopped in large pieces to the bowl. On top of the onion, add the pickling cucumbers.

Step three, add sugar, salt, and vinegar. Most recipes said about 1/3 - 1/2 cup of sugar and salt, and approximately 2 cups white vinegar. Of course, we had forgotten the measuring cups and were too lazy to go get them. We estimated what we used to be about a 1/2 cup sugar, 1/3 cup sea salt, and a little less than 2 cups of vinegar.  We then topped off the bowl with about 2 cups of water.

Step four, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place it in the refrigerator. Make sure to stir or shake (if you have a jar) the pickles at least once a day if not more often. It will take a few days, but soon they will taste just like dill pickles!

We made these on a Saturday, and by the following Thursday, we had already eaten half the batch. They were just that good!

The Dog Days of Summer

Hey Everyone, 


   Summer is now in the full swing of things, and that means that we have been busy in the garden and in the kitchen. Hopefully, you can expect a weekly update from us with one of our favorite 'experiments' of the week. Since we are college kids, we eat what we can afford and store in the mini fridges of our dorm rooms, which makes meal time an interesting collaboration of who has what ingredients. 


Besides recipes and delicious pictures of food, we will keep you updated on all sorts of locally-inspired activities and finds. 


Remember, this is our first attempt at blogging, and Brittany is better at this than I am, so feed back is majorly appreciated!