Category Archives: baking

Jammin’!

baking, summer, , ,

Last year, the hubby and I set about making jam.  I had made a few half-pints of blackberry jam at my mother’s house, and, once I realized what a simple process it was, and coming home with boxes of peaches and nectarines, we decided to try making a few varieties of jam.

This year, a friend of mine and I made jam together over the course of a couple of afternoons.  We both gained quite the appreciation for those who process boxes and boxes of fruit.  We only had two and were pretty tired of peaches by the end of the second afternoon of our jam-making adventures.

I found all of the jam from last year, and combined with this year, we have quite the selection!  Below are the varieties:

– Blackberry
– Nectarine-blackberry
– Peach
– Peach-blueberry
– Peach-blackberry
– Peach-mango
– Peach-ginger
– Peach-habanero

Applesauce Drop Doughnuts

baking, tutorial, ,

With so many friends asking for the recipe for these doughnuts, I thought I’d post it on my blog.

First, the original recipe came from AllRecipes.  I made a few modifications (like using a little whole wheat flour), and, because the sugar mixture my husband whisked together for these was so darn tasty, I added that to the recipe.

Ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 eggs
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1/4 cup milk
1 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
oil for frying

For the coating
1/2 cup sugar, 1 tbsp cinnamon, 1 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp nutmeg

Directions


Heat oil to 375F.  (We used oil in a stock pot on the stove, rather than our deep fryer.)

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, salt.

Cream sugars and eggs until mixture is well-combined.  Add oil and mix well.  Mix flour mixture and milk, alternating between dry ingredients and milk, ending with dry ingredients.  Blend well.  Add applesauce and vanilla.

Drop batter by even tablespoon into oil, and let fry for 2 minutes, then flip and fry for another 2 minutes to get an even brown color all around.  (The original recipe said a total of 3 minutes was needed, but I found I needed to cook them for 4 minutes to get them cooked all the way through.) Let cool on a plate with a few paper towels to soak any excess oil.

NOTE:  The doughnuts inflate once they get into the oil, so be sure to do as close to an even tablespoon each, else they will get too large and not cook through very well.

Whisk together the coating ingredients, and once the doughnuts have cooled a little, roll them in the coating mixture.

Really, you can dust them with powdered sugar, eat them without dusting them at all, or just do a simple cinnamon sugar dusting.

Enjoy!

Embarassing Moments in the Kitchen (or Why Z’s Husband Does the Cooking)

baking, cooking, embarrassing moments

Let me start by saying my mother taught me how to bake, but not necessarily how to cook. I take that back…I learned how to cook, but I didn’t have ANY kind of knack for it, and my mother was probably all too happy to let me take care of measuring flour and sugar and leave the cooking to her, or to my sisters.

Episode 1 – See, Mommy? I cooked dinner so you wouldn’t have to!

When I was maybe 10, I tried to cook dinner on my own for my mother. Mommy was out doing something, and I remember thinking she was going to be tired and I wanted to help. The options for what I could cook with my extremely limited skillset narrowed to ramen noodles or macaroni and cheese. I chose the mac and cheese. I vaguely remember reading the box and following the directions, my mother coming home, being all proud about cooking dinner, and her asking if I’d turned the heat off on the stove when I cooked the macaroni and cheese? Result: burned mac and cheese by the 10 year old in the 7th grade. Mommy had to cook dinner anyway.

Episode 2 – Cooking dinner to impress the boyfriend, his friend, and my roommate

Fast forward to college, my junior year, at CWU, 18 years old (graduated early and did my AA at a community college). I was dating a guy from Mexico whose buddy was dating my friend and second roommate. She and I decided one night to do dinner for the guys. I wanted to make the dish I grew up knowing as casserole – ground beef cooked with tomatoes, potatoes, and carrots, served over rice. It’s another of the comfort foods I enjoy (however, I can never get it to taste anything like my mother’s did…so we don’t have it that often). We bought the groceries we needed, found a kitchen to use, and set to work. The dinner was nice, except the rice was a little crunchy – and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I’d done wrong. I thought I’d followed all of the directions I’d gotten from my mother: I sauteed the rice in 1 tbsp butter until it glistened, then covered it and let it cook covered on low heat for 10 minutes, then uncovered it, stirred it and added another bit of butter to the center of the rice and stirred until the butter melted.

To give you a sense of how little I knew about cooking…it wasn’t until I was making that same dish a year later that I finally realized…I hadn’t added the water to the rice! I don’t think I ever told my mother about that incident. Or the fact it took me a year to realize what I’d done wrong!

Episode 3 – Give me tuna and creamed corn, and I shall make myself a dinner never to be forgotten.

A couple years later, I was living in an apartment, and Rich and I had just started dating. I was working full time and going to school part time for my Masters in Business Administration. It had been a late day at work and I was STARVING, but I only had a few minutes before I had to be at class. I didn’t have time to stop by Rich’s parents’ to grab dinner with them, which had been my plan. I was on my own for this one. I knew I needed protein, else I’d have a splitting headache by the end of the night, but I also had been taught by my mother to always have some sort of vegetable with dinner. I rummaged through the pantry and found the quick things to heat up: tunafish and creamed corn. I think I’d had tuna noodle casserole earlier or something…but I figured I liked tuna, and I liked creamed corn, and I was short on time and short on pots, so why not mix the two together?

Maybe THAT was why my father-in-law was so surprised when I took a pie I’d made entirely from scratch to their house and he loved it…

Episode 4 – Okay, okay, I can’t cook…but I can still impress the future in-laws with a dish from my mother’s country!

Rich’s family was all together for Christmas that year. I decided I wanted to make Salvadorian Quezadilla. I got all the ingredients out at Rich’s mom’s house, and I started the mixing. Rich had said at some point that “a real Johnson doesn’t need to crack eggs with two hands – a real Johnson can crack an egg with one hand while using the other to keep stirring.” As he and I were still dating, and I was trying to not only impress him but his family as well, I tried doing the whole one-handed-egg-cracking thing. That egg cracked all right…and fell, shell and all, into the already-going mixer. I immediately stopped it, and picked out all the small eggshell pieces I could find in the batter (note – that Bosch was mixing faster than I intended it to and had already gone around a few times before I stopped it). I figured I’d retrieved all the eggshell pieces and kept going with the batter. I was so excited to share the dessert – it smelled WONDERFUL! Johnson family – be impressed!

I think it was Rich’s older brother’s wife, Kjaristy, who crunched on the eggshell first. It ended up being dubbed eggshell cake…everyone got some eggshell in the dessert. I think they all still hesitate just a little if I say I’m going to make it.