We are having a bumper crop of cucumbers this year and I'm in serious need of a good pickle recipe stat! If you have any that are tried and true and you don't mind sharing, I'd be extremely grateful.  Thanks!

I didn't think it was going to happen this year.  The kitchen is still not completely put back together.  Other deadlines loom and the girls seem to be busier this summer than in years past.  My time is so limited these days.  But on a whim Sunday afternoon, I called the berry farm for Monday's hours.  When they said that if I wanted to pick today, I'd have to be in the field by 4:30, I took a quick look at my watch.  3:00.  If we left right away, we'd be there by 3:30....oh, why not?  We went.

After 40 minutes of picking, the girls and I had amassed three gallons (14 pounds!) of berries.  So on Monday (and Tuesday) I made what had seemed impossible possible.  The kitchen is messier than when I started, but it doesn't matter.  We'll all be happier for the mess because I was able to squeeze it in this year.

I made jam.

(Last year's jam post is filled with information on how I make my jam.  I wrote about strawberry jam in 2008, too.)

I know I just said I'd be gone for awhile, but then something happened that I think is blog worthy, so here I am.  Are you all familiar with Gwyneth Paltrow's newsletter, GOOP?  I don't remember how I was turned onto it, but I have been subscribing for awhile now.  Yesterday, this little gem landed in my inbox.  The timing could not have been more perfect:  I was just looking for something to make for dinner.  Shrimp tacos, anyone?

 

 

They were fantastically fresh, simple and easy - all things I like in a meal.  I didn't follow the recipe.  Instead, I watched the video and I enjoyed how Gwyneth just showed you what to do.  Really, nothing needed to be precise.  I opted out of the guacamole because the avocado I had wasn't ripe and substituted green for red with the jalapeno and red for white with the onion.  Otherwise, I just followed her lead.  It was a great meal for us because Jane, who is allergic to shellfish, could still make herself veggie tacos while us other three ate the shrimp.  We were all members of the clean plate club.  Thumbs up all around!

Have a great weekend.

I pick up the paring knife, its shape fits my hand.  Blue cardboard quarts sit on the counter to my right and the colander is in the empty sink waiting to be filled.  I pick up the first berry.  With a quick twist of the blade, it's little green top is detached and dropped.  It sits on the bottom of the big white sink looking brighter somehow.  The plump, red strawberry is placed in the strainer, waiting to be joined by all the others.  I reach for the next berry without thinking.  Quick twist, dropped top, berry plopped. I find my rhythm immediately.  It's a familiar task - one I don't think much about until now.

I make fast work of the first quart and half of the second one.  After a quick rinse, I lay the berries on some paper towels to dry.  I sample one.  It's perfect - sweet, juicy, not too ripe.  Although dinner is in a short while, I help myself to a few more.  With each bite, I taste summer.  I'm immediately in central Wisconsin, some June day around the age of seven or eight.  I walk outside my grandparents' house and pick strawberries for breakfast, eating one for every couple berries that make their way in to the wooden box.  The sun is shining on my shoulders, warm but not yet too hot.  There isdirt under my toes, turning my white sandals brown.  I bend over again and examine the plants.  I lift the leaves, find the gems and pick them.  Two in the box, one in the mouth.

"Mom!"  Her voice brings me back to the task at hand.  "Would you like a strawberry?" I ask.  She grabs one readily.  I take another one for myself.  I look down at her face and she's smiling.  "These are soooo good," she says.  "They are, aren't they?" I reply.  She nods and grabs two more before she skips out the kitchen door, yelling for her sister to wait up.  I plop another berry in my mouth - it's just as sweet as the first one.  I could keep eating, but I make myself stop so I can fix dinner.  The truth is I could skip the meal all together.  The days are growing longer and I am anxious for the stretch of carefree days ahead of us.  Only four days of school remain and the calendar says May, but itmight as well be June.  For me, summer always starts with the strawberries.

I baked this past weekend.  A lot.  The total was 2 loaves of the master recipe from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (HBI5), 2 loaves avocado-guacamole bread from HBI5, 5 bagels and 4 soft pretzels from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (ABI5).  I also made a sandwich loaf from the master recipe in HBI5 on Friday.  Yes.  5 loaves and 9 miniatures.  A whole lot of baking.

My successes:  The bagels!  The pretzels!  I have been wanting to make bagels since I got the book over a year ago.  I was scared, though.  Boiling pot?  Sounds tricky.  Guess what?  Not tricky at all.  Actually, super easy.  Both the pretzels and bagels were well received and they both use the same dough.  The difference is what you add to the water in the pot when you boil them.  The bagels take baking soda and sugar whereas the pretzels take cream of tartar and baking soda.  The resting time is shorter than for the big loaves so they are faster to get in the oven which means they are faster to get out of the oven too.  We ate both the bagels and the pretzels warm - yum!  The only thing I really found tricky was rolling the dough in long ropes to form the pretzels.  I did it with difficulty and they turned out fine.  I made some more pretzels after school on Monday for the girls and made the pretzels into sticks instead of twisting them.  So much easier and the exact same taste.  Another word to the wise:  my edition of ABI5 had a significant error in the bagel recipe.  A quick check of the official website told me that the oven temperature should be 450 instead 400.  I also searched the site for soft pretzels and found that although the authors say the cooking time is 15 minutes, it really takes about 30 minutes.  Check the errata before you attempt any of these recipes.

Mixed results:  the avocado-guacamole bread.  If you have been a reader of this blog for any length of time, you know that I love Mexican food.  Accordingly I had high hopes for this bread.  It has whole wheat and white flours with avocado, tomato and garlic.  The taste profile is fantastic!  I baked up the two loaves and took them to a party where the bread got great reviews.  I was a little disappointed, though.  My dough seemed overly wet even though I followed the recipe to the letter.  Accordingly my loaves were a little flat.  Next time I make the dough, I will add additional flour to see if that helps.  But the taste is there so I will definitely make this bread again.

The other mixed result I had was the HBI5 master recipe.  I was really excited to make this because it is a whole grain bread.  My loaves turned out very dense and too wheat-y for my taste.  Don't get me wrong - I like wheat bread.  In fact, when I buy bread, I almost always choose the wheat.  This dough looked great, smelled wonderful and rose exactly as it should.  When I cut into it, though, the crumb was dense.  I think that I was the issue here.  I don't think my oven was up to temperature - I had forgotten that 450 on my oven really isn't 450 degrees.  I have to set it to 475 to have my oven thermometer register 450.  Duly noted.  I will try this again at the correct temperature and hope that it's more to my taste.

Failure:  The master recipe in HBI5 as a sandwich loaf.  It was tiny and I kind of guessed it would be based on the loaf pan size that the authors call for.  The taste is nutty and nice, but it's not great for sandwiches and only ok for toast.  I'll try it again, using a bigger pan and maybe it will work out.  There are a couple other loaf recipes in HBI5 that I want to try too.

All in all, I love both books.  Both ABI5 and HBI5 have made baking bread doable for me.  The fact that I have tubs of dough in my refrigerator and can bake a loaf as it is wanted is amazing.  I love that HBI5 has many more whole grain recipes and interesting ones at that (banana bread for french toast, anyone?).  It also has a whole chapter full of gluten-free recipes - that alone should be a selling point for many people.  The recipes in ABI5 were revolutionary to me and the ones in HBI5 only add fuel to my baking fire.  And, especially, I love that it is easy for me to bake bread.  Easy, people.  So easy that I made blueberry bagels without a recipe telling me exactly what to do. 

Uh huh.  That's what I am talking about.

You guys are awesome!  There are so many great snack ideas in the comments on the last post.  If you are looking for instant ideas, go check them out.  If not, I'll put them all together and make some sort of reference sheet for downloading.  Give me a few days or a week and I'll post it here for you all to download.

This isn't the best photo, but it gives a good indication of my weekend.  Bread.  And then more bread.  Surprisingly, I have quite a bit to say about it, but I want to try one more thing first.  Monday is going to be crazy, so hopefully I'll be back mid-week with my baking successes and failures.

And between batches of bread, I sewed something.  It's cute.  Photo shoot tomorrow and then I'll dish.  Hope your week is off to a good start.

I'm baking bread with regularity again.  I don't know why I stopped in the first place, but I did.  I just bought a copy of Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day (from the same authors of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day) and it's pretty much rocking my world in a good way.  The photo shows my first batch of the master recipe dough.  It has a much higher wheat to white flour ratio than any of the recipes in the first book.  I haven't eaten it yet, but the oven is heating as I type.  I'll report back once I have sampled it.  My bet is that it is going to be good.  I also have some Avocado-Guacamole bread rising.  I'm pretty psyched to try that.

Speaking of healthy, I'm at a standstill for after-school snacks.  Specifically, after-school snacks that are portable and easily eaten in the car.  There are two days a week that I pick the girls up from school and we drive straight to an activity.  I admit that we do stop at the coffee shop frequently.  I want to change that for health and pocketbook reasons.  I can dream up all kinds of food combinations that I think are fantastic, but don't enthuse my kids.  If you care to share your ideas, I might just make up a master list for downloading.  Is that incentive enough?

Over the past few months, I have been working hard to simplify my daily life.  One key has been that I cut my grocery shopping down to one big trip, normally on Monday, and a second, smaller shop later in the week.  Now, this may be the norm for most of you, but there was a time when I was a DAILY grocery shopper.  Seriously.  I'd figure out what we were having for dinner, go buy the ingredients and whatever staples we needed that day.  It's amazing how much time and running around this has saved me.

Another thing I am trying to do is make meals in advance.  This is a bit trickier for me.  We aren't big casserole eaters and I really like fresh produce.  So, this week I bought a family pack of chicken thighs and made a double recipe of chicken taco meat in the slow cooker.  We ate some of it last night and I used the leftover meat to make empanadas.  Rachel's empanada dough was super easy to make and it made 12 individual meat pies which will cover three meals for us.  Sweet.  I also made a double batch of marinade for tuscan lemon chicken.  I put the chicken in ziploc bags, poured the marinade over it and put it in the freezer.  That's two more meals done. (Both the chicken taco meat and tuscan lemon chicken recipes are in this post).

I'm also back on the bread baking train.  I pulled out Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day and made a batch of dough.  We really enjoy the peasant loaf that has whole wheat and rye flour in it.  I cut off one hunk and baked it on Tuesday.  I'm pretty sure there will be another loaf in the oven tomorrow.  Nothing is more satisfying to me than freshly baked, homemade bread.  The house always smells good too - bonus.

Dinner is coming together faster on our busy days thanks to these little steps.  I'm always looking for more ideas so if you have something to share, please do.