Where did the recipes go?

In case you're wondering when I'll post more recipes, I am now posting all of them on the Homegrown & Handmade blog. I just posted a recipe for bread pudding, and last month I posted a recipe for strawberry jam. In May I shared my recipes for chocolate truffles and multigrain bread that's light and fluffy. If you don't want to miss any of the upcoming recipes, be sure to "follow" the Homegrown & Handmade blog or subscribe by email. In the next few months, I'll be posting recipes for cucumber goat cheese spread, spiced pear butter, and pumpkin spice cookies, just to name a few!

Sneak peak: Homemade noodle recipe

The following recipe is from Homegrown and Handmade. If you get a chance to try it, let me know what you think, especially if you have any problems with the instructions.

Homemade Noodles

Cut and dried and waiting to be boiled

Although noodles are not expensive to buy, they cost only pennies to make, and you can use your own organic eggs. They are also incredibly easy and delicious. This recipe is enough for one serving of noodles as a main dish or two servings if it is part of a hearty soup or side dish. Feel free to double, triple, or quadruple as needed.

1 egg
½ cup flour plus more for rolling out
pinch of salt

Break egg into bowl and beat. Add flour and mix thoroughly. It’s easier if you add it ¼ cup at a time. The dough should form a ball. If it hasn’t formed a ball yet, add a little more flour. Roll it in flour to coat completely. Sprinkle flour liberally on countertop or waxed paper and press dough ball down on it. Flip dough ball over and press again. Use a rolling pin to roll out the dough as thinly as possible. It’s quite elastic and will keep trying to shrink on you. Use flour liberally to keep the dough from sticking to the countertop or rolling pin. You can’t use too much flour at this point. Cut noodles into strips using a pizza cutter. If you don’t have a pizza cutter, sprinkle more flour on the dough, then roll up like a jelly roll and cut through the roll with a knife to make noodles. Dry for one or two hours, if you have time. If you want to cook them right away, they’ll puff up a little but will still taste great. Drop them into boiling chicken broth (made from a stew hen) for best flavor.

Mother Earth News Fair: Baking bread

The following information is from a handout that participants will receive at my bread baking session today and tomorrow at the Mother Earth News Fair in Pennsylvania.

Basic bread recipe
Makes 1 loaf, 1 dozen rolls, or 1 thick-crust pizza

3 cups flour
1 cup water (or milk, tomato juice, pasta sauce, orange juice, etc.)
2 t. yeast
1 t. salt
1 T. sugar or honey
2 T. butter or oil
optional: ¼ cup dried cranberries, raisins, uncooked oatmeal, chocolate chips

These ingredients can be put into a bread machine and baked, or they can be mixed by hand and baked in a loaf pan at 400 degrees for 25 to 30 minutes for loaves, 20-25 minutes for rolls, if using unbleached flour. If using whole wheat, bake at 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes. You can let it rise two or three times or not at all. The more times it rises, the lighter the bread will be. If you bake it on the first rise, it will be quite dense. Bake it on the third rise, and it will be much lighter.

Delicious breakfast bread: Use orange juice as your liquid and add cranberries! When we had a bread machine, this was one of my favorite recipes to put on the timer, so we would have hot bread when we woke up in the morning.

French bread recipe
Makes 3 loaves or 3 dozen rolls (If you want a no-fail recipe for sandwiches, this is it!)

3 cups water
2 T. yeast
2 t. salt

6-8 cups unbleached flour (If you use whole wheat, the bread will be like a brick, because there is no sweetener in this recipe to feed the yeast, so it doesn't rise as much a the first recipe.)

Mix first three ingredients in a bowl. Add 6 cups flour. Add additional flour ¼ cup at a time until dough does not stick to your fingers. Dough can be used to make three loaves at once, or it can be refrigerated for several days (in a greased bowl, loosely covered with plastic wrap) and used to make individual rolls or loaves as needed. Dough left in refrigerator will develop a sourdough taste. When ready to bake, shape into desired loaves or rolls. Let rise half an hour if starting at room temperature; rise two or three hours if bread has just been removed from refrigerator. If cooking as baguette loaves on a flat baking stone, and you want a crispy crust, sprits with water before placing in 400-degree oven. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes for loaves, 20-25 minutes for rolls.

This is a great recipe for making a bread braid. Just make three long, skinny snakes of dough and braid them. Let rise about 20-30 minutes and bake, as above.

Both of these breads can be stored at room temperature, wrapped in a cloth. They will go stale long before they mold. As each day passes, they will become drier. After two or three days, it's really best to just cube whatever bread is left. You can make croutons by sprinkling it with spices and putting in a 200 degree oven for a couple hours. You can put bread cubes in a freezer bag or box and freeze for future poultry stuffing.

Naan

Use French bread recipe, and after dough has risen once, punch down, and tear dough into egg-sized pieces. Roll out on floured surface. Oil a cast-iron skillet with butter and cook naan for a couple minutes on medium heat. Flip when bubbles start to form in naan, and cook second side until it begins to brown. After it’s done, put it on a plate and smear it with butter and crushed garlic, if desired.

Objections?

· I don’t have enough time. Answer: Mix up a batch when you have 10 minutes to spare and keep it in your frig. As you need bread through the week, tear off a piece and bake it. OR Bake four or six loaves at once and freeze all but one. OR Teach your spouse and children to bake bread. The top recipe is taped inside my cabinet, so it's always available for anyone.

· We wouldn’t eat a whole loaf before it molds. Answer: See first answer. You don’t have to make a whole loaf. However, home-baked bread tastes so good, it gets eaten much faster than store-bought bread.

· I’ve heard it’s really hard, and I don’t think I can do it. Answer: You’ve got nothing to lose! Even if you forget the yeast, which is absolutely necessary, you can use the dough to make crackers or pretzels. If the bread falls, it will still taste good. And if you think it’s really too ugly to let anyone see it, you can cube it and use it to make bread pudding.

Troubleshooting:

· Always add flour to the mix gradually. It is much easier to add flour to a sticky dough than the add water to a dry dough.

· Forgot yeast? No problem! Roll out the dough to 1/8-inch thick and cut into squares or triangles. Bake at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes, and you have crackers! Sprinkle with Kosher salt or garlic salt before baking, if desired.

· Dough is too sticky to handle? Add more flour ¼ cup at a time.

· Bread falls during baking? Too much liquid. Use less next time. Usually only happens when using a bread machine. When making bread by hand, you’ll know if there’s too much liquid, because the dough will be sticky.

For more information:

www.kingarthurflour.com
www.artisanbreadinfive.com

Homemade coffee creamer

Someone recently asked me if I've always been concerned about nutrition. Yeah, people ask me that question a lot, but this time I happened to think about the fact that I used to love that fake coffee creamer in the store -- you know the French vanilla and all of those other flavors. And I loved it a lot, meaning that I put a lot of it in my coffee.

Now, I would not call this a "health food" or even a healthy alternative, but it is all natural. I won't be putting this in my coffee every day, but I'll probably make it a few times a year for a special treat. It's a dulce de leche coffee creamer -- or caramel.

This recipe might look familiar to some of you:

2 quarts goat milk
2 cups sugar
1/2 t. baking soda

Yes, it's the same ingredients as many cajeta recipes. Put it on the stove and start boiling gently. After four to six hours, it will look like this. You can call it creamer whenever it suits your fancy. I think it's just perfect when it's reduced slightly more than half of its original volume. In this particular case, I doubled the recipe to one gallon of milk and cooked it down to two quarts of creamer. Don't worry about getting it just right. If you don't boil it down enough, you'll just use more of it in your coffee. If you boil it down too much, then you won't need as much. If you boil it down way too much, then you'll have a great caramel sauce for dipping apples or putting on ice cream. You really can't fail with this one.

Canning pizza sauce

We took forty-four pounds of tomatoes from the garden . . .

and turned them into eight pints of pizza sauce!

One pint of this sauce, which is very thick, will make four pizzas, so the eight pints will last us about four months. We make homemade pizza every Friday night to eat while watching a movie. I hope we have enough tomatoes left in the garden to make more, because I'd love to have this sauce available to us for the whole year. The only possible snafu is that we need to have about 45 pounds of tomatoes ripen on the same day. I'm not sure that will happen again this year.

We used the Seasoned Tomato Sauce recipe from the 1999 Ball Blue Book, which is where I get almost all of my canning recipes, along with the 2005 and 2009 editions. We left out the onions, because we've already used all the onions we grew in the garden this year. Plus, we can just put fresh onions on the pizza if we want them. We also left out the bay leaf and sugar, because I just don't like the idea of either one in pizza sauce. We added fresh basil from our garden. When the sauce was the consistency of juice, we put a little in the blender with a bunch of fresh basil. (How's that for an exact measurement?) We also used our homegrown garlic.

Another change we made from the original recipe was to cook down the sauce to a third the original volume, instead of half, which the recipe called for. The recipe is for an all-purpose spaghetti, lasagna, and pizza sauce, but we don't like runny pizza sauce. That's the great thing about making your own food. You can customize it just the way you like!

Sorry my photos have been so blech lately. I've been using my cell phone to take photos. I need a new camera!

Garden-fresh salsa

The simplest things are often the best. I've learned this lesson over and over again out here. I used to think that I needed to have a recipe for everything I cooked, other than the most basic dishes. For several years, I tried a variety of salsa recipes, but never was excited about any of them. Then one day several years ago, one of my daughters (probably the oldest, but I don't remember exactly) just chopped up a bunch of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers, sprinkled on a little salt and started dipping. That was the end of my search for salsa recipes.

As Alice Walker says in her books, the key to good food is to start with the freshest ingredients. If you start with a bunch of tomatoes that were picked green and gassed to turn red, your salsa won't taste very good. But when you start with vine-ripened tomatoes fresh from the garden, the response is, "Mmmm!"

This particular salsa was made with a few red tomatoes, a couple of orange banana tomatoes, and a few green zebra tomatoes, which creates the beautiful rainbow of colors. We're already out of red onions, so Katherine snipped some of our green onions for this particular batch of salsa. And we all agreed she went a little overboard with the peppers this time by chopping up three fresh jalapeños, but we all kept going back for more as soon as our mouth recovered.

Squash on television

Squash and cook top ready to go
on the set of The Morning Blend

Yesterday was definitely not a typical day in the life of a homesteader. I went to Milwaukee to talk squash on The Morning Blend, NBC's local morning show that comes on after Today. I had already spent Tuesday and Wednesday cooking up squash multiple times, because I had to get it done in five minutes.

I did an Asian stir-fry (garlic, ginger, and soy sauce), a Mexican stir-fry (garlic and a habanero), and an Italian stir-fry (garlic and basil) twice. In case you didn't know, I love garlic. The first one I tried was Mexican, and as I told you a couple days ago, I quickly realized that I should not do anything with hot peppers, because I got a whiff and started choking and gasping for air, which was not something I wanted to do on live television. I figured out what I needed to do to get it all done on camera in five minutes. Basically, the pan needed to be hot and squash needed to be sliced before the camera went on, and then I could chiffonade the basil and crush the garlic on air while the squash was cooking.

Sounded like a good plan. But then the cameras were rolling, and Molly and Tiffany started asking me questions. I was concentrating on answering the questions and suddenly thought that it seemed like it had been a few minutes. I looked down, and the squash appeared to be done. I suddenly remembered the basil and garlic! So, I went into panic mode inside and started thinking that I'd never get done in time, but I had to keep talking and appearing calm. I always told my college students that you feel worse on the inside than you look on the outside when you're speaking, and I'm glad to know I was right. When I watched the video, I didn't look nearly as panicked as I felt. Whew!

So, if you want to see how it went -- and see my simple and quick squash recipe -- click over to The Morning Blend site and watch!

Another take on sandwiches

I hate sandwiches. At least, that's what I would have said if you would have asked me that question a few days ago. That was before I discovered the most delectable sandwich imaginable -- worthy of a four-star restaurant.

When I was looking for a pesto recipe, I came upon the idea of using pesto in a sandwich with mozzarella. Hmm, that has possibilities, I thought. So, I baked several French baguettes, and we layered them with homemade pesto, parmesan, mozzarella, and garden-fresh tomato slices. The homemade pesto is merely olive oil blended with freshly-harvested basil, garlic, and our own goat milk parmesan. Although we didn't grow the wheat for the bread flour, everything else was homegrown.

The side dish is golden zucchini stir-fried in unrefined sesame oil with freshly crushed garlic and red pepper. Mike spent a good chunk of Saturday afternoon harvesting all of our garlic. Final count was around 40 bulbs of garlic, almost all softneck. For whatever sad reason, the hardneck didn't do very well. Only four of them grew. Oh well, that's why we grow a variety of varieties. Some like our climate and soil better than others. We have enough garlic to last at least a few months.

For more food posts, check out Food Renegade.

Zucchini spice cake

It's zucchini season, and one of my favorite things is zucchini spice cake. (Another thing I love about this time of year are the gladiolas!) Quick note before I forget -- if you use green, black, or gray zucchini, you'll have green specks in the cake. I used golden zucchini, which is why you don't see any green. This is important for those of you with loved ones who refuse to eat zucchini-anything. I seriously suspect that they just don't like green specks in their food, so if you use golden zucchini or just peel the zucchini, they'll never know.

Now, I have to get back out to the garden, so here you go:

2 c. shredded zucchini
1 1/2 c. whole wheat flour
1/2 c. unbleached flour
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. vegetable oil
1/3 c. water
1 1/4 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
1 t. ground cinnamon
1 t. ground cloves
1 t. ground nutmeg
1 t. vanilla
3 eggs

Mix everything together and beat for a couple minutes. Pour into a greased and floured 9 X 13 pan and bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Frost with chevre frosting, if desired:

4 ounces chevre (soft goat cheese)
1 T. milk
1 t. vanilla
2 1/4 c. powdered sugar

This will give you a thin layer of frosting. If you really like a lot of frosting, you can double it. And if you're not lucky enough to have your own goats, you can make a cream cheese frosting, as well. Store the cake in the refrigerator, because it will grow mold within a couple days if you leave it at room temperature, and that's really sad.

Tis the season for eatin'

Homemade chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream
in a baked meringue shell with caramel sauce

I just realized why I usually write so much about food in the summer -- it's because I'm cooking all the time, except when I'm working in the garden or milking goats. I'm looking at food, working with food, and eating like a queen July through September.

Blackberries are in the woods, and Mike has been picking them once a week for the past couple weeks. There are some bushes that haven't even ripened yet, so for whatever strange reason, the blackberry harvest seems to be prolonged this year.

In the garden, we're getting green beans, several types of squash, tomatoes, onions, sweet and hot peppers, and basil.

We're milking 13 goats, which provides us with almost two gallons of milk a day after all the goat kids are fed. That means we are making lots of cheese, as well as buttermilk, yogurt, ice cream, and more. Yesterday, I experimented with a recipe for cajeta. None of the recipes I found were very complete, so I had no idea whether this would take an hour or all day. As it turns out, it took about six hours, which was more than I expected. It's basically a caramel sauce, and all you're doing is reducing goat milk, sugar, and a tiny bit of baking soda until it turns golden and sweet! This is what I used:

2 quarts goat milk
2 cups sugar
1/2 t. baking soda

I whisked it all together and put it on the stove to simmer or gently boil for hours and hours. When it was a light tan color, I tasted it -- perfect dulce de leche for coffee -- so I poured off enough to fill up my cream pitcher, and this morning we used it for our coffee. It reminded me of those artificial creamers that I used to use when I lived in the burbs -- except I knew this didn't contain any multi-syllabic ingredients that were unpronounceable. I continued boiling the rest of the mixture on the stove, and a few hours later it was caramel colored. It was evening by then, which meant it was time for me to milk goats again, so I turned off the stove, because I didn't want it to suddenly turn into fudge while I was gone.

The caramel sauce in the above photo is what I wound up with.

Growing bean sprouts

I'm not ashamed to admit that my first efforts at gardening in the sandy soil of Florida more than 20 years ago yielded only a handful of green beans that were tough and unpalatable. However, I have been growing something successfully for two decades -- sprouts! When my first child was still a baby, I bought a set of sprouting lids for wide-mouthed canning jars, and I've been growing sprouts in my kitchen ever since.

If you can pour yourself a glass of water, you can grow sprouts. To grow bean sprouts, all you have to do is put 1/4 cup of mung bean seeds into a jar, add enough water to cover the seeds, and let it sit on your counter for a few hours or overnight if you'll be asleep in a few hours. Then dump the water and rinse the sprouts a few times a day. In about four days, your two ounces of seeds will have yielded about 10 ounces of crunchy sprouts. We used this batch in an oriental stir-fry with onions, green peppers, celery, mushrooms, and tofu.

Warning: Once you've grown your own sprouts, you will no longer be content with store-bought.

Sprouting seeds are available in many health food stores, but if you can't find them locally, you can buy them online through Frontier Co-op, where you can also buy lots of flavorful herbs.

Making gjetost

My first attempt to make gjetost was an icky failure. I wound up with a bit of salty, sweet, grainy goo in the bottom of a pan after 11 hours of simmering whey on the stove. It looked like sand that had sunk to the bottom of a watered down caramel sauce. I had used the recipe in Ricky Carroll's book, which was inadequate.

Then blogpal Maggie, who had originally inspired me to try this cheese, suggested I check out a couple of other sources. I found David Fankhauser's recipe to be straightforward, and I decided to try again. Combing what I'd read in all three recipes, and using a bit of my own cooking knowledge, I decided to use a stick blender at the end. This is what it looked like after using the stick blender.
My husband was actually the person to do it, and it worked beautifully. I should have taken a picture before using the stick blender, but if you look at Fankhauser's pictures, that's what it looked like -- grainy. I don't think he's made gjetost much, because I don't think it would be possible to whisk out the graininess. This is what it looked like when it was ready to pour into the buttered bread pan and cool.
It was so sweet, it tasted like candy, and we all had to remind ourselves not to eat too much! We had quite a bit of it plain, and we sliced some for breakfast and put it on whole wheat biscuits, which was also heavenly.

Making ginger ale

I just drank my first glass of homemade ginger ale, and it won't be the last. It was bubbly, sweet, and delicious! Credit goes to David Fankhauser's website for the instructions. Yes, it really is that easy. No, it doesn't taste yeasty or beer-like. I actually doubled the ginger, because I love ginger, and I thought it was just right.

I only drink all-natural beverages -- water, coffee, tea, and wine, but yes, I have an urge for something different every now and then. In summer, I often make lemon balm-spearmint iced tea, which is a favorite. Now I have even more options. I will be trying the cream soda from Fankhauser's site (on the root beer page), and I have a few ideas of my own for other bubbly beverages. Of course, I'll share them with you as I get them figured out.

Apple cinnamon muffins

I rediscovered this recipe recently and have been enjoying these warm muffins for breakfast. When my children were younger, I made these a lot! Cinnamon just seems to beg for whole wheat flour. As you know, I'm not a purist when it comes to using whole wheat (I do love my French bread), but when cinnamon is involved, it just doesn't taste right to me unless you use whole wheat flour.


Mix together:
2 c. whole wheat flour
1 t. baking soda
1 t. cinnamon
1/8 t. ground cloves
1/2 t. salt

Add:
1 c. buttermilk
1/4 c. honey
3 T. melted butter
1 egg

Once everything is mixed together, add:
one apple (peeled and chopped)

Fill muffin cups about half full and bake at 375 degrees F for about 15 minutes or until top of muffin springs back when touched lightly. In other words, if you poke it gently, and the muffin now has a dent in it, it's not done yet. This recipe makes a dozen muffins.

For more posts on food check out Fight Back Friday.

Pizza night

Most nights, we sit down around the dinner table and have a proper dinner, but every Friday night, we make homemade pizza and eat it while watching a movie. Everyone in the family knows how to make pizza, so anyone can jump in and start the dough or roll it out or whatever needs to be done to keep pizza night on track. In fact, the kids usually make the pizza without even being reminded.

The dough recipe is taped inside the cabinet above the Kitchen Aid, so it's easy to get everything started on time. To make enough dough for two pizzas, put the follow ingredients into the mixing bowl:

1 1/2 c. water
1 T. yeast
1 T. sugar
1 t. salt
2 T. olive oil
4 to 5 c. flour

If you're using a Kitchen Aid, use your dough hook and mix until the dough forms a ball and no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl. You don't have to let it rise, but if it does rise for 30 minutes or an hour, it will be easier to stretch and roll out on the pizza pan.

Mike is the family mozzarella guru, and we haven't purchased mozzarella in a couple years. When we're really drowning in the milk in the spring and summer, we make extra mozz and freeze it for winter when we might not have the gallon of milk needed to make a batch.

Jonathan is especially good at rolling out the dough and preparing the pizza. Rub olive oil all over your hands to make it easier to handle the dough. (Olive oil is also very good for your skin, so don't wash it off!) Pour sauce to taste on each pizza crust. Newman's pasta sauces make great pizza, if you don't want to make your own sauce. Sprinkle chopped veggies and other toppings on the pizza. Bake for 20-25 minutes at 400 degrees F. Or when doing two pizzas, bake for 11 minutes, rotate pizzas on racks, and bake for an additional 11 minutes.

Pick a movie that the whole family will enjoy, sit back, and enjoy your pizza!

Check out more blogs on meatless meals here!

Bread fun

bread
Originally uploaded by Antiquity Oaks

Here's the bread we had for Thanksgiving. (I just realized I never posted this!) I used my standard French bread recipe and then played around with it. I made two small, plain loaves (upper right), and I kneaded raw, chopped red onions into two loaves (upper left). The onion bread was gone first! Everyone who tried it went back for second helpings. And the bread in the front is just a braid. Make three long skinny ropes and braid it just as you would hair.

All of this bread was made from my regular batch of French bread dough, which includes:
3 cups warm water (bath temperature)
2 T. yeast
2 t. salt
7-8 cups of unbleached flour

I put all the ingredients in the Kitchen Aid bowl* with a dough hook, in the order listed. Start with only seven cups of flour, and if it's sticky, add more. It's always easy to add more flour, but if you've got a dough that's too dry, it's an icky nightmare to try adding more water. Once it's all mixed up, cover the bowl with waxed paper or a towel that was wet and wrung out. Let is rise until doubled in size, which could be 45 to 90 minutes, depending on how warm your kitchen is. Don't sweat it if you can't get back to it until it's more than double. If you're making regular loaves, this will make three, so cut into thirds and shape into a ball, a baguette, or skinny ropes to make braids, etc.

After braiding or putting into bread pans, bake at 400 degrees F for 20-35 minutes, depending upon how thick the bread is. The thicker it is, the longer it has to bake. The smallest loaves only took about 20-25 minutes. Onion loaves took 30. The braid took 35 minutes.

*Please note that I have the large Kitchen Aid (says "Professional" on the side). If you have a smaller mixer, you'll need to cut the recipe by roughly 2/3. (2 c. water, 1 1/2 T. yeast, 1 t. salt, 5-6 cups flour)

Edited at 9:40 a.m. Monday, thanks to readers' comments! Just holler if anything else is unclear.

News from Elsewhere

Here are a few articles I've found online recently:

I've been thinking about 2010 apprentices, and I thought it would be a good idea to read descriptions from other farm internship programs. I found a number of farms with great programs, and I also found this article from the New York Times about college students doing internships on farms. What surprised me is how many of them were not majoring in agriculture or related fields.

It's exciting to see the documentaries being produced about the food revolution, like Fresh and Food, Inc. I just became aware of Dirt! The Movie. It's something most of us don't think about much, but it's really a deep subject. I can hardly wait to get the DVD and watch it.

Hard-hit community learns to grow food is an article about Wilmington, Ohio, which has 15% unemployment. Through volunteers and donors, the local college is teaching people how to garden, as well as providing garden plots, tools, and seeds for them to actually grow their own vegetables. Although the program started with only 20 families, they're hoping to increase that number next year. They also offered instruction in preserving and cooking. If a family doesn't take care of their garden plot, they are quickly replaced by a family that is committed to the program.

And I also wanted to share this great recipe for Roast Pork with Maple and Mustard Glaze. We don't get any of our pork smoked, because we don't want nitrates in our meat, so this is a great way to have a pork roast that tastes a lot like ham. Do not try this with bacon (fresh pork sides) however, because it will stick to your skillet and make for a terrible mess to clean up!

Let the baking begin!

If you were around last year, you know that I do a lot of cooking around the holidays. Okay, fine, compared to most people, I do a lot of cooking all the time. But during the holidays, I do even more. I like to have a good variety of sweets around the house during the holidays, so I start baking early and freeze some of it. Last year, I doubled all my cookie recipes and froze half of the cookies. I also started baking in November. By January 1, I had gained 15 pounds, and my knees were not happy. So, this year, I've held off until now.

I found this recipe when I was in college. I've loved cooking ever since I was eight years old. I remember the day I made my first cake. My mother had gone outside, and being a perfectly good reader, I pulled a cake mix out of the cabinet, mixed it up, and baked it. My mother was pleasantly surprised when she came inside to find a cake waiting for her.

By the time I was in eighth grade, I was cooking four or five course meals, and we didn't have a dishwasher, which meant I was leaving a big mess. I am amazed that my mother never insisted that I clean up the kitchen afterward. Maybe she liked my cooking enough that it made up for the mess? While other girls were subscribing to Seventeen and Cosmo, I was subscribing to Better Homes and Gardens and collecting recipes.

So, when I went off to college in Connecticut (far from Texas), I missed cooking. I went to the college library one day and found the 12th edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (1984). I went out and bought a cookie sheet and the other baking utensils and supplies needed to make these cookies, which I still love to this day. Of the 1,800 recipes in the book, I have no recollection why I chose this recipes, but I'm glad I did. Since they have nutmeg in them, I tend to make them around Christmas, because nutmeg always reminds me of Christmas.

Sour Cream Cookies

2 eggs
1 c. sugar
1/2 c. sour cream
5 T melted butter
1/2 t. vanilla
2 c. flour (I used white whole wheat*)
1/2 t. baking soda
1/4 t. nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 F. Cream together the eggs, sugar, sour cream, butter, and vanilla, then add the dry ingredients. Drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet. Bake for 10 minutes or until lightly browned.

They have a cake-like texture, and you can frost them if they're not sweet enough for you. You can freeze them in a single layer, then drop them into freezer containers or bags for storage. If you stack these cookies before they're frozen, the tops and bottoms will stick to each other.

*Most whole wheat flour is made from red wheat. White whole wheat has a lighter texture, which makes for lighter breads and pastries than regular whole wheat. I use King Arthur flour, which is available online if you can't find it locally.

For more recipes, check out Foodie Friday.

Curried pumpkin soup & the Firefly Grill

The sensory highlight of the Organic Gardening Day for me was lunch! I think it was the sensory highlight for a lot of people. Every time anyone mentioned lunch, people started cheering and clapping. The conference center happily catered to our group's every whim by bringing in all sorts of fresh, organic, locally grown produce and meats to create some outstanding dishes.

The curried pumpkin soup was my personal favorite. It's a creation of Chef Niall Campbell of the Firefly Grill in Effingham, IL. Their remote location has not slowed them down one bit -- they've been featured in Bon Apetit as one of the "hot ten" eco-friendly restaurants in America and in the Chicago Tribune as a "restaurant worth the trip," which is 210 miles from the city! The building is made from recycled steel and reclaimed barn wood. They have their own on-site organic garden, which is irrigated with water from their pond, and they buy produce, meat, and dairy from about 45 farmers. Chef Niall says he can drive past the farm that raises his beef and see the cattle out there grazing. Talk about quality control! But really it's about taste -- fresh just tastes better.

The moment I tasted the curried pumpkin soup, my taste buds were in culinary heaven. I ooohed and mmmed and sighed. I was even more excited because I'd already seen the copy of the recipe and knew I'd be able to duplicate this delicacy at home. Of course, it uses a real pumpkin. Chef Niall prefers to use one of the heirlooms, such as Long Island Cheese or the Cinderella Pumpkin (Rouge Vif d'Etampes), which run in the 10-pound range, according to my Seed Saver Exchange catalog. So, without further ado, here is the recipe -- and as a really special treat, Chef Niall and Kristie, his wife, who helps him run the restaurant, have agreed to pop in a couple times on Wednesday to answer any questions that you might have about the recipe or their restaurant!

Curried Pumpkin Soup

1 whole pumpkin
1 1/4 T. unsalted butter
1 large Spanish onion, finely diced
2 oz. chopped ginger
1 T. coriander powder
1 T. turmeric
1 T. white pepper
1 T. cumin
1 T. cardamon
1 T. cinnamon
1/2 T. clove
1 T. fenugreek seed crushed
1 c. orange juice
1 c. cream
salt and pepper to taste

Roast whole pumpkin at 350 degrees for 1 hour until soft. Make certain to save juice in dish and run through a fine mesh strainer. Let pumpkin cool and remove all seeds, remove skin and cut pumpkin into 2" X 2" pieces. In a large pot combine butter, onions, and ginger and cook on medium heat for two minutes until melted. Add pumpkin, orange juice, cream, pumpkin juice, and spices, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 10 minutes then puree with immersion blender or food processor and serve.

What's for breakfast?

It's no secret that most breakfast cereals are bad for you, but now consumers can get a better understanding of exactly how bad they are, as well as how they stack up with each other. If you can't find your cereal listed here, there is a cereal calculator here where you can input data from the "Nutrition Facts" on the label, and the calculator will give it a score, which tells you how healthy it is -- or not. It's especially sad (although not surprising) that the least nutritious cereals are those marketed towards children.

So, what can you do for breakfast? When I searched my blog, I realized I've talked about this a lot in the past, so instead of reinventing the menu, here are links to some of my breakfast suggestions from past posts:

It's winter now, and I'm enjoying oatmeal or grits several times a week. Before you say, "Eeyew!" and head off to read another blog, however, check out these great ideas to make that gray goo delicious.

Biscuits are one of my favorite breakfast foods, and they take less time to mix up than it takes for my oven to heat up. Here's my recipe for quick, yummy biscuits.

Hash brown potatoes have always been one of my favorite breakfast foods, and shredding a small potato takes less time than you think.

French toast is another super easy, delicious, nutritious, and inexpensive breakfast. It's especially good with dense homemade bread that has the body to soak up the egg and milk mixture. Since it takes the same amount of time to make one or two loaves of bread, I'll often make a double batch for dinner one evening, planning to make French toast for breakfast the next day.

And no breakfast list would be complete without a recipe for buttermilk pancakes, which is also quick, easy, and inexpensive. If your children don't like them, throw in a few chocolate chips, and they'll still be less expensive and more nutritious than commercial breakfast cereals.

I'm sure all of you have ideas for good breakfasts, so don't be shy -- share your ideas in the comment section!

For more blog posts on real food, check out Kelly the Kitchen Kop. For other money-saving ideas, check Life as Mom, and for more recipes, check out Foodie Friday and Friday Food.