Merry Christmas!

It was a great Christmas in the Blue Kitchen! We had the traditional ice cream and waffles for breakfast (I wait all year to have ice cream for breakfast) and then the traditional Christmas Lasagna for dinner. It was awesome. I hope all of your Christmases were filled with great food traditions and lots of goodies, of which I ate way too many.

"Glory be to God on high, blessed are all beneath the sky."

Cookie Cutters

We just discovered the best kids toy ever - metal cookie cutters. Ever since Jacob found my ice cream bucket full of them when I was making sugar cookies this past friday, that is all he has played with. He knows what all of them are (except the moose is a giraffe and the unknown animal with hooves and ears and a tail is a hippo, though I think it might actually be a donkey). Yesterday he stretched one out and I couldn't even tell what shape it was. I carefully reshaped it and it turns out it was the ACTUAL giraffe. I am amazed at how many hours he has spent playing with these things. He lines them all up in a standing position, then he lies them all down, then they go for walks, and yesterday the camel was jumping on the couch. Today the "Man" (gingerbread man wearing a santa hat) was playing in the fischer price barn with Fillmore (the bus from Cars) and the cow from his nativity set. As part of the gift from his sunday school teacher after their Christmas program on sunday he got two plastic cookie cutters. He gave them to Daniel because they are not as fun as the metal ones, apparently. This is actually okay by me, because I think the metal ones are a little too sharp for the baby to play with. I must remember to wash them before I make cookies again, especially since they were used with the playdough. Though I don't think I will be making sugar cookies again anytime soon, maybe even never. They were an epic failure. It was so epic I don't even want to talk about it. My sister makes great sugar cookies so maybe I will just hope she makes them every Christmas.

Hippo-Donkey & Moose-Giraffe

Roast Beast

So we had a family christmas thing this past weekend. We decided that we wanted to all get together for the holidays but actually trying to do that on Christmas is nearly impossible... especially for us. We decided that we would potluck the event and my sister assigned different parts of the meal so that we wouldn't end up with only dessert. I got to do the "Main Dish" which makes sense since I was hosting and I have an oven and everyone else had a one-and-a-half-hour commute to get here. I decided to make a beautiful roast beef in the oven with my new roasting pan. I've only ever made roast beef in the slow-cooker. Our beef supplier gave us a large enough roast to feed everyone and that would be perfect for slicing. Yum. It looked amazing. So on saturday I took out my "How To Cook Everything" cookbook (a pretty good cookbook but it has no pictures) and my "Betty Crocker Cookbook" (a standard for me) to figure out how to cook a roast. Now neither book had the cut I had (Inside Round) but other then Tenderloin they were all pretty much the same. Cook at 325 for 20-22 minutes per pound. Now my roast was 1.598kg, so more kitchen math and I decided 1.5 hours would be lots to cook this thing. I preheated the oven at 3:30pm. (Dinner at 5:30). At 4:30 I realized I had forgot to put the roast in. (Dinner at 6:00). We ate all the yummy appetizers brought by my family and we were stuffed. At six we took out the roast and Jeff cut into it. Not even close to being cooked. We turned up the oven to 400 and took a food break for the boys to open some gifts and visit. (Dinner at 7:00). Well, the roast did taste delicious. And there were some potatoes and gravy to eat with it, so it wasn't too weird. In conclusion, I don't know where I went wrong, but it all started with forgetting to put the darn thing in the oven.

Crinkle Conundrum

My Betty Crocker cookbook touts the following recipe as being low-fat.
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Chocolate Crinkles

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Ingredients:

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla

4 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled

4 eggs

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup icing sugar

Directions:

Mix all ingredients (except icing sugar) in large bowl. Cover and refrigerate 3-4 hours.

Heat oven to 350. Lightly grease baking sheets.

Roll 1 inch balls of dough in icing sugar and place 2 inches apart on baking  sheet.

Bake 10 minutes, immediately remove from baking sheet to cool on wire rack.

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I've made them a couple of times, and they are very delicious. But then this week, with my "Cookie Countdown to Christmas" newsletter I got a recipe for chocolate crinkles... The picture looked exactly like these amazing cookies my friend Shannon used to make. I didn't know that was what a chocolate crinkle was supposed to look like!

Here is Jacob offering me a bite of his chocolate crinkle in September of 2009.
Note how the cookie is flat and light brown. 

Here is the picture that was e-mailed to me.
These look like Shannon's amazing cookies. I don't know what she calls them.

So I compared the recipe to Betty Crocker - IDENTICAL except that instead of 4 ounces of chocolate melted and cooled it uses 1 cup baking cocoa. I thought "hey, that actually makes these cookies easier" and decided to make up a batch last night for a christmas party tonight. I made the dough while the boys were napping (Yes, they were both napping, it was amazing), so that I could make them once the boys were in bed.  I used baking cocoa, refrigerated for four hours, did not grease my baking pans, and baked for 10 minutes. I got about 40 cookies, and they are so chocolatey, moist, and yummy.

Want one?

So my question is... why did they turn out so weird the previous times I made them?

For The Birds

So I thought I would try and get ahead today. Our next couple of weeks are starting to look busy... we are hosting several dinners, I want to do some Christmas baking, and various other little things... Like today Jeff is teaching confirmation and I like to send something along for the kids to eat. So I baked up a double batch of Low-Fat Brownies. My Aunt mentioned that there was a lot of sugar in this recipe so I cut out 1/2 cup of sugar. I also used the egg yolks because I didn't have quite enough applesauce, and thought I still needed some liquid ingredients. They turned out quite yummy. Then I decided to make bread. I need communion bread for tomorrow and sunday, and I wanted to serve home-made rolls (something new I've tried only once before) on saturday. Well, the first time I made these dinner rolls they didn't quite rise the way I wanted them too, but they still tasted really good. Today they rose beautifully! I thought these are going to be so perfect! I preheated the oven to 350 (I think) and set the timer for 20 minutes (I think). I always set the timer because I tend to get distracted by the boys. Suddenly I smell something burning. There is 5 minutes left on the oven timer but I yank the bread out. The bottoms of both communion loaves and all my buns are burnt. AAarrrRRGGggHHhH!!!! Now I am grumpy. The tops taste good, but they are totally unservable. So I didn't really get ahead, and I have no motivation to start again right now. Perhaps the birds would like a nice treat.

mmmmuffins

Yesterday Jacob wanted a muffin and there were none in the house. So today, while Daniel was napping,  we made some. I had a craving for these delicious cheese muffins my mom used to make, but every recipe in my three main cookbooks was bran-cheddar. They are probably good, but I don't have any bran cereal in my house. Then I found a recipe that didn't have bran, but it had yogurt. We don't eat yogurt. So what do I do? I invent. And this is what happened:

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Apple Cheddar Muffins

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Ingredients:

2 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 cup marble cheese, grated  

1/2 cup applesauce

2 small apples, not peeled, grated

1/4 cup margarine, melted

2 eggs, beaten

Directions:

COMBINE flour, sugar, baking powder and soda, and salt. Stir in cheese. Blend together apples, applesauce, butter and eggs in separate bowl.

ADD liquid to dry ingredients. Stir only until moistened. Spoon into 12 large greased muffin cups.

BAKE at 400°F (200°C) for 20 minutes or until lightly browned. 

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Kitchen Math: When 2x2=3

So yesterday was Pizza Friday. Every friday in our house is Pizza Friday. It is everyone's favourite food. If you come over for dinner on a friday, we will feed you pizza.
Anyways... I needed to make dough. I brought up the recipe on the computer and proceeded to double it. Fairly simple math. Partway through I think... "Gee, I don't remember ever needing 1 tablespoon of salt for this recipe." I check my math. One-and-a-half teaspoons times two definitely makes three. And there are three teaspoons in a tablespoon.... wait a minute... "Why am I doubling this recipe?!?!" What you need to know is that the recipe as-is makes two thin crust pizzas. We only eat one so I freeze half the dough and then I only need to make pizza dough every other week. So here I am doubling a recipe that I've never doubled before, and now it will make four thin crust pizzas. Well, I wonder if dough is supposed to be in the freezer for a month, and what if over Christmas we don't have a pizza friday... will the dough get wasted? My solution - divide the dough into three pizzas. It will all hopefully get used this month and we will have slightly thicker crust. But then I had another idea! Instead of having thicker crust, I would roll the dough out into a larger circle and make stuffed crust. It was so yummy!
Math is fun. And delicious.

An Ultimate Experiment

And I thought my chocolate chip cookie recipe was tasty! I think this one just might be better. I signed up for a "Cookie Countdown to Christmas" e-mail newsletter that started December 1st. And this was the first recipe. I made them fancy by dipping them halfway into melted chocolate chips and sprinkling with sprinkles. But I did taste one beforehand and this might have to be my new standby.

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Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Recipe By: allrecipes.com

Ingredients:

3/4 cup butter, softened

1 1/4  cups brown sugar, packed

2 tbsp milk

1 tbsp vanilla

1 egg

1 3/4 cups flour

1 tsp salt

3/4 tsp baking soda

1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375.

Combine butter, brown sugar and milk. Beat in egg. Add flour, salt and baking soda. Mix until just blended. Add chocolate chips.

Bake 8-10 minutes on ungreased cookie sheets.

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Anyways, I don't plan to make every cookie on this countdown. But the picture looked yummy, and earlier today Jeff came upstairs and asked if there was any cookies or snacks to eat. I said Krumkake and instead he had a sucker left-over from halloween. So I was feeling like being a nice wife and made him cookies.

Also... no one except my Mom has joined my New Year Challenge. So I challenge YOU to commit to trying a couple of recipes with me this year. I have a great one lined up for January that I saw on TV a long time ago.

In conclusion, I couldn't wait to offer Jacob one of these cookies at snack time, because I knew he would love them... hope you do too!

Cookie Please...

Taking a first bite...

Discovering the sprinkles...

Pondering how life is like a cookie...

Licking chocolate off his hands...

Offering Mama a bite...

Totally satisfied.