You Say Goodbye, and I Say Hello

Goodbye 2010... the year I really discovered how much I like experimenting in my Blue Kitchen. The year I decided to make more of my own food and buy less pre-made food. The year I discovered the joy of baking and eating home-made bread. The year I realized how much I love a clean kitchen floor. The year I made jam for the first time. The year I quit composting and then started again. The year I welcomed one more person to feed into my family!

Hello 2011... the year I will hopefully get all of you to try a few new recipes with me through my 12 month cooking challenge. The year I hope to become more of a Locavore. The year I plan to succeed at making hamburger buns. The year we are going to try growing some of our own food!

I ended this year with a very successful new bread recipe. I made caramelized onion bread! It made a huge loaf (much bigger than I was expecting), and the whole entire thing got eaten for lunch. I served it with homemade soup made with homemade turkey stock. I wish I had taken a picture for you before it all got eaten, because it was beautiful.

I still have a lot of goodies in my house left-over from Christmas, so I am putting a moratorium  on baking for awhile. I ate WAY too much over the last couple of weeks. But it was all delicious. Though as I write this, I realize that I made a cheesecake today. I meant to weeks and weeks ago so I had bought all the ingredients for it. The cream cheese sitting in the fridge has been taunting me, and the raspberries were just begging to be used up. The huge bag of unopened graham crumbs was wanting to be turned into Reese's Pieces, and I have eaten a lot of chocolate lately. So here's the recipe:

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mOm's No-Bake Cheesecake

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Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups graham crumbs

1/2 cup butter, melted

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup icing sugar

1 pkg cream cheese, softened

1 pkg whipped topping, plus milk and vanilla according to package directions

Directions:

Mix first three ingredients in bowl and spread evenly in large baking dish.

Make whipped topping.

Mix remaining ingredients with whipped topping until smooth. 

Pour on top of crust.

Top with any fruit you like.

Notes:

I like a little cinnamon in the crust. 

Mom would sometimes use oreo cookie crumbs instead of graham crumbs and chocolate milk instead of white for a tasty chocolate cheesecake.

I mix everything in the blender because it takes forever to get it smooth with a spoon. 

I sometimes throw the fruit in the blender too, for a fruity cheesecake.

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AND... January's recipe should be up shortly! It won't be anything too complicated or fancy this month, so I hope you try it out.

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.