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bread

Egg Muffins

Egg, bacon toast muffins

Date: September 25, 2012

Recipe: http://www.marthastewart.com/330179/bacon-egg-and-toast-cups

Modifications:  I chopped the bacon up, rather than use whole strips, we also threw in some slightly sauteed spinach to add some veggies. Also, not wanting to waste pieces of bread, I used a half slice of bread in each muffin tin, rather than cutting a circle out of 6 pieces.

Time to table: 20 minutes prep, 20 minutes cook time

Servings: 6 eggs worth

Ben: Like

Erin: Like

Annie: Dislike

Notes: This was a great way to use up some eggs and bacon that we had leftover from other recipes. I was surprised how little spinach and bacon fit inside the muffin tin, so I chopped up a bit too much spinach. Annie flipped out over this meal because she didn’t want the eggs touching anything else. Ah, the rough life of a toddler :)
Happy before she discovered this was not a "real" cupcake :)

French Toast

French Toast

Date: 3/28/2012

Recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/french_toast/

Modifications: I added a splash of vanilla to the mixture, didn’t use triple sec or orange zest.

Time to table: 20 minutes

Servings: 4 adults

Ben: Love

Erin: Love

Annie: Love

Notes: We are coming around more and more to breakfast for dinner – mainly because it’s guaranteed to be well liked by Annie and is usually really easy. This is an excellent basic french toast recipe – I’ve never actually made french toast in my life, so it was high time I start! Unsurprisingly, we all LOVED this. I used french bread, and served with sausage and strawberries. You know something is good if Annie will even eat some of it when strawberries are an option.

Beer bread grilled cheese

Beer bread grilled cheese

Date: 2/29/2012

Recipe: http://honestfare.com/beer-and-cheese-sandwich/

Modifications: None.

Time to table: 30 minutes

Servings: 2 adults, 1 toddler

Ben: Love

Erin: Like

Annie: Like

Notes: We actually had some fontina cheese for this, though we had to cut some mold off of it :) The carmelized onions and mustad were awesome additions to the grilled cheese, I’ll certainly be adding those to grilled cheeses in the future. The tomato soup we had was just so-so, from box at the store. I haven’t mastered the technique to make a grilled cheese that actually melts the cheese in the middle without burning the bread on the outside. Oh well, just more opportunity to try it out!

Annie eating her sandwich

Beer bread

The finished product

Date: 2/18/2012

Recipe: http://honestfare.com/beer-bread-2/

Time to table: 7 minutes prep (without Annie’s help: 5 minutes). 45 minutes bake time.

Servings: 1 loaf

Ben: Love

Erin: Like

Annie: Love

Notes: This was amazingly easy and delicious, hat tip to Bill for making this and twitting about it. I think I’ll be making this frequently as it is SO damn easy. Next time I will either grease up my hands, or use gloves and grease the gloves as it makes a total mess on your hands. I used a honey weiss as my beer and even though the recipe says a hoppy beer didn’t come out as well, I’m going to make this at work soon with a summit, just to see for myself.

Helping make beer bread

Uncooked beer bread

Chicken wild rice soup and honey yeast rolls

Chicken Wild Rice Soup and Honey Yeast Rolls

Date: 1/15/2012

Recipe:

Soup: Ingredients:

  • Approximately 7 cups water, 6 tablespoons of “better than bouillion” vegetable broth mix
  • 2 cups finely chopped celery (when we have extra celery, we chop and blanch and freeze in 2 cup portions to have on hand for soups – so one of those bags went in here)
  • 1 carrot, shredded
  • Half an onion, chopped
  • 1 teaspoon dried parsley flakes
  • 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup, undiluted
  • 3 cups cooked wild rice
  • 1 pound cooked chicken thighs, cubed
Directions:
  • In a large saucepan, combine the first nine ingredients. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer for 30 minutes. (We did this part while cooking the wild rice)
  • In Dutch oven, melt butter; stir in flour until smooth. Gradually whisk in broth mixture. Bring to a boil; cook and stir for 2 minutes or until thickened. Add mushroom soup, rice and chicken; heat through. 

Adapted from:  http://www.tasteofhome.com/Recipes/Chicken-Wild-Rice-Soup

Rolls: http://annies-eats.com/2008/10/29/honey-yeast-rolls/

Modifications: The soup recipe was pretty heavily modified, which is why I posted what we did. I followed all instructions on the rolls, but it didn’t take 2 hours for my dough to double.

Time to table: Soup took about an hour total, because the wild rice takes 45 minutes to cook – but since we combined that with the first step of the soup (simmering for 30 minutes) it wasn’t so bad. Rolls take about 3 hours including all rising time, maybe 30 minutes of active prep time total.

Servings: The 3 of us ate this for dinner, and then froze another dinner portion for all of us. There was enough after that still for one lunch and one toddler dinner. Probably would feed 6 adults. The rolls make 10-12.

Ben: Love

Erin: Love

Annie: Love

Notes: I feel like we need a special category for these rare (but happened twice in a week!) triple LOVE meals. So I am making one, and calling it “triple love” (some are amended from my feelings on a meal during the first trimester of pregnancy. Another note – apparently we mostly love soup). I was VERY skeptical that this would live up to restaurant quality soup, but wow, it definitely did! This soup was absolutely delicious, and paired with fresh baked rolls? Can’t get much better than that on a cold January night! When Annie even chooses to eat the soup after eating an entire roll, you know it’s good. She eats so much better on weekends it’s ridiculous – the big difference being that we don’t give her snacks in the afternoon on weekends – shockingly that results in her actually eating dinner! Anyway, this meal was definitely a winner all around. Kind of surprising for us given the lack of cheese and cream involved!

Chicken Wild Rice Soup

Honey Yeast Rolls

Annie eating soup and bread

Muffaletta sandwiches

Muffaletta

Date: 1/16/2012

Recipe: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2010/09/dinner-tonight-muffaletta-sandwich.html

Modifications: I didn’t use olives in the “olive salad”, which probably makes this not authentic but I don’t really care. Neither Erin nor I like olives. I also did not use the mortadella, because that is always the stuff that looks so gross at the deli case.

Time to table: 15 minutes prep, 3 hours waiting time.

Servings: 3 adults

Ben: Love

Erin: Love

Annie: Like

Notes: I came by this recipe when Bill posted about their muffaletta experience a few months ago. I drooled over his picture for a long time before finally getting around to trying it ourselves and this was a fantastic sandwich. I wish I would have used more oil in our olive salad so that more would have soaked into the bread. Annie promptly took hers apart and ate just the meat and cheese first before going after the bread.

Muffaletta

Annie picking apart the muffaletta

Sloppy Joes

Sloppy Joes

Date: 12/19/2011

Recipe: http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/sloppy_joes/

Modifications: Much to Erin’s chagrin I used half ground beef and half ground pork, because I like pork. She was not a fan of this mod.

Time to table: 30 minutes

Servings: 4 adults

Ben: Like

Erin: Like

Annie: Like

Notes: A bit of a delay on this post, so I don’t really have much to say about it. I liked this and would make it again in favor of the “not so sloppy joe” mix that Erin likes. I liked that this had some vegetables in it.

Annie eating sloppy joes

Sloppy Joes

Pizza balls

Pizza balls

Date: 9/8/2011

Recipe: http://weelicious.com/2011/06/27/pizza-ball-program-2/

Modifications: We used chopped up spinach instead of broccoli, and we added chopped up pepperoni as well.

Time to table: 1 hour

Servings: We approximately doubled this recipe and made two cake pans of rolls – 32 rolls.

Ben: Like

Erin: Like

Annie: Like

Notes: The pizza balls were pretty good, I liked the inside balls better than the edge pieces. Erin’s sister and parents came over for dinner and we nearly ate both pans, I think there were three leftover. We used pizza sauce that we had frozen several months ago, and Erin made the pizza dough from Annie’s Eats the night before. A fairly healthy meal and Annie seemed to enjoy it!  She also enjoyed mooching pieces of key lime pie from everyone for dessert. :)

Pizza balls

Annie eating pizza balls

Sammich

My lunch today was too good to not share:

Sandwich

Date: 7/6/2011

Recipe:

  • bread
  • red onion slices
  • cheese
  • spinach
  • turkey
  • mayo
  • mustard (stone ground)
  • roasted garlic cloves

Spread the garlic cloves, mayo, and mustard on the bread. Top with cheese, turkey, red onion, and spinach. Cut in half (this is important!). Enjoy

Time to table: 10 minutes

Servings: 1

Ben: LOVE

Notes: Damn, a large homemade sandwich is delicious. I got used to having these everyday at the cabin last week, now we’re out of deli meat :(

Sandwich ingredients