Jennifer's 365 Project

Today I've spent some time in the kitchen. First I started by baking a batch of apple-strawberry oatmeal. Super tasty. Below is a modified version of a few recipes I found online.

Recipe

• 1 and 1/3c steel cut oats
• 1c milk
• 1/6c brown sugar
• 1 apple
• 5-6 strawberries
• 1tsp cinnamon

Directions

• Preheat oven for 350 degrees
• mix oats, milk, fruit and cinnamon in a bowl together.
• divide evenly among 4 containers
• place in pre-heated oven. Bake for 40 minutes.
• top with preferred toppings (raisins, nuts) or add splash of milk

Pumpkin Puree

• Pie Pumpkins uncut

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8193/8106984774_6546e16f9f_z.jpg
  

• using a hacksaw

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8333/8106975051_3fabd21369_z.jpg
  

• scraping out

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8465/8106974929_1dcb3fa692_z.jpg

  removing the seeds and pulp

  

• ready to bake

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8463/8106975147_ec8e7ce1dc_z.jpg

  removing the seeds and pulp

  

• done baking!

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• pumpkin skins

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8469/8106974587_796b6081c5_z.jpg

  the pile on the left is from the normal pumpkin I could slice with a knife. I could easily peel the skin away from the pumpkin, similar to how you peel a banana. On the right are the hard shells from the hacksaw pumpkin.I could not peel those pieces and used a knife to cut the pumpkin free.

  

• ready for the freezer

  http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8043/8106974469_c60c0eed52_z.jpg

  3 and 3/4 cups of pumpkin puree for the freezer

  

While the oatmeal was baking I started working on the next project - pumpkin puree. I used the Pioneer Woman's directions for making puree. 

I used the recipe on the back of the box, although the recipes I found online were all basically the same and involved using a wine of some sort. If I know Chris might eat something I'm making, I use a substitute like fruit juice. In this case the recommended substitute seemed to be pomegranate juice.

A lot of the recipes I read alternated between pan frying in a deep frying pan (which I dont really have) or deep frying. I opted for deep frying.

Aside from filling the entire house with smoke and making my eyes sting, the deep frying went alright. Although next time I may try pan frying and see if that makes a difference.

I ended up frying about half the shells and froze the rest of the dough for later.

The single cannolo I ate tasted fine, although the shell was a little tough. Of course, like I said before I've never actually had a cannolo, so I have no idea if it tastes right or not.

It's another rainy day today, which means indoor activities.

I spent the morning making two types of pierogi (potato and cheese and pork and cheese), chicken and dumpling soup, and Swedish meatballs. The Swedish meatballs and pierogi are tied in terms of labor intensity, but since they're both tasty I don't mind.

Since Chris also made chili yesterday I ended up tossing 40+ pierogi and the Swedish meatballs into the freezer for later. That just leaves me with tasty soup and him with his chili.
(note: I forgot to take a photo of the meatballs when I made them today so here's a photo of the same recipe I made awhile back)

The Swedish meatball recipe I use is one out of an old cookbook my mom was kind enough to make a copy of for me. Here's the basics of it. It's supposed to make 70 meatballs, but I usually end up with closer to 40-50 since I don't make them quite small enough.

Recipe

Ingredients

• 1/3 cup water
• 1/3 cup heavy cream
• 1/4 cup bread crumbs (fine)

• 1/4 cup finely chopped onion (I typically just use powder since I dont like the texture of onions)
• 1 tablespoon of shortening
• 3/4 lb ground beef
• 1/2 lb ground pork
• 2 tsp salt
• 1/3 pepper
• dash of cloves

• 1/3 cup butter
• 1/4 cup boiling water

Directions

• If you're using onions, saute those first until brown in the shortening (or butter if you don't have any). 
• Mix the water and cream together. Soak breadcrumbs in the mixture.
• combine onion, soaked crumbs, meats and seasoning in a bowl. Shape into small balls with your hands (you can wet your hands to prevent meat from sticking).
• Fry meatballs in butter until browned, shaking pan continuously to keep the balls round. 
• Add boiling water, cover and simmer 5-10 minutes or until tender. 

I pulled out the bread machine and got

So I rolled out the pizza dough I made in the bread machine and topped it with the traditional mozzarella and pepperoni toppings.

(Sometime I'm going to try a pesto and chicken roll. I think that would be delicious.)
Next I rolled the pizza dough into a log. I didn't split the dough in half, which probably would it made it easier to roll a tighter log.
I cut the log into one inch sections...
..and placed them on the a cookie sheet.

I then let them sit for about 20 minutes to rise.

After 20 minutes I popped them into the oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes.
Just add a little cup of dipping sauce and you're ready to go!

Recipe

Ingredients

• 1 pizza dough (fresh made or frozen)
• approx 1c mozzarella cheese
• pizza toppings of choice (pepperoni, mushrooms, etc)

Directions

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees
• Divide dough into two balls and roll out into two rectangles
• Top rectangles of dough with mozzarella and pizza toppings, leaving approx 1/4 inch border
• Roll each of the two rectangles into a log. Cut the log into 1 inch pieces and place on a greased cookie sheet. Allow dough to rise for 20 minutes
• Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees.
• Serve with your preferred dipping sauce

I kicked off the morning in the kitchen with some plain (for Chris) and cherry-filled pancakes. I've made blueberry and strawberry pancakes in the past, but I don't usually have cherries on hand. Pancakes are definitely tasty with cherries too!




I took a short break to do some research on a few recipes and then it was back into the kitchen. I was determined to make pierogies, if nothing else today.

The dough recipe yielded far more than I thought. I'm not entirely sure how many equal a "serving size" for pierogies (my guess is three to four), but it certainly isn't one or two, which is what I was I initially thinking. So next time I'm certainly scaling the recipe back (five cups of flour should have been a tip but I wasn't really processing that fact - I was too busy enjoying viewing recipes on the webOS tablet). So i ended up with a fair number of cheese and potato pierogies that are now living in my freezer.




With the pierogies boiling in water and converting the kitchen into a steam room, I decided it would be a fantastic idea to make cookies. I think the heat was affecting my judgement.

These particular cookies I grew up eating on holidays at my Grandmother's house. For some reason I had it in my head that these things were sugar cookies (Hey! They look like them and I swear someone at a family get together called them that once). As a result whenever I have "real" sugar cookies I'm always disappointed and can't eat much. They're too sweet. (Yes, I realize that's the point and it's right there in the name.)

This recipe is apparently from my great-grandmother, and after poking around on the internet the ingredient list looks similar to sour cream cookies. They're pretty light on flavor so my grandmother always topped them with raisins or frosting. The recipe is for Champion White Cookies and goes something like this:

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cup sugar
• 1 cup lard (I use crisco, you could use butter as well I imagine)
• 1 1/2 cup sour cream
• 3 eggs
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 3 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• "flour to handle" - (which my mother figured out is somewhere between 5 and 7 cups of flour)

Directions:

• Set oven to 350 degrees.
• Mix the dry ingredients (sugar, baking soda, powder, nutmeg, flour) together. Add sour cream, eggs, vanilla extract, and lard, mixing well.
• Take dough and roll out on floured surfaced. Use cookie cutters to cut shapes. *note: the less flour added to the cookie dough during the rolling process, the less dry and more soft/chewy the cookie is.
• Bake 7-10 minutes. Allow to cool before decorating. Makes approx 3 dozen.

I didn't have any sour cream (I'd used it all for the pierogi dough) so I used a tip my mom had given in the recipe above and used milk and added two teaspoons of lemon juice.

I did use far too much flour while making these, so they're a little dry. But they taste pretty close to what they should and every bite is a like a bit of my childhood.

I jammed a few dozen into the freezer because there's no way the two of us are going to eat that many cookies anytime soon.