Let it frost....

Since we have been too warm for snow to stick around, it was a pleasure to wake up to a white freezing frost fog which had covered everything in the night.  The perfect crystals were everywhere making the world a lovely frost wonderland.

The last few days I have been trying to finish up my holiday baking and I think that I may have succeeded with the last of the cookie / bars being finished.

 Start with excellent ingredients...check!  I have other plans for this flour sack as well.  I was so excited to find that you are still able to find flour in a sack.  My grandma would buy them and embroider them for drying dishes.  Next step...add delicious unsalted butter.  It even has a beautiful creamy glow to it.

 Then add various ingredients to your butter...sugar, oats, nuts, spices.

 Mix it all up and make sticky rounds of cookie dough to bake up.  This set includes making wells so you can later fill them up with dark chocolate.

 Bake them up.  Cool them off and they are ready for your melted chocolate.

The baking of the bars and other Christmas cookies...repeat with slightly different ingredients to make other sweets to give away and to enjoy for yourself.  Merry Christmas!

What to do with leftovers?

So with Thanksgiving past and Christmas staring us in the face, I figured it was time to get rid of the last turkey and actually use it all up as I usually intend and don't always do.  So, yesterday there was turkey chili and today there is turkey stock.  If I had thought about it I would have reversed the two days so I could have used homemade stock in my chili, but that just means I have to be cooking with more stock in the next week or two!

Making stock is a lot easier than anyone would think.  You need aromatic vegetables and some bones with meat on them.  In this one there is about a cup of onion, a cup of carrots and about half a cup of celery.  In addition to a few pounds of turkey bones with meat still on them, you add about 16 cups water and seasonings like a bay leaf, fresh parsley and thyme.

All you do is bring it to a boil, reduce heat and let it simmer for several hours.  Once the meat is falling off the bones, you strain all the ingredients and squeeze the juice from the meat.  By the end of the hours of simmering, the stock has been reduced and you can use it as you would any already prepared stock.  You can also add salt or other seasonings after the stock has been boiled.  Once it cools, you need to skim the fat off the surface and use within 4-5 days or freeze or reboil.

Cold winter meals - White Chicken Chile

When the weather turns cold, it makes me want to cook and bake good hearty soups and roasts.  Yesterday, it turned colder, becoming more like Christmas type weather and I decided after all my errands, I should cook up a hearty chili.  So this is a twist on a recipe my aunt gave me for White Chili.

White Chili is comprised of:
2 pounds of chicken
3 cans white beans (like canelli, great northern, kidney)
12 oz. drained green chilies (3 x 4oz. cans)
1 1/2 teaspoon cumin
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1-2 Tablespoon cilantro
1 1/2 teaspoon oregano
3/4 teaspoon pepper
1 medium onion chopped
2 tsp garlic
about 1 Tablespoon olive oil
3 cups chicken broth
1 tsp salt
6-8 oz sour cream
1 cup heavy whipping cream (or evaporated milk)

Saute chicken, onions and garlic powder in oil until chicken is no longer pink.  Add beans, chicken broth, chilies and seasoning.  Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat and simmer for at least 30 minutes.  Remove from heat and add cream (or evaporated milk) and sour cream.  Serve immediately.  Serves 4-6.

It looks thinner than it is.  It is a hearty, slightly spicy chili.  Because I had leftovers from Thanksgiving, I used leftover turkey instead of the chicken in this version and it was also very good.  The sour cream adds a thickness and creamy texture that fills and satisfies you.  I also used fresh roasted green chilies.  I was not sure how spicy they would turn out to be as each chili is a little different, but the spiciness will be cut with the addition of the milk products.

It is delicious with bread or tortillas as well.  Enjoy!

Christmas is coming...

With Christmas on it's way, there are many traditions that come with it.  One of my favorite is Christmas baking!  Yesterday I started on one of the many bar-type Christmas cookies.  This one is derived from a 7 layer bar where you just layer the ingredients and bake at 350F for 25-30 minutes.  The only problem was as I was layering, I realized that I only had 6 of the 7 ingredients.  So this is a 6 layer bar which is layered with butter, graham cracker crumbs, coconut, chocolate chips, pecans, and sweetened condensed milk....Yum!

This one also varied in that I had a few walnuts leftover and used them in addition to pecans, which adds a more complex nutty flavor to the bars.  I am a walnut purest in that I don't like them in baked goods, but the treats went over very well.

Chocolate and nutty goodness!  Happy Christmas baking!

Glorious Gourds

Squash!  Who cannot love squash?  Well I am the one to speak since I would never eat a pumpkin or a squash in the form of it roasting in the oven.  My favorite form of pumpkin would be in a pumpkin pie.  At any rate, referred by a friend to a store with free pumpkins, my first thought was that there were only a few and why bother go and pick up a pumpkin.  I not only found many, many, many glorious gourds, but they were of every size, color and shape.  I tried to get an assortment, but sadly not all were great for cooking.

Sunday morning...I decided I needed to tackle the pounds upon pounds of squash sitting, patiently waiting fro me to do something with them.  So I began the hours and hours of chopping, boiling and pureeing the lovely squash, and I came down to many cups of squash.  Lots of purred squash.  Now I am at the point that I need to discover more to make than just pumkpin bread.

So if you, dear reader, have any suggestions of what to do with pureed squash, I would be happy to try them out.  In the meantime, if you are on my Christmas list, think pumpkin bread....lots and lots of pumpkin bread. Until then sweet dreams of squash puree.

Eggs anyone?

What's for breakfast?  I don't know how many times people have asked me this.  Most people look into the cupboard and see cereal and think that is the only thing to eat.  This however is not true, especially if you have some flour, sugar and eggs.  You can create numerous easy, quick and delicious things with those ingredients.  Since breakfast is such an easy meal to prepare, I decide to try something different for breakfast yesterday.  I came across a recipe for a sausage and cheese egg bake.  It was of course easy to make as long as you prepared everything the night before as it required the ingredient to sit overnight in the refrigerator.

Of course this particular egg bake cannot be good for you....it has 3 -4 cups of cream in it, though I lightened it a little and added more milk and less cream.  Spicy sausage, bread, 2 cups of cheese, and 5 eggs later you have what is ready to soak overnight.  Then add one more cup of milk/cream and 2 more eggs and throw it in the over until it is golden brown and sizzling through and through.  It was served with pumpkin bread also fresh from the oven.  Oh, the wonders of breakfast!

Remains of pumpkins

As I mentioned before I like to take something and use all the parts of it.  Recreation of a pumpkin turns into boiled mass of puree of pumpkin and then pumpkin bread and pumpkin pie!  Yum!

Pumkpin puree!  This one happens to be from two different squash since they both were living at my house and needed to be turned into some good to eat.

The first of many pumpkin pies for the season.  This is a simple recipe of pumpkin, sweetened condensed milk, eggs and spices.

And pumpkin bread...This is another very simple recipe with only flour, sugar, spices and eggs.  Simple, delicious and it makes two loaves so you can share this pumpkin goodness.  Pumpkin is the essence of autumn...it helps us celebrate Halloween, Thanksgiving and the autumn in general with all the varieties of squash available for cooking and eating.  Happy Autumn!