Author Archives: metamegan

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Pumpkin Waffles

I was rummaging in my cupboards last week and I found a can of pumpkin. I recalled that every time I made a pumpkin dish last fall, Luke mentioned that pumpkin and chocolate is a good combo. Poor Luke – I never made anything with pumpkin and chocolate. But it’s a new year so…

I based this recipe on a carrot waffle recipe from The Skratch Feed Zone Portables cook book. The carrot waffle recipes sounds like a great and health snack, but it calls for carrot juice which is not something I can make at home and don’t see myself purchasing. So this is less healthy and possibly more delicious, but we’ll never know.

I got another opportunity to use my awesome waffle maker from Aunt Suzy, and the waffles that it makes are pretty big. This recipe made 8 or so. Jack and I were happy with 1 each. Dave would have had 2, but I needed to save one for photographs. They were pretty good, but I am still getting used to my waffle maker, and these can easily be undercooked because of pumpkin. I gave Luke the first one I made because it was the softest and he just started life with rubber bands on his braces and was feeling some pain.

Pumpkin Waffles

1 cup flour
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
2 Tablespoons melted butter
1/2 cup pumpkin
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
chocolate chips

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add milk, eggs, vanilla and butter to measuring cup and whisk. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients. Cook waffles.

I doubled the recipe I think. I messed around with adding chips to the waffle as I put it in the waffle maker, but ended up deciding it was easier to put the chips on top after it came out.

Delicious. I have quite the stack from the library right now, so I need to do another book post.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Diet

I’m sure no one wants to hear about the 3-day “cleanse” I did, so this is going to be a short post. I will say that part of the cleanse included oatmeal, which I already love and I have continued eating it so I will share that recipe.

Make this the night before and refrigerate it. On the cleanse I think I was supposed to eat it cold, which I did the first day. But come on. It’s January, I want a hot breakfast.

1 cup almond milk *
1/3 cup oats
1 T chia seeds
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 cup blueberries

Mix in a bowl before bed, cover, refridgerate
In the morning, microwave for 30-60 seconds.

*I have been using almond milk because I bought it for my “cleanse” but I will switch to regular milk now that I have run out. I have been experimenting with chia, and this recipe has the best results so far. It’s very filling and I have been able to live on this until lunch time. I have also substituted the blueberries for cut up apple. (I cut the apple in the morning.) This recipe has more milk and fewer oats than what I normally make, but I like it better.

I am going to be honest and say I never sweeten my oatmeal, so if you like your oatmeal sweet, this may not be for you. However, the enormous amount of cinnamon did make it taste sweet to me. I did the full teaspoon during the cleanse, but have cut it in half since then.

Don’t worry, real FBF will be back next week. I have something delicious cooking right now.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Buttermilk Waffles

Last Friday we had big plans to snowboard at Copper so I rescheduled FBF for New Years Day. I mean, no one knows what day it is over winter break anyway. We had fondue for New Years Eve, as you can see from the uncleared table in the pic above. I told the fam to go easy on the chocolate so we’d have some for breakfast. For some reason, that sounded like a healthy choice at the time.

I got a new waffle maker for Christmas (THANKS AUNT SUZY) and I made this Smitten Kitchen recipe for our New Years Day breakfast. They were delicious. My favorite waffle recipe is still the Liege Waffle, but I had buttermilk so I wanted to try something different. They were really yummy. A little complicated with extra steps but pretty worth it. I served the waffles with leftover chocolate fondue that I warmed in a double boiler, and strawberries that had been sliced and mixed with sugar.

Jack was awestruck to see his. We had delicious waffles and then headed to Eldora to try out my new birthday snowboard that you can see in the background.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Cinnamon Rolls

Happy Early New Year! If you have time for one last indulgence before your new year’s diet, then I recommend these cinnamon rolls from Smitten Kitchen.

Over the holiday, I also made blueberry scones, I reheated some frozen croissants, and I made a quick batch of waffles. I just threatened the kids that maybe Fancy Breakfast Friday is over and we’ll start something new in 2017, but I just commissioned Luke to make a logo for me, so maybe I’ll keep it up. I did get a waffle maker and a breakfast cookbook for Christmas.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Gingerbread

I’ve made gingerbread houses, decorated gingerbread cookies, made gingerbread waffles… are you sensing a theme here? Everything but actual gingerbread. It was probably last Christmas when it occurred to me that gingerbread, as in a bread type item, was a thing. A thing that I should, in fact, make. Fast forward a year – I needed to come up with both a treat for a third grade party and something for FBF. I went with gingerbread. It is amazing. And festive. It makes your house smell like a special wintery holiday.

Of course I couldn’t follow the recipe because I do not have a 9×9 pan. I have 2 8×8 and one 9×13. I started to do the math and then I decided to go with two 8×8 since I needed half the gingerbread to be portable. I doubled this recipe and I cooked it about 5-8 extra minutes to accommodate the smaller pan/taller bread.

I will admit that I added a little extra sugar because I got cocky with my digital scale. One of the things I love about the King Arthur Flour website is that you can toggle between volume and weight for ingredients. I always use my scale for flour because I hate measuring flour – the scale is life changing. But then once I had the flour in the bowl, I zeroed the weight and started dumping in sugar and I went way over. It was kind of hard to remove the extra sugar because it was a thin layer on top of the flour. So. This may be a little sweeter that the actual recipe. (As in 14o grams of sugar instead of 100 – or 70 instead of 50 if you aren’t doubling.)

I would say it got mixed results from a class of 3rd graders who may have been expecting a brownie. On Friday, I thought it had a strong molasses aftertaste which I didn’t mind, but didn’t LOVE. A day and a half later, it’s perfect. Or maybe it has grown on me.

The boys had a side of gingerbread for Fancy Breakfast Friday with whatever else they wanted for breakfast that day. (Within reason.) Luke had a fried egg on toast and Jack had oatmeal with blueberries, almonds and maple syrup.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: French Toast

I’m trying to take it easy this holiday season. I am not sending out cards, and I am bought cinnamon bread at Trader Joe’s last week. I thought the Trader Joe’s bread would make delicious French Toast, and I took the easy route with that too. I thought it was amazing. Luke liked it, Jack thought it was bland and too hard to cut. In his defense, I maybe overcooked it, but I like a sturdy toast. We did have another slight problem – we ran out of syrup. The boys all love Log Cabin Syrup, but I keep a secret supply of real maple syrup in case a recipe calls for it, or as a decoy in case someone comes over that may judge me for having Log Cabin instead of the real deal. This came in handy when the Log Cabin well ran dry. Still. This wasn’t one of Jack’s faves.

Baked French Cinnamon Toast

8 slices Trader Joes Cinnamon bread.
3 eggs
1 cup milk
1 T brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 450
Put sheet pan in oven for 5 minutes to preheat.
Mix all the ingredients except for the eggs

Once pan in preheated, spray with non stick spray. Dip bread in the egg mixture and place on sheet. Bake 5-7 minutes per side. Serve with a sprinkle of sugar and syrup and with a side of bacon, fruit, and maybe some yogurt.

I recommend this for a cold morning when you want to spend more time with the crossword puzzle than baking in the kitchen.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Croissants

Three years ago, as a way to distract me from my flooded house misery, my friend Laura took me to a croissant making class at Sur La Table. It was so fun. I knew I wasn’t going to make croissants any time soon after that, with the boys sleeping in the office and the living room full of everything from the basement. Who has time for croissants while tearing out dry wall? But it was a nice little carrot to dangle in front of myself for that day in the future when the house was back to normal. I didn’t think it would take three years, and I definitely bought some fancy butter this summer with high hopes that it would turn itself into croissants. But I finally did it! I was intimidated by the time commitment and it does take a long time, but it’s not too complicated or hard to do.

There are plenty of recipes out there, or consider taking a class! Because I am not going to rewrite the 3 page recipe. I will say this – there was a technique from the class that I did not remember until I was rolling one of the last croissants and it was this: Once you have the triangle cut, make a little tear in the base of the triangle. The pull the dough until it has the shape of the eiffel tour. Once it is stretched like that, you can roll it into a bigger croissant with more layers.

The other trick that I figured out was how to get all the many hours of work done before 7:00 am. The trick is this: I didn’t. First I made the dough up to the step where it needs to be rolled out and shaped. At that point it it supposed to be refrigerated for 2-24 hours. But no more than 24 hours or else the yeast will give it a bad taste. Well I didn’t read that part until it had been in the fridge for 2 days. Then I traded Fancy Breakfast Friday for Fancy Friday afternoon snack. I got up in the morning, rolled, shaped, and set the dough to rise for 3 hours while I ran errands. Then I baked the croissants and went snowboarding at Eldora. I got home with 30 seconds to spare before the bus arrived and I was making the ganache as kids walked in the door.

The best part is that the croissants don’t last forever, but they do freeze. So I put two bags in the freezer to defrost and warm in the oven for Christmas when Grandma and Grandpa are here. I said, “The best part is that we can have croissants on Christmas!” And Jack said, “No, we always have scones on Christmas.” So the best part is, we can have croissants the day after or the day before Christmas!!!

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Black Friday

Starting the day before Jack’s birthday and continuing until Thanksgiving, I made a batch of cookies, three cakes, three Thanksgiving sides and we hosted a taco party/piano recital at our house. So, I was thinking of taking a Fancy Breakfast Friday off. But then I had a better idea!!! Delegate. We still have to eat, right?

As Dave says, when in doubt, make a bagel supreme. That is what is pictured above. Yum! Dave makes an excellent bagel supreme.

Then went out to breakfast with the kids to one of our fave spots. Dots. I had a latte.

And just because I have to have at least one thing to brag about, here is the cake I made for Jack’s birthday.

It’s called the Game of Thrones Cake. I have now officially perfected it. Although, I did try to rush the last few steps and my chocolate swords started to melt. I had to put the rest of it together outside and hope for the best.

I used this recipe in a bundt pan at 350 for 55-60 minutes. Maybe a smidge too long. I cut the cocoa a bit because it literally calls for more than what normally comes in a tin. And I wasn’t going to send Dave back a second time for more. I’ll do a Game of Thrones Cake tutorial before the next season comes out.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Pumpkin Muffins

I’ve made this recipe for pumpkin muffins or bread 3 times now. I love it because it uses a whole can of pumpkin so I don’t need to plan a use for two portions of a pumpkin can. (Although I did learn I can make pumpkin cake and pumpkin donut holes at the same time out of one can. And since I made pumpkin cake for Thanksgiving, I assume I will be making pumpkin donut holes at some point this weekend.)

But the recipe is self contained. It’s also written to be a one bowl recipe which awesome. It makes a spectacular loaf of bread, but it also can make 18 muffins. Since we get way fewer than 18 servings out of the bread, I have been going the muffin route. However, the bread is also worth making because the cinnamon and sugar on the top makes an amazing crust. I haven’t been able to replicate that with the muffins.

Everyone loves this, although Luke keeps suggesting that I add chocolate chips. It seems perfect as is, and I already have a chocolate chip pumpkin muffin recipe, I just prefer this new one right now.

I hope everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving!

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Corn Tortillas

At Dave’s request, I made corn tortillas from scratch as a basis for huevos rancheros.

I bought the masa harina at King Soopers instead of getting the real deal from one of my many other options in Boulder. King Soopers also had something more authentic looking than what I bought (the Quaker brand) but the bag was a lot bigger and I had a suspicion I would go back to buying tortillas after making them once so… I bought the smaller bag.

When I got home I realized I bought the darn bag for flour tortillas. As I already have 4 kinds of wheat flour, I returned it for the corn flour. Luke and Lucy walked to the grocery store with me, so that was a nice outing.

Breakfast was delicious, obviously. But the leftovers were… crackery. In retrospect I wonder if I overcooked them. It took me about 5 tortillas to get it “right”. I suppose I’ll make them again as I have a lot of masa harina left over.

I read that it’s hard to get the shape you want with a rolling pin. The preferred method is to use a tortilla press. Even though I knew I wasn’t going to end up with perfectly round tortillas, I was surprised at how misshapen they were, and at how annoyed I was by that.

I did spend a lot of time thinking of the people who lived in the Mesa Verde area while I was rolling my tortillas. (This is just an excuse to share vacation pictures.)

I already shared my book for this week in my book club post on Monday, but here it is again.

MetaMegan

kids, bikes, books, food