I Bought a New Slow Cooker!

I have owned a CrockPot for the past two years that I hate. I have been doing a slow burn over this slow cooker. It burns everything I cook! It drives me nuts. Have I stopped using it? No, I just have suffered. After all, it cost money and I should use it until I gotten out of it what I paid, right?

Wrong! Sometimes it is just better to admit defeat and start over. I recently (Monday) bought a new one. I'm SO excited! I bought this one:Mine looks a little different, the various crocks are all white. I was excited to have a crockpot that had different sizes. The crocks all stack together for storage which will be nice.

I made a bean soup in the 4 quart crock last night and it worked fabulous! Cooked it 8 hours on low and when I came home it was gently simmering. In my old one, it would have been boiling furiously and burned on the sides and bottom. I made overnight oatmeal in the 2 quart last night for breakfast this morning. It cooked perfectly, but I can't say it was a winner here in our house. I used steel cut oatmeal that had been on the shelf for awhile and it had a slightly stale taste. I liked it and my son asked for seconds. Carina had to be forced it eat it and no one else would even try. *sigh* I try to cook healthy.

So, if you are suffering with something that just doesn't work, I would highly recommend getting a new, different one. Unless it's your husband.

Jill

Life is Peachy

Guess what I'm doing today? You guessed it - canning peaches! That box has 25 lbs in it, so does the other box. So, 50 lbs of peaches to can. I've done as many as 100 lbs in a day so I'm hoping that 50 won't take too long.

Thankfully it is raining and about 69 degrees here - I hate canning in hot weather! But I love eating home-canned peaches in the dead of winter. So, I'm off - I've got my supportive shoes on, some music in the CD player and a big ol' Diet Coke in the fridge! Wish me luck.

Jill

My Master List of Meals

Earlier this week I posted about my "food book," the little book that keeps my food life and menu planning organized. In that post I mentioned that in the front of my food book I have a "master list of meals." These are the meals that I know my family likes and I cook on a regular basis.

Because I enjoy cooking, enjoy trying new things, and because my family is pretty easy to please (ie, they enjoy lots of different meals), this master list is pretty long. Not everyone will have 86 meals on their master list! Some will only have 30 (one for every day of the month), some will only have 14 (a two week rotation that gets repeated). My family (and I) really enjoy variety so we have a lot of different meals on here. Plus, I cook differently in the summer than I do in the winter.

Due to overwhelming demand (ok, one request), I thought I'd post my master list of meals. It is grouped by meat so if you are looking for a certain thing you can look in that section.

Vegetarian Meals

• Quesadillas
• Lentil Rice Casserole
• Crepes with berries
• Dutch Babies (German Pancakes)
• Torts and Brodo (An Italian recipe for tortellini soup)
• Toasted Cheese Sandwiches and Tomato Soup
• Our Favorite Potato Dish (a scalloped potato sort of thing)
• Cheese Beer Soup (using non-alcoholic beer)
• Vegetable Pie
• Fondue
• Spanish Tortilla
• Baked beans and rice
• Waffles
• Pancakes
• Good Ol' Beans and Rice
• Baked Lentils with Cheese
• Cottage Cheese Casserole

Chicken Meals

• Stir fry
• Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup
• Chicken and Rice-a-Roni (a skillet meal of chicken added to rice-a-roni)
• Chinese Chicken Salad
• Mar Far Chicken or Sweet and Sour Chicken
• Chicken Broccoli Oriental
• Creamy Baked Chicken Breasts
• Parmesan Chicken
• BBQ Chicken on the grill
• Hawaiian Haystacks
• Chicken Enchiladas
• Chicken Tetrazini
• Chicken ala King
• Fajitas
• Chicken Crockpot thing
• King Ranch Chicken
• Chicken Packets

Sausage Meals (using Polska Kielbasa)

• Potato, Sauerkraut, and Sausage
• Red Beans and Rice
• Smokey Sausage Skillet
• Sweet and Spicy Sausage

Ham Meals

• Scalloped Potatoes with Ham
• Black-Eyed Pea Soup with Ham
• Croquettes (and Italian version with rice and mozzarella cheese and ham)
• Ham-fried Rice
• Ham and Noodle Toss
• Ham and Cheese Baked Potatoes
• Ham and Potato fry with eggs

Beef Meal

• Impossible Taco Pie
• Beef-Topped Bean Enchiladas
• Sloppy Joes
• Tacos
• Braid Bread
• Taco Soup
• Meatballs with variations:
• meatballs with gravy over rice or mashed potatoes
• Sweet and Sour meatballs
• BBQ meatballs (or BBQ meatball sandwiches)
• Meatball stew
• Meatloaf
• Pot Roast
• French Dip Sandwiches (using leftover pot roast)
  
• Vegetable Beef Soup (using leftover pot roast)
• Corned Beef hash

Pasta Meals (ok, I know this isn't actually a meat, but whatever . . . )

• Pasta with Red Sauce
• Pasta Bake
• Polenta with Sauce (and I know this isn't actually pasta, but whatever . . . )
• Spaghetti Carbonara
• Stuffed Pasta Shells (stuffed with a mozzarella/ricotta cheese mixture)
  
• Taco Stuffed Shells (stuffed with taco meat and cream cheese and topped with salsa)
• Homemade Mac and Cheese
• Spaghetti Pie
• Pesto Pasta
• Wagon Wheel Chili
• Homemade Egg Noodles with Butter Sauce
• Pasta Salad

Tuna Meals

• Tuna Loaf
• Tuna Salad
• Tuna Noodle Casserole
• Creamed Tuna on Toast

Other Miscellaneous Meals (that I couldn't figure out where to put)

• Breakfast Burritos
• Homemade Pizza
• Baked Potatoes with Chili and Cheese
• Bacon and Swiss Cheese Quiche
• Homemade Chili
• Frito Salad
• Broccoli Salad
• Navajo Tacos
• Soup and Rolls
• One-Eyed Egyptians

Whew! That took a long time! I cook a lot of things. If there are specific meals that you would like a recipe for, tell me and I'll try to post them in the coming weeks.

Enjoy!

Jill

Strawberry Fields Forever

Guess what I did last night? Lots and lots of strawberries! I buy my berries from the Salem Rotary Club every year. They do a fundraiser and I can get lots of berries for not much money. I bought 30 lbs of strawberries for $40 or so. Not too bad. The only problem is that then I had 30 lbs of strawberries I had to deal with! Luckily they come washed, hulled and sliced, so dealing with them isn't too bad. Here is what the bucket 'o strawberries looks like.
That is my youngest, Kaden, snitching some berries out of the tub. That is a 5 gallon bucket full of strawberries! Ok, in this picture it isn't exactly full, I had already fed the boy a big bowl and made two batches of freezer jam by the time I took this picture. Here is what the strawberries look like:
Mmmmm, don't those look good? My kitchen didn't look all that good by the time I was done but this sure looked great:
I did four batches of freezer jam (14 containers worth), 9 quart bags full of frozen berries that we will use when we do crepes with berries during the year, a big bowl of berries to eat the next few days and some "strawberry ice cubes" for making smoothies. Since I didn't have to slice, wash or hull them, it only took me about two hours. Not too bad, but I'm really, really tired!

Jill

Breakfast Burritos

When I was in college I lived in an apartment with five other girls. We had the required number of fights over boys, chores, loud music, and whose dishes were left in the sink. We also shared a lot of good times too. Most often it was our neighbors complaining about the loud music that all six of us were dancing to. Usually it was five of us cheering up the one who was dumped by the boy. And sometimes we knew whose dishes they were because one roommate had made some delicious meal for all of us. I made a lot of friends in college, very few that I keep in touch with. The recipes I learned, however, are still with me.

The recipe for Breakfast Burritos if from my roommate Threesa (yes, that is actually how you spell it, Mormon mothers often get very inventive with their baby names!). Threesa was from Utah, I think, and she had some great recipes. I still love her Chocolate Mayonaise cake recipe and we eat Breakfast Burritos all the time. I think she had some much more impressive name for them, but we simply call them Breakfast Burritos, although we never eat them for breakfast.

In addition to being something almost everyone likes, Breakfast Burritos are very cheap and easy to make. There is no real "recipe" it is more of a concept that you adapt as needed. I'm sure lots of people make some version of this.

First you take some bacon, ham, sausage, or whatever you have. Fry it in a pan with some onion if you have/want it. When they are almost done, add several chopped potatoes. You could add leftover baked potatoes that have been chopped up and they would cook lots faster. I never think ahead enough to do this so I just add chopped raw potatoes. Because they are raw I add a few tablespoons of water and cover the pan to allow the potatoes to steam. Then cook the potatoes until they are tender and crispy on the outside. Now scoot all the potatoes to one side and add to the pan a couple of beaten eggs (for my family of 6 I usually add 4-5 eggs). Scramble the eggs until they are just barely done then mix them with the potatoes. On top of the mix lay enough tortillas for everyone to have one, then cover the pan with the lid. You are just heating up the tortillas so they will be soft and yummy. At the table, give everyone a tortilla and spoon some potato/egg mixture down the middle, add ketchup, if desired, and roll up and eat.

You could, of course, add cheese to the mixture. You could add salsa instead of ketchup. You could vary the type of meat. You could use whole wheat tortillas. You could make this lots of different ways but however you do it, it is cheap, fast and good!

Jill

A Slow Burn over my Slow Cooker

About 3 years ago, I purchased (or was given as a gift - I don't remember which) a Rival Smart-Pot 5 quart Crock-Pot. I was so excited! My old slow cooker was a cheap-ish one I was given as a wedding gift some 13 years earlier. I had used that trusty slow cooker to death. Tons of giant batches of spaghetti sauce, baked beans, chicken and sauce stuff, and lots of other stuff had been slowly cooked to tender goodness in there, but it was falling apart and needed to be replaced.

This new Crock-Pot was so shiny! So clean! So huge! So substantial! It was much more heavy duty than my last one and I was excited to use it. The first few batches of stuff were over cooked and I couldn't figure out what I had done wrong. These recipes had always worked in the other one, what had I done wrong? I thought that maybe it was a size issue; the other slow-cooker had been a 4 quart and this one was a 5 quart, meaning that it didn't fill up as much, maybe that caused it to get too hot? The next thing I tried was a huge batch of spaghetti sauce - on low. It was boiling withing an hour - what the heck? I remember talking to my sister about the problem and she said she thought she had heard that slow-cookers were now being made to cook at a higher temperature due to food safety concerns. That made some sense, after all, cooking something all day on "low" could, theoretically, cause bacteria to grow.

So I just put up with it. I cooked things for three hours instead of the recommended 6, I alternated between the "low" setting and the "warm" setting, I propped the lid open for part of the cooking time. Nothing seemed to help and it was ticking me off. Yesterday was the proverbial straw (and I was the proverbial camel - picture that!), I started my Crockery Beanery recipe from the Saving Dinner cookbook, on "low," at approximately 11:15 am, then I left to go have lunch with my sister. When I got home at 1:40 pm my recipe was burned on the bottom!! Just two hours and twenty minutes later!! I thought, this cannot be right. So, I did what any computer savvy 21st century woman would do - I put "Rival crock-pot too hot" in Google and hit return. One of the first results was a link to the Amazon listing for this crock-pot, there were 95 comments/ratings for this crock-pot and 93 of them said versions of this, "Don't buy this product! This crock-pot cooks way too hot! It burned my food! I'm taking it back! I hate it! Don't waste your money!" (Go read the reviews if you don't believe me)

My first reaction was joy - I'm not crazy! I have been cooking these recipes right and it is the cookers fault not mine! The next thought was sadness. Why have I been putting up with this for three years? Why didn't I do some research and figure it out a long time ago? I have a tendency to do this in my life, I just settle for something even though there might be something way better out there. Sometimes it is an object (like my crock-pot) but sometimes it is a situation (putting up with someone rude when I could have asked them nicely to stop and it would have changed everything).

Needless to say, I'll be buying a new crock-pot soon. But I'm going to go read the reviews on Amazon before I bring home anything!!

Jill

Book Review: Saving Dinner

My husband laughs at me for the way I read cookbooks. Ok, actually, my husband laughs at me for lots of things, but he really thinks I'm crazy for how I read cookbooks. You see, I check cookbooks out of the library and read them like novels. I always have a cookbook going next to my bed and I pick it up and read a chapter or so before I go to bed. Right now I'm reading, and loving, the book Saving Dinner, The Menus, Recipes, and Shopping Lists to Bring Your Family Back to the Table by Leanne Ely.

For those of you familiar with Flylady, the organizational website/email group, Leanne Ely is the woman who does all the food related content for Flylady. She also happens to be a certified nutritionist, cookbook author, cooking class instructor, food editor for ePregnancy magazine,and radio show host. The woman is busy, which must be why she wrote a book about quick, healthy meals that you whole family will actually eat.
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This book is the result of, and compilation of, Ely's Menu-Mailer program, a program where you sign up, pay a small monthly fee and receive a menu of meals, complete with shopping list, each week. As a result, the cookbook is set up in weekly format. At the beginning of each "week" in the book, you are given a list of the meals that week along with a shopping list. You could, of course, follow each weekly plan and use the shopping lists, or you could (as I did) pick and choose meals from different weeks and make up your own list.

Each weekly menu contains a crockpot meal, a fish meal, and a meal featuring beans.
Since I am trying to incorporate more beans into my families diet, because they are cheap, healthy and can be vegetarian (for my daughter Talia), I picked a bunch of the bean recipes to try. I have been very impressed . I tried the Polenta Casserole and my whole family actually ate it. I called it Tamale Casserole, because my children are convinced that polenta is the worst food item in the world, but since it wasn't actually called "polenta" they ate it and liked it.

One recipe I would definately recommend is the Garlic Lime Chicken. It was moist, flavorful and very yummy! I'm trying several more recipes this week and have already recommended this book to several people. I might actually have to go and buy it!

Jill

Baking Banana Bread with Boy

I looked at the fruit basket the other day and noticed that the bananas all had come down with a serious case of "banana pox." You know that disease, right? When the bananas are all covered with brown spots! I knew it was time to make banana bread, and I'd have enough to make a double batch.

I got my banana bread recipe from my mother, who got it from her grandmother. My mom was not much of a baker (although she was an excellent cook) but one thing that she did bake was banana bread. I remember toasting slices up and slathering them with butter, oh so good! I've been making banana bread my whole married life and it is especially fun now that I can involve my kids in the experience. My son Kaden loves to help me cook and bake.

He loves to measure, stir, and pour things. He especially likes eating the end result! That is fine with me, I love to bake for an appreciative audience!

Banana Bread

makes one loaf

Stir together in a bowl:

2 c. sifted flour (I use 1 c. white flour, 1 c. whole wheat flour)
3 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 c. sugar

Combine in a separate bowl:

1/2 c. finely chopped walnuts (optional)
1 egg well beaten
1 c. mashed bananas
1/3 c. melted shortening (that is what the recipe says, I use melted butter/margarine)
1/4 c. milk

Fold the wet mixture into the dry mixture. Stir until mixed but don't over stir it. Pour into a greased 5x9 loaf pan and bake at 325 degrees for 50 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Notes:

I use unsweetened applesauce for part of the marg/butter.

I have used the soy flour/water substitute for the egg in this recipe with good results.

I rarely put the nuts in because most of my children do not like nuts in things. They will eat nuts plain but they don't want them in anything. Go figure.

Jill

Perfect Pancakes, The Easy Way!

My family loves pancakes. They could eat them once a week for breakfast or dinner. I love pancakes, too. Actually, I don't really like to eat pancakes all that much but I really like them anyway and I'll tell you why. To me, pancakes for dinner is cheating. It isn't a "real" dinner and it is so easy that when I make pancakes I feel like I'm taking the night off. But I'm taking the night off without anyone in my family whining! In fact, they cheer! "Yeah! Pancakes!"

The secret to really good pancakes was given to me by my sister and I bless her name every time I make them. You see, you start with Bisquick (or any other mix) and add a few things and viola, it tastes like you made them from scratch! This last batch I did was even easier (and cheaper) I had some Aunt Jemima Just Add Water Pancake Mix and some Krusteaz Just Add Water Whole Wheat and Honey Mix. I had gotten the Aunt Jemima for about 25 cents a box during the last Albertson's freaky $10 off 10 items sale. The Krusteaz is pretty cheap too. I put equal amounts of each mix in a bowl (The "large" recipe called for 3 c. mix and I put 1 1/2 c. Aunt Jemima and 1 1/2 c. Krusteaz). I use half of each for the whole wheat in the Krusteaz. My family doesn't love the 100% whole wheat by itself but I feel better if they are eating at least half whole wheat. To the mix I added about a tablespoon of baking powder and a tablespoon or two of sugar. I mixed that up really well. Then you measure out the amount of water/milk that is required (the Bisquick calls for milk, the "just add water" mixes, surprisingly, just call for water! go figure.) To the measured liquid you add egg, if called for, and a tablespoon of lemon juice.

The baking powder and the lemon juice chemically react with each other to provide a really powerful rising action. The lemon juice gives it just a hint of tartness and the sugar balances that out nicely. These always turn out terrific and everyone raves about them. Should I tell them it is just a mix? Nah, let 'em think I'm awesome.

The last time I did them, I did them the night before Jana's birthday. She leaves really, really early in the morning and I didn't want to get up that early but I still wanted her to have a good breakfast. So I made a batch of pancakes the night before. They reheat in the microwave perfectly and everyone loved having pancakes for breakfast. I loved not having to make pancakes for breakfast!!


Jill

The Joys of an Off-Set Spatula

(Updated: The above picture is of an off-set spatula. Some people (ahem, Jenifer) said they didn't know what one looked like, so here it is.)

There are certain things in life that aren't neccessary but help make life so much sweeter. Right now I'm sitting out on my deck overlooking my backyard (thank you husband for the wireless laptop!). The grass is that amazing green that it gets only in late spring when the spring rains and the first warm days collide. My flower pots are full of pansies which are running riot, much to my delight. My chickens are wandering the yard, nibbling grass and clucking softly to each other. My neighbor is mowing his lawn which makes for some noise I could do without but is also generating that heavenly fresh-cut grass smell which says "Spring!" to me. I don't need any of these things, but man, do they make life better!

There are some kitchen gadgets that are a lot like fresh-cut grass and foraging chickens, you can cook without them but they sure make it a lot more fun. My off-set spatula is one of these. I love my off-set spatula. You can get them in lots of different sizes but my favorite is my little one. It is about the size of a butter knife, I got mine from Pampered Chef the last time the Pampered Chef parties went through my group of friends. I don't think I bought it on purpose, it was probably that extra $5.oo I needed to get that free gift or something, but oh, am I glad I did! The official use of an off-set spatula is for spreading things like frosting on a cake or sandwhich spread on bread, or something like that. For this use it is fabulous. Because the handle is off-set (hence the brilliant name!), you don't get your fingers covered in goop. It also provides a good angle so that you can make those frosting swirls on the top of the cake like you see in the cookbooks.

The other uses are what I really love. My favorite use is to unstick muffins. I never use paper liners when I make muffins, partly because I really cheap, partly because I'm trying to be "green" and the wasted paper just kind of gets to me, and partly because I have silicone muffin tins so I don't really need liners. But I do need to go around the edges to loosen the muffins from the pan and then tip them out without burning my hand. The off-set spatula is perfect for this! The angled handle lets me get it in along side the muffin and the fact that it doesn't have a sharp edge lets me pop them out without gouging my muffins all to bits. I also use the spatula for loosening the bread from the bread pans before turning them out on the rack to cool.

I could go on and on, but I won't. Just suffice it to say that I love my off-set spatula, almost as much as my chickens!

Jill