Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Cranberry Muffins... Hot from the oven

There is something about a piping hot bran muffin straight from the oven. I have been working on my recipe and feel like I have finally achieved the taste I was looking for. If you want to follow along at home, here is what you need to make sure you have:

1/2 cup flour,
1/2 cup wheat germ,
1/2 cup oats,
1/2 cup milk,
1 egg
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup (or less) unsalted sunflower seeds
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tsp baking powder

mix, put in muffin cups, cook at 425 for 15 minutes...

This is an instant classic. Sounds like a lot of ingredients but it really isn't and you just throw it all in a bowl and stir.

Let me know if you try it. Better yet come on by and I will make you some!

Saturday, January 24, 2009

When all the Cheese is gone...

So if you follow my blog you know that I received a variety of cheeses from my sister for Christmas. Before the house was even empty of guests we had blasted through 3/5 of the cheese samplers. We made hard boiled egg breakfast dish using the Spanish Mahon, I will attempt to get some more of that in the future. I added Manchego to a breakfast pizza that I made for the morning after Christmas and it was great. Finally I worked through the Idiazabal, adding it here and there to sandwiches and crackers. It reminded me of a hard swiss.

In addition to the three mentioned above the sampler pack came with a Murcia al Vino. Ugh! I am not much of a wine drinker so my palette is not sophisticated enough to deal with this taste in cheese. But that is the fun of a sampler. I really want to know about the different kinds of cheese and how they taste.

Finally the Fifth cheese was an Italian Parmagiano. This is your not so basic parmesan cheese that you can grind out of a cheese grater... Well I ground my last few strokes of that just last night... I am feeling a bit of a loss now that the fun is gone...

Now I am back to looking forward to my birthday... Maybe the cheese fairy will visit again!

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Homemade Root Beer

Hmm. I take a certain amount of pride in my cooking skills. I enjoy making things that people enjoy eating and to a lesser degree drinking. I was all excited to use a homemade rootbeer kit to make a rootbeer. The recipe was drop dead simple, add rootbeer flavoring to sugar, water and yeast, pour into a 2 liter bottle, wait 2 weeks, voila.

I will save you the drama. Total junk. Completely not worth the time. Absolute junk...

Well just a bit of a disappointment, but what are you gonna do?

Maybe it is time to breakout the cheese making again.