Fruit salad prepared by TOPWLH.
The bowl on the left is a mix of eggs and 1/2 & 1/2, then the fillings I chose for the two separate quiches.
Me, putting filling in quiche number 1. Note my extremely large Twins Tshirt from the best sporting event I've ever been to.
Gracefully poured by yours truly. Or something. Special thanks to my photographer.
Finally, bake them for about an hour or so.
Don't they look lovely? I think everyone enjoyed them. Here's the recipe for those who are interested:
They're looking a little sad in their advanced age, aren't they? Then Mom and I got down to the real business of the day: making a metric ton of cookies. I had a cookie exchange at work today and needed to make 10 dozen cookies to exchange with my coworkers. I chose to make Spritz, which was going to more of an ordeal than originally anticipated. See, Mom got me this fancy new cookie press which we were all excited to try out. Except it broke (faulty, cheap plastic thing) after the first 2 dozen. 2 dozen! So I ran frantically to Target while my Mom searched frantically for her old school metal press. She won the race:
Then they go in the oven for about 6 minutes or so, at least in my mom's oven. Looking good...
Then they sit on the counter to cool. There were lots and lots and lots of cookies:
Finally we packed them up into these nifty tins that I got at Walgreens for $1.09 each. They were a steal!
Full disclosure: the original recipe for the dough said it would make 6 dozen cookies so we doubled it, thinking 12 dozen instead of 10 wouldn't be so bad - that way we could keep some for ourselves. Yeah, that turned out not to be necessary: by the time we were done, we ended up with 20 DOZEN cookies. So yeah, I gave everyone at work 1.5 dozen, left a bunch with Mom and saved 2 dozen for Andy. I may have to carefully monitor my cookie intake or I am going to be on a major sugar high for the next week and a half. Not that that would necessarily be a totally awful thing... I would have to go to the gym a lot more to compensate though...
I had some Velveeta left from the last time so I prepared a toasted cheese sandwich following the old family recipe with the exception that this time I only had actual bread instead of the cheapest white bread in town.
And this would be an excellent place to acquire the ingredients for the soup, the town market in the village of Noirmoutier.
Anybody want to go to France?
This bread is easy to make, but it does dirty three bowls. Bowl one is the largest bowl, and it has one cup of sugar and one stick of margarine in it. (Room temperature margarine.) Beat them together well. Bowl one now becomes your main bowl.
Bowl two has two cups of flour, two teaspoons of baking powder and one teaspoon of cinnamon in it. Whisk together, or at least stir it up with a fork. Bowl three has one cup of mashed very ripe bananas, two beaten eggs, one quarter cup of milk and a half teaspoon of vanilla in it.
Pour bowl three (banana/egg) into bowl one (sugar/margarine). Mix well (with a spoon). Add bowl two (flour/baking powder/cinnamon) gradually into bowl one. Stir just until the flour is mixed in. Fold in one and a half cups of cranberries which have been cut in half. Bake in a 9X5 inch greased bread pan at 350 degrees for 50 minutes, or until it is done. Remove from oven, put the pan on a rack for 15 minutes, remove the bread from the pan, put it back on the rack, let it cool completely. [You can probably substitute about 2/3 cup of wheat flour for the same amount of white flour, and it should still turn out fine.] This has all the moist goodness of banana bread with the tart bite of cranberries. Good stuff.
Mix or whisk together:
I am pretty sure that I was not supposed to open the oven door to take a picture of the batter after it had already started to bake. No harm seems to have been done, fortunately.
Remove from oven when it's done -- this is the hardest part for me. I decided it was done after about 55 minutes. The cookbook says an hour. Ovens vary, and I used a dark pan which bakes faster, I hear. Let it cool on the rack in the pan for 10 or 15 minutes, then remove it from the pan. I added extra spices -- the original recipe has only 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/4 teaspoon cloves, but I like a spicy bread. If this is good, I'll make another loaf for Thanksgiving. If not, there's time for a trip to DeBoer's. I made some of my homemade tomato soup for lunch today, and I'm thinking that this bread would go well with the leftover soup for lunch tomorrow. 
Step 2: Cut them up in to bite size pieces and put them in a baking dish. Add some olive oil to coat them (not too much) and some salt and pepper. Then put them in a 400 degree oven to bake for about 20 minutes:
While the potatoes are baking, take out the rest of the ingredients. Sausage, about one whole sausage per person (I got pork/garlic/shallots from our local specialty butcher. YUM!), half an onion (color of your choice), and a package of mushrooms.
Cut up the onions and mushrooms then, after 20 minutes, add all of this to the potatoes. Nestle the sausages down in the middle. Cook for 20 more minutes and then turn the sausages. Cook for still 20 minutes more or so and everything should be done and look fantastic, kind of like this:
Enjoy!
Most of this stuff I keep on hand, 'just in case.' The Pillsbury Pizza Crust in a can is pretty good, any spaghetti sauce will do, and the rest depends on what I have in the refrigerator. That's diced ham, mushrooms, onions, tomatoes and pepperoni. I added some shredded three cheese Italian, and some shredded mozzarella cheese. I like a lot of cheese. This is what it looked like before it went in the oven.
And this is what it looked like when it came out. I baked it at 400 degrees for 20 minutes -- that's not quite what it said on the package the dough came in, but close. I threw a bunch of spices on it, too. Parsley, Italian Seasonings.... maybe some garlic salt.
So that's supper. Anybody else make homemade pizza any more?
These are the ingredients -- plus a tablespoon of flour.
Turn off the heat, remove from heat, and blend the mixture. Add 1/2 to 1 cup of half and half or milk, salt and pepper. Do not return to a boil after this point. The milk will curdle if you do. I left the soup a little bit chunky because I like chunks of stuff in my soup.
I made a couple of toasted cheese sandwiches, following the directions in the earlier post, while the soup was simmering. Sorry, I didn't have any white bread. Fresh tomatoes instead of canned and milk instead of half and half would make it an even better entry for National Start! Eating Healthy day, but any day with an exclamation point in the middle is not deserving of being taken too seriously. The soup was good. The recipe made about 3 bowlsful of soup of the size in the photo.
I am not at all happy with the result. Disappointing. I have more yeast and more flour, so there will probably be another attempt at bread making. This looked like a pretty simple process, too. I must say that the house smells really good, though.
If I can find a squash that is relatively uniform in size, I like to use those. I start by poking a few holes in it, on all sides, using a very sharp fork, shown below. I then wrap it in a paper towel, put it in the microwave for 1 1/2 minutes, turn it over and nuke it for another 1 1/2 minutes. This cooks it just enough to be able to cut it more easily.
I cut this one in 8 pieces, having removed the icky stuff with a spoon.
Next I lined a cookie sheet with tinfoil to make clean up easier, and seasoned each piece. I drizzled them with olive oil, mostly so that the seasonings would stick to them. I used seasoned pepper, parsley, rosemary and a little salt. Whatever you like. The rosemary smells great, but has a pretty distinctive taste. You might want to try it on just one section to be sure you like it on your squash.
I used the same cooking process as for the roasted sweet potato recipe. Preheated the oven to 375 degrees, covered the squash with foil for the first 30 minutes or so, removed the foil, and continued baking for another 20 or 30 minutes. Until it passed the fork test. They still felt a little firm at this point, but they were definitely done. I added a little butter to my own serving, and more salt and pepper.
Serve with just about anything -- I've had this with meat-cakes, and liked that flavor combination, so tonight I fried up a little left-over meatloaf to go with it. I also had some leftover broccoli from the first time we ate this meatloaf, so it turned out to be quite a colorful plate.
It may not prevent the flu, but it tasted good on a cold, rainy, blustery night.
But here's how I threw this particular one together.
So, I read the back of the package. It had a recipe for whole wheat bread. Reasonable enough. I have been thinking about making something yeasty for a while, now -- much like I occasionally take a bike ride with a blog post in mind, I now find that I occasionally cook something with this blog in mind. I'm not sure that this is a good thing. Anyway, Gino's discussion some while back (it must have been in the comments -- I can't find it to link to it) about buns and Sloppy Joe's got me thinking about the old bun recipe. I don't have it. Andy is on Facebook, so I asked him - Wall to Wall, as it were. He didn't have it on him, but was willing to check at home. Tula (or Rosemary, as she calls herself on her Facebook page) had the recipe which she had gotten from Mavis. Tula/Rosemary posted it to me on Facebook, I got it on my g-mail. Life has gotten very strange -- or technology rules, one of those. However, that recipe uses white/unbleached/bread flour. And authenticity seemed to be desireable, at least the first time I make them. So this morning I made the Honey-Whole Wheat Bread, according to package directions.
I let it rise a bit longer than this, but as you can see, it looks like bread already. TOPWLH commented that he remembered that I used to make bread, but he couldn't remember what we used to do with it. I'm pretty sure we ate it, but that says something about how long it has been. Not counting bread machine bread. Which isn't bad, but isn't really the same deal, either.
I started the whole process about 9 am, I had the finished product cooling on the counter by 1:00 or there abouts. Here's the deal. It's good bread, but it isn't great bread. The crust is a little too crusty. It's a little chewy. We'll eat it, but I probably won't make it again. We had it with left over home made beef stew and boiled potatoes for supper tonight.
Maybe I should have taken some pictures of the beef stew.
