Moohoo New Year.

More or less clockwise, beginning at lower left:Fruit salad prepared by TOPWLH.

Topping for fruit salad.

Scoops.

Fat fritos.

Clam dip (clams mixed into French onion dip by TOPWLH).

Emily's cheeseball.

Guacamole prepared according to the old family recipe.

Canned baby oysters (an acquired taste).

Shrimp and cocktail sauce.

Smoked salmon and two kinds of crackers.

There are only three of us here. We might have a bit too much food.

German Near Beer

Buy beer.


Open, pour, and drink.



Easy.

Quiche for Christmas

First, Merry Christmas to one and all! I was responsible for the Christmas morning brunch, so I decided to go with one of my fall back, no fail dishes - Quiche. Here's how it starts:

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.

Step 2: Put the filling into the quiches. Quiche #1 (right) was broccoli, red pepper, and cheese. Quiche #2 was ham, onion, and cheese.

Me, putting filling in quiche number 1. Note my extremely large Twins Tshirt from the best sporting event I've ever been to.

Step 3: Add the egg mixture to the quiches until the come up to the top of the crusts.

Gracefully poured by yours truly. Or something. Special thanks to my photographer.

Here they are, ready to put into the oven:

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:

Ingredients:
4 eggs
1 3/4 cup half & half
salt
pepper
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
4 ounces grated swiss cheese
4 ounces grated mozzarellla cheese
1 pre-made pie crust (I like the refrigerated ones from Pillsbury)

Equipment: 1 pie or quiche pan

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees
2. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs and half & half. Season with the salt, pepper, and nutmeg. (Sometimes I also add a little garlic salt. Up to you).
3. Place the pie crust in the quiche/pie pan. Add any filling (ham, broccoli, etc.) and the cheese.
4. Pour the egg mixture over the filling.
5. Bake in 425 degree oven for 15 minutes. Reduce heat in the oven to 350 degrees and bake for an additional 25 minutes or until crust in golden and the filling is set/no longer runny.
6. When set, take out of the oven and allow it to sit for 5-10 minutes before serving.

Orange Juice

It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Cross Post

NOTE: My dad made it obvious that this needed to be cross-posted to the food blog. So here it is.

As reported elsewhere in the family blogosphere, I spent all of yesterday over at my parents house getting prepared for the Christmas festivities. I very artfully arranged the Nativity Scene and we even made lots of progress on the Christmas tree. No family Christmas tree is complete without our old favorites, the sheep:

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...

P.S. - The recipe in full:
1) Cream together 1.5 cups butter and 1 cup sugar.
2) In a separate bowl, combine 1 egg, 2 TB milk, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp almond extract. Then add to the butter/sugar mixture and beat well.
3) Mix together 4 cups flour and 1 tsp baking powder, then gradually mix into the butter/sugar combo until you have an even dough.
4) Preheat the oven to 400. Using a cookie press (quality can vary), shape cookies onto a baking sheet, spacing evenly. Bake in 400 degree oven for 6ish minutes, being careful not to burn them. The bottoms burn very quickly.
5) Allow to cool on a counter after removing from oven.
Recipe makes approximately 8ish dozen cookies.

Toasted cheese sandwich and homemade Navy bean soup

Today's hearty lunch after cleaning up the mess left by the first big snow storm of the year.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.

Yesterday while out and about I stopped at Roundy's and got a one pound package of ham steaks and a one pound bag of Roundy's Navy beans.

Prepare Navy bean soup more or less according to Roundy's package directions. Soak beans overnight. Drain and rinse. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer, the directions call for about an hour and a half.

Hold the onions out until near the end so they don't overcook. I think they should go in after about an hour. Also add some carrots and celery at this same time.

Season with a 30 year old bay leaf and Sel Marin Ile de Noirmoutier, French sea salt from Ile de Noirmoutier. Here is how you get to the island, the Passage du Gois at low tide. When the tide comes in the sea rises and covers the road. If you are unwise enough to be out there when that happens you must take refuge on that tower next to the road and wait for the sea to recede.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?

Turkey Soup

There is no recipe for turkey soup. It makes a lot, though.

Banana/Cranberry Bread

I mentioned this bread on my other blog. I've been doing some holiday bread baking, and I like to make them ahead of time and freeze them. They seem to just get better after a couple of days. OSLO and I both had a sample slice of this one, and it is as good as I remembered it. 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.

Pumpkin Bread

It is only a week until Thanksgiving! Pumpkin bread is part of that holiday's traditions for us, whether it is homemade, or purchased at DeBoer's Bakerij. This is a modified Joy Of Cooking Cookbook recipe. The usual drill -- preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Mix or whisk together:

1 3/4 cups flour (or substitute up to 3/4 cup of wheat flour for the same amount of the white)

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon each: cloves, nutmeg, ginger and pumpkin pie spice

In a large bowl, beat until light and fluffy:

1 1/3 cups sugar

1/3 cup soft shortening or margarine

2 eggs (the margarine and eggs really should be at room temperature)

Add 1 cup canned pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie mix -- the cans look deceptively alike)

Add the dry ingredients to the egg/margarine/sugar mixture alternately with 1/3 cup milk (into which you've poured 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla - optional). The book says to do it in three additions -- I did it in five, starting with the flour mixture, since I wasn't sure if they meant three of each, or three altogether. Put into a greased 5 X 9 inch bread pan. Bake at 350 degrees.

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.

Sausage Potato Roast

As mentioned elsewhere on the tubes, I made an attempt at a sausage & potato roast a week or so ago. For a first try it wasn't so bad but I wanted to perfect it a bit before I put it on the blog. Tonight was my second attempt and I think it turned out well, so here goes:

Step 1 - Start out with some potatoes. I had Yukon Gold and some new red potatoes, so I used those:

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!

Homemade Pizza

I haven't posted anything here for a while. Since I was 'cooking' tonight, it seemed easy enough to take a few pictures along the way. I'm pretty sure that I am not the only one who makes and bakes their own pizzas in this family. When we lived in DeKalb, OSLO used to make "Uncle Gene's Pizza" about once a week, whenever I had a night class. This version is a little different than that. 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?

Tomato Soup

Apparently today is National Start! Eating Healthy day, sponsored by the American Heart Association. (National Start! Walking day is April 10, 2010 -- but that's another story for another time.) I took my cue from a previous entry on this blog, featuring a school day lunch. There is no attempt at authenticity here, this is just the tomato soup that I made today for lunch for myself and TOPWEH. (The other person who eats here.) These are the ingredients -- plus a tablespoon of flour.

• 1 Tablespoon olive oil (or butter)
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 1 small carrot chopped -- put the oil, onion and carrot in your cooking pot on medium heat for 3 to 5 minutes
• 1 Tablespoon flour -- add to the pot, cook for 1-2 minutes, stirring frequently, then --
• ADD:
• 1 14 ounce can of crushed tomatoes (I used diced) or 1 pound of fresh tomatoes
• 1 cup chicken broth (or vegetable broth)
• 1/4 teaspoon basil
• 1/4 teaspoon thyme
• 1 small bay leaf and
• salt and pepper - bring this all to a boil, reduce heat, cover, simmer for 15 minutes, stirring frequently
• Remove Bay Leaf!!!!

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.