Oatmeal at Sunrise

Upon reading my email, SparkPeople sent me an article about getting fiber in the morning with oatmeal! I thought "I already eat oatmeal...sometimes. I have packets of Quaker raisin n' spice!" but they had something better in mind. Ready for this?

Crock-pot oatmeal


Weird? I know, right? That's what I said!

I read the article, tips and the recipe. Sounded good, so I got out of bed and thought I'd give it a try! Here's my spin on it. Here we go:

1 cup Old-Fashioned Quaker Oats
2 cups 1% milk
1 cup finely chopped apples
1/2 cup Craisins dried cranberries
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 TSP butter or spread
1 tsp sugar (I ran out of brown sugar)
dash of salt
dash of nutmeg


Crock-pot it up. Stir well & cook for 'undetermined amount of time'

This part scared me. After reading the reviews (like I usually DON'T DO til LATER!) many people said theirs burnt after cooking 8-9 hours, like the recipe called for. Some cooked in only 90 minutes! 90 MINUTES?!!? I need sleep, man!

I put them on at midnight & checked at 1am to see how they were so far. They looked no different, so I decided to get some sleep.

8 hours later....

It came out strange. I didn't like, nor did I eat it. haha.....right.

I was a bit cranky that I had to keep checking on it all night. And I forgot the simplest thing about the meal choice:

I like my oatmeal soupy. Which I know is gross to most of you. But thick, soggy oatmeal doesn't do it for me. And it didn't have much flavor, despite me adding a bazillion extra things. Oh well, in the words of Jim Carrey in The Grinch Stole Christmas "BUT THAT'S WHAT THESE TESTS ARE FOOOR!"

Until next time!

Jess ♥

Sunday Dinners: Chef Tyffanie

I'm going to start posting about Sunday dinners that my friends and I put on. Tyffanie cooked up some soul food, with some help from the eaters. We had an awesome time dancing to Lecrae and frying chicken! I made the filling for Apple Pie and our friend Gijey came for some gluten-free treats!

Here's the awesomeness that went down:

Baked Mac n Cheese
Fried Chicken
Greens
Apple Pie




After hours in the kitchen, several trips to get more milk and things, and a ton of dancing, we finished! Food was awesome! Not much more to add! Pictures say it all! :D

Jess ♥

Favorite Food

Whenever I think back to the simple times, I think about how a tiny town could have all of its necessities when the whole town pitched in. Cute little shops and each town had a baker, a shoemaker, a butcher, some farmers probably, a blacksmith, a seamstress, and even a candlestick maker! I've always wanted to be the baker. My version of corporate America retirement would be to open a bakeshop & give cookies away to kids! I want to be that cute grandma that spoils the kids & makes pies for busy people!

One thing I've always wanted to do is bake bread. It's like the simplest, most basic food need for a simple family, and it's one of my FAVORITE foods! It's a HUGE culinary step for me. I tried banana bread last semester and it was delicious!

Here's the recipe from SimplyRecipes.com:

Banana Bread Recipe

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour

Ingredients

3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
1/3 cup melted butter
1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
1 egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch of salt
1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

Method

No need for a mixer for this recipe. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). With a wooden spoon, mix butter into the mashed bananas in a large mixing bowl. Mix in the sugar, egg, and vanilla. Sprinkle the baking soda and salt over the mixture and mix in. Add the flour last, mix. Pour mixture into a buttered 4x8 inch loaf pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool on a rack. Remove from pan and slice to serve.

Yield: Makes one loaf.



Since bread is one of my favorite foods, you'll be seeing it again. I would like to try something new. So look forward to Apple Bread, Cinnamon Pecan Bread, Cheese Bread pretty much anything that can be a muffin I'll find a way to loaf it! :D


Until we meet again,

Jess ♥

Whoops

Forgive me. As school became overwhelmingly stressful, I got away from blogging my baking adventures. In my absense, I successfully baked banana bread, whole wheat pizza and sweet potato pie! I plan to make these again, so I can write about them! :)

For the sake of memory, I'll talk about the pie! My family loves sweet potato pie (many Black families do). I've noticed it's a cultural thing too. My Black friends say their families eat sweet potato pie while my White friends say pumpkin pie's the way to go. My parents have slowly let my sister and I protrude into the kitchen during the holidays to make small things, here and there. This time for Christmas, we tackled dessert! Jasmine made her delicious Chocolate Mint Cake while I decided on Sweet Potato Pie.

Since Grandmother Mary (who we call Maw Maw) is the best cook I've ever known, we decided to call her up and ask what she puts in her pie, while I scoured the internet for a good recipe. I usually find myself on and sometimes google brings me to the Food Network or even Cooks.com! Maw Maw said she'd have my cousin text us the recipe (never happened, she probably forgot, bless her heart). So my mom, being one who wants to get in and out of the grocery store and refuses to wait for my indecisiveness, picked a recipe she liked from some chef whose name I can't recall lol.

Regardless, on Dec 23rd, I set forth to make my pie! I spent most of the time mashing the potatoes myself, and I had fun adding sugar and everything. When it comes to recipes that need sugar, I like to improvise. I know brown or granulated sugar belongs in pie but I added nutmeg and cinnamon to my pie. [I'll post the recipe soon].

While I finished mashing the potatoes and mixing, I baked the pie crusts beforehand. My mom said "Sure you can make the pie but you must make the crust crispy" or something like that. So I gave it an eggwash and prebaked it.

An hour later, I had a delicious pie!



It was pretty good! I was more excited that I did it. My parents liked it more than I thought they would (genuinely, they've had some good pie!) Now I know what you're saying, parents usually say they like it, even when they don't. My parents don't lol. They'll tell you if they don't like it, which is a good thing. You'll never get anywhere with only positive feedback.

You can also tell if people like your food, depending on how fast it goes. My dad is by NO means a picky person, he'll eat the whole thing whether you got it from Paula Deen or the gas station lol. Mom, on the other hand, will tell me straight up whats good and bad about it! I couldn't convince Jasmine to even try it (she's super picky with everything).

Up next, I plan on making Mam Papaul's Original King Cake (it's Mardi Gras season and a lot of my northern friends don't have a clue!) I'm super excited about this one! From now on, my photography will be more professional and I plan to give it a new layout soon! Until next time, keep cooking friends!

Jess ♥

Don't Judge a Book by the First Recipe

Sometimes the most interesting recipes can come from the most unlikely of books. One day in 2008, I ordered [insert textbook or something, can't remember] from Amazon and shipping was $5. I could get free shipping if I added $5 to my order. So I thought, "hm, I can pay for this $20 item and pay $5 shipping or I can add another item and pay the same w/ no shipping! Let's do it!" So I scoured the website for another 30 minutes searching for a 5-dollar something. I came upon Totally Muffins Cookbook by Helen Siegel & Karen Gillingham. I figured it couldn't hurt. So I bought it.

Two years later...

Here I am, never having tried a single recipe. I looked around my kitchen one summer Friday afternoon. I had everything I needed. I just needed to give it a try. My parents were about an hour west of campus, driving my sister in for freshman orientation. I had to work in an hour and a half. I decided to surprise them with some buttermilk blueberry muffins.

An hour later...

Total disaster. I had no time to wait for them, because my parents arrived sooner than I thought. I took them out and they look half decent (completely blue bread with giant black berries protruding out of them). I grabbed one as their Uhaul pulled up in front of my rental house. It wasn't bad. Wasn't good but wasn't terrible. I realize at that moment that they needed to drop me off at work and the Uhaul had some of my furniture in it!! Oops, fail moment.

As we discussed an execution plan for moving my furniture & getting me to work on time I kept eating. I had finished the muffintop and reached the bottom half. It was compeltely dough, hot sticky dough. I gave up hope at my dinner and threw it in the grass for the wildlife to eat. I thought "that recipe book is terrible!! Never again!!"

[I won't burn your retinas with a terrifying picture of these muffins!]


[By the way my dad had put my entire room together (desk, bed, dresser, nightstand). Yeah my parents are that awesome. I did have to wait a month to receive these things from home. Living on an air mattress & out of suitcases isn't so bad.]

August rolls around and my friends return to campus for classes. One Friday night I decided to give the book another try. I decided to go simple with the pecan cinnamon muffins this time, minus the pecans (didn't have any). I'm not sure if this changed my muffins but I didn't have time to finish them before leaving to hang out with friends. So I threw the wet ingredients (including sugar) in a bowl, mixed it and put it in the fridge. Three hours later, I return and start mixing in the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda). I baked them and by then there were like 10 people in my livingroom, including my roomate. No one would wait for them to cool off. They were pretty good!! I was like "wow, this book ain't so bad".


[They devoured them before I could get a better picture.]

This past Thursday, I gave another recipe a try, banana muffins. No walnuts (didn't have any) and I really just needed to get rid of some bananas. I added 3 bananas like the book said and looked up a crumble top recipe (brown sugar, cinnamon, & flour; crumble cold butter on it too). Everyone asked "what kind is it again?" lol So note to self (and all of you), add more than 3 bananas!!





[I know they look the same as the cinnamon muffins but they're different! I swear!!]

So far so good with this little book. For an introduction in muffin making I've had a lot of fun! It's simple, nothing complicated or tricky. If you stumble upon some tiny muffin-shaped-or-odd-shaped book that costs 5 bucks, it may be worth a shot! And if nothing else, your friends will eat it! Til next time, keep cooking!

Jess