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On Saturday, I baked Banana Oat Muffins for breakfast to use up four small overripe bananas. I baked them as six large muffins and froze two. In the afternoon, I made dough for Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers, which I will bake next week. I did not realize until this morning that Scott was going to run out of crackers after today, or I would have made the dough earlier in the week.
I had good intentions, but I decided to take the day off on Saturday from jam making. For dinner we had more of the Turkey-Zucchini Loaf with our first sweet corn of the season from the farmers market. It was wonderful.
Hi, Navlys--Yes, I do a water bath for the jam. That is ten minutes at boiling, then turn off the heat, remove the lid and allow to rest for 5 minutes before removing from the water bath onto a towel on the counter to rest. I check the seals the next day.
Joan--I am beginning to think that poker is secondary to food at your poker games, which suggests that you all have your priorities straight!
Replacing butter with oil is tricky, Joan. In cakes or breads, I use 1/3 cup oil per 1/3 cup butter, but that does not work as well in cookies. For the Soft Ginger and Molasses Cookies I just baked, I used 1/2 cup avocado oil plus 2 Tbs. water in place of the 1 cup of butter. That would probably be my starting point.
Your coconut pie and cornmeal cake look delicious!
I always look forward to seeing what you bake for the poker game, Joan. Those cookies look so good. I followed your recipe link, and now I am wondering if I can engineer an oil-based version. I will put it on my list of future experiments.
Scott and I went back out to the meadow area in our woodlands and picked blackberries for two hours on Friday morning. Due to the drought we had last month, the blackberries are not as abundant as they were last year, but we still picked four quarts. I hope to go out once more on Sunday. After lunch, I began deseeding blackberries, starting with the ones from our last outing and ones I picked on our terrace. Once I had two four-cup containers, I did another 12 oz. and froze those for later use in my blackberry brownie recipe. Then I made a batch of jam before dinner, which yielded three half-pint and one 4 oz. jar. After dinner, I made the second batch, which yielded four half-pint jars. I heard all the jars seal, which is a glorious sound.
In between my jam making sessions, I made Turkey-Zucchini Loaf with Peach-Dijon Glaze for dinner. I used a golden arrow, which is the yellow zucchini squash, and I grated the whole one in, as it was getting old. Scott really liked the flavor, and it is a milder one than the green zucchini. We had the meat loaf with the rest of the green bean salad and a maple-oat roll. I am tired but looking forward to more jam making tomorrow.
Your dinner looks great, as always Joan.
Len's pizza also looks good. Interesting that you shaped it by hand. I find these days that I am less and less likely to reach for a rolling pin when shaping dough for pizza, sweet rolls, or bread. I primarily save the rolling pin for crackers and pie crust.
I made another jar of refrigerator dill pickles on Thursday. This jar uses pickling cucumbers and dill, both from our garden. We will let them rest in the refrigerator for two days before we start eating them.
For dinner tonight, we had more of the green bean salad, and we finished the chicken salad, which we had as open-faced sandwiches on the Maple Oat buns that I baked today.
A thunderstorm with a cool front arrived on Wednesday evening. That allowed me to head back to the kitchen to bake on Thursday, which is good, as we were out of cookies. I baked "Soft Ginger and Molasses Cookies" (no butter), which is a recipe that I adapted from one with a cup of butter on the King Arthur site. I use ½ cup avocado oil plus 2 Tbs. water in its place. I replace the AP flour with white whole wheat flour and add 4 Tbs. milk powder. The recipe uses equal parts ginger syrup and molasses. (I hope King Arthur does not stop selling the ginger syrup, although with my luck, they will.) The recipe made 31 cookies, so that may get us through the week.
I also baked a new recipe, "Maple Walnut and Oat Rolls, from The Baking Sheet XXIV, no. 1 (Winter 2013), p. 7. [Note: If you have the back issues of The Baking Sheet, it incorrectly says XXX for the Volume,] I have taken to paging through my notebooks of The Baking Sheet and pulling out recipes to try. I make a list so that I can find them again. As always, I made some changes to the recipe. I increased the whole wheat flour by ¼ cup and decreased the King Arthur AP by ¼ cup so that it is exactly half whole wheat. I added 2 Tbs. special dry milk and 2 Tbs. flax meal and reduced the salt from 1 ½ tsp. to 1 tsp. I replaced 1 cup of the water with buttermilk and omitted the maple extract. I added 2 Tbs. avocado oil because I think some oil keeps bread softer for longer. The dough, which I mixed and kneaded in the bread machine, was a little dry, so I added 1 Tbs. of water. Next time I will increase the ¼ cup of water to 1/3 cup, as the dough was a tad dry when I was shaping it. I made it as twelve rounded rolls. The rolls are delicious, although they do not have a noticeable maple taste.
I had some cucumber salsa for lunch on Wednesday. The cucumber flavor is stronger than I would have expected. It is ok. I am not sure if part of my disappointment is that my taste buds really want corn chips with it. I will need to see if I can engineer a cornmeal flatbread.
I made yogurt in the morning. For dinner, I made, for the first time this season, the Green Bean, Cherry Tomato, and Feta salad we like so much. We have been waiting patiently for the green beans, and at last we had the necessary pound. I used our ripe, multicolored cherry tomatoes, along with some from the farmers market. We had the salad with open-faced chicken salad sandwiches and pumpkin bread from the freezer for dessert.
In my quest to use the rest of the cucumber left on our doorstep, I searched for recipes on Tuesday. If our tomatoes were coming in, it would be easy: a salad of sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions like my grandmother used to make. Most cucumber recipes require onion, so unless it is green onion, Scott cannot eat it, and he is not particularly a fan of cucumber unless it is in refrigerator pickles. I found a recipe at Taste of Home for Crisp Cucumber Salsa and decided that it would make a nice snacky lunch for me for the next few days, using my flatbread. The original recipe used a half cup of seeded, finely chopped tomatoes. I replaced that with a 14 oz. can of Del Monte Petite Diced Tomatoes with mild Hatch Chilies, which is my go-to for making salsa. I doubled the onion and increased the garlic. I deleted the sour cream. I added some squirts of bottled lemon juice and replaced the ground cumin with 2 1/2 tsp of Penzey's Salsa and Pico. I also added some chopped red bell pepper, as one recipe reviewer suggested. I peeled and seeded the cucumber. I will let it rest overnight and start eating it at lunch tomorrow.
For dinner on Tuesday, I made chicken salad from the leftover roast chicken breast meat. We had open-faced sandwiches on our current bread and the rest of the potato salad. I pulled out the sweet pickles I made yesterday. They are "interesting." I will need to ask my sister how she uses hers and how much of the Penzey's pickling spice she uses. I think mine needed less spice and more sugar. I am unsure if Scott is going to eat many of them.
We had a dinner of the last two pork chops and more of the potato salad, with microwaved frozen peas. It is so nice not to have to turn the oven on when the heat and humidity are so high.
That's a good idea, Mike. My husband often forgets which plant is which. Our Early Girl and Best Boy have green tomatoes. The Dester Indiana only has one. As it is an heirloom, it does not set fruit when the temperatures are as hot as they have been. We hold out hope for it if we stop having such long stretches of heat. I'm pleased that our cherry tomatoes are beginning to ripen, including one yellow and some purple. We will soon have enough beans for our favorite salad. My husband picked some pickling cucumbers today, so more dill pickles will be coming. I need more wide-mouthed pint jars.
Our pumpkin plant has vines, lots of leaves, and many male flowers, but so far nary a female flower.
We also went blackberry picking in the meadow area of our woods early this morning to escape the heat. Some of the blackberry plants were really hit by the drought, but other areas are looking much better, especially as we have had some significant rain in the past week. I also picked a pint of blackberries from our terrace. Jam making will commence this week.
I seem to have avoided ticks and mites this time. Better clothing, and the bug spray from the article to which CWCdesign posted a link seem to be doing the trick so far.
Thank you and Diane again, Mike, for your service to all of us!
That dinner sounds delicious, Navlys!
While we were out picking blackberries early Sunday morning, someone left a bag of two large and two smaller cucumbers on our doorstep. I have heard about zucchini being left at people's houses, in their cars, and other such spots, but cucumbers are a new one for us. I used the two smaller ones and a smallish one a vendor at the farmers market threw in because it was skimpy and made two 1-pint jars of sliced refrigerator sweet pickles. I used my dill refrigerator pickle recipe, but I replaced the white vinegar with cider vinegar and in place of the spices, I used for each jar 1 ½ tsp of Penzey's Pickling Spice, which one of my sisters recommended last year.
Now I have to figure out what to do with the two large cucumbers, which need to be eaten soon. If I had tomatoes, it would be a no-brainer, but the tomatoes are slow this year. I may need to go to the Tuesday farmers market to see if I can get some.
For Sunday dinner, I roasted two bone-in chicken breasts. While that did mean the oven at a high temperature, today is probably the coolest it will be for the rest of the week unless we get more rain. I also made potato salad, using red potatoes from the farmers market. We finished up the little bit of the pasta salad as well.
The wings look delicious, Joan! Of course, you ate those first!
We warmed up two more of the pecan-crusted pork chops and had them with more of the pasta-vegetable salad.
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