Bread and Soup

Last week King Arthur Flour came to my school and presented their Life Skills Bread Baking Program. Basically they come and show students how to bake bread. Then they send each kid home with most of the ingredients to bake the bread. The recipe makes enough for two loaves of bread. One loaf you keep at home and eat and the other loaf you bring back to school to donate to the town food shelf. I got to bring home a bag of the ingredients. So today Alexa was eager to bake our loaves in order for me to bring the loaf back to school on Tuesday.

They turned out quite well!

We also decided to harvest the last carrots in the garden today. Alexa set to cleaning them and I chopped some up to go into a soup to go with our bread for dinner tonight.

Breakfast Requests

I made blueberry muffins this past weekend.Alexa has been eating them for breakfast. This morning she realized that there were none left. "Can't you make some more today mommy? They are my favorite breakfast." When I said maybe I could she asked for blueberry and raspberry ones.

Because you know I have nothing better to do on a Thursday night when I get home from work.

Ode to the Rice Krispie Treat

About six months ago I started getting this Parenting magazine in the mail. It is called Parenting the Elementary Years... or something like that. At first I though t it was just a free sample designed to make me order it. However, it showed up again the next month and the next. I have been getting on for about six months straight. It has become my running question to my family, which one of you thought I needed the parenting magazine? Because it is pretty good. I mean I wouldn't PAY for it, but it is entertaining reading at bedtime. None of them have owned up to it. Friday night I was reading it and came across this recipe using Rice Krispie treats. I should back up and tell you that two Thanksgivings ago I was visiting my friend Jason in Philly. We were waiting for things to cook and then digesting afterwards and we must have watched about ten episodes of The Cake Boss. This was the first (and only) time I have ever watched the show. I don't have cable or satellite dish and since my one and only TV is about twelve inches across I rarely watch anything. At any rate I was fascinated by the cakes that this guy could put together. It was amazing. I was even more amazed to learn that a lot of the shapes were Rice Krispie treats. The guy built and airplane out of them! I was extremely impressed. I have always thought of Rice Krispie Treats as a fixture at school bake sales not suitable for much more than thier rectangular shape stuffed in a zip lock baggie. So when I came across the recipe this weekend. I though I am so doing this, the kids will love it. So today I made these...

Cute huh? They were amazingly easy. I learned that the treats stay soft for quite a while so you can shape them into the balls. Which is handy because otherwise things would have the pesky charred flesh taste. I had a couple extra so I made two look like ice cream sundaes. The kids were pretty excited and I may be making these to send in to school on birthdays instead of cupcakes!

Rainy Day Baking

It is a damp rainy day. The perfect day for doing some baking. Somehow I just can't bring myself to bake in hot weather. Nothing says just eat a salad like hot days of summer. So as soon as we get a cool day I am happy settle in and get some baking done. The first thing I needed to tackle was zucchini bread. I had two rather large zucchinis that I had brought back from my mother's house a few weeks ago. They had been hanging on in the refrigerator waiting to be made into bread. So this morning I started my day with a bicep workout called grating the zucchini. I had enough for three loaves. Two of which will be heading into the freezer.

The next item that needed to be dealt with was the over abundance of cherry tomatoes. I took these pictures of Alexa picking some a few days ago. She looks like she is lost in there doesn't she?

These things are extremely sweet, but there are so many we are not able to keep up with eating them. I did a little recipe hunt on line (prompted by a conversation with my sister Cherie) and decided to roast and freeze them. We had about three quarts from picking this week.

I first had to slice them all in half. This is a lot of slicing.

I then decided to mix in some olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper. I poured it all onto a cookie sheet covered in foil and baked them at 220 for about 45 minutes to an hour.

They tasted yummy! I am hoping that this preserves some of the really great taste to fresh tomatoes well into the winter when all you can buy are the ones that have no flavor.

Lastly I moved on to muffins. I have to go back to work this week, so the kids are headed to daycare and preschool. I knew the switch to early mornings again would make breakfast a bit of a struggle. I decided to to have some blueberry muffins on hand to put in lunch boxes. I keep them in the freezer and  toss one in each lunch box the night before. That way they are all thawed out by morning and the kids can have a mid morning snack when they get hungry.

In the end my counter looked like this...

Yes, I know the loaf of bread on the right has pieces missing. I got hungry.