Soooo, I made breakfast… the Hubster slept in until about 8 on Saturday while I was the one to get up with the boys and make breakfast. Now take a minute to pick your jaw up off the floor, I even fumbled my way thru french toast for them (this was actually a compromise since they had really asked for pancakes, HA!)… it’s been a long time since I made breakfast and I’m not a morning person so I was not interested in looking for or in a cookbook so I made it up and tried to make it look right… and for the bread, I did half whole wheat and half Sara Lee Blueberry crumble–the SL gets a bit too soft so you might want to dry it out some (quick way: pop in the oven at about 200 flipping once until both sides feel coarse and stale) before soaking to make it work nicer but hindsight and all…

French Toast
12 slices of bread
6 eggs
3/4 c milk
3 capfuls vanilla ext
1 T ea: sugar, maple syrup, and southern comfort (or frangelico, or just use another capful of vanilla and a couple more tsp of sugar if you want alcohol-free)
2 T ea: oil and butter (I used 1/2 T of ea to cook each batch of three, or could use a bigger pan I guess)

Mix eggs, milk, vanilla, sugar, syrup, and alcohol… pour over bread and let soak it all up… preheat you pan to MED, add your fat to the hot pan and fry them up in batches until they are good and golden on each side maybe a minute and a half a side (not sure I do this by smell… I can tell by the shift in the alcohol when to flip, but I reckon this is not a reliable technique for most… and I wasn’t wearing glasses so I can’t even backwards engineer how long from start and stop times, sorry… but then again everyone makes french toast if you need times someone is sure to have them somewhere… just google it…)

cakes on the griddle

I was laying around on the couch sick dreading the return of the boys as it would signal the beginning of homework and making dinner… Girlie and I were channel surfing when she decided she wanted to see A Lyon in the Kitchen… and he made these blueberry pancakes and she kept marveling “oooooh, that’s for me mom… those are for me…” and “can we make those?” so when hubby called home at the end of the day to check on me I told him I really didn’t feel like cooking and pitched him the breakfast for dinner idea and asked if he’d make it… he agreed to both so this worked out very well…

N. Lyon’s Blueberry Pancakes

I’m presuming the Hubs essentially followed the recipe… but we did sub yogurt for the buttermilk… (and of course if I were to make them I’d add a couple tablespoons of the maple syrup to the batter so as not to have to use it later but I’m weird like that…)

Mini Pictorial of sorts:

initial batter…

egg whites

assembled batter

cakes on the griddle

You may ask yourself why someone about to flee from the hurricane’s mighty winds would slow down the getting on the roads process to make blueberry muffins when breakfast was already made… Well, it’s simple really if you know either me or my grandmother (not to mention the guilt I bore over my children’s behavior this extended visit)…

The story goes that for “quite some time now” my grandma was going to make blueberry muffins for her neighbors JB and Anne as the nurses and caretakers who stay with them never do and JB has a mean sweet tooth… Well, she’d as of yet not and the last of the blueberries from her yard (which by the way were less than adequate in her opinion as well) were squirreled away in her freezer but she was afraid if the power went out she could lose them and then oh my would it be hard to fulfill her promise… But opening the fridge too much to make them with this uncertainty looming could doom everything else as well, plus what if the power went out when she was baking them as her stove is not gas…

So, instead of sitting down to eat my breakfast I stay puttering in the kitchen to make them… with my g-ma’s favorite recipe no less (so of course have to keep stopping to check how to do things) but in the end it works out and she runs them next door and stays for a bit of a visit while we are packing up…

Blueberry Muffins (H. Lewis, Tylertown UMW’s “A Book of Favorite Recipes” 1986)
1.75 c flour
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp bkg soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cream of tartar
1 egg, beaten + milk to make 1 c
1/3 c oil or melted shortening
frozen blueberries (at least 1 c) **
grated lemon rind and juice (1-2 tsp at most) ***

Mix the dry, add the wet and blend… Fold in the berries and spoon into greased muffin tin (makes only 12, fill them well as they rise just enough)… Bake 20-25 min at 375

** I’d think one would probably want to use around 2 c, and I dusted them in a bit of powdered sugar… (meaning to dust the remaining powdered sugar I’d tossed them with over the tops after baking but g-ma was too eager in taking them over for me to have that chance…
*** I used 2 tsp of lemon juice, no zest

pretty much as before but with slight adjusting for fresh berries… (also a bigger batch to feed the extra people)

Blueberries and Cream Oatmeal
3 c ea: oats, milk, water
1/2 c sugar
2 c fresh blueberries

Bring all but berries to a slow boil. Stir in berries and shut off heat but leave on hot eye to stand 5-10 mins until cooked and creamy…

So we’d loaded up on blackberries last week when we found them for $1/pkg at Superlo (and yes they were perfectly good and no I do not know why they were on such deep sale, but they were very good–and since we don’t frequent Superlo and really only hit them when we’re out at Target anyway, they reside side by side, I suppose it is entirely possible that they frequently have loss leaders on produce but who knows) at any rate, we overbought considering it was like Tues and we were leaving town at the end of the week… so I took them with us–along with some other stuff–and was intending to make a sort of Entenmann’s-ish danish-y coffee cake thingie… but I sent hubby to the store in T-town and had another minor shopping debaucle, so instead of the puff pastry dough rectangles and nut meal/ground nuts I’d asked for I got a gob of little mini pastry shells (no, not even puff pastry shells… not that it would have helped anyway in shell form) to morph into a new game plan… the truly unfortunate piece of this is that I discovered this problem in the morning when I figured I’d pull the puff pastry out to thaw… [So yes my wonderful and fabulous husband can do many a thing quite exceptionally and is frequently bragged on for many of them, but he really is not so unlike the average male when it comes to making a grocery store run--incorrectly fills the request at hand but comes home with an assortment of other superfluous items he is elated about finding (although not so like the typical male at all, one of these trips while down south this weekend resulted in cans of diced rutabegas... that he was raving about how cool it was to find...) and you now have to re-plan and add on planning of how to use some of his more obscure finds as well... *sighs* I'm the real problem though as I really may never learn better, because rationally I know this but when I need something I still send him for it...]

So I opened them out to thaw and proceeded to scan more than half a dozen cookbooks for ideas… unfortunately too many required things like double boilers that I had no desire to fuss with early in the morning… so I finally settled on a custard, as yes I overmake them but so what. LOL

Blackberry Custard Tartlets
15 mini pie crusts
3 pkg blackberries
2 c milk
4 eggs
splash vanilla ext
sugar to taste

rinsed, sorted and dried the berries… the prettiest ones went into the thawed pie shells, the not as lovely into a pot to breakdown into a jam-like topping… mixed the remaining ingredients well and poured over the berries in the shells and placed on baking sheet (in hindsight, I wished I had put them on the tray before filling with the custard) baked at 350 until set…
meanwhile cook down the berries in the pot with 1-2T sugar until juices run and thicken into a bit of a runny syrup, smash the berries up a bit and spoon over cooked but still warm tartlets and allow to cool a bit (like the amount of time it took to crack, mix and cook the scrambled eggs, for example) and the berry topping will set up…

*** As a bonus if you added enough extra sugar this would easily cross over into the dessert arena…

So Saturday I got up and made breakfast. Yes that bears rereading, but I truly did and it was a good decent breakfast hour and everything. (No one starved waiting for me to wake up and this wasn’t a late brunch or even 10 am deal… but a real deal 7:30 meal.) The problem is it was such a feat for me to be up, I was not going to make a grand production of the food… but the kids are deeply accustomed to the Hubs making something special so I had to find something middle of the road to work for both sides. Hence was born berries and cream oatmeal, only I felt I’d rather save the richness/heaviness for dessert rather than breakfast so I improvised…

Berries and ‘Cream’ Oatmeal
2.5 c oatmeal
2 c ea: water and milk
2/3-3/4 c ea: dried blueberries and dried raspberries (w/o corn syrup)
1 T sugar
pinch salt

Dump all in a pot, bring to a boil while stirring. Reduce to simmer for 5 min. Shutoff heat and let stand 5 min on hot eye. Serve drizzled with real maple syrup.

Here’s the basic recipe the Hubs added the nuts and chips to this weekend. But also, we use it for a lot of things… I do like using a sour cream/yogurt one as a base for things with berries but otherwise this is pretty much our slow morning go to. Sometimes the hubster thins it with more milk (I think he said up to 2 c) and sometimes I sub Bisquick for the flour because I’m a dork like that and because sometimes I crave it (and yes, if you are thinking what the Hubs often snarks, I do realize you don’t have to add all that to bisquick but it’s good that way and I don’t care!! LOL)

Basic Pancake
2 c unbleached ap flour (we’ve subbed this with ww pastry flour and even barley flour with success if you snub the ap)
2 T sugar **
1 T plus 1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/3 c milk
1 egg, beaten
2 T butter, melted

Mix dry ingredients, and mix milk with egg. Mix milk mix into dry mix stirring slowly. Add melted butter and mix well. Gently stir in whatever add-in you wish. (Then I let the batter set but hubby rarely does–ok almost never–works either way, but I think they are better if you let the batter rest and it’s room temp… plus my daddy did/does it that way so umm that’s a completely valid reason, right?)

Then we use about 1/4 c – 1/3 c of the batter per pancake as long as you cook it on a hot pregreased griddle or skillet they’ll work fine. I guess once it’s hot I like to idle it at MED while I make them. (Then if we are making a big batch or are exceptionally not lazy we’ll throw them in about a 200 degree oven while we finish making them all, but this is really to keep them warm and is really self serving as we have enough eaters for it not to matter.)

** I sometimes add more like 1/4 c, or add a splash of syrup or something, because I don’t like putting syrup on my pancakes… Now waffles on the other hand, I will drench in syrup and must obsessively fill each individual square, go figure.

Arrange the fruit in the bottom of the pan

Now look, I don’t know if this is the texture a clafouti is supposed to be, as it’s certainly not the same as the french recipe I had turned out, but can I just say the custardy bit was just silken. (without a water bath might I add)… I can’t imagine why a clafouti wouldn’t want to be this texture. Of couse maybe my tastes are so Anglicized that I just can’t help but favor her version, or maybe I got a lousy french one to start from–I mean duh there are bad cooks so, authentic or not, things can be swill. But this was rockin’ and required no translation, plus it had been hiding in my pantry bookcase since before I even made the french one. Shame on me for not checking there first. Now I would probably not do peach again (at least not white flesh) as it stayed too crisp and the blueberries got a little too soft and everything floated to the top (I guess that happens without the cherry pits to keep it weighted to the bottom though). I think I’d do raspberries next time and just dust the berries in a little powdered sugar and not put in the oven for the first 10 but just arrange and top with the batter. {That said, we made this a couple weeks back for hubby to take to work with stone in cherries and it worked beautifully. Sooo perfectly… *sighs* but I wanted to toy with less traditional ones.}

it's hard to get a pic of this, but here's my best one

Peach and Blueberry Clafouti (essentially Nigella’s Clafouti, “How to Be a Domestic Goddess” p 136, with different fruit)
1 T butter
1 peach
blueberries
6 lg eggs
1/2 c cake flour **
1/4 c sugar
1 tsp ea: Southern Comfort and vanilla extract
1 1/3 c ea: heavy cream and whole milk (close your eyes and forget any diet rules, you want to eat this)

Preheat the oven to 375, throw in a baking sheet and while your at it a 9-in pie pan with the butter. When the butter’s melted, brush a little on the sides and start arranging your fruit in the bottom of the dish. When it’s reached temp, pop the pie plate back on the hot bkg sheet, for about 10 min. Throw everything left in the blender until smooth.

When the 10 min is up (if you’re slow like me this is perfect timing), reduce the oven to 350. Pour the blender batter over the fruit, all the way to the top it will be easier not to spill–plus help the oven cool off if you do at least some, if not all, of this pouring while it’s still in the oven on the tray so pull out your shelf some. Bake about 45 min–I can’t remember if this is really how long or not, but it’s near there so it’s a jumping off point–or until just set (should still shimmy a bit when given a jiggle as it will keep setting up outside the oven, but shouldn’t look like raw liquid sloshing under a cooked surface…but if you’ve ever eaten jello you probably know how to test for jiggle). Dust with some powdered sugar and prepare to sing Nigella’s praises.

** if you don’t have it, use 1/2 c ap flour minus 1 T plus 1T cornstarch and at least triple sift before remeasuring, you’ll have a little extra but it’s nice round measurements…and you should have just bought yourself some Softasilk, or better yet King Arthur’s one, and made life easy. Oh and if you have pastry flour on hand, you can use about 1/2T starch and sift less.

Submitted for Joelen’s summer produce challenge. Though it’s the near end of the season for my selections…

So a friend got me obsessing about muffins when she complained about the orange poppy seed one she bought. I’m probably gonna get things together and work on a recipe of one for her with a tangy glaze and everything to be what she thought she was getting with the other. But as I have no oranges and wasn’t sure how fab a muffin I could make with just store bought oj and poppy seeds, so I rummage what I do have and while it’s entirely no longer related to the inspiration, I make these little babies… So if you enjoy these, you can thank the lovely Sarah.

Oh and technically, these are probably not really muffins as I didn’t make them with the standard muffin method or the biscuit method or any other quick bread method–I used rather more of a cake method with the creaming and such–but come on who calls it a cupcake when you’re eating it for breakfast…

Chocolate Chip and Goji Berry Yogurt Muffins
1 c dried Goji Berries (soaked overnight in 1 c sparking apple juice, regular works great but this is what I had)
1 c vanilla yogurt (plain works; let sit at room temp 30 mins–before or after mixing batter, I did before but the Pops often do after so I know it’s great that way too)
1/2 c dark chocolate chips (a little over powering, nearly eclipsed the gogi berries might want to cut back/out or use a strong flavored berry–like raspberry maybe)
1 tsp vanilla ex
1 stick (1/2 c) butter, room temp (for fluffier muffins use half butter, half margarine–but use a bigger bowl as the creaming stage will create a lot of volume)
1/2-3/4 c sugar
2 eggs, room temp
1.5-1.75 c flour
2 tsp bkg pwd
1 tsp bkg soda
1/8 tsp-ish salt

Drain the berries, I let them drain for the 30 mins the yogurt was standing so they’d get drier but that clearly isn’t necessary. Then mix berries, yogurt, vanilla and chocolate chips in one bowl…while you set to work on the rest. Preheat the oven to 350. Cream the butter and sugar together. When fluffy and no longer grainy, add the eggs 1 at a time beating well. Then stir in the yogurt mixture and sift in the dry ingredients in 3 batches, stirring just until well incorporated. Fill your muffin cups (we used those silicone liners on a jelly roll pan so as to not have to fuss with filling any empty cups with water, and to be able to make all in one batch-woohoo. Now I made 21, because of my multiples of seven obsession, but you can adjust your filling to make an even number.) about 2/3 to 3/4 full and bake about 20 min or until the tops are springy to the touch. Cool on a rack, so as not to burn oneself with molten chocolate, and take a moment to appreciate the muffin.

While this batch will never see the inside of the freezer (I personally ate four for breakfast, and there are 4 other people to help eat them) I definitely think the Hubs and I need to start making some muffins for the freezer to prep for the coming school morning breakfasts.