So I could find my recipe last second and the one in my go to breakfast cookbook, SL Breakfast and Breads, was made from wheat germ (I had none), so I had to scramble and googling a bit and rejiggering slightly from what I can remember of the ones we used to make and this is what I made…

it makes a larger batch but I only remembered to snap the pic before giving the kids more... so this is the much picked over stack and several of them turned out better than these, but they'd been eaten by this point...

Cottage Cheese Pancakes
1 (24 oz) container lowfat cottage cheese (1%), about 3 c
6 lg eggs
2 c flour + 1 T bkg pwd (normally I make them with ww pastry flour but tonight I had none so it was the white lily instead)
2 T oil
1/3 c + pineapple juice (reserved from the canned fruit, could have used the orange juice or just milk or water with a bit of sugar)
pinch of salt
2 capfuls of vanilla
butter and oil as needed

Blitz together in the blender and add the pineapple juice as needed to reach pancake batter consistency… (this was just slightly over 1/3 c so I’m guessing 6 T would make a nice round estimate to start from if you want to tinker it up or down… but pour it in as needed as the wetness of the cottage cheese and the humidity affecting the flour, etc can change how much liquid you want to add…) then just fried them up in a bit of butter and oil as one does the pancake dance (watch for a bubbled surface to flip and let them get golden on the second side to finish cooking thru)…

They weren’t bad, but as usual I would have sweetened them a bit more to eat them plain but knew the fruit was coming. And this is what the lovely branny directed me to: a cottage cheese pancake that uses oatmeal(you have to scroll down)… no less than 5 min from my asking, and I wish I’d found it before cooking them but I was starving and impatient so I quickly moved on to google (and when hubs went to check if anyone gotten back to me, my Papa called so he had to get the phone) so I do plan to try these soon… and then there was this jillian michaels number which I may consider as the simplicity of it is very appealing…

as for the fruit salad, I had the 4 yo and 2 yo mix it up to distract them while I finished cooking…

what you need... pineapple, orange segments, dried unsweetened coconut... (plus two ornery children who are chasing each other around the house in need of something reasonable to do with themselves while you finish cooking...)

what you end up with/top the pancakes with...

Pineapple, Orange, Coconut Salad
1 (20 oz) can pineapples in juice, drain (reserve juice)
2 (11 oz) cans mandarin oranges in juice, drain
1/2 c dried unsweetened coconut

Thoroughly drain the canned fruit. Put in a bowl along with the coconut. Toss/mix all together.

[You really want the fruit drained as dry as you can, and you don't want to make this up before you plan to use it as it will juice up and you lose coconut in the juice... you can of course do this with fresh fruit as well, but you still have to drain the excess juices...]

So someone posted this at the What’s Cooking Board awhile back (when I was still getting on the computer, LOL) and I’d kinda wanted to try it…

Georgia Peach Bread – From Dickey Farms
3 cups sliced fresh peaches
6 tablespoons sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup shortening
2 eggs
1 cup finely chopped pecans
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Place peaches and 6 tablespoons sugar in container of electric blender; process until pureed. (Mixture should yield about 2 1/4 cups.) Combine flour, baking powder, soda, salt and cinnamon; set aside. Combine 1 1/2 cups sugar and shortening; cream well. Add eggs and mix well. Add peach puree and dry ingredients, mixing until ingredients are moistened. Stir in nuts and vanilla. Spoon batter into 2 well greased and floured 9×5x3-inch loaf pans. Bake at 325° for 55-60 minutes or until done. Cool 10 minutes in pan; turn out on rack, and let cool completely.

Yield: 2 loaves

Well my problems with trying it were many, but most chiefly now that I’m getting around to it I don’t have shortening on hand… so since the oven is sorta kinda working, I though I’d give it a go… I decided to just use a banana/applesauce bread as a foundation odding out the fruits…

the peach puree...

Improvised Peach Bread
3 peaches, pitted and sliced
3 T sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2/3 c sugar
2 oz ea: butter and cream cheese
2 eggs
2 c cake flour
2 tsp bkg pwd
1/2 tsp bkg soda
1/4 tsp salt

Cook peaches and sugar together until softened, mash with potato masher and continue to reduce slightly until 2 c and stir in vanilla… cream sugar, butter, and cream cheese until light and smooth… add the eggs and mix well… Stir in the peach puree and and add the dry stirring until well moistened. turn out into pan and bake for about 1 hr @ 325-350. Cool about 10 min in pan and turn out on a rack or towel…

This was snarfed down by all in the house and the baby really LOVED it… I never got around to getting a pic of the bread itself before it was gone I don’t think or else I’d show you one…

Yep, it’s Eat to the Beat time and I did “I Want You” by Savage Garden at the beheadst of my little brother… I hestiated a bit a first, but decided I felt I could do fun things with this song and food… (The reason for my pause is this song and I have a soap opera story past, riddled with unforseen drama… and was once the source behind me being nicknamed Chicka Cherry Cola among other things…)

So on to the eats… I bet you could have guessed that I used chicken, cherries and coke, huh? I started with leg quarters because I saw them and thought of Amber and how I was telling her they were perfect for something sticky sweet and/or with something carb-y (so I also put this over mixed whole grains) and thus my first attempt at an Eat to the Beat was born…

Chicka Cherry Cola
4 chicken leg quarters (cut in thighs and drumsticks, and haphazardly skinned and trimmed of excessive fat)
flour for dusting chicken (maybe 1/2-3/4 c, no idea though since I never made note of it)
1/2 yellow onion
1 lg carrot
2 c cherries (I’d use 4 c next time)
1 T herbes de provence (I might sub something else never time–a little muddled with this pairing IMO)
2 tsp ea: garlic and onion pwd
1 tsp ea: thyme, salt, blk pepper
1/2 tsp cayenne
1/2 c cachaca (or rum if you are normal)
2 cans coke
2 c hot water
1 T vanilla ext (next time I’ll plan on a bean I think)
1/3 c sugar
1/4 c creme de cassis/rasp reserve (leftover from PMG, but a cherry liqueur would work and might be better)
1/2 c chopped fresh parsley
1/4 c chopped fresh chives

Season the meat as you wish with s/p and garlic (not included in the amts listed above for the sauce) or however you season basic chicken before flouring… dry in flour and quickly pan fry in 2T of your preferred fat (I merely redendered some the chunks I cut off the chicken to have enough for the meat and veg, but oil works too) until browned on all sides… set chicken to the side and add the diced carrots and onions, with the alcohol (or a splash of vinegar in some water) to deglaze the pan and simmer until veg is soft and liquid is absorbed… add hot water and pour into blender to puree and add back to pan with seasonings and coke and bring to a simmer and pour over chicken and cherries in an oven safe dish andcover with foil… Baked 1 hr @ 375 and then drained off the reduced liquid to taste and adjust… decided to strain out the dried herbs (they’d done their job and I didn’t need that much mouth feel), and added vanilla, sugar and creme de cassis (I really wanted more cherry flavor but had used them all and had this tucked in the fridge and figured the berriness was a similar vibe to what I wanted), parsley, and chives before reluctantly–becuase I really wanted to add more cherry oomph but couldn’t–returning to the chicken for another 30 hr or so of cooking until the meat was to temp….

final oven stages... sorry, I neglectfully forgot to get a dished out pic over it's bed of grains...

All in all, it worked out alright as a stand alone dish with another name but I think I could make this rock the name better with more tweaking… so it didn’t submit because it fell short in a confusing way, and I really couldn’t decide what it needed (except obviously the cherry hit)… Hubs and the kids really liked it, and I think part of my disappointment rested in the Cherry Cola-ness not being more oomphy…ever so technical I know. LOL) But my best guesses where I’d start: I think I would pull the extra thyme and replace it with rosemary and perhaps pull all the herbs and use just rosemary as a stand out kick instead… yeah I really think that could help, and I’d like to double the cherries and puree half of them to lift the sauce… I guess in the end it is a brand new dish I invented on the fly and I just want to tinker some more (however we’ve been to 3 stores since then–I was gonna doctor up the leftovers some more to see if I could get it where I wanted it–and can’t find any cherries… *sighs* so I may just have to wait until next year, as I really don’t think I’d want to bake frozen cherries that long… but maybe I’ll try it, who knows…)

PS. Oh and despite my vows to try the bobbypin tip the next time I pitted cherries I of course did not, as I hadn’t bought any (there’s always next year, right?)…
PPS. I made this at the beginning of the month but still may find time to do another before the deadline, which hopefully I’ll deem submittable…

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…

see how they get those yummy caramelized bits? If you do not let them brown enough you will cheat yourself out of yummy... but if you overbrown it well, who wants burnt bananas? (and for the record these could have browned a bit more but I was starving and hubby got first dibs since he had to dash so my patience was shot...hence the beautimous picture in pan)

These are soooo good, we’ve even made them in past on the grill. I love them, Hubs loves them–plus the Pops was intending to be here and loves spicy food in general, as does Little Hawk so I figured they’d probably enjoy them (though with Dad and Hubs gone and with Hubs and I eating some at lunchtime when he was dropping off the car, I never quite got around to making them that night and hence they didn’t actually try them… but Little Hawk was very interested so I’ll probably make them for him soon-ish depending when I see him again.) or that they’d at least appreciate how we could–and yeah they’re too spicy for the kids (but we don’t have to share everything we like with the kids to be good parents, we already cut out a lot of mains not to have to make double dinners all the time, so sides are fair game people) but the oldest has said “they’re really good, Mama, even if they are a little too spicy for me.” So see try them, even the 5 yo likes them. Painlessly simple too, not really a recipe even…

Step one: make chili oil (yeah you could probably buy it, so if you have one you really like on hand don’t bother with making it, but really I like making a fresh batch for this each time). The easiest way is Giada’s, gently heat some red pepper flakes in your olive oil. I make a much smaller batch, and use a higher ratio of pepper to oil (because I’m not gonna fridge it so it won’t be stilling around perking itself up; 1/4 c to 1 tsp btw) so this could easily be made more child/mild palate friendly–maybe even with her amts–but we like it spicy and it’s not a big part of the meal so they don’t miss out that much. But there are tons of ways, many many that are good—however, for this I really like hers because it’s quick so you can make it fresh and still get this done quickly.

the pic may not be good enough to show what I wanted it too, but if you pop this in a nice preheated pan... as soon as the edges start to look somewhat translucent you can flip them...

Chili Fried Bananas
chili oil
banana(s)

Slice your bananas and deep fry, pan fry on each side, or coat well with the chili oil and put in a foil pouch on the grill (or probably even in a high temp oven). Get them a little golden/caramelized and it is a beautiful sweet spicy foil. While freshly out of the oil you can sprinkle them with a tiny bit of salt if needed, really all depends on the ripeness of the banana and degree of contrast if it really needs it or not–ie, to taste. And before you think I’m a crazywoman eating these straight out of the oil so I can season them in time, the trick is to make one or two before the rest to taste for seasoning (you know, kind like how you can test for meatball/meatloaf seasoning).

[Note to self and spouse: We totally need to make these more often!]

Note to the Pops: maybe you should make these for you and L as it may be a while before I will have another chance.

Ok so normally when I make this, it’s sort of twice baked sweet potatoes… cut in half carefully scooped out leaving some meat to support as the skin is flimsy… roughly mashed with some withstanding chunks with a bit of s/p and maybe butter and even a splash of the pineapple juice if needed or desired… then the refilled shells topped with crushed pineapple and spinkled a small amt of brown sugar and sunflower seeds and cooked until brown sugar is bubbly… and that is one of the best things, mmmmm…. you should totally make them that way–very, very good

That particular night I had gianourmous potatoes so I cubed 2 of them and mixed with them with a can of pineapple tidbits and a can chunks and the juices (I get the kind in fruit juice) add a couple pinches of salt and sprinkle with some brown sugar)… Cover and bake until potatoes are fork tender… this was so-so and not close enough to the real thing. But definitely easy and edible… and sometimes that’s enough.

I don’t really have a recipe for either version… but I am reasonably certain that the twice baked version came from one of those paperback betty crocker’s or something of the like (or at least something quite similar that jump-started all this business) that you can get in the checkout line… but those are tiny thin little paperback magazines so I will check around the pantry for it and add their recipe if I can find it… so that you can have more of a springboard to start from… (but it’s become one of those things I just do, and I really don’t measure anything… so I’m useless beyond a vague description…)

With the twice baked ones, I often microbake the potatoes rather than oven bake just the cheat time as you can do this while it preheats… I nuke them on high (5 min for 1, 7 for 2, 10 for 3, 14 for 4) then wrap them in foil and tuck them inside oven mitts and let stand 5-10 min  (or until I remember, which is why I use the oven mitts to help keep them warm as I forget to check on them… a normal person need not tuck them in a mitt).  Then just split them in half and go about the rest as if you’d baked them normally…