Life With The Crew

Peaches Galore!

I bought 1/2  a bushel of peaches from the CSA yesterday and managed to get them all peeled and sliced up today.  I have baked one Peach Cobbler bread, have some ice cube trays of pureed peaches in the freezer, and waiting for those so I can do more.  Perhaps a muffin recipe tomorrow!  If anyone has any great peach recipes, feel free to share!

Peach Cobbler Muffins (which I baked as a bread)

http://www.barbarabakes.com/2012/08/peach-cobbler-muffins/

Instead of 1 cup sugar, I used 1/2 cup brown sugar and 1/2 cup maple syrup.

Instead of all purpose flour, I used wheat.

Instead of the oil in the streusal topping, I used coconut oil.

My New Addiction

Its no big secret that I am a baked goods fiend.  I love cakes, muffins, brownies, cookies, etc.  The past two days I have been able to eat cake and not feel guilty.  I should have tried this before, but I was hung up on the beet part of chocolate beet cake - the part that makes it healthy (in my guilt ridden mind).   But I have finally tried it and I am SO glad I did.  So is my 11 month old daughter!  This cake is nothing fancy, just a plain old sheet cake, but it is simply delicious!  I found the recipe below and tweaked it a bit.  Then I added a simple icing of whipping cream.  Run to your local farmer's market, get some beets, and bake this cake!  When the crumbs are gone, you can tell your family it was healthy too! 

My changes:

Instead of 1 1/2 cups sugar, I used 1 cup sugar and 1/2 cup maple syrup.

Instead of 1 cup veggie oil, I used 1/2 cup veggie oil and 1/2 cup coconut oil because I am just starting to cook with it and this sounded like a recipe it would work well in.

For the icing:

I whipped 1/2 pint of heavy cream with a couple drops of vanilla extract, then added the last of the powdered sugar I had in the cupboard, about 1 cup.  

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Mystery-Chocolate-Cake/Detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Thumb&e11=chocolate%20beet%20cake&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e7=Home%20Page

Chickens or the Eggs

What is more important - keeping chickens or having eggs?  Because keeping chickens does not mean that you will have eggs.  We have a flock of 9 hens of various breeds that we chose because they were pretty.  They are all over 2 years old now and so egg prodution varies.  Some days they wow us and we'll get 4, other days we won't get any, even in summer.

I love how different the eggs are.  If you buy a dozen from the grocery store, all 12 look identical in size and color.  Not our eggs.  I brought these 4 in today and each one is a different size and slightly different color, ranging from terracotta to a light buff.  We keep chickens because they are fun to look at, they eat our kitchen scraps, we love cooking with our own eggs (when they decide to grace us with some), and now that we have a daughter, I am looking forward to teaching her about that part of the food chain.  So we keep our chickens until they die of natural causes, be that illness or possum, and we have taken then to the vet to be euthanized when that is the most humane thing to do.  I know a lot of people will think that is crazy and say we should just whack off their heads, but that is not our style and not what our hearts tell us to do.  

So I am grateful for the 4 eggs I received today and I will continue to be embarassed when I have to go to the farmer's market and buy a dozen when I have my own flock in the backyard!

 

Maizie the He/She Rabbit

*Sorry about the poor photo quality.  It is hard to get an in-focus picture of a moving target with a cell phone camera.

This is Maizie.  Maizie is a boy rabbit.  However, Maizie spent the first half of his/her life being a girl, until the one day that we saw her/him doing a very unfemale action towards our cat.  Yes, our cat.  

About 4 years ago we were suckered into buying Maizie from Amish friends of ours with the intention of breeding her and using the rabbits for meat for dog food.  Having so many dogs, we thought this was the more sustainable and local thing to do, rather than buy factory farm beef from the grocery store.  When we bought Maizie, for the whopping price of $5, plus another $10 for the crate handmade by an 11 year old, I had been a vegetarian for about 10 years.  Now take a look at that first picture.  I don't know how anyone could think of killing something so cute, let alone a diehard animal lover, so needless to say, Maizie turned into a pet, not a breeder.  And since we later found out Maizie was a boy, we really didn't even have a say in the decision!  

I love this rabbit.  He/she is big, not afraid of anything, and thinks he is a cat.  He lives in the laundry room and we normally let him out of his crate in the evening for a couple of hours.  He plays with the cats, runs around the cat room, laundry room, and bathroom, and chews on the molding a little.  He LOVES the cats, especially Molokai, his best bud.  They wrestle, play, bite each other, and run/hop all around.  People ask if I worry about the cats hurting him, but it is the other way around.  The cats run crying from Maizie.  

About 2 weeks ago he stopped eating his hay and alfalfa pellets.  I thought this was finally it, so I let him stay out of his crate as much as he wanted and started feeding him tons of organic veggies.  I realized a couple days later that Maizie had not been in his crate at all for two days.   He drinks out of the cat water bowl, uses their litter boxes, and lays on the carpet all day.  Now two weeks later, he seems just as spunky as before and has the run of the area.  Talk about living the good life.  He gets us to think he is dying so that he never has to go back in his crate and can be a total free range rabbit!  I hope he lives long enough so that our daughter grows up thinking that having a rabbit in the bathroom with her is normal.  It always makes people jump when Maizie pops out from under the bathtub!  

 

Homemade Soft Pretzels - So Cool!

I saw this recipe early in the week and wanted to surprise my husband with them.  However, like a lot of people I think, I have a fear of recipes that use yeast.  That scary wild thing that can turn the best intentions into hockey puck, hard as a brick, inedible even for the dog, mistakes.  Not to mention the multiple kneading and rising sessions.  However, this recipe only has a couple of ingredients and doesn't require the dough to rise.  And the deal breaker for me was that Liam just bought a dough hook for our KitchenAid mixer and so I really didn't have to do any work except the fun part - shaping them into pretzels!  So I made them yesterday and I am so pumped that I did.  They turned out awesome!  They were brown on the top, soft and white inside, and not hard!  As well as salt, I topped mine with flax and sugar and cinnamon.  My husband was impressed.  I recommend you try them, just for the fun of it!  Again, another great recipe from honestcooking.com.  Recipe below.

http://honestcooking.com/soft-baked-pretzels-recipe/

My Morning Granola

This is for you Dad!!

I've been telling my Dad how easy it is to make his own granola, not to mention how much cheaper it is than buying it.  It literally only takes me 5 minutes to make it and then about 30-45 minutes to bake, depending on if I have anything else in the oven and what temperature I bake it at.  I just throw it together and don't measure anything, so I have tried to think about it and put measurements to it here.  It is hard to mess up granola, so just go with it!  I use organic ingredients for most everything, but using REAL maple syrup is the most important part, local is even better!  A lot of granola recipes use honey in them, but I have found that my granola burns easily if I do that, so I stick with just maple syrup.

Katie's Granola Recipe

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Stir all dry ingredients together in large bowl:

4 cups of rolled oats

1 cup of chopped nuts (I use walnuts because they are the cheapest, but feel free to mix with pecans or almonds)

1 cup of shredded unsweetened coconut

3/4 cup of ground flaxseed

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 tablespoon nutmeg

1/2 tablespoon ginger

Then add wet ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

Enough maple syrup to entirely coat everything.  The more you add, the more your granola will stick into clumps.  I'd say about 1 1/2 cups.

Mix everything together well than spread onto a large cookie sheet.  You can use parchment paper if you want, but I typically don't need to.  Bake for 30-45 minutes, until it is golden and looks dry and smells delicious!  You will be able to smell if it is burning.  When it is just about done, I normally turn off the oven and leave the granola in to cool.  When it is totally cool you can mix in cranberries and store it in a pretty glass container where you can admire your homemade granola and get excited for breakfast tomorrow!

 

 

 

Flowers and Bumbles

 

Yesterday was a typical August day in Pennsylvania - sunny, hot, and humid.  Not the best day for a long run, luckily it was our "easy recovery run day", but the  bumble bees* loved it!  My nasturiums have gone wild this year and taken over the flower bed.  I wanted them to help cover the wire mesh fence and they have succeeded in totally doing that in some places.  I would love to have a flower bed that I don't have to fence in, but with 6 dogs, the flowers don't have a chance unless they are protected and even then, the dogs manage to break in when they are on the rabbit hunt.

*No, these are not honey bees from the once existent hive in our backyard.  That hive has now "gone native" and is doing its own thing.  Apparently bumble bees are on the decline also, though there are a lot of very happy ones in my backyard.  I found the interesting link below if you want to know more about bumble bees.

http://www.xerces.org/bumblebees/