FarMor and FarFar's 60th Anniversary

My first time making kransekake. It tasted just like it was supposed to--a minor baking miracle.

My Mom made a gorgeous fruit salad and farmer potatoes.  Justin made not one but two egg casseroles.  And I made banana bread, because I've inherited my grandmother's fear that there won't be enough food. (There was!)

I also made a vanilla cake with raspberry frosting.

Hostess gifts were snickerdoodle cookies and pieces of the kransekake.

Bread Sundays

I have gotten back into the habit of baking bread once a week.  The recipe I use is similar to the famous Poulaine sourdough, except I don't have a wood burning fire to cook it in, or legions of French kitchen assistance.  What I do have, is a whole wheat sourdough starter that lives in my fridge for most of the week.  I feed it on Saturday night just before bed, adding flour and water to make it active again and leave it out, overnight, in the counter.

By the morning, the starter has nearly doubled in size.  To start the bread, you mix flour with water and allow it to sit for 20 minutes to allow the gluten to develop.  Then you add in the salt and the starter (putting a small amount aside for the next time) and knead it in a mixer.  I think the mixer actually does a better job than mixing by hand, and it's much easier.

After that, you set the bread to rise.  After one hour, you encourage the dough by flipping in over and kneading it briefly. It can rise after that for another 2-4 hours.  Once it has nearly doubled, or at least made some kind of an effort to rise, you shape it into a ball and stick it in a brotform, which is a reed basket.

 Now, for the past few weeks I have had a terrible time getting the dough out of the brotfom when it was ready to bake, so this week I very cleverly lined the basked with plastic wrap that I had oiled and floured.  It didn't have the beautiful design on the crust, but at least it came out in one piece.

The bread rises in the brotform for another two hours or so, and then, finally, it's ready to bake.  The thing I like about whole wheat sourdough is that it lasts for several days in the breadbox and actually improves in flavor for the first few days.

It might seem as though this recipe it takes all day, but it really requires very minimal effort. You just have to be remember to move it from stage to stage.  The end result is (usually) delicious and a way to show my love for my family. 

Smooches

We have a wonderful little cookbook called Mouse Cookies, by Laura Numeroff.  It's a companion to the "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" Series and it has ten simple and delicious cookie recipes.  The peanut butter cookies are amazing, with only two ingredients.  There is an easy sugar cookie recipe that we make every year at Christmastime. 

And then, there are Smooches, which combine two of the girls' great loves--cookies and candy.

Cousin Bitsy's Smooches
30 cookies 350 degrees oven
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 cup softened margarine (we used butter)
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
30 unwrapped Hershey's Kisses (The girls loved counting, unwrapping and eating the chocolates, we used Hershey's Dark Chocolate Kisses since they were out of regular at the store.)

1.  Mix all ingredients except Kisses.
2.  Drop one-inch balls of dough onto a greased cookie sheet (we used parchment).  Press a chocolate Kiss into the top of each cookie. 
3.  Bake for 20 minutes.

My tip--pop the bag of  Hershey Kisses in the freezer for an hour or so before baking so they don't melt too much.

That's it! 

Pickled Peppers

These:

Went into those:

And now my dear husband is very pleased with himself.

Contemplative

Keeping me honest

During dinner at my parents' house tonight, while I was lecturing/encouraging Miss Bee on her table manners, I gestured a little too wildly and clumsily poked myself in the eye. 

I assumed she didn't notice but nothing escapes my oldest child.  She looked at me scornfully, matched me tone for tone and said, "Mommy, did you just POKE yourself in the EYE?"

I could only meekly reply, "um yes, yes I did."

And that ended my lecture.  Parenting is impossible.

Flipping out

So tomorrow it's back to real life.  I had a wonderful three weeks of vacation + five weeks of training but now it's time to get back into working full time. 

These eight weeks of just normal life have been so wonderful.  We went to Rhode Island. We went to the beach. I was able to go to the girls' ballet and swim lessons. We spent lazy afternoons together doing puzzles and going to the park. 

So I tried hard this weekend not to dwell too much on the fact that this was my last weekend "home" with the girls before regular work kicks back in.  But somewhere between Saturday night and this morning the reality of it started to creep in. 

So, what to do when you're starting to freak out just a little? In my family, there is only one thing to do actually--cook good food.  We tried a new recipe tonight, recreating the cheese spaetzle from last year's trip to Germany.  I would not recommend trying this without an actual spaetzle maker, we had a heck of a time convincing the noodles to go through our cheese grater..  I made pretzels to go with the spaetzle; the Wednesday Chef recipe never disappoints. 

For dessert, I made "Sunday night cake" from Baked Explorations. Oh my goodness that chocolate frosting was amazing and like nothing I have ever tasted before--closer to a pudding than frosting.  

I'm off to spend the next hour doing something completely mindless.