BACON!

Okay, quickie post. I’m planning to write something up later too (after I make gluten-free cookies), but I had to share.

Today we had the first of the bacon from our hog. It was super tasty! I actually liked it better than what we normally have from Meadow Haven. This still had the delicious flavor of the pig, but was less salty.

Which, to be honest, probably means we need to eat it faster. Tragic?

We also had chocolate-blueberry semi-whole wheat pancakes. They sound better than they were. Next time, less whole wheat flour & more chocolate.… Continue reading →

[114] Linguine Nagoda for Two

Cover of Cooking for Two

I picked this recipe because it looked very fast and easy to make, and because it involved pasta, heavy cream and walnuts. Which is funny, because I’m not the biggest fan of walnuts. They’re growing on me, particularly mixed in with something, but generally I don’t like ’em.

And I’d better not see any in or on my brownies. No joke.

Anyway, I needed a dish that wouldn’t take much energy, time or focus, because I was “battling baked beans TO THE DEATH for a party.”:http://metacookbook.com/archives/221-113-Borracho-Baked-Beans.html I needed something that would be fast and good enough to fill the gaping hole that comes from smelling delicious food cooking all day, then being told (or telling yourself), “Don’t eat that. It’s for a party.”

This appeared to fit the bill when I was digging through my cookbooks.… Continue reading →

[111] Quick Whole Wheat and Molasses Bread

Cover of How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman

This recipe is the result of not having the ingredients on hand to make the bread Bittman suggests eating with baked beans, and having a lot of time on my hands while my friends hung shelving.

Not that it took a lot of time. In fact, I almost forgot I’d decided to make bread until near the end, and I still managed to whip it up and serve it. Under normal circumstances, this would make me feel like a dinner hero. Under the circumstances of beans simply not cooking, no matter how much I beg, it just made me feel like at least I had something else to feed the ravening hordes.

Not that Rob, Tony & Krysti are really much of A horde, much less “hordes”.… Continue reading →

[68] Pancakes

Cover of The Healthy Kitchen, by Andrew Weil and Rosie Daley

Pancakes. Bill and I love us some pancakes. By now, readers of this blog are probably fairly familiar with this.

Our “first recipe”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/6-1-Whole-Grain-Griddle-Cakes.html was pancakes. We didn’t even get 20 recipes in before “we did a second pancake recipe”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/38-19Everyday-Pancakes.html. Our first actual encounter with “a duplicate recipe (a.k.a. recipe #45) was pancakes.”:http://www.metacookbook.com/archives/87-Well,-was-it-a-new-recipe-or-not.html

So, yeah. We like to make pancakes on lazy weekend mornings. Somehow, I suspect we’re not the only Americans who eat homemade pancake recipes so often. Given the sheer number of Americans, I bet we’re not even the ones who have tried the most recipes in the shortest time. But we might get there. Or we might find our perfect recipe and forget trying any others.

That would certainly make this challenge harder.

So, here’s a recipe that’s about being healthy.… Continue reading →