Saturday Morning Breakfast

Moving to a new region and a new house and a new job has created some new traditions. Although Calhoun and I have always loved Saturday morning breakfast they've taken on new life and new meaning in this new life we're living.

Unfortunately, one aspect of this new life we're living that we spend days apart from each other. Calhoun is still a full-time graduate student and working hard at it. Part of that is work is as a teaching assistant for a class in Minneapolis - that means he drives back and forth every week and spends a few nights sleeping in a basement room he's rented from friends before coming home for the weekend.

In a very practical sense this time apart has changed the way we spend time together. In Minneapolis we would often plan things for Saturdays, taking advantage of all that Minneapolis had to offer. It wasn't really time we lost with each other either, because we had so much other time together. But now, Saturday mornings feel like an acceptable time to cook a great breakfast, enjoy coffee and to just be with each other after a crazy week spent mostly apart.

So this morning we actually planned for breakfast! New traditions take some time to develop and I just realized that this Saturday morning breakfast thing was happening so, instead of throwing together a last minute egg bake and frying some delicious bacon I actually got a recipe, shopped and (imagine this) followed the recipe!

So this morning we had Baked Egg Boats, from spoon fork bacon. Since I was just cooking for two I cut the recipe in half and we each had a delicious egg boat for breakfast!

The only tough thing about this recipe is that it is so easy and so clean to make. Sogn has adjusted pretty well to Calhoun's weekly absence but, when Calhoun is here, Sogn follows both of us around the house a little more closely. Usually in the chaos of a morning breakfast that means he gets a few stray scraps of vegetables or cheese and we let him have the bacon grease when we make bacon. No such luck this morning, easy and delicious recipe, very little cleanup and no scraps for the puppo!

Cooking is Going to be Different Down Here

I'm on Pinterest now. I'm a little obsessed. My email is now full of recipes from Pinterest and from wherever on the web pinterest has led me, but cooking is going to be different down here.

Snelling's recipe for Kielbasa Stew was not on Pinterest, but I was thinking about food and it led me to her blog as a standby for food I know has been vetted by a friend, tasty and healthy. So, in anticipation of Calhoun's return home I planned on making Kielbasa Stew!

Unfortunately, the grocery stores had a different plan. I stopped at two, the HyVee and Sunshine Foods, and neither had kale! No where. Nada. I also wanted to surprise Calhoun and make this incredible looking mug cake (courtesy of Pinterest, aren't these pictures awesome?) and couldn't find espresso powder either, and no one in the grocery store knew what it was. It's clear that I can't just pick a recipe out of the sky and expect to find the ingredients. Clearly, more thought and planning is going to have to go into meals if while we live down here.

So, adaptation was required. Although one of the main reason's I wanted to make Snelling's Kielbasa Stew was because of the kale in it, I love Kielbasa and rice so I decided to go with it anyways. And, since I also love mushrooms I figured there was no way I could go wrong. And I didn't! Although the final dining result was a far cry from Snelling's beautifully green stew, it was still delicious. And, as usual for our household, I doubled her recipe. So, we had:

Kielbasa and Mushroom Stew

2 lbs. Kielbasa

A bunch of carrots

2  eight ounce packages of baby bell mushrooms

1 c. rice, uncooked

2 white onions, chopped

4 cans chicken stock

salt and pepper to taste

Brown onions and kielbasa, then toss in chicken stock and rice to cook rice, add mushrooms and carrots until done!

So, the next night we had a different strategy for dinner. We had a lot of food we needed cooked, so we cooked it! We love sweet potatoes in this house and usually use them in a standby mashed sweet potato recipe from America's Test Kitchen. I will not post this recipe because it is a strong belief of mine that you should own their cooking book, "The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook " - well worth the $30. Anyways, we love sweet potatoes and had a few of those and some chicken thighs that needed to be cooked soon. Calhoun set about finding a recipe and we ended up taking inspiration from a variety of recipes and made amazing

Roasted Chicken and Sweet Potatoes with Honey Glaze

Three chicken thighs, skin on

Two sweet potatoes, skin on, cut in 1/2 in. chunks

aprox. 2 tbs butter

Roasted in 400 degree over for 80 minutes. Cover with tin foil, remove after about 50 minutes.

Make glaze:

Butter

Honey

Apple Cider Vinegar

Parsley

Oregano

Poultry Seasoning

(according to Calhoun, "until it tastes good")

Both cooking adventures were successful! Even though the local grocery stores don't carry all of the variety of the metro area, we will still be eating well down here, even though the cooking will be different!

Canning in Minnesota

I learned how to can this weekend! Calhoun and I went up north to his parent's house this weekend and the weather was BEAUTIFUL! It was sunny, breezy and about mid seventies during the day. It ended up being great canning weather, so Bemidji and I had an afternoon adventure canning tomato juice!

Canning requires a lot of tomatoes. Good thing Bemidji's garden has had a great summer, we blanched and peeled fifteen pounds of garden tomatoes with pounds left over.

Tomatoes from the garden

blanched tomatoes

almost fifteen pounds!

Next, we cooked the tomatoes along a handful of other ingredients to make tomato juice.

Bemidji's tomato juice recipe. She got it from her sister who got it from Cuisine Magazine. 

Some modifications have been made.

Cooking - it smells better than it looks 

After cooking, we had to strain the ingredients so that the texture was actually juice like.

The juicer - who knew canning tomato juice required so much equipment?

Finally, we poured the juice into the jars

Sealed the jars and boiled them for fifteen minutes...

I successfully canned for the first time EVER!

 Although writing this now makes the process seem simple, it took us over two and a half hours to complete the whole process but Calhoun and I brought home seven pints of tomato juice - we'll be hosting blood mary's sometime soon :)