hopeful

We take St. Patrick's Day pretty seriously around here. In the old days, that meant a lot of loud Irish punk and some serious pub carousing. Now we settle for excessive amounts of green clothing, nothing but traditional Irish music on the iPod, and cold beverages in a can poured perfectly into pint glasses (see here) enjoyed from the comfort of our own couch. For the last few years, we've attended our church's St. Patrick's Day program, and this year we somehow landed ourselves on the planning committee. It was a blast - Irish stepdancing, snake hunts, cake walks, an appearance by St. Patrick. With all that on the agenda, we managed to talk my parents into coming down for the day...and they brought along my aunt, my eleven-year-old niece, and my eight-year-old nephew. My boys were completely surprised, and the day was subsequently even more fun than anticipated. There is nothing quite as exciting as a group of surprise visitors at the door, especially when the group includes cousins.

We started the day with St. Patrick's Day brunch. This recipe was soooo yummy, and really easy to throw together. I made the biscuits the night before so all I had to do when everyone arrived was warm the biscuits, fry up some eggs, and stack it all together. Yum. As written, the recipe makes 8 to 10 biscuits, but because you only use half a biscuit for each serving, you end up with a lot of extra biscuits. If you are serving a bigger crowd, just make more eggs. The ham is totally optional; use it if you like it, skip it if you don't. I opted to double the recipe and freeze lots of leftover biscuits; we had them for dinner tonight with baked potato soup and enjoyed them all over again.

In addition to tasting good, the biscuits are really pretty to look at. I did not manage to take a decent picture, but the one on the Betty Crocker website gives you a good idea.

It wouldn't be a holiday without a little custom applique...

Happy March!

St. Patrick's Day Biscuits
Adapted from Betty Crocker

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Makes 8-10 biscuits / 8 servings + leftover biscuits

1 package frozen creamed spinach, thawed
2 3/4 cups Bisquick mix
3/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1/4 tsp. ground mustard
2 Tbsp. butter
8 eggs
2 Tbsp. butter, softened
1/4 lb. sliced deli ham (optional)

1. Heat oven to 425 degrees.

2. In medium bowl, mix spinach, Bisquick, cheese, and ground mustard just until dry ingredients are moistened. It seems like you need to add liquid, but you really don't - there is enough in the spinach.

3. On a lightly floured work surface, knead dough eight to ten times. Pat to 3/4 inch thickness; cut with 3 inch round cutter. You should get 8-10 biscuits.

4. Place rounds one inch apart on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 13 to 16 minutes or until golden brown (can be done in advance).

5. In a nonstick skillet, fry eggs to desired consistency in butter. Season with salt and pepper.

6. Split 4 biscuits and spread cut sides with softened butter. Reserve extra biscuits for a later use.

7. Top each biscuit half with a slice of ham and one fried egg.

I read cookbooks the way some people read novels, and I've got a new favorite. I love it so much, in fact, that I won't let the library have it back until I absolutely have to. Marion Cunningham (who is a real person, not the mother from Happy Days...) is best known for her work on The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Back in 1987, she also wrote a book called The Breakfast Book and I simply can't get enough of it. This is not a brunch book - "brunch," she writes in her introduction, "with its undefined ingredients and preparations, is entirely different from breakfast." Nope, this is a cookbook for breakfast (or, as is often the case in our house, breakfast-for-dinner) and includes 288 recipes for all things morning with an emphasis on grains. In addition to the recipes, there is extensive narrative and explanation which, in my opinion, is what makes a cookbook both fun and functional. There are also recipes for such odd-sounding items as baps, bannock, scrapple and rusk, so you really can't go wrong.

I've cooked a few things out of this in the last month or so. One of the first things I tried was a recipe that grabbed me both for its uniqueness and its simplicity -- homemade English muffins. Unique in that they are a yeast-based dough that you do not bake. Simple in that they only require 8 ingredients but yield something far greater than the sum of the parts. This is not your average grocery store muffin - these were fluffy and soft and absolutely delicious.

To make English muffins, you need rings. I picked up a set at the kitchen store for about $6. Alternately, you can use tuna cans with both ends removed.


After the first rising, the muffins are cut out from the dough and left to rise on a cornmeal-sprinkled cookie sheet.


They are then cooked in a skillet back inside the rings. I was crazy nervous about placing metal rings in my nonstick skillet as I am kind of nuts about taking care of these. The rings don't really move at all, though, so it wasn't a problem as long as I was careful. You can only cook as many muffins as you have rings at a time, so account for this in your timing. I ended up making 8 then freezing 8 in their pre-griddled format - they defrosted beautifully another day.


The rings also came in handy for making circle-shaped eggs for breakfast sandwiches. And what divine breakfast sandwiches they were...


Enjoy!

English Muffins
Adapted from The Breakfast Book
Yield: 16 muffins

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1/2 cup warm water
1 package yeast
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. sugar
1 cup milk, warmed
3 1/2 cups flour
3 tbsp. oil
1/2 cup cornmeal

Pour the water into a  large bowl, sprinkle the yeast over, and stir.  Let stand for 5 minutes to dissolve. Stir in the salt, sugar, warm milk, 2 cups flour, and the oil. Stir briskly with a spoon for a minute to mix well. Add the remaining flour and stir to blend smoothly.  This dough will be very soft. Cover and let the dough double in bulk - about an hour.

Flour a board and your hands. Put the dough on the board, and add a little flour if it is too sticky to manage. Knead the dough three or four times. Pat and push the dough out so it is about 1/4 inch thick. Using a 3 inch ring as a cutter, cut the dough out and place the muffins 1 inch apart on a baking sheet that has been sprinkled with cornmeal. When the muffins are all cut, cover them lightly with a towel and let them rest for 30 minutes.

Heat a griddle until medium hot and spray with cooking spray. Spray the inside of the rings and place on the griddle. Put the muffins in the rings and cook for about 10 minutes on one side and 5 minutes on the other. Watch closely and lower heat as needed.

Before serving, split the muffins in half with a fork and toast. Butter generously and serve warm.

I am proud to say that since posting the recipe for slow cooker yogurt, I have consistently made a batch a week, and we've all enjoyed having that bowl of thick, creamy yogurt on  hand. As the weather turns warmer, we've also been experimenting with yogurt pops. Super easy, super delicious, and much healthier than a popsicle...so I thought I'd share a few tips with you today.

 
A homemade yogurt pop is essentially a frozen smoothie on a stick, so you basically make a batch of fairly liquidy smoothie then freeze it in a popsicle mold. I have found that it is necessary to make the smoothie a bit sweeter than you do for a smoothie that you drink - it seems to lose some of its oomph in the freezer. Go ahead and experiment to find what works best for your family. These are the general proportions that we use - it is of course very flexible:

1 cup plain yogurt
1 ripe banana
1 cup berries (fresh or frozen)
1 tsp. vanilla
2 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 cup milk

Blend - pour - freeze!

BONUS: When you make popsicles out of smoothies, you have the option of offering them at breakfast time, which makes you a VERY popular parent. It was a Mom of the Year moment, for sure.

This is something I have always wanted to try, and if I had known how easy it was going to be, I would have tried it a long time ago. The ingredients couldn't be any simpler, the steps are very straightforward, and the end result is absolutely marvelous. I came across the recipe in Stephanie O'Dea's Make It Fast, Cook It Slow (it is also included in More Make It Fast, Cook It Slow, which I like even better) - but you can also find it on her website, A Year of Slow Cooking.

O'Dea recommends making this on a day when you are going to be around, as there are different steps to follow throughout the day. I started it at 8:30 am and put it in the fridge to drain around 9:30 pm. When we woke up this morning, we had a huge bowl of the thickest, richest yogurt imaginable.

A vertical spoon!

The recipe is included in full here. A few things to note:

- After the eight hour stretch, the yogurt is ready to eat.  If, however, you follow the suggestion to drain the yogurt, you end up with Greek-style yogurt, as thick as sour cream. This is mentioned in the notes if you read all the way through the recipe, but I'll detail it again here. Line a strainer with a few paper coffee filter and set it over a big bowl. Pour the entire contents of the slow cooker into the strainer and stick it in the fridge for a couple of hours. This separates the whey, which can then be discarded.

- I used full fat Vitamin D milk. From what I read on the website, you can use lower fat milk but then you might need to thicken it up with gelatin. Your call.

- The yogurt lasts for 7-10 days in the fridge, and you get a lot of it, so prepare for lots of smoothies. And the cost effectiveness is pretty startling, as detailed on O'Dea's site:

• One 6-pack of yo-baby is $6.50 (24 ounces) 
• One gallon of almost totally organic milk is $3.00 (128 ounces) 
• One gallon of yobaby would be $34.67 or 10 times what it cost you to make it, more or less.

So go make a batch this weekend, and throw together some granola while you are at it!


Enjoy!

Mmmm....smoothie! (cup design can be found here)