Random MomBlog

The last time I made this, my father-in-law (I didn’t even know if he liked spinach!) said he loved it, but it needed more spinach. He’s from meat-and-potatoes Wisconsin, but he’s always had his meat and potatoes with a salad too. So this time I doubled again* the amount of spinach, and I hope this ratio works for us. This recipe as written serves my family: Daddy and Mommy eat all of our spinach, and there’s enough chicken to share with our two hungry sons who like chicken but are small enough that they don’t need their own serving from this recipe. Plus the boys just think food tastes better when it comes off our plates. No, neither of them eat spinach yet. I loved spinach, even as a small girl, and even more the other dark leafy greens, so I’m not worried yet.

*Almost all meat-and-veggie recipes taste better to me if I double the amount of veggies or halve the amount of meat. I’m pretty sure this recipe has already had at least one doubling, which is why it goes in a baking pan with high sides!

Baked garbanzo flour (mixed with olive oil or chicken stock) is a surprisingly good cheese sauce substitute! It even has protein, and a lot less fat than cheese.

I almost called this recipe “Vegan Chicken Florentine” because it is dairy-free and egg-free, but then I remembered the chicken … hehe … oops! But it is GFCF (not that the original had gluten either, but this version is gluten-free and casein-free) so it works around Cale’s allergies.

This is an easy make-ahead recipe: I do all of the steps except baking the chicken (sometimes I butterfly it and try to have the chicken breasts “hug” the spinach, but as I said, we like more spinach than you can even pretend to stuff inside the chicken, so the chicken is a topping on a bed of delicious spinach). I take it over to the in-laws, leave the boys to play (Karston said today that he doesn’t get to visit Opa and Grammy often enough), go to work, and return to a yummy meal that I know is allergy-safe for me and Cale to eat. Making three dinners tonight (chicken soup for Daddy who has the cold that the boys have, chicken stir-fry for me, and chicken florentine for tomorrow) was a challenge, but at least mine was just combining and heating leftovers.

Come to think of it, I guess that chicken soup was da bomb! Daddy went back for seconds, if not thirds, and this cold has removed his appetite (not that he ever had much). Chicken soup with tiny pastina stars made by a food lover is pretty tasty … homemade stock + chicken breast + grated carrot + sliced celery + a handful of frozen peas + a few diced onions from the florentine + a sprinkle of adobo seasoning + pastina added at the end so it doesn’t get over-cooked, boiled until done. Simple, and good enough for someone who’s sick and not hungry to go back for more.

I looked at The Post-Punk Kitchen for a butter or margarine to oil conversion (1/2 cup/1 stick of those to 1/3 cup oil). Also, when I use Ener-G Egg Replacer, I use the whisk attachment on my mixer to whip it into a meringue-like froth before using it, and I’ve never noticed the chalk-y taste. Another tip is that chocolate chips don’t “stick” to oil batters, so use fewer than in the chips-laden original. I also replace brown sugar with slightly less white sugar and a dollop of molasses. So here’s what I did:

I either left the cookies in too long (the kids were wild), or I need to drop the temperature to 300 °F for the oil substitution. Or perhaps I should use a combination of apple sauce (to hold moisture) and oil (to transport yummy flavor)? OK, this is still a work in progress, but completely edible as is too. The cookies also wanted to stick to the pan, so I either should have removed them sooner or I should have greased the cookie sheet. But still mighty tasty! These are my favorite cookies …

So I had some Bob’s Red Mill garbanzo flour that includes a recipe for hummus on the back. Starting with finely ground garbanzo flour seems a lot easier than grinding my own chickpeas to the properly smooth texture! I was also tempted by this hummus cracker recipe so something had to happen eventually.

The first time, I scaled down the hummus recipe to make only the 1/2 cup needed for the crackers, and I left out the tahini because I didn’t have (or want!) any. What I learned from this batch of hummus answers one of those little mysteries: why is some hummus so amazingly good, and why does the rest taste horrible like dirt? The answer is that cooked garbanzos are tasty, and raw garbanzos are ick ptooey. Cook the mixture again after adding the garbanzo flour, and it improves greatly!

On to the crackers, first time! I used olive oil instead of canola oil. Even adding extra flour, the crackers still were too wet to roll out, but after baking, the clumps tasted pretty good! Worth making again.

The second time I made 1/2 cup hummus from the Bob’s recipe much as before, except I put all the liquids (lemon juice and texas pete) in the 1/2 cup measuring cup, and topped it off to 1/2 cup total. I also skipped the olive oil in the hummus this time around (it still tasted mostly ok, suggesting I can skip the tahini and cut back on the olive oil, and still get enjoyable lower-fat hummus), and just added the olive oil for the crackers part of the recipe. This time I had crackers that I could roll out to a uniform thinness before baking on a silicon baking sheet.

The report is still yummy crackers, and more cracker-like with the much drier hummus. I’m inspired to try this with refried beans! I had never considered making my own crackers until Cale had allergies to most commercial crackers, but it’s not hard to make these crackers and they taste great! The one drawback (ahem) is that I get some remarkable gas from just two small crackers, so I probably need to cook the garbanzo beans even longer to tone down that effect. Or perhaps this is inherent in the garbanzo flour, although I suspect not since I don’t remember gas from the vegan calzones made with it.

We wanted pancakes this morning, and I’m still searching for the right vegan recipe to avoid Cale’s allergies. I started with the Simple but Perfect Pancake at Recipezaar. To eliminate the eggs, I followed the Post-Punk Kitchen’s advice and used 1/2 cup of banana that had been through the food processor (I was trying to make banana ice cream, but discovered that if the banana has been frozen so long that it has lots of ice crystals, the water prevents the desirable ice creamy texture: so I had leftover, defrosted, maple-extract-spiced banana purée to use up). Instead of milk, I used fruit juice (mango, passionfruit, peach, and pear; cleaning out the frig again). I followed the technique, even to beating the “eggs and milk” with a mixer. The banana and fruit juice, despite not having the protein (and allergen!) content of eggs in milk, did froth up a lot! I used the whisk attachment for my mixer, and that may have helped aerate it. Whatever the reason, frothy fruit or Bakewell Cream, the pancakes turned out great! They were thick, fluffy, light, and only very vaguely possibly fruity. No gooey center (and no crispy edges), either. Yum! I didn’t add fruit chunks this time since I figured I had already pushed my luck enough by replacing all of the protein and most of the liquid with Cale-safe alternatives.

I made a half-batch of Root Beer Pancakes this weekend, with 1/4 cup of mashed banana as the egg substitute. The report is that the griddle needs to be hotter for these pancakes, to get the yummy crispy edges and to avoid a gooey center. Since my root beer was going flat, I added 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder. Cale had to have one as soon as he saw pancakes, and he had to do a lot of blowing. He definitely understands that hot foods need blowing!

This makes a thin batter that needs to be on a hotter griddle than most pancakes. Then it makes somewhat thin pancakes with tasty crispy edges and soft middle. The root beer flavor came through (as did the baking powder, barely), so I need to adjust it for perfection … like maybe using regular beer that isn’t flat so I can skip the baking powder.

Flour with even higher protein levels than typical bread flour needs more water to make bread. I made chewy bread with this recipe:

1 cup warm water
1 tsp salt
3 cups Sir Lancelot high-gluten flour from King Arthur Flour
2 tsp yeast

I added ingredients in that order, and put it on the Dough cycle. I checked on it after 3 minutes of machine kneading to check the water-flour ratio. Add more water by teaspoons, more flour by tablespoons. (On a dry day, I needed to add 3 tsp water!) When it was done, I started the cycle over again for 10 minutes so that the bread machine did the second kneading also. The flour is that fractious! Form log, slash, bake as usual in french bread pan or on a pizza stone.

I’ve had a bread machine for many years, although I made bread by hand for many more years before that. And, having made bread manually, I have to say that my bread machine is one of my favorite kitchen tools! I know exactly how much time it saves me! I do get better results for knowing how the bread should feel, and I adjust by adding teaspoons of water or tablespoons of flour when I check on it after about 5 minutes of machine mixing. Great results all the time! (I usually pull out the paddle after the last kneading cycle so that it doesn’t tear up my loaf.)

After the initial excitement, I find that I pretty much make only two base recipes in my automatic bread machine (ABM). Although my bread machine makes both 1.5 and 2 pound loaves, my 1.5 loaves usually rise high enough that I’m not sure I should make the 2 pound size. So these are scaled to 1.5 pound recipes!

Plain Bread

1 Tbs olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 1/8 cup warm water
3 cups flour
1 tsp yeast

My usual variation on this recipe is 2 cups of bread flour and 1 cup whole grain whole wheat flour, but I’ll vary it up. If I use less than 1.5 cups of a high-protein flour like bread flour, I add wheat gluten to make sure it holds together like bread instead of cake! If I add raisins at the beep, it becomes raisin bread! When I do that, I often use sweetened water, like water that I’ve used to rinse out that last little bit of honey.

Fancy Bread

1 Tbs canola oil
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup warm liquid (like water)
1/2 cup warm sauce (like applesauce)
3 cups flour
1/3 cup rolled oats
1 tsp yeast

My usual variation on this recipe is, of course, applesauce bread as noted. When I make applesauce bread, I tend to add cinnamon and often something sweet (2 Tbs honey or molasses). This would also be a good base for raisin bread too. But I’ve been “free form” and used thinned barbeque sauce for the liquid and leftover guacamole for the sauce. As long as the combination of liquid and sauce adds up to 1 1/4 cups, I’ve had good results baking with whatever needs to be used up!

Yum yum!

I had a bottle of breast milk reaching the end of its shelf life, and I wanted to make something for Cale. Since I also had two baby bananas (the baby variety, not the standard Cavendish) getting black, I decided to make banana pancakes. I started with a recipe from Food For Little Fingers by Victoria Jenest (it’s a nice cookbook for ideas, but I recommend not feeding liver to children due to accumulated toxins) but I had to modify the recipe for Cale’s egg allergy.

I mixed the wet ingredients with the drink attachment for my immersion blender, which made everything very smooth and aerated fluffy. Once you add baking powder (or baking soda), put away the mechanical mixers and do it by hand so you don’t lose the leavening action. I don’t know if I needed extra milk because I like thinner pancake batter, or because the air is so impossibly dry right now, or because the protein content of the whole wheat flour I used was higher than that in the test recipe. Or maybe the egg substitution needed more water? The recipe called for 1/3 cup, and I used more.

I made one batch of 8 2-inch pancakes. Based on Karston’s interest, I made another batch as Mickey pancakes. Cale ate one pancake and started on a second, while Karston ate one pancake and one Mickey. For no-sugar pancakes with no eggs and with whole wheat flour, these were surprisingly light, fluffy, and tasty.

I’m not sure it’s worth mentioning my starting point (the Best Banana Bread Recipe at Recipezaar), but I made some tasty muffins this evening with peanut butter, bananas that needed to be baked soon, and chocolate chips.

I made 24 mini muffins (10 minutes) and 4 regular muffins (15 minutes) with cups filled about 3/4 full. Neither the banana flavor nor the peanut butter flavor is very strong, but it’s fairly tasty. I like the texture variety of the chocolate chips. The muffins rose nicely, are soft, and didn’t need silicone muffin cups greased. Given that they didn’t rise an exceptional amount, this recipe would probably adapt to the microwave pretty well (like this recipe, but for muffins maybe 4 minutes at half power and 2 to 2:30 at full power). Now here’s hoping Karston will eat them!

UPDATE 04/05/2009: in my 1.5kW (1500 Watt!) microwave, the proper cooking time was 3 minutes at half-power, 1:30 at full power. Even then, the batch made in the dry silicone muffin pan had two get almost overdone, while the batch made in the damp (from cleaning it after the first batch) silicone muffin pan stayed out of the hard-as-a-rock zone. Mini chocolate chips are best for mini muffins. This recipe made 33 mini muffins, and it rose beautifully while “baking” in the microwave!

Family trip to the beach this weekend! My mother, my husband, and both of my sons piled in our station wagon and headed to the coast Thursday morning. I left work a little early on Friday and drove my mother’s car down to join them, and then my mother drove her car home Saturday just in time for her to go to work this weekend.

Reflections on this trip … I didn’t leave as early on Friday as I should have, so I hit the interstate parking lot. There I saw one of the saddest secondary accidents (not the accident that caused traffic to slow down, but an accident because of that slowdown) I’ve ever seen: a 1940s vintage Rolls Royce rear-ended by a much newer vehicle. Since I know that braking distances have improved vastly (3x better just since 1970!), I know who was at fault, who was not paying enough attention in heavy traffic.

My mother noticed that Cale’s two meltdowns were at the same time of day. She says Cale expects Mommy to pick him up at 5 PM, and he has a fit if I’m not there. The rest of the time, he was fine playing or cuddling or sleeping with anyone else, but he expects Mommy time at 5 PM. That’s pretty perceptive! Other than the 5 to 5:30 window, yelling was probably Karston.

I could not believe how much Cale had changed in 36 hours away from me, and how much he learned over the weekend! He started sitting unsupported (the tripod position, but he didn’t need his hands very often). In fact, he put his belly on the floor to reach a toy, and then he pushed himself back up to a sitting position! At one point, he was “swimming” (pre-crawling) to reach a toy, but since he’s not crawling, he didn’t get there. He could already pass a toy from one hand to the other, but he now rotates the toy for the best chewing angle. It’s always about the chewing for him.

Cale had 4 poops on Saturday and 3 on Sunday, which is a sign that I’ve eaten food to which he is allergic (dairy, soy, and egg known so far). Time to read labels! When I arrived Friday evening, I had to make a quick allergy-safe meal, and since there’s very little safe in the freezer section, I had to get creative. I boiled water, added a chicken breast, waited until it was almost done then added sliced squash and noodles. After draining all of that, I added a can of diced tomatoes with chipotle peppers for seasoning. Pretty tasty for something that quick straight from the store! (Finding rice milk at the coast took forever, though.) The basic items were safe, of course, and I read the ingredients on the noodles and the canned tomatoes to make sure those were Cale-safe as well.

We had to make sure we bought some shrimp with the still heads on because Karston is fascinated watching the process of popping heads off of shrimp. (When he goes fishing, he has to touch every fish before release. Not squeamish about that low-tide smell!)

Other than that, what you would expect for boat trips, shells, box turtle in the sand boat (a no-float turned into child’s play), and outstanding views.