Cooking at home
As I mentioned in this post, I like to do some prep cooking when I have the chance. Walt and I really enjoy Mexican food, so we like to have some meat prepared for easy dinners. We usually just make an oversized batch when we are preparing dinner and then freeze the leftovers for later use.
We have used this basic recipe for quesadillas, tacos, chimichangas, and other dishes. It can be made with beef, pork, or chicken. Walt combined a couple of recipes to create this recipe.
For the last few years I have been growing poblano peppers in my garden. They are a darker green and when fully ripe are a nice deep red. When a poblano is dried, it is called an ancho. They are a mild to medium pepper in terms of heat.
I usually pick them when they are green, but I don’t worry if they turn before I use them.
I have been trying for some time to find a biscuit recipe that comes out flaky and light. I am getting there, but I will always compare my biscuits to the ones we had in a little café when visiting Memphis .
This recipe is the result of many attempts to come up with a really good biscuit. Thank goodness Walt is a willing test subject for my cooking experiments!
The same sort of features that make a flaky pie crust, like I covered in this post, apply to flaky biscuits.
When the garden does well, early August can be a busy time getting all of the produce stored.
I love to eat the fresh tomatoes from the garden! The first BLT sandwiches are always a favorite part of summer.
I really like to cook, but I have to admit that I am not the safest in the kitchen when it comes to hot objects. I have bumped my hands and arms more times that I would care to admit when I am taking things out of the oven.
I had been looking for a set of longer oven mitts for a long time, and everything I found had really large hands, so much so that I was having trouble grasping things. It was like putting on a pair of oversized mittens and trying to pick small things up. So I decided to make my own.
I had a fun botanical print that went well with my kitchen decor. I purchased some insulated batting called Insul-Bright©. It is a polyester and mylar batting that can be sewn on a regular sewing machine. I have since used it in other projects.
Every year for Walt’s birthday I make German Chocolate Cake. The recipe comes from the Iowa State Fair Cookbook from 1985.
It took me a lot of practice to get a really good pie crust. It is easy to mix too much and get a tough crust. I found that it is really important to use a large bowl for best results. At first, I mixed in a smaller bowl and my crusts were tougher and not very flaky. When I moved to a larger, wide bottomed bowl I got much better results.
I am a huge caramel fan, so I increased the caramel and nuts from the original recipe to add even more topping to these rolls. This uses the same dough as the Cinnamon Rolls I posted earlier.
I really enjoy this variation on my homemade sweet rolls. I made the recipe a few times tweaking the quantities and flavorings. Fortunately, I live with someone who is happy to act as taste tester.
I use the same basic recipe to make a variety of sweet rolls. There is cinnamon and its variations – raisin or raisin and apple. I make a delicious orange roll. There is a sticky pecan roll. I will cover each variety in a separate post.
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