Sunday Randomness #275: Bringing puzzles back into our lives Late June into July sees puzzles 16, 17, and 18

 

300 piece Buffalo Puzzle Vivid collection "Rainbow City" was a fun little puzzle-smaller pieces but it came together quickly since the mirror images were very different.  

Back to another 1000 piece!  Cobble Hill made this scrumptious Breakfast Sweets puzzle.  Who would have known that pancakes in different forms would look so alike?!?!

July saw us going to a simple 500 piece puzzle from Bits and Pieces of animals at a picnic. 

Sunday Randomness #112 : Puff Pancake for dinner

 Yes, puff pancake looks a little lumpy when out of the oven but the taste makes up for the weird bake shapes!  Our favorite recipe is from our good next door neighbors that lived to the west of us who shared it for the neighborhood cookbook. 

Puff Pancake

2 tbsp butter

3 eggs

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup milk

1/4 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.  Melt butter and place in 9 x 13 pan, swirling to coat bottom.  Beat eggs, add flour, milk, and salt  Mix well with rotary beater or in blender until smooth. Pour into pan and bake for about 25 minutes or until puffed and golden brown.  Top with desired toppings.  We've used powdered sugar, syrup, whipping cream, fresh fruit, nutella, etc....   You can easily double the recipe and it still fits as illustrated by the double batch baked in the 9 x 13 pan in the picture. 

About the only downside is that puff pancake doesn't reheat well.  You can eat the leftovers but it's really not the same, there's a rubbery consistency to the dish.  So if possible, try to eat as much as you can as soon as it comes out of the oven.

Anytime Muffins: For snacking or breakfast

Anytime Muffins

2 cups flour

1/2 cup sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk

1 egg, slightly beaten

3 tablespoons melted butter or margarine

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Sift flour, sugar, baking powder and salt into a bowl.  In a separate bowl mix the milk, egg and butter. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until flour is moistened. Do not over stir.  Pour into greased muffin pan.  Bake for 16-18 minutes.  Makes 1 dozen.

Recipe is from a cookbook compiled by our ward congregation a number of years ago.  These muffins are simple and basic.  Great with butter and honey and/or jam or plain!

French Onion Soup and Quiche

Recent cooking adventures...

Spinach and Mushroom Quiche. (It was delicious-best warm but good cold.)

The start of the onion soup-browning the onions in butter. (Not looking very brown yet.)

Homemade croutons. (Here's a chance to use the broil feature on your oven!)

Golden onion soup. (Color aided by the addition of beef stock.)



Finished French Onion Soup topped with Swiss cheese and croutons. (It was wonderful!)

The recipe is really similar to a lot of French Onion Soup recipes that you can find on the web. Pioneer Woman has a wonderful version that's almost identical to the recipe we used except we used Swiss and not Guyere and left out the wine, garlic and Worcestershire sauce. As you can see from the pictures we're still fiddling with the camera. These were the best shots out of dozen of tries. Thank goodness we don't have to buy film!

Author 47 : (Disney) What's Cooking? (from Ratatouille)

And now for a month of cookbooks! Continuing right along with the theme of "C", this month we're chosen a collection of cookbooks.

First is What's Cooking? A Cookbook For Kids from the makers of Ratatouille. We tried the French Breakfast Muffins made by Sarah and they were delicious!
Easy, ingredients already on hand, and fast. Sarah made fluffy little muffins coated in cinnamon sugar for a tasty breakfast treat from this colorful cookbook.

The recipes are not complex, don't use a bunch of pre-made ingredients (although there are a few such as English muffins for the Pizza Rats) and the recipes are actually simple and appealing enough for children to want to make them.

The full color pictures really help with some techniques and the pictures are realistic of the finished product. Our muffins looked like the picture without the slight blurriness. I wish the book had a general index either in the front or the back. At the beginning of each section, such as "Bon Matin Breakfast" and "Dinner is Served", there are individual indexes.

Crepes-with video from Taste of Home

Crepes
3 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup water
3 Tbsp. butter, melted (not margarine!)
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1 Tbsp. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
3/4 cup flour
additional butter for cooking

Whir everything together in a blender. Heat small skillet on medium-high heat or until a drop of water skitters across the surface. Grease with a little bit of butter. Pour in about 1/4 cup batter and quickly tilt and swirl the pan to form a large thin pancake covering the bottom and part of the sides of the skillet. Cook crepe like a pancake, looking for little bubbles, a dry top and a light golden brown on the bottom. Gently flip over and cook for a few seconds on the other side. Remove from pan and start the process over until all the batter is used.

This video is a good example of how to cook the crepes-the batter should have the consistency of heavy cream before cooking. Refrigerate for 1/2 hour or so if needed. We tend to like our crepes a little lighter than the video and I think they cook up yummier with a little butter in the pan-about a 1/4 tsp smidge of butter per crepe. Serve with fresh fruit or syrup or jam or nutella or ice cream.... The crepes also freeze beautifully. As the video mentions, practice. Crepes take practice-just remember, non-aesthetically pleasing crepes taste just as good as the pretty ones.

Mmmmm......pancakes.......

How many of us will still be recording our thoughts through words, pictures and sounds when the next leap year comes along? Will world and/or personal events interrupt our Internet foraging and blogging? Hopefully we'll still be learning, sharing and enriching ourselves and others for many years to come.

So today I want to share one of our favorite comfort foods-the pancake. The dry mix stores well, making it easy to whip together a batch of pancakes for a quick treat anytime.

Basic Pancake Mix

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
2 TBSP. sugar
2 tsp. baking powder (a little less for high altitude)
½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
1 ¼-1 ½ cups milk
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla (optional but yummy)
2 TBSP. vegetable oil (or melted butter-also yummy)

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Add wet ingredients and whisk until mixed but still a little lumpy. Make a test pancake first-batter should be not too clumpy and not too smooth & runny-somewhere in between.).

Heat frying pan to medium (a sprinkle of water should skitter) (use a little oil or butter if not using a non-stick pan) and when hot, pour in anywhere from about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of pancake batter depending upon size wanted for finished product. When the pancake starts to bubble on the top and is golden brown on the bottom, flip and cook until the other side is also golden brown. Continue cooking until batter is gone. Cooked pancakes can be frozen and reheated if desired but won't taste as good as fresh made pancakes.

Add a little more milk or flour to make thicker or thinner pancakes.

Dry mix will store for several months in a cool, dry place. (Be sure to label before you store!)