Recipe Ideas Needed

It looks like we may have planted too many yellow squash plants this year. We are already drowning in them and they just started coming off. What do you do with yours other than frying, stewing, grilling or adding to spaghetti? Any casserole or bread ideas?

We also have a lot of banana peppers. I am planning to pickle them but have misplaced my Ball book. I'm hoping to put up a batch of pickled peppers (perhaps a peck of pickled peppers) this weekend but I was wondering what else you would use these for.

A Day of Cooking

For some reason I decided to be productive on Sunday, don't ask me why. I had a long laundry list of things that needed to be done and was having some problems deciding what I should do first. Chandler, as wives often do, made the decision for me. Sundays are often days she spends in the kitchen cooking up some vittles for the upcoming week. This Sunday morning she didn't quite feel well enough to tackle any big cooking jobs so I thought I would try it.

First was lunch for the upcoming workweek. I made two big dishes of Cheeseburger Macaroni based off this Betty Crocker recipe, which I tripled and added two pounds of beef (Next time, I think I'll double it and use a pound of macaroni and a pound of beef). Chandler usually makes this and starts with a béchamel sauce but, lacking her culinary talents, I wanted something a little more basic. This was my first time making Cheeseburger Macaroni from scratch. I had made it plenty of times previously using Hamburger Helper and a family size box of mac & cheese but that didn't fit in with our goals of avoiding convenience foods and building recipes on a more elemental level. It made 18 12oz servings and does quite well in a thermos.

Once I was done with Cheeseburger Mac, I moved on to take another stab at bread baking. I hadn't tried again since the first time, which was mostly a negative experience.

I had been reading on HT about whole wheat bread baking and a few people mentioned working the dough longer for whole wheat to get the gluten going. I tried that this last time and it was a good workout but the end product wasn't really any better. The bread still did not rise as much as it should and was very dense. Since I had worked the dough much longer this time, I may have mixed in too much flour, but I think the problem was the yeast. We are still experimenting with the recipe and I think we made a miscalculation on how much we should use or I should have just let it bloom longer.

Though the bread turned out heavy and is most likely destined for life as croutons, I did have one success. The recipe we use makes 4 1.75lb loaves with dough left over. I am more apt to blame the yeast than the flour for the disappointing texture of the bread simply because this is the first time that either of us ended up with 4 of the 1.75lb loaves and I still have over a pound of dough left. I took the recipe creator’s suggestion and made Schnecken, which is a nutty sweet roll. Those were absolutely awesome! Easy to make: just butter, chopped nuts, brown sugar, cinnamon, and your dough, but amazingly tasty. The brown sugar and butter gave the nuts a nice gooey caramel covering. I can't wait to make them again the next time we need to make the bread.

The Large Pot of Soup

A couple of Sundays ago, I made a big pot of chicken soup. I took a whole chicken and boiled it until it was done. Took the chicken out of the broth to let it cool enough for me to debone. To the pot full of broth, I added carrots, celery, onion and some parsley that was just going to go to waste otherwise. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and let it simmer till the vegetables were nearly done. Then, I added the chicken back to it all.

The next day, Matthew and I each took about a pint of soup to lunch each. When I heated it up and tasted it, I was so pleased, it was great soup, had been easy to make and tasted better than canned soup (and was probably less expensive). That night, we put away 9-10 quarts of soup in the freezer (there are only the two of us living in the house, so this soup should last us a good long while for taking to lunch at work).

A week later, we are still eating the soup. I'm getting tired of it but it's not bad. It still tastes good on the cold days that we've been having.

However, today, ten days later, I eat the soup and it nearly makes me sick even after taking a break from it yesterday. It's almost the worst thing I've ever tasted. It's very interesting to me that I've progressed from it being the most awesome soup in the world to something I can barely keep down.

This is the problem, I think, with bulk cooking for two people. Even normal recipes make way more than the two of us together could (should) eat but bulk recipes fill up our freezer and we eat on them until we can't even imagine eating that particular food again for a long long time. I think the next time I do a big bulk meal on the weekend, I'll do more than one so that we at least have some variety with our lunches. I just need to get better about managing my time on the weekends so I can get everything done that needs to get done (but that's another story).

I think tomorrow, I'll bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch...