Being Overboard: Updated April 6, 2012

April 6, 2012: New pictures of the garden below

Last week I was pretty upset about our garden. It was not looking good. The leaves were all turning yellow or brown on all the herbs except the rosemary plants. The tomatoes looked like they weren't going to make it, and my onions all but died.

I took pictures but apparently they don't want to upload.

But we took a weekend trip to Dripping Springs and played in the flowers. Maybe just maybe Mother Earth smiled on us, because the garden is coming back!!!

Most of the onions are still not doing great, but the garlic is making up for it. The tomatoes are peaking out and one is very large. All of the herbs have come back. The strawberries out front are not doing as well as I expected but maybe they're not getting enough sun. Hmmm. Our neighbors may hate us right now, because we look like a mini farm, but they'll love us if we give them some of our produce.

Original Picture March 17, 2012 Happy St. Patty's day

Friday March 23, 2012

Today, March 31, 2012.




Hopefully things will continue to do well!!! :)

New Pictures:
April 5, 2012

Wow! You can really see how much it's grown just in the past week.

Some other pics, just for fun.

 Strawberries

 Green beans starting to form

 Green Peppers

 Cucumbers

 All the herbs

 Garlic

 Cherry Tomatoes

Roma Tomatoes

Yeah! I didn't kill everything!
Happy Earth Day! Turn some lights off and go enjoy outside!

Best White Bread... so far

So far we have tried a couple of different breads in our household. Some have been good, some have been ok, and some have been awful. But few have been amazing. So here we go again, trying another recipe for white bread. This is actually Chef Blackheart's second time to make this bread. This is to prove that we can consistently make this beautiful and tasty bread.

White Bread 101:

What you'll need

Ingredients:

3 cups unbleached all- purpose bread
2 tsp instant yeast
1 1/4 tsp salt
3 tsp sugar
4 tbsp butter
1/4 cup non fat dry milk
1/4 cup potato flour
1 1/8 lukewarm water

Items you'll need:

kneading surface
a bowl with a towel
8 1/2"X 4 1/2" bread pan

First of all make bread with love!!!

Combine all the dry ingredients except sugar in a bowl

Warm the water, butter and sugar in a pan

Mix the two separate mixtures together as best as you can

Take the total mixture and knead on a pre-floured board (We use a cutting board with a wet towel underneath it.)

Knead it until it is fully mixed (about 9 minutes)

Place in a greased bowl and cover with a clean towel. Let the dough rise for at least an hour.

Shape the dough into a log and place into the bread pan
Let it rise for another hour (About 1" above the bread pan)

Bake at 350F for 25 to 30 minutes

Cover with foil if the loaf is getting too brown 10 minutes before it's done baking. Also, rotate the pan in the oven for even heating

Remove the bread from the oven. Remove the loaf from the bread pan onto wire rack
Thump the bottom of the loaf, it should sound hollow, If not place it back in the oven for 2 more minutes. (No need to use the pan)

Enjoy your bread!

Being Overboard

We have still been baking and cooking. We made fettucini alfredo with the pasta we had dried, on Monday. Later last week, we made some pretty awesome meals out of Jamie Oliver's "Meals in Minutes" Cookbook. We tried a baked chicken with creamed spinach and potatoes that went over really well with the whole family. And we had cod with sweet potatoes, a broccoli and asparagus mix and home made berry frozen yogurt. Yum! Then we had leftovers. I have been trying to drink tea instead of DrPepper, but DrPepper is so good. Damn you DrPepper.

Getting back on track, I was talking to a friend of mine who's husband juices (as in juices with fruits and veggies.) She has bought organic produce for years. Made her own baby food. Really I'm jealous that she cares so much. I don't really believe that grocery stores are telling the truth when labeling organic. Maybe I'm just a cynic. Sometimes I feel like they just put food that looks organic (IE. smaller and looks like it's about to go bad.) and place it in the organic pile while no one is looking. I'm sure I'm wrong.

Anyhow, one thing you will notice is that organic food is expensive. Well more expensive than non-organic food. Herbs are also very expensive and normally we don't use all that we buy. So we thought, we just grow it. It will be so much more economical. I'm not so sure that's true, but I'm trying to convince myself that I will make my money back. And more importantly SAVE some money along the way.  So we're trying to grow a garden. We've been successful with radishes and sweet peas in our front yard flower bed. We did grow some carrots but they tasted like cigarette butts. Yuck.

So here's our plan. It changed after we went to the store, but we realized it's too late to grow cauliflower and broccoli until fall here in Houston. We also forgot to buy parsley during our many trip to Lowes and Home Depot yesterday.


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Roma	Roma		Garlic	Rose	Sage	Mint	Dill	Cucumbers	Cucumbers	Yellow Onion	Red Onion
			Garlic	Rose	Sage	Mint	Dill	Gr Pepp	Green beans	Yellow Onion	Red Onion
Cherry	Cherry	Cherry	Cherry	Rose	Cilantro	Cilantro	Cilantro	Gr Pepp	Green beans	Yellow Onion	Red Onion
Cherry	Cherry	Cherry	Cherry	Basil	Basil	Thyme	Thyme	Gr Pepp	Green beans	Yellow Onion	Red Onion

Home Depot was having a sale on the boxes for $30 a piece. The plants were kind of expensive but it would of been a lot cheaper if we had done it from seed. We choose not to go completely over the top this time, and we went the route of transplants. Just putting the boxes in, filling in the dirt and planting the herbs and veggies was a lot of work for two people in two day. But here's a picture of our end product. We're really new to all this so I will try to give updates and link them to this post. I'll let you know if we kill everything, or if things turn out fine.

Please wish us luck. I think I might cry if we kill all these beautiful plants. Now, if we only had a deck.

Are you there?

Hello everybody,
This is Chef Blackheart with his first chat with you, the reader. I hope that you have and will enjoy reading our posts about parenthood and various baking ventures, but I just have one request. I know, you're probably thinking "I just happened upon this by mistake and now they want something from me?" Well, yes. If you like what you read, find it humorous, adorable, or just want to tell us how much we suck (or helped with a recipe preferably) then we would love to hear from you with comments. At least let us know that it's not just cookie-enabled, spam-vertising websites that like to hear about our adventures in canning or making homemade, somewhat healthy snacks for our girls that don't contain high fructose corn-syrup, dyes, preservatives, or partially hydrogenated oils that can potentially cause developmental issues and/or childhood obesity.
            Anyway, I justed wanted to introduce myself. I hope you enjoy every minute of our action-packed blog and I welcome you to leave comments or suggestions.
Thanks.
Chef Blackheart

Strawberry Jam, Man.

It's the last day of my stay-cation, and things have been pretty awesome. We've baked, we've cooked, we've even made pasta! We also cleaned the floor when we were finished, so our feet wouldn't become black. Funny how baking with two toddlers makes for an extremely dirty floor. Most importantly, I spent  four whole days with my family! So in this spirit, Chef Blackheart decided, on the last night of my vacation, to make strawberry jam, instead of being lazy on the couch and possible watching that netflix movie we have. So here we go again, laughs, cries, and snoring from the monitor. Time to make some jelly! Just letting you know, you will be getting homemade items for Christmas. We're just perfecting it, so you'll look forward to our homemade jelly, instead of being, "They got us homemade jelly?"


What you'll need:


2 pints hulled strawberries
1 3/4 tbsp of dry fruit pectin (or half a pkg.)
1/4 tsp of butter
3.5 cups sugar


Tools needed:


medium sauce pan
potato masher
measuring cup
knife for hulling the strawberries
large spoon
canning debubbler
5-6 canning jars with lids (We used Ball)

Canning items needed (We are just using the boiling method, we don't own a canner):

extra large pot
medium pot
canning tongs
water


I think I should go to sleep, I can feel spelling mistakes and bad grammar coming on. It's like third grade all over again. Let's not joke, eleventh grade, and if it weren't for spell check, who knows how I would make it through one email, much less a presentation. Alas, Chef Blackheart refuses to blog, and twists my arm to finish documenting his masterpieces.

Enough complaining, let's get to work.

1. For those of you in Houston March 2012, go buy strawberries! This year's crop is overflowing, so prices are low and quality is good! I got strawberries for $1.77 a pint today. (That was 25 cents less than yesterday.) And they are delicious!

OK, no really I'm going to start now.

1. a) Put 1 cup of your hulled strawberries into an 8 quart heavy kettle (or in our case pot) and mash them with your potato masher.

2. Continue to add berries until you have 2 1/2 cups crushed berries.

Give this part to your kids or your stressed out spouse, teenager, sister, neighbor, or just relieve some stress for yourself.

 3. Stir in pectin

4. Stir in butter (Chef Blackheart melted so he could measure out a 1/4 tsp)

5. Heat on high, stirring constantly, until it comes to a full rolling boil.

6. Add sugar all at once. (It's late and Chef Blackheart's hands were full, so no pictures for you... of sugar.)

7. Return to boil

8. Boil 1 minute while stirring

9. Remove from heat and skim the foam off the top with a metal spoon.

10. Boil or submerge canning jars in hot water

11. Ladle at at once into 1/2 pint (sterilized) canning jars. This is much easier if you have a funnel. We ended up with 5 jars. Also de-bubble the jam now if you feel like it's necessary. It was not necessary for us.

12. Leave 1/4" head-space in the jars

13. Wipe jars, hand tighten lids

14. Process in "water boiling canner" or a large pot

Large pot canning instructions for Ball Canning Jars and Lids

What you'll need:

extra large pot
medium pot
canning tongs
water

1. Boil water in both the extra large pot and the medium pot

2. Place jars into the extra large pot of boiling water. If the water doesn't cover the jars by about 1" add water from the medium pot to get the water to the correct height.

3. Place "lid on the pot with jars

4. Let it process for 5 minutes

5. Remove with canning tongs

6. Let them cool on a rack. (We let them cool overnight.)

Ok, on a side note, we were talking to Granny today, and she questioned how much was all of this costing us. Wel,l not anymore than regular food. She begs to differ, so I've decided to post the estimated (% of item used) price of our completed projects.

Here's the money
Pint of strawberries (2)- $3.54
Pectin (1/100 of the bottle) - $ 0.04
Sugar (1/4 of the bag) - $0.22
1/4 teaspoon of butter $0.05
Canning jars (One time expense- pack of replacement lids are $0.77) - $2.90

Total price for 5 jars of homemade jam - $6.75

And considering HEB jam is about $1.80 a jar. We SAVED approximaely $2.25. Hey the saying goes, every penny saved is a penny earned. And if we had already had the jars, the whole thing would have cost us $3.91. So, sometimes it is cheaper to make it yourself.



Strawberry and Fig Bars

Trying to set us up with some additional snacks for the week, we decided to make strawberry fig newtowns. The girls never had fig newtons until they started day-care a couple of months ago. But Ryan loves strawberry newtons. We kind of decided to do this last minute and just grazed the cookbook before heading to the store last night. So we made some changes simply because we wanted to, we got different ingredients than the "original" recipe called for, and we thought it would work better.


I think we'll change it up a little bit next time, but they came out good.


What you'll need:


Ingredients:

Cookie Dough:

1/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup coconut oil* optional
1cup brown sugar, firmly packed
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder

Filling:

8 oz dried figs
1 pint fresh strawberries
1/4 cup table sugar
1 cup water
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp apple juice (or you can use orange if you want.)

Tools you will need:

mixer
2 large bowls
whisk
food processor
2 medium sauce pans
large spoon
parchment paper
baking sheet

Doh, no I mean dough. Let's make some cookies!

In a mixer, mix the coconut oil, brown sugar, 2 large eggs, vanilla extract, and shortening until creamy.

Note: I hate shortening. I think it's gross and next time I will use 2 sticks of butter instead of the shortening. But this time I tried to substitute the shortening with coconut oil. It didn't work. And I had to add shortening at the end to get the dough correct. But the cookies came out good, so I figured I should put what I actually did on here. Not writing about what I had "hoped" to do.

In a separate bowl, whisk all the rest of the dry ingredients.

Slowly, add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture.

(This is where I had to add the shortening to get the dough to act properly.)

Refrigerate dough for 2 hours

Make filling!

Grind the figs in a food processor

Combine sugar, water, figs and juices in to a medium sauce pan on low heat.

Put hulled strawberries into the food processor, process, then add the strawberries to the fig mixture

Turn the stove to medium heat. Stirring constantly until the mixture becomes thick. (about 3-5 minutes)

Set aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 375F

Remove dough from fridge and roll it out on a floured surface into 14" X 16" rectangle.

Cut dough into 4 equal strips (4" X 14")

Spoon filling evenly down the center of each strip

Lift sides of strips over the filling and press to seal.

Cut each strip in half cross wide making (8) 7" X 4" strips

Place strips seam down, leaving 3" between each strip on a lightly greased or parchment paper lined cookie sheet.

Cut each strip into 1" pieces, but don't separate them

Bake for 13-15 minutes

Cool on baking sheet for a couple of minutes

Separate the cookie and continue cooling on cookie racks.

These things are so freaking good. Make some! The girls loved them, and now we have homemade snacks for the week. Well, that's if I don't eat them all tonight.





Thin Wheat Crackers: Easy!!!

We rely heavily on snacks. Kids NEED snacks. But what to give them? If it was up to Rose, the girls would have chocolate cake and ice cream for every snack. But mostly they get gold-fish, crackers, cheese, and fruit. In an attempt to make more things at home, and the fact that it's spring break, we made our own crackers.

This recipe comes from King Arther's Flour Baker's Companion.

What you're going to need:

Ingredients:

1 cup un-bleached all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup a sugar
1/4 cup sesame seeds
4 tbsp butter
About 1/2 cup milk
Coarse salt

Tools:

one large bowl
spoon
rolling pin
cooking sheet

Let's get started! This is super easy. You should do this!

Mix all the dry ingredients except the coarse salt

This is a good opportunity to get the kiddos involved in making their own food.

Cut in the butter (4 tbsps of non salted stick butter)

Add milk a little at a time until the batter is workable

Separate the dough into 3 pieces
Roll out the dough to about 1/16" thickness

 Cut dough into 1-1 1/2" squares

Remember they don't have to be perfect!

Preheat the oven to 325F

Place the crackers on a lightly greased or parchment paper lined cookie sheet

Cook from 20-25 minutes

DO NOT USE THE LOWEST RACK! All of those crackers burned.

Take out and let cool on a wire rack.

Eat the crackers by themselves...

Or add sliced cherry tomatoes with mozzarella cheese for a special snack. Pop in the oven to warm at 300F.

Save the rest for snacks for the rest of the week.

Yum yum yum!