Baked Oatmeal….who knew it was actually good?

Okay, no one in my family growing up liked oatmeal very much, but when we did have it, it was the kind with that strange Quaker dude on it, so it wasn’t until recently when some friends were talking about how yummy baked oatmeal was that I actually tried making it.

You see, in our home, when it’s time for lunch, we try to eat together. When it’s time for dinner, EVERYONE eats together unless someone is seriously ill, but when it comes to breakfast, hubby eats at 5 am and I usually don’t get up until 9am, sometimes later, so eating breakfast together just doesn’t happen often. However, this year I wanted to have something easy that I could make for breakfast on Thanksgiving so everyone wasn’t starving by the time I got the turkey out of the oven, plus what other time of the year am I going to be up at 3am while hubby is still sleeping, right?

Thus the reason I tried baked oatmeal-it can be prepared the night before and baked while you are preheating your oven Thanksgiving morning! So I tried it and hubby requested that it become our new Thanksgiving breakfast meal from now on…and I thought I’d share the recipe with y’all:

Amish Baked Oatmeal 

1/3	cup butter
2	large eggs
3/4	cup brown sugar
1 1/2	teaspoons baking powder
1 1/2	teaspoons vanilla
1	teaspoon nutmeg or cinnamon
1/4	teaspoon salt
1	cup milk
2	tablespoons milk
3	cups oatmeal (regular or quick)

  1.  Melt butter. 2.  Grease 1 1/2 quart baking dish and drop in eggs and beat well. 3.  Add brown sugar, baking powder, vanilla, nutmeg or cinnamon, and salt. Mix well, no lumps. 4.  Whisk in butter and both measures of milk, then add oats. 5.  Stir well, and refrigerate overnight. 6.  Bake, uncovered, at 350 for 35-45 min, or until set in the middle.

1. Serve hot with warm milk poured over.

Happy Thanksgiving, All!

I just wanted to wish y’all a Happy Thanksgiving and let you in on a couple pictures of our dinner…we have much to be thankful for, especially the yummy food! Our menu this year included a brined Turkey, Homemade (from scratch) dressing, Mashed Potatoes, Sweet Potatoes, Green Beans, Homemade Gravy, Green Bean Casserole, Homemade Yeast Rolls, Deviled Eggs, Green and Black Olives, Sweet Pickles, Homemade Praline Pecans, Homemade Dutch Apple Pie, Sparkling Cider (both Strawberry and Cranberry), and Homemade French Vanilla Pumpkin Pie! We had a good time and played games after dinner, so despite the loss of sleep from staying up half the night making all this and getting back up 2 hours later to start the turkey, it was well worth it. There’s nothing like spending time with your family!

The munchkin’s favorite part was the Praline Pecans, my favorite was the Pumpkin Pie, and hubby’s favorite was the turkey-best he’s ever had-what a compliment! (For those on the fence about brining your poultry before cooking it, TRY IT, it’s well worth the effort and cooks twice as fast when brined!)

A few pics from our bountiful harvest:

And my lovely family-starving to death as I had them stand there while I took this picture…smelling and looking at all that food!

My Very First Pumpkin Pie w/pics

I just had to show y’all what I made tonight! I’ve never even attempted making a pumpkin pie before tonight, and I’m so impressed with how it turned out! I thought you might enjoy some pictures, so here they are:

I also made a Dutch Apple Pie, so here’s a pic of it:

 

This Weekend’s Cooking Lesson

I know I’ve been fairly sporadic in my postings as of late, and I apologize to all those family and friends who miss the more regular postings, but we’re just super-busy lately! I think y’all mostly missed the Dairy section that we did, but we’re now on to the Protein group, and while I don’t have tons of pics, I thought I’d tell you what we did. I originally had shrimp on the menu for the seafood part of our protein lesson, but then I thought about it and hubby and I decided we should try K out on some different seafood than she was familiar with, so I had K prepare Salmon fillets and baked Tilapia. I also made her some crab cakes (can you believe there are children in the world who are almost 12 years old and have never tasted crab meat? It’s insane, I tell ya!). She loved the crab cakes, thought the Tilapia had too much lemon, and liked the salmon (apparently she’s never had any salmon that didn’t come out of a can-poor kid!).
We had some butterbeans with it and called it a meal. A highly protein-laden meal, but a meal none-the-less.
After dinner, I made my very first Angel Food Cake, and made a chocolate marshmallow frosting for it. This is the best picture I could get of it…it was so moist and spongey…I think I did alright!

Every week we also either do some work on the chalkboard-fridge or look up recipes that fit that week’s theme (like grains or dairy or whatever), and we usually have some food safety “quizzes” as well. This week after her food safety worksheet, she wanted to go test her Dad on it, and I was able to use her “teaching” him to be sure that she had absorbed the information. I love when you can use sneaky ways to make sure they’ve learned something…it’s too neat to watch them teach someone else what you have just taught them!
Anyway, I don’t have any other pics except for what the chalkboard looked like this week. I listed out several different “complete” menus, and she erased all the foods that belonged in a certain food group as I called them out. For example, I would say “DAIRY”, and she would erase all the milk, cheese, etc. in each menu. When we were done with this, we ended up with only the proteins left, which allowed us to move into our new Protein section of the class pretty smoothly. Here’s what the fridge looked like this weekend:

Doughnuts-the final stretch!

Now for the fun part, after our doughnuts were cut and had risen a second time, we heated our oil to the appropriate temperature in a cast iron pot, and began frying doughnuts. Here are a few pictures:

The second side of a batch frying:

The fried doughnuts cooling on a cookie sheet with a rack:

To fry the doughnut holes, I just put them in my deep fryer basket a few at a time and lowered them into the oil, flipped them, then pulled back out when golden brown:

Once the doughnut holes were cooled, we glazed them:

And the chocolate glazed holes:

The beautifully glazed doughnuts:

The chocolate glazed doughnuts with nuts:

The packages they went out in:

They turned out great and all the military ladies and gentlemen thought they were professionally done. Not bad for our first attempt at doughnuts, huh?

Doughnuts, mmm!

Okay, so I’ve been really busy this past week and I’ve been holding off on making this post. A couple weeks ago we took a small detour on our cooking class at Daddy’s request. Bryan asked us if we would mind making some doughnuts for the soldiers at his base. We like to make stuff for them occasionally, just to show we care, and had been planning on making some doughnuts via Alton Brown’s recipe for a while. Only one problem…I don’t have a stand mixer with a dough hook…but never fear hubby came up with an ingenious plan that worked well, even if it was a bit unorthodox. This post will be split into two parts, the making of the dough for the doughnuts, and the frying/glazing/finished product post.

We’ll start with the flour, we measured it by weight, using my little digital scale. Good math lesson, let me tell you, lol:

Next, we let our yeast and liquids mix:

Now for the unconventional method…like I said, no stand mixer, no dough hook, so we thought and we thought, and finally hubby came up with the idea that if we used the drill with a clean bit that was shaped similarly, it might work…so you guessed it, we used a drill. (I should note that we cleaned the drill thoroughly before attaching the clean bit, so that dust didn’t fall off into our doughnuts!)

The mixed dough before rising:

After a long rest, it was time to get into the “dirty work” of rolling out dough and cutting the doughnuts:

And then we ran into a second issue. I don’t own a doughnut cutter. Biscuit cutters I have, doughnut cutters, not so much. So I got seriously creative, and cut a ping pong ball in half and used that to cut the “hole” in each doughnut. Since we floured it before each use, it worked really well.

And the doughnuts being cut:

We learned that cutting the holes on the spatula worked quite nicely:

Our doughnuts resting:

And the doughnut holes:

I made fried chicken for dinner, tonight!

Well, after a fun time in the kitchen as a family-making doughnuts, I started dinner, and my chicken turned out so pretty I thought I’d show you a couple pictures. I found a great sale on Chicken quarters and still had some sweet buttermilk left over from our homemade butter-making last weekend, so I soaked my chicken in the buttermilk and made fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn for dinner. A carb-filled yummy dinner, hehe.

Anyway, here’s the chicken cooking:

And here’s the finished product…not bad for only my second time EVER of making fried chicken, huh?