When looking for new ideas for fancy meals (or fancy feasts as my littles call them), I almost always go straight for breads. I like to have a winning bread option at dinner because each of us can be picky about different things and while I do try hard to come up with meal ideas everyone will like, of course there are some meals that are better received by some littles than others. Thankfully, our pickiest little one loves pretty much anything to do with bread, so I always have something different ready for her. (read)
After posting all of our Easter fun this week, it occurred to me that some people may like to make actual Easter bread for their families this weekend, not sweet bread stuffed with cheese and made to look like bunnies and not Greek Easter bread, but you know, standard old school straight up Easter bread. Like your granny probably made, in a braid, with dyed eggs on top. (read)
These little bunny buns are the cutest food I've made in a very long time. So so cute. I will admit right now - some of them look like cats. But you can tell they're all at least trying to be bunnies. It's actually a very basic and entirely painless process. Essentially, you mix it all together, leave it alone for a bit, then roll it around, a couple of snips and pokes later, and you're done! Easy! (read)
I love, love, love Greek Easter bread (technically it's called Tsoureki). My mother is Greek so any time we celebrated something a second time because of the Eastern Orthodox calendar we just called it Greek Christmas or Greek Easter or whatever food we were eating that was slightly different because of the Mediterranean influence we'd toss the word Greek in front of it and my sister and I would happily partake in whatever it was. Now that I'm older and have been ribbed by my friends for years that it's actually Eastern Orthodox Christmas and Eastern Orthodox Easter we were celebrating two weeks after the western version and that it's more like Mediterranean chicken and pilaf - not just for Greeks - but I don't care. I still use 'Greek' instead of 'Eastern Orthodox' and I can't help it. ;) (read)
There are those recipes for 11 layer cakes that wow a room full of friends or a seriously huge batch of stuffing with all the random stuff in it that makes your entire extended family reach for seconds on Thanksgiving, and those recipes are wonderful and certainty have a time and a place (you know, like a going away party or, um, Thanksgiving). But what about like, Wednesday night dinner?
Enter this recipe. This not only always pleases my crowd (all of them at once even!) but if you're feeling lazy short on time, you can make the filling over a bed of rice for a no hassle, no dough involved meal and make them just as happy. Wee One #1 loves this so much he requests it for lunch on the regular, and I always have to make a separate 'lunch batch' because there are never any leftovers. Never. (read).
I have made chili from maybe half a dozen recipes over the years, but I had never made cornbread before. These recipes made a heap ton of chili and cornbread. All five of us ate our fill and then the family of five next door ate their fill and there was still some left over! (read).
Eastside Food Bites, The Curvy Carrot, What's Gaby Cooking, Smells Like Home, Mel's Kitchen Cafe, all of these blogs are conspiring against me to fill me with salty carbs. The easy to follow and execute recipes and the beautiful photography totally worked on me. I made these first for a few of my girlfriends who came up to the woods for an afternoon of acting like kids and swimming in the lake by our house. They were amazing, and we polished them off on one sitting. Then I made them a few months later when one of our aunts and uncles came to visit, and then again when more dear friends came out. Ugh. I can't help but spread them around!! I must be stopped!!! (read).
This is the 5th recipe my kids have made from Baking With Kids and this created yet another fun Sunday in the kitchen. The recipe calls for ready-rolled puff pastry, but overachiever that I am, of course I had to make it myself. Here is the recipe and walkthrough for the puff pastry I made for them, it's from an ancient cookbook my Granny gave me called The Art of Cooking and Serving, that I will cook and bake my way through one day. (read).
I made this batch of puff pastry for the kids to use as the base for their Giant Cheese Straws. The recipe called for ready made patry but we can't have that around here!! The horror. I can just see my Granny with her rolling pin asking me why I would give my children inferior pastry. This recipe comes from her cookbook - published in 1932, when she was 10 and doing more than an equal share of the food prep for her family. Note that this vintage cookbook refers to puff pastry as 'puff paste'. (read).