I’m baaaaack!!!

I know I said I’d be back in a week four months ago and as you can see there as been a whole overhaul around here, the blog has expanded to better sort and organize all the content and the really exciting news is in the middle of all of this – we bought a house!! There are a lot of reasons we love the house we bought but for now I’ll give you a sneak peak of our favourite parts – the backyard and of course the kitchen. There’s no way we could buy a house without a serious kitchen.

There will be more pictures as we move in and get settled – which isn’t happening until August anyway. The backyard is huge and has an area already set aside for gardening, and as you may have suspected, will be growing once I get my hands on it. The other thing I adore so much about this house is that it has a pantry – an absolute necessity in my dream kitchen.


The changes to this site have been long in the making and I am so happy to finally be finished and able to show it all off. I’m still going to be posting my weeklies – I love doing them! Just now I’ll be linking to the pages instead of putting the recipe or instructions directly in the blog post – this way I can include more than one if I want to.

Tomorrow, we’ll get back to business as usual, with a few little changes. The weekly line up looks like this now:

Mondays – Menu Mondays from Kate Says Stuff

Tuesdays – Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club and Hearth ‘n Soul

Work in Progress Wednesdays – from Freshly Pieced, Tami’s Amis and Musings from the Fishbowl

Baking with Kids Thursdays – documenting the kids’ cooking and baking through Baking with Kids

Cookie Fridays – perhaps the best day of the week, check out the gallery

Super Cute Saturdays – if I have time for this, so do you!

Catchall Sundays – rando day, for things that don’t fit anywhere else

I have still been doing my self-inflicted challenges, so I’ll be posting them as often as I can to catch up. Right now, I have a lot of fun stuff to share with you!

As far as my domestic endevours go, I feel head over heels for Bakerella’s Cupshakes, which essentially is a milkshake crossed with a cupcake. I also made step by step instructions for eclairs, and chocolate fudge. As part of the Baking With Kids challenge, where the kids are baking and cooking their way through Linda Collister’s cookbook, I made a batch of puff pastry for them to use in the giant cheese straws recipe. I also added the 4th cookie of the year, the playfully pink cowgirl cookies to the gallery.

I have gotten my crafty groove back, though so far I’ve only posted about my stack of facecloths. Ahem. I did add two window shopping posts though, one on Charlene’s Supply Closet and one on The Loopy Ewe, two shops I am moderately to severely obsessed with. I’ve also added two interviews (Krissy of Krissyanne Designs and Megan of Radmegan) plus a book review of yet another new obsession – Martha Stewart’s Craft Encyclopedia. I’ve been busy!

There have been some health-concious related kitchen changes around here as well. I may as well just say it now without outing anyone, but two dear friends of mine have gone vegan. Which means two things really. First of course it means I now know way more than I ever wanted to know about being vegan and what rules there are and what different types of vegans there are which then also means I also know a whole lot about all kinds of scary stuff that even my vegan friends are not interested in. What’s that? SUGAR. Wowzers. White sugar is way worse than I thought and people let me tell you, I love me some sweet treats so what to do? I’ve been testing recipes using other kinds of natural sweeteners (because as bad as white sugar is fake sugar is even worse), and they’re working out pretty well. I mention this because while I am still cooking and baking my way through Deceptively Delicious, and while I am aware that adding veggies to pretty much anything is never a bad thing, I hesitate to call these recipes healthy knowing all that I know now. I am going to keep them in the ‘healthy’ category anyway because they are miles healthier than what used to come out of my kitchen. The second thing that happens when good friends go vegan is that I have to learn to cook and bake for them! I can’t have them coming up for the weekend to eat pasta and lettuce, can I?! I have been learning so much – expect some uber healthy additions to the healthy section in the coming weeks.

In the meantime though, here’s what I have added to that section to start with – Deceptively Delicious Stew (which adds pureed borccoli to a yummy stew), Dr Oz’s Green Smoothie (this is crazy healthy), Deceptively Delicious Mac & Cheese (with cauliflower puree and two kinds of cheese), Deceptively Delicious Applesauce Muffins (with applesauce duh and carrot puree), Deceptively Delicious Brownies (with pureed carrots and spinach), and an old school homemade Garlic, Honey & Lemon Cough Syrup recipe. Very old school, my Granny would be proud.

Aaaaad just like I said I would, I dove right into making a ‘pretty’ section. I’ve become more of a girly girl than ever in the last year so it’s been fun to write about it! I added two window shopping pieces, Body Shop and Mod Cloth, plus a 101 on Lotions, my Make Up Bag Must Haves and my first hair tutorial ever – my Puffy Bun, which literally takes 5 minutes – no more than 10 even with all three wee ones running underfoot at once.

Phew. I hope my little hanful of loyal readers are happy with the changes. Let me know what you think guys!!

In this post, I’m participating in Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club, and Hearth ‘n Soul.

The 5th recipe I made from Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious was Ranch Dressing that I served with fish.

I’m a huge ranch dressing fan. I love it on salads naturally, but I also love it as a dip – for pretty much everything. The only bummer about this recipe, if it’s even a bummer, is that it makes quite a bit but only lasts a few days. I gave some away to my husband’s cousin and his girlfriend and the rest I used as a dip with fish, then on a salad and finally on the third day when Wee One #2’s Godparent’s came for their annual visit we used the last of it as pizza crust dip!

Ranch Dressing (with navy beans) – from Deceptively Delicious (p. 123)

*great northern beans are listed as an either/or suggestion

First drain, rinse and mash the beans. Set aside.

Mix the buttermilk, beans, sour cream, garlic, Parmesan and seasonings in a magic bullet or something similar. Blend till smooth!

Use right away and store what’s left in an air tight container for up to 3 days – eat it quick!

Some notes, the dressing is thin enough as a sauce to drizzle over chicken or fish if you like it with those. Otherwise, next time I will add more navy beans to make it thicker and more dressing-like.

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This is the fourth recipe in my little kitchen adventure of cooking and baking my way through Jessica Seinfield’s Deceptively Delicious.

This recipe was a winner for the kids and myself, but my husband was not at all a fan of the chicken meatballs. He also commented that the pasta sauce tasted like the dipping sauce at Swiss Chalet (that’s a painfully Canadian reference, it just tastes sort of tangy). So this was an epic fail as far as my husband was concerned but the kids happily ate the pasta and the meatballs, so the next time I make this will be a lunch for the wee ones.

Spaghetti & Meatballs (with butternut squash and carrots) – from Deceptively Delicious (p. 120)

When I made this I already had some butternut squash puree in the fridge, but I didn’t have any carrot puree so I whipped some up on the spot by steaming in a little water in a frying pan for about 15 minutes, till they were really tender.

Then I tossed the carrot pieces, along with the teeny bit of water that was left in the pan with them into the blender and voila. Once that was out of the way I could get going with the actual recipe.

Mix the ground turkey or chicken with thebreadcrumbs, butternut squash puree, garlic, 1/2 tsp of the salt, and 1/4 tsp of the black pepper till they’re totally mixed, you will have to use your hands a bit! Which is fine because you’ll be using your hands to shape the meatballs anyway! Make them about 1″ and put them on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Coat a frying pan with non stick cooking spray, add the olive oil and brown the meatballs for about 5 minutes. I’m paranoid about chicken though so I cooked them for twice as long.

Then I pureed the tomatoes with their juice, and plunked over the meatballs with the water, carrot puree I just made.

Next add the garlic powder, cayenne, bay leaf and the rest of the salt and pepper. Simmer over low heat for about 20 minutes, or till the meatballs are cooked all the way through. Take out the bay leaf.

I found the sauce as is to be really loose and watery at this point. It tasted great but wasn’t really thick enough for pasta, you know? So I added cornstarch. A rookie mistake is to just plunk a tablespoon or so of cornstarch directly into the sauce and try to whisk it in. That will give you serious clumps – everytime. Instead, take a little of the sauce, add the cornstarch to it and whisk it in the cup or small bowl. Then when that little bit is totally mixed in with no clumps, pour it into the rest of the sauce and whisk that in.

Then? Perfection. I turned it off but left it on the burner for a little heat while I boiled water, made the pasta and set the table. Rotini is a favourite around here so that’s what I went with. Nothing could save this dish for my red meat loving husband, but as I said the rest of us loved it so I will likely make it again for lunch.

In this post, I’m participating in Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club, and Hearth ‘n Soul.

I was looking forward to making this because I love French Toast and the kids usually do too. I say usually because if you add too much to it it’s not always acceptable to their discerning palettes, dontcha know?

Not sure exactly why one would need to hide bananas in other foods (I thought all kids loved bananas), but she also offered up pineapple, sweet potato, carrot, butternut squash and pumpkin as alternatives). I went with banana even though I just made fun of it because I didn’t have any purees on hand and making a banana puree is well, the easiest thing in the world.

French Toast (with banana) – from Deceptively Delicious (p. 49)

So, of course, start by whisking your eggs with your banana puree and cinnamon. Once it’s blended well together, plunk your bread in.

Some people have trouble with how long to leave the bread in the egg mixture or they get hung up in which is the correct tool for flipping the bread. Leave it in a few seconds past ‘just wet’ and use a fork!

Just a few minutes each side and it’s done!! French Toast is so fast! I love it! By now, the house smells like cinnamon and banana (and really strong coffee) and at around 150 cals per piece I was game to have one with the kids.

I was a little nervous they’d think the banana taste was weird by they were down and all three wee ones at it up like it was a tray of pancakes! Hey pancakes! I bet I could hide things in there too!!

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In the last few months, I have mastered my husband’s favourite lasagna – his mother’s recipe. Last summer, I was buying frozen lasagna and now I’m making it myself! Doing more and more from scratch around here has really inspired me to keep going. So now, I’m breaking down the ingredients to make them from scratch too – which just means the sauce, stock and the pasta, really.

The pasta and stock will wait for another day, this week I made the sauce from my father’s classic recipe.

May’s Dad’s Pasta Sauce

Chop your onions and garlic first. It’s a big joke in my family that my father will chop onions and garlic before he even knows what he’s making, so all his recipes start like this. Anyhoo, once your onions and garlic are browning a little, add your meat. My dad tends to use pork and beef or turkey and chicken. I sometimes use pork and beef, but this time around I just used beef. Let that cook on a back burner, stirring from time to time to keep it from burning horribly.

Then put the tomato paste and chicken stock in a large pot and whisk together. As I was emptying the cans of tomato paste into the pot, I thought about making my own tomato paste too, because even though the ingredients on the side of the can just say tomatoes, we all know the can is full of chemicals. Eww. Next round, I’m doing the paste too! You decide if you use store bought chicken stock or homemade. I love homemade chicken stock and I swear you can taste the sodium in the store bought stuff after tasting scratch stock. I had no scratch stock though, so I went with the new little jelly-style stock from Knorr. It actually worked out really well and the sodium content wasn’t bad. While that’s simmering, chop your veggies, then add them to the sauce. Now sprinkle in your nutmeg and oregano, maybe salt and pepper if you feel the need. 😉

Meanwhile, your meat is probably cooked through now and the smell of garlic and onions have no doubt filled your kitchen at this point. Mmmm. Drain your meat through a colander lined with cheesecloth (or paper towel) and then add it to your sauce.

The sauce can sit as it is for as long as you’d like on a very low simmer, as long as you keep stirring. I left it simmering for about an hour or so, while I cleaned up my kitchen and got the cheese and pasta and all that ready for the lasagna I was making.

This recipe made about 4 mason jars full. I say ‘about’, because I usually go through 2 jars when I make it with store bought and here I used a bit more than typical and I still had 2 mason jars full.

It was fun to make, my kitchen wasn’t too much of a disaster and it makes lots. You can do two big lasagnas with it or four pots of spaghetti!

Next up in my hopping around Deceptively Delicious is Chocolate Pudding – of course it’s not just any chocolate pudding, it’s got avocado in it! With a smack of Cool Whip on top, all three kids *and* my husband ate it and loved it.

Making the puree is beyond simple. Really. Just cut the avocado in half, scoop out the flesh and mash it with a fork before pureeing it in the blender or food processor. So why avocado? Brimming with monounsaturated fats, serious soluble fiber and vitamin E – hello good cholesterol, stable blood sugar and shiny hair! Ok, so vitamin E does more than shiny hair, but it’s a bonus! So now that you have your puree…

Chocolate Pudding (with avocado) from Deceptively Delicious (p. 159)

Pull out your favorite mid-sized saucepan and melt the Becel. Then add in the avocado puree, sugar, cocoa powder and vanilla.

Mix it while it cooks and mush up any lingering avocado chunks you may have, for about 3 minutes. Once it’s thickened, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cornstarch.

I think the entire operation took me 15 minutes start to finish – and that includes making the puree. Painfully simple. If you’re giving this to someone really super picky, I’d mix a little Cool Whip right in the pot. Here, I served it with the Cool Whip on top, which is how I normally serve the fam pudding so that wasn’t suspect. I only had a lick, but I didn’t notice anything but chocolate! This one goes into the ‘will make again’ box!

In this post, I’m participating in Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays, Tuesdays at the Table, Tuesday Night Supper Club, and Hearth ‘n Soul.

I mentioned a few days ago that I’d be cooking and baking my way through Jessica Seinfeld’s Deceptively Delicious cookbook this year, and I’m not making you wait! Her butternut squash infused coffee cake was my first project, and it was fun!

Every recipe in this book sneaks in a nutrient packed veggie or fruit. They’re all pureed ahead of time (though there’s no reason you can’t just make the puree before you make the recipe). So before we get into the recipe, let’s talk about pureeing the squash in the first place, shall we? I swear, it’s a cinch!

Just cut the stem off, cut the squash in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds. Put them fleshy side down on a baking sheet and roast them naked for about 45 minutes. Then just scoop the flesh out and pop it in your blender or food processor till it’s baby food! Tah-dah!

Coffee Cake (with butternut squash) – from Deceptively Delicious (p. 61)

I’ll warn you right now that after following the directions to beat the sugar and the butter till creamy and then add 1 cup of the buttermilk, sour cream, egg and vanilla it did not look pretty (left). However, just like that vanilla cake I made a lot of last year, once I added the flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt it started to look a whole lot better (right).

Then comes the super weird part. Pour half the batter into your buttered or sprayed cake pan (9″ will do it) and smooth out the top. Now, spread your cup of squash puree over the batter. I know, right? THEN, sprinkle with the mini marshmallows and, as you can see, half a cup doesn’t totally cover the cake but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Now, take the rest of the milk (1/4 cup) and the other half of the batter, mix them together and then spread over the squash filling and marshmallows.

Now mix your topping ingredients together and sprinkle that over the batter. Bake at 350 for about 45 minutes.

My crust looks burnt, but it’s not bad at all. The photo in the book has a dark looking crust as well. This cake is probably the heaviest cake (for it’s size) that I’ve ever made, very dense – and also very good. I like squash anyway, but you can’t taste it at all.

P to the S, your leftover butternut squash puree can be frozen for months or made into soup. I looooove butternut squash, and at just 63 calories a cup, if you’re careful how you prep the soup it can be a really filling and healthy low cal snack!

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There is so much going on here for the blog I hardly know where to start. Tomorrow is my first proper post of the year but I thought I’d outline a little of what I’m cooking up!

With my Uncle Bob passing last spring, my Granny last summer and then our big move in the fall, Cake Year 2010 did not go down as I had hoped. The official count for 2010 was 45 different cakes or cupcakes, but I did not do as well as Pie Year 2009 – when I made 57 different pies or tarts. Now that we’re settled into our new house and I’ve gotten comfortable in my new kitchen, I’m taking on two cookbooks, one with the kids help, and declaring 2011 to be Cookie Year. All of my long distance friends just got really excited because they know I’ll totally mail cookies.

I’m also going to make a separate gallery for my handmades because I knit more socks than I can keep track of!!

The first cookbook I’ll be baking from with the kids, the oldest two anyway. It’s called Baking With Kids and I’ll supervise them baking one thing from it every week – there are 53 recipes so we’ll double up one week. They’re really excited about this so I’m super looking forward to it!

Last year for Christmas my dear friend Brigitte got me Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food, the cookbook about hiding veggies in unusual places (like french toast and brownies). I’d see it on my counter and flip through it and think about cooking from it and now it’s been a year! This year, my aunt got me the next book, Double Delicious!: Good, Simple Food for Busy, Complicated Lives and getting this second book was the kick in the butt I needed to really get into the first one! I’ll be making something from Deceptively Delicious slightly more often than once a week. Thankfully my husband is on board to try out these new recipes! He is getting a lot more adventurous in the kitchen (ever since I really mastered some recipes he’s been asking me to figure out), so that’s a win for us as a team for sure!

My adorable friend Sammie has asked me to help her pull together a little DIY cookbook for a good friend of hers who has had gestational diabetes in the past and is blessed with another wee one on the way! Good thinking on her part, to be proactive about it before it becomes a problem!

Between these two books, Cookie Year 2011, our light on the sugar project and all the random seasonal and holiday themed baking that is sure to fill in the gaps, this promises to be a busy year for my kitchen and I could not possibly be more excited!

I’ll leave you with that as I made a mad dash to my kitchen to get baking!!

05. January 25 – Ranch Dressing

04. January 20 – Spaghetti and Meatballs

03. January 11 – French Toast (with banana)

02. January 6 – Chocolate Pudding (with avocado)

01. January 4 – Coffee Cake (with butternut squash)

In this post, I’m participating in Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, Tuesday Night Supper Club, Hearth ‘n Soul, Tuesdays at the Table and Delicious Dishes at It’s a Blog Party

We were really feeling the Halloweeny vibe this year, but wee one #2 marches to the beat of her own drummer. So in the midst of the black and orange explosion of last week, she chose to go off the rails and bake something not even remotely seasonal. That’s ok, she’s 4 – as long as she’s actually creating edible food in the kitchen who cares if it’s on theme or not right? Right!

The Halloweeny food does not need recipes, as I am sure you make these on your own already and if you don’t there are about eleventy billion recipes online. I did my best to make Halloween week as silly and as fun as possible for the kids – of course it got me in the spirit too. Every day, we had at least one themed treat or meal, and towards the end of the week the whole day was themed! Not that I have ever been known to get carried away. Ahem.

(mmmm garlic), oregano, a little thyme and a teeny bit of Miss Diana sauce for chicken. I know that doesn’t sound amazing, but trust me, it is.

We were having a really laid back day and I asked wee one #2 if she felt like baking something on her own (under supervision, natch) and without even thinking about it she announced she wanted to make granola bars!

They are painfully easy. All I did was turn the oven on, measure the ingredients into bowls, put the dish into the oven and then later take it out. She did the rest.

Painfully Easy Granola Bars

First she piled her dry ingredients into the Kitchen Aid and gave it a whirl. My mother didn’t get a Kitchen Aid till I was 14, so it’s hilarious to see my not quite 5 year old daughter working the kitchen power tools!

Then she literally dumped all the wet ingredients on top and gave it another whirl. It worked. If I had made them, I likely would have mixed all the wet ingredients together first and then added that to the dry, but what do I know?! 😉

She then greased a brownie pan with Becel and a pastry brush before unhooking the bowl from the stand and dumping the entire contents into the pan. She smoothed it out and instructed me to pop it in the oven. And so I did – then 20 minutes later I took it out again.

It was hard to hold everyone back while the pan cooled enough for me to cut them into bars. Mmmm. The kids brought them to school the next day! Yes, I know there are peanuts in them and I said they took them to school. Believe it or not, their school only has 41 kids in it and no peanut allergies so they are a peanut friendly school.