Organization for Life
Vintage Hardware Drawers: I love them!
This year, I will:
Learn to Knit.
Learn to Felt.
Make Bread from Scratch.
Make Soup.
Make dinner from scratch at least twice a week.
Plan meals.
Sleep well.
Run, walk, breathe, stretch.
Go outside every day, if only for a moment.
Organize a cohesive wardrobe.
Make jewelry and sell it on Etsy or in the gallery.
Play with the cat each day until she flops.
Catch fish.
Read a new book each week.
Keep a clean house.
Be Happy.
♥ Momo
Let the games begin! First, a small disclaimer; I have made this without walnuts, because one of the possible judges has a nut allergy, and that just wouldn’t be fair to the first contender.
I think I ought to have a category tag titled “Serendipitous Breads”, because I started this post having found two zucchini recipes that are different enough from each other, one being considerably fancier, only to get word from my spy at the store that there were no. zucchini. in. stock. After a few deep breaths, spies then reported that they had found the last zucchini in the store! Huzzah! And so we find our heroine, with borrowed iPhone in hand for visual documentation, marching bravely into kitchen stadium…wait. That’s Iron Chef. I’ll just bake the thing and get on with it. ♥
2 c. all purpose flour
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp ground allspice
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2 c. sugar
1 1/2 c. vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 Tbsp vanilla extract
2 tsp grated lemon peel – I’m fond of lemon, and so I threw in at least 1 Tbsp, to be honest. I almost always throw in at least 1 Tbsp of lemon into everything. I even had lemon zest on shepherds pie last week, and it was surprisingly good!
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
2 c. coarsely grated zucchini – from the lovely zucchini pictured below:
1 cup walnuts, toasted, coarsely chopped
Preheat oven to 325°F.
Butter and flour two 8x4x2 1/2-inch metal loaf pans. (I made do with one looooong pan and one very baby pan.)
Combine flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, allspice, and baking powder in medium bowl. In a Kitchenaid mixer – what can I say, I love them – with a whisk attachment, combine sugar, vegetable oil, eggs, vanilla, and lemon peel.
…I have another confession; I squeezed an impromptu bit of lemon juice into the liquid mixture after adding the lemon zest – if I had to guess, maybe 1 tsp? I believe it made a pleasant difference.
Add Flour mixture gradually, remove bowl from mixer and fold in zucchini…and walnuts, if you don’t care about your loved ones with allergies.
Pour batter into prepared pans. If I were adding nuts, I like to place halved walnuts on top in cute daisy patterns. But not today…sigh.
This was my first experience baking two loaves at once, let alone loaves of different sizes. Epicurious advised a little over an hour, for two equal pans, so I baked them together for 35 mins, checking every ten minutes until at 50 mins the smallest loaf was done, and at 1 hour ten mins the long loaf was finished.
Let stand 10 minutes, if you can stand it! Turn breads out onto rack and cool completely. To store, I wrap in foil and leave at room temperature; these loaves of mine tend to go pretty quickly, so I’ve never really had to see about storing them for more than 24 hours.
Watched Tonari no Totoro again this week! Disney finally re-released the DVD, and while I suspect they’ve redone the Japanese actors as well as the American, it was still the great movie I remember.
We love Totoro!
I just got home from Eastern Washington to word that the enormous loaf I left with family is essentially gone. So the recipe is going up before the final pics, which I need from that borrowed camera…hint, hint.
Enjoy!
♥ Momo
Trout Apples!
I’m up this morning drinking Yorkshire Gold and eating a Spudnut doughnut with cantaloupe in Eastern Washington and stalking Etsy. What could be better?♣
♣ Things that might be better: sipping coffee and eating a macadamia nut sticky bun on Kauai; Sipping coffee and breaking off fresh pieces of baguette while sitting on a bench near the Eiffel Tower; the triumphant feeling of making perfect English scones for the first time, for starters – but I’ll take this.
Yesterday was spent running all over the Tri City area looking for a terra cotta garden pot, to be used to cook a fancy roast. My camera battery has died, but I’ll see about posting pics of the final results. In the course of our impromptu tour of every garden nursery in Eastern Washington, I got some pretty nice pics of pretty plants, and my all time favorite, the pussy willow:
Soft!
My parents used to buy these when I got a splinter, which is so much easier to remove from a six year old who’s preoccupied with the botanical equivalent of a new kitten. I wish we could keep them around the house, especially since they keep better than a vase full of flowers, but Migi loves them too. She loves them the way Simpkin loved the same little fat mice as the Tailor of Glouster, with clearly mischievous intentions. So no bundles of pussy willows for me today!
I have a few recipes up my sleeve for either my time here or this weekend when I’m back at home – Zucchini loaf should be first up; I’m really looking forward to it!
♥ Momo
Yummy
Had an awesome morning – up too early, talked too much too early, stumbled home, and encountered a messy kitchen! To celebrate having a clean kitchen once again, I present to you Serendipitous Orange Lemon Tea Loaf, so named because I had exactly the right ingredients for just this thing in my kitchen when the dust cleared, and for very little else….and might have replaced orange with lemon, because not only do I love lemons, but I did not have the requisite oranges in my kitchen to zest for this loaf.
Orange Lemon Tea Loaf
2/3 cup butter (softened)
1 1/4 cups sugar
2 Eggs – Exactly how many we had in our house this morning! Serendipitous!
1/2 cup Plain Yogurt – Picked up on my way home yesterday evening, before finding this recipe!
1/2 cup orange lemon juice – When life gives you lemons…make tea loaf ♥
1 Tbsp orange lemon zest
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Glaze! (I did not have enough lemon juice for this, so I sprinkled the top of the loaf with lemon zest prior to baking – it was lovely.)
1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 to 3 teaspooons orange juice
Preheat oven to 350° & grease a 9×5 loaf pan.
In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (I only figured out last year that this really means medium speed for at least five minutes, to get the texture right!) Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition…or two at once if you’re like me and went a little egg-happy at this step. Add yogurt, orange lemon juice and zest. Combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; add to creamed mixture and mix well.
Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake at 350° for 55-65 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean (as per usual – you can, and I did cover loosely with foil if/when the top browns too quickly. (After about 25 mins in the oven.) Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan to wire rack to cool completely.
Glaze! I am enthusiastic about glaze:
Combine confectioners’ sugar and orange lemon juice with a whisk. Drizzle over cooled bread, having poked holes in the top if desired.
Enjoy with Earl Grey tea with sugar and cream – because bergamot goes best with any citrus baked goods, as you well know.
…and lazy kitchen helpers, who snuck off to catch some Z’s. Naughty!
Baking Varmint
♥ Momo
Pink!
“Dress is a very foolish thing, and yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed.” – Lord Chesterfield, via The Happiness Project.
Madelines! Perfect with tea, coffee, lemonade and most importantly, more madelines – I’ve been meaning to make these for a while, and wimping out because they require a 20 minute walk in the rain to buy lemons. Lemons! All those sayings about “when life gives you lemons…” if only. I’m in my kitchen, staring at the monsoon outside calling “a lemon, a lemon, my kingdom for a lemon!”…okay, maybe not so dramatically, but I do feel the absence of lemons rather sorely.
I have of course made them, and forgot the lemons. This recipe turned out nicely, but I think I’ll add a quarter teaspoon of almond extract, or possibly two teaspoons of lemon zest, as they were a little plain for my tastes.
4 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
1/4 pound unsalted butter, melted
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Butter and flour madeline pans.
Beat the eggs, salt, and sugar together until thick. I had to do this by hand, as my Kitchenaid didn’t whip enough air into the eggs to bring them to the right consistency, and it took about 8-12 minutes of hard work between myself and a friend, bribed with the promise of tasty desserts. Add the vanilla. Fold in the flour, rapidly. Fold in the butter gently. Quickly spoon the mixture into madeline pans. Bake until golden, 8-10 minutes. Remove from pans, and upend over a cooling rack. Dust with powdered sugar, and enjoy!
I fixed a pot of Yorkshire Gold to go with these, and it went quickly!
I ♥ this dress:
Dots!
♥ Momo
Tasty!
Without further ado, I give you…. drumroll….Raspberry Pinwheels:
Posted in Food
Woke up to a cold, grey Sunday morning! Hot muffins and tea are a given on mornings like this. They turned out well, considering I started with a blueberry muffin recipe and discovered halfway through that I have no blueberries. I substituted raspberries, to satisfactory results:
1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup fine cornmeal
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. grated nutmeg
2/3 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup milk
6 Tbs. (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted
1 cup fresh or frozen raspberries (or blueberries)
2 Tbs. granulated sugar mixed with 1 tsp.
ground cinnamon
In an electric mixer, combine the eggs, milk and butter and beat on low speed just until blended. Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and beat on low speed just until moistened. Fold in the raspberries.
Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin cups, filling each one about three-fourths full. Sprinkle the cinnamon-sugar evenly over the tops. Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean, 15 to 18 minutes.
Transfer to a wire rack and let cool for 2 minutes, then turn the muffins out onto the rack. Serve warm. Makes 12 muffins.
Posted in Food
Totoro!
“Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.”
-Virginia Satir 1916-1988
First post!
I’m a 25-year old full time artist working on a jewelry portfolio/skills, part time retail associate, & gleefully former office drone. I love baking, but I’m approaching cooking with some trepidation – poaching eggs is at the top of my must-do-but-keep putting-off list.
This is my first blog; I hope to fill it with recipes & photographs of my wanderings & work.
About me as a baker: I’m a total food geek, a self-confessed sugar junkie, and an organic-obsessive compulsive.
My pseudonym comes from Michael Ende’s Momo, also known as The Grey Gentlemen published 1973. The German title fully translates to Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people.
Momo!
♥Momo