Five on Friday

1)  You've probably seen the macaroni-and-cheese-boiled-in-milk pin/recipe floating around for a time, but I finally tried it on Wednesday.  It was very decadent and filling, but I approve.  The only thing is, I over salted it.  Blurgh.  I will have to try again soon.

2)  To put me in the holiday mood further, the Christmas trees went up on campus this week AND we had our annual Thanksgiving feast today.  In our meeting this morning, we early Christmas celebrators were chastised with the song here.  It was coincidental considering I tried to convince Zach to let me listen to Holly on route to work today because I was feeling bad, but no dice.  For the Thanksgiving lunch, my suite mates headed over 20 minutes early, so we could get in line first, and half of us braved the freezing temperatures (literally 32 degrees) to walk across campus there.  But it was worth it!  I'm so ready for turkey day and the Christmas rush.  :)

3)  I watched this video, and now I am obsessed with learning more about Hasidic Jews.  I love learning about other cultures, and I was really touched by one man's description of his soul being attached to God (I immediately thought of an umbilical cord) and how nothing can severe that connection or break God's love for him.  (He worded it much better than me.)

4)  The night before Veterans Day, we were visited by a little grey cat.  Then that Thursday, I heard the cat mewing when we got home after my long night of teaching.  This kitten was so sweet, purring and rolling around so we could rub its tummy.  It was clearly domesticated and not feral.  So we made it a box with blanket and put out some food since it was getting skinny.  Little kitty got upgraded to a carrier and a warmer blanket, and we started calling him "Pancake."  Now, we have found him a home with my SIL's coworker, so we are keeping him inside where it's warm.  Meet Pancake!

5)  Zach and I are "adopting" a little boy for Christmas through a program at work.  I am very excited to serve and go shopping for him over the coming weeks!!  I've already spent my lunch breaks all week combing through Amazon and Black Friday previews for a game plan to maximize our budget for the most blessings.  :)

Menu Monday (I really meant to post this yesterday!): BLUEBERRY ICE CREAM

I really love ice cream. After (or tied with) pie, it's my favorite. Zach got me a Cuisinart ice cream maker for this past Christmas, and I think it has been one of the best presents ever. :)

We've made mint chocolate chip, chocolate, chocolate chocolate chip, strawberry, Terry's chocolate orange, strawberry-chocolate, fresh mint chip, and who knows what else because we've made some of these multiple times. And this week we made HOMEMADE BLUEBERRY ICE CREAM.

I had never had BLUEBERRY ICE CREAM until last summer when we stayed with Zach's aunt and uncle in Springdale; we lived with them for a month after Zach got his job. Anyway, at that time, Zach had a couple of interviews in MO and OH, so we stopped by to visit them for a few days en route. Their neighbor Nancy, who is constantly making delicious things to eat and sending them over, had her daughter and son-in-law in town that week, and they went berry-picking. With their hard-earned treasure, they made HOMEMADE BLUEBERRY ICE CREAM.

I am not a blueberry lover. I like them in muffins and will tolerate them elsewhere. In ice cream, however, they are divine. The sweetness of the ice cream balances out the tartness of the berries and enhances their flavor. Sooooo good! If you are not a fan of these dark berries, you will be after you try some of ice cream with them. :)

Thankfully to Bridget at Bake at 350, I heard about Ben & Jerry's Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book.

Once I came across her (mostly) cookie blog and saw how much she referenced this cookbook when she wasn't baking cookies, I immediately used my Swagbucks Amazon gift cards and grabbed it up. I can't wait to try cantaloupe, kiwi, and strawberry-coconut ice cream this summer.

But for now, I will share my adaption:

BEN & JERRY'S WILD BLUEBERRY ICE CREAM.

We got these beauties at the Farmers Market. :)

-Combine 1 pint of blueberries with 1/2 c. sugar and a generous dash of lemon juice. Marinate for at least two hours, stirring occassionally.

I bought an 18-pack for memorial day when I knew I would need six for my potato salad and five for my fresh mint chocolate chip ice cream. I don't think I've ever purchased an 18-pack.

-Whisk two eggs for one to two minutes.

I was holding the phone in my right hand to take a picture while pouring in my left. And it was right after this point I dropped my phone on the floor, causing it possibly permanent damage. : / Husby was not too happy. He said he would always be happy to take photos for me, but I told him I have a vision in my head that he may not capture. Plus, he usually looks grumpy when I ask him to take just one more for the fifteenth time. *lol* Sweet Lord, I do need a new camera (and phone)!

-Whisk in 3/4 c. sugar gradually. Continue whisking until sugar is dissolved.

-Pour in 2 c. heavy whipping cream and 1 c. milk and whisk to blend.

I find it interesting that blueberries are dark blue, become pinkish when mashed, and turn ice cream purplish! A chameleon berry!

-Mash the blueberries until pureed.

-Stir into cream base. Make sure you clean off the the bits from the whisk. They are tasty!

-Assemble ice cream maker with freezing bowl with arm inside. Place cover over freezing bowl and start ice cream maker. Pour in batter and process for 25 minutes.

[1-1/2 quarts--the recipe said 1 quart, but it is very generous.]

It comes out like soft serve, so I then scoop it into a freezer-safe bowl and place it in the freezer for at least two hours until hardened. This evening it was hard as a rock!

This is what I simultaneously love and hate about my ice cream maker: I get to clean it up...with the help of my mouth. :) But it's tricky to get every drop up!

Here she is in all her glory! If you plan to store it in the freezer (because you can't eat it in one sitting), be sure to cover with a piece of wax paper and press down so that it sticks to the top of the ice cream. This prevents freezer burn.

We have another winner!!

Menu Monday: PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES

In case you have been living under a rock (or aren't my friend...on facebook), then you might have missed the BIG news:

I got an early birthday present!

This is my new baby, an Empire Red Artisan KitchenAid Mixer.

I had been saving up my Swagbucks Amazon gift cards since June for this, and, as of last week, I had about $145 or so to put toward it. I hoped to save up the rest or, at least, much more, to get it around Black Friday when the prices drop; we had planned all along to pay the difference. Well, I had planned. My husband had different plans. :)

Last Thursday Zach came home from work, and, in a very serious tone, said he had something to tell me:

1) he hacked into my Amazon account and used my Swagbucks gift cards to put towards the mixer because he and his parents decided to pay the difference for my birthday

and

2) he tried to hack into my Yahoo email to intersect the Amazon notifications.

Unfortunately...fortunately...he couldn't hack it. *lol*

(Actually I can't remember exactly what my password is for my email now because I have it saved to my computer. *oops*)

Anyway, he had to 'fess up, and I got this bad girl when she came Monday night. :)

It's going to be so handy to have when I decorate cakes. I still don't really like to eat cakes, but I love to decorate them. A. LOT. Soon I've gotta start planning an Easter cake, and I already know I want to make some French macarons, as difficult as they may be--they're just so pretty.

But I could hardly wait until Easter to use my new girl, so I flipped through the instruction/cooking booklet and found a recipe for PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES.

My aunt Grace made these often when I was growing up, most likely because they didn't call for a lot of expensive ingredients and were quite tasty. For a plain cookie, I preferred these to sugar cookies. (I liked her peanut butter fudge and pies the best; I'm just not really a cake/cookie/brownie type person. Ice cream is my favorite. Supposedly it helps increase your fertility, so I must be one fertile turtle by now! *haha* And my husband can admit that one of the perks about buying me these appliances is that I can make him sweets...but that is not the only reason he buys them for me. ;)

Sadly, I don't think we have her recipe book anymore, but I imagine most recipes would produce the same results. And, as this recipe tells you what speed to use and what not, I had to try it! (For the sake of including it here, I will not include the numbered speeds, etc.)

KITCHENAID PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES

1/2 c. peanut butter

1/2 c. butter or margarine, softened

1/2 c. sugar

1/2 c. brown sugar

1 egg

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. baking soda

1/4 tsp. salt

1-1/4 c. flour

-Place peanut butter and butter in mixing bowl and beat on medium until mixture is smooth.

BUTTERS!

-Stop beating and scrape bowl. Add sugars, egg, and vanilla. Beat for one minute; stop and scrap bowl.

SUGARS!

-Gradually beat in all remaining ingredients to sugar-butter mixture.

-Roll into 1-inch balls. The dough will be sticky, so flour hands to keep dough from sticking. Place about 2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheet. (As you can see, I did not place this batch 2 inches apart, and mine definitely had touching edges when they were done. I like to think they wanted to be friends with one another!)

I need a smaller cookie scoop. Mine was too large for this project!

-Flatten slightly with your palm and then flatten with a fork in a criss-cross pattern. A large fork is preferred than the small one I used. You may also need to dip the fork in flour between flattening to keep it from pulling up the dough.

I ate one.

Hey! It was smooshed. :)

[I am in the process of buying some cooling racks with my most recent Amazon gift cards.]

-Bake at 375 degrees until golden brown, about 8 to 10 minutes (according to my oven). Remove from baking sheets immediately and cool on wire racks. If you don't have wire racks, you can take a piece of wax paper and generously sprinkle it was sugar, and it will do the trick. PLUS it gives the bottoms of your cookies a nice sugary crunch. :)

[2 dozen or so]

I topped the second batch of cookies with trios of chocolate chips.

Chocolate + Peanut Butter = :)

I alternated between cooking mine on a cookie sheet--Lord, we need some new ones BADLY--and on my Pampered Chef stone. I found that the cookies on the stone were chewier, which is what I prefer, but I had to bake them much longer. The recipe states that the cookies should bake between 10 to 12 on the cookie sheet, but they were already far too crisp at 10-ish minutes. I believe it's because I have a dark metal cookie sheet, which usually requires a chef to knock twenty-five degrees or so off the cooking temperature. (The same goes for glassware.)

Menu Monday: HOGWARTS' PUMPKIN BREAD

In case you didn't know, I'm a little obsessed with Harry Potter:

The Elephant House: one of the local establishments in Edinburgh where Rowling penned the first HP

my seventeenth birthday cake

my husband as The Boy Who Lived

One of the Gryffindor scarves I made :)

Next on the list: a Gryffindor beanie.

Monica and me at the midnight release party of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Zach got me a Dobby minifig for Christmas 2010

Magical and Muggle at the showing of Part 1 of Deathly Hallows

my collection of HP books along with my Freeing Dobby Lego set & the Harry Potter Sorting Hat charm holder Sara got me for my birthday once upon a time

(We recently got rid of all our paperback Harry Potter books.)

with Harry

I recently had a $10 Amazon voucher from Coinstar I needed to use, so I consulted my Wish List. And what did I find I really, really, really wanted? This. :)

The week when it arrived we had tried to bake PUMPKIN BREAD in our bread machine. It did NOT turn out. The recipe called for canned pumpkin, but all I had on hand was pumpkin pie mix. It was my understanding that you could substitute the pumpkin pie mix for the canned pumpkin as long as you omitted the seasonings and (part of) the sweetener because these are already included in the mix. The first loaf we tried did not have nearly enough pumpkin for our tastes. It did not have that dense, rich texture either. So we tried to double up on the pumpkin pie mix. Well...the bread machine rebelled and did not mix the dough enough, so it did not rise. Alas, alack, we decided to discard that recipe.

When we had all but given up hope, luckily this gem came in with a pumpkin bread recipe. Even though it wasn't a bread machine recipe, I baked it up. It turned out beautifully! :) The following recipe is based on the one in the cookbook:

HOGWARTS' PUMPKIN BREAD

1 1/2 c. flour

1/4 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder

a sprinkle of each of the following: cinnamon, ground nutmeg, ground cloves

1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter or margarine at room temperature

1/2 c. sugar

2 large eggs

3/4 c. pumpkin pie filling

1/3 c. whole milk

powdered sugar, for dusting

-Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.* Grease and flour a loaf pan. Whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, and seasonings.

-In a separate bowl, beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, about four minutes. Add the eggs one at a time. Add the pumpkin and beat until combined. Add the milk and beat until combined. Add the flour mixture in thirds and mix on the lowest speed until combined. Scrape and fold with a rubber spatula to finish.

-Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour to 1 hour and 10 minutes, rotating halfway through baking, until the top is golden and the loaf is well risen and feels firm when pressed lightly in the center. Remove from the oven and cool in the pan. To serve, remove the loaf from the pan and dust with powdered sugar.

[Makes 1 loaf]

*If you are using a glass or dark metal pan, reduce baking temperature by 25 degrees to prevent overbaking.