Mosaic table

It's done. Grout is curing. Sealant will be added in a couple of days. Now, if the rain would stop, we might just be able to use it on the deck. I think a tall glass of lemonade or frappuccino would look just great on this.

Home-Made Frappuccino

8 shots of decaf espresso
3/8 cup of sugar
6 cups of low-fat milk
1/4 to 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, to taste
1 tsp. xanthan gum

Combine first four ingredients in blender. If there isn't enough room, leave out some of the milk until the blending is done. With the blender running, gradually sprinkle in the xanthan gum, blending very well. This last ingredient is not strictly necessary, but allows you to get a rich creamy texture out of what is a pretty low-fat beverage. Store in fridge. Serve over ice. Yum!

If you didn't get your kids an espresso machine for Christmas, you can substitute 1 1/2 cups of very strong brewed coffee amplified by about 2 teaspoons of instant coffee. Starbucks Via instant is far and away the best instant I've ever tasted and almost comes close to brewed coffee, and it comes in decaf too now. Which is important, because in my experience most kids love this drink.

Pink Stuff for Pirates

Our favourite salad dressing is referred to as Pink Stuff for Pirates. I think it began because we were storing it in a used grocery-store salad dressing bottle with the surface layer of the label torn off, and I wrote "pink stuff" on it to distinguish it (as if it needed distinguishing, in all its lurid fuschia glory) from the "white stuff" ranch dressing also on the table when we eat salad at dinner.

My kids have a penchant for labeling all sorts of things with strange randomness. For instance we have a small jar which encloses a bag of bulk-bin ground cinnamon in the pantry which is labeled "ant farm project." They claim this will help prevent others from invading our home after any global political / environmental disasters and living off our stuff, because they won't know what is food and what is not.

Pink Stuff for Pirates is very popular here. Assuming you have an Asian grocery store where you can find the curiously strong Ume Plum Vinegar, it is easy to make.

Pink Stuff for Pirates

1/2 cup ume plum vinegar
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. dill
6-8 medium to large cloves of garlic
1 cup olive oil
1 cup light vegetable oil

Combine all ingredients in a blender and whizz until well puréed. Store in fridge in any appropriately-labeled container. The cranberries and garlic help keep it pretty well emulsified. The combination of oils helps keep this dressing from solidifying in the fridge.

Turning March's Corner

Some signs of spring, inside our house, evidence of the inevitable annual rebirth of creative energy, intellectual hunger and interest in doing stuff.

Fiona stirs the foam atop her London Fog with her finger while doing math. We now make our London Fogs with decaf earl grey tea, a tablespoon of café-style vanilla syrup and proper steamed milk from our espresso machine. Math and London Fogs are both comfort foods for Fiona, who has been delighted to learn of the invisible fraction hidden in every whole number. Who would have guessed that 5 is actually "five oneths"? But it makes her cackle with delight over the logical good sense of it all.

Sophie has been struck by the urge to sew. It's been at least a couple of years since she's done a major sewing project. True to her nature she's taken on a  big project. She's found a lovely organic cotton-bamboo-spandex fabric out of which she wants to make a sleeveless swing dress. She's madly tracing off pattern pieces, laying out and cutting her fabric. The pattern is filled with infuriating options like "matching line for sleeveless option" and "cutting line for tunic option." She's figuring it all out.

And Fiona is as I type this working her way through our favourite Ginger Crinkle recipe, stirring in molasses, rolling out balls of dough, dredging them in sugar and lining them up on a cookie sheet. 

Ginger Crinkles

1 cup sugar
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup molasses
1 egg
1 3/4 cup flour
2 tsp. dried ground ginger
1 tsp. each of cinnamon, baking powder and baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
a extra 1/4 cup sugar

Whisk together oil with 1 cup of sugar. Whisk in egg and molasses. In a separate bowl mix together flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder and salt. Dump into oil-sugar mixture and mix well. Form into 2.5 cm balls and dredge in remaining quarter cup of sugar. Place on lightly greased cooking sheet and bake in 375˚F (190˚C) oven for 12 minutes.

A box of cheesemaking supplies and instructions arrived in the post this morning too, so we may soon be kneading our way to mozzarella and squeezing out discs of gouda. Stay tuned.

Rum Balls and their friends

Fun and easy. We do both types at once in two separate bowls.

Rum Balls

The main deal:
4 oz. semisweet chocolate
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/3 cup dark rum
200 g chocolate cookie crumbs
1 1/4 cups finely chopped walnuts
1 tsp. vanilla

For coating:
1 more cup of finely chopped walnuts

Melt chocolate in a saucepan over very low heat with the sweetened condensed milk. Remove from heat and stir in other ingredients. Chill in fridge for at least an hour. If leaving overnight, cover tightly to prevent the top from drying out.

Shape mixture with hands into teaspoon-sized balls. Toss in remaining finely chopped nuts. Allow to sit out for a few hours to dry out slightly on the outside. Store cool and dry for a couple of weeks. May be frozen for longer, but thaw without opening to prevent condensation from making them soft and sticky.

Hazelnut Balls

Follow the same procedure as for Rum Balls, but substitute hazelnut liqueur for rum, and hazelnuts for walnuts.

Minties

These are a perfect for young children to make, so long as they can keep their fingers out of their mouths for the duration!

Minties

1 egg white
300 to 350 gm of sifted icing sugar (varies depending on egg size)
1 tsp. mint extract
a few drops of food colouring, if desired

Whisk the egg for a minute or two. Add mint extract and food colouring if used. Sift in icing sugar half a cup at a time, mixing with a wooden spoon, until mixture is very stiff and stops being shiny and sticky. Knead by hand if the wooden spoon becomes onerous. It should eventually have the consistency of playdough. This is the best part! Try to the resist the urge to play with your candy fondant for hours before making your minties.

Form into balls the size of a large marble and place on baking parchment. Leave them for a minute or two, then flatten gently with the tines of a fork. Or you can be more creative with your creations, making little animal shapes, combining batches of different colours, whatever you like. Just don't make anything too big or it will crack as it dries. Leave to dry for an hour or so, then flip over and allow the same drying on the other side. Store in a closed container away from heat and moisture.

Makes about 30 small mints.

Almond Crescents

These are another classic treat that we never do without at Christmas. We use fresh Rancho Vignola unsprayed almonds, blanching and skinning them before turning them into crumbs. There's not a lot of sugar in these, but there's more than enough butter to make up for that!

Almond Crescents

2 cups whole blanched almonds
1 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup icing sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/4 tsp. almond extract
pinch of salt
2 cups flour
an extra 3/4 cup of icing sugar for dusting / dredging

Finely chop almonds; a food processor works best. In a bowl, beat together butter, 1/4 cup of icing sugar, almond and vanilla extracts and salt. Mix in flour and almonds, using hands as necessary. Refrigerate one hour.

With 10-15 mL (two or three tsp. worth) of dough, shape into a ball, roll gently into a log, and then form into crescent shape. Place crescents an inch or two apart on baking parchment lined cookie sheet. Bake cookies in 350F oven for 18 minutes, rotating trays partway through baking. Cookies should be firm to touch and barely golden on the bottom.

Cool slightly, until cookies can be handled easily but are still warm. Dredge in remaining sugar. Place on racks to cool fully. Makes about 4 dozen.

Cranberry Hazelnut Biscottini

Yesterday we went an sorted, packed and distributed our wholesale dried fruit and nut order, bringing home a good hundred pounds to our own pantry. And thus the holiday baking has gone into high gear.

Cranberry Hazelnut Biscottini

We like these small so that they more closely match the size of our other holiday fare -- the truffles and the like.

1/2 cup softened butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tsp. grated orange rind
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1 cup dried cranberries
3/4 cup chopped hazelnuts

Preheat oven to 325F.

Cream together butter and sugar util fullffy. Beat in eggs, vanilla extract and orange zest until blended. In another bowl, stir together flour, baking power and cloves. Add to butter mixture and mix well. Stir in cranberries and nuts.

Shape into logs about 8" long and 1 1/2" in diameter. Flatten each log slightly to make a slab about 1/2 an inch high and 2 inches wide. Place on parchment on baking sheet and bake in 350 degree oven for 20-25 minutes.

Remove from oven and transfer to a cutting board. Allow to cool for 8 to 10 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 325 degrees. Use a chef's knife (quickly and decisively!) to slice the logs into 3/8" strips. Place back on baking sheet in upright position and bake for a further 15 minutes at the lower temperature.

Makes about 6 dozen.

Granola

About 16 years ago I was busy at home when I got a surprise visit from an old medical school friend. She just dropped in and we had a brief though lovely visit. It was one of those moments, though, when I realized how much I'd changed in the small handful of years since medical school. No longer playing the role of fairly straight-laced urban medical school student, I had become something a lot closer to what I am today. To whit: she interrupted me barefoot, pregnant, and mixing up a big batch of home-made granola. How much more cliché could it get?

I'm not pregnant these days, and my feet prefer the comfort of cushioned footwear in the kitchen. But my granola-making has gone even more funky and back-to-the-land. It's not store-bought oat flakes I'm mixing up. It's local organic groats, spelt and Kamut that I've bought in bulk and flaked myself in my hand-cranked flaker, mixed with organic coconut, raw honey, unsprayed almonds and fruit grown on our own trees and dried in our own kitchen. This is the recipe I'm using today. Gosh, fresh flaked grains make a huge difference to the aroma of this stuff! I'm happily imagining many breakfasts to come.

Root beer

We've done ginger beer a few times, using lemons and fresh ginger. It's wonderful and not very complicated at all. I think you can use large plastic soda bottles to bottle it, but for us half the fun is filling and capping all those non-twist-off Corona beer bottles we've been hoarding for years. They've held lagers and ales and most recently batches of ginger beer. Thanks to my friend Rosalie for turning us onto ginger beer!

Today we tried root beer. Traditionally sarsaparilla root was used to make it, but for most of the last century "root beer" has been made from natural and artificial flavours. While we have wild sarsaparilla (sometimes used as a substitute for the Central American variety) growing on our property the kids really just wanted something fun that was similar to, though less sweet than, commercial root beer.

So we started at the beer & wine supply store. We found a bottle of root beer Royal Old Fashioned Soda Extract and basically just used the recipe on the back. We mixed 8.5 Litres of water with 1 kg of sugar. Then we dissolved 1 tsp. of beer yeast in 250 ml of lukewarm water, then pitched that in. Washed and filled the bottles, then capped them. To allow the yeast to develop these bottles stay undisturbed at room temperature for 10 days, and then go to a cool dark location (the shop) until we're ready to drink them.

This root beer will be slightly fizzy, more like beer than soda. If we want more of a fizz, we can use sparkling wine yeast.

Taste test in a couple of weeks!

Feet up

A day with nothing scheduled for me and the kids! Erin went to work. Fiona and I practiced together. The other kids did their practicing -- outside, in some instances. Dirt got shovelled and raked. Chickens got fed. London Fogs got made, and drunk.

Fiona and I went for a hike. We collected special rocks, as usual. There was hula-hooping on the deck. There was a teenager on the phone on the deck for almost two hours. Said teenager also did four hours of practicing, so who's complaining? Not I.

I tried a slow, easy 6km run today. SI joint pain was a minimal 2/10 and I'm stiff and a good bit more sore afterwards. But overall it's nowhere near as bad as it was last week, so I think I'll do another easy run tomorrow.

Supper was green salad, sweet potato fries with curry yogourt dip, and Essence of Waldorf Salad. Mmm. We haven't had the latter for ages, but our Gravenstein apple tree is overflowing with crisp tart green fruit and I decided to give this salad a whirl again. The kids were fairly unimpressed, but Chuck and I loved it as always.

Essence of Waldorf Salad

5 large sticks of celery
3 medium-sized tart green apples
1 cup lightly toasted walnut pieces
1/3 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbsp. cider vinegar
1 Tbsp. sugar
1/4 tsp. salt
2 tsp. mild prepared horseradish
1 Tbsp. dijon mustard

Chop celery. Core apple and chop. Put apple and celery in a bowl with walnut pieces. Mix together remaining ingredients to make dressing. Dump over the salad and mix.

The Only Fruit Salad

I don't much like fruit salad. When I grew up fruit salad was pretty much limited to after a Christmas dinner gorge when I wasn't really in any fit state to enjoy any more food. Maybe that's why. For whatever the reason I have an aversion to pineapple, banana slices, grapes, tinned peaches, pears and mandarin oranges mixed together in a large bowl.

But this, this is different. This is the Only Fruit Salad I'll ever love. And gosh, do I love it. So does the rest of the family. We discovered it last summer. I couldn't make it through until August again without it, so I confess we're occasionally buying California fruit.

The Only Fruit Salad

4 nectarines
4 peaches
1 1/2 cups of blueberries
juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup sugar (or less, to taste)
1 Tbsp. fresh-grated ginger
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh thyme

The thyme is the odd ingredient here. It really works. Really really. This salad is enough reason in and of itself to plant your lawn over with thyme.

London Fogs

This family has become addicted to London Fogs. The kids and I are prone to drinking two to three a day -- each! They started out as a BC lower mainland invention, quickly spread to Washington state and the interior of BC, and we are doing our best to export the contagion elsewhere. Here is our recipe, refined for ease of production by children:

1 Earl Grey teabag
1/2 a mug of boiling water
1/2 a mug of steamed milk
1 Tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Set tea to steep with water. Steam milk and add this along with the other ingredients. Mix. Remove teabag and begin drinking as soon as the fog reaches a nice medium brown tea-like colour.

We sometimes use a Tbsp. or two of vanilla syrup, the kind cafés have on hand to make vanilla lattés with, in lieu of the brown sugar and vanilla extract. That's the official barrista way of making them. And because our dairy consumption has gone way up since we discovered these, we've recently begun making a soy-based London Fog premix. We make 2 litres of soymilk, add a 1/4 tsp. of salt, 3/4 of a cup of sugar and 3 Tbsp. of vanilla extract. Then all we need to do is combine one part Earl Grey tea with one part premix for a quick and easy dairy-free version.

We highly recommend London Fogs for greasing the wheels of family meetings, for improving math concentration, and for cozying up with for a readaloud.

Christmas Treats

Sophie has done most of the decadent Christmas baking this year, but this morning I decided to do up some fruit & nut balls. I had forgotten how amazingly simple and healthy (in a relative sense) these are. My recipe is essentially:

some nuts
some dried fruit
a little juice concentrate of some sort (frozen OJ works fine)
a little Triple Sec or Cointreau
some shredded coconut
anything else I feel like tossing in

Today's were particularly tasty. I used about:

2 cups of organic dates
2 cups of dried organic cranberries
2 cups of finely chopped organic baby pecans
2 - 3 Tbsp. Ribena blackcurrant juice concentrate
1/4 cup Triple Sec liqueur
1/4 tsp. ground clove
3/4 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 cup shredded unsweetened organic coconut

Chop fruit in a food processor until most of it is the size of currants. Adding a bit of rice flour may help prevent it from glomming up. Dump chopped fruit in a large bowl. Chop pecans to a coarse crumb-like size in food processor. Add to bowl. Add all other ingredients and mix well. Allow to sit for an hour or so -- any excess liquid will be absorbed by the dried fruit.

Squeeze into truffle-sized balls with hands. Roll in some extra shredded coconut. Leave to dry on a pan overnight before storing in airtight containers in a cool place.

Eat. Guilt-free.

Porridge morning

It was a good morning for porridge today, with the leaves starting to turn and a crispy feel to air, but our box of Red River Cereal was cobwebby and showing the telltale signs of invasion by little hungry six-legged things. I'd kept meaning to get around to dumping it in a mason jar, but somehow it was one of those things that never got done. So the last couple of cups (and any yummy grub-like things therewithin) went out for the chickens to eat. And I was left wondering what to cook up for breakfast. For whatever reason oatmeal porridge is not thought very highly of here, so that was out.

When I looked at the ingredients on the Red River Cereal box, though, I suddenly realized what anyone else with a Family Grainmill probably would have figured out at the outset ... I can make this stuff! So I threw in a cup of hard red wheat, half a cup of rye grains and another half cup of spelt. I cracked them in the mill. Then I ground a couple of tablespoons of flax seed, and tossed a couple more tablespoons of whole flax seed in.

It cooked up beautifully, just like the packaged stuff, but fresher-tasting. With a teaspoon of brown sugar and a drizzle of milk, it was a perfect fall breakfast. I can't believe I never thought to grind my own porridge meal before.

First crumble

It's hard to believe, from looking at this, that there was 8 inches of snow on the ground a scant 3 weeks ago. Temperatures are still cool here, but the rhubarb is loving the weather. Fiona's peas, chard and spinach are all sprouting. Our tomatoes and peppers are growing lanky in a friend's greenhouse.

Today we picked the season's first rhubarb. I had stocked up on brown sugar and butter in anticipation of twice- or thrice-weekly rhubarb crumble for the next month or so. We have four of these vigorous plants, all growing in clayish soil that shouldn't be resulting in such vigour, but we're not complaining at all.

How long does it take for rhubarb crumble to bake? One violin practicing (i.e. 40 minutes). How perfect! Now we just have to wait for it to cool a little and a spring rite of passage will have been completed.

With the May long weekend a scant two days away, temperatures ought to be a lot warmer than they are. Today hovered around 10 degrees C (50 F) at our place until well into the afternoon. Pretty chilly for mid-May. But tomorrow promises to be up into the 20's, and Friday and Saturday should be in the high 20's (around 80 F). It's about time!

Super Quick Rhubarb Crumble

1/2 cup butter
1 1/2 cups oatmeal
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt

1 cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
2 Tbsp. tapioca flour (or corn starch)
1 tsp. vanilla extract

5 cups chopped rhubarb

Place first 5 ingredients in a microwaveable bowl and heat gently until butter is softened. Mix together until well blended. Press a scant half of this mixture into the bottom of a 9x9" baking dish.

Mix water, granulated sugar and tapioca flour in a small saucepan. Heat and simmer until clear. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Dump chopped rhubarb over first oatmeal mixture in pan. Drizzle the sugar/water sauce over the rhubarb. Sprinkle on the remainder of the oatmeal mixture. Bake at 350 F for 40 minutes. Serve warm or cool. Warm with vanilla ice cream is especially yummy!

The big red machine

Thirteen years ago my affinity points at the area grocery store had increased to such a point that I was able to get, for free, my first-ever stand mixer. It was a white KitchenAid classic, with the 250W motor. Little did I know how crucial it would become to my kitchen work. When our breadmaker broke in a power surge 8 years ago, I discovered that with the mixer I could make bread with pretty much the same efficiency. And then, as fresh whole grains become more alluring and available, the addition of a Family Grain Mill attachment put the mixer to even more use.

And so for years the mixer was being used probably 8 to 10 times a week, whether for grinding grain, whipping eggs, kneading bread dough or mixing muffin or cookie batter. I was amazed that our little entry-level model was holding up so well. More than a dozen years of heavy, heavy use, including the toughest jobs of all -- bread-dough kneading and grain-grinding.

But it was getting cranky. The main pivot joint was getting looser and looser, bits of trim had fallen off, the enamel on the paddles was peeling, and the locking mechanism had to be held in place with a firm hand the whole time it was working. Still, we carried on.

And then it finally just burned out. Chuck had a go at repairing it, but there was something irreparably damaged in the speed adjustment mechanism. And while we considered sending it off for parts and repairs, that had huge logistical obstacles and would probably cost us well over $150 as well as taking a couple of months to get out and back. A new mixer, the Artisan, with a beefy 325W motor, was available to us for free in red as the result of ever-accumulating points. We caved in and ordered it.

It arrived today. I'm like a 19-year-old guy with a new sports car. Check this baby out! It will knead two big loaves of bread dough without protest. It does not need to have its locking lever stabilized with a hand while it works. It matches our backsplash contrast tiles. And oh, how it gleams! Here's what's on the go right now:

Cottage Cheese Bread

A high-protein family favourite.

2 cups of cottage cheese
1 cup of water
2 eggs
2 Tbsp. sugar or honey
1/4 cup of butter
1 1/2 Tbsp. instant active yeast
2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
Enough flour to make a barely-not-sticky dough,
all-purpose, whole wheat or a combination

Place the cottage cheese, water, butter and sugar or honey in a microwaveable bowl or small saucepan and warm ever so gently to a little better than lukewarm. Empty into gleaming bowl of swanky new KitchenAid stand mixer (or just any bowl) and pitch in all the other ingredients except the flour. Mix well.

Now pitch in about 4 cups of flour and mix well. Continue adding flour, a cup at a time, mixing in each addition. Use a stiff spoon to do this manually, or the dough hook with your stand mixer. At some point the dough will stop sticking to the inner surface of the bowl and will come away cleanly into a ball. At this point, add just a little more flour (half a cup to a cup usually), until the dough is barely not sticky to the hands. Turn out on a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes, adding small amounts of additional flour if necessary to prevent sticking. Or complete the kneading in your skookum red stand mixer.

Place dough in an oiled bowl, cover and leave to rise until a damp finger leaves a depression that doesn't fill in or falls slightly -- about an hour. Punch the dough down, reform a ball, and leave for another rise which will usually take about half as long.

Punch down dough. Grease two large (9x5") loaf pans. Divide dough in half. Shape each half into a loaf by flattening it and rolling it up into a cylinder, and place in loaf pan. Cover pans and leave to rise to the desirable height. I find this recipe rises very high because of all the yeast and gives a wonderful springy loaf.

Bake in a 375 F oven for 45 minutes. Remove from oven, turn out of pans and leave to cool for at least 15 minutes before slicing. This bread keeps pretty well and is great for sandwiches.

Kid sushi

Today our Ethnic Cooking Co-op (a.k.a. "Kitchen Club") did a quick foray into Japanese cuisine. We have a lot of bits of Japanese culture on the periphery of our lives. We have kids who say "sumi masem" and "domo arigato gozaimasu" at Aikido, and who have been raised in the Suzuki music paradigm, who have had periods of obsession with anime, reading Japanese kana, and who live in a tiny town with a significant population of Japanese-Canadians ... enough that until five or ten years ago Japanese was probably the second commonest language spoken here. Our grocery store, which is really only the size of a good convenience store, with a produce "aisle" that's a single cooler 8 feet long, has a Japanese food section with a choice of three different types of wasabi and six different types of seaweed, among numerous other options. They even had red bean mochi cakes (above, upper right).

We know sushi pretty well here, but I don't think any of the kids had ever rolled it for themselves. Pictured above are a couple of plates of their creations. I think they did very well!

There was extensive use made of the Buddha board over the course of the morning for practising calligraphy (mostly hiragana), and lots of origami was made. Strangely enough, these ever-so-appropriate side-forays into Japanese arts and culture were completely initiated by the kids. If the parents had suggested them, the kids no doubt would have found the whole thing contrived and teacherish and gone off to do something else.

We paired the sushi with a simple miso soup and finished off with delectable green tea gelato.

Green Tea Gelato

1/4 cup of loose green tea, or about 16 teabags
5 cups of milk
1/3 cup instant dry milk powder
3/4 cup granulated sugar
6 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups heavy cream

Bring about half of the milk to a simmer in a saucepan. Add tea and steep on low heat for 10 minutes, then remove from heat and allow to sit for half an hour. Strain out the tea and press to extract as much of the milk as possible from the leaves. Return milk to saucepan. Stir in the sugar and the egg yolks. Place over very low even heat and cook, stirring constantly, until a thickened custard has formed. Mix in the remainder of the milk, plus the cream and the dry milk powder.

Chill overnight. The next day freeze in ice cream maker or shallow pan, stirring frequently until desired consistency has been achieved. Yum!

Easter eggs

Today's baking frenzy seems to have killed my KitchenAid Classic mixer, the one that I've used an average of twice a day for grain-grinding, dough-kneading, cookie-making, muffin-dough mixing and various unmentionable warranty-voiding activities for probably 15 times as long as the warranty lasted anyway. But maybe it was worth it. One of the tasks we set it to, before it died, was this one:

Easter Eggs

1 cup butter
1 14-oz. can of sweetened condensed milk
1 Tbsp. vanilla extract
1 - 3 tsp. almond extract, to taste
2 tsp. salt
10 - 12 cups of icing sugar
1 tsp. yellow food colouring
16 oz. semisweet chocolate
4 oz. food-grade paraffin (optional)

Cream butter. Mix in sweetened condensed milk. Add salt and extracts. Gradually mix in 10 of the cups of icing sugar. Mix thoroughly. Your stand mixer, if not broken, will come in very handy with this.

Separate out a third of the nougat and add yellow food colouring to it, kneading it in a little at a time, and adding more icing sugar as needed to keep it from sticking.

Divide yellow nougat into 48 pieces. Roll each into a sphere.



Turn out white nougat and knead for a couple of minutes, adding more icing sugar as necessary to minimize sticking. Divide this nougat into 48 pieces. Press each piece flat and place a "yolk" on top.



Wrap the "yolk" in the "white".



Roll the egg in your hands until it is smooth and roughly egg-shaped. Leave to dry for a few hours, turning occasionally.



Next day:

Melt 1 lb. of semisweet chocolate over simmering water. Add a 4 oz. of paraffin if you can stomach the idea. Or not. If used the paraffin gives a nice glossy firm chocolate finish. We won't bother with it.

Using a fork, dip the eggs in the chocolate. Place on cookie sheet to cool and harden.

1-1-1-1-1-enough bread

Noah wanted to make some bread all by himself today. The kids have helped with bread-baking a lot over the years, turning the mixer on and off, dumping in ingredients, kneading, shaping and so on. But they've never really taken the trouble to figure out how all the bits fit together as a total process from start to finish. That was what Noah wanted to do. Soon he had two hangers-on who also wanted to do the same.

I usually bake with whole grains, but for this endeavour I gave them my most forgiving, straightforward recipe, done with white flour. They love French bread, which is a rare treat, and this dough will work equally well for dinner rolls, pizza crust or French bread. Each of the kids mixed up their own dough and made their own loaf.

1-1-1-1-1-Enough Bread

1 cup of warm water

1 Tbsp. oil
1 Tbsp. sugar

1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. instant yeast

... and enough white flour to make a lively kneadable dough

Add ingredients to mixer in order. Use dough hook to mix well. Knead by hand for a few minutes. Form into a ball and place in an oiled bowl. Cover and leave in a warm place until dough is well risen. When it's ready a damp finger poked quickly into the dough will leave a depression that will not fill in, or will sag slightly. At this point punch dough down and re-form into a ball. Leave to rise again. Second rise will take approximately half the time of the first. Punch down again, then roll out to a flat rectangle and roll up to form loaf. Leave to rise for about as long as the second rise, until the loaves look about right.

Preheat oven to 350F. Brush top of loaf with a mixture of a little egg white and an equal amount of water. Slash top of loaf with a sharp knife to a depth of up to about a centimetre if desired. Bake at 350F for 45 minutes.

Noah had never imagined that so much bread could come from such a small amount of ingredients. When I explained the recipe to him and he got his measly cup of water to start out with, he was pretty sure he'd end up with a bun. He was pleased to see that he ended up with a whole lovely loaf!

Grape stuff

After a week of colds, with appetites now returning, a fresh but somewhat decadent dessert seemed on order. This is one of our all-time favourites, though we don't have it very often, not being much in the habit of doing desserts. I used to work with a food service organization that did some catering, and this recipe is loosely modelled on something they made, though they tended to serve it in champagne-style dessert glasses, with an orange zest garnish, rather than as a blob in a stoneware bowl. Presentation aside, it's so simple and delicious that I have to share the recipe.

Grape Stuff

2 lbs. of seedless green grapes, washed and halved
3/4 cup of sour cream
3/4 cup of whipping cream
1/4 cup of sugar
1 Tbsp. of grated orange rind
2 Tbsp. of triple sec (optional)

Add the sugar to the sour cream and stir. Whip the whipping cream. Fold in the sweetened sour cream, then the orange rind and triple sec, if used. Fold in the grapes. Spoon into hoity-toity glassware or IKEA stoneware as desired. Serve.