Bunches of Berries in Bars

One of the fantastic things about our move is that I found a great wholesale fruit and vegetable source. I admit, typing that out it sounds lame. I'm okay with that though because this awesome place will have avocados by the case, 48 for $37.50, blueberries in 9 ounce packages 12 for $7-10, 12 ounce packages of raspberries 14 for $14, 10 artichokes for $8,  organic packs of produce that end up being $1 a pound. It's amazing and awesome. That's how these bars came about. We love fresh berries and were eating them by the handful. The kids were taking 14 ounce packs of raspberries for lunch.  I purchased 28 packs. Yes 28. In the end I had 3 packs that needed to be used up. We ate a bunch. I still have blueberries in my fridge that I can freeze for later also.

Coconut Sticky Rice With Mango (Pandan and Butterfly Pea Flower)

Coconut Sticky Rice with Mango, Khao Niew Mak Houng is something I've blogged before. Twice actually.
Here in 2008.
Here in 2013 with Forbidden Rice.

Butter Croissants

I use a combination of recipes and techniques from America's Test Kitchen and King Arthur Flour sites to make my croissants. It's a long processes but it's actually methodical and relaxing in many ways. You can find the recipes online. Here are some pictures of the process to show what I do.

BEST Hamburger and Hot Dog Buns

These bun are so very good. Every time I make them I wonder why I don't make them more often. Probably because my waistline would expand. We use these buns for pulled pork, hamburgers, French Dip, breakfast sandwiches, etc. You can shape them for sub sandwiches, chili dogs/hot dogs and sausages also.
The recipe can be found here. The dough for these can be made in a bread machine, in a mixer, or by hand.

Coconut Pandan Crepes

Coconut Pandan crepes

 Coconut Pandan Crepes, these lovely fragrant crepes. You can fill them with anything you like. Keep them tropical themed with coconut, mango, papaya, and other flavors from South East Asia. I used strawberries and bananas in the pictures. I'm on a pandan flavor kick. It's a bit floral, aromatic, fragrant. It's lovely, especially with coconut. I made a cake with it for Christmas so good, I've made that cake again just a couple weeks ago. I'll try to get that recipe up before next year (wink). It looks like this.

 Pandan or screwpine leaves, also known as pandan goes well with coconut many desserts are paired with these flavors. In Lao,  and also in Thai the leaves are called Bai teoy. They look almost like a tall grass. Fresh leaves are hard to find, but can be ordered. Sometimes you can find them frozen but it's not as flavorful. I have not personally tried the dried leaves yet. I opt for the ever easy gel flavoring. You can also buy a canned extract. If you use the canned, the remaining portion can be frozen in an ice cube tray since it isn't shelf stable. For these crepes I use pandan extract/gel. The extracts do have coloring in them. They are thicker like a paste, the bottles of essence I hear have less flavor. So I stick with the extract. You can find them both at Asian markets. You can also find many pandan flavored desserts in Asian markets.

Fantastic Five Grain Porridge

Instant Pot Five Grain Porridge

I'm on a porridge, congee, steel cut oats kick. I think it's the cool weather. Someone mentioned Pret a Manger the other day and how they had the best porridge. So I looked it up on their site and they have a five grain porridge, the site lists the grains, but not the recipe, though they have recipes for other things on there. The grains are what I had on hand so I set off to find a recipe or at least some clue on what to do. My search lead me to Bon Appetite. They have a recipe for this 5-Grain Porridge Bee Pollen with Apples and Coconuts on their web page. It has brown rice, quinoa, millet, wheat bran, and amaranth. Well I didn't want rice. I love steel cut oats. I didn't have millet. I don't really like bee pollen, I used to take it as a kid for allergies, so it's just not my thing now. I still wanted to pull grains from my pantry and see if I could make a mix of my own up. So you should use any grains you have also, just like the Bon Appetite recipe says, "Use what you have". Just pay attention to cooking times and water ratio.

Five Grain Porridge.

Instant Pot Jasmine Rice

Each grain stands on it's own, no mushy rice here!

Jasmine rice, basmati, most long or short grain white rice I cook with the same method. In a rice cooker I wash and drain. Add about one inch of water and press the start button. I measure with my finger, have since my mom taught me as a child.  I don't usually pull out my ruler, but I thought it would help for this post. For brown rice, I add a splash more of water. That's helpful isn't it?

Apple Cider Steel Cut Oats

Apple Cider Steel Cut Oats

It's just the right weather for hot breakfast isn't it? I like to send the kids off with a hot bowl in their tummies before school. Although I like oats for a snack or even lunch too. But that's me and the fact that I don't always sit down until about lunch time after I get the kids off to school.

Steel Cut Tropical Oats

Talk about "Throwback  Thursday", today I had a bowl of oats that was much like what I used to make for my toddlers and babies. Except of course, at the time theirs looked like this:

Jambalaya

Seafood Jambalaya.

 I have been making this same Jambalaya recipe for a couple years now. I got it from a friend online. It's fairly easy to make. I never posted the recipe because there is a bit of eyeballing and tweaking when doing this on the stove top for me. Sometimes I need more water, sometimes less. It's got a lot to do with how tight fitting your lid is on the pot, how much evaporation happens each time, stuff like that. It's not that it's a hard dish to make, it's that it's a hard dish to give concrete measurements for. You'll find that the more you make this the easier it is to tell just by looking in the pot how much stock or water is needed for  rice that isn't too wet. You also don't want it to be crunchy. The plate above I made on the stove top with a medium grain rice. The plate below I made in my electric pressure cooker, Instant Pot. Both methods take about the same amount of time, maybe a bit less time in the Instant Pot.

Blue Box Mac and Cheese (Instant Pot)

 So, I grew up eating boxed Mac and Cheese. It was an "American" food, so my mom didn't make it from scratch. It's still a comfort food for me. My youngest however, LOVES THIS STUFF. She really does. We have it about once every other month at most, but it's still a treat. We all like it really. It's so easy to follow the instructions on the box and do this on the stove top, but if you have an Instant Pot. I'm going to save you the trouble of washing a colander also. Because you won't need to drain this at all. I have done up to two boxes in my Instant Pot using a method that someone posted on the Instant Pot Community page. It's just so simple.

Strawberry Banana Pancakes

Remember these great Banana Greek Yogurt Pancakes? The pancakes above are the exact same batter with some strawberries thrown in. I think along with blueberries you'd have a great Fourth of July

Banana Greek Yogurt Pancakes

These pancakes are very simple. The recipe came about when I was trying to use up two old bananas and some plain Greek yogurt. Usually those items go into a smoothie, or into the freezer for a smoothie later on, but it was a cool, cloudy, rainy morning. I wanted something warm. These pancakes were a big hit.

Pancake recipes are pretty simple and forgiving. You could add an extra banana and use half the amount of yogurt if you wanted. Add some nuts for banana nut pancakes. Or add some pulsed rolled oats and add a little more milk. 

I'll be adding this to my rotation of pancakes, and "what to do with ripe bananas" list. They are very good, sweet, just enough banana flavoring- add more if you loooove bananas, and tart from the yogurt. 

Flour Tortillas

Bust out your rolling pin and lard because we bout to make some tortillas. GOOD ones. I'm sorry, I've tried butter, I've tried oil, I've even thought about bacon grease. But there's a simple fact for me. I don't make good tortillas without lard. There. I said it. Lard, lard, lard! See how beautiful those are, okay aside for the picture quality that is because, that picture sucks. But the tortillas are soft, and flakey. Sorry folks. That flakey goodness comes from the lard. Or it comes from lard for people like me who are not good at making tortillas with oil or butter. You can find lard at the grocery store, or you can most certainly render your own ask your butcher! I HAVE had success with using part lard part butter, more on that below.

Whole Wheat Greek Yogurt Pancakes

Whole Wheat Greek Yogurt Pancakes

Pancakes. Yum. Who doesn't love a stack of pancakes on a lazy morning? I don't often make pancakes on the weekdays, because I love sleep. Not that these are hard to make, I just love sleep. So we usually have pancakes on the weekend. The batter comes together quickly and the Greek Yogurt gives these pancakes a bit of a tart flavor, not a lot at all. For this reason I paired it with whole wheat flour. I think the whole wheat flour can stand up to a bit of zing and the texture from the yogurt is a tiny bit custardy. Which is perfect. I hope I explained that right. You should make these so you can see what I mean.

I served the pancakes above with butter, pumpkin pie syrup, and pumpkin seeds. But the sky's the limit here, top these however you want!

Pumpkin Spiced Caramel Rolls

I can't tell you how many times I've made these, tweaked this, baked these, tweaked some more. I mean really. It's one of those things where I would bake them, and we would like them, but I wasn't jumping up and down. I wanted some Pumpkin Spice flavor, pumpkin flavor, I wanted tender rolls, gooey caramel, then I wanted cream cheese glaze, crunchy seeds, no seeds. I finally tonight made some that I just think are PERFECT for us. I may at times leave off the Pumpkin Spice Glazed seeds, I may use a Maple Cream Cheese glaze. But the Pumpkin Spice caramel roll is so good as pictured above. The tender pumpkin spiced dough, the gooey caramel, the crunchy candied pumpkin seeds. SO perfect. I also have thrown the flour, yeast and heated pumpkin mixture into my bread machine to let the machine mix, knead, and proof for the first rise and it's worked beautifully. 

Here are some pictures of  my journey...

Gorilla Bread

This easy to make Gorilla Bread is perfect for brunch!

Hello everyone! It's so close to summer break I am getting antsy! By the time this post goes live my children will finally be on Summer break! We don't have any travel plans but I just can't wait to have my kid at home. What are your summer plans? I know we'll be doing lots of cooking and taking our lunches to the park. But other than that we'll play it by ear. One of the great things about being in our home is that there's room for everyone to be in the kitchen! It's been such a blessing. I'm hoping that the kids will get to cook more and more.

Manic Monday- Best Banana Bread Ever

This recipe was originally posted in 2008 here on Give Peas A Chance, and it's still my favorite recipe for Banana Bread. I just happened to bake them in a muffin tin for ease this time around. I hope you all had a wonderful Easter weekend! The girls are back in school, Spring break was so fun! I should get some pictures up to share soon! But really, I'm just shocked that I got around to posting a Manic Monday post!

Here's the link to the Banana Bread recipe.

Have a WONDERFUL week!
Looking for more Manic Monday?

Don't forget to enter the giveaway I have up also. LINK.

Coconut Forbidden Rice with Mango

Welcome to Manic Monday! Today I'm updating/reposting Coconut Sweet Rice with Mango. Instead of Khao Neow/Sticky Rice I used Black rice or Forbidden rice. We all really like Forbidden rice. It's a shame it's so much more expensive than Jasmine rice, this Forbidden rice is a short grain rice. I made this in the rice cooker, I didn't steam it in the Sticky Rice basket because it's not a glutenous rice (the kind I have).
My family likes both the Forbidden and sticky rice. Enjoy this very simple recipe. I'm sure different people have different ways of making this dish, but this is how my mom makes it and this is how I make it.

Nehm Khao- Lao Crispy Rice Salad

Lao Crispy Rice Salad.

Nehm Khao is a childhood favorite. It's rice that is seasoned with coconut cream, red curry paste, and my mom always added fragrant kaffir leaves and lemongrass. Lemongrass and kaffir leaves aren't traditional but my mom uses them and it's so very good. You don't have to add them, a good curry paste will already have these ingredients in it. You can also make your own Curry Paste and keep it in the freezer. The rice is formed into balls and fried until golden brown. The result is a flavorful crispy rice ball that is a great snack, and it makes an awesome Crispy Rice Salad called Nehm Khao. I used to snitch a couple as they came out of the fryer to snack on. When I was a little older my mom had me sit outside to watch the pot and fry the rice balls. The recipe makes a lot of rice balls. I would guess enough to make the salad for 6 servings, and a few leftovers to be eaten as is.