Crafty!

I may have to learn to crochet, just so I can turn all those annoying plastic grocery sacks (they seem to pile up even when you try to refuse them!) into a cool tote bag.

What I've been Cooking

We actually ate out or ordered in a little more than usual the last week, but I still did a fair amount of cooking and baking.

I also thawed out the homemade egg-muffin sandwiches I made a while back and tried those out on a couple of occasions. On the whole, they are a B+. The egg and soy sausage and muffin reheated just fine. The ONLY thing I didn't like was that by the time the egg and sausage were thoroughly warmed through, the cheese was SUPER melty, just all over the plate. I think this was mainly because I used processed cheese slices. If I try this again, I plan to use thicker slices of "real" cheese and see if that solves the issue. I think just egg/sasuage would be good without the cheese, too. J. liked them as well, so I think it's a keeper of an idea.

Other things I've cooked or baked lately have included:

-Homemade half whole wheat bread. I pulled the dough out of the breadmaker to put into a bread pan (so you can bake the loaf without the hole that the breadmaker leaves in the middle), and it was really wet and sticky. Usually, in that instance, I just add a tablespoon or so of flour at a time until it's a little less sticky. However, I had used-- literally-- every tablespoon of white and wheat flour I had in the house. I'd just barely had enough to make a loaf. So, I baked it anyway and hoped for the best. It turned out quite good. Really nice toasted with butter.

-Curried lentil stew. I've made this before on the stove, but it was so nice to put it in the slowcooker and then walk away and do other chores. It turned out fabulous! I don't normally put tomato in my lentil stews, but I did try a can of diced tomatoes this time. It made the broth quite acidic, so I mellowed it out by adding a little honey and sweet spices (ginger and cinnamon). It was so good. And we have a ton of leftovers. Besides lentils and tomatoes, it also had vegetable stock, 2 cloves of garlic, whole cumin seeds, curry powder, other assorted spices, about a quarter of a huge Vidalia onion minced, about 3/4 a cup three-color-peppers, chopped, and 2 big carrots, chopped. Yummers!

-Whole wheat pasta with sauce & homemade garlic bread. Store-bought frozen mozerella cheese sticks with dipping sauce as an after-dinner snack, too.

-Lots of fruit salads. Between fruit we bought and stuff that has been left at our house, we've been up to our eyeballs in fruit, but I'm not complaining!

-Apple oatmeal crisp. I made this to use up some of the apples we had left at our house after a party. The crisp turned out a little too dry. The recipe calls for canned apple pie filling, and I used fresh apples, so I knew I needed to add extra liquid, and I did, in the form of lemon juice, grape juice, and honey. But, it still wasn't enough. It had good flavor, but because it was so dry, it would have been better served warm with vanilla ice cream. I didn't have ice cream, but luckily, I did have full-fat plain Danon yogurt, and three or four tablespoons of that went terrifically with the leftovers from the crisp.