Category: Recipe

Recipe: Cinnamon Rolls

by Diane, posted in Recipe, Uncategorized

I don’t like cinnamon rolls. However, my kids do, and they keep telling me I make very good cinnamon rolls. Others have asked me for the recipe, so here it is with the instructions on how I do it. If you don’t make your rolls this way, don’t worry. I’m sure there are more than a dozen ways to make them. This is what works for me, and since everyone who has eaten mine wants more, I might be doing something right.

What You Will Need

1 cup of milk. I use 2% but whole will work just fine. I’m sure skim will also work.

1/2 cup of margarine. You can also use butter or shortening. They’ll turn out slightly different, but use what you have.

1/3 cup white sugar

1 teaspoon of salt. I use sea salt. The original recipe had 1 1/2 teaspoon of salt, but I thought that was a little too much.

3 teaspoons of dry yeast. That’s 1 envelope.

1 teaspoon of white sugar. This will go with the yeast and warm water.

1/2 cup of warm water

1 egg, well beaten

4 1/2 cups of white flour. I used unbleached but any regular all-purpose flour will do.

Making the Dough

Step 1: Put milk, margarine, 1/3 cup of sugar and salt in a sauce pan and warm until the margarine is melted. Stir to mix ingredients. Then remove from heat and let cool. It’s vital that this is only lukewarm, not hot, or it will kill the yeast.

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Replace Vanilla with Rum

by Diane, posted in Recipe

Every year around this time, I make carrot cake. It’s become a tradition. It’s a large cake, and I’m the only one in the house who likes it. I give about 1/4 of it away to someone else who loves it as much as I do, put 1/2 of it in the freezer to savour in January and leave the rest out to eat over the holidays.

I’ve shared my recipe for this cake here: Recipe: Carrot Cake.

This year, instead of using vanilla extract, I used rum. Coldstream Coconut Rum to be exact since that was what I had on hand. I was told a few years ago that alcohol, particularly rum, can be a substitute for vanilla, but I had never tried it. After reading a horrifying article about the future of vanilla extract, I’m looking for alternatives. Vanilla sticks are expensive, and rum is still needed to make homemade vanilla flavouring.

When substituting rum for vanilla, double the quantity. In other words, if the recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of vanilla, put in 2 teaspoons of rum.

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Let’s Make Brown Sugar

by Diane, posted in Recipe

One way I save money is I buy raw ingredients. It takes a little time to turn these raw ingredients into another product, but it’s worth it to save money and to know exactly what is in my food.

Brown sugar costs about twice as much as white sugar. I often get a 2 kg bag of white sugar on sale for $1.99, but I think the regular price is $2.99. One kg of brown sugar is $2.49. A 1.35 kg container of molasses is about $3.00 (that’s a lot of tablespoons).

If I make brown sugar instead of buying it, I’m saving money. And it’s simple. Fast. And is done to my taste, not the company’s. I don’t even need special equipment to do it. Just my regular mixer I’ve had since December 1996.

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Highly Persuasive Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

by Diane, posted in Recipe

After trying several chocolate chip cookie recipes, I stumbled upon one in October 2005 that made me set all the others aside. Over the past 16 years, I’ve made this recipe countless times. I’ve tweaked it here and there to improve it. Now, this is the family’s favourite chocolate chip cookies. It makes 3 1/2 dozen.

Cookie recipes are tricky. I’ve improved my method, yet I still think I can do better. That doesn’t mean the cookies aren’t good. They are delicious. I’ve seen mine disappear within 24 hours. My kids, their friends and even their ex-girlfriends love these cookies.

Step 1

Put margarine in a large glass or steel bowl and put in oven on the lowest setting. My old stove, original from 1972, has a warm setting, which is perfect to warm up the bowl and make the margarine exceptionally soft. Usually, this takes 20 minutes.

Step 2

While the margarine is softening like it’s a hot July day, mix in a smaller bowl:

  • 3 cups of flour (I use unbleached)
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt (I use sea salt)
  • 1 cup chocolate chips of your choosing (this might be sweet or semi-sweet chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, mini chips, etc.)
  • Optional: a handful of chopped walnuts or sliced almonds
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Warm Memories of Hot Cocoa

by Diane, posted in Recipe

When I was born, my family lived in a run-down shack on the outskirts of town. My bed was a drawer in my mother’s dresser. It had also been the bed for the brother who had been born 23 months before me and the brother born 15 months after me.

The shack, as my parents referred to it in later years after we moved into the house my father and old brothers had built on the same piece of property, had four spaces. I say spaces because while I don’t recall living in the house, my mother described it in a similar manner. It had a living room and kitchen combined. My parents had a bedroom that had room for their double bed, a dresser and a crib. The other ‘room’ was a space off the living room and kitchen, but there was no wall separating it. My mother had put up a curtain to create privacy and to block light from reaching the children as they slept.

A cinder block basement provided additional space for storage and beds for the four oldest boys. The outhouse was out back down by the large birch tree.

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A Special Find at a Second-hand Shop

by Diane, posted in garden, Recipe

We have a wonderful local second-hand shop. We’re only a village, maybe even a hamlet, but this shop is always brimming with donated treasures for resale. Sometimes I spend only a dollar. Other times, like last week, I spend over $10.00.

Things aren’t expensive. In fact, they are priced less than most yard sale items. Many of the things I buy cost between 50 cents and $2.00. That doesn’t mean things are cheap. Some might be, but most are good quality.

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The Ancient Practice of Making Bread

by Diane, posted in Recipe

Making bread has been a tradition for centuries. How many centuries? When I googled it, I found this: According to history, the earliest bread was made in or around 8000 BC in the Middle East, specifically Egypt.

This could mean those who built the Great Pyramid more than 10,000 years ago may have been the first bread makers. Where had they come from? Advanced societies, such as Atlantis, where they probably made bread for centuries before that, but all that history has been destroyed.

Up until about 70 years ago, one could literally live off bread and water, but the high processing of the grain that goes into today’s bread is far less nutritious than it was decades ago. With all the good stuff removed to make bread soft and white and bad stuff added to fortify it, it’s more like junk food and would never sustain life.

The ingredients listed for our local Ben’s white bread are:

Enriched wheat flour, water, sugar, yeast*, vegetable oil (canola or soybean), wheat gluten*, salt, vinegar*, soybean flour, calcium propionate, sorbic acid*, soybean lecithin. * ingredients may vary.

Canola and soybean are two of the worst oils to consume. While this processed bread contains 12 ingredients, real bread needs only five: flour, water, yeast, butter and salt. It doesn’t need a sweetener to feed the yeast, so honey (or sugar) can be left out. However, I put a dab of honey in mine.

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Recipe: Carrot Cake

by Diane, posted in garden, Recipe
This carrot is ready to walk away.

This year, I grew an abundance of carrots. I grew them in the multi-sowing pattern: three seeds in one hole. If you’re like me, you’ve been taught since your first steps in the garden to either drop one seed in the hole or (since this is carrots), scatter them and when they start to grow, thin out the weaker seedlings to give the carrot lots of room to grow.

Well, that’s not how Charles Dowding does it, and I’ve been watching his videos and following him for almost two years. He puts three seeds in and grows carrots (and other vegetables, such as onions) in clumps.

My experience with this has been extremely interesting.

I can’t say these deformed characters were the result of multi-sowing or the organic seeds I had sown. However, these are the most interesting carrots I’ve ever grown. My onions sown with this method grew normally.

More on this multi-sowing method and Dowding in a future post. This post is about carrot cake.

I pulled the last of the carrots from the garden on December 14th, the day before temperatures were predicted to drop below -10 Celsius.

I’ve made this recipe several times, starting in 2017. I found the original on the Internet and tweaked it to my tastes. The original didn’t include raisins, but I love raisins.

I’ll be honest, when I look at carrot cake, nothing in my body says, “Oh. Lovely. That looks so delicious.”

Then I take a bite, and my taste buds ignite with excitement, and I love this cake.

Carrot Cake

The last harvest of carrots this season.

In a sauce pan

  • melt 1 1/4 cup butter

In a small bowl, shred

  • enough carrots to make three cups – that’s about 4 carrots average size

In a small bowl, mix

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
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Cranberries: the little berry for every season

by Diane, posted in Castle Keepers, Recipe

Readers of this blog know I love cranberries. It’s a berry for every season, and it’s made it into my books on more than one occasion. Bronwyn Darrow, one of the main characters in the Castle Keepers series, shares this love for the berry. In my fantasy series, I call them fenberries.

When Bronwyn travels along a mountain range in the fall with Alaura, Tam and Kellyn, he picks a sack of the tart red berries. Not long afterwards, Kelly, who often made fun of his love for the berry, catches a turkey and cooks it over a fire and calls on him to share the sauce he’s made with the berry.

Here’s the scene.

Scattered Stones

Book 2 in the Castle Keepers Series

The following morning, they came upon the river flowing south. Without a word, they headed north on a faint trail. With rations running low, they hunted as they travelled and enjoyed feasting on the pheasant and partridge they killed.

Late one afternoon, Kellyn spotted a turkey in the bush and leapt from the saddle to give chase. Ten minutes later, she strutted back to the others, beaming and holding up her catch. That night, as Kellyn sliced huge pieces of the roasted bird, she eyed Bronwyn.

“Hey, Mr. Fenberry, don’t be selfish with that spread. This is the only time anyone should eat those tart berries.”

He had been picking fenberries whenever he found a patch and had gathered several sacks. The coolness of the season drove out the green worms and made the red berries pop with flavour. He plopped a generous serving onto everyone’s plate. When he filled his mouth with the sauce, he shook from its tartness. The sensation made him crave more.

As he lay back against his ruck sack and stared into the late evening sky, he tried to think of a better meal with better friends but couldn’t. His objective hadn’t been reached when he entered Tigh na Mare, but he couldn’t complain about the outcome.

Cranberry Sauce

Sauce, jam or spread, which ever you call it, is so simple to make, I wonder why everyone doesn’t make it fresh for their turkey dinners and sandwiches. Here’s the recipe.

Dump two cups of cranberries in a pot with 1/2 cup of white sugar and 1/2 cup of water. Simmer on low for 35 minutes or so. If it’s too tarty for your taste buds, add a wee bit more sugar. I simmer it until most of the berries have popped and the consistency is that of a jam. I don’t like it too smooth. I want to be able to see the berries within the sauce. Bottle this up, let it cool and toss it in the fridge. That’s it. Enjoy.

Another Use for Cranberries

If I want a thin cranberry sauce to drizzle over something, such as ice cream, I add more water than called for to the above recipe. I simmer the berries until they’ve just about popped, but there’s still juice in the pot. Then I drain off some of that juice, leaving behind enough to turn the berries into jam. If the juice is not sweet enough, I add a bit of sugar.

Taking this sweet sauce, I’ve added more water to make a drink for myself. Sometimes I’ve added a few raspberries or a shot of apple juice.

This juice is what Olive made for John in Northern Survival to give him a boost after falling ill. In the novel, she sweetened it with honey. I’ve done that, too.

Here’s the scene that mentions it.

Northern Survival

John rested his hand on his stomach. For the first time in days, he felt satisfied. While he had slept away yesterday, Olive had caught eight trout, four of which they ate for supper and four they saved for breakfast. She’d also found a patch of cranberries and cooked them to make a thick drink she sweetened with honey. He drank this eagerly. She’d made enough to fill his water bottle, and he sipped on that instead of water. The liquid, more like a syrup, excited his taste buds; it was almost as good as coffee.

She had also tended to his feet, washing them, applying ointment and ensuring they were warm and dry while he slept. When he woke this morning, he was shocked to find the nail on his big toe gone. The only benefit was most of the pain went with it. Before he put on clean socks and dry hiking boots, she applied cream and bandages to keep the blisters from chafing. Starting on the trail, he felt almost as good as their first day in the woods. A day’s rest was exactly what he needed to rejuvenate his energy.

99-cent Sale

This week, Northern Survival is on sale for $4.00 off. It’s exclusively at Amazon.

Kindle Unlimited members read it for free.

Zesty Cranberry Muffin Recipe

by Diane, posted in Recipe

cranberriesCranberries. They’ve been a part of my life since I was conceived. I’m certain my mother ate them while pregnant, and soon after I was off the bottle and on real food, I’m certain she fed them to me. I have never stopped eating them. If I had a penny for every cranberry I’ve eaten, I’d be a millionaire with growing investments.

Each October, we were sent to the woods with pails to pick berries. By the end of October, my siblings and I had picked enough cranberries to make dozens of bottles of ‘jam’.

I call it jam. Some call it spread. Others call it sauce. To me, it was jam because that’s what I put on my sandwich. If it was a successful pick, we had enough jam to do us until the following October. Most years, it was a successful pick.

While most endured the tangy taste of the red berry with turkey at Christmas time, I ate it every day. Every day. From primary to grade 12, I took a cranberry sandwich to school with me for lunch. While others were having peanut butter and jam sandwiches or egg sandwiches, I enjoyed the sour red berry squished between two slices of bread. Mmm.

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