Tag: 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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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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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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It’s the Season for Blueberry Cake

by Diane, posted in Recipe

Every year in late August, blueberries enter my house by buckets or boxes. This year was no exception, and I face the Gathering of the Bird season with 20 pounds of fresh, locally-grown blueberries in my refrigerator and freezer.

As usual, the fresh blueberries weren’t in the house one hour and I started making cake. The recipe I use has been in my family for decades. My mother made the cake for me and my siblings when I was a young girl. Where she got it and how long she had been making it before I arrived on the planet is anyone’s guess. The recipe could be 70 years old – Mom is 92. Or it may be older, a recipe made by my grandmother in the 1920s. Either way, this recipe makes excellent blueberry cake.

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Onion Soup Recipe for The Trail

by Diane, posted in Recipe

I recall years ago many realists complaining about fantasy stories in which people travelling by horseback ate stews and soups made from scratch over the fire. While I somewhat agreed with them, I didn’t fully agree with them. You see, I make soup all the time and while I’m not riding all day and building a fire to cook it, I know how to make it, and I’m certain it’s possible to do while travelling. All that’s required is the right circumstances.

A pot of soup feeds many mouths, and it doesn’t cost very much. All the goods (except one, the meat) can be carried without refrigeration and can remain edible for many days. The meat, however, will only last a few hours in hot weather unless it was first frozen and packed to keep it cold. On the other hand, meat is easily kept frozen for long-term storage when travelling in cold weather. Regardless of the weather, meat, such as rabbit, partridge or other animal, can be caught and cooked when needed.

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Fantasy Biscuits for The Trail

by Diane, posted in Recipe

Tam dug into his pocket and pulled out a biscuit. Isla stared at the food. She had tasted many types of biscuits in her life, but even the worst tasting ones filled an empty stomach. Her mouth watered. She rubbed the top of her legs and realised her hands trembled; they craved to hold the food.  ~ Shadows in the Stone

Biscuits have been around for centuries in one form or another. I don’t remember a time when I never ate biscuits—not the store-bought type though I’m certain I must have eaten a few of those over the decades, too. I’m talking about the biscuits my mother whipped-up at short notice to complement corned-beef and cabbage or some other type of supper.

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