I tried Honey Garlic Pork Chops last night for dinner. The marinade was very good, though the chops turned out rather tough. Because I baked them? Because of the less than sterling quality of the meat? I don’t know. But the kids didn’t seem to notice and snarfed it right up! I had cold leftovers cut up on a cabbage salad for lunch, and enjoyed the flavor again. Perhaps the marinade would be good on Costco meatballs for a quick and easy church meal or company dinner? Either way, with 4 ingredients and minimal prep time, I think this is a recipe I will use many a time!

I baked a loaf of no-knead sourdough bread (for sandwiches for Parish meeting tomorrow), an apple pie (also for Parish meeting), and an apple tart  (to celebrate the end of Tax Season and to take to Rose and David’s for dinner tonight) today. Ezra told me, “You’re like a bakery, Mom.”

I was alerted to this recipe by Mystie  last spring. I think she send me the link to this time-saving tweak, as well. When I told my mom about making yogurt a couple days ago, she asked for the recipe, so I thought as long as I was retyping out my own variation on the recipe I might as well get a blog post out of it as well!

Homemade Crockpot Yogurt

Ingredients:

6 cups whole milk, pasteurized (as opposed to the 8 cups in the original recipe – it made a little too much yogurt, so I cut it back a little and it still works)

 1/2  cup or more storebought plain yogurt with live cultures (after you make your first batch you can use your own yogurt to seed the next batch)

Pour the milk into your crockpot, set it to low and heat it for about an hour. The goal is to get it to 110 to 115 degrees F. If it gets too hot after an hour, turn it off and let it sit with the lid off until it gets to your target temperature. Similarly, if it isn’t hot enough.. heat it longer! After you’ve made it once or twice you should theoretically know exactly how long it takes to heat to the target temperature, but I always have distractions and can’t-get-to-it-right-nows, so it always takes me a while to get the temperature just right.  When you do, TURN OFF THE CROCKPOT. Use an instant read thermometer or a candy thermometer to check the temperature.

Dip a large glass cup measure into the hot milk to get around 1-2 cups of milk. Stir in the plain yogurt. Dump all of it back into the crockpot and stir it in.

Now put the lid on, and wrap the entire crockpot in a large heavy bath/beach towel to insulate it and allow it to cool more slowly.

Give it about 4 hours, then check it. If it has worked (and it should if the milk wasn’t too hot (which kills the cultures) or too cold(which never starts them working) to begin with), you’ll see that it has turned into your own batch of plain homemade yogurt. The consistency is different than storebought yogurt… I’ve never gotten it to a sour-cream like consistency throughout myself, though I’ve read that others have. One thing you can try is to turn the crockpot on for 10 minutes after it sits the initial 4 hours, then TURN IT OFF AGAIN, rewrap it, and let it sit for another 2-3 hours. I’ve tried this before, but like I said, never gotten it to a completely sour-cream like consistency. I noticed last time I made it that it “gelled” more after it’d been in the fridge for a while though.

Plain yogurt is like a blank canvas – what you can do with it is only limited by your imagination. I have a limited imagination. But my kids love it plain with brown sugar, or with sugar and frozen berries/other fruit stirred in. Probably my favorite is mixing it with a little brown sugar and some homemade granola or grape nuts. I like to eat that for dessert as an ice-cream substitute!

One of these days I’m going to try it with half and half – I expect that would be REALLY good… if somewhat calorific.

I stopped making yogurt after a few months last summer/spring –  I think we overdosed on yogurt after the first few months. But I started up again at the beginning of tax season. Just got the bug to try it again.  Maybe it’ll be a seasonal cooking item with me!

Judah grew pumpkins this year. That is, he planted several pumpkin plants, several sprouted, two survived and those two bloomed wildly all summer, finally producing one pumpkin each.  Considering that both plants were attacked and destroyed by powdery mildew, I think we can be thankful to have a whole two. When I mentioned to Judah that we hadn’t had much success with pumpkin growing, he responded, “Yes we did – we got two pumpkins!!” I guess it’s all in what you expect.

But anyway, we had two pumpkins, the first of which we used for decor, and the second of which Judah wanted to make a pie with. So, feeling very proud of myself, I got instructions off of the internet (where else?), and proceeded to spend an entire afternoon to make a from-scratch pumpkin pie.

We succeeded. We ended up with one deep dish 9 inch pie and three custard cups I lined with extra pie dough and poured the extra filling in. It was all good! The color was a little funny – more brown than orange, and the flavor wasn’t exceptional – maybe a little spicier than my normal pumpkin pies. The texture was good – not stringy at all. (I pureed the living daylights out of it in the food processor) In the end we didn’t have the 3 cups of pumpkin the recipe called for, but we had an extra piece of acorn squash from the night before, that I pureed and threw in and it worked out OK.

Now, would I do it again? Maybe. I’d like to try an actual pie pumpkin, as opposed to the jack-o-lantern variety we grew. Then I could make a real comparison with a canned pumpkin pie.

But I have this to say – with a pie pumpkin, it’d better be really good, or I probably won’t do it ever again. It’s not that it’s hard – all of the steps are fairly simple – but it makes an incredible mess! First there’s the cutting board, ice cream scoops, the bowl for the seeds, then the steamer basket and pot, then another couple of bowls and spoons to separate the skin from the flesh, and then the food processor – and that’s before you make the pie crust and mix up the final pie filling! It’s a TON of dishes!

It was worth it though. The kids really enjoyed it, and hopefully they will remember the afternoon they spent making authentic pumpkin pie with Mom.

Do you like your cookies flat and crispy at the edges? If so, this recipe is NOT for you! I like my cookies soft and poofy, barely done. I tried this recipe from Cooks.com and have been using it ever since. From what I’ve read it sounds like the softness comes from using half shortening, half butter, rather than all butter (or margarine). Some say, in the context of the great pie-crust butter vs. shortening debate, that the butter gives the cookie a better flavor, and I think they’re probably right. But, like I said, what I’m looking for is a soft and gooey cookie…

Soft Chocolate Chip Cookies

2/3 c. shortening

2/3 c. butter, soft

3/4 c. granulated sugar

3/4 c. brown sugar, packed

3 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla extract

4 c. flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

12 oz. pkg. semi-sweet chocolate bits

1 c. chopped nuts, if desired

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Mix thoroughly shortening, butter, sugars, eggs and vanilla. Stir in remaining ingredients. Drop by rounded tablespoons 2 inches apart onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake 8-10 minutes or until light brown. Cool slightly before removing from sheet.

This recipe is new to me: I tried it just this week when the Meyerdierks came over so that the Mikes could discuss Sunday School business. There isn’t much I like more than really good Fettuccine Alfredo at a restaurant – especially if it includes seafood, but plain is good, too. However, I’ve never been able to cook one myself that wasn’t too bland. The secret, apparently, is massive amounts of parmesan cheese – makes all the difference! Of course, that makes it more expensive, as well, because this recipe calls for an entire 5 oz. container (or block, if you shred cheese) of parmesan cheese for only 4 1 cup servings of what amounts to a carbohydrate side-dish. That’s pretty expensive by my standards for normal dinners, but it made a great company side-dish.

Internet recipes are a gamble. Sometimes they’re really great. Sometimes they appear to have been added by someone who… well, doesn’t cook.  I thought I’d do a blog “series” on internet recipes that I’ve tried that we really like. It’ll be a short series. Not because there’s not a lot of great ones out there, but because I haven’t actually tried that many.

“Yellow Rice Salad with Grilled Capsicum and Spicy Black Beans” is one of our favorites. It came from a very brief phase when I thought we would eat vegetarian one night a week to promote health and weight loss. Most of the other vegetarian things I tried we didn’t like, but this one stuck. The boys love it. It’s got a lot of fresh flavor from the cilantro, green onions, and green pepper. I do modify it of course – sometimes I have all of the produce on hand, sometimes I don’t. Mostly I always substitute lemon juice for the fresh lime juice called for (Ummmm, I NEVER have a lime on hand). And, since we don’t like spicy, I just entirely omit chillies of any kind.

This recipe was nice when it was 106 degrees outside because I could do the cooking part (the rice) in the morning when it was still marginally cooler, then refrigerate it until dinner time.

Also, it’s rather pretty, with the bright yellow rice and colorful reds and greens amongst the shiny black beans. If you’re looking for a cool, somewhat cheap, Mexican-style meal with a lot of colorful veggies – this is your dish!