happy?

Spring is here! The sun is shining again, tulips and daffodils have popped up everywhere and the supermarkets have beautiful artichokes and asparagus. Those of you who have been reading my posts as of late know that I have done my own little reawakening. Finally, I don't feel so much like a frumpy mama bear. I have lost the baby weight (never mind that my youngest is now 4), have more energy, am happier, and [drum roll] a friend who came by for tea last week actually went so far as to say I am glowing. (I swear, I didn't pay her to say that.)

In the process of figuring out ways to jibe my needs with my family's needs I have done a bit of reading. Two books, in particular, really resonated and have helped me to be more calm and focused on what is truly important to me at this life stage. The first, I cracked in the New Year. Since reading Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project, I have given it to several friends who agree that it's fabulous. The second, Sara Avant Stover's new book, The Way of the Happy Woman, is so thoughtful and calming. She is actually coming to New Canaan Library on May 9th and leading a mini retreat at Saraswati on May 14th. I know a lot of you reading this are my friends scattered across the U.S. and beyond so here are the other places you can catch her if you'd like to hear her speak or go to one of her workshops. I am excited to send a copy of Sara's book to one of you who might like to read it as well. Simply leave a comment below letting me know something you have done to bring more happiness into your busy life. I will choose a winner on Monday!

undies...recipes...it's all the same

I am belly laughing right now. Maybe that's because I feel lighter having (finally) vacuumed up the Christmas tree needles and put away the last stray ornaments, or because I gave in and went back to a nice cup of fully caffeinated coffee this morning, or maybe it's because this post my friend sent me is just so spot on. If you're reading The Happiness Project along with me, then you know that in January, you want to try to "toss, restore, organize". Undies, sweaters, toys, recipes...isn't it so true that when you pare down, you actually feel like you have more to choose from?

In the spirit of freshening things up a bit, I also updated the "Sites that Inspire Me" column here on the right (scroll down a bit). If you have other sites I should check out and possibly add, please make a suggestion here in the comments section. As with anything, I find the best ideas through my friends!

first pages turned in 2011

Now that I have finished up the last batch of Christmas cards (yes, you read that right so don't be offended, just check your mailbox if you still haven't gotten ours...), I cannot wait to delve back into the book that's currently on my bedside table, the magazine I am always excited to find in my mailbox, and the cookbook I am currently reading cover to cover.

Eating Together - The New York Times Food Issue

The New York Times' magazine is themed Eating Together this week. To say I am excited would be an understatement. If it's not waiting in your driveway this brisk morning, run out and buy a copy so we can read it together. Here is a peek at the first article.

The Recipe for Truly Simple Homemade Bread

I have to laugh that I am trying out baking bread. As a child, my mom baked bread. I don’t remember specifics about the bread, but I do remember jealousy at lunch time when my friends would whip out Ding Dongs and fluffer nutter sandwiches (on perfect, crust less white bread). And here I am baking bread for my children. Hmmm. But neither child is complaining. Yet.

Anyway, for those of you who would like to whip up a quick, healthy loaf for your family, as promised, here is Mark Bittman’s recipe. I personally thought the loaf I made last week with sunflower seeds (which we then smothered in veggie cream cheese) was best. But the kids happily snacked on this loaf all day yesterday. This go round, we added ½ cup of pecans and ½ cup of dried cranberries.

Almost No-Work Whole Grain Bread
Recipe from Food Matters by Mark Bittman (pages 156-7)
Makes 1 hearty loaf

3 cups whole wheat flour
½ teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons olive or vegetable oil
Optional: up to 1 cup chopped nuts, seeds, dried fruit or proofed whole grains

Combine the flour, yeast and salt in a mixing bowl. Add 1 ½ cups warm water and stir until blended. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it rest in a warm place for at least 12 hours. The dough is ready when it is dotted with bubbles.

Use some of the oil to grease the loaf pan. If you are adding nuts, raisins, cranberries, etc, fold them into the dough with your hands. Transfer the dough to the loaf pan, and let it settle in evenly. Cover with a moist towel and let it rise until doubled, an hour or so. When it is almost ready, preheat the oven to 350.

Bake the bread about 45 minutes, or until deep golden in color and it sounds hollow when you tap it. (If you have an instant read thermometer, usually kicking around since Thanksgiving, it should read 200 degrees when inserted into the center of the loaf.) Turn it out of the baking pan and let it cool before slicing.

Here are photos of the bread recipe in action for those who find them helpful:

The photo at the top of this post shows the bread the morning after, when it has risen. Hopefully the photo is clear enough that you can see it's more airy and there are tiny little bubbles dotting the top, compared to the dough I prepared the night before. So ideally, that's what you should wake up to. Then I simply tossed in 1/2 cup of pecans and 1/2 cup of dried cranberries;

and (lightly) kneaded them into the dough with my hands, until the pecans and cranberries were incorporated.

Next, I popped the dough into a lightly oiled loaf pan. You'll see that the dough didn't fill the pan, so I just centered it as best I could by shaking the pan a bit.

When I left the dough out to rise for the night, I just left it on the kitchen counter in the bowl covered with Saran wrap, as the recipe says to do. But, our home is really old, and really drafty, so the warmest place to do the second rise is in the oven. (This also guarantees that the second rising would only take an hour, since I knew the space would be warm and condusive to rising.) To do this, I turned our oven onto 200, let the heating process start, then turned the oven off after a couple of minutes. I didn't want the oven hot, just warm. Then I put the loaf into this warm oven and closed the door for the hour. As you'll see above, I also wanted the space to be slightly moist, so I covered the loaf with a damp (ran it under warm water then rung it out) kitchen towel.

And here's what the loaf looked like after rising for 1 hour in the warm oven, covered in the damp towel. Nice!

So, then it was ready to go into our second oven, which I had preheated to 350.

And here it is after baking for 45 minutes. Hollow sound when I tapped the top. Couldn't find our kitchen thermometer, so had to assume it was ready to come out. Bittman's recipe says to turn it out of the pan right away, then let it cool before slicing.

Here it is, ready to offer up as a snack on a snowy filled day!

Truly Simple Homemade Bread

I just put dough out up to rise. Yes, you read that right. I’ve never been a baker. Baking requires precise measurements, and usually having the right ingredients on hand…two things which often aren’t the case over here. I much prefer cooking, and relying on my sense of taste, texture as I create a dinner for my family with whatever we have in our fridge, freezer and pantry. But, there was a bread recipe in Mark Bittman’s book “Food Matters” that caught my eye. Maybe it was just the title that wooed me: Almost No-Work Whole Grain Bread. Whole Grain: super. Almost No-Work: I’ll give it a try. I first made this bread last week when I was meeting some friends for coffee. They are good friends, so I didn’t worry that I’d never made bread before. The verdict? Not only is this bread super easy, but it’s delicious. If baking bread is this easy, then I just might say I like baking too.

Because the dough needs to rise for at least 12 hours, this is a perfect recipe to throw together before you go to bed, letting it rise while you sleep. In the morning, add in the extras (raisins, walnuts, etc.) by kneading them into the dough with your hands, and then let it rise again for 1 hour while you workout, read the paper, shower, etc. The first time I made this bread, I added sunflower seeds. This time, I’ll let the kids choose what they want to add from our pantry stash.

Tomorrow I will jot down the recipe and share photos of it after it has risen so you have a visual in case you feel like making your own super easy loaf this weekend.

Cooking with Little Ones: Homemade Granola

I blew into town last night, just before the heavy snow. In case you hadn’t noticed, it was very quiet over here the past week, as I was enjoying a decadent week away with my mom where the only thing we had to worry about was which yoga class to take, whether to hike or take a breathing workshop, and whether to have dinner at 6:30, 7:30 or 8:00. Bliss I tell you.

Anyhow, local schools were cancelled today, which was nice because I hadn’t spent quality time with my children in a week. On my flights home, I had earmarked all sorts of recipes from Mark Bittman’s book, Food Matters, and jotted down this elaborate shopping list, excited to launch back into cooking after being cooked for for the past fifteen meals.

After the novelty of making Valentines wore off, my littlest one wanted to cook together. Truth be told, he wanted cookies, and I think he figured asking to cook together just might make a couple dozen appear. No such luck on Day 1 back from the spa. But close, since oats/butter/sugar/flour were some of the only things on hand. I’d left the home stocked with plentiful frozen meals and enough fruits and veggies to last the week, intending to do a major marketing run upon my return. But the snow was keeping us in, so I honed in on a recipe that we could whip up together with what we did have on hand…and this recipe happens to also be perfect for little hands because it involves dumping and stirring, that’s it. Today I tried Mark Bittman’s granola recipe, which is very similar to the one I posted a couple of months back, minus the olive oil and his has a higher proportion of oats to nuts/coconut.

Anything Goes Granola from Food Matters by Mark Bittman
Makes a lot of granola!

5 cups of rolled oats
3 cups of mixed nuts (we used walnuts, pecans, and slivered almonds)
1 cup of shredded, unsweetened coconut
Cinnamon, to taste
½ - 1 cup of agave or honey (we used half of each and probably put ¾ cup in)
Sea salt, dash of
Vanilla (but we didn’t have any on hand)
1 cup of raisins (which we also didn’t have, so we used cranberries)

Preheat oven to 350. Mix rolled oats, nuts, coconut, cinnamon, honey, sea salt in a big bowl. Spread the mixture on a rimmed cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes, stirring once or twice during the cook time. Once it comes out of the oven, stir in the raisins (or cranberries). Cool and then store in an airtight container.

Mark says that it will “keep indefinitely in the fridge” but I think we’ll blow through this batch in the next few days. Excellent eaten plain for a snack (if you have a vacuum nearby), eaten like cereal, or made into yogurt parfaits.

Personalized Holiday Gifts: Books for Everyone! Easy, DIY guide

Holiday Gift-Giving Themes: Easy, Inexpensive, Personalized Gift Books
Holiday gift-giving and shopping can be one of the most exhausting, least enjoyable parts of the Christmas and holiday season. But present shopping can also be great fun with holiday gift-giving themes. Here's one: books.
Read More

Sticking with what I know

I love cooking magazines. Every year, I switch up the ones to which I subscribe. Given the hundreds of recipes I have filed by category in notebooks (yes, you read that right), I need new recipes like a hole in the head. And sometimes the magazines pile up and two months pass from the publication date before I actually get enough peace and quiet to crack the magazine open. But still, I love those cooking magazines. This fall, my little one is taking swim lessons so I've had the chance to slip a cooking magazine in my purse, and spend a weekly half hour relishing these magazines.

Well. Yesterday I made a shopping list from the recipes I’d torn from the magazines, and set about to cooking what I thought would be three fabulous new dishes for my family. I had to make a special trip to the supermarket because I never have things like liquid eggs that come in a carton, or refrigerated bread dough that comes in a tube. That should have been clue #1 that I should have stopped right there. But the pictures in the magazines looked so pretty….

I won’t even touch on the disaster that was the sausage thingies. The whole process of dealing with the sticky artificial dough grossed me out…and I put too much of my yummy filling (my adaptation of the recipe) inside so the thing wouldn’t roll the way it was supposed to. So, I just folded it into a blob and stuck it in the oven. Never mind that my husband came home to this baked blob on the counter and proclaimed it really good. That recipe was tossed before I even took a photo.

The "Seafood Cakes with Mustard Crema" from Cooking Light’s October 2009 issue weren’t much better. When I served them last night, they looked pretty (just like in the magazine photo) but it was too much effort for too little taste.

Then there was this morning’s attempt to send my husband and older child off on their (rainy, gray) father-son Y Guide campout with some fortification: "Ham and Cheese Corn Muffins". Listed under the Bake Ahead and Freeze category (again in the October 2009 issue of Cooking Light), I thought they sounded brilliant. Perhaps a new weekday breakfast to add to the repertoire? No. They are like tasteless yellow balls. Totally not worth the effort. And tell me again why I had to buy eggs in a milk carton instead of cracking the real deal?!

So, I still have this affinity for the cooking magazines, but I think I will go back to simply ogling the photos and relying on my own mom-a-licious sense of flavor combinations, texture and-- most important—simplicity when cooking for my family. And if I ever do feel like following a recipe to the letter, then I've got hundreds of tried and true ones just waiting for me.

"If no one's in the kitchen, who's to see?"

Last night I got to see the movie "Julie and Julia". While I attempted twice to read the book, Julia and Julia, I could never get through the first chapter. But the movie was fun. (Shocking, I know, that I would love a movie about food and/or Julia Child…) Afterwards, we went to local French place, Bistro 44, because what other kind of food would you crave after a movie like that? The chef/owner, Alain, cooked a scrumptious dinner for our out of town guests one of the nights leading up to Jeff and my wedding celebration—wow, was that really that many years ago? Anyway, Alain still has his way with food, and the Bordeaux, escargot, halibut in lobster sauce (with a side of pommes frites, of course) and floating island were a perfect way to end a night of babysitting.

If any of you are caught up in the Julia wave these days, I highly recommend “Appetite for Life – The Biography of Julia Child”. In addition to being a phenomenal cook, the background of how Julia got to be this icon of fine food is so interesting...particularly since Julia didn’t even start cooking until she was 40 and her TV career didn’t take off until she was in her fifties! So, for all you moms wondering what to do when your little ones head off to school, imagine all of the possibilities for your second career!