Yep. Have to try this bread recipe. It was quite an adventure. Was going to get started making it when I discovered I had NO YEAST! No yeast. Didn’t seem possible in this house but there I was. Wanting to get a lot done so didn’t want to break the work rhythm to go get it. Picked yeast up in the evening when I was running another errand.

Mixing the dry ingredients together using the trusty Kitchenaid. No yeast was in here as I discovered later. Oops!

Innocently heating the milk for the English Muffin Bread!

Get home & decide to get this going. Mixes up super easy. Got the batter in the loaf pans. Set them aside covered with a damp cloth. Go back to check them about 30 minutes later. They haven’t risen a bit! Big failure! The recipe says it takes about 45 minutes to rise so baring a miracle these puppies are NOT going to rise enough. Glance to the side. There sits my brand new unopened jar of yeast! Oops! Maybe it’s not the recipe. Maybe it’s operator problem. Maybe I’ll retry the recipe in the morning.

Here I am adding flour still under the delusion I'm making bread.

The batter that I so innocently was going to rise & make a beautiful loaf of bread.

Nice & cool in the morning so it’s a wonderful time to retry a bread recipe. Again the English Muffin Bread batter mixes up easily. This time I try making it WITH the yeast. Suspect that will have a positive influence on the outcome. Check the bread in the loaf pans after 20 minutes and lo they are rising. Must be the yeast! The bread rises just as quickly as the recipe says & I slide the bread pans in the oven.

"Real" bread--you know, the kind that has YEAST in it.

Bread cooks for the required time. Pull out of the oven 2 beautifully browned loaves of bread. Oh yes, it is going much better today. Naturally, I have to give the bread a taste test. Slice off a piece as soon as the bread has cooled, butter it & share it with Sarah. It’s good! That’s our verdict. I have to be honest though & say that I’m not sure how often I’ll actually bake this bread. As delicious as it it, & it IS delicious, I prefer breads that can serve double duty. We enjoy using homemade bread for our sandwiches & this is not a sturdy enough bread for sandwiches. If you’re only looking for something to slice & eat or slice, toast & eat, you’ll be very happy with this bread.

All those beautiful airholes are what makes for wonderful toast!

If you’re an experienced cook, I’m sure you enjoyed my “little” mistake. Probably reminded you of a few of your own mistakes when cooking. If you’re a novice cook, take careful note. Doesn’t matter if you’ve cooked for 50+ years, there are going to be times when you make mistakes. It’s not the end of the world. Just try again. Sometimes when you make a mistake, you’ll like the results better, but not when you leave the yeast out of your homemade bread. Trust me on that one.

A collection of the blooming daffodils from our yard.

Flowers feed my soul. The beauty of them calms & centers me. The scent brightens my mood & brings a smile to my face.

My roses are blooming their heads off.

Knowing the importance of flowers to me, I have always filled my yard with them. With a fairly new house & yard, there are lots of nooks begging for flowers to be planted in them. Last year, I was too overcome with grief to add more than a handful to the yard. But this year, I have felt Jim nudging me to plant. He has been reminding me that one of the reasons we bought the house was all the places it had that I could plant flowers. It has seemed that the plants themselves are echoing Jim.

Even though it was a 3 year old plant tuber, I got ONE bloom all of last year from this peony plant.

I planted lily bulbs last year in pots. A mixture of Oriental lilies & Asiatic lilies caught my eye last year & I brought them home. Carefully planted them in pots & watched & waited. Nothing! Most of them didn’t even sprout any greenery! The ones that did only grew about 4-5 inches tall & refused to do anything else. The pots were as barren as my soul. But this year — all those barren pots have grown lily plants! They vary in size but all of the pots are full of lush green stalks. They are also loaded with flower bulbs. I no longer remember which bulbs were planted in which pots so it will be delightful surprise after surprise as they bloom.

THIS is one of pots of lilies that didn't even sprout last year!

Having watched all of this and knowing my feelings about flowers, Sarah bought me plants for Mother’s Day. While we were having our enjoyable day together yesterday, we went round to several places & I picked out flowers. There is a strip between the ditch at the bottom of the hilly front yard and the road that is a pain to mow or weedeat. My plan is to eliminate that strip of weeds with a little grass. Slowly I’m replacing the unruly weeds with daylilies.

The lily bulbs had multipled so much, one of the bulbs was forced up in the air. So it grew sideways & produced this lovely flower.

I’m not planting your common orange daylilies. I’m planting glorious reds, yellow, fragile pinks & bi-colors. I picked out 2 different colors of daylilies. Kept eyeballing some Knockout Roses. Everybody keeps telling me they need very little care. I’m about to find out! I picked out 2 of them & they are going to join the daylilies in transforming that ugly weedy strip into a thing of beauty.

A couple of chicken tenders sit in buttermilk.

I have a package of chicken tenders thawed out & planning on frying them for supper tonight. Sarah & I are talking & she asks the world wide recognized question: “Whatcha doing for dinner?” Now for those of you that don’t speak “teen”, that translates into “What are you cooking for dinner?” Next is the comment “When are you going to fix pretzel chicken? … in my lifetime?” Sigh. Mothers are NOT the only ones who know how to press the guilt button.

As I tell her, she’s in luck on her timing; I already have chicken tenders thawed. I don’t have any pretzels in the house so it’s agreed that it’s Sarah’s responsibility to make sure I buy pretzels on our way home from her piano lessons. Grab a couple of small storage containers & pour some buttermilk in one. Add about a cup and a half of flour to the other container & add some salt & pepper to it.

Prepared flour & a chicken tender

First the chicken tenders sit in a bath of buttermilk for a short time. Turn the tenders so all sides of the tender gets coated with the buttermilk. Next, the tenders are placed in the prepared flour container. For this container, I hunted up the lid that fits the container. With the tender inside, I place the lid on the container & shake until it has a light coating of flour on it. Personally, I prefer using a small, lidded container to using a bag, ziploc or otherwise. Gently removing the tender from the container, I shake off any excess flour & lay it on a plate. Once I have finished all of the tenders, I cover the plate & stick it in the refrigerator. Time to leave for piano!

Crushed pretzel bits

After piano, we stop at the store to pick up a bag of pretzels. A small bag is all that is needed. Once we get home, Sarah decides to be helpful & is going to start crushing the pretzels for me. Oh my! Removing the pretzels from the flimsy bag they’re sold in before trying to crush them is a wise idea as Sarah learns the hard way!

While Sarah sweeps pretzels up from the kitchen floor, I pour some of the pretzels into a heavy ziploc bag & proceed to beat on them with a hammer. It doesn’t take much effort to smash the pretzels. Be careful NOT to smash them too finely as you want to have the pretzel taste.

As the pretzels get crushed I put them in the small container with the lid. Yes, I washed it out for this reason before we left for piano. You might prefer a different method but I find I make less mess using the small lidded container. Once again, it’s a matter of placing the chicken in the container, putting the lid on it, shaking until the chicken is covered & laying the chicken out on a plate or pie pan to set.

Pretzel-covered chicken tenders

While the chicken sits, I start the rice and green beans. Nothing fancy with the green beans as Sarah is such a picky eater, I can barely get by with a little mild seasoning on can beans. As a long time Southern woman, an iron skillet is one of my favorite kitchen tools.  An inch of vegetable oil in the iron skillet and it’s just a matter of letting the oil get hot enough to fry the tender. Don’t crowd them in the skillet as the temperature of the oil will go down and the chicken won’t cook properly.

Pretzel chicken tenders frying in the iron skillet.

Personally, I find a medium-high temperature gets the best result when fixing the pretzel chicken. Let them cook all the way on one side then gently turn them with your tongs. The less turning you do, the fewer pretzel bits will fall off the chicken. Finish cooking the tenders. Then pull them out & drain them before serving. Then it’s only a matter of plating them up with the rice and green beans. The adults also had fresh home-grown tomato slices.

Dinner is ready!

Teaching your children to cook does pay off. This morning Sarah offered to cook bacon if I would fix some biscuits so off to the stove she went. Sarah has cooking bacon down pat so I’m not needed to supervise. I mix up & roll out a batch of biscuits while she cooks the bacon. We talk companionably while cooking & it’s an enjoyable experience.

She still has a lot to learn, but it gives me pleasure to watch her with activities like these that she has mastered. I suspect in the coming week or 2, we’ll dig out the cookbooks & find something new to cook together. Cooking with a teen like Sarah is a fun & relaxing activity as she has learned most of the basics of cooking. It allows us to kick back & enjoy the process while I throw out tidbits of information in case I haven’t passed on that piece yet. She either listens carefully or informs me she already knows that. It’s fun cooking with Sarah; I would suggest you try cooking with your teen if you haven’t already.

Our adventure with mahi mahi begins.

A few days ago, Sarah & I were in the grocery & mahi mahi & tuna steaks were on sale for half price. Now Sarah is an extremely picky eater, but she’s been working on trying more foods & really giving them a chance. She loves fish so lately I’ve been pushing her to try more types of seafood. It’s not as hard to get her to try a new fish dish so I’ve been having pretty good luck. Sarah was agreeable to trying one of the fish so I let her pick which one we would try. I think she was really enthused because she knew that like her, I would be trying it for the first time. She chose the mahi mahi.

We left with 2 portions of mahi mahi & me without any clue as to how to cook it. Don’t you love the internet? See, I wouldn’t have dared do that 10 years ago, because it could quite possibly been days before I could find a suitable recipe. Keep in mind, I have to stick to pretty basic & simple recipes when Sarah is trying a new food.

Mahi mahi sauting in the skillet.

At http://www.howtocookfish.info/recipes/fish/mahi-mahi.html I found a recipe for Teriyaki Mahi Mahi. Ok, this recipe has possibilities. Sarah loves teriyaki chicken so this might be enticing for her. I don’t have sesame seeds & decide to leave them out as I’m afraid they might make it harder to get Sarah to eat the fish. It’s a very easy dish to fix but it is a bit time consuming because of the marinade. It doesn’t take very long to fix but you have to allow 30 minutes for the fish to marinate.

It didn’t take but a couple of minutes to saute the garlic. Then I added the rest of the ingredients for the marinade leaving out the sesame seeds. While the fish marinated, I started a pot of rice. My family loves rice so I always fix a large pot of rice when I cook rice. Leftovers of rice are well received in the Spears household.

Time to melt the butter in the skillet & add the fish. Broil a couple pieces of toast & we’re set for supper. In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not neglecting Jim. He hasn’t felt well for the last several days & had a bowl of chicken noodle soup for supper.

Just waiting on the asparagus

The mahi mahi is a hit with both Sarah & myself. This really pleases me as she’s added another food to her acceptable menu. I also spotted several other recipes for cooking mahi mahi that I’m looking forward to trying.

Those little lumps you see are the bits of marmalade.

It’s another day when I pulled out The Great American Cookie Cookbook. See, this is why it’s in such bad shape; it’s well used. Turn to page 40 & you’ll see the recipe I tried today. Just not in the mood for chocolate. I know I know. That’s totally surprising, but sometimes I go for another flavor. The citrus aspect of this one appealed to me. Besides it uses orange marmalade. That sounds totally yummy. I love orange marmalade so that’s one point in its favor. Besides the sound of these make me think of Paddington Bear. I can just see him eating one of these cookies!

They’re not a difficult cookie to mix up & smell absolutely wonderful. The aroma of the orange marmalade drifts around the kitchen making me hungry before they’re even baked. They’re a drop cookie so with the use of the scoop, it doesn’t take long to measure them out. They smell so good while baking that Sarah & I can’t resist trying one before it has cooled down & been iced. Mmmmm is our verdict. Real anxious to get them iced & checked out. After all, if they taste this good without the icing…..

Orange Marmalade Cookies just out of the oven

While the rest of the cookies, finish baking I whip up the icing. A lot of the flavor is going to come from the marmalade. When the cookies have barely cooled off, I ice one & split it with Sarah. That immediately gets me a volunteer to help finish the cookies because they are so good. In fact, as we ice them, she announces that we will NOT be sharing these cookies. I don’t disagree with her as I’m having a hard time imagining voluntarily handing these babies over to somebody else. This recipe is a real gem. There’s no debating about whether or not this recipe will be used again. In fact, we ink in TWO stars by the recipe in the book.

Here are the little darlings iced & ready for the cookie jar.

The Great American Cookie Cookbook

Today I have decided to try a new recipe. On page 44, you’ll find the recipe for Malted Dream Drops. This is the one I’ve decided to try. All the needed ingredients are in my cabinet so I’m good to go. The dough is easy to mix & not at all time consuming. It needs to sit in the refrigerator for an hour so I work on other things.

As you can see, this cookbook is held together by tape.

It’s 2 hours before I get back to working on the cookies. I notice that dough is still a very soft dough in spite of being chilled.  Fill the first cookie sheet & set it in the oven to bake. As I pull the baked cookies out of the oven, I see a potential problem. The cookies have spread out a great deal instead of being a nice puffy cookie as the photo in the book shows. The first thing I do is check the recipe to see if I made any mistakes. This could be quite a problem as the difference in spread will not only affect the appearance of the cookie but also the taste. The cookie dough goes back into the refrigerator for another hour.

Malted Dream Drops are flat & spread out instead of puffy like they should be.

When the first batch of cookies cool off, Sarah & I taste them. This is our sworn duty & we take it seriously. The Malted Dream Drops are ok but nothing spectular. They have a nice malt taste but just don’t impress. We decide to reserve judgment until tasting the next batch. After an hour is up, I throw another batch of the cookies in the oven. The dough is a bit stiffer but still pretty soft. Again, no surprise here, they spread out on the cooky sheet. Again the taste test shows them to be an alright cookie. Our definition of an alright cookie is one that tastes as good as you get out of the box or bag off the grocery shelf in the store. If we’re taking the time to bake them, we expect more!

They didnt come out quite like they should have & still were decent, so eventually Ill come back to them & try again. If I can figure out why they were spreading too much, I know it would make a lot of difference in the taste. Perhaps then, Sarah & I would have a different opinion of them.

Pollock still in the pagage.

Sarah, my super picky eater has agreed to try it so I need simple and not too much added to it. Found what I wanted on cooks.com. Couldn’t have been simpler. Just a matter of simmering the fish in some salted water for 10 minutes. After that, it was a matter of covering the fish with cold water, adding vinegar & simmering for another 10 minutes. Melted some butter for it & it was ready. I think I should have used a shallower pot as my fish flaked too easily instead of staying together in chunks for dipping.

We solved that minor problem by pouring the butter over the fish & eating it that way. While I wouldn’t mistake it for lobster, it did have a nice mild taste to it. Sarah also found the fish agreeable. She did say it wasn’t one of her favorites fish dishes. I believe the texture would have been firmer and more lobster like if I had used a shallower pan. It wouldn’t have taken as long for the water to heat up therefore the fish wouldn’t have cooked as long. I would be willing to eat the fish fixed in this manner again although I’m curious to try some of the other recipes using the pollock.

The pollock & a baked potato was our supper.

Cupcake fabric

As a cook, aprons serve a very useful purpose. They can also make a statement. In my case, I have desperately been trying to find some cupcake fabric to make an apron. The fabric is very hard to find! I finally found some today & it’s adorable. Cute little cupcakes sitting on a pink background. Now I need to find the time to get started making aprons. I’ll also be on the lookout for more cupcake fabric!

With setting up a cakeshop, I’ll need a lot of aprons. Have no desire to wear the dull old white chef’s aprons. I know they’re practical, but I want cute, whimsical, fun. Have even found some awesome black & white fabrics to suit Sarah’s personality. There will be no question as to which apron belongs to who.

Valentine's fabric Sarah style

That is all going to change today! I am so excited. One of my friends from widowhoods is visiting family members in Marietta, Georgia. We have arranged to meet for tea at Chelsea’s on Thorton in Dalton. Two of her daughters are joining her & Sarah is going with me. I can hardly wait.

Sarah in her hat & gloves.

Sarah & I spent yesterday looking for hats to wear because. Well because it’s a tea & that’s what you do! She has even gone up into the attic & pulled out a box of her grandmother’s gloves. She has picked a lovely black pair of gloves to wear.

We arrive about 5 minutes before my friend & have a few minutes to explore. It’s a lovely older home that’s been redone. When the others get there, we sit down to a beautifully set table with linen & gorgeous china. No plastic plates are used here!

After being asked if anybody wanted cream, a small pitcher of cream is brought out for our tea. A lovely teapot of tea is served & trays start appearing with wonderful goodies. As was to be expected, we had cucumber sandwiches. They were not only tasty, but looked adorable as they are cute little heart sandwiches. In true tea tradition, all the sandwiches are crustless and tiny. The other sandwiches were pimento  cheese & chicken salad. All of them were delicious.

Sandwiches from our tea at Chelsea's on Thornton

Two stands were brought out, one for each end of the table. Besides the delightful sandwiches, the stands were filled with a varity of petit fours. Small scones with strawberry jam & lemon curd finished out the stand. I had heard of lemon curd, but never had it before. It was wonderful with the scones. I easily understand now why lemon curd is a popular filling for cakes. Certainly, I’ll be giving it a try soon.

The scones & petit fours are adorable.

My friend, Jeanne, was a thoughtful & gracious hostess. Sarah & I had so much fun that it was hard to remember that I had never before talked to Jeanne in person. While caution is important with the internet, I must say that the internet can bring wonderful friends in our lives that previously we would have never met because of distance. Unfortunately, Jeanne & I got to know each other through the common bond of our first husband’s death, but I am delighted to call her friend.

If you live close to Dalton, I would heartily reccommend checking out Chelsea’s On Thornton for tea. You won’t regret it. The food is wonderful. The atmosphere is charming & the service left nothing to desire.