I happened to find some zucchini at Meijer last night, so I made zucchini bread. Last week when I made banana bread, I made two loaves and three mini-loaves. The two big loaves went with me to jury duty, but only one got eaten. So for the whole weekend I had a delicious breakfast/midnight snack ready and waiting. That was the idea behind making the zucchini bread, but I can already tell its not going to last that long.

Tomorrow ends my stint in jury duty. It was a short week but strangely enough we members of the jury have bonded in our time together, despite the fact that nobody seems to know anybody else's name. The best way I can describe it is to say that its like an extended field trip in high school.

Yesterday I made muffins for Tuesday morning breakfast and a Monday night snack. I used the sour cream muffin recipe, added a tablespoon of lemon juice and a small package of blueberries.

I finally got around to it. This morning I woke up at 10am, went the store to buy some milk because I didn't have enough and then got on with the recipe.

3 cups warm milk (105 to 115 degrees)
1 envelope active dry yeast
1 1/2 sticks of butter, melted then cooled to lukewarm
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs, yolks and whites separated
2 teaspoons vanilla
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
4 cups all-purpose flour

Add the yeast to the warm milk and let stand for 5 minutes. I am pretty sure if the milk is too warm it will hamper the yeast's activity. So I used a small thermometer to make sure I was at least near the right range. Unlike a yeast dough recipe you're not going to see the yeast foam after 5 minutes but that is ok. Whisk the milk until smooth. When your melted butter is lukewarm, add that to your milk and whisk.

Add the sugar. When you add the sugar you should be able to hear the yeast crackle in celebration. The sugar is food for them. If that doesn't happen, you might be in big trouble. Add the egg yolks, whisk, then add the salt and vanilla and whisk until smooth.

Then you need to add your 4 cups of flour in three installments. Beat until smooth between each addition. Your final batter should be thicker than waffle batter but still pourable. You'll be able to scrape it away clean from the sides, as it will stick to your beating spoon like a runny dough.

Cover with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature for 1- 1 1/2 hours, until the batter has doubled in size. Beat your 3 egg whites with an electric mixer until soft peaks form (aka really foamy). Remove the plastic wrap from your batter and fold in the egg whites with a large spoon.

Fire up the waffle iron and enjoy. This makes 12 delicious, but pretty heavy waffles. I think you can store the batter, provided you let it come to room temperature before you use it again. The waffles taste similar to a waffle cone. At least that is what Lauren says. I topped mine with strawberry syrup and whipped cream.

Well, I had hoped to be posting about Belgian Waffles right now but my weekend didn't really work out like that. Lauren had to go into work Saturday morning and I had soccer at 12:30 so there was no opportunity for an elaborate breakfast.

Sunday brunch was the next plan, so I made sure to pick up eggs, flour, syrup and toppings from Meijer. But when I opened my cook book I realized I had already made a terrible error. Belgian waffles, true Belgian waffles, use yeast. Which means the batter needs time to proof. The recipe is something like this:

1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
3 egg yolks
2 3/4 cups warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
3/4 cup butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm
1/2 cup white sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups all-purpose flour
3 egg whites
Activate the yeast in the warm milk, set aside for 5 minutes. Then combine only the wet ingredients, followed by only the dry ingredients, then add the ingredients together and let sit for an 60-90 minutes until doubled in size.

But we were hungry now, so we scrapped the Belgian waffle idea and just made regular waffles from scratch:

• 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/8 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 1/2 cups milk, at room temperature
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature, separated
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup unsalted butter, melted, plus more for brushing the iron
• 1 large egg white, at room temperature
• 1/4 cup sugar

We mixed a mashed banana and chocolate chips into our batter. The result was great. It was also cool to be able to use a waffle iron in the comfort of my own kitchen and not the breakfast area of a hotel lobby with a hundred kids in soccer gear wreaking havoc in every direction.

I am going to try to talk Lauren into Belgian Waffles for dinner later this week, but I suspect I'll have to wait for Saturday morning. What I really want is to try chicken and waffles.

I haven't been doing a whole lot of cooking this past week. At least not new cooking. We did French Toast and Macaroni & Cheese for some easily stored on the go meals but that was about it. Part of our Valentine's Day weekend was to avoid cooking. So we went out for dinner Friday and Saturday night, but Saturday morning I managed to squeeze in a MacGyver breakfast in part because Lauren never brought her waffle iron back from work.

The result was cheese omelets:

2 eggs
1 tbsp butter
1 8 or 10 inch non-stick skillet
salt & pepper

Add butter to the skillet and heat until slightly brown. crack 2 eggs, beat with a fork, add salt & pepper to taste, then add to skillet. While the egg begins to form to take your fork and stir the eggs without scraping the bottom of the skillet. With your other hand shake the pan back and forth. It is somewhat like patting your head and rubbing your stomach. To get comfortable with this you may need to remove the skillet from the heat. Thats not problem just periodically put it back on to keep the egg cooking. After about a minute, take your fork and run it around the edge of your egg to set the boundary. After another 30 seconds, lift one edge of the egg and tilt the pan towards the opening to let some excess egg run off. Why? I don't really know. I'll let Alton Brown explain below. But once you've run off some of the excess egg, let it cook on medium heat for 10-20 seconds (depending on your preference), then add your toppings, cook for and additional 10-20 seconds, fold and serve.

For my omelette I used Mozzarrella, Parmesan and Provolone. Thats the cheese we had on hand from the lasagna. Lauren didn't care for her because of the Parmesan, so I got to eat mine plus a half of hers.

As far as how you cook them, if the instructions were not clear enough, here is the Good Eats episode that will show you how it's done. For what its worth I didn't bother with warming the eggs before I started, so my omelet may not have been as delicate as Alton Browns, but it wasn't scrambled eggs either. I also didn't bother with all the nonsense about what kind of spatula is best. I used a fork for everything. To see the important omelet related stuff for Alton Brown, skip to about the 9 minute mark of the video above.

Borne primarily out of laziness and the hatred of single digit temperatures I have begun a weekend tradition I'm calling The MacGyver Breakfast. It consists of me waking up, wandering aimlessly around the kitchen opening and closing the refrigerator door several times, taking note of what I do and do not have to work with.

When I've keyed in on at least one bountiful ingredient I open up my Joy of Cooking cookbook and check the back pages for recipes utilizing that ingredient. When I opened the fridge last Saturday I couldn't get my mind off the bottle of lemon juice I had purchased the week before when I made chicken salad. I wanted pancakes, I wanted them to have flavor but all I had was lemon. That is when I discovered


Lemon Pancakes:

Dry Ingredients
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

Wet Ingredients
3/4 cup sour cream
1/3 cup milk
lemon zest
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 tablespoons butter (melted)
1 egg 1
1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Mix the dry ingredients with a wisk, in a separate bowl mix all the wet ingredients until it becomes a milk-like consistency. By hand quickly mix the wet ingredients with the dry for 15-20 seconds. The batter will be light and airy. Do not overmix the batter or the pancakes will be dense and not nearly as good. Heat a skillet and make pancakes.

These pancakes are awesome on their own, but the next time I plan on making them I'm going to throw in some blueberries. I didn't bother with the lemon zest since I was using bottled lemon juice.

This post isn't done yet. A couple weeks ago I had a similar, but far less spectacular, experience with sour cream. The night before Lauren and I had made some white chicken chili and as a result had most of a 16 oz container of sour cream left in the fridge. So when I went rummaging through it the next morning looking for potential breakfast items I couldn't get my mind off of the sour cream. It might be weeks before we do anything else with sour cream and I just don't trust expiration dates, especially when the container in question costs about $1.50.

So once again I opened up The Joy of Cooking and discovered an excellent use for the ingredients I had on hand.

Sour Cream Muffins:

Dry Ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Wet Ingredients
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
2/3 cup brown sugar (packed)
1/2 stick butter (melted)
1 teaspoon vanilla

Bake at 350 or 375 for 10-12 minutes, or until you can stick a fork in the middle and have it come out clean.

This is an excellent base muffin recipe. The sour cream and brown sugar keep the middle and muffin top nice and moist. They are pretty good on their own but a bit less sweet than you might expect. My suggestion here would be to add either lemon and blueberries or banana and walnuts to the muffin batter to round out the taste.

Other sour cream muffin addition possibilities include Snickerdoodle (pictured), cherry & peach, apple cinnamon and chocolate.

Sour cream is pretty awesome.

Here is a recipe for some awesome French Toast. It freezes extremely well, so you can make it on Sunday, freeze it and then pop it in the toaster in the morning before work. I do this about once a month but the French Toast only lasts about 3 days. I didn't think to take a picture of the fresh product, so this is a picture of the freezer bag. It looks like it has freezer burn, but thats just some moisture from the French Toast. I put it in while it was still warm.







6 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
Cinnamon, optional
1 loaf Texas Toast sliced white bread

Mix together all ingredients except bread slices. Dip bread in the egg mixture,
coating both sides. Place on heated griddle and cook until golden. Turn and
cook opposite side until golden. Serve immediately with your favorite topping.

So this morning we tried our hand at Chocolate Chip Scones, or at least she did. I mostly watched while I washed dishes. The recipe was as follows:



1 3/4 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 1/4 tsp baking powder
1 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 cup cold butter
2 eggs
1/3 c heavy cream

Sift flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt together into a large bowl. Cut butter into small pea sized cubes. Mix into dry ingredients with pastry blender. Beat eggs in a separate bowl. Reserve 2 Tbsp of egg. Beat cream into the remaining egg. Make a well in the dry ingredients. Pour in the liquid and combine with a few rapid strokes. Handle the dough as little as possible. Place it on a lightly floured board. Flour hands, and pat dough to 3/4 inch thick. Cut into diamonds, squares, or whatever shapes you want. Brush with reserved egg and sprinkle with salt or sugar. Bake 15 minutes at 450.

We added chocolate chips, or rather shavings of bittersweet chocolate from a baker's block because we didn't have chocolate chips.

Warm scones are delicious.

I had breakfast for dinner last night. French toast with a side of sausage. It was awesome. I haven't made this French Toast in a while, but the best part about it is how well it freezes. I can make the full recipe on Sunday night, freeze it and have breakfast on the go for the rest of the week. Just turn the toaster dial about halfway (so it heats for about 2-3 minutes), put your frozen French toast in and you're done.

I think the original recipe is from Great Harvest Bread Company, but since they seem to be dying off where I live I am going to claim it as my own.

I use Texas Toast for this recipe. I mention this because usually when I tell someone this recipe they either don't know you can buy Texas Toast at the grocery store or they get confused and think I'm disgusting for using garlic bread to make my French Toast. With the internet and hyperlinks I can quickly illustrate the difference.

6 eggs
1 1/2 cups milk, can be skim or any other
1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons orange juice
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
Cinnamon, optional
Nutmeg, optional

Mix everything together, batter your bread, throw it on the griddle and cook until golden brown. It will make an entire loaf of Texas Toast (plus an additional 3-5 pieces), which is roughly twice the thickness of normal bread.

Last night we used our Saturday night food experiment to revisit last weekend's sticky bun nightmare. During the week in between I got a tried and true recipe from the mother of a friend, and used that to make our dough (using all-purpose flour only).









SWEET YEAST DOUGH

2pk (1/4 oz. each) active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
3 Eggs
1/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 cup buttermilk or sour milk
1/2 cup melted butter or vegetable oil
3 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup wheat germ

Note: All-purpose flour can be substituted for wheat flour and germ, in roughly the same quantity--then you can skip the step of combining them in a separate bowl. Sprinkle the yeast over the warm water in a small bowl, stir, and let stand until soft, about 5 minutes. Reserve.

In a large bowl, combine eggs, sugar, salt, baking soda, buttermilk, and butter, and beat till smooth. Stir in reserved yeast. In a separate bowl, combine the flours and wheat germ. Then add 3 cups of the dry mixture to the wet ingredients, beating until well blended. Add 2 more cups of the dry ingredients and beat until the dough just holds together. Turn out onto a lightly floured board and knead for 1 minute. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Knead the dough again, sprinkling on the remainder of the flour mixture as needed, until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, turn, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place until about doubled in bulk, about 60 minutes.

From this point on, we finished using Bobby Flay's filling and sticky bun goo, but that only accounted for half of the dough. The awesome thing about this dough recipe is that its versatile enough to make cinnamon rolls or sticky buns, you just need to decide for yourself how you finish once the dough has risen and has been rolled out.

These buns sticky buns are cartoonishly large, to the point that you might suspect they'd been stolen by a cartoon character from a window sill in the deep south. This recipe makes 12 rolls, so we used six last night to make sticky buns and saved six for Monday morning to make cinnamon rolls. All we'll need for that is to bake the rolls, take some softened cream cheese and mix it with a small amount of milk and confectioner's sugar to make a topping.

Thank you Rebecca and thank you Cindy for helping me out on this.

(By the way, here is the rest of that recipe:)

Punch the risen dough down and turn it out onto a lightly floured surface. Roll out into a 15x24-inch rectangle about 1/2-inch thick. Sprinkle the reserved filling over the dough, gently pressing the mixture into the dough with your fingers. Beginning with the short end, roll the dough up like a jelly roll. Slice crosswise into 12 equal pieces. Place the slices, cut side down and barely touching each other, on top of the glaze in the pan. Cover, and let rise in a warm place until puffy and almost doubled in bulk, about 25 minutes. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Bake the buns until golden brown on top, 25-30 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool in the pan to set the glaze, about 5 minutes. Invert onto a serving tray or another baking sheet and allow the glaze to dribble down the sides. Pull apart and serve warm.

CURRANT-PECAN FILLING FOR STICKY BUNS

1 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 tbsp ground cinnamon
1/2 cup dried currants
3/4 cup finely chopped pecans

combine all in a bowl and mix thoroughly. Reserve.

STICKY PECAN GLAZE FOR STICKY BUNS

1 cup butter, softened
1 3/4 cup [acked brown sugar
1/4 cup dark corn syrup
3/4 cup small pecan halves or coarsely chopped pecans

The last month or so this is how I've spent my Saturdays

AM: Go the YMCA
Noon or 3pm: Watch Michigan football, eat lunch
3-5pm: watch Food Network, specifically Throwdown with Bobby Flay, get dinner ideas
6pm: Go to Meijer, buy what I need to make my crazy Food Network recipe
7pm-12am: Make some crazy meal

So I have decided to call it Saturday Night Food Lab, since Lauren and I generally try to make something we've never made before. This coming Saturday should be really interesting, because boneless skinless chicken is on sale at Meijer this week ($1.99/lb!!). My preliminary guess is something like chicken cordon bleu or some other chicken dish that requires flattening chicken with a meat hammer.

But before that happens I need to share the disaster of this past Saturday night. Saturday afternoon Lauren and I watched Throwdown with Bobby Flay. In this episode he had a sticky bun battle with Joanne Chang of Boston. We thought that might be a nice thing to have either as a late night snack or for nice, easy breakfast. The sticky buns have to rise and proof for a total of about 5-7 hours, so it was best to get started early.

The recipe is not hard. Warm milk, flour, eggs, butter, vanilla, sugar, salt and yeast. Oh how I hate yeast. So we make these sticky buns about 7pm Saturday night and the first step is to add yeast and sugar to warm milk, then let it sit for 5 minutes until it gets foamy. "Foamy" isn't exactly a scientific measurement. So we stare at it, see some bubbles around the edge and a think skin on top and wonder if that is considered "foamy". We let it sit for a few more minutes and doesn't get any foamier so we decide that is probably what they mean. After all its warm milk, sugar and yeast, what is there to screw up?

We do all the other steps, add the flour and let the dough hook go to work. We set it aside and check back in hour later to see if our dough ball has doubled. Maybe? I doubt it, but I don't have a set of those calipers doctors use to pinch your body fat during a physical, so I can't really be sure. When it comes to dough, I kind of have an out of sight, out of mind attitude. Using my eyeball to determine whether or not a dough ball has increased in size just doesn't work for me.

So we proceed with the 4 hour refrigerated proofing, assemble the "goo" and pastry, cut the sticky buns and let them rise in a finished state for another hour. At this point its after midnight and I can see the writing on the wall. Even if they're any bigger than they were an hour ago, they're still not big enough. We bake them anyways and about 1:15am we sit down to a nice treat of unleavened sticky buns. Basically brown sugar syrup covered hockey pucks.

Sunday we go through all of this again, using a different packet of yeast. This time the milk/yeast/sugar mixture seemed thicker, had slight yeast bubbles on top and had been thoroughly brought to temperature and remained at the recommended temperature for activating the yeast for a full 20 minutes or so. The dough ball never rose and is still sitting its bowl this morning.

This is the third time we've struck out making some kind of yeast dependent breakfast pastry. I hate yeast. It freaks me out every time I make beer because I have to use yeast and the instructions always say that the yeast will begin fermenting within 12-15 hours but if nothing has happened within 48 hours you have a problem. However I've never once had the yeast become active within the 12-15 hour early period. It almost always takes 36-48 hours, which basically become an awful 1-2 days of me wondering if I was careless and just wasted $40 worth of beer ingredients. But even so, I've not yet had a batch of beer go bad on me because of problem with yeast, and beer takes about 6 weeks and 18 hours longer than sticky buns.

I just don't get yeast, and that bothers me even more.