Shiny Cooking

Dear banana-oat pancakes,
It’s not you. It’s me. I love bananas, oats, and ohmigod pancakes. And you’re fine. Better than fine. You’re sweet and oat-nutty and you never leave your dirty socks on the floor. Oh, sure, you might be a bit temperamental about griddle temperatures, but what pancake isn’t?
But you see, you’re too good for [...]

Ohnoes. A pantry meal — in June!
It may be spring — almost summer — but the garden’s getting a slow start around here. A very wet spring kept us from planting until late May. We’ve already burned past the asparagus and rhubarb, and strawberries are due any day now, but normally at this time we’d [...]

Want an easy, colorful, summery, fancy-schmancy looking appetizer to serve guests? These little fellas fit the bill, the bright crunch of juicy tomato mingling with sweet basil and fresh mozzarella, all drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette.
There. The food porn description is out of the way.

We threw a surprise party for Mom Saturday. As I apparently [...]

Time now to quit with the endless family stories and begin slamming out these cookie recipes. Today I made progress on this month’s Daring Bakers Challenge. It’s a secret, to be revealed on the 27th. Which is a shame, because it’s sort of festive. :p

Also began filling the chocolate mint cookie sandwiches. Damn, those little [...]

Check out this awesome bowl Dad found under the house.
Under the house, you say? Why yes, under the house. Why do you ask?
Oh, you didn’t know. My house got a new foundation this spring.
Wow, those plum blossoms in the background sure look pretty.
So yesterday Dad, his cousin, and the guy who works with [...]

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca. Recipes for whole wheat graham crackers and Nanaimo bars at the end of the post.

Let [...]

Neat, this made Foodie Views of the day! They gave me a pretty button to go with it: foodie_views_link_url = ‘http://shinycooking.com/easy-one-egg-omelet’;
foodie_views_submit_or_vote();
Routine is a good thing. I lost 60 pounds eating the same thing for breakfast every morning, and anecdotally people suggest that eating the same thing for breakfast and lunch, and mixing it up for [...]

Weddings. Baby showers. Christmas.
These are the some of the family gatherings where miloste, a Bohemian fried pastry, graced the banquet tables and spreads. Don’t bother googling; “miloste” is a phonetic spelling. We have no idea what the “real” name for these treats is. Hell, we usually call them “those fried things with beer in [...]

Blueberry pie ranks right up there. Number two after sour cherry pie, for sure. I’d always had blueberry pie that was baked, but the blueberries this year are so fabulous — large, and the perfect sweet-tart combination — that I wanted to do one that was more strawberry pie-style.

In other words, blueberries mixed with [...]

Today is Mom’s birthday. Go Mom! I won’t tell you which birthday it is, since she’s a tad shy about that. I’m just gonna say she had me when she was very very young. Nearly criminally young. Not that she’s a criminal. I don’t think.
Got anything to confess, Mom?
Grandma used to make this, her [...]

Ignore the “gluten-free” in the title. These are not some saintly cardboardy cookie things.
And I’m really not trying to be All About Baking here. Honestly.
And I’m not trying to be all health nut vegetarian gluten-free, either. FSM knows I’m a crappy vegetarian and an even more piss-poor health nut.
But you know what? These cookies [...]

Hey, look, another super simple recipe that is super yummy.
I know. Fried rice is intended as a leftover-user. Day-old rice? Make fried rice with it! Unfortunately for the rice, fried rice is so good on its own that it gets made a lot on purpose here and never makes it to day-old status.
In fact, [...]

Skip ahead to to the blue text if you want the instructions without the incoherent babbling.
Flash freezing has been done in the food industry for ages to quickly preserve and seal in nutrients and freshness. It’s why nutritionists say frozen seafood, vegetables, and so forth are technically “fresher” than their fresh cousins you find [...]

Dad plants sweet corn for all of us every year, staggered a week or two apart so we have sweet corn for longer. I don’t know exactly how far apart; I’m sure someone will read this and correct me since I seem to get something wrong in every post.

It’s like when there’s a story [...]

That funny looking thing that looked like a cross between a post-nuclear-holocaust carrot and an anime tentacle monster?

Horseradish. It grows in the front of my yard near the ditch, and in Mom and Dad’s in a little “patch” near the field. All I know is it grows on its own and it’s nearly impossible to [...]

To skip the Facebook rant and get right to the recipe instructions, scroll down to “Let’s freeze some chard!”
Hola, amigos. How’s it going with you? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. Okay, I’m channeling Jim Anchower, opinion columnist for the esteemed newspaper The Onion. I was confused as to [...]

This recipe featured on Wanderfood Wednesday and Real Food Wednesday!

This is the time of year when we write posts about how tired we are of winter. But I’m not. I’m totally over being tired of winter. I already gave in a few weeks ago to the allure of fresh produce, abandoning the frozen corn, green [...]

Yup, we sure did.
I provided the kitchen and the canner and my aunt picked the pears, cleaned the pears, peeled the pears, cut the pears, packed the pears, and processed the pears.
I practically did it all by myself!
the canning stuff, yawn

Right there you see the basic canning setup on the stovetop. I began doing this [...]

Here’s one amazing thing to do with leftover scraps of puff pastry: make mini palmiers. A good idea for snacks for a crowd. They’ll go fast, though!
Warning: drunken post ahead

My cousin Tone is in town, and he brought a big ass RV and several other modes of transportation with him. I countted five: the RV, [...]

Man, the Christmas cookie recipes and pics are piling up. Hmm, I seem to have developed an obsession with them this year.

I had some trepidation about posting this particular Christmas cookie. As I wrestled with rolling out endless walnut-sized lumps of dough, making crescents seemed a lot fussier to me than it did last [...]

Truly, these pickles only appear before you because I’m dead tired. Been working on a house all week and I’m a tad unused to hours of physical labor every day. It’s a good tired, I guess. There’s overdone tired and there’s muscles kind of achy but in the well-used and getting stronger way, and it’s [...]

About damn time we talked about tofu here, isn’t it? I mean, right up top there, it says “vegetarian, whole foods, and local foods recipes.” And yet, it’s taken all these months for humble tofu to even get a mention. Let’s rectify that now.
You can do this tofu roasted in a sesame and soy [...]

Strawberry season is full-bore, yay! We don’t grow them in our garden, though my grandma used to. Sis has a patch in her garden, though. The only thing fun about picking strawberries is popping them in your mouth while you do it. Otherwise it’s hunched-over, hunt-and-peck labor.
So we order them from a local grower. How [...]

Two things, and then the recipe for the best basic coleslaw you’ve ever had.

First, we went to Hello Sushi tonight. You may recall that I became a bit cranky on my last visit. Tonight, however, was delightful. Just like last time we were coming off a day working at my aunt’s house, but this time [...]

Oh my. The garden asplode. Zucchini, broccoli, carrots, green beans, broccoli. And the broccoli isn’t sporting those horribly invisible green worms yet. I think.
There’s still lettuce and peas, though that’s ending now that hot temps have arrived, and cucumbers coming along, and some poblanos that are looking mighty big, and swiss chard with leaves 2 [...]

The September 2009 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Steph of A Whisk and a Spoon. She chose the French treat, Vols-au-Vent based on the Puff Pastry recipe by Michel Richard from the cookbook Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan.
When I read that my first Daring Bakers challenge would be to make puff pastry, and [...]

Now there’s a mouthful. Know why? Because it’s so versatile. It works for the gluten-free folks. It works for the pie folks. It works for the tart folks. It works for the don’t-make-me-get-out-the-rolling-pin folks.
Even better, this walnut-oat pie crust recipe is just a prelude to the fresh blueberry pie I made it with, coming up [...]

We love seaweed, how about you?
People were confused when I told them my aunt Linda and I would be making sushi for January’s 24, 24, 24 event. “Isn’t that raw fish?” they asked, knowing I’m not a huge fan of animal foods. Technically, sushi is rice that’s been specially prepared with vinegar and a little [...]

I have a confession to make.
I cannot bring myself to bake or cook with fresh berries.
Why not? Their season is so short, it seems such a waste to transform them with heat, when frozen berries will do the job just as well. And you can whip out frozen blueberries in the dead of winter, anytime.
But [...]

Guess what? I actually got off my arse and did some research for y’all this time.
moops?
See, the cookie we call Mexican wedding cakes, or Russian tea cakes, or polvorones in Spain, or melting moments in Australia actually has a common descendent: the “sandie” type cookie first developed by the Moors in the Middle Ages, medieval [...]

Oh gods. Rotting bananas on the counter again.
I don’t want banana bread. I’ll just put half of it in the freezer and forget it’s there.
Oh! A recipe for banana-chocolate chip muffins. I like chocolate chips, yes I do.

And about 45 minutes later these babies came out of the oven, all gently crisped tops and [...]

Sis told me yesterday she began the starter for Amish friendship bread, which apparently involves mixing flour, sugar, and yeast and letting it sit on the counter. After it develops for several days, you can make sourdough bread from part of the starter, keep the rest of it going, and continue making bread.
I’ve always [...]

This is your brain on SmokeMonster!Locke.
Okay, it’s just the whole wheat levain before stirring it up on Day 2. You know what that liquid is on top? Sourdough breadmakers have a highly technical term for it. They call it hooch, because it’s about 15-20 proof. It’s a result of the fermentation process of the [...]

How about a nice tall glass of levain?
Today is Day 3, when we begin feeding the levain twice a day versus the once per day of days 1 and 2. That pic is at 3.5. I’ve put the levain into a tall, clear glass and marked it. In 12 hours we’ll see how much the [...]

Some of you have been expressing…concern…as to what happened with the whole big levain/sourdough plot. I’ll tell you what happened. A winter storm happened. Unripe levain happened. Flat bread happened. And a possibly unconnected but mysteriously coincidental horrible sinus flareup happened.
By day 4, I had a feeling the levain was ripe and active. Compare the [...]

Don’t you just get bored with bread sometimes? Bla bla sandwich, bla bla toast. Wouldn’t it be so much more fun to stuff egg salad or beans and lettuce or —
Stop the presses! Shut. Down. EVERYTHING. (We’ll intersperse some tortilla-making photos during this break.)

The latest casting news for the upcoming HBO production of George R. [...]

How about a nice bowl of cheery orange-colored soup to warm your tummy on a cold winter night? I only recently began to appreciate soup, having been too lazy to properly appreciate it in the past — soup isn’t often stick-to-your-ribs fare and I’m pretty side-dish impaired, as far as getting out bread or making [...]