Little Wishes

This Christmas season, I'm volunteering for the Foster and Adoptive Care Coalition. The Little Wishes campaign allows people to buy Christmas gifts that have been requested by children in foster care. I'm doing some of the work to make sure that those gifts arrive in time for Christmas at the homes where the children are living. There are lots of good gifts left on the site -- you could give 10 year old Andrea a membership to the Science Center, 1 year old Jeredin a Funtime Tractor, or 8 year old Rahab a gift certificate to a book store.

And, if you have some time in the next couple of weeks, I think they will still take on volunteers. Getting Christmas gifts to foster kids is a really great gig this time of year--it's a lot of fun in a busy, friendly environment. There is volunteer information at the bottom of the Little Wishes web page.

Pumpkin bread with maple syrup spread

Yogurt cheese has been my favorite "miracle" diet food for the last couple of months. I mix it half-and-half with things like peanut butter and mayo. I like my lighter spreads better than the original product--they are creamier and less oily. Yogurt cheese is also great as a potato topping, a spread on rye crackers, and an ingredient in creamy salad dressings.

Yogurt cheese is simple to make--just dump a carton of plain, nonfat yogurt into a colander lined with a coffee filter or a couple of paper towels. Let it sit in the fridge for 8 to 24 hours. The yogurt cheese will be about the texture of whipped cream cheese with a tangy flavor more like sour cream. The whey that ends up in the bowl can be used in place of water in bread or soup.



Yogurt cheese allowed me to transform a treat that I used to eat this time of year: pumpkin bagels topped with cinnamon-brown sugar cream cheese. This fall, I'm making pumpkin bread with maple syrup spread. Maple syrup spread is simply maple syrup whisked into yogurt cheese. My recipe for pumpkin bread is below.



Joy's Pumpkin Bread for the Bread Machine
makes 2lb loaf

2/3 cup warm water
1 1/2 Tbl canola oil
2 Tbl molasses
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup pumpkin
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cup bread flour
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 Tbl brown sugar
2 Tbl vital wheat gluten
1/8 tsp cloves
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp dry yeast

Stir the wet ingredients and salt together. Stir the dry ingredients together. Pour the wet ingredients into the bread pan. Spoon the dry ingredients on top of the wet. Add the yeast to the bread pan.

Set the bread machine for Fruit and Nut bread (or whatever gives the longest rise time) and 2 lb loaf.

Check partway through the first kneading cycle to see if the dough is too wet (add flour by tablespoons) or too dry (add water by teaspoons).

Fall salad

Our favorite salad the last couple of months has been Radicchio, Pear, and Fennel salad with Anise Orange Dressing, although we've made a couple of changes to the recipe. This was our first introduction to radicchio -- it's bitter but adds a sophisticated element to the salad. We needed to tip the balance to the sweet side, so we use three pears (instead of two) and one head of radicchio (instead of two). We also added a tablespoon of rice vinegar to the dressing to brighten it up a bit.




Give it a try -- fennel won't be on our grocery shelves much longer this year!

Pesto

The last basil harvest occurred just before Halloween, shortly before our first freeze. I got two cups from my three surviving plants even after an aggressive harvest in late September (when the first freeze was predicted but didn't materialize).





I like this Fresh Basil Pesto Recipe but leave out the cheese and the salt because I would rather add them, if I want them, to the final dish. Two cups of basil yields a little less than one ice cube tray (I made two batches at a time in the summer and used what wouldn't fit into the ice cube tray over the next several days).



I'm still using pesto cubes from this batch once or twice a week, most commonly in a dish that starts with roasting a whole eggplant and red pepper on the grill and ends with stirring those chopped vegetables, pesto, toasted pine nuts, and a bit of cheese into bulgur wheat.

Autumn Entry

It still doesn't feel like fall here, but they're promising colder weather later in the week so we got motivated to decorate the bottom of the driveway for the season.

Here is Rick artfully messing up the straw:

And, here is our final design:

Back to School

I'm not going back to school this year in any form. Which feels a bit odd. Last year I went "back to school" as a staff member at a university. For three years previous to that, I went back to library school in late August or early September.

I needed to find a new way to employ my back to school energy this year. So, I decided to make my study functional. It's not beautiful, but this old desk and new chair are way more useful than the deck chair and two TV tables I've been using.

Summer Breads

With my particular blend of allergies, August tends to be my most miserable month and I'm glad it's over. Not that my allergies can read the calendar. They didn't improve dramatically on September 1, but I know that the worst is over and that, in itself, makes me feel better.

One thing that helped (and I want to remember this for next year) is home made bread. Now, I know that is no one's idea of health food, but as comfort food goes it's on the healthy side and it prevented me from eating worse things.

It all started on August 1 which is Lammas, the loaf mass, to celebrate the first of the wheat harvest. In August, I baked two kinds of bread: Whole Wheat Zucchini Herb Bread and Pesto Bread. Both recipes have a seasonal aspect -- one uses a cup of a grated zucchini to use up the surplus I got from the Farmer's Market; the other uses pesto made using basil from my garden and garlic from my sister-in-law's garden.

The zucchini bread recipe came in the booklet with my bread machine, but it's up on the web here. My favorite thing about this bread: it's so light that I can eat more than I think I should but the scale won't chide me the next morning.



I made up the recipe for the pesto bread. It could use some tweaking to rise a bit better but it tastes so good that I'm afraid to mess with.

Joy's Pesto Bread for the Bread Machine

2/3 cup warm water
1/3 cup pesto
1 tsp. salt
2 tsp. sugar
2 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup bread flour
2 tsp. dry yeast

Stir the pesto and salt into the warm water. Combine the salt, sugar, and flours in a bowl. Pour the wet ingredients in the bread machine and then dump the dry ingredients on top. Make a "bowl" in the flour for the yeast and put it in.

I set the machine for the longest rise times I can get (for my machine that's the "Fruit & Nut" setting) and turn it on. Check the dough in the middle of the first cycle of kneading and add more water if too dry, more flour if too wet.

My favorite way to eat pesto bread is topped with heirloom tomato and a little grated cheese and popped under the broiler in the toaster oven until the cheese melts.