Maternity. a photo post.

Spiced Orange Tart

Oranges are really cheap at my grocery store right now. Now, I do like oranges, but I have some sort of mental block against just picking them up and eating them as a snack.

I'm not sure why... maybe it's because when I was little I chewed my fingernails and so I could never really peel oranges very well and they were a lot of work to eat for little me.

Maybe it is because one time when I was around 6 I ate an orange by slowly and messily dissecting it little juice-filled packet by packet.... on top of one of my favorite books... thereby accidentally banishing that book to sticky, orange-covered oblivion. Poor book. That must have traumatized me or something.

ANYWAY, for whatever reason, oranges always sound really good at the store, and they are cheap, so I buy them... and then they sit in my fridge for several months until they are sufficiently green and fuzzy to be sent to the compost pile. But not this time! This time I decided to take control of the destiny of the oranges in my fridge and make something of them. I adapted this recipe a bit for the custard insides: http://www.crumbblog.com/2012/03/pretty-in-pink-blood-orange-tart.html, and I adapted this recipe for the spice shortbread crust stuff: http://smittenkitchen.com/blog/2008/11/the-great-unshrinkable-sweet-tart-shell/

First off, the tart shell. See, the shell has to sit in the fridge and chill for a little while before you bake it, so it is a good thing to start off with.

Cinnamon and nutmeg in liberal helpings take this tart crust from pretty darn good to a spicy, wonderful thing that makes your kitchen smell like heaven.

Flour, icing sugar, butter, spices, and an egg combine together into crumbly goodness. The trick to this tart crust is first to cut in the butter until it is very coarse, then to add the egg and stir in the egg until the crust begins to clump together like the last picture above shows.

When it begins clumping like that, dump it out of the bowl onto your countertop and gently fold it over and over until it sticks together into a rough crust.
This will take a while, and you will be tempted to mash it together and knead, but you must resist the temptation because that will take away all the lovely flakes of butter in the crust. Gently press the crust into a square, then fold it in half (sort of roughly since it is all crumbs), press it together again, fold again, etc, until it is done.

Then take this rough crust, wrap it in saran wrap, and place it in the fridge for a while so that the moisture can work all the way through it and make it easier to work with.

Roll it out on plenty of flour, and put it into a tart or pie pan, then press it with your fingers until you like the shape.

Freeze this shell now, for about 20 minutes or until it is sort of firm. This will help it keep its shape while baking.

Meanwhile, lets begin to talk about the insides of this tart. Orange juice, lemon juice, spices, and eggs combine to make a lovely custard. I didn't have a lemon, so I used a lime instead. It worked.

Juice oranges until you are tired of juicing oranges, then juice a few more...

Aren't egg shells pretty?

You are going to cook the mixture until it turns into a custard. This is not hard, you just have to heat it up slowly and stir it constantly or it will curdle. I am a very impatient, forgetful person so mine usually curdles. I then just pretend that is how it was supposed to be, and no-one is the wiser. It doesn't affect the taste, just the looks... and if whoever you are feeding it to hasn't made custard before, perhaps you too can convince them that it is supposed to be a bit lumpy.

While your custard cools, you can pull your tart shell out of the freezer, poke it all over with a fork so that it doesn't bubble, and bake it.

Once it is baked, pour your custard into it.

Now, pop it back in the oven to bake the custard. I like to sprinkle some cinnamon and nutmeg over the top of it before baking it, because it is pretty, hides my lumpy custard, and tastes good.

And then you eat!

Spiced Orange Tart Recipe

Crust ingredients:
1 and 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup icing sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 stick plus 1 Tbs cold butter
lots of cinnamon and nutmeg... like, probably 2 Tbs of each. At least.
1 large egg. Or two or three eggs the size of the eggs I use, which are laid by little farm chickens in my mother-in-law's barn.

Mix together flour, sugar, salt, and spices. Cut butter into cubes, then cut it into the flour mixture until it is in large crumbs. Beat the egg, then mix it in. Keep stirring until the mixture begins to clump, then turn out on counter and gently knead until it clings together. Wrap in saran wrap and place in fridge for 10 to 20 minutes, or up to a day.

When ready, roll out crust and press into pan, then freeze for about 20 minutes or until slightly firm. Poke all over with fork, cover with aluminum foil, then bake at 400 degrees F for 20-25 minutes. Remove foil and bake for another 10 minutes to brown crust.

Custard ingredients:
2 tsp orange zest
3/4 cup fresh orange juice
2Tbs lemon or lime juice
3/4 cup sugar
3 whole eggs
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup butter, cut into cubes
1 Tbsp each of cinnamon and nutmeg

Whisk all together in medium saucepan and heat slowly while stirring constantly. Heat until mixture thickens enough to coat back of spoon... a very runny custard.

Pour custard into crust and bake at 350 degrees F for 25- 30 minutes until custard is cooked. This means that it will be a bit bubbled at the edges but the middle will still wobble some.

Chill in the fridge until ready to eat.

Enjoy!

The Painful Implications of Gratefulness

I have no recipe today for you... but I do have a few thoughts. I have been learning a lot recently, and the thoughts bouncing around in my head demanded an outlet. Lucky you, you get to hear them as my outlet.

My relationship with God is a long story of struggle.
Sometimes I think that Jacob got off easy with just one night of fighting with God... I sometimes feel like I never stop fighting with God.
I am an independent person.
No-one tells me what I should do, how I should feel, who I should be.
I need my life to make sense, to be under control.
I need to be in control.
And God does not fit nicely into that need.

And so we fight.
I struggle.
I give in a little.
I take it back.

And then I blame God because there is no joy in my life.
Why no joy? I yell at Him.
You are supposed to give me joy.
 I have none. 
You are failing.

How arrogant I am.

I have been reading a book recently called One Thousand Gifts. It has continued me on a path that I have been on for some time, that of gratefulness. Oddly, it would seem that gratefulness is the key to a lot of things. A lot more than I thought at first.
The author of this book challenges me to begin giving thanks for everything, to begin acknowledging the gifts of God every day, in every situation. To literally practice being grateful for everything.

When I began this practice, only a week ago, I began it for me.
I wanted, I needed joy in my life.
My controlling tendencies drive me to stress and depression far too often, and I needed to get out of the cycle once again.
This seemed like a good way.

It seemed like a tame, easy way to access joy for my life.  
Thank you for the sunshine. 
Thank you for warm bread. 
Stop, be thankful, feel joyful, move on.

Being grateful seemed like such a simple, easy thing to do. It is fun, stopping to acknowledge and thank God for the warmth of the sunshine stretching golden through my kitchen window.

And yet, I found, that gratefulness, when put into practice for a while, even a week, begins to pull and pick at surprising places. The act of seeing each thing as a gift from God for right now to be thankful for has far-reaching consequences.

If this thing before me is an extravagant gift from God for this moment, then... I have no inherent right to it. Nothing I did means that I deserve this thing. Nothing I can do will ensure that I will never lose it.

To give thanks for a thing is to face the fact that I did not earn it, and it may go away. It may be gone tomorrow. And that, when it is gone, I have no right to throw a fit, to be angry,  because it was not mine to begin with. 
If I give thanks for this gift from God, I am acknowledging that it is God's. Not mine.
I have no rights. 

For a control freak like me, and perhaps like every human on the planet, it is painful for me to face that idea over and over every day.
It is more painful than I expected to acknowledge each thing for what it is: a fleeting, temporary, extravagant gift that God is allowing me to enjoy today. 
And yet... it is freeing. Painful, yes. But freeing, too.
For, if it is not mine, if I have no right to it, then I do not have to grasp it, to hold on to it, to attempt to control it.
My emotions can go toward enjoying it and being thankful for it, rather than toward worrying about losing it, and trying to hold on to it.

And my demands and requests of God, my worries and stresses begin to be turned on their heads.

Please give me security. 
Thank you for a roof over my head today. 

Keep my husband safe. 
Thank you for the privilege of living life with my husband today. 

Make my baby whole and perfect. 
Thank you for making my baby exactly the way You need him to be. Thank you for choosing me to be his mother. 

Why would you take away this house, make us find another? 
Thank you for Your perfect plan.  

Give me joy.
Thank you for today. 

How simple.
How hard.
I have no claim on tomorrow.
Thank you for today.

     

Herb Bread from yeast starter

I've never been much of a gardener. When we were growing up, my brother used to forbid me to even look at his tomato plants, because he believed that if I looked at them they would die. It probably was not an entirely unfounded belief.

I think that my stunning lack of success as a gardener is closely tied to my scatterbrained personality. I just... forget that I have plants to take care of. I water them and weed them and help them tenderly along and then the next time I remember they exist it has been two weeks and they are dried, shriveled little shrubs of themselves, overtaken by the more hardy weed-plants that don't need my care or protection.

I do have a solution to this problem. I learn to like the weeds. I pretend that the four-o-clocks that have taken over my front flower bed are gorgeous, and what I wanted there all along. Stickers? Builds character.

But I haven't entirely given up on the idea of my own garden filled with real plants that I actually planned to be there. I keep trying. And I'm getting better. For example, my herb garden this year was not entirely a bust. Granted, the basil is kind of... sad. And the rosemary insists that life in my garden is just not worth living. But the parsley is doing GREAT. ... uh, what do you do with parsley? Lots and lots of parsley?

Anyway, it came to my attention the other day that I actually had quite a few herbs in my garden, and I decided that the time had come to put them to work in my kitchen. Why else grow herbs? Exactly. So I made this delightful herb bread, and I thought I'd share.

If you've been reading my blog for long, you know that I grow yeast starter. I like the flavor better, and it's cheaper than store bought yeast. So this bread is made from starter, and I explain how to make said starter here: http://lifebydanielle.blogspot.com/2011/09/pet-yeast.html

I keep my starter in the fridge so I don't have to use it every day, so before I made this bread I pulled the starter out of my fridge and let it warm up for a while until it was all bubbly again, then poured about 2 cups of starter into my mixing bowl.

Herbs from my garden. This is all that I used in the bread, and I made a lot of bread. Fresh herbs are quite strong.

Chop chop chop. And crack some pepper too.

Pile flour on the starter.

Add some herbs. And salt. And warm water. Not much water, just enough to make a shaggy but rather stiff dough.

Knead, knead, knead the dough until it is smooth and elastic.

Olive oil all over the dough and let it rise to double. Then shape the bread how you want it and let it rise to double again before baking it.
Now, I have no pictures of my first batch of bread, because, true to form, I forgot all about the bread in my oven and it became large croutons. But the rest of my dough became nommy, lovely calzones with cheese and ham and onions in the middle of it. And I do have pictures of those.

Herb Bread

2 c starter
some fresh herbs and cracked pepper and garlic
salt (about 1 to 2 tsp)
3 c flour
about 1/2 cup warm water

Chop up the herbs. Mix the starter, flour, herbs, and salt. Add enough water to make a stiff, shaggy dough. Knead until smooth and elastic, about ten minutes. Coat liberally with olive oil and let rise to double. Punch down and shape into bread loaves, calzones, etc. Allow to rise to double again.
Bake at 400 degrees F for about 20 minutes, or until slightly golden. Eat happily.

Oven Fried Chicken

It is summer. I mean, really, it's summer. It's really hard to miss here in Oklahoma. The first clue is the stifling heat and humidity that wraps you up like a big, warm, wet blanket and doesn't let go for a few months.

Nevertheless, I continue to maintain that I would rather be hot than cold. Hot is not fun, I will admit that, it is miserable and stifling and sometimes feel like I am boiling alive and like I cannot think because my brain cells are slowly being cooked one by one....

That is my nephew. He looks like he thinks it's too hot.

But I still think cold is worse. I know how to cool off. Granted, I think Oklahoma is hotter than the tropics in the summertime but many of my tried and true techniques perfected over ten years of living on a tropical island still work to at least take the edge off the heat here. But cold... I don't know how to deal with cold. When I'm cold I just freeze up into a little miserable tense ball of cold. I can't get warm, I can't move, it hurts to be cold.

Besides. I love cotton. I really, really, really love loose cotton yoga pants. They are one of my favorite things ever. And it is really hard to rock loose cotton yoga pants when there is snow on the ground. They are much more suited to stifling summer days. But, as the name of this post is "oven fried chicken" and not "loose cotton yoga pants," I digress. Maybe I will write another blog about loose cotton yoga pants. They deserve their own blog post. I'll get back to the point now.

Hot summer days call for picnics and swimming in the cool lake and ice cream (like this)

and lady bugs (like this)

and iced tea and cold fried chicken and watermelon. Cold fried chicken is, in my opinion, the perfect picnic food. You can make it the day before, it is cold and delicious, and just screams SUMMER PICNIC to me. You almost have to eat it while sitting on a red and white checkered tablecloth on the grass.

I guess, however, not everyone has had the privilege of eating cold fried chicken on purpose rather than just because they were too lazy to heat up the leftover fried chicken. When I first proposed the idea as part of a picnic menu, Morgan looked at me like I was a bit crazy. But he now admits that it is alright, and an acceptable picnic item. Mostly because I made him admit it whether he wanted to or not. I digress again.

The only problem with fried chicken on the summer picnic menu is the standing over the hot, popping oil frying chicken for hours and hours. (because it sure seems to take fried chicken hours and hours to cook. Or is that just me?) And hot, popping oil isn't my favorite thing on the best of days. I'm kind of scared of it. It always targets my face. I end up with little red blister bumps all over my arms, kind of greasy, hot, tired, and mad at the world. This is not a good way to start a picnic day, so I propose an alternative to this method of frying chicken: oven fried chicken.

Obviously, oven fried chicken is not actually FRIED chicken, per se, since it is not fried, but it is still crunchy and happy and fully ok for picnics. So I shall show you how to make it, now that I have talked for a sufficiently long time to probably put you to sleep.

The main ingredient in oven fried chicken (besides the chicken), the secret weapon of crunchiness, as shown to me by my mommy, is CORN FLAKES. Crunchy crispy corn flakes make our chicken all crispy and fried-like.

You take the corn flakes and crunch them up into little pieces with your hands. It's fun. Then you add flour and spices to make it a proper covering for chicken.

My favorite spices in this recipe are seasoned salt, pepper, and garlic powder. Lots of each, for maximum flavor impact.

Now in another bowl we mix eggs and milk for a wash to get the crunchy to stick to the chicken. 

Dip each drumstick (or thigh, it works well on thighs too) into the egg-milk mixture.

Then coat it well in the crunchy mixture.

And lay them out on a baking tray. You want the tray to have sides, and if possible it would be best to put the chicken up on a rack on the tray for maximum crunchiness. I didn't have a rack that fit my tray. But we survived anyways.

Bake these delicious noms until the chicken is cooked through. You can tell that chicken is cooked through if, when you stick it with a knife, clear juice runs out. No juice, and it is not cooked enough. Red juice, and it is not cooked enough. Clear juice, and it is cooked enough. Make sure to stick it deep though, and near the bone, to check in the middle of the chicken. It takes about 45 minutes for drumsticks to bake well in my oven.

The result is crunchy deliciousness, without standing over evil popping oil!

Sherman thought the drumsticks looked like something he should help eat. But he was not given a drumstick. I think I offended him. Oh well. He will get over it.

Oven Fried Chicken Recipe:

Dip:
2 eggs
3/4 c milk

Crunch:
1 c crushed corn flakes
1/4 c flour
garlic powder
seasoned salt
pepper

To Do:
Preheat oven to 350 F. 
Beat eggs and milk together in one bowl.
In another bowl, mix the dry ingredients. Season to taste... I use a lot of seasoning, it depends on what you like.
Dip the chicken first in the wet, then in the dry ingredients, coating thoroughly.

Alternatively for a thicker coating, mix the flour and seasonings separately from the crushed corn flakes, and dip the chicken in the flour, then the egg mixture, then the corn flakes. 

Bake chicken for about 45 minutes for drumsticks, or until juice runs clear and chicken is cooked thoroughly. Enjoy hot or cold!

Dutch Babies (aka German Pancakes in a muffin tin)

These are one of my favorite breakfast foods ever.
No, really, they really are.
Above French toast.
Above eggs.
Above bacon... well, that might be taking it a bit too far. There really isn't much above bacon.

But these little breakfast things are really good. I'm not completely sure how to describe them... if you have had yorkshire pudding, they are kind of like a sweet version of yorkshire pudding. But I don't know very many Americans who have had yorkshire pudding. They are kind of dense, eggy, salty, and sweet, very buttery, and delicious with fruit on top.What they actually are is Dutch or German pancakes, but made in muffin tins instead of a skillet, so they are little.  Just make them, and then you will know how good they are and I won't have to explain it!


I got this recipe, and adapted it a very little, from this blog.

Dutch Babies

6Tb melted butter
1 cup flour
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp salt
1 cup milk
4 eggs

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Then, mix together all your ingredients EXCEPT the butter... you can mix the dry ingredients and then add the wet ingredients if you want, or you can do it the other way around, or you can just dump all the ingredients in a bowl together and stir... I really don't care, it all works. The goal is to get it all mixed together, by whatever way makes you the most comfortable.

Add two tablespoons of the butter into the batter.
Now, take the rest of the butter (that is 4 tablespoons), and use it to grease a 12-muffin muffin tin. Use all the butter. there will be little pools of lovely warm golden butter on the bottom of every muffin tin. You want that. You want lots of butter. Butter is good.

Pour the batter into the muffin tins, but don't fill the tins too full. You want them to be about half  to three-quarters full, actually, with plenty of room to puff up to their full, delicious, puffy, butter glory.

Bake for 12-14 minutes, until they are all puffed up and the edges are golden. They will puff pretty high.

Pull them out of the oven, and let them cool a bit before pulling them out of the muffin tin and serving them with fruit on top... or jelly... or lemon juice and sugar... or berries... or whatsoever you desire to serve with these little pillows of deliciousness.

The centers will fall down, leaving the edges puffy, giving you a lovely little cup in which to hold the topping of your choosing.

You can make a large portion of the batter and then keep it in the fridge and cook only as many dutch babies as you want at the time... the batter keeps well in the fridge for at least a week. I'm not sure if it lasts longer... I usually use it all up within a week, and if I don't use it up in that time it's usually because I've forgotten about it, in which case I will continue to forget about it until it is far too late.

Happy Dutch Baby eating!

Sherman

Well, school is finally out for the year. I know, you didn't have any idea I was in school, right, since I kept posting just as frequently during the semester as normal.... yeah right. Twenty hours of classes nommed my life. But it's over now! Happy day.

In other news, we got a puppy! Hence the adorable picture. Sherman is about 9 weeks old, and he is what we refer to in proper terms as a "mutt." He is 1/4 blood hound, 1/4 blue heeler, 1/4 beagle, and 1/4 terrier. Basically, he is a mutt of hound dog leanings. But boy is he cute! And he has blue eyes. Which makes him even cuter.

We've had Sherman for about a week, and so far he has learned his name, that he has to sit down before coming inside, and to look very, very guilty if he has an accident in the house. So, we'll call that progress.

He also snores when he's asleep, likes to chew on potatoes, hates the garbage truck, and can't completely control all of his legs at the same time when running.

He likes to crawl under the couch and fall asleep under there, but frequently forgets where he fell asleep, and bonks his head on the couch when he wakes up and tries to lift his head. I never, ever laugh when this happens. ... ok maybe I do just a little.

Also, we went for a picnic recently and got some very pretty pictures of flowers which I will now share with you.

I'm quite happy to be out of school for the summer, and able to cook more and post more blog posts. Yay food, blog posts, summer, flowers, and puppies!