Christmas Morning Breakfast Ideas for Berry Good Boys & Girls!

Not many days left to peel back on the advent calendar. In no time at all, it’ll be Christmas morning—and that, my friends requires a sugar and carb infusion of the highest order.  New word for “short-stack” anyone? I’m drawing from my Sunday Best repertoire on Wednesday, December 25^th and would advise anyone with the same lust for life (and pancakes) to stock up this weekend on King Arthur Flour—the best for pancake house-style flapjacks—eggs, sugar, butter—the essentials for enough fluffy pancakes to take everyone through the learning curve of new gadgets and sporting equipment sitting under your tree.            

I believe the headlining photo on this blog, featuring Buttermilk Blueberry Pancakes with Berry Good Maple Syrup, can revv up the family on Christmas morning and turbo power their snow shoes! I haven’t made a habit of posting many of my book’s new recipes on my blog, but am doing so today as a gift to those “birds of a feather” out there who love pancakes as much as my family does. Other Christmas Day secrets that can put the wow factor into a Chris Cringle inspired table setting involve my Monkeying Around Bread (fun at any age!), trick for making inside out omelets, Canadian Bacon prepared just so (click on this Chipotle Spiced Bacon post to learn how to make it a legend in your household, too) and Cranberry Oatmeal Scones with Pine nuts.  For those bolded recipes, there is still plenty of time to download Sunday Best Dishes, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It really makes a great Xmas gift!

Other Winter Day Breakfast Ideas….Faking Buttermilk in a pinch, etc…..

Buttermilk Biscuits with a savory gravy are also a great way to go for Christmas breakfast….but what if you open the fridge only to find you’re running low on precious buttermilk?  A lot of Apple commercials would tell you there’s an app for that. I won’t offer you that as a solution, but I can pass on a little cooking trick that can turn plain old milk into a buttermilk knock-off for all your breakfast recipes. Just pour ¾ cup of milk into a measuring container, add 2 tablespoons of white vinegar and set the mixture aside for 5 minutes at room temperature. The result is as close to actual buttermilk as it needs to be. 

If kids are part of the Christmas package this holiday season….

Here are a few tips for decorating pancakes in ways that’d tickle Santa pink!

• ·        Use sliced strawberries and cover the top half of the pancake with them to represent the red-felt hat. Squirt a big dollop of whip cream for the powder puff on top of Santa’s hat and continue on with the Ready-whip to make the big white beard.
• ·         Banana slices with Hershey’s kisses in the center make great eyes and maraschino cherries are a terrific nose!
• ·         Triangles of French toast can be arranged into a Christmas tree, with a star shaped cut of pineapple just prefect for the star on top!
• ·         Make Rudolph using bacon for antlers, blueberries for eyes and a dime sized pancake in the middle, strawberry on it, for the world-famous nose.

It’s not rockets science….it’s reindeer science! I hope your Christmas is full of love and magic, everyone. See you in the New Year with lots of new cooking advice and recipes! 

Buttermilk-Blueberry Pancakes with Berry Good Maple Syrup

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

Syrup

1 cup pure maple syrup

1 cup fresh blueberries

Pour the syrup and blueberries into a saucepan and heat to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until the sauce is thickened and the blueberries begin to burst, about 10 minutes.  Reduce the heat to very low to keep the syrup warm.

Pancakes

2 cups pastry flour

1 ½ teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon baking soda

¼ teaspoon table salt

2 large eggs

1 cup buttermilk

½ cup milk

1 tablespoon honey

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

½ to 1 cup blueberries

Confectioners’ sugar

Stir the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl.  In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs, buttermilk, milk, honey and vanilla.  Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until smooth.         

Heat a griddle (or large non-stick skillet) over medium high heat.  Ladle batter onto the griddle to form 4-inch pancakes.  When the pancakes are just set, sprinkle with a few blueberries. Cook until the pancakes are golden on the bottom, about 3 to 4 minutes. Flip and cook until the second side is golden, about 2 minutes more. (If you are cooking the pancakes in batches, keep warm in a 200° oven or warming drawer.)

Serve the pancakes with a ladleful of syrup and garnish with a few extra fresh blueberries. Sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar.

A Wee Bit of Work Yields This Amazing Daily Bread

Top o’ the mornin’! Could we be coming up on St. Patrick’s Day weekend already?! While some are headed for pubs with green beer, I’m thinking of staying in and waiting for the crowds to lighten up, and I gotta tell you that it helped me rediscover the joys of being alone in my kitchen. This spring morning seemed perfect for baking; shafts of lemony sun played across the counter tops, so that I knew natural lighting would be more than enough for photos: It's called “plate and shoot”—a process I’ve been doing for months getting my new book ready.

I gathered the ingredients to make Irish Soda Bread and had them whipped up before the oven preheated. Then I wandered into the office to work. Once that bread started baking, I wandered right back out! I worked in the kitchen with my laptop, just to sit and revel in the aroma. I got out the nice dessert plates, boiled and steeped my blackest most Irish tea, and cut up pats of chilled Kerry Gold butter that would soon melt over the golden, crunchy peaks of the bread. I arranged some daisies, dyed green…yeah, we food bloggers take the holidays pretty seriously!

My work this morning has consisted of pouring over friends’ thoughts on bread machines. Certainly, I advocate their use in lots of SUNDAY BEST bread recipes, but my love of actual hands-on, old-fashioned baking just won’t go away. Working with dough, is the most cathartic thing ever; in fact, with Irish soda bread you can work your biceps by hand mixing and forgoing the electric mixer altogether. The butter in the bowl is chilled and doesn’t yield immediately, but, eventually it does disperse its buttery goodness through the entire mound of dough.

The only trick you need to know going in, is that if you want your currents, raisins—or, in my case, dried cranberries—to bake in evenly, you’ve got to toss the berries in a tablespoon of flour first. I love the note every baker who makes this bread says about knowing when it’s done: “Tap the loaf when it’s fresh from the oven, and you should hear a “hollow” sound. Friends, I can tell you that this is one of the truest things in life.

But wasn’t I supposed to be telling you the merits of bread machines? I talked to several home cooks who prefer them over the “kneading, rising and watching” process that is baking from scratch. One fellow food blogger admitted that the Oster brand she’s loved for 15 years, once walked itself right off the counter during the kneading process. Long story short: she put it back together and carried on just fine. Her advice for those who wish to buy a bread machine? You’re better off with a horizontal shaped pan, so that the shape of the loaf doesn’t look weird, and cuts up better for sandwiches.

The bread machine I link to in Sunday Best Meals (buy the book this summer to get the gadgets!) can be programmed in the evening, for fresh baked bread in the morning, and the only beef with it, is that it takes up some real estate in kitchen space—but for a bread lover, it is, as the name of my catering biz connotes: Worth It!

Anyway, happy St. Pat’s everyone. May the road rise to meet you and the wind be always at your back. I’m going to make some shepherd’s pie the way my Irish grannie used to, so just keep trying me if you can’t get me on the phone!

Love and all things Irish--XXOO!! 

Irish Soda Bread

Yield:  1 loaf
Preparation Time:  15 minutes plus 30 minutes baking

3 ½ cups all purpose flour
¼ cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon orange zest
4 tablespoons butter, cold, cut into pieces (1/2 stick)
1 to 1 ¼ cups buttermilk
1 large egg
1 cup dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 425 degrees

Sift together the flour, sugar, baking soda, salt and orange zest.

Whisk together 1 cup buttermilk and the egg.

Pour the buttermilk mixture into the flour mixture in three additions, mixing the dough with a fork after each  addition.  The dough should be moist and sticky.  You can do this in a mixer, using the dough hook if you prefer.  Use additional buttermilk if the dough is too dry. 

Toss the cranberries in a tablespoon of flour, and mix them into the dough.  Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface.

Shape the dough into a round, about 2-inches thick.  Place the round onto a Silpat lined baking sheet.  Use a sharp knife to cut a 1-inch deep cross into the top of the bread.

Bake until golden, about 35 to 40 minutes.  The bread will sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.  Cool on a wire rack.

The No Pumpkin Left Behind Bakery

I haven’t done any baking yet, but as you can clearly see my items are all laid out, and this year gives cause for both trepidation and eagerness to try something I can’t believe I haven’t tried before: making my own pumpkin puree.

I’ll admit it’s the one item I don’t—or didn’t in previous years anyway—mind phoning in; after all, the ingredient list on the back of the can features just one item, “pumpkin”, so you know it’s as pure as the driven snow that’s just a few weeks shy of blanketing us this season.

But let me tell you what’s driving me. I got the idea to make my own pumpkin puree from a new Slow Food Movement Challenge, called “October Unprocessed.” For anyone who’s game, that means that everything you eat should and can—for not too much money—be made from scratch. I think that’s a great idea, except for a cheat day on October 31st when ripping into a Fun Sized Snickers doesn’t seem like the worst of crimes. I won’t tell if you won’t, and just to put this out there now: I do intend to decorate my purest pumpkin desserts with a little candy corn—which is just for show and comes right off, leaving your icing intact.

So there’s that…and the second driving force to gut, bake and scrape 2 smallish pumpkins until my best friend Mr. Food Processor can render them into a creamy paste, is my excitement over kitchen gadgets, or KMHs. To the uninitiated, that’s a Kitchen Must Have, and I’m writing a new cookbook right now that encourages their avid use. From deep fryers, chicken rotisseries, mandolins and food mills, I am all about the KMH. They can cost a lot, yes, but in no time at all they’ve paid for themselves by giving your family superior food and MORE of it. The particular beauty of making your own puree is that you get to keep the pumpkin seeds and roast ‘em later on!

My Homemade Pumpkin Puree (click the link to find out how to do it; I’ve gleaned together my own recipe by reading over scads of others and perfecting my own technique! I’ll post news ASAP on how effective it is. But I can tell you now that it SOUNDS easy!) calls for two midsized pumpkins, and from what I understand they’re going to yield several Ziplock bags of puree—way more than I need for the baked goods I plan on surprising my loved ones with this month. After I use a fraction of the lovely, sweet smelling autumn colored stuff for Pumpkin Apple Muffins and Pumpkin Brownies with Cream Cheese Frosting, I’ll have enough left over to freeze for other pumpkin treats further down the road. Plus, I’ll have the added pleasure of getting back with my readers on Facebook and Twitter to let them know if there was much of a difference between the pumpkin confections I’ve made with canned puree vs. the real deal that I mashed up myself.

Can you stand the suspense?

My senses are going to go wild with the scent of ground ginger, clove, cinnamon and allspice. I might actually turn into a pumpkin if I served it with TOP NANA’s seasonal hot toddy of “Pumpkin Pie in a Cup.”

Am I out of my gourd? Stay tuned to find out!

Whole-Wheat Pancakes with Strawberry Syrup

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 30 minutes
Serves: 4Serving Size: 3 3-inch pancakes

2 pints strawberries hulled and quartered (about 2 cups)
2 tablespoons honey
1 cup water
½ cup unbleached white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup fat free milk
2 large eggs

Place the strawberries, honey and water into a saucepan over medium high heat. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until the mixture reduces and becomes syrupy, about 20 minutes. Use a hand held blender to puree the syrup.

Whisk together the flours and baking powder in a bowl. Stir in the milk and eggs.
Preheat a griddle over medium high heat
Coat the griddle with vegetable oil spray. Ladle the pancake batter onto the griddle, turn when bubbles rise to the top, and continue cooking, about 4 to 6 minutes total.

Serve the pancakes with the syrup.

Blueberry Pie Muffins

The aroma of these muffins, when you bring them out of the oven, will remind you of blueberry pie. They taste just as good. All purpose flour lightens the batter just a bit. You may want to serve these with a slather of protein-rich nut butter for a longer lasting energy boost. They are best served warm, but they’re pretty darn good the next day, too!

2 cups whole-grain pastry flour or whole wheat flour
¾ cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon sea salt
½ cup organic unsalted butter (1 stick), melted
1 cup all natural granulated sugar
3 large organic eggs
¾ cup organic milk
Juice of ½ medium lemon, about 1 tablespoon
Zest of ½ medium lemon, about 1 teaspoon
1 pint fresh blueberries, about 2 cups

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line a 12-cup muffin tin with paper baking cups.

Whisk together both flours, the baking powder, cinnamon and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together the melted butter, sugar, eggs, milk, lemon juice and lemon zest.

Coarsely chop half of the blueberries using a knife, or briefly pulse with a food processor. Add the chopped blueberries into the butter/egg mixture. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until just combined. Fold in the remaining whole blueberries. The batter will be thick.

Drop the batter by rounded tablespoons into the muffin tin. (An ice cream scoop is perfect for this task!) Bake until the muffins are golden and a tester inserted into the center comes out clean, about 25 to 30 minutes. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes and then remove the muffins to a rack to cool completely.

Yield: 12 muffins
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 25 to 30 minutes

Sources and Substitutions
Organic, whole wheat pastry flour is a little lighter than regular whole wheat flour. It works very well in place of all-purpose flour in most baking recipes, and can be found in most super markets.

The recipe used here is a perfect basic muffin recipe. It screams for your inventiveness. You can use any fresh fruit that you like; all berries, chopped peaches, apples and bananas are perfect. You can incorporate oats, nuts or chocolate chips; add flavorings like vanilla, instant coffee, peanut butter – it all works!

Just Like Grammy's Apple Strudel

Using frozen Phyllo dough short cuts the preparation of this great dish.


2 tablespoons organic unsalted butter room temperature, plus ½ cup (1 stick) melted
½ cup fresh bread crumbs
4 to 5 medium apples, peeled, cored and thinly sliced
Juice of 1 medium lemon, about 3 tablespoons
Zest of 1 medium lemon, about 2 teaspoons
1 cup all natural granulated sugar, divided
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon, divided
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon salt
1 package of frozen phyllo dough, thawed (you will need at least 18 sheets)

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Melt 2 tablespoons butter in a non-stick skillet over medium high heat. When melted, stir in the bread crumbs and cook until they just begin to turn brown, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat and set aside.

Place the apple slices into a bowl. Sprinkle with lemon juice. Stir in the lemon zest, ½ cup of the sugar, 1 teaspoon of the cinnamon, and the nutmeg.

Stir together the remaining sugar, cinnamon and salt. Set this aside.

Place a piece of parchment or waxed paper that is larger than a sheet of the phyllo dough onto your work surface. Carefully unroll the dough and place between 2 damp towels. This will keep the dough moist and prevent breakage.

Place 1 sheet of the phyllo dough onto the parchment paper. Carefully brush with melted butter. Sprinkle the dough with the sugar cinnamon mixture. Repeat this process with 5 more layers of phyllo dough.

Place 1/3 of the filling across the wide end of the pastry dough layers, leaving 2-inches on the sides and bottom. Roll the bottom edge over the filling. Fold in the sides. Continue rolling to form a log. Transfer the log, seam side down, onto a baking sheet that has been coated with vegetable oil spray. Repeat the process until you have 3 logs. Brush the tops with butter and a final sprinkling of sugar. Use a sharp knife to cut slits into the top of the pastry to allow the steam to escape.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until the strudels are golden. Cool on a rack for 5 to 10 minutes. Use two spatulas to transfer the warm strudel to a serving platter and cut into 2-inch slices. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream, or a scoop of ice cream. (My Grandmother served the strudel hot out of the oven in a bowl with cream poured over the top. Yumm!!)

Yield: about 8 slices per strudel
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Cook Time: 10 to 12 minutes