Small Batch Egg Salad

We planned a suppertime picnic for Thursday night, which meant I needed to come up with a good meal to eat cold. So I tried the small batch egg salad recipe for myself. 

I cooked the eggs in a bain-marie, made homemade mayo with an immersion blender, and chopped up homemade pickles to make dill relish. 

It turned out very good. G said not quite as good as the large batch for Saint Mark Summer Nights, we think because of the pickles. 

 

Chicken Nesting Boxes

Battle of the nests is going on in our shed... The chickens love to lay their eggs up in the haymow, but they keep scratching all of the straw down so there's no bedding for them to lay in. I'm attempting to solve this problem by building a few more nesting boxes - some up in the haymow, and some down below. We'll see how they like their new options!  

It was a pretty quick build- leftover wood scraps screwed together into a box. Jaron handed me screws. 

Here are the haymow nesting options:

Now filled with straw to entice them in:

Since we have so many layers, I added a few more boxes next to their favorite laying spot. I'm hoping the taller wood will entice them in. 

To further entice them, I had my little helper "seed" the nests with fake eggs. 

 Do you think it will work? Which nesting boxes will become their new favorite?

Applesauce

My favorite way to make applesauce these days...

A five gallon pail of apples fits in one roaster. I used a hand held apple slicer to quickly cut them into smaller pieces. I don't need to peel or core them because I have a food strainer that filters all of that out. 

I left them in the roaster at 250° pretty much all day. This temp required little stirring. I stirred it when I thought about it, but it wasn't hot enough to burn the apples if I left it too long. 

Normally I like to run the apples through the food strainer right away after cooking, but it was bedtime so I let it cool down overnight and ran it through in the morning. Doing an entire roaster full of applesauce takes a while! 

Here's my setup:

My plan for the applesauce is to eat some fresh, make more fruit roll-ups since those are Jaron's current favorite snack, and try freeze drying some applesauce bites. Stay tuned for the applesauce bite experiment!

Fast Food

My cookbook sharing friend let me flip through a few of her current cookbook finds the other day. "What to cook when you don't feel like cooking" was the theme. The cookbook was neat because it had recipes organized by time needed to cook. 

This one caught my eye because we have a bag of tator tots in the freezer (leftover from tator tot hotdish). 

It was super easy and only used one pan, so cleanup was a breeze. 

I used freeze dried peppers instead of fresh, and they seemed to rehydrate okay. 

I left it sit in the cast iron too long after cooking... It didn't stick, but the moisture reacted with the metal and gave it a slight metallic taste. At least for my taste. That's happened with other foods too (that have sat too long and are acidic). G hasn't noticed, so maybe I'm just sensitive. 😅 

Definitely a recipe I'd make again!

Tomato Basil Soup Upgrade

Remember that failure of a soup I made about a month ago? The tomato basil goat milk soup that split and wasn't tomatoey enough? 

I had frozen the leftovers, thinking I'd make a pasta sauce sometime. Today was that day. 

It was so liquidy, I knew it needed to be reduced by quite a bit. Therefore, frying pan for more surface area. 

I thought about cooking noodles directly in the sauce to try to soak up some moisture, but I wanted to use rice noodles, and because they don't have the starch regular noodles have, they could turn soggy and gelatinous instead of a nice firm texture. (Thank you AI for the information). 

So the noodles cooked separately. 

The sauce took a long time to reduce, as I suspected. I added some tomato peel powder to thicken it, more salt, and a splash of lemon juice. 

Noodles added once cooked, and voila. 

It would've tasted nice with chicken, but I didn't have any around (besides our live ones outside 😅), so I served it with ground walnuts on top. Wow, did that elevate the flavor! 

Not a bad meal! 

RMH Meal

Jaron is almost two years old. How did that happen? 🤯 Isn't that always the case though? Time flies by. 

We had appointments in Rochester the past three days- general checkups, all went well- and we served our annual meal at the Ronald McDonald House to celebrate Jaron's birthday and give back to the organization that helped us so much when he was in the hospital. 

Our menu was the same as last year: homemade goulash soup, homemade bread, lettuce salad with tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade applesauce, and cookies. 

This year we used tomatoes from our garden and I made gingersnaps from scratch. 

Last year we made way too much food, so this year we made half as much and it was just the right amount. Six batches of soup, six loaves of bread, one roaster of applesauce (same amount as last year - a 5gal pail of apples), and four batches of gingersnaps. There were a lot of cookies leftover, but we did that on purpose so we could bring them to the NICU nurses. 

We started cooking around 2pm Thursday after a stop up on the NICU floor to visit our nurses. That timed out very well. Last year we paused cooking to visit and cooking got rushed in the end. This year was much more relaxed even with the extra from scratch item. 

Jaron fell asleep on the way back from the hospital and snoozed in the car seat while we cooked. 

I made the bread and cookies. G bought the groceries and made the soup. One of our favorite house volunteers had signed up to be the scheduled host for us (they always have someone familiar with the kitchen/serving help with the meal). She made the salad and helped get our serving line set up. 

Mimi and Papa showed up just in time to entertain Jaron when he woke up from his nap. He had a blast playing with them outside, in the gym, and in the toy room. 

They also helped serve the meal. 

Here we are, ready to go! 

We served about 65 meals, which was our estimate of how many. Lots of positive feedback on the food. Guess we'll keep it the same for next year. 😉 

Breakfast Cookies

I was super excited about this recipe... Breakfast Cookies! 

I didn't have any sliced almonds, but I did have some chopped walnuts left from a different recipe, so I swapped those. Instead of the craisins, I did a combo of dried mulberries and dried berry mix, which includes pepitas. 

They turned out great. Very hearty, just sweet enough. They hold together well and aren't crumbly.

A perfect filling breakfast before a day of appointments!