bake more

I made another batch of butternut squash mash last night, as well as some cranberry-oatmeal bars, and it was all delicious!

In addition to the squash, I made a batch with mostly carrots and some squash; I’ll be trying that tonight to see if I like it as well.

No pics this time, but trust me – YUMMY!

I made up the recipe – I made a white sauce with butter, cake flour, and rice milk, plus some spices and brie cheese, then I baked it with cooked macaroni shells. It was so good!

I made lemon bars today, and boy howdy, this is a great thing to do. Zesting the lemon was my favorite part. This is going to be a repeat recipe!

I am delighted with how this turned out. It is delicious, moist, heavy, rich, and full of good ingredients.

This was a fun pick, because the ingredients can be adapted to be renal-friendly, and it could be a sweet way for my mom to gain some weight back. Besides, carrots are good for us all. Here’s hoping it turns out well.

Maybe I’ll go make the frosting now.

Today’s baking was a white cake, using cake flour, and a cream cheese and powdered sugar icing. I chose this because it’s renal-friendly for my mom – she’s on dialysis – and it turned out okay. The frosting would be better on a spice cake, and I didn’t cook the cake very well – it needed about 7 more minutes, I think. I’m going to try this again as cupcakes, and I’ll put pear slices on top of the cupcakes before I bake them.

As luck would have it, my sister brought us garden-fresh vegetables this weekend, a gift from her new boyfriend and his family garden. Among the sundry variety of tomatoes were three beautiful yellow squash and a gigantic zucchini. Now we have all those tomatoes and a really beautiful zucchini souffle with mashed squash and cheddar. The whole house smells so good!

This recipe is very similar to the squash bake I learned two weeks ago, but the major difference is this one called for flour and baking powder – here’s hoping the batter turned out alright. Off to find out…

I remember being moderately scornful of the whole idea of home economics class in high school, probably as some sort of alliance-seeking with my woolhat dad, and boy has life shown me up in this regard, over and over again.

Home economics is HARD WORK! I’m not even trying to run a household – I’m working on just me stuff – and it’s hard. This weekend, I found myself attempting to create a month-long menu, 28 days of recipes I already know (or things that won’t be difficult to pick up) so I could have a food budget, make far fewer trips to the grocery store, and minimize the amount of unhappy surprises inherent in feeding yourself. An added bonus to trying this out is I can figure out a way to keep from being bored by eating the same foods day in and day out.

I’d give myself about a C for “nice try, but keep working on this” because it was worth doing but it isn’t a presentable menu, by any means. The simple fact is, I’m one of those people who is always going to spend more money than absolutely necessary on food, and I don’t mean by eating out, either. I just like to splurge on food.

The most exciting part of this exercise was when I realized I wanted to learn how to bake more casserole dishes. The squash bake I recently discovered was so good, and I would like to have more of these recipes among my options.

I would like to have a fairly decent menu of meals worked up so I can cook for myself without too much fuss on a consistent, economical basis. Some of those meals will require baking. Ah, that feels good – having a clear reason for wanting to bake more often will probably help me achieve this goal more quickly. It has the added benefit of helping me figure out when such a thing can be accomplished.

On deck: some kind of fish. That shouldn’t be too hard, and it’s great brain food. Maybe I could try a marinade? Maybe just lemon butter – simple, good.

This sort of knowledge is really important to me – knowing that I can feed myself economically, with satisfaction, day in and day out can help me get on with the business of living.

I’ve got a recipe box and am working up a repertoire of repeat recipes. I may only try a new recipe every few weeks, but this will build on itself as I continue. My latest: squash supreme. Yum!