Foody Photos

We're in that funky time of the year here on the urban homestead....we still have a few local potatoes and apples in storage, as well as some homecanned & frozen goods from last year's garden, but it is definitely a difficult time of the year to try to cook from scratch and using stored or in season ingredients! It snowed on Sunday, so we're still pretty far from the tomatoes, carrots, green beans, etc., time of year, but we are rapidly approaching the time of year where we'll have access to Easter Egg Radishes, salad greens, etc., so we're pretty excited. In the meantime, here are some of the "real foods" that have been coming out of my kitchen recently....first up, we've had homemade pizza 3 times the past two months. It definitely pays to make a triple batch of the dough, roll out 3 pizza crusts, and freeze 2 for later use while making one pizza fresh. Homemade pizza is such an easy meal when you prep ahead that way:

I've also been making bread like crazy. I'm working on a mildly dessert bread involving special ingredients of cream cheese, egg, and dried fruit. Here's the first attempt...I think I need to work on adjusting the yeast level, or the yeast-to-salt ratio as it came out ginormously tall, but it was a good first attempt.



I also finally perfected this peasant bread style dill loaf I've been tweaking every time I made it. It turns out that the final secret ingredient change I needed was to substitute olive oil for the butter in the recipe....now it's exactly as I want it. It doesn't photograph too well but, trust me, it is delicious:



I also made and froze a large batch of chocolate muffins for snacks at work:





And as things have been rather busy at work most of the meals have been easy meals like a several mealsworth batch of homemade soup, dill bread and tea:



Quesadillas & homecanned pears (and a yummy muffin):



And, of course, also lots of homemade mac and cheese using the cheese sauce I made a large batch of and froze in several containers in late January, sandwiches, and mashed potatoes. Mostly pretty basic stuff, but it's tasty, filling and exactly the sort of stuff we need this time of year.