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jillbcooks 9/30/2009 6:45:00 PM
Since I am so cheap, I never send my husband’s clothes or mine out to be dry cleaned if I can launder them myself. My husband is a school principal, so he wears dress clothes every day and the laundry piles up fast. I always seem to get behind on ironing and end up with a mountain of clothes that need to be done. I have a trick for looking forward to the chore: watching television while I iron. I always watch something that I don’t necessarily watch during the week—not junk exactly, but not cerebral dramas, either. Think a marathon of America’s Next Top Model or those Discovery channel shows about medical mysteries. Well, this pa...
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ironing, Christmas cookies, QVC, Mexican Wedding Cakes
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jillbcooks 9/25/2009 2:13:00 PM
Since our fifth wedding anniversary, for which the traditional anniversary gift is wood, my husband has had the idea to buy me a tree. We are celebrating our eighth wedding anniversary next week, and we just bought some pear trees to mark the occasion. We learned a lot about trees as we researched options that would work in our yard. We also learned that pear trees need to be planted in pairs, making pear trees even more apropos anniversary gifts.
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pear dessert, anniversary, pear tree
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jillbcooks 9/23/2009 8:23:00 PM
In my last post on Rosh Hashanah, I promised some pictures of my Upside Down Apple Cake experiment. I decided to be inspired by the Warm Caramel Apple Cake recipe, but to doctor a cake mix and make it up along the way.
I started with four small cake pans (6 inch pans) and put some brown sugar (a few tablespoons), a pat of butter, a bit of pecans and very thinly sliced apples. ...
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butter, white cake mix, fall, pecans, apple cake
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jillbcooks 9/18/2009 2:26:00 PM
The title for today’s blog is a quote from a young cook who helped bake the honey lemon cakes the other day. It’s funny that even with family, friends, celebration and excitement for a new year, food is the part of the holiday that can stand out in the memory and bring a feeling of satisfaction and contentment.
I asked the young cooks if they had any special holiday food traditions for Rosh Hashanah. One student answered quickly, “Tzimmes. I love tzimmes.” Other students weren’t fami...
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Rosh Hashanah, warm caramel apple cake, brisket
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jillbcooks 9/16/2009 8:14:00 PM
One of the pleasures of what I do for a living—writing cookbooks for kids and teaching them how to cook—is that I get to watch kids having fun and truly being delighted by cooking.
Yesterday I was helping 34 students, half in grade eight and half in grade one bake enough Honey Lemon Cake for fifty-six Rosh Hashanah baskets for elderly members of the community.
While cooking with kids can seem chaotic, being well organized can make it a piece of cake. I broke students into teams of 8, with older students helping the elementary students. Then I had half the team work on wet ingredients and half on dry ingredients, and then combine them. The...
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Rosh Hashanah, baking with kids, honey cake, lemon cake
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jillbcooks 9/11/2009 4:48:00 PM
Did you realize that we had a date with all nines in it this week, 9/9/09? It is hard to believe that we are already in September’s double digits. As I was figuring what to blog about today, I decided to check the calendar. We are less than two weeks away from Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sunset on September 18. I guess with dates in my mind, I noticed something sort of significant about Rosh Hashanah this year. Just like some cultures find 9/9/09 numerically significant, in Judaism, th...
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Cupcakes, tea, Chai, tea cakes, Rosh Hashanah
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jillbcooks 9/8/2009 8:59:00 PM
I do love dessert with wow factor. I don’t love a fussy dessert that leaves me with a boatload of dishes to clean up.
And I do love ice cream.
We had guests over for dinner on Sunday night, and I concentrated on making lots of sides for our barbecue since I really, really love sides. I made everything from scratch: cornbread muffins, baked beans, coleslaw, roasted potatoes, garlic butter corn on the cob, and grilled cheese-stuffed jalapenos wrapped in bacon.
That did not leave a lot of time for making dessert.
I bought a pre-made chocolate pie shell, hot fudge sauce, strawberry ice cream, chocolate chip ice cream, vanilla ice cream and w...
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ice cream, ice cream pie, barbecue
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jillbcooks 9/4/2009 4:40:00 PM
I love cookies. I really do. It is a simple pleasure, and one I like to indulge. I like to experiment and find new recipes. I especially like to get cookies that I hear others sing high praise for. The Minnesota State Fair has a beloved cookie vendor called Sweet Martha's that people love. I heard about it from just about everyone I met when I moved to Minnesota a couple summers ago. I even heard about it on the message boards at Chow.com, a foodie website where users share food experiences. My husband was set on getting some Sweet Martha's cookies, which, I should add, are sold in buckets....
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cookies, Minnesota State Fair, chocolate chip cookies