First you will need two eggs per omelette, your favourite ingredients along with your favourite cheese. Now I've made it no secret that I'm no conoisseur, so I like it simple. Here's what I add.
What do you do when you have too many eggs? We've been averaging about 7 a day and my fridge is starting to run out of room. Don't think I'm at a point yet where I can start selling them, so I have to find uses in cooking them instead. One of my favourite and easiest ways to get rid of 10 eggs quickly, is making the family omelettes. It's a fast meal, healthy and a crowd favourite. Here's my very simple recipe. First you will need two eggs per omelette, your favourite ingredients along with your favourite cheese. Now I've made it no secret that I'm no conoisseur, so I like it simple. Here's what I add. My omelettes must include the three above ingredients...ham, mushrooms and cheese. Preferrably black forest ham, fried mushrooms, and any kind of processed cheese. But I'm not that picky. Canned mushrooms and sliced cheese will do the trick just fine. So to begin, mix your eggs in a bowl along with two tablespoons of water and a dash of salt and pepper. Poor it into a fry pan and cook on medium heat until done. Add your ingredients to one half of the omelette and flip the other side over them. Let it sit long enough for the cheese to melt and voila, she's done. Simple. Quick. Easy. Healthy. Well, until someone drowns it in ketchup!
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Ever since we owned backyard chickens and they began laying, our eggs are always fresh and eaten within a day or two of laying. However, because of this trying to peel a hardboiled egg became a problem. Eggs need time to allow air to filter through the thousands of little pores in the shells to create air pockets. Without those air pockets, it's next to impossible to peel those shells away from an egg. Believe me, I've tried. The best way to peel a hardboiled egg is to allow it to sit in your fridge for a week or two (the longer the easier the shell falls away) before boiling it. I boil mine for about ten minutes (start at a low temperature to prevent shell cracking) then sit it in cold water until cool. When cracking, begin with the widest end of the egg where the largest pocket of air has settled at the bottom. The shell should then peel away for you easily and in large sections. This may seem simple to some, but I figure if I could make this mistake, so could other first time backyard chicken owners.
I'm about to reveal two really bad things about myself. A) I'm a really, really bad cook. And B) I have very, very poor eyesight and should have upgraded my glasses ten years ago---and I don't think that is an exaggeration. To make matters worse, for some reason the cute little folks who live in my house believe I am some kind of wonderful chef. So when I mess up I feel doubly bad. As in tonight's dinner. Dinner at my house is a pain. I hate thinking about supper, I hate preparing supper and I especially hate cooking supper. And, yes, I even hate eating supper. I'm too busy. I don't have time for it. I'd rather just grab a quick bite to eat, nibble on something from the fridge, or even better yet, grab a prepared pizza at the local grocer. You see I'm not a huge connoisseur of good food. I'm not a fan of trying new things. I like my old trusted and trues. However, there are times when I do come across something that may fall into my limited palette and looks simple enough for a bad cook like myself not to mess up too much. As was the case tonight. I decided to try a recipe I found on Chickens in the Road. It was a barbecue hamburger that sounded tasty and looked pretty straight forward. But I should have known, for me that wouldn't be the case. First, I lacked one of the ingredients. It called for chile sauce and I didn't have any in the cupboard so we decided to switch it with a sauce we did have. My hubby picked out one called Kansas City Style Smokey Barbecue Sauce. Sounds yummy, doesn't it? It actually was a pretty good choice. That wasn't where I messed up. It was the part where I read "1/3 lb of brown sugar". 1/3 pound of brown sugar?! Like, isn't that an awful lot of brown sugar? And who measured brown sugar like that? I went back to my computer to see if anyone had left comments on this 1/3 pound of brown sugar and found noone had, so I headed back into the kitchen to grumble to my hubby that I had no idea how to convert pounds into cups. Being a butcher and apparently converting pounds to cups is part of his daily duties, informed me that it equalled two cups. Oh my God! TWO CUPS! Wow---but okay. So in went the two cups of brown sugar. Then I came across the next ingredient. 1/3 lb of lemon juice. There it was again. 1/3 pound of lemon juice. I wondered if the author was British or something but grabbed my measuring cup and the lemon juice my hubby passed me from the fridge. Wait a sec....why do I have lemon juice in my fridge? Must have been for some past Christmas baking. Past alright----the best before date read September 10, 2008. Ya right.... So we ditched the lemon juice you'll be happy to know and went in search of a replacement flavour. I came up with mustard. At last I had all my ingredients in the bowl and was about to mix them together when I glanced at the recipe again and notice something. I lean in close, squint my eyes and reread "1/3 tb lemon juice". Ohhh, well that made more sense----oh geez, hold the phone. I reread "1/3 tb brown sugar". Yep, that's right. 1/3 teaspoon of brown sugar (though I really think she meant tablespoon---in my world I was taught a small t was for teaspoon and a capital T for tablespoon). Anyway, I glance at my bowl of mustard and ketchup and sauces.---and my 1/3 pound of brown sugar. Only I would mess up that stupidly. Trying to salvage my concauction, I scooped out as much of the brown sugar I could and doubled the ketchup requirement. My brave hubby stuck his finger in the mix and gave it a taste test. He shrugged not bad and we went forward with it. Well he did, I went and sulked in the chicken yard with my little friends. Then surprise, surprise, we had a winner! For a complete mess up, we actually really enjoyed the taste of them! I'd share with you the recipe but I really have no idea how much of anything went into them. I can, however, refer you to the original recipe which undoubtedly tastes nothing like my concauction but probably just as wonderful (it certainly sounded promising); recommend you use your own choice of sauce (unless Chile Sauce is your choice of sauce); replace lemon juice with a good sized dollop of mustard; double the ketchup; add 2 cups of brown sugar and then scoop about 1/3 of it back out. Follow the rest of the recipe until done. Then hopefully, if you're lucky, you'll create a great tasting blunder burger like myself. Let me know how it works out for you.
Ok, here's another recipe from our Easter dinner. This recipe I found a few years back and have shared it many times, it is that dang good. Dutch Apple Pie is my favorite pie but for years I had a hard time finding the perfect pie. Store bought pies are just a joke, they taste luck rubber. My mother-in-law's isn't bad, but I wasn't over the head in love with it. I found a popular mennonite bakery that sold homemade dutch applie pie and thought at that time I had found the best dang apple pie. Until one year I attempted my own. I scowered the internet and recipe books until finally I concocted up my own recipe. It's very simple, what I like, and takes all my favourite ingredients. Mix 1 cup of brown sugar, 3 tbsp all-purpose flower, 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/4 cup melted margarine or butter, and 3-4 tbsp milk in a large bowl. Creme until you get a nice a carmel blend. Cut and peel 5 to 6 good size apples. I use macintosh because they are nice and sweet, but feel free to use any favourite apple of your choice. And I always have an extra apple handy because for some reason slices seem to mysteriously disappear. Next, add the sliced apples to the mixture. Once apples are completely coated, place them in a pie shell. In a separate bowl, mix the topping. Be sure it has a crumbling consistency and then layer on top of pie. Place in pre-heated 375 degrees oven. I place a baking pan under it as it will bubble over and make a mess of your oven if you don't. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour and viola, there you have it. The best dang apple pie you'll ever have tasted. Here's the full recipe.
The Best Dang Dutch Apple Pie 1 cup of brown sugar 3 tbsp flour 1 tsp cinnamon 1/4 cup melted margarine or butter 3-4 tbsp milk or rich cream (I use milk, but the rich cream sounds devine.) Mix all above ingredients in a large bowl. Cut and peel 5 to 6 good size apples. Add sliced apples to bowl. Stir and completely cover apples in mix. Using store bought pie crust (though you're welcome to make your own) pour contents of bowl into pie crust. Topping 1 cup brown sugar 3/4 cup all-purpose flour 1 tsp cinnamon 1/2 cup butter or margarine Mix all above ingredients until the mixture is the consistency of coarse breadcrumbs. Layer contents over apples as topping. Cook pie in oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 45 minutes to an hour. Then enjoy! I don't claim to know anything about cooking. As a matter of fact I would consider myself uneducated in the art of culinary skills. The main reason for this is because I take absolute no interest in it. Probably because I'm not very good at it. Vicious circle, really. But I will get excited and want to share when I discover something new, find a good tip, or come across a really good recipe that turns out well, particularly under the uncultivated ministration of yours truly. For Thanksgiving we have turkey, Christmas it's ham and for Easter I wanted something different. One Christmas Eve we treated ourselves and had dinner at a very swank upper class restaurant in a resort near our home. We ordered lamb and couldn't get over the tender delicious meat. So for this Easter we thought we'd give it a try. Now I've attempted lamb once before since that Christmas Eve and it turned out dry and tasteless. Now as I said, I don't know much, but I do know in order to produce a tender meat you must cook it very slow at low heat. So I pulled out the crockpot. My hubby worried about my choice of cookware, but I assured him this was the route to go. His biggest concern was flavour. Where would it come from? When roasting a meat, the flavour obviously comes from absorbing the seasoning you administer to the surface. In the crockpot it absorbs it from a broth or it's own juices. And as we discovered in our first attempt at cooking lamb, it doesn't have much flavour. That left us with concocting up a broth. So I hit the internet. And found just what I was looking for. I thought it was pretty straight forward until I realized I really didn't know anything about cooking. Or cooking terms. For instance the "zest of a lemon" is the outer yellow part of the lemon. And when referring to garlic cloves, they mean the small individual pieces inside the garlic, not the entire head of garlic. Really, I was that niave. I must have been because when I excitedly went to inform my hubby of my new found knowledge, he looked at me oddly as he already knew those terms and what they stood for. Oh well. I guess I learned something knew. And did you know that Rosemary is the best kept seasoning secret of all time? Oye! Just scrumptious. Can't believe I've never used it before. So anyhow, the above photo shows my seasoned leg of lamb sitting in my crockpot. I asked my butcher, aka hubby, to cut off some of the shank so that it would sit flat in the pan but he went off to work forgetting to do so. Again, I'm about to reveal something of myself that is pretty embarrassing. I've been a butcher's wife for nearly 24 years and I still can't tell my meat cuts apart. Or my knives. He keeps a special set of butcher knives locked away and when I pulled them out and looked at all the blades, I didn't have a clue which knife was which. Guessing the largest, meanest one was the meat boning knife, I began to hack away at my leg of lamb. It wasn't pretty. Shards of bone flew everywhere. (And, by the way, if you haven't already figured it out, here's another term for you...the boning knife does not cut thru bone it removes the meat from the bone. The knife above is called the cleaver and is the you want to cut thru bone...which is the knife I grabbed. I just gave it the wrong name.) Anyway, I cut off enough bone so that the lamb rested on an angle and not flattly in the pot. Which might have been a good thing, or else all my wonderful seasoning would have washed away in the broth below. And it was wonderful. The seasoning that is. The lamb came out of the crockpot eight hours later, tender and oh so yummy. It was a hit with the family. Here is the finished product. And for those who are interested, here is the recipe. There are many different ways of cooking leg of lamb on the internet and probably far better and more sophisticated ways than mine, but I thought this was pretty simple and straightforward.
Leg of Lamb 1 leg of lamb 1 lemon 4-5 garlic cloves 1 Tbsp chopped rosemary 1 Tbsp olive oil 1 tsp salt 1 tsp pepper Wine, chicken or beef broth, tomato juice or water Grate about half the zest off your lemon and mix with the rosemary, olive oil, salt and pepper. Rub this mixture all over your lamb. Let it sit to marinade. (I let sit all night.) After marinading, place in crockpot with half can of broth, wine, tomato juice or water. Squeeze lemon juice over lamb. Cover and cook for 6-8 hours. |