Another "relaxing" Saturday

My parents are in Montana, so we've been keeping an extra eye on grandma while they are away. Last night she spent the night to join us for Shabbatt dinner. At 3am (the usual time I seem to wake up from the pregnancy anyway) I woke up to grandma coughing...a lot. Not terribly surprising, since she's been recovering from a cold...but it went on for an hour, resulting in fever, chills, and a lot of "unproductive" retching over the toilet. She finally fell back to sleep at 4, and I did the same at 5:45.
Around 6:30 Haim and I woke up from lots of chicken squawking. At first we thought that they had escaped into the front yard...but after a dash to the front and the back, we realized that they were having a stand-off with a hawk who was a touch smaller than them. He flew off, we fed the chickens and went back to sleep for an hour.
I woke up and prepared some ricotta pancakes...thankfully, because the day has never really calmed since then! Exciting events include a garbage truck exploding a tire in front of our house just after Maya woke up, Haim and I running back and forth between rental properties, and a very confused grandma waking up believing it was Monday. Luckily a yummy, protein packed breakfast helped us set the tone for the day!

Ricotta Pancakes
(the original recipe says this is enough for 2 servings, but I think it is enough for 6 small to medium eaters, especially with fresh fruit served on the side)

• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 cup ricotta cheese
• 2 eggs
• 2/3 cup milk
• 1 or 2 handfuls fresh or frozen mixed berries (if you like)
  
• 1 lemon, zested and juiced
• Butter, for griddle

Preheat a nonstick griddle.

Combine flour, baking powder, nutmeg, salt, and sugar in a small bowl. Whisk together the remaining ingredients in a large bowl, and then combine in dry ingredients. Add butter to hot pan, and pour silver dollar size pancakes. Cook on both sides until light golden brown. Repeat until no batter remains. We like to top this with a touch of maple syrup, but they are delicious plain too.

Enjoy!

Challah

For a couple years now I've been preparing a challa for Fridays that always turns out gorgeous, but is a bit dry for my taste, and never lasts more than 36 hours...which is ok if we host a lot of people, but leads to french toast overload if it was just the 3 of us for dinner....too much left over stale bread!
My friend Beth gave me a recipe that I am IN LOVE with. The bread lasts just about a week, and you make four loaves worth of dough at once, what you don't use immediately, you can freeze for later!

Challah Bread

• 3 cups warm water
• 1 1/4 cup sugar
• 3 packages of active dry yeast
• 3 eggs
• 4 tsp salt
• 1 cap vanilla
• drizzle of honey
• 11 cups of flour
• 2 1/2 to 3 1/4 cups of veggie oil

Mix sugar and warm water; add yeast and let activate 3-4 minutes.

Add eggs, salt, vanilla, and honey. Mix and wait 5 minutes.

Add oil and flour and knead (I use a stand mixer with dough hook, but Beth always does it by hand) for about 10 minutes or until it is a bit springy (but not tacky) to the touch.

Cover with a moist towel for 2 hours until it doubles in size.

Divide into 4 loaves, braid what you will use, place on a cookies sheet with parchment or a silicone baking sheet and let rise 90 minutes covered with a moist towel. Place the extra dough in airtight containers (tupperware type or zip baggies) in the freezer. Alternately, if you were preparing this the night before, you could refrigerate the next day's bread in airtight containers (pre-braid).

When the loaf is ready to bake, brush with a mixed egg, sprinkle with sesame, poppy or sunflower seeds, and place in an oven that has been pre-heated to 350 F. Cook for about 30 minutes until golden. Remove from baking sheet and let cool on a rack.

If you are cooking bread that has previously been frozen or refrigerated, you can let defrost overnight in the fridge and then remove from fridge and let warm to room temp for about 1 hour before you braid.

Mothering Your Nursing Toddler

The linked article, Mothering Your Nursing Toddler was developed from a post that I wrote on UnschoolingBasics. The editor of New Beginnings read the post and asked if she could modify it into an article...several months later, I received the paper copy of this article in the mail.
I would love to get back into writing, and the idea of getting paid for it some day is really appealing, so I see this as I nice and fortuitous first step on that path!

The girls are working hard

It's Sunday morning and Haim is in the garage doing some projects with his helpers. Can you spot 2 chickens?

Birthday Gifts

We try to limit the amount of birthday parties that we attend to just those of very close friends. Also, I've been trying to make, instead of buy, birthday gifts....much more personal and meaningful in my opinion...especially when a kid is having a giant party and already receiving 15-30 gifts anyway.

Andres will be 2 and we are joining him to celebrate his birthday tomorrow. Here is the toddler scale messenger that Maya and I made him...cost about $4.50 in materials and about 2 hours of my time (with Maya's help...without her help it probably would have been closer to 45 min!)

New Recipies

Though I haven't been writing much, I've been cooking plenty.
This week I made a killer ginger chicken and made some excellent chocolate chip cookies. The ginger chicken is a great, fast prep meal with minimal effort or clean-up, and the cookies are fairly straight forward but use oil instead of butter (cheaper and/or good for the dairy intolerant) and are both crunchy and chewy. Enjoy!


Ginger Chicken

• 8 scallions
• 3 inch chunk of fresh ginger, peeled
  
• 6 cloves garlic
• 3/8 c soy sauce
• 3/8 c honey
• 3lbs chicken (I used legs, but you could use a cut chicken or whatever parts you prefer)

Coarsely chop scallions, ginger and garlic and add first 5 ingredients to the food processor. Process until thoroughly mixed. Place chicken in baking dish in 1 layer and pour sauce over. Put the chicken into a cold oven, uncovered, and set the oven to heat to 350 and cook for a total time (including pre-heat) of 70 minutes. (I like this recipe because I can leave the house or leave it unattended while cooking, then come home and have food on the table in 15-20 minutes) When you are getting dinner ready, flip the chicken and heat the oven back up for as long as it takes to prep rice vegies and a salad (about 20 minutes). Everything will be delicious and moist. The sauce is excellent over plain rice, or stir fried rice if you're feeling fancy. Some steamed or lightly sauteed veggies are also be a pretty and healthy addition.

Lastly, the original version called for 1/8t of 5 spice powder but I forgot to add it....you could try it like that too if you wanted, though it didn't miss anything with the omission.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

• ¾ c light brown sugar
• 3/4 T molasses
  

• ¾ c sugar

• 2 eggs

• ½ c oil

• 1 t vanilla

• 1 c all purpose flour

• 1 c whole wheat pastry flour

• ¾ t baking soda

• 1 t salt

• 6 oz chocolate chips

• 4 oz dried cherries (I used the new costco mix)

Mix all wet ingredients, then mix in dry ingredients untill just mixed (don’t over mix). Add fruit and chocolate and mix. Place cookies on cookie sheet with parchment or silpat Put in oven preheated to 375 for 10 minutes.

We made some tiny and some big…10 minutes was good for all of them. A bit crunchy outside and soft inside.

Yum!