Weekend chilli

Where to begin?  Our family woke up at 8:50am this morning...with a refreshed sense of strength.  I felt very optimistic with my plans for the day.  Toast and coffee for breakfast, cocoa for Aubrey, piano homework, reading time, say good bye to Jeff, left over fried rice for lunch, a walk to the library, play at the park, smoothies for snack and then what for dinner?  On a cool crisp sunny day....chilli  it is!  And if I making chilli; I'm making cornbread....gluten free corn bread!  It's the absolute best recipe I've ever had....and at least three professional chefs that have eaten at my table agree....so how's that for cred?!

So I feel like a chilli recipe would be a little obvious....I pretty much throw anything in and every bean possible!  The one different thing I did do today was when I was browning my beef with onion and red pepper I froze half for this week; it's either ready for nachos or a pasta bake!  I was pretty excited I thought of that....browning the meat seems to be time consuming. So only doing it once this week seemed like a brilliant thought!

So I threw everything else in the crockpot and let it simmer all day!

Now for the cornbread!

I make my own gluten free flour mix and keep it in and airtight container in the fridge.

Note: that's tapioca starch....I originally didn't know there was such a thing so I used minute tapioca....boy was I wrong!  They sell everything at super store(so probably any grocer)  but you can also get everything at a bulk store. 

Alterations:  if I'm using salted butter I omit the salt, but I do add chopped green onion, shredded cheese and onion salt.  I usually add chopped  jalepenos  too but didn't have any today.

 

Mix all my dry ingredients

Add in my wet ingredients, stir...it will be lumpy

I add in all my garnish additions and stir until just combined. 

I line my cast iron terrine baking dish...it makes the edges so crunchy and delicious. 

Smooth the top.

Bake at 400F 25 minutes

I remove it from the terrine right when it's done;  I don't want it to continue baking since those dishes hold the heat!

So now I'm ready to eat!  Waiting for my sisters to join me...I did a dinner shout out around noon.  Anything made in a crockpot is enough to share!!!!

What to make?

Loss of inspiration in the kitchen is very common; well atleast to me it is.  Especially when I'm not feeling super great...I have no energy to think with my taste buds.  But there is a catch....I'm a mom and Aubrey has to eat.  So I asked on Facebook what people's "go to" meals were....all were great ideas ...I will probably try them this week.  

My friend Cate suggested chicken fried rice with lots of fried egg and serve it with plum sauce.  Her boys love it! Since I had about 3 cups of cooked brown rice and tons of veggies and some pork loin; I thought "perfect"!  

So I went to the basement and got the Wok....Aubrey found this funny!  After I dusted it off...I turned it on high.  With some oil I fried 4 scrambled eggs. I set this aside.

At about this moment I realized..."I've never made fried rice before".  I did however remember getting it made for myself at the mall in Thailand...so I thought back 12 years and used my imagination!

Diced up all of my veggies very thin; so they'd cook evenly.  I taught Aubrey how to peel pea pods.  She was so proud of herself!

On a separate cutting board I chopped up the pork really small.  Threw it in the very hot wok and added a bit of this and bit of that!

Hoisin, soya sauce, grated fresh ginger, grated orange zest, fresh orange juice....I think that is it.  Over seasoning the meat I find helpful in giving flavour to the rest of a dish like this.

It cooked really quickly and I removed it from the wok.

At this point I added all of my veg except for the broccoli florets and stir fried it with a bit if soya sauce and fresh orange juice.

Then I added my cooked rice; sautéed that for a couple minutes and then added everything else in.

This was a complete meal and it was so fresh and light! I couldn't believe how far it stretched.  If you're looking for a meal on a small budget....this is it!  You may have notice the pork was $2.05 with 30% off...like what do you want for nothing?!?!? This meal was probably under $6 in its entirety...crazy!

Well the real critic Aubrey did pretty good...she liked the pieces of meat and egg, she said.  We didn't have plum sauce but I added Saracha to mine; that added a nice zip!  A touch of sesame oil would of been nice while it was cooking but it slipped my mind.

So thank you Cate!  I appreciate your suggestion!

If you get grapes; make grape jelly!

I happily received two bags of Concord grapes from a women at church.  Our deal was; I would give her a couple of jars of the jelly and I would also give her a couple jars of my pickles from this year. With my new found love of preserves ....of course I agreed.

Not really sure where to begin so I called my mom!  She decided she'd come over and she was more than happy to me; all I needed was to find a recipe.  So of course I called my MIL and she gave me a recipe.

Once my mom came over we decided to follow the recipe on the liquid pectin box.  

First we; and by we I mean they ....had to wash and pluck all the grapes off of the stems. 

Then the grapes needed to boiled and be squashed down for ten minutes to release all of the juices. The potato masher worked great!

Once this was completed we needed to strain it....essentially we made grape juice....really yummy grape juice!

We put the strained juice back in the large pot and added the sugar called for on the liquid pectin packet.  We got 12 cups of juice so that was three recipes.  So we added 20 3/4 cups of sugar; the recipe warned against cutting the sugar so we didn't dare!!!!

We needed to bring this to a rapid boil and then add the liquid pectin.

After the pectin is added it needed to boil for a minute.  

As far as getting the jars ready we put our clean washed jars on a tray and put them in the oven.  Set the oven to 350F; once the oven reached 350F we turned it off and left the sterilized jars inside.  We boiled our lids and tongs.

Let the filling begin....

We kept some of the grape juice and served it with dinner....I wish I had taken a picture of all of our grape moustaches!!!! Hers was the cutest!

My growing cellar!!!!  I can't wait to give them all away...Christmas here we come!

Strawberry blueberry muffins

I looked in my fridge and saw fresh strawberries and blueberries that were a little soft to be enjoyed but I surely didn't want to waste them.  So off I took to google looking up muffin recipes.  

I found this one and I had all the ingredients so I decided to give it a try!

I doubled the recipe so we'd have enough to share!

I mixed all the wet ingredients together(even the jam); since I doubled the recipe...I used half oil, half fruit sauce.  I ran out of milk so I used the last of my half and half cut with water.  Don't worry I have another litre of coffee cream for tomorrow morning....priorities!

I added in my dry ingredients and the berries and gave it a good mix. 

The batter smelt so good; I felt very optimistic!

We baked them at 375 for about 28 minutes.  They were firm to the touch but with a little spring; tooth pick came out clean.

They tasted just like Tim's Hortons "Fruit explosion" muffin....yum!

A double batch actually made 30 large muffins.

We decided to pack up 20 of them for teen challenge.  Our motto is "sharing is fun"...you'd hear our two year old say that on any given day.  We try our best to show her practical ways to show kindness...and that you can have fun whilst being kind!!! So we wrapped them up and used her Dora stickers to seal them.  I think that was more of a sharing lesson for her!

So next time you're making something maybe double it and remember "sharing is fun"!!!!