Thankful Thursday--Apricot Crescents

I have so many things to be thankful for, but one of them is that I am still able to share my joy of baking with others.  Today we baked and delivered four plates to some special friends from our church celebrating birthdays and others "just because".

Apricot, coconut & pecan crescents

I normally bake these with apples and pecans

AUSTRIAN SOUR CREAM APPLE PECAN CRESCENTS

I found this recipe in a Taste of Home publication around 2000. They were

one of my best sellers at our local farmer's market the summer of 2001.

Everybody loves them!

1 pkg. (¼ oz.) dry yeast

3 C. flour

1 C. butter, softened

1 C. (8 oz.) sour cream

3 egg yolks, beaten

½ C. sugar

½ C. finely chopped pecans

¾ tsp. cinnamon

1 med. tart apple, peeled, cored & finely chopped (I like Granny Smith)



Combine yeast and flour; add butter and mix well (I like to do this by hand,

gently working butter throughout the flour until it is like cornmeal). Add

egg yolks and sour cream; mix well. Shape into four balls and place on

plastic wrap. Flatten slightly and seal. Refrigerate overnight or at least

several hours.



In a small bowl, combine sugar, pecans and cinnamon; set aside. On a floured

surface, roll each ball of dough into a 9-inch circle. Sprinkle with sugar

mixture and chopped apple. Cut each circle into 16 wedges; roll up from wide

edge and pinch to seal. Place with point side down on greased baking sheet.

Bake at 350 º for 16 to 20 minutes or until lightly browned. Immediately

remove to wire racks to cool.

Icing:

1 C. powdered sugar

4 tsp. milk

¼ tsp. vanilla

finely chopped pecans (optional)



Combine sugar, milk and vanilla until smooth; drizzle over the crescents

while they are still slightly warm. Sprinkle with pecans if desired.

Note: These contain yeast but no rising is required before baking. I like to

use a little strong coffee for some of the liquid in the icing. These are

not quite a cookie, not quite a roll, not quite a pastry...but something

wonderful.


After I'd been making these for awhile I realized that I actually had copied down an almost identical recipe in my personal collection probably sometime in the 70's.  That version called for apricot preserves, coconut and pecans and that is what I did today for the first time. 

Hope  you try them!

Best Date Bars

Last Saturday I baked (among other things) a pan of these date bars to take to church for coffee fellowship. Arrived at church and realized I'd forgotten them at home. Wisdom says to freeze them for the 31st when we take treats again, but I'm not sure they will last that long! OMG they are good! Back in the 70's I used to buy a packaged mix for date bars (one of the few packaged things I ever used or liked). I loved them and the boys loved them. In the last few years I've been thinking about them and searching for a recipe. Recently I bought a Taste of Home annual and found this recipe. Not quite the same, but every bit as good!

1 pound pitted whole dates


2/3 cup packed brown sugar

2/3 cup orange juice

3 teaspoons vanilla extract



CRUST:

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1-1/2 cups old-fashioned oats

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Dash salt

1 cup cold butter, cubed

3/4 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

Vanilla ice cream, optional

Directions

In a small saucepan, combine the dates, brown sugar and orange juice. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer, uncovered, for 3-4 minutes or until thickened and dates are tender, stirring constantly. Remove from the heat; stir in vanilla.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Cut in butter until crumbly. Press half into a greased 13-in. x 9-in. baking dish. Carefully spread with date mixture.

Stir walnuts into remaining crumb mixture. Sprinkle over filling; press down gently. Bake at 350° for 25-30 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool on a wire rack. Cut into squares. Serve with ice cream if desired. Yield: 2 dozen.

.

Here's a smaller version for an 8x8" pan
1 cup chopped dates


1/2 cup water

1/4 cup sugar

1-1/2 cups quick-cooking oats

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup butter, melted

1 egg white

It's Fall

Fall is definitely here.  First pot of chili, herbed oatmeal pan bread, and Rumble In The Jungle football  tomorrow.

This is such good bread with any kind of soup.

HERBED OATMEAL PAN BREAD

11/2 C. boiling water

1 C. old fashioned oatmeal

2 pkg. yeast

1/2 C. warm water

1/4 C. sugar

3 T. butter, softened

2 tsp. salt

1 egg

4 - 4 3/4 C. flour

Pour boiling water over oatmeal and let sit until luke warm (110-115 degrees). Dissolve yeast in warm water. Add sugar, butter, salt, egg, oat mixture and 2 C. flour and beat until smooth.. Add enough remaining flour to form a soft dough forms. Knead for 6-8 minutes and let rise until double in a greased bowl. (about 30 minutes). Punch down and press evenly in a 13 x 9 x 2 inch cake pan (greased). With a very sharp knife, cut diagonal lines 1 1/2 inch apart completely through dough. Repeat in opposite direction, creating a diamond pattern. Cover and let rise until double, about an hour. Redefine pattern by gently poking along the cut lines with knife tip. Brush with 2 T. melted butter. Bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile combine:

2 Tbsp. parmesan cheese

1 tsp. basil

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

Brush the bread with another 2 Tbsp. melted butter and sprinkle with the cheese and herb mixture. Bake for another 5 minutes. Loosely cover with foil and bake an additional five minutes. Serve warm.

Have a good weekend everyone.



Weekend

Last night we drove up to Farlington Lake and spent a pleasant couple of hours visiting with some friends, listening to a great band, chowing on some grilled burgers, funnel cake, watermelon and homemade ice cream, and watching some Canada Geese float merrily by.

The weather was just perfect!  We didn't stay for the fireworks but I'm sure they were spectacular over the water.

Today I pieced the sashing  and joined the blocks of my California Baltimore. I opted to go with nine-patches instead of plain cornerstone squares.

Now I will add the outer pieced and appliqued border so that it will look like

this

We had one piece of Roast Sticky Chicken left, so I cut it up and used it to make 3 individual pizzas for supper

I love using frozen creamed spinach for the sauce, then pile them high with sauteed onions and peppers, feta and mozarella cheese, and chicken when I have it handy. Yum!

Finally, two more Dutch Treat blocksI finished on the 30th.  This makes 77 since April 1.

Geometry in Motion

Goldfish

Hope my American friends have a happy and safe 4th of July and my international friends just have a great weekend!

I Won't Need to Add Oil For A Month

My level is overflowing!

This weekend is Homecoming Celebration in Frontenac.  We went over long enough to get some lunch and for Tom to stroll through the vintage cars on exhibit.

This picture was after I'd already eaten half of the string potatoes

What's really amazing is that it was a HALF order to start with..so this would be like ONE-FOURTH of a regular order. Actually they weren't as greasy as you might think.  Pretty darn good in fact!

Castle Window & Cat's Paw

No Dutch Treat blocks finished yesterday as I was baking....

But two finished today....

Castle Window

and Cat's Paw

Spring Flavor

I think my favorite non-quilting blog is The Perfect Pantry.  I not only love peeking into other people's pantries (a feature every Saturday), but I love the recipes Lydia shares. 

A couple days ago she had a recipe for a red pepper, asparagus and spinach quiche.  The picture looked so scrumptious I had to try it right away!

Of course I never make anything exactly like a recipe shows and this was no exception.  First of all I used frozen asparagus because for us, without access to home grown, frozen is always top quality vs. what's available in the grocery store. Instead of fresh spinach I used frozen CREAMED spinach (which I use often) and omitted the yogurt. Lastly I used an Italian cheese mix. And I make my own crusts..have circles of dough in my freezer all the time.

My pictures aren't  nearly as nice as Lydia's..but it sure tasted good!

We loved, loved, loved it! Next time I will use a stronger cheese (maybe Swiss?) and add a couple more eggs. I will definitely make this again and again.

Be sure and check out the original recipe here.  Thanks, Lydia, for sharing!

Maid-Rites

One of the best parts of traveling home to Iowa (after seeing family and friends of course) is getting my fill of Maid-Rites. I grew up eating these sandwiches and still love them! Unfortunately there are no franchises in Kansas, at least not that I know of. These are the "loose meat" sandwiches always referred to on Roseanne. This trip I had at least one every day except Friday I believe. I eat these for breakfast, noon or supper, doesn't matter!

It's probably a good thing that we don't have any close to us, as I'd live there and weigh 500 lbs!

One of the secrets to their goodness (for me anyway) is that they are wrapped up, even if you are dining in. Then you need to let them steam a bit in the wrapper and squish them down so the bun is nice and soft and warm.

OMG, I'm already dying for another one but will have to wait until the next Iowa trip which will be way too long!

Decisions, Decisions.........

Thanks to everyone for the input on my Baltimore quilt. The responses couldn't be more varied and I appreciate all the suggestions.

I don't think I've ever agonized this much over a setting before. My problem wasn't so much that I couldn't think of what to do, but that everything sounded like a good idea to me. I really liked the idea of no sashing and having the blocks "float". But I really liked the idea of sashing too. And I liked plain sashing and pieced sashing.

Finally I just made myself pick one! And this is what I've done so far. And I like it, even though I know I would have liked no sashing just as much. That would have been an entirely different look. Maybe I'll have to make another???

So now I still have to make the border decisions. I've come up with a couple more ideas there so will let that percolate over night at least.

Quick supper tonight and a meatless one. We love spinach/pepper and feta pizzas. So easy with store bought crusts (almost as easy to make your own but I didn't this time), creamed spinach and lots of chopped and sauteed onions and peppers.

I think they've cooled enough I'm going to go eat some.

Thanks again for the advice everybody!

Christmas Dinner Traditions and a Baking Disaster

What was your Christmas menu like? Do you continue to eat things that are traditions from your earlier years..maybe even going back to your childhood? Or does your Christmas menu change each year, adding new items as tastes change and new people enter the family with their own traditional foods to add? Or maybe you eat out?


Since we were going to one of our son's for Christmas I did just a small amount of cooking . I was asked to bring bread/rolls and so I baked a double batch of Butter Semmels like those pictured here. It's unusual for me not to bake rohlicky but Tom has fallen in love with the semmels for now.


I asked Tom what else he'd like me to make and of course he wanted his Italian peppers and onions. I've been making this for a little over 20 years now, though I had the recipe for years before that. It's very rich, looks very festive at holidays, especially Christmas and goes well with just about any kind of meat. As it turned out Ashley and Bart brought meatballs that were particularly good with this dish as was the ham Mark and Stephanie fixed.

Then I had to make some scalloped corn, just because I love it and since Tom is not wild about it I rarely fix it unless I have some place I can take it to share with others. I usually just dump stuff in..don't follow a recipe and this time it ended up not as firm as I'd like it, but hey..scalloped corn tastes good no matter what you do to it. I sometimes make a version that has egg noodles added in too.

My friend, Cynthia, shared a new cheese spread recipe with me. She said she'd taken it to work and everyone proclaimed it "killer good". That was a good enough endorsement for me to give it a try. And you know what...they were right! It made a lot , so I took half and left half at home. What I took was nearly eaten before the meal started. It was very, very easy and very, very good. No doubt very, very fattening too, but hey, it's Christmas, right?

Now to the disaster. I started remembering how my mother always made a Czech Christmas bread called houska. Actually I think it is more correctly vanocka but she called it houska. Even though I've been baking all sorts of breads for 45 years or more, I'd never made a houska. I'm not even sure I ever liked it all that much, especially since she usually put assorted candied fruits in hers and I don't really like that. But I got the urge to try my hand at it using just raisins and slivered almonds like most recipes I've seen.

So Wednesday I stirred up the dough and about 8 cups of flour and 1 cup of butter later I had a huge amount of dough which I refrigerated overnight. Thursday morning I shaped the braided loaf and baked it.

After an hour it sounded done and according to my recipe it should have been done. I took it out, let it cool a bit and iced it. It wasn't the best looking bread I've ever made..but for a first time effort it didn't look too bad and we trucked it over to Aurora.

So guess what we found when we started slicing it? Pretty much raw dough in the middle of it! Yuck! Approximately the outside 2 inches was baked okay...after that, forget it! How disappointing and embarrassing.

IF I ever get the urge to try it again (and I probably will, simply because I'm anal enough that I have to prove to myself I can get it right), I think I'll make half the recipe and a much smaller and less dense loaf. And I think I'll add some rum to the dough and a bit of mace or cinnamon!!

Now what I'm really getting nostalgic for is some good old-fashioned cinnamon bread!

So what are your Christmas food traditions? I'll talk more about ours in a later post.

For now..may all your bread be done!