Chocolate Zucchini Bread-Cake

I thought that everyone grew up knowing about chocolate zucchini bread, but given the number of requests for my recipe I've been getting lately, I'm starting to think it must be a regional thing.  If you haven't heard of or eaten it before, it's good.  So very good.

A few years ago, I received my current incarnation of this wonderful recipe from the director of a local museum, and it's very, very yummy.  The hubby loves it, and he doesn't even like zucchini!

The recipe is titled "Zucchini Fudge Cake," but it's exactly the same thing, only cake-sized, heh.  So, without further adieu, here it is. 

The Ultimate Fried Chicken Recipe

I spend a lot of time searching for THE recipes.  Like, THE buttermilk biscuit recipe.  Or THE pork chop recipe.  The absolute best way to make any given kind of food.

This week, I discovered THE fried chicken recipe.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.  Is it good.

The hubby has a sensitive stomach when it comes to poultry.  He can eat some, but if he overdoes it, or eats too much of the fattier bits, he'll end up sick for hours.

The hubby was almost in tears because he couldn't eat more of the skin without ending up sick.  It was that good.

In all fairness, I have to warn you before you continue that this is not one of those healthy, lean chicken recipes.  There are probably enough calories in each bite to keep you going for a week, with a few left over.

That said, here's the link for the recipe.

Crispy Fried Chicken

To summarize with my own notes, for those short on time:

Get yourself a cut up fryer chicken, three or four pounds.  Pour a couple cups of buttermilk into a bowl, and put a couple cups of flour in a freezer bag, along with a tsp each of salt, pepper, and paprika, shaken to mix.  You can probably guess what comes next: Dip each piece of chicken in the buttermilk, then drop it in the bag.  Close, shake, place chicken on baking sheet.  Repeat with all chicken.  When you're done, let the chicken sit there until the coating has turned to a paste.  (According to the recipe, this is very, very important!)

Fill a large skillet about a third full with oil.  (Don't go any more than that, or you're going to end up with oil all over your floor when it overflows.)  Get it really, really hot, not quite smoking.  Plunk the chicken in there and brown both sides really well.  (It's going to bubble and hiss and generally freak out.  Don't be alarmed.)  When your chicken is brown, turn down the heat to medium-low and cover.  Let cook for thirty minutes.  When this is done, get the oil really hot again and cook the chicken until the skin is crispy.  Drain on a plate lined with paper towels.  (Lots and lots and LOTS of paper towel.)

And you're done!  We ate our chicken with a big bowl of sweet corn, and turned some of the leftovers into chicken salad the next day.  Dh brought the rest with him to work and fed a buddy.  This chicken is very, very popular.

How to Make Your Own Sandwich Bread

I used to make my bread by hand.  There's something very soothing about folding and pressing bread dough over and over until it's satiny and elastic.  Not to mention the great workout your arms get during the process.  Then, the small support beams under my table began to crack in the middle, and I realized I'd better find a new way to knead my dough.  My counters are too high to do it effectively, so I decided my best bet was a bread machine.

I love my bread machine.  It was a gift from my daughter's godmother, and it is amazing at kneading bread dough.  It doesn't get tired, it doesn't break my table, and best of all, the bread comes out fluffy and soft and amazing.  I dump all the ingredients in the machine's bucket, let it do the mixing and kneading and first rise, and then I shape the bread and do the second rise and baking as I did before.

My recipe for white sandwich bread is delicious, and very, very easy.  In my machine, you have to dump in the liquids first, then the dry ingredients, so that is how I have them listed here.  You should follow the instructions specific to your own machine.


1 cup warm water
3 tbsp vegetable oil
3 cups bread flour
3 tbsp sugar
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 packet active dry yeast
Melted butter

Place all ingredients in bread machine.  Set to dough setting.  After cycle and first rise are complete, shape bread into tight loaf and place in greased loaf pan.  Cover with lightly oiled plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until bread has doubled in size and is starting to rise above the top of the loaf pan.

Preheat oven to 350.  Bake bread for about thirty minutes, or until crust is golden brown and loaf sounds hollow when the bottom is tapped.  Brush crust with melted butter and let cool before slicing.  Store loaf in plastic bag to keep soft.


The best part about this bread is that it's dirt cheap to make.  There are no eggs, no milk, and you can sub in olive oil or butter for the vegetable oil, depending on what you have on hand.  You can also add a tsp of Italian seasoning to the dry ingredients for a loaf of herb bread.

Happy baking!

My Wondrous Homemade Chicken Noodle Soup

Here it is.  The best chicken noodle soup you will ever eat.

8 cups chicken stock (homemade if you have it)
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups sliced carrots
1/2 cup diced celery
1/4 tsp pepper
a good handful of egg noodles
2 cups chopped chicken
1 tbsp minced fresh dill
1 tbsp minced fresh parsley
1/2 cup frozen peas (optional)

Bring chicken stock and salt to a boil.  Add carrots, celery, and pepper, and reduce heat to a simmer.  Simmer, uncovered, for about ten minutes, less if you like your vegetables more firm.

If you are using fresh egg noodles, add all remaining ingredients and continue to simmer until noodles are tender.  If you are using dried egg noodles, add noodles and let simmer for about five minutes, then add remaining ingredients and simmer until noodles are tender.  Serve with warm, crusty bread.

If your family is sick and congested, upping the pepper to 1/2 tsp can help clear that right up.  Heh.

The Egg Noodle Experiment

The flu has settled in at our house.

It started yesterday.  The hubby woke up and thought he was dying, then he realized he wasn't going to die and so went to bed and started praying for death to take him.  He had a fever of over 102, headache, chills, aches, and all sorts of other unpleasantness.  Syd hasn't come down with the full flu yet, but she's warm and flushed, and has a bad cough going on.

By some happy coincidence, my plan for yesterday's dinner was chicken noodle soup.  Given that I was chained to the house and my two sickies, I decided it would be the perfect time to try making homemade egg noodles for my soup.

First, I found a simple recipe.  Here's my condensed version:

4 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/8 cup water

Break eggs into mixing bowl and beat with fork.  Add water and salt and beat more.  Add one cup flour and mix in until blended, then mix in remaining cup until dough begins to form a ball.

Work the dough with your hands on a well floured surface, adding flour as needed, until dough is smooth and elastic and no longer sticks to your hands.  Pinch off egg-sized piece, dip in flour, and roll out with well-floured rolling pin until dough is as thin as you can make it.  Lay out rolled out ovals of dough on paper to dry a bit.  Flip after half an hour and allow to continue drying until dough is dry to the touch, but still flexible.

Roll each oval up like a jelly roll and then slice off narrow strips with a sharp serrated knife.  These are your noodles.  When you have sliced all your dough into strips, pile them back up on the paper to continue drying for several hours or overnight.  When they have finished drying, you can either cook them or freeze them and use within a few months.

Sounds pretty simple!  I didn't have too many problems with the execution of the egg noodles.

Sydney was very excited to help me make noodles.  She's usually pretty excited to help me make just about anything, really.

The first few steps were incredibly easy.  Beat eggs, mix in other stuff, dump ball of dough onto table.  Check, check, and check.

Rolling out the dough was pretty easy too, though if I was going to make these again, the only thing I'd do different is to roll the dough out even thinner.  Paper thin.  Also, I think using bread flour may have made the a touch chewier than normal, so I'd be sure to use AP flour.

Syd just had to use the rolling pin for her itty bitty piece of practice dough.

At last, the dough was rolled out and laid out to dry.  The other side of my counter was full of egg noodle dough, too.  When you roll it out this thin, you're going to need a lot of square footage for the drying.

Then it was time to roll them up and slice them into noodles.  This part wasn't too hard, but you do need to make sure that your serrated knife is very, very sharp.

Sydney used her little butter knife to slice her dough into noodles, too.

Aaaaaand.... we have noodles!

And soup.  As you can see, they don't have as neat a look as store-bought noodles, but they're definitely much more filling and healthy.  When you make your chicken noodle soup with homemade chicken stock, organic roasted chicken, and homemade egg noodles, you can be sure you're not going to be hungry again in half an hour.

Have I mentioned that I make the best chicken noodle soup ever?  I'll post the recipe soon, given that it's the season for sickies.  I will say now that the key to good chicken noodle soup is to add a bit of fresh dill. 

Hopefully you won't need to make this for your own family for the same reason I did, but if you do, it's sure a great way to get them healthy again!

A Healthy, Easy Breakfast

I love breakfast.  I often tell the hubby that I should have married a farmer and had ten children, because nothing would make me happier than getting up before the crack of dawn to cook a tableful of eggs, bacon, pancakes, biscuits and gravy, and whatever else I was in the mood to whip up.  (Needless to say, the hubby is not amused by my hypothetical farm family.  He is, however, amused by the idea of me getting up at four in the morning.)

Because we would be hard-pressed to fit ten children and a herd of cows in our home, I'll just have to settle for making little breakfasts in miniature quantities.  One of the easiest and most filling things to cook is steel cut oats, which is what we ate this morning.

"Already with the camera, mommy?"

We buy bulk organic oats from a local health food store, and our toppings of choice are cream and plenty of raw honey:

Mmmmm.

Cooking steel-cut oats is extremely simple.  Bring three or four cups of water (depending on how long you plan to cook your oats- longer = more water) to a boil, then add one cup of oats and a dash of salt.  Reduce the heat to a simmer, toss a cover halfway over the pot, and cook for twenty or thirty minutes.  The longer you cook them, the less chewy your oats will be.

And that's it.  Give them a stir occasionally to keep them from sticking to the bottom of the pot.  Drink your coffee and read the newspaper while they cook.

Oh, and speaking of coffee, you absolutely have to try Peace Coffee.  It's organic, shade-grown coffee that I get from the same place I buy my oats, and it is simply the best coffee I've ever had.

As for toppings for your oatmeal, you can mix in just about anything you can think of.  Honey, brown sugar, maple syrup, bits of fruit, nuts, cream, milk...  Heck, throw in a bit of everything.  This breakfast is almost impossible to screw up.

Dipping sauce of the gods.

I have a confession to make: my daughter loves french fries.  LOVES them.  She would eat them for breakfast, lunch, and dinner if I would let her, and she would lick the leftover ketchup from her plate when she was finished.  As someone who always swore up and down that my kids will never eat such trash, this is mildly embarassing.

Because Syd is getting increasingly picky with her eating habits as she makes the long journey to four years old, I've tried to find things that she'll actually, you know, eat.  Without bribery.  And sweet potato fries are a definite hit.  We buy the healthy, natural ones from our local health food store and pop them in the oven when we having something like fried fish or homemade burgers.

What makes them so popular?  This.  Right here.  This dipping sauce is insanely good, and it works with almost anything breaded and crunchy.  Here it is.

1 heaping tbsp mayo
1 level tbsp mustard
1 level tbsp honey

And you mix it all together.  At my house, this makes one serving.  Maybe.

The yummiest lentil soup you'll ever eat.

I haven't always been a fan of soup.  Before I learned to cook and the only kind of soup I'd ever had was out of a can, I hated soup.  It tasted artificial and like the can it had sat in for months.

Then I got married and had a daughter, and realized I'd better learn how to cook actual food.  Since then, I've come to love soup.  When you're stuck inside because three feet of snow has iced your door shut, few things are as warm and cozy as a pot of homemade soup simmering on the stove and a loaf of bread baking in the oven.

The recipe that follows makes amazing lentil soup.  And it's easy.  You don't even need stock, just water, though you'd never know it from the taste.

Lentil Soup

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

2 cups diced onion

3 garlic cloves

Salt and pepper

3 tbsp tomato paste

1/3 cup finely diced celery

1/3 cup finely diced carrot

2 bay leaves

½ cup chopped parsley

1 ½ cup lentils

1 tbsp Dijon mustard (I've used plain yellow mustard too, and it still tastes great)

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

Heat oil in soup pot over high heat.  Saute onions 5 – 7 minutes.  Mince garlic with 1 tsp salt.  Work tomato paste into onion, then add garlic, celery, carrot, bay leaves, and parsley, and cook 3 minutes.  Add lentils, 2 quarts water, and ½ tsp salt.  Bring to a boil.  Lower heat and simmer, partially covered, until lentils are tender, about 25 – 35 minutes.  Stir in mustard and vinegar.  Salt and pepper to taste and remove bay leaves.  The longer the soup sits over low heat before serving, the better it will taste.  Makes 4 to 6 servings.