No matter the holiday, no matter the season, no matter the dessert spread, my Mom will always choose the cookies first. Chewy oatmeal raisin or chewy oatmeal chocolate chip cookies are her favorite. I’ve taken to stocking the freezer with frozen cookie dough so I’ll always have them on hand when she visits.
Why should the kids get all the home baked treats? With all the dog food recalls recently, it’s easy to forget that making simple, nutritious homemade dog biscuits for your furry friend is easy and usually involves just five or six pantry ingredients.
Why pay six, seven, eight dollars or more for organic, natural dog biscuits when you can make a batch of your own in less than a half hour that easily avoids preservatives, strange ingredients, fillers, and harmful chemicals?
These homemade dog biscuits are incredibly easy to make. If you have peanut butter and flour, you are mostly there. If not, it’s pretty adaptable.
Is a Billy bookcase or Ikea’s Knada bread mix easier to put together? Which tastes better?
If you’re going to Ikea just for the flat-packed furniture, and bypassing the food, you’re missing out on half the experience. One dollar ice cream, cinnamon rolls, lox, meatballs, free drinks. A stop at the Ikea cafe is the cherry on top of the Swedish shopping spree.
But could you bring a little bit of that bistro goodness home and bake it up in your own oven?
For the past year, I’ve been happy to act as my local bread baking phone-a-friend. I was the Butterball hotline of beginner bread baking tips and questions. It was great to see so many people take the quarantine time to dive into bread baking and discover it’s not all that difficult, in fact, it’s quite easy and quite rewarding, to baking a beautiful loaf of homemade bread that easily beats any soft, rubbery disc you might find at the food store.
These are the beginner bread baking tips, advice, and questions I answered the most in the past year. Do these simple, basic things right and you’re well on your way to being a successful home bread baker.
There is a divide in our house and it revolves around when bananas are actually ripe. Maybe that’s not quite right. The divide is around when bananas are good to eat.
Michelle says almost never (she carries long-lasting scars from childhood medicine that was banana-flavored). My kids both only like them when are still tinged with green and “taste more like an apple.” Um, okay.
I like them spotted but still firm. No one likes them when they are brown and resemble plantains. That is the time for banana bread.
The whole point of this year-long exercise is to improve and get better at making pies so failure is to be expected, even encouraged. A brief guide to improvement: lots of research, lots of attempts with a focus on refining and trying different things, and lots of repetition once you find a good method.
So the process has multiple failures baked in. It does not however make the sting of belly-flopping on your face feel any better.
