My lovely co-host – Donna – has abandoned me taken a short blogging break so it’s just me this month running this show. It’s spring on Vancouver Island and I am out of doors as much as possible, gardening and walking/playing with my granddog, Bowser. This means I need a quick and hearty breakfast to power me through till lunch. Steel-cut oats to the rescue!

I came across an online recipe years ago for cooking steel-cut oats in the pressure cooker. I know the recipe by heart now, so forgive me please: I’ve forgotten the source.

Here goes (serves 5):

1.25 cups steel-cut oats

3.75 cups water

Pinch of salt

Place in electric pressure cooker. Stir to mix. Close lid. Cook on high for 13 minutes. Let the pressure come down naturally. Open lid. Stir and serve.

That’s it.

JUST KIDDING. Of course I add all kinds of stuff to this recipe!

This time I added raisins, cinnamon and nutmeg. In past versions I have added embellishments such as dates, apricots, apples, nuts, tumeric (thank you Jonathan for that tip!)…you are only limited by your imagination! Ooooh – what about shredded carrots for a carrot cake oatmeal?!?!

And the next day, when you are in a hurry to get outside?

Now, doesn’t that look better than ripping open a packet of instant oatmeal? I think so. And it tastes better too. Dare I say it’s better for you?

Well, dear readers – I look forward to your comments and seeing what’s on your plate this month. Before she went on break (literally seconds before), Donna did the InLinkz thingy for me as I am so over it refuse to fight with it any longer. Fingers crossed (as usual), that it works for you.

Rock on,

The WB

While I was away late January/first 2 weeks of February, I got a message from my co-host Donna asking if I had a copy of that old classic: The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen, that she could borrow. I knew I had bought a copy once upon a time (as part of my longstanding yearning for creating a Hippy Dream Fantasy Life (HDFL)* but I couldn’t remember if it had made the cut when I was packing to move to Vancouver Island or not. Well, when I got back home I went straight to the living room book case and yep, there it was! (Of course it had made the cut, being integral – in my mind – to the HDFL! 😁)

By this time, Donna was able to source the cookbook from another friend so it was no longer needed but I decided to flip through it anyways, just for old time’s sake. I couldn’t for the life of me remember a single recipe I had actually cooked out of this book and I couldn’t find any of my scribblings on any of the recipe pages either. Huh? This must be corrected!

I found a recipe that sounded good and – after asking Donna if it was OK that I cooked out of the same cookbook as she had done (it was) and checking that I had all most of the ingredients – I set to work!

I decided to check on the loaf at the 1 hour mark, because 90 minutes seemed like an awfully long time at 350 degrees. I was very glad I did. Sorry Molly, but I think something must have been wrong with your oven when you made this.

Changes I made to this recipe: I used gluten-free flour, so my daughter could enjoy it as well. I only had slivered almonds in-house, and not enough, so I improvised by completing the almond quotient with some almond meal. As noted, I cut the baking time down to 1 hour.

So, what’s on your plate this month? Have you ever revisited an old cookbook and wondered why you haven’t actually cooked out of it, or cooked MORE out of it? Please join myself and Donna in this month’s challenge and let us know in the Comments or the Link Party, below.

Rock on,

The WB

*Hippy Dream Fantasy Life: a term I coined to express my longing for a life that is slower, richer, more artistic and meaningful than the one I was currently living. It is not historically accurate as it encompasses a lot of things I found meaningful not just in the actual hippy time (mid to late 60s) but also the 70s. So don’t come for me, historians. I was just a tad too young to be a hippy in the 60s (to my parents’ everlasting relief) but NOW I am working on making that dream a reality. Fantasy life no more? I think so!

For those of you who may not already know, I moved recently (late Summer 2022) from my city apartment to a separate dwelling located on my daughter and son-in-law’s semi-rural property. I have spent the fall waiting not-so-patiently for my kitchen to be installed and become workable. Thankfully, I am on good terms with my new landlords 😉, and had access to their kitchen while mine was being worked on. My kitchen is still not finished – backsplash, range hood, and under-cabinet lighting has yet to happen – but it is a fully working kitchen now, with brand new appliances. In December, I gave my new range a workout one Sunday as I prepared a meal for my landlords family. This post is about that momentous day, when I officially “broke in” Blue Steel, my navy blue Samsung range.

The inspiration for my range’s nickname:

Blue Steel is very smart (and chatty). He sends me messages all the time, on all my devices.

But how is he at actually doing the stuff he is built for? Let’s see, shall we?

The meal’s menu consisted of the family favourite: Greek potatoes, with a simple salad and air-fried chicken. I also made an almond cake.

Blue Steel came with an air-fryer function and also this tray, for that purpose:

For the “fried” chicken, I used this KFC dupe seasoning recipe, with some modifications: I didn’t have buttermilk so I soured a cup of milk with 1 tbsp vinegar; I used gluten-free flour; I only added 1 tbsp white pepper; I skipped the MSG; I used garlic powder instead of garlic salt and added an extra tsp salt (I figured that was close enough). Instead of deep-frying, I air-fried the chicken for 20 minutes at 400F, then turned the pieces and air-fried them again for another 20 minutes.

To finish off the main meal:

And the cake?

Blue Steel, you did me proud. (And you were worth the 4 month delivery wait.)

via GIPHY

You’re welcome, Widow Badass.

Please share with Donna and/or myself what’s on your plate this month, in the Comments! Please check out her post on the delicious soup she made me, here! And here’s the Link Party, if you are so inclined.

Rock on,

The WB

For those of you not up to date on/following my Sunday Schnauzer posts: right now I am in Grand Forks, British Columbia (a 2 hr ferry and 7 hr drive from where I live) helping my sister move to a new abode. My other sister flew in from Ontario to help as well, and this is the first time we three have been together since our mom died in December 2015!

Moving is chaotic and tiring but you still gotta eat, and lucky for us Grand Forks has a wonderful Japanese restaurant: Sushi Ocean Dream. Definitely stop there if you are in the area.

We were pretty tired after a productive first day of all 3 of us schlepping stuff from the old place to the new, but not too tired to have some fun with the menu.

Us crazy girls went full-on gangster and had us a rock n’ roll sushi party! And then we went to our respective beds and rested up for the rest of the moving yet to come.

And now it’s Day 5 and we are coming to the end – the old place is empty and we are concentrating on making the new place “home” for my sister. Tomorrow is going to be a shopping day for some necessities so we need to leave town in search of some big box stores.

Please let Donna and myself know what’s on your plate this month! I may be late at getting to the Comments but I am definitely looking forward to reading and responding to them!

I’m just too brain dead tired to fiddle with the InLinkz thing this month (sorry, Donna) but Donna will have it on her blog if you want to join the WOYPBC party that way.

Rock on,

The WB

It’s still summertime and the living is crazy. At least it is where I am at. I created this blog post several months ago, anticipating a summer full of packing, moving and renovations and I was not wrong. As of the date this post goes live, I’ll have moved to my new place, and be neck deep in Renovation Hell, Address: RIGHT HERE 🤪

I’ve been looking for recipes that are easy to make initially, and then easy to pull together from the fridge for a meal after a busy day. This one ticks all the boxes!

I came across this recipe from Dani Spies’ wonderful YouTube channel, Clean and Delicious. I’ve posted WOYPBC recipes from her before, and this one is another winner.

What I really like about this recipe is that it has inspired me to think of so many ways I could vary it. For instance, I could use ground chicken or turkey. I could make it vegetarian with beans only, or a veggie crumble instead of ground meat. I could add in extra greens. I could skip the rice and I could add some crushed tortilla chips instead. I could throw it all in a soft tortilla, to make a burrito. Etc. You get the idea.

Please let me know what’s on your plate this month! Either in the comments or by using InLinkz to link your post (🤞it works this time) or at Donna’s blog!

Rock on,

The WB

I had a whole ‘nother post lined up for August’s WOYPBC and now it will have to wait until September…because of a conversation Joanne and I had on the morning of my birthday (July 27 – mark your calendars 😉). We FaceTime most mornings (I know – lucky me, right? 😄) and this was my birthday morning and the conversation turned to food. Well, OK it usually does. Specifically what was I going to eat on my special day. I mentally went through my cupboards and my fridge and decided I had all the ingredients to make myself French toast for breakfast on this most auspicious day – fresh BC raspberries, sourdough bread, eggs, vanilla, cinnamon and milk. And maple syrup, of course!

So after our call I got to “work”. And while I was assembling everything I had another thought: I wonder if I could make French toast in the air fryer? A quick Google search confirmed that I most certainly can. I didn’t follow a specific recipe but just noted the approximate times and temperatures, and off I went!

Please let my co-host Donna or myself know what’s on your plate at your house, in the Comments section of either of our WOYPBC posts (or both, if you are so inclined!). Please check out Donna’s August post where she details her typical meals!

Trying this InLinkz thing yet again – thanks to Donna for setting this up! Please use this if you’d rather:

Rock on,

The WB

Thanks to inspiration from my co-host Donna and from the delightful Julia series on Crave TV, I recently became once again consumed with the idea of trying out some of Julia Child’s recipes. When the movie Julie and Julia came out, I was charmed by the idea of working my way through a cookbook like that (and also blogging about it). As I was firmly entrenched as the Mayor of Crazytown at that time, it was only a pipe dream (that I soon forgot about).

But now I am retired and I have an Amazon Prime membership, so it was only a matter a time before Amazon notified me of a price drop…

But what to cook first? The next time I was on YouTube, this video showed up in my feed as a “suggestion” to watch. Coincidence or was Big Brother watching/listening? You decide.

I’d like to tell you that I had some kind of epiphany while attempting this recipe…well, actually I did. But not in the way that I thought I would. Hear me out. I thought that perhaps making one of Julia Child’s recipes would revolutionize the way I cooked from that moment forward. No high expectations here, eh? Instead, my revolution came in the knowledge that Julia Child was asking me to cook meat exactly the way I had been first taught by my mother.

Uh huh. Long before fat (especially butter) became a kitchen pariah, Mom was showing me how to cook the Dutch way. Melt plenty of butter (or *gasp* margarine because we were a broke-ass immigrant family) in the pan and wait until the foaming subsides and the fat starts to turn brown to introduce the meat.

I have to say that I was kinda disappointed and thrilled at the same time. Weird as that sounds. Even the addition of more margarine butter later in the recipe, to make a sauce/thin gravy to accompany the meat was what I learned at the kitchen stove from my mom. No wonder people sang the praises of her cooking…

Nope, I am not going to be working my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking anytime soon. But I may dip into it for inspiration (and a challenge) from time to time.

Please let my co-host Donna or myself know what’s on your plate at your house, in the Comments section of either of our WOYPBC posts (or both, if you are so inclined!). Please check out Donna’s July post, where she posts some mouth-watering photos of her vacation in the mountains.

Trying this InLinkz thing once again – thanks to Donna for setting this up!

Bon appétit and rock on,

The WB