Ypsi Cooks

We make A LOT of brown rice. Sometimes, when I don't know what to make, I'll put on a pot of brown rice and it gives myself a time constraint: 35 minuets to figure out what else is happening for dinner. Last night I actually knew ahead of time what we were going to have: a sort of Asian rice salad. Because brwon rice takes a little while, and because it reuses and even freezes well, we make a rather large quantity at a time. I did 4 1/2 cups of water

This is another situation where it would have taken ma a long time (if ever!) to make this bread if it hadn't been an “assignment” from Michelle over at BigBlackDogs, but am I ever glad I did!
This bread had a fair amount of white flour

There wasn't a lot of flavor from the avocado and tomato, especially early on, but the texture was FABULOUS. Tom made them into rolls to go with our salmon cakes (use your favorite crab cake recipe but replace the crab with salmon) for a nice Friday-during-lent meal. We shared it with friends, so we pulled out all the fixins: our pickled beets, shredded carrots and sliced green onions along with the standard mayonnaise and mustard (both from trader joes, both really good). The kids devoured the rolls and the cakes, only separately.

A few days later, we made pizza with the remaining batch. We made a regular pizza for the kids, and for us we used green salsa, chopped “moonblush” tomatoes, chopped green chilies and cheddar cheese. Our guest made some gua

We used the bread dough to make witch's fingers (roll up skinny little bread sticks and stick an almond on the end, point out for the finger nail, let rise an hour or more, pop in the oven, set to 350* and pull out 20 min later. The boys went nuts over these. A fun way to be goulish without increasing the sugar insanity.

We were out to dinner with some friends and their friends and the question was asked “What kind of pumpkin is best?” The result? It depends, of course, on whether you're carving, or cooking. And a friend of a friend said, “And the best pumpkin for pumpkin pie is butternut squash.” And I thought, well of course it is. A butternut squash is is so much more flavorful than any of the pumpkins we've cooked so far. But I've heard Blue Hubbard is truly THE BEST. So we bough a (huge!!!) Blue Hubbard squash at the market, sliced and roasted it, and mashed it up for use in all of our favorite “pumpkin” recipes. For E