Fun in the kitchen

I have made homemade peanut butter eggs for Easter the past few years. I thought Brooks would like to help me this year. I was out of cream cheese, so I decided to try this recipe for Chocolate Easter Eggs. Brooks has had this chef outfit for awhile, but has never wanted to wear it. He happily obliged this time.



Here's the eggs ready to go into the fridge to setup. I will dip them in chocolate tonight. I'm thinking about taking them to Brooks' classmates at preschool. His preschool does not publicly celebrate holidays (due to the diversity of the students), but we could give these to his classmates to take home. Brooks spent about 45 minutes playing with his piece of filling before he was finally done.

So my other kitchen "experiment" this week has been from the book "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a day". The basic concept of this book is you make up a simple bread dough (flour, water, salt, and yeast), just mix it until it's all incorporated, put it in a container with a loose lid to rise on the counter for a couple hours and stick it in the fridge until you're ready to make some bread. You then take off a grapefruit size chunk, shape it into a boule and let rise for 40 minutes. Then you bake it on a stone for 30 minutes. I've made 2 loaves so far and they have been excellent. It's so simple and the bread has a great texture to it. When you place the bread in the oven, you have a broiler pan at the bottom that you pour a cup of hot water into to create steam which gives you that great artisan crust. I've only done the basic recipe so far, but am looking forward to trying some others. I was happy that our fabulous library had this book in circulation.
Hudson has been dairy free for a week now. He loves the soy milk. We've had to make up the lack of fat (soy milk only has 4 grams a serving where whole milk has 8 grams) in other ways. Fortunately he loves avocados so one of those a day can do the trick. I also got him some Sunbutter, which is like peanut butter but made with sunflower seeds. He likes to eat the Sunbutter off first and then eat whatever I put it on, so I would say he thinks it is yummy. I had also purchased some Veggie Slices, which is cheese made with soy. I got the American cheese style (thanks to a Manager's Special at Payless). He's not to sure of it. He had never had processed cheese before, we only use "real" cheese. I think he'll like it as a grilled cheese so I'll try that.

Hudson had a nice fall into the fireplace yesterday evening, you can see the result on his forehead.