Another week of (confined) deliciousness

So, we’re about two weeks in to our “stay home, stay safe” mandate, and the children haven’t been bothered by a lack of extra activities. We have been eating well, and they’ve been burning their energy in creative ways. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve enjoyed this week...

  Elisabeth made church window cookies, a recipe that I remember my Grandma making when I was growing up. She always had a batch of these ready for when the grandchildren stopped by. Our kiddos enjoyed their first taste of them!

 Every Saturday is pizza night...last week's pizza options were pepperoni, cheeseburger and our "waffle ball" of the week...barbacoa and Mexican style beans.

"Pigs in Blankets" are always a treat.  Peter and Timothy are ready to eat their portion.



Our family really enjoys hummus for snacking and meals.  Steve usually makes our hummus (which is amazingly delicious!) from a tried and true recipe that we've had for years.  However, I recently found the Classic Hummus recipe in the Feed Zone Table Cookbook, and here's my take on it.  We also really like this one (this one has no garlic, but gets topped with toasted chickpeas and paprika).

This is our family's upgrade of a recipe that I grew up calling "sick rice," because my dad always made it when we were sick (colds, flu, whatever).  Steve has made us change the name, so in the Barnhart household it's now known as "comfy rice" and it's been slightly improved.  A double boiler is the required cooking implement (and Steve just got me a huge one, so I can make a large enough batch for our family), 1 cup of brown rice and 1 quart of milk, cooked gently for about 2.5 hours, stirred occasionally.  We top it with the standard toppings: honey, butter and cinnamon.  But we've now added nuts, raisins, coconut oil.  Anything that could make it extra delicious. (Note: our family requires 3 cups of rice and 3 quarts of milk....we eat a lot)  If you decide to make this with white rice (how I knew it as a child) it would cook completely in about 1 hour.

We make bread almost every day (sometimes it's every other day, and very occasionally every three days).  This is our standard batch.  If it's fresh for lunch time and sandwiches, we'll devour two loaves then.  Then a loaf with dinner, and a loaf for snacking or to supplement breakfast the next day.  Then we bake another batch.  We eat a lot of bread.  No gluten-free diets in this household!

And yesterday's batch of pizza.  We made the Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza from Cook's Illustrated (I think David originally got us a subscription to this magazine, and we've made lots of delicious foods from it...we've made this one a number of times over the years).  We made a double batch, for a total of 4 pizzas, as the recipe indicated a single batch would serve 4 to 6 people.  Definitely didn't want to run out!  Two of these were plain cheese and two had added pepperoni (we could tell them apart by their pans). 

 

Steve decided we'd just cut into two of them to start with....and that's actually all we needed for all of us! (with 2 pieces left over)  Here he is wielding our pizza knife; it's long enough to cut through the pizzas we bake on our half-sheet pans in one go.

We'll be eating deep dish pizza again for another meal this week....very happily and without all of the work!

Happy Eating from the Houghton Barnharts! (And that food on the table really did feed all 8 of us!)