Cooking and more cooking

The preparation for today's meals began yesterday, just like Monday. I am finding that cooking/preparing to cook is taking a great deal more time than usual. I always considered myself a "slow food" cook--I don't buy canned soups or vegetables, we never have prepackaged meals; we rarely even just make sandwiches. But this is a whole different level.

For breakfast this morning I had grape nuts that we made last night. It's a pretty simple recipe, which I adapted for our ingredients: whole wheat flour, milk, cider (the original calls for buttermilk), a bit of salt and maple syrup. This dough is spread on a cookie sheet and baked until crisp, then broken/chopped into pieces. This turned out to be the challenging part: while Ben was valiently pounding at it with the rolling pin, one of the bowls he had already filled fell off the counter and straight into the trash can. Ben very kindly gave me the remaining bowl and ate leftover soufflé. The grape nuts were more bite size than the traditional ones, but very crunchy and tasty. (I'm currently resisting the urge to eat the rest of them.)

Before work I also saw that the milk I had left out had thickened, so I set in an old pillowcase in a strainer to separate for cheese.

For lunch we took leftover buttons from last night (see Monday's post), apples, and I also took a few chestnuts which we had had in the freezer from last year.

I made a stop at the farmer's market this morning and picked up a bag of spinach, and after work bought more milk and butter.

For supper Ben and I made a salad with some of the spinach, dandelions, chives, arugula from the garden, and hardboiled eggs. I made a dressing out of strawberry juice, honey, salt, and lemon thyme from our herb bed. It wasn't as sour as I would have liked, but not bad. We also ate some of the wheat thins we made last night with cheese that I started this morning. I mixed the separated curd with salt, basil, and chives. I loved it--Ben wasn't so sure, but he generally doesn't like soft cheese.

My last cooking project for the day was pumpkin bread for snacks and breakfast tomorrow. I used frozen pumpkin, eggs, honey, butter, salt and flour. It didn't rise, since it didn't have any baking powder, but Ben says it's good anyway.

I just realized I have one more cooking project to do--put sourdough in the bread machine to rise overnight. So here I will end my writing for today.