Strawberries & Cream Baked Oatmeal

This recipe is dedicated to those of you who, like me, always seem to pick out strawberries that only last a day or two before they start turning squishy.

Over the weekend I picked up several pounds of strawberries with the intention of making jam... Only to get home and realize that I already helped my mom make jam this season, when Otter was very new and I was very tired, and so I already had eight pints of jam in the cupboard. Oops. So the kids and I made strawberry bars, and strawberry popsicles, and after making popsicles we still had a bunch of puree left over. Working off the idea that strawberry puree is basically the same as applesauce, I cooked it down a little and wound up making it into a pan of delicious, moist, hearty baked oatmeal. To be honest, I'm considering sending Matt back to the store this evening before the sale ends to pick up more strawberries for me to puree and freeze—it's that good!

Strawberries & Cream Baked Oatmeal

3 cups rolled oats
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
About 1 3/4 cups strawberry puree, cooked down to 1 1/2 cups
1 1/2 cups milk of choice (I used coconutmilk)
3/8 teaspoon salt
1/3 to 1/2 cup honey
2 to 4 Tablespoons nut butter (I used cashew butter)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl and pour into an 8x8 or 7x11 (2.2 qt) baking dish. Bake for 25 minutes or until firm. Delicious warm or cold!

Freezer Cooking

I have been intimidated by the idea of "freezer cooking," "batch cooking," whatever you want to call it, for years. It wasn't until I participated in an online roundtable on meal planning last month that I realized something super important: there are different ways of freezer cooking. Maybe this is ridiculously self-evident to most people, but my mental picture of freezer cooking was that you had to dedicate a full weekend (or similar block of time) to cooking all the food in the world, and fill up your freezer with it, and then... I was a little bit foggy on how it was actually helpful, because I think I was picturing freezer meals as being a way to save dinnertime if you weren't able to make whatever you had already planned.

Last assumption first, while there are certainly some things that you can pull out of the freezer and use immediately, that's probably not going to be the main way that freezer cooking is helpful: quickbreads, breakfast cookies, chocolate banana oatmeal fudge bars, yes, but main dishes not so much... For full meals, it's more about having the prep work done ahead of time than about having healthy versions of instant pizzas in the freezer. Having a menu plan is still important—ideally, the freezer meals get built into the menu plan, so that they're written down and I can see on my planner a day ahead that I need to pull whatever it is out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge overnight.

Matt and I were talking about this a couple of weeks back, about slow cooker freezer meals specifically; he was confused about how it could possibly be all that helpful to have, say, a pork shoulder frozen with a marinade. "But you still have to cook it all day!" I certainly saw his point, but (as we were actually discussing an upcoming cookbook that I'm excited about on slow cooker/pressure cooker freezer meals) it got me to think through exactly how it would be helpful. Yes, in that case you still have the cooking time of a regular meal, but all of the prep work is done and if you're planning your cooking ahead, there's no last-minute "oh no, the orange juice has been sitting in the fridge too long and has a funny smell so I guess we're making carnitas with grapefruit juice today!" (It's not awful, for the record, but orange is definitely better.) And as we're getting ready to have a newborn in the house, even the 20-minute prep work of making a spice rub, coating the pork, dicing the onion, and making the marinade sounds a whole lot more challenging when I picture trying to do with with a tiny person who wants me to sit on the couch and feed him constantly. So in that case, yes, being able to dump the thawed bag into the slow cooker and turn it on instead of doing that small amount of prep work would be legitimately helpful.

Okay, now back to my first assumption. There certainly are people who do huge batch-cooking marathons and get an entire month's meals into the freezer in one go, and that works for them, and that's great! But there are other people who just make double batches of suppers when they know something freezes well, and stick one batch into the oven/slow cooker and the other into the freezer. Some people mainly freeze breads/sides/snacks, things they can easily use from frozen (or after a quick thaw). And some people just make staples ahead of time, things that can easily be transformed into a variety of meals, like beans, rice, tomato sauce, pesto, cooked meat... 

And any of those methods, or any combination of them, helps to save time and get dinner on the table more smoothly. I've actually been doing a little bit of several of those methods for years without realizing that I was "freezer cooking": sticking leftovers in the freezer when there's enough to serve as another full meal, keeping things like pesto and pureed beets portioned out in the freezer, storing batches of muffins or individually wrapped bars in there to be easily grabbed for quick breakfasts or snacks.

I've been trying to be a little more intentional about it as we prepare for a new baby, though. I don't even remember how I started reading the Thriving Home blog, but our family has enjoyed their recipes (and their "real food meets reality" philosophy) for a while now, and when Polly and Rachel released a cookbook full of freezer meals last fall, I was so excited to pick up a copy. Many recipes from From Freezer to Table have since become favorites in our house—their Killer Carnitas, Peach Baked Oatmeal, and Pesto Feta Tuna Melts all made it onto this week's menu plan! 

And in this last however-many-weeks pre-baby, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have meal components already in the freezer and easy to assemble! I'm exhausted today, and had been dreading the end-of-the-day "they want to eat again?" time... until I realized that all I have to do is slice bread, pull pesto out of the freezer, and combine tuna with a couple of items from the fridge. I can practically make supper sitting down! Little Bear can peel some carrots for me, and if I have enough energy we can make ranch dip, but if not there's some hummus in the fridge. Easily-assembled suppers are very, very valuable!

Do you use any (or all!) of these methods of freezer cooking, or are there other ways of doing it that I missed here? How do you incorporate cooking ahead into your meal planning?

Instant Pot convert

Confession: for the past several years, I've been ever-so-slightly scornful of the Instant Pot as a, perhaps not silly, but unnecessary extra appliance, a fad that would burn itself out quickly enough.

I was wrong.

This pregnancy has been... not easy. There's nothing seriously wrong with me or the baby; I have chronic loose joints, which during pregnancy makes standing/walking/bending down much harder and more painful than it otherwise would be, and means I tire more easily. I had to stop sitting on the floor months ago, for example, because it was too difficult to stand up and walk again. And now that I'm mid-third-trimester, I am so tired all the time, but that's kind of to be expected.

All that to say, my meal-planning abilities have been lackluster lately. By the time the kids are in bed and the kitchen is clean, and maybe I've even picked up after the two-year-old tornado, I am firmly stuck on the couch until bedtime. Getting chia pudding started in the fridge last night (3 minutes of work max) was an embarrassingly rare feat of breakfast-prep. Pulling meat out of the freezer so it can thaw in the fridge overnight just hasn't been happening. (Though to be honest, I couldn't tell you how much of that is due to being pregnant-hurting-tired and how much is attributable to the meat being in the chest freezer out on the sub-zero deck...) 

And so the Instant Pot has been saving me, over and over again. Oh, the chicken breasts are frozen and it's mid-afternoon? Not a problem. Ground beef is frozen and supper needs to be in the slow cooker in an hour? That's fine. I told Matt we were having moose stroganoff, and accidentally pulled out stew meat instead of steaks? Pressure cooker to the rescue. And the reason I first decided to give it a try: dry, unsoaked beans to cooked in less than an hour! I haven't even found a permanent home for it off the counter yet, because I've been using it almost every day. (And we got an 8 quart, so while it's not too heavy for me to lift, it's certainly heavy enough that I don't want to be hauling it up and down twice each day.)

Even with all of those applications, I would still have said that it was nice to have but not necessary... And then we got home tonight after a long afternoon of appointments and discovered that the pork shoulder I'd had in the slow cooker all afternoon was not done, not even a little bit. It wasn't the first time in the last month that a recipe hasn't gotten done in the called-for length of time in the slow cooker, but the other times were new-to-us recipes, so I figured they just hadn't been written well or I'd made too many "tiny adjustments" to the recipe. Tonight's planned supper was a recipe that I made successfully in the same slow cooker two weeks ago—the only difference was that las time I use high heat instead of low, because I got it started (quite) late. And looking back, all of the failed recipes were supposed to cook on low. So it seems that the low heat function of our slow cooker—which is certainly at least as old as I am—is no longer working properly. I guess it's time to actually read the four or so articles I have bookmarked on how to convert slow cooker recipes for the Instant Pot!

We've loved our ancient slow cooker particularly because it has a dial instead of buttons: with the frequency of power outages this winter, it has been helpful to have one that doesn't reset when it thinks it's been turned off and on again! But I'm also grateful, now that I can't rely on it anymore, that we have a machine that can take its place; it's rare enough for the kids and I to be out of the house for a long span while the slow cooker is on that, at least for now, it shouldn't be a huge deal to go reset the Instant Pot if we lose power while it is running. And we probably have less than three months left of winter, so power outages shouldn't be a regular thing for too much longer.

Do you have an Instant Pot (or other kind of electric pressure cooker)? What's your favorite way to use it? I would love more ideas—I know there are so many more things to do with it than the ones I've tried!

Making good use of mixers

I grew up using my mom's Kitchenaid stand mixer, and when she got a new one around the time I got married, she passed hers on to me. It being about as old as I am, when it finally stopped working last fall, there were no parts anywhere that we could find to repair it. Since I used it all the time, we wound up getting a new Kitchenaid as my Christmas present, but early, so that I could use it for all my Christmas baking.

Unfortunately, it turned out that they don't make them like they used to... Even a single batch of chunky cookie dough had the motor straining and groaning. After about a year of doing many things by hand since I didn't trust the stand mixer to be able to handle them, I was done; one of Matt's coworkers was interested in a Kitchenaid primarily for the attachments, which worked fine on ours, so we sold it and started researching other stand mixers. 

Well, my second early-Christmas-present-stand mixer just arrived, and so far I am very impressed and happy with my Bosch Universal Plus! I made a big batch of cookies Saturday night, and a "small batch" (2 loaves) of bread Sunday evening. It's so fast! And it had no trouble at all with a cookie dough stiff with oats, white chocolate chips, and frozen cranberries. And the bread... I have never made sandwich bread in a stand mixer, not even my mom's old reliable one, because the motors simply couldn't handle it. But the Bosch is made for bread-making: it combined ingredients perfectly, and kneaded the dough as well in 6 minutes as would have taken me at least 20 by hand. The loaves rose beautifully by the woodstove and again in the oven, and I couldn't help cutting into one as soon as they were cool enough. A perfect, soft, not-crumbly-at-all texture! And did I mention that it did all the kneading, and quickly? No more having to put off nap time for another 15-25 minutes because I just started kneading but now the two year old is melting down! 

From what we've read, the Bosch should last a long time; I sure hope so! Right now, I couldn't be happier with it.

Funny thing about those cookies: when I make desserts, I know that as a rule that Matt would just as soon not eat anything containing cranberries or white chocolate, and he won't bother sneaking cookie dough from my mixing bowl if it has oatmeal in it. But, somehow, when I combine all three, he's asking if I really have to bake any of it; can he just have the bowl and a spoon? ;-) I can't really blame him, but then, I do love cranberries and white chocolate. But seriously, these are some great cookies—and seasonal! (Though I make them all year round.)

Cranberry Oatmeal White Chocolate Cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1 1/4 cups sugar*

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 eggs

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 

1 teaspoon baking powder 

1/2 teaspoon salt 

2 cups flour (I always use at least a little whole grain flour)

2 cups quick oats

12 oz white chocolate chips 

1 cup cranberries (frozen is best, if you don't want bright pink dough)

Preheat oven to 375 F. Cream butter and sugar. Scraping down sides of bowl as needed, beat in eggs and vanilla. Mix in baking powder, baking soda, salt and flour. (Switching to dough hook if your mixer recommends it), Add oats, cranberries, and chips. When combined, scoop rounded spoonfuls onto a greased cookie sheet. Bake until edges just barely begun to turn golden, about 8-10 minutes. 

*Alaskan cranberries are substantially more tart than domesticated ones, so you may not want this much sugar; try starting with 1 cup.

My sister, who ought to know what she's talking about since she just won numerous ribbons with them at the fair this year, says that the recipe makes 6 dozen. I don't know how small she's making them... But I also can't say how many I'd get if I actually managed to bake all the dough, since that never happens! So, it makes a good lot of them, anyway. The dough freezes fine, too, if you want to make a full batch of it but don't actually want dozens of cookies sitting on the counter all at once.

Homemade Graham Crackers

While we're thinking about the start of the new school year, here's a quick and portable snack that my kids love to help make:

1/3 cup honey

1/2 cup butter

1 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup water

3 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Pinch of salt

Cream honey, butter and vanilla. Mix in water. Add dry ingredients and combine thoroughly, kneading dough together. Split dough in half*, and roll or press out flat on two greased sheet pans. Cut into squares/rectangles, docking with the tines of a fork if desired, and bake at  F, one pan at a time, for 10-12 minutes or until bottoms begin to turn golden brown. Remove crackers to wire racks or countertop to cool.

*Theyll be slightly thicker and softer than commercial graham crackers, which we like, but if you want them crisp, divide dough into thirds instead and bake in three batches.

And if you have a choice between using sheets pans with and without raised sides, definitely use the ones without! I don't have any of those, and it's always a challenge to roll the dough out to the corners because the sides get in the way.

Homemade Tortillas

I promised to try out tortilla recipes and report back a while ago, didn't I? Like, somewhere around spring break? I may have passed the acceptable "better late than never" threshold here, but... at least I have a well-tested recipe for you? The last time I made them, Matt said, "You can make these any time you want to!" So I think we have a pretty good recipe here.

Well, I'm making another batch tonight, so I figured I'd get some photos and finally post the recipe. It takes a few steps, so it's certainly not as quick as using store-bought tortillas, but it's not all that complicated. And in my opinion, there's a world of difference in flavor between a store-bought tortilla and a homemade one fresh out of the skillet; I came down with an awful headcold today, and despite feeling like staying sprawled on the couch all afternoon, the prospect of having to eat store-bought tortillas for supper was enough to get me into the kitchen.

Flour Tortillas

3 cups flour*
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup lukewarm water
5 Tablespoons coconut oil (solid)

Mix together flour(s) and salt, and cut in the coconut oil until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Add the water and knead several times until the dough is smooth. Divide into 16 to 20 balls of equal size and let rest at least ten minutes, up to two hours.**

Heat a skillet or griddle to 400 degrees F. Place one ball of dough on a lightly-floured counter and roll out to a 6" to 8" circle-ish shape, as thin as you can easily get it without the dough tearing. (If you only made 16 balls, you should be able to get larger tortillas.) Lay tortilla on the hot skillet and cook for 30 seconds on each side. While it cooks, roll out the next tortilla; repeat process. (If you have a large enough skillet, cooking two at a time really helps speed the cooking along.) Stack cooked tortillas in a towel. Serve immediately.

Once cooled, leftover tortillas keep well in the refrigerator in a ziptop gallon bag for at least a week. Reheat in the microwave before trying to roll them; they'll tear if they are cold, but they roll up perfectly when warm.

*I've used straight all-purpose flour, straight spelt or whole wheat flour, and blends of the two, and all of them have worked fine. I prefer at least one cup of whole grain flour, but use whatever you prefer.

**I have not found any particular advantage to a shorter or longer rest time, but as you get up to the two-hour mark, the dough starts to dry out, so letting it go longer than that would make it harder to roll thin.

Roman-style gnocchi

Yesterday was my birthday, and to celebrate I made bolognese and gnocchi alla romana for supper. They're very different than what I think of as "regular" gnocchi, baked instead of boiled, but they're so good!

The kids aren't fond of any form of gnocchi—something to do with the rich+creamy texture, I think, since risotto is also firmly in the (very small) category of foods they don't like—so I can't make these often, but last night we had my sister and brother-in-law over to share them with us and gave the kids Italian bread to go with their bolognese instead.

Gnocchi alla Romana

3 cups milk

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 cups semolina flour

1 cup freshly grated parmesan or pecorino cheese*

2 egg yolks

3 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cubed

3 Tablespoons butter, melted, for the top

more grated parmesan for the top

Line a large baking sheet with plastic wrap, enough that it comes up the sides if not overhangs. 

In a large saucepan, combine milk and salt over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally. As soon as you see bubbles forming on the top, stir in the semolina. It will thicken up quickly. Once it's thickened, stir in the cheese, egg yolks, and cubed cold butter. 

When the "dough" is homogeneous, spread it flat on the plastic-lined baking sheet. You want it to be no more than 1 centimeter thick. Cover with more plastic wrap, and chill for at least half an hour.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F and butter the bottom and sides of one large or two medium-sized baking dishes (we always use two). Removing the top layer of plastic, cut the dough into 2" to 2 1/2" diameter squares or circles.** Place them, overlapping, in the baking dishes. Brush with the melted butter, and sprinkle with shredded cheese.

Bake 25 minutes, or until edges begin to be golden.

*I accidentally bought pecorino instead of parmesan this last time, so I can confirm that pecorino does work okay; it just didn't melt as smoothly as parmesan does.

**Circles seem to be the traditional shape, but squares are much easier (you just divide up the pan into a grid, instead of cutting out circles and rolling out the scraps to cut again), and it's not like circles taste any different than squares, so we just make squares.

Blueberry Almond Granola

Little Bear's at noon Mass with Grandma, Kit is napping, and I'm all caught up on the non-noisy items on my to-do list, so here's a quick recipe!

Kit helped me mix up a batch of our current favorite granola this morning: with blueberries, whole grains, and coconut, it has something for everyone in our family! It's dairy-free, and easily gluten-free as well.

Blueberry Almond Granola

3 cups seven-grain cereal blend (or rolled oats, gluten-free if necessary)
3 1/2 cups almonds, chopped
1 Tablespoon sugar (I use evaporated cane sugar, but brown sugar or coconut sugar would also be good)
1/4 teaspoon salt
5 Tablespoons coconut oil
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup desiccated coconut (not the sweetened kind), divided
2 cups freeze-dried blueberries

Preheat the oven to 340 degrees F. In a large bowl, mix together seven-grain cereal, almonds, sugar, and salt. In a small pot over medium heat, combine coconut oil, maple syrup, and vanilla. Heat, stirring occasionally, until the coconut oil is melted. Pour liquids over dry ingredients, stir until it's all thoroughly moistened, and spread the mixture over two ungreased, unlined sheet pans.

Bake for 20 minutes. Remove pans from oven, and stir 1/2 cup of coconut into each pan. Return to oven, rotating pans so that the one that was on the upper shelf is now on the lower, and bake about more 5 minutes, until the coconut is turning golden. Allow the granola to cool completely before stirring in the blueberries. I've found that it works best to pour the granola off both pans into the (cleaned) bowl I mixed it all together in, add the blueberries, and stir it up again in there rather than trying to stir in the blueberries on the pans.

(Recipe adapted from Minimalist Baker's Strawberry Coconut Granola, which also looks delicious, but no one in town carries freeze-dried strawberries so I haven't been able to give it a try!)


I started using seven-grain cereal in all of my granolas because I had a 50-lb bucket of it that we weren't going through quickly enough as hot cereal, but we've discovered that we really like the variety of flavors and textures that it adds to the granola; the last oat-only granola I tried tasted kind of boring in comparison! We use a blend of wheat, rye, oats, triticale, barley, spelt, and flax.

Strawberry Palm Sunday

Happy Palm Sunday! We wound up at the cathedral instead of our usual parish for Mass; our bishop was the celebrant, which made Kit excited because she likes seeing his "bishop hat" (mitre). We all gathered outside the cathedral doors for the blessing of the palms and the first Gospel reading, and then the whole congregation processed around the outside of the cathedral singing "All Glory, Laud and Honor" before going inside. I'd never seen that before; maybe because Holy Week for us is often right in the icy, slippery part of breakup? Are Palm Sunday processions common where you are? 

Oh, and despite the extra-long Mass, Little Bear was so good. Like, significantly better-behaved than a typical Sunday. We were so proud of him. Kit, on the other hand... well, I know long Masses can be hard on little ones, and she was sad and sleepy.

Our meals today wound up—unintentionally—featuring the liturgical color of the day, which Little Bear got a kick out of. Strawberries have been on sale, and I'd promised Little Bear strawberry shortcake for Sunday dessert. I had some berries that to be used right now this morning, though, so we diced them up and enjoyed them over chocolate brownie waffles, from the Chocolate-Covered Katie cookbook. (One of my favorite cookbooks right now, y'all; everything we've tried from it has been delicious, and it's all healthy! And no one's paying me to say that ;-)) Matt whipped up some eggs and sausage to go with them, and we were all so full afterward that we didn't really need lunch.

For supper, we sort of had our traditional Palm Sunday meal of psari plaki; I used an Argentinian Malbec instead of the called-for white wine, because that's what I had open. And dried parsley instead of fresh. And I didn't really measure anything. And I didn't remember the olive oil until it was in the oven, and had to quickly pull the pan out and drizzle it over the top. But it tasted good! We used halibut cheeks, which certainly contributed to the deliciousness. I'd totally forgotten about having psari plaki until the night before, so I was sure glad to find one last package of halibut in the freezer!

And for dessert, the promised strawberry shortcakes. I used Chocolate-Covered Katie's recipe, but with cow's milk instead of coconut milk, and they turned out very well—light and fluffy and just the slightest bit sweet. I did wind up whipping too much whipped cream for tonight; one thing I love about coconut whipped cream over cow's milk heavy cream is that the coconut cream will hold its' fluffiness in the fridge for at least a day or two before going flat, but in my experience at least, leftover whipped cow's milk cream will be flat by the next morning.

Anyway, much tasty red-themed food. Kit was ecstatic over all of the strawberries she was allowed to consume today. Good vitamin c and fiber, right?

What did you do for Palm Sunday?

Soft pretzels for Lent

I haven't made soft pretzels in years; in my head, they're way too hard for anything other than a special occasion. We needed meatless meals for Kit's nameday last week, though, so I decided to give soft pretzels a try again to make her supper a little more special. And you know what? They really aren't that hard! Time-consuming, yes, and harder than most things for kids to actually helpfully help with... rolling the dough "snakes" took a long time, and Kit didn't understand why she couldn't just wave a piece of dough around in the air for a few seconds and then pat it out on the pan, but Little Bear got the hang of it by the time he was halfway through his second.

And they are sooooo good! If you like soft pretzels and don't mind spending the time shaping them, it's definitely worth trying to make your own.

For the dough:
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 Tablespoon sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
3 cups all purpose flour
1 3/4 cup spelt flour (or other whole grain flour)
2 teaspoons salt
4 Tablespoons melted butter (or 3 1/2 Tablespoons olive oil)

10 cups water
1/2 cup baking soda
milk or an egg wash (1 yolk + 1 Tablespoon water)
coarse salt

Combine the warm water, sugar, and yeast; set aside until foamy. In a mixing bowl, combine flours and salt. When yeast mixture is ready, add to flour along with butter or oil. Combine thoroughly and knead about 8 minutes. Shape into a ball, and place in bowl, covered with plastic wrap, in a warm place until doubled in size.

Begin bringing water and baking soda to a boil in a broad, straight-sided pot, and begin preheating oven to 450 degrees F. Line two sheet pans with parchment paper.

Divide dough into eight equal pieces. Roll out each piece into a rope/snake at least 24 inches long. Lay on the counter in a U shape; cross the ends over each other twice, and fold the twisted ends down to press against the lower edge of the U, forming a pretzel shape. Place four pretzels on each sheet pan. One at a time, place pretzels in the boiling water for 30 seconds. When each is back onto its baking sheet, brush with egg wash or milk and sprinkle with coarse salt. Don't assume that a kid will interpret "use the smallest amount possible" as anything other than "go ahead and dump the entire thing of salt on it". Remove excess salt as necessary.

Bake 12 to 14 minutes. Remove from pan right away, and allow to cool on a wire rack.


Thinking about it, there's no logical reason for me to have believed that making pretzels was too hard when I think that making pita is easy. Hmm. I guess it's time to try something else that's always seemed too hard... maybe tortillas? I'll have to start looking around for a recipe, and report back once I've tried!

St Lucy Buns {dairy-free}

A year ago, I was still coming to grips with Kit being allergic to casein. Our traditional Advent and Christmas baking is chock full of butter, milk, cream cheese, sour cream... and because I was feeling overwhelmed, and most of the few Christmas treats that I did try to adapt to be dairy-free turned out poorly, I more or less stopped trying.

Well, we're still dairy-free around here, but with a year's experience in baking without butter et al, I am ready to tackle all the Christmas things! Well, most of them. The ones that are supposed to taste like butter can wait another year.

I was sad to miss out on St Lucy Buns last year, but with milk, butter, AND sour cream, there was no way I was going to attempt to muddle through them. I was still a little bit nervous last night, waiting and hoping they'd turn out as my dough oh-so-slowly rose, but they are perfect. Light, tender, melt-in-your-mouth rich... Mmmm. :-) So glad to be able to celebrate St Lucy's feast day with these treats from my Nordic roots!

St Lucy Buns/Lussekatter {dairy-free}

3/4 cup milk of choice (I used almondmilk)
pinch of saffron threads
1 teaspoon + 1/4 cup white sugar
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast
3 1/2 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons nondairy "butter" (I used Earth Balance soy-free)
1/4 cup nondairy plain yogurt (I used coconutmilk yogurt)
2 large eggs + 1 for egg wash
raisins

Combine milk, saffron, and 1 teaspoon sugar. Heat to 115 degrees F, and stir to dissolve sugar. Stir in yeast and set in a warm place until foamy, 5 to 10 minutes.

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the remaining sugar, 3 1/2 cups flour, and salt. Make a well in the middle and add the milk mixture, 2 eggs, diced "butter", and yogurt. Combine thoroughly. Knead dough, adding flour a tablespoon at a time as needed until dough is still tacky but doesn't stick all over your hands when you touch it. Shape into a ball and set in a bowl, covered with plastic wrap, to rise.

When dough has doubled, divide into 12 equal balls. Roll into snakes and shape into tight Ss. Lay out on a parchment-lined sheet pan and cover with plastic wrap to rise until doubled, about half an hour. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Beat an egg and brush over the Ss. Stick raisins into S curls. Bake 9 to 10 minutes, turning pan 180 degrees after 4 minutes. Remove from parchment to a wire rack to cool. Enjoy!


Notes:
If you aren't dairy-free, the recipe works equally well with cow's milk, butter, and plain yogurt or sour cream.
Coconut oil works in place of the fake butter, but only use 3.5 tablespoons instead of 4.

No-bake Granola Bars

I know I've mentioned these no-bake peanut butter chocolate chip granola bars a few times lately, but they're just so delicious and easy! We've tried several variations on the base recipe over the past couple of months, and I have to say that I believe we've found a winner. Our family's winner, at any rate; as you'll see in a moment, it's easy to adapt them to fit your own preferences!

The basic recipe that I've linked above, from Don't Waste The Crumbs, makes a good bar. Salty, sweet, holds together very well instead of crumbling apart like many other no-bake recipes I've tried before. I'll let you go visit her site for the original recipe, but for comparison purposes, I'll tell you that her honey-to-peanut butter ratio is 1:1 and her pretzels are crushed to breadcrumb-consistency.

Pros: Like I said, they stick together really, really well. And they only get fingers a little bit sticky; Little Bear, who hates having messy fingers, didn't have a problem eating them---though he did ask me to wash his fingers when he finished eating.

Cons: They were a little too sweet for me, and they softened significantly in just a short amount of time after removing them from the refrigerator; the day I brought one to town as a snack for Little Bear, it was a very good thing that I had a pack of wipes in my purse to clean him up!

The chunkier version was actually attempted by my younger brother, but I'm going to include it anyway because we learned something important from it. He included the optional peanuts from the basic recipe, which I've never done, and crushed his pretzels by hand to a much-less-fine size than the recipe called for. The largest pieces I saw were a little smaller than 1 cm. He also used the "if needed" coconut oil because his mixture was too dry.

Pros: They were chunkier, more like what I've always thought of as a "granola bar."

Cons: They didn't hold together well at all; they were too dry, and crumbled. The only reason I can come up with is that the pretzels needed to be crushed more finely in order to hold the bars together. He used exactly the same peanut butter I did, it even came out of the same bucket!, so it wasn't a difference in our peanut butters.

An almond butter version, as Yvonne asked about the other week. I maintained the original 1:1 ratio, just substituting almond butter for peanut butter, and used almond extract instead of vanilla extract. For the record, this was the first time I've ever used almond butter so I don't know whether mine was typical or of an unusually runny consistency, but it was not as thick as peanut butter.

Pros: They held together well, and tasted like almond. Stirring the mini chocolate chips into this batch was easier than with any of the peanut butter batches.

Cons: Soooooo sticky! Little Bear refused to eat his until I brought him a wet towel, so that he could wash his fingers after each bite. They were too sweet for me again; I had thought that the stronger salty/roasted flavor of the almond butter would balance out the sweetness of the honey, but the sweet and salty notes were more competing than complementing each other. In my opinion, at least; it turns out that I don't actually like almond butter very much, so take that with a grain of salt.

And finally, our perfect version! I changed the honey-to-peanut butter ratio to 3:5, and crushed the pretzels to a coarse cornmeal consistency.

Pros: These held together very well, even staying fairly firm when I brought them to town with us (so they were out of the fridge for an extended period of time.) And they were not very sticky at all; Little Bear had to be reminded to wash his hands after snack, because he didn't think that his fingers were sticky. They were not as sweet, which I appreciated, and felt more filling, so it worked fine for me to cut them a little bit smaller.

Cons: It was harder to get the mini chocolate chips into this version, and I wound up basically kneading it like dough to work them in.

Here you go: Shifflerhaus No-bake Peanut Butter Granola Bars

2 cups oats (instant or rolled; I used instant)
4 oz pretzels
1/3 cup mini chocolate chips
1 1/4 cups peanut butter
3/4 cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla

Line an 8"x10" baking dish with parchment paper. Crush pretzels in a food processor or blender until ground, about the consistency of cornmeal. Pour into a bowl and mix in oats and chocolate chips. In a smaller bowl or liquid measuring cup, combine peanut butter, honey, and vanilla. Pour over the dry ingredients and thoroughly combine; you'll likely wind up needing to use your hands. Dump into parchment-lined pan and press out smoothly, giving attention to the corners. Place in the freezer for 30 minutes or in the fridge for several hours. Remove from pan, cut into bars, wrap individually in plastic, and store in the fridge.

Notes:

- It would be worth trying the almond butter again using these quantities, except that I don't have enough almond butter left to make another batch, and I didn't like it enough to want to buy more. If you try it out, though, let me know! Or if you think that I must have had a particularly poor first jar of almond butter and there's a better brand that I should try before writing it off altogether, I'm willing to consider it. :-)

- I've just now realized that not everyone uses natural peanut butter, a.k.a. the kind you have to stir before using. All of the no-stir brands that I've seen contain soybean oil, so we can't use them, and anymore it doesn't even seem out of the ordinary to me to stir the peanut butter jar each time I open it. In other words, I can't tell you what will happen if you use no-stir peanut butter in this recipe; if you try it and find out, though, I'd be interested to know how much of a difference it makes.

Midweek Motley

What we're doing

Our miniature "container garden" on the deck is growing well, for the most part. The herbs all seem content, and the Siberian bush tomatoes are getting bushy indeed. Our grape tomato plant, on the other hand, is definitely less than thrilled with the 40s and 50s we've been having; I think I need to pull it inside, if I can find somewhere that Kit won't be constantly getting into it. The green lettuce is growing more quickly than the red, though today I noticed Little Bear knocking over one of the reds when he watered it, so that may be the reason. The strawberry plants in their hanging basket are covered with little white berries, and a few of them are beginning to pink; more and more of the berry plants' leaves are starting to turn brown, though, and I'm not sure what's going on there. Little Bear is still being very helpful with the weeding and watering, and is always proud to show off "his" plants when we have visitors.

Kit's vocabulary is growing. I know we're often the only ones who understand her, but she's not quite 1, so that's normal! We're hearing "boom" frequently these days, as she's constantly looking for opportunities to drop things on the floor so she can use her new word. Another new one this week is "buh" (bye), which she says every time I hang up the phone. Oh, and "aaah-meh!" She's just started folding her hands when we all sit down to pray before meals, which is so cute, and then when we get to the Amen she often shouts "aaah-meh!" and beams at her own cleverness.

What we're eating

This afternoon we picked up our first "share" of the summer from a CSA that we signed up with this spring. Since we're still renting and I don't have the ability to plant a big garden right now, I've been so excited about getting produce fresh from a local farm each week this summer, and expanding our family's repertoire of vegetables consumed. Well, I had my own vegetable prejudices confronted right off the bat; there aren't any vegetables that I "won't eat," exactly, but despite knowing that Matt likes it, I have never once brought home arugula in our nearly-5 years of marriage. And what went into the top of our sack of vegetables this afternoon? A large bag of arugula-chickweed salad. But I ate it! And it wasn't as off-putting as I remembered... which may possibly be related to the fact that I make my vinaigrettes with a 1:1 ratio of oil and vinegar... Everything tasted more or less like balsamic. But still. 

Here's the whole of our leafy loot. From the top left: arugula-chickweed salad, spinach, sorrel, chives, bok choy, mizuna mustard, and radishes. Kit helped herself to some of the mizuna while I was putting everything away, and she didn't seem to mind it, though she didn't wind up actually swallowing any of it. Little Bear groused about not liking chickweed, because his youngest aunt doesn't, but we told him that he had to try it anyway and he wound up excitedly asking for a second helping of salad.

I'm in the process right now of testing out the no-bake granola bars from last week with almond butter instead of peanut butter, so we should have a post with the main recipe for those and a couple of adaptations up soon!

What we're reading

From Haley at Carrots for Michaelmas, Tim Burton's Big Fish, Me Before You, and the Terrible Power of Story
 - Beautiful, inspirational look at Story, at how powerful a force storytelling is in forming and directing our hearts and minds. She reminded me strongly of J.R.R. Tolkien's essay On Fairy-Stories, the conveying of fundamental Truth through myth.

From Meg of Held By His Pierced Hands, Heavy Blessings
 - Reflecting on the Visitation and the pregnancy of St Elizabeth, Meg delves into how receiving blessings with joy and gratitude does not preclude acknowledging that some blessings can be difficult to carry.

From Tiffany of Don't Waste the Crumbs, All-purpose Slow Cooker Chicken
 - Did you know that you can roast a chicken, roast it, in the slow cooker? I had no idea. It worked perfectly, though! And we really, really appreciated being able to cook the chicken without heating up the house.

From Katie of Kitchen Stewardship, 3 Common Summertime Toxins (& How to Avoid Them)

From Kendra of Don't Waste the Crumbs, Companion Gardening Beginners Guide

From Molly Green Magazine, Allowing Yourself Time to Heal

And I'm still listening to Andy Minter's recording of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda on LibriVox, but I'm getting close to the end; I'm still very impressed with and thoroughly enjoying Minter's presentation, and was so excited to see that he has also done the sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, which I've actually never read. That will be a treat!

Sourdough Cinnamon Roll Bread

This would be one of those "happy accidents" in the kitchen: a recipe that was apparently a total failure, but instead is getting renamed and added to my recipe file. Love those!

We made sourjacks for breakfast after Mass again this past weekend, so there was about half a cup of leftover starter sitting on the counter. Flipping through the sourdough section of my cookbook, I found something that sounded delicious: sourdough cinnamon rolls. Matt said yes, please make that!, so I fed the starter another cup and a half each of flour and water, and gave it about 24 hours to get good and foamy. Then Little Bear and I started in on the recipe... But by the time it said we were ready to let the dough rise, I was pretty skeptical. It did say that it made a soft dough, but soft enough that I was still stirring it with a spatula instead of kneading it? I conferred with my mom and decided to let it rise as it was; I could always add a little more flour after the first rise.

After the first rise, it was a mess. I'd barely even call it "dough"! It poured out of the bowl onto the countertop, closer to the consistency of a quickbread batter. I kneaded in another cup or so of flour, which made it so that I could sort of maneuver it around, but my hands were thickly coated in the sticky mess, and there was clearly no way that I was getting a dough with enough form to roll out flat and make proper cinnamon rolls without adding a lot more flour. The starter in the dough could probably eventually get the dough to rise if I added the extra flour, but I didn't want to wait another day before baking them! 

So I gave up. Eh, I didn't really want cinnamon rolls anyway... and I'm out of powdered sugar, so I couldn't frost them even if I did make them... Never mind the fact that I made some more powdered sugar for another recipe later that afternoon, anyway; I was looking for excuses. But, I have a huge problem with throwing food away, and I felt badly about disappointing Matt and Little Bear. I looked at the bags of raisins and brown sugar, looked at the little boy who was so excited about cinnamon rolls, and decided to take a chance.

Little Bear eagerly dumped handfuls of brown sugar and raisins on top of the lump of sticky dough, and carefully shook on some cinnamon. I kneaded it all together as best I could, split it in two, and dumped it into two greased bread pans. When it had risen, we threw it in the oven at the temperature the cinnamon rolls would have baked at, and hoped for the best.

And the result? Better than I could have hoped! The loaves slice nicely, and somehow perfectly merge the tenderness you expect in a sweet roll with the sponginess of sourdough bread. The sourdough tang is certainly there, but it doesn't overpower the sweetness or the cinnamon. It's like eating slices of cinnamon roll, minus the mess! You could certainly ice the top of the loaves, too, if you wanted to bring the bread one step closer to cinnamon-roll-hood, but we're enjoying it all by itself.

Here's the recipe, if you don't mind getting sticky and want to give it a shot yourself. And just in case your dough turns out like, well, dough, I'll include the "real" cinnamon roll directions, too.

Sourdough Cinnamon Roll Bread

2 cups sourdough starter

1 cup lukewarm milk of choice

3+ cups flour

2 eggs

1/4 cup oil

1/2 cup sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon

a couple handfuls of brown sugar and raisins

Mix together starter, milk, and 2 cups of flour, beating until smooth. Add eggs and oil, and beat thoroughly again. In a small bowl combine sugar, salt, soda, and 1/2 cup flour, then sprinkle mixture over the dough and stir gently. Gently knead in another 1/2 cup of flour, with a spatula if necessary. If it looks like a soft dough, congratulations! You can make proper cinnamon rolls out of it if you want to. If you're not sure whether it's "soft" or "soup," don't worry; that's how mine looks. Leave the dough in a bowl in a warm place, covered with wax paper, to rise until doubled. (Sourdough takes much longer than yeast bread to rise, and I can't give you an exact number of hours—that will depend of the room temperature, the humidity, your starter's temperament, etc.)

When the dough has doubled, if it looks like a ball of dough, go ahead and divide it in half, roll out each half into a rectangle, top with the cinnamon, brown sugar and raisins, roll it up lengthwise, cut it into 1" wide cinnamon rolls, and put them in a greased pan cut side down. Cover and rise until doubled, which could take hours and hours again. 

If your dough looks like a soupy, sticky mess, don't panic; grease two loaf pans well. Knead in, again with a spatula if necessary, about a cup more of flour or enough to make it slightly handle-able. Knead in the cinnamon, raisins and brown sugar. Divide the dough in half and put/glop/pour into the two prepared pans. Cover and rise until doubled, hours and hours etc.

Whichever form your dough wound up in, when is has doubled again, bake at 375 degrees F for about 40 minutes. Turn them out of the pan immediately and cool on wire racks.

Midweek motley

What we're doing

Migraines on Monday, teething on Tuesday... It's been "a week" so far. Late Monday morning, bright flashing lights began invading my vision, eventually clouding over half of my sight at a time. When it hadn't lessened after an hour of laying down in a dark room, Matt came home from work to take me to the eye clinic. By the time the optometrist was ready for me, I was curled up on the floor in the dark waiting room, trying not to throw up from the pain in my head. Turns out that I'm one of the lucky people who can get "auras" leading into their migraines... yay.

Given that I was having a migraine and could barely keep my eyes open, it was not exactly surprising that I sort of failed the visual field test on my left eye. I'm not sure why they even bothered to have me do one right away, now that I think about it. But I'm supposed to go back the week after Easter to repeat it, just in case.

Kit has been fussier and clinger than usual all week, which has been so much fun with the "aftershock" headaches that have popped up by midafternoon every day since Monday. On Wednesday morning I finally figured out why: another tooth has been breaking through. Eight teeth in two months—Little Missy should hopefully be ready to take a break from teething now!

Little Bear and I talked about St Patrick today and he colored a picture of the saint holding a shamrock and ordering some snakes to leave. I don't think the snake story made much sense to him, because we don't have any snakes here, either, so he's never seen one outside of a zoo. But he liked how St Patrick used the shamrock to teach about God! We never did get around to the idea of green being associated with his feast day, which is good because I'm not sure I know why it is; Little Bear was very sure that he should use purple for St Patrick's chasuble and mitre since it's Lent, so I wasn't about to argue with that.

What we're eating

Lentil soup, pasta with marinara... Nothing very impressive, though it's Lent so that's kind of the point, isn't it? We did not have corned beef et al tonight, thank goodness; the week has been penitential enough without that!

I made a chicken pie this evening, and I think this crust turned out better than my last dairy-free crust; I used a bunch of whole wheat flour in it, and added some savory, marjoram, thyme, and lavender. Being accustomed to butter- or cream cheese-based pie crusts, shortening pie crust tastes so bland! The toasty wheat and the mixed herbs certainly helped, though.

So I grew up believing that all shortening is basically evil, right? Straight-up hydrogenated vegetable oil. Yuck. But when we received Kit's diagnosis right at the beginning of Advent, I went to the ladies at my natural foods co-op in the hopes that they could give me dairy-free alternatives to salvage my Christmas baking. One of the things that came home with me was this:

Non-hydrogenated shortening. It's made from 100% "mechanically pressed" palm oil, so even now that I've had to cut out soy as well, it still works for us. No trans fats, no weird additives; I still prefer coconut or olive oil for most things, but I use this for greasing pans, and it works fine in recipes that call for shortening, like pie crust.

Little Bear and I also made some quick no-bake granola bars the other day, but I was working one-handed with Kit in the other arm, so no photos. They are soft and chewy, and everyone seems to agree that it's a recipe worth saving:

2 cups rolled oats

2 cups rice crispies

1/2 to 3/4 cup raisins

1/3 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup honey

1/2 cup peanut butter

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Line a 13x9 pan with foil and grease well. 

Combine oats and rice crispies in a mixing bowl. Set aside.

In a small saucepan, bring honey and brown sugar to a boil, then remove from heat. Stir in peanut butter and vanilla, and pour over oats and cereal. Stir until there are no more dry patches, then stir in raisins.

Press mixture firmly into pan and allow to cool completely. Remove foil from pan, cut granola bars to desired size, and wrap individually.

What we're reading

Same books as the last few weeks: 

This week it's been all I can do to get through the daily readings from each of these books, plus the daily emailed reflections from Bishop Robert Barron and Blessed Is She. And I don't want to give any of those up, because they are all so good! So I've wound up not really having the time or mental ability to read much else. Hopefully once these headaches go away I'll get a chance to catch up on some blog reading; right now, my eyes are preferring to avoid screens as much as possible.

Chocolate chip doughnuts {dairy-free}

Whoops, I disappeared for a while there! We're still recovering from two and a half weeks of traveling, followed by too much everything-is-breaking excitement when we got home, but more about that soon. Today, I'm writing about doughnuts.

It is practically Lent. How is that possible? I feel ridiculously unprepared; I still don't even know what time zone I'm in half the time, let alone what liturgical season it is! But because Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, we're celebrating Tuesday with rich, traditionally non-Lenten fare. We often try to pick up traditional foods from one of our ethnic backgrounds on holidays or other notable days, and for Shrove Tuesday we're going with both English—pancakes—for supper, and German—doughnuts—for breakfast. Matt and I each have both German and English in our family trees, but I only grew up hearing about eating pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, while he grew up hearing about Fasnaucht Day. But really, why not do both? We'll have one great symbolic "using up" of the rich foods before our Lenten fasting begins.

I feel rather silly, making dairy-free versions of these supposed dairy-full treats, but oh well. Maybe next Shrove Tuesday Kit and I will be able to have milk.

Chocolate Chip Doughnuts

3 tablespoons coconut oil, melted

4 tablespoons canola oil

1/2 cup sugar

1/3 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups flour

1 cup almond milk

3/4 cup chocolate chips

Cream oils and sugars together, then beat in eggs. In a mixing bowl, combine dry ingredients, then thoroughly stir in oil/sugar/egg mixture and almond milk. Fold in chocolate chips. Spoon batter into greased doughnut pan, not quite all the way up to the tops of the wells, and bake at 425 F for 10-15 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes before removing doughnuts to a wire rack to cool completely.

Notes: when making these dairy-free/soy-free, remember to check ingredients on the chocolate chips and cooking spray! If allergies aren't an issue, you can feel free to use cow's milk instead of almond milk and 4 tablespoons of butter instead of the 3 tablespoons of coconut oil. 

Also, per our highly scientific experiment wherein I forgot to grease the pan the first time and the doughnuts stuck and tore when I tried to take them out, even silicone pans should really be greased if you want the best odds of getting your doughnuts out in one piece.

Recipe adapted from these doughnuts from King Arthur Flour.

Apple walnut spice cake {dairy-free}

Breakfasty cakes, especially coffee cake, have been on my mind a lot lately. Moist, rich squares of cake with a delicious crumble topping, all held together by an exorbitant amount of what? Butter, of course. So much of a coffee cake's flavor comes from butter, I couldn't bring myself to bother trying to recreate it to fit my current dairy-free, soy-free needs.

But on Sunday, as we were leaving the parish hall after Mass, Little Bear caught sight of the big sheet cake being sliced up in preparation for the soup kitchen. Of course he was just sure that he needed some, and I wound up promising that he could help me bake cake at home later instead. "So, what kind of cake are we having?" Matt asked on the way home. 

"Apple cake!" Little Bear told him. "An apple coffee cake?" Matt interpreted. "Good idea!" While they proceeded to go back and forth about what 'coffee cake' meant and how Little Bear wanted apples in the cake, not coffee, I started flipping through recipes. After looking at a whole bunch, though, I still couldn't make myself attempt a dairy-free coffee cake proper. Most of the cake-ier cake recipes I was finding were intended for bundt or tube pans, which I don't have, but then I found this old-fashioned apple cake from King Arthur Flour that looked adaptable. Swap out the butter for oil, bump up the spices to compensate for the lost flavor, give up on the frosting as a lost cause and decide to just serve it au natural... and we have a new favorite. This is deicious!

1 1/3 cups white flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 2/3 cups sugar

2 teaspoons baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon ground cloves

3/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

2 eggs

6 tablespoons oil

4 cups peeled diced tart apples

1 cup chopped walnuts

Mix together everything except the apples and walnuts, beating until well combined. Mine looked like a graham cracker crust mixture—almost like coarse damp sand! It looks ridiculously dry, but don't go adding any extra liquid: add the apples and walnuts and beat it for a couple of minutes. As the apple pieces release their juice, the batter will magically come together. When it resembles slightly soft cookie dough, stop beating and press it into a greased 13x9 pan. Bake at 325 degrees F for 45 minutes, and cool (in pan) on a wire rack. 

Chocolate-covered coconut balls

On the twelfth day of Christmas, the Internet gave to me: this amazing and delicious dairy-free recipe!

I know, it doesn't quite fit the meter. That's okay. These little treats completely make up for my lack of poeticalness. And ability to use real words, apparently. Moreover, they've erased all of my lingering resentment about not being able to eat Christmas cookies this year. These things are amazing.

The idea came from these dark chocolate coconut bites from Pinch of Yum, but I Kit and I didn't quite follow the recipe as written... Here's how we made ours:

2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut

4 tablespoons maple syrup*

5 tablespoons coconut oil

Splash of vanilla

1+ cup(s) semisweet chocolate chips

In a bowl, mush together the coconut, syrup, coconut oil and vanilla with your fingers until thoroughly combined. Take large pinches and squeeze them firmly in your hand to make balls, about an inch in diameter. Line the balls up on a wax paper-lined cookie sheet and refrigerate for half an hour. 

Melt chocolate chips; I started out with about 3/4 of a cup, but I ate some, and then I ran out of chocolate when I was coating the coconut balls so I had to melt more, but my additional 1/2 cup of chocolate chips were about 34 degrees F when they went in the microwave so they didn't melt well, not having sat on the counter for a half hour like the first batch, so I really don't know exactly how much I used (or should have used). The size of the balls will affect the amount of chocolate you wind up needing, too, so I'd recommend starting with 1 cup but making sure you have more room-temperature chips standing by just in case.

Anyway! Melt the chocolate chips, then carefully roll the chilled coconut balls in the melted chocolate and set them back on the wax paper-lined cookie sheet. Chill the balls until the chocolate hardens, then transfer them to a wax paper-lined tin and store them in the fridge (you can use the same wax paper from the cookie sheet).

*I used Grade B maple syrup, which is stronger and darker than Grade A. It's delicious, but 4 tablespoons of it made for a very strong flavor. Next time I might try Grade A or honey instead, or an adult-only version with 2 tablespoons each of honey and rum, or of maple syrup and some liquor. Bourbon? What would you pair with maple?