S'mores

I'm off celebrating my birthday and my present to you today is my favorite s'more recipe. "Recipe?" you ask. YES!

First, you need a good fire with some hot embers (or your gas stove or your microwave). Next spread your graham cracker with peanut putter and add some bananas, top with Hershey's chocolate and a perfectly browned marshmallow. Enjoy

I'll also add they're great if you make it with fresh raspberries and dark chocolate

Just so you know I was too excited about my s'more to stope and take a picture of the final product. Sorry. 

Blueberry Skillet Cornbread

I got this mad craving the other day for cornbread. I even had my husband get one container of cornmeal while he was picking up our free Redbox rental randomly at the store. We got The Iron Lady if you were wondering. Rent it because Meryl Streep is amazing. 

Back to the cornbread. Normally I would bust out with some Jiffy mix or have some that Nana made (when I lived with them) but we have a whole set of cast iron cookware so I decided to do my own thang. I adapted a recipe on the back of the container that I thought I'd share it with you. 

Blueberry Skillet Cornbread

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup yellow corn meal
• 1 & 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg beaten
• 1/4 cup canola oil
• 2 tbsp honey
• 1 cup of frozen or fresh blueberries
• 2 tbsp butter (for greasing the pan)

The plan:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place 8 inch cast iron skillet in the oven while oven preheats.

Blend all dry ingredients (corn meal, flour, sugar, powder and salt). Then stir in the milk, egg, oil and honey until mixed. Finally fold in the blueberries (I put frozen blueberries in without thawing them beforehand).

Take cast iron skillet out of the oven and place butter into the skillet. Turn skillet so the bottom and sides are covered. Now pour the batter into the skillet and put in oven. 

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean and top is lightly brown. Cut into however many slices you want. Or just eat it straight out of the pan if you feel so inclines. 

Take a slice out of the skillet, while warm, slather some butter on it and eat that sucker UP. 

My first cupping

I went to my very first coffee cupping on Wednesday this past week at Montana Coffee Traders. To start out they have a table set out with various ground coffees. They're all very lightly roasted in small batches and freshly ground. After a lengthy intro by Richard, the toastmaster (what an awesome job title) about what we were doing you smell them. You're supposed to be smelling it for the overall flavors and the nuances. They even provide you with a list of possible descriptive words including things like "fruity, fermented, baggy, cardboardy, rioy" (which I interpreted to me it smells like a river in Mexico). 

After the smelling of the grounds the facilitators, ours was Katie, pour hot water into the cups. Then you smell that. Thirdly you go around and "break the cusp" with a spoon and smell it while you do that. 

Lastly, you get to drink it. You take a small amount and slurp it with a spoon (possibly one of my least favorite noises in the world but I got over it for the cupping). While you taste it you're trying to assess the acidity, flavor, aftertaste, sweetness and overall impression. My honest opinion is that I'm terrible at it. I mostly just wanted someone to tell me what I was smelling/tasting. I did however enjoying getting to learn a lot about coffee. 

Weekly review

Monday: violently ill. maybe heat stroke. this was my view for much of the afternoon.

Tuesday: heaven in a bowl, homemade chocolate peanut butter ice cream

the only thing I ate other than toast

Wednesday: coffee cupping. more to come on that later. 

Thursday: breakfast on the porch. I love having a porch.

Thursday: accessories. 

Not sure what day, but a note I found in my library book. I hope Naz got his sheets upstairs.

Friday: day trip to Missoula & wine cubes in Target

Saturday: my sunflower is the on on the left, its losing but at least its alive.

Malted Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies won me "best cookie of the summer award" as granted by my dad and husband. I take that as a pretty high honor.

I once used Pioneer Woman's recipe for Malted Milk Chocolate Chip Cookies and the men really like them. However I consistently experienced technical difficulties when making them (they STICK to the pan like you wouldn't believe and are paper thin). I decided to hunt down a new recipe and found a good one! This recipe comes from The Cookie Scoop. 

Ingredients:

• 2 3/4 cups flour
• 3/4 cup plain malted milk powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened (recipe calls for unsalted but I used salted and omitted the salt)
• 1 large eggs
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp. sweetened condensed milk
• 1 1/2 cups semi-sweet chocolate chip (used Hershey and they were great)

To make: Preheat the oven to 350. 

Cream the butter and sugars in a mixer until light and fluffy. While this happens, mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl (flour, malted milk powder, soda). 

Next, add the eggs, vanilla and sweetened condensed milk to the butter/sugar mixture until well combined. 

Dump in the flour&stuff just and mix until all the dry ingredients are mixed in. Stir in chocolate chips.

Place dough in balls on cookie sheet and bake until edges are slightly brown (mine took quite awhile, 15-17 minutes.)

Even my nephew enjoyed them.

Sunday Funday Pictures

One of my favorite bloggers (Tracy from shutterbean.com) does a "my life in photos" post that I thought I would try once in awhile. Basically you'll get to peek in at my week in pictures. I'm not the greatest at weekly posts but we'll see what happens. 

(My sleeping and adorable niece)

(Blueberry popsicles for the 4th that need some work)

(Clove face from my baked beans)

(Fancy water spread for the ladies while the men work away,

with some nephew hands creeping in)

(Contraband from GNP on our hike today. Don't tell anyone)

Book reviews: lemons, happiness and cancer

I am thoroughly enjoying this summer for a lot of reasons, the 70 degree sunny days, the time with my niece and nephew and the fact that I am finally crossing a bunch of books off my list. 

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

I have been interested in this book since I started reading the blog a few years ago and I bought the book off of Amazon months ago but have been saving it to read. Rubin spends one year of her life focusing on her "Happiness Project." She researches happiness and decided to spend one month of the year focusing on a particular subject (marriage, kids, money, career, etc.) and works on certain goals to make herself happier. There are so many interesting things she does in writing this book from becoming a "treasure house of happy memories" to starting a young adult book club and beginning the blog based on the premise of the book. While I don't agree with everything she does (she isn't a Christian so I'm still wrestling with the "me" emphasis of the project) and don't have a year of my life to simply dedicate to doing things to making myself happier I definitely took a lot away from this book. I could write a whole post just about this book and if I end up doing my own mini project you'll hear about it. 

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and The Heart of the Middle East by Sandy Tolan

A friend of mine recommended this book over a year ago and I'd been looking forward to finally reading it. But it was very different from what I anticipated. In my mind I would dive in to a flowery story about two people that meet and have a lovely friendship despite religious differences. What I got was that intertwined with a history of the conflict in Palestine. Bashir is a Palestinian man who goes to the home he was forced from as a young boy and meets Dalia, a Jewish woman, who ended up living in the same house. From there their unlikely relationship begins and develops over decades. Honestly, I knew very very little about the Palestinian conflict prior to reading the book (I still don't know much) and, at first, found it challenging to really embrace. It took me a little while to get through but I slowly became engrossed with the story. Because the conflict still exists there the book just seems to drop off without much resolution, but that's the way it goes. I would definitely recommend it if you have any passing interest about the Middle East. 

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Where do I even begin? First, I would like to thank Entertainment Weekly for the recommendation :) John Green is a young adult author who tackles the heartbreaking subject of pediatric cancer. He writes about Hazel, a 16 year old with terminal cancer held at bay by a new drug. Hazel ends up meeting Augustus Waters and guess what happens? But really, this book gave me a new appreciation for YA lit, despite the cheese and the fact that teenagers do not really talk like that. It also made me cry on a plane, which is just embarrassing. I really was so so good.