Making Peach Preserves!

On Friday, the local Whole Foods had peaches on sale for $.69 a lb!  That was entirely too good a deal to pass up, so I went and bought a whole case of peaches!  (so it was a half bushel for $15.52 - such a good deal on fresh, local NC peaches!)

However - I now have half a bushel of peaches to use up as they definitely won't last that long!  Yesterday, I decided to use a good bit of them to make peach preserves.  I just used a basic recipe from Martha Stewart (which can be found here) and I think they turned out really well!

Here are some pictures of the process:

Peaches freshly peeled and ready to be chopped up (notice the large box of peaches in the background...)

The recipe only calls for three ingredients - peaches, sugar, and lemon juice!

The peaches cooking while we sterilize the jars

Easy peasy sterilization!

The cooked down ingredients ready for the jars!

The final product - the jar size we use is a half pint jar - just because there are only two of us, so we don't want an open jar to spoil because we're not eating it quick enough.  Plus, with the husband's diet, it's usually just me eating the preserves!  

The plan for today is to bake a few more peach recipes and then freeze most of the rest!

Other meals this week (and Happy Saturday!)

Happy Saturday to everyone out there!  The first week back after a holiday break can definitely be longg at work - it was great to sleep in a bit this morning!

We tend to only have time to make 3-4 meals a week - the rest ends up being leftovers or us going out to eat (which this week, Sunday, Thurs. and Saturday all will end up being eating out days, which is a bit above the norm for us).  So as a result, we only ended up making three meals - the kale pasta and then slow cooked venison and last night we had sliders with fries, carrot sticks, and sliders.

The slow cooked venison was made with venison from deer that were hunted by the husband's family out in Illinois - it was delicious!  We have quite a lot of venison since hunting season recently ended, so we'll likely be eating it quite a bit over the next few months.  My husband has his own recipe for cooking it - it basically consists of the roast, a chopped up white onion, a chopped up mushroom (we used portabellas this time and they were excellent in it), and then some italian seasoning, red wine and salt and pepper.  And as is the beauty of all slow cooking - you don't need to do anything when you get home from work except serve yourself!

Along with the venison, we also had this cauliflower mac and cheese - which was pretty easy to make and the husband loved it, as it was a great low carb recipe.  We're still trying to figure out how to recreate a cauliflower cheese casserole we ate at Tupelo Honey in Asheville as this just didn't measure up - anyone know where we might find it??

I'll cover the sliders we had last night in another post - I'm off to Chick-fil-a for their new spicy chicken sandwich with some special visitors we had over night! :)

Kale and Tomato Pasta

Two nights ago we tried a new recipe (from my favorite- Martha!) - and it turned out ok.  I added some Parmesan at the end to throw in a little cheese and the husband added some butter and cheese to his to make a bit of a sauce.  We're thinking of trying a buttery lemon sauce to go on it next time to add a bit of flavor and make it a bit more than just some vegetables with noodles.

However - for my first time trying something with kale I think it turned out ok and I definitely plan to try more kale recipes in the future - it's just a vegetable that's so packed with nutrients and super tasty in the winter!

Here's a few pictures from my prep last night:

And as I'm a bad blogger - all I have for the final meal is a picture of my leftovers for lunch yesterday :-/!  But the website had a nice picture of what it ideally could turn out to look like.

Also - in case you're curious how the husband is eating pasta since he does low carb - he has found some shirataki tofu noodles at Whole Foods that are low carb friendly!  I don't eat them - but it allows me to make pasta dishes and we just split the toppings between us!!  If you want to find out more about these - check out this article here.

Starting off with the right muffin

In an effort to get back on track with my eating after a very unhealthy holiday season I baked some carrot banana muffins that I found in the January 2010 (yes- a year old!) issue of Everyday Food by Martha Stewart.  The recipe can be found here, on the Martha website.  I left out the raisins as I'm not a big raisin girl!

Here's how mine turned out - pretty tasty looking - and I sampled one right out of the oven - they're very tasty indeed!  And at only 186 calories a piece, perfect snacks :)

Using yogurt in baking

For some reason I keep trying to like vanilla yogurt. Mainly because it comes in such a lovely large container size unlike most other flavors. Yet - everything I try it it is just not what I'm looking for. But I didn't want to toss out a whole container of yogurt. So I thought that a simple google search would pull up an easy recipe to utilize a lot of the yogurt.

I found an oatmeal raisin muffin recipe on the Dannon website - and thought that sounded perfect! I doubled the recipe and froze half the muffins - and left out the raisins because I didn't have in the house. They came out really well and are a bit healthier than a normal muffin.

Oatmeal Raisin Yogurt Muffins

• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 cup old-fashioned rolled oats
• 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons double-acting baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/2 cup raisins, plumped
• 1 cup Dannon® Light 'n Fit® Vanilla, Cherry Vanilla or Strawberry nonfat yogurt
• 1 large egg, beaten lightly
• 2 Tablespoons canola oil

Directions:

• 1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
• 2. Lightly grease 1/2 cup muffin tins or use paper liners. In bowl stir together flour, oats, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and the raisins; in another bowl whisk together yogurt, egg and oil.
• 3. Stir the yogurt mixture into the flour mixture and stir the batter until it is just combined.
• 4. Divide the batter among 10 cavities and bake the muffins on the middle oven rack for 22-25 minutes.

Yields: 10 Servings