Tag: cook

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Baking Bread with Charlotte

I was invited to come to a cookware party by my good friend, Miss Charlotte, so I went with a skeptical attitude and a tight fist on my checkbook. Turns out that I’m not really interested in the line of cookware that she was offering and I didn’t buy anything that night. But while at the party we did get to chatting about cooking and baking and different shortcuts and kitchen tips.

Miss Charlotte invited me to come back one weekend and spend the day baking with her. I think that would be great – I love to bake and it is even more fun when you have someone there working alongside you.

Net weekend we are going to spend Saturday afternoon together in her kitchen making some different breads and rolls. She wants to donate the finished products to a church function the next morning. So I am looking up bread recipes online and finding two that I want to try. We are not using a bread machine to make these – they will be completely from scratch, hand rolled and raised, and then baked with love. I can’t wait to see how they turn out!

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Yummy Banana Nut Muffins

Betty Crocker makes a great banana nut muffin mix. All you have to do is stir in a couple of eggs and then add some oil and water. Thirty minutes later you have baked deliciously moist warm muffins waiting for the little slab of butter and a cup of hot tea.

I like to add real bananas to the mix before baking, so I try to keep one or two ripe bananas on hand most of the week. It can be challenging to find bananas in varying stages of ripeness. At the Food Lion grocery store near my house, they get a shipment of bananas once a week and they are bright green. They ripen naturally in the store, but they all ripen on the same schedule, so the bananas you buy are either not ripe enough or too ripe all at the same time. So I only buy two bananas at a time at Food Lion.

But Kroger is a few miles further from my house and they seem to get banana shipment three times every week. So you can buy individual bananas in varying stages of ripeness. If I happen to be at Kroger, I’ll buy two very green bananas, two almost ripe bananas and then one that is ready to eat. That way they will continue to ripen after I get them home and not all spoil within just a couple of days.