So we know what little Olivia likes to eat!
This was a gluten- free cake, almost like blackforest with out the gluten.
It was made with chocolate cake, Cool-whip and cherry pie filling.
Although it was very good I personally I like it with the gluten.

]]> http://dadsworkbench.com/2010/09/20/let-them-eat-cake/feed/ 0 http://dadsworkbench.com/2010/09/04/garden-dinner/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=garden-dinner http://dadsworkbench.com/2010/09/04/garden-dinner/#comments Sun, 05 Sep 2010 04:26:00 +0000 Orlund http://dadsworkbench.com/?p=1302

This year I wanted to plant a garden. I thought it would be healthier and save a little cash. I was wrong about saving money, we saved almost nothing. It was not worth the time and work but I still think it was much healthier.

For this dinner the other night, I picked our romaine lettuce, a tomato, Spanish onions, chives, a leek, and little red potatoes. We also buy farm beef so we also had some really nice steaks to cook up.

I made a salad with lettuce,  tomatoes, chives and shredded carrots. As a hot vegetable dish I cooked carrots in garlic butter but left them slightly crunchy and topped with chives. The potatoes were cooked with leeks and tossed in a bit of oil and salt. The steak was marinated over night with my own little concoction, then topped with satay-ed onions.

Next year I think I will forget the garden and use it for a playground. Although it was fun and exciting to see the results I think it is more work that I want to do next year. Maybe I will spend that time building a play house.

I think I will have to learn to carve up one of these. It should be easy enough to do and looks really cool at the same time.

One of my favorite breakfasts is Eggs In The Nest. I have never seen anyone else make it like my mom so maybe it is a family secret. Well I guess I am letting the secret out. This is just a general idea of how it is made.

I guess on all the amounts to the ingredients so if your like my wife and need exact measurements you may want to look for a good recipe for cheese sauce. The rest of the recipe is easy, cheese sauce is the hardest but there are lots of good cheese sauces so just choose your favorite.

Here is how I make Eggs In The Nest:

First we will start with cutting the cheese. I like cutting the cheese first thing in the morning.

Next melt some butter and add some flour (once again I just guess on the amounts)

Once the butter and flour are nicely mixed, slowly add milk or cream (I never have cream so I use Homo milk(Why is it called Homo milk?))

Mix the milk, flour and butter often or it will clump together. You should be doing this on low/medium heat. This takes a while so you can make toast while you are doing this. Make one slice for every person. Also you can make your coffee while your doing this.

Eventually it will start to thicken. Starting with less milk is easier because it is easier to add little bits of milk to thin it out than it is to thicken the cheese sauce.

Once it is thick you can add the cheese you cut earlier. I prefer extra old cheese because it has more flavor and you don’t have to uses as much. Cheese is good so if it does not look cheesy enough then get the knife back out and cut the cheese.

You can turn down the heat when the cheese starts melting and add some salt, pepper and even a few drops of your favorite hot sauce. Even on low heat you should mix the sauce once in a while.

Now separate your egg whites and yokes. You will need one egg for every person you are making breakfast for. Set your yokes aside but make sure you don’t break them.

Next beat your get whites. I usually start on low for a get and then move it to full speed. If you start too fast it will fly every where. You will need to beat the egg whites until they become stiff and start to form peaks.

This is similar to how you make the taste white stuff on lemon meringue pie, except this stuff isn’t supposed to be sweet.

Lay your toast out on a bake tray. Scoop the egg whites on to the toast. Used the spoon to press down a bit of a whole in the center of the egg white so that your egg white is in the shape of a nest.

Now place one egg yoke in the the nest you just created. Place these eggs in the nests in the oven which is pre heated to 350 degrees. Let them slowly bake. Once the egg whites turn a golden brown they should be done (just make sure that there is no liquid whites, I hate that).

Place each egg in the nest on a plate. If you want it too look nice and show off your egg in the nest you can pour just a little bit of sauce on the plate or serve it separately in a bowl. I don’t usually care about how it looks so I smother it in cheese sauce until both the egg and the nest are drowning in cheese. (photo of finished product at the bottom of post)

I guarantee you it will be the best break fast ever and it will take you much longer to make it than it will take your family to eat it but it is worth it. You can also add some strips of bacon on the side ( I suppose you could consider bacon as the branch the eggs in the nest sit on)

Don’t forget your freshly brewed coffee!

I looked at the menu, hmmm, different design. It looked kind of nice. But done judge a menu by its cover. Then looking through the burgers that I had already eaten, the list seemed… well… maybe smaller? Then to my horror I realized what it was. THEY REMOVED THE A1PEPPERCORN BURGER!!! Of all the burgers, that was so far the best burger. It got a rating by me of three thumbs up!

So this is my official petition to bring back the A1Peppercorn burger. So what if it had enough sodium for a whole week in one burger, if you want to eat health you wouldn’t go to a burger joint. So Red Robins bring back my A1PEPPERCORN BURGER and I promise you will be my bestest restaurant forever again!

The best thing about Thanksgiving is mom’s homemade pumpkin pie.

If Iwas a vegitarian the only things I would eat is pumpkin pie, zucchini pound cake, carrot cake, carrot muffins and borsch. It is a good thing I am not a vegitarian.

Tomorrow my wife is making another pie. I think we need to schedual Thanksgiving a little more often through out the year. It wouldn’t hurt to be a little more thankful and have a little more pie.

It is not that my life has been boring or that I don’t like food. It is that my little girl doesn’t let me get much sleep and work is so busy that at the end of the day I like to sit around and do mindless things. Which includes being a lazy dad that lays on the floor while my daughter crawls over me like a jungle gym.

Anyways here is a update and a post for my food category. The other day I saw sardines in the store. Not the nice little canned sardines but whole sardines. I thought it would be fun to try them fresh like that so I bought them.

When I got them home I realized that they were not even gutted. I never gutted a fish before. So I got out my big sheifs knive my wife bought me and went to work. Not knowing where to start I sliced down the belly and then stuck my hands in. If you can get past pulling the intestine sand organs out then there not bad. Just nicely chop the head out and rip the spine out and you have a great little filet of fish. I dipped them in flour and herbs, then into egg and last in to bread crumbs. They tastes create after being fried on the frying pan and are juicy.

I would diffidently eat them again but I would perfer if they were pre-gutted.

It was fun  to taker her to the big celebration down at the park. As Canadians a big part of our Canada Day is celebrating different types of food, …um.. I mean all the different nationalities we have here. Which means all kinds of good food.

This year I had Phillipean food. My wife and daughter had chowed down on some Chinese chow main.

Personally although I am pure Canadian and I am also mixed bread of Sweedish and Ukrinian. This means at Christmas we eat pickled fish and goat cheese on dry crakers for breakfast then for dinner sour cabage rolls with garlic sausage and perogies.

Now that my daughter has learned to walk and eat international food I guess it won’t be long until I can teach her how to eat the pickled fish and goat cheese. For now we will just leave it to the Chinese noodles.

Spicy Latte

I don’t care if caffeine is bad. I LOVE COFFEE! I love it hot, cold or any style of coffee.

My wife would never drink coffee. That is until I served her one of my cold coffees. I like flavored cold coffee.

Lately it was the latte that has been the drink of choice. I don’t have a fancy espresso machine. I wish I did. Since my wife never drank coffee before I could not justify spending a couple hundred dollars on an espresso machine.

I have had to make do with a regular coffee machine. So tonight I will share my latte making process.

1. Start by making about 3 cups of very strong coffee with espresso beans ground fresh and fine (sometimes I will pour it through the filter a second time).
2. Put in an new filter with about an eighth of a teaspoon of each of cinnamon and nutmeg and a tiny shake of cloves and mace.
3. Pour the coffee through the spice filter a couple of times.
4. Warm about one and a half coffee cups of milk.
5. Once done fill two coffee mugs three quarters full of milk and top up with coffee.
6. Mix in about a teaspoon of sugar.

Of course every time I make it I make it slightly different and it is easy to change the amounts of spices to your liking.

You can even replace the spice with any of the following:

• vanilla extract
• chocolate syrup
• maple syrup
• caramel extract
• mint extract
• rum extract (I don’t drink alcohol but I am sure you can use the real thing)

Chocolate syrup was what got my wife hooked. For me coffee is what keeps my world going.

What is your favorite coffee? Any tips you would like to share?

Those were great memories even though I was never much of a breakfast eater. Dad however could eat breakfast any time of the day or night. If you wounder why some restaurants have a breakfast section on their dinner menu it is because of people like him.

I now have my own family and have started liking the breakfast thing on weekends. It is funny how family traditions start.

Some traditions start for the sake of something to do and others are started from necessity. For my dad the tradition was started because he needed to give mom sometime to get ready for church in the morning and it was time with us (and he loves breakfast). For my our tradition is simply for the fact of spending time in the morning together and also that I don’t really like toast or cereal.

It is also interesting to see how family traditions combine and form new traditions. Like our Christmas which is a combination of:

1. pickled herring (fish) & Gjetost (goats cheese) for breakfast (Swedish)
2. Perogies and sausage for dinner (Ukrainian)
3. My wife likes ham for dinner
4. And lots of chocolate throughout the day

So we have very interesting food on Christmas day.

Boy, I wonder how my kids will turn out!

It will be fun to watch and see how these traditions grow as our children get older. It will be fun to watch and see them develop their own when they get married (far far in the future).

BTW: why do I post so much about food?