Quick chicken and dumplings

I'm not in my own kitchen. I'm far from home with three children. Today has been...bleh. You'd feel that way, too, had you been away from your Viking for more than two weeks. So, my thoughts turn to things that soothe the bleh, like chicken soups, warm breads, hard liquor. This being a family blog and all, and given that I've already bestowed upon this blog sufficient warm breads recipes, I'm going with the chicken soup.

Having three children on my own, I'm going with easy chicken soup, or easy chicken and dumplings. Seriously, I just made this, and it took very little time and effort. Add that I think my children (well, two of them) will eat it, and it's win-win all around.

Ingredients: Chicken broth (I used one box of organic broth). Small onion, chopped. One or two cloves of garlic, chopped. Pat of butter. Biscuit mix or your favorite drop biscuit recipe--because what are dumplings, after all? They're boiled biscuits. Chicken, chopped or shredded--I just use the breast and thighs off of a market-purchased roasted chicken and save the legs for a later child dinner. Salt. Pepper.

Saute the onion and garlic in a large soup pan in the pat of butter. Add in the broth, bring it to a boil. Mix up the biscuit recipe and drop teaspoons into the boiling broth. It's fine to let little bits fall in, too, because it helps thicken up the broth to make a nice, creamy sauce-like base for the chicken and dumplings. Stir lightly and periodically.

While that boils, chop up your chicken. Then, mix it in to the broth and dumplings. Turn down to simmer, let cook through, salt and pepper to taste. Yes. You are done.

I serve this to my children with peas on the side, although some people I know put the peas in--I guess it's hard to handle that vast space of colorlessness that is chicken and dumplings. My mother-in-law hedonistically serves this over mashed potatoes, while other folks I know serve their boiled biscuits with chicken over...biscuits. We're just gonna eat it as it is.

Bon appetit.

Banana/oatmeal muffins

I'm traveling and not cooking a whole lot, so the below is something I scraped from a blog of mine that I put on hiatus, in part because I'm over here posting recipes anyway. These are muffins my children love. You can bake this batter in whatever pan you like--loaf, small loaf, muffin, square...just test the center with a knife or straw to make sure it's cooked through.

P.S. I'm aware that the above is NOT a muffin. The above is a tiny little loaf pan that turns out a beautiful miniature loaf of quickbread.

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I've devised a banana muffin recipe (based in part on the Joy of Cooking) that (a) my kids will eat but that (b) has relatively low sugar and relatively high fiber. Give it a try. They're good buttered, hot or cold, and they last a couple of days. We use these for breakfast and for snacks...either way, they're cheap! My kids really love these, to the point that I double this up every time I make it, which is about once a week or so. Caveat: my kids are a little bit...odd.

You will need...
Old brown bananas
Applesauce, unsweetened
Flour
White sugar
Brown sugar
Oats
Wheat germ
Egg
Canola oil
Vanilla
Cinnamon and nutmeg
Baking soda
Baking powder
Salt
Two mixing bowls, a good whisk, a big spoon/spatula
Muffin pan/cups

1. Get two bowls, a big one and a small one. Set your oven to 350 F.

2. In the small bowl, whisk together one cup of flour (I use white whole wheat--if you use whole wheat, cut it with half white or they'll be too heavy), a half cup of dry oats (I just use Quaker oats), and a half cup of wheat germ (obviously, this isn't for the gluten-free crowd). Add in about a quarter teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon each of baking powder and baking soda, and then shake cinnamon powder over it until it's all covered in cinnamon powder (or, to taste...sorry, I don't measure my spices). Shake in some powdered nutmeg (I give it about three good shakes), and mix really really well with the whisk.

3. In the large bowl, put in two or three peeled, super ripe bananas and smush them up. Add four ounces of applesauce, a quarter cup of white sugar, a quarter cup of brown sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla, and six tablespoons of canola oil (or some other reasonable oil, but don't use one with a strong flavor, like, say, olive oil). Add one egg. Whisk it all together until you get as many lumps out of the banana as you can.

4. Dump the dry stuff into the large bowl. Mix until all is moist. Muffin recipes always say to mix until everything is "just" moist, but I just mix the hell out of it.

5. Fill muffin liners (I use muffin liners to avoid greasing a pan, but if you don't like them, grease the muffin pan) about 3/4 full. Put in oven for 18 minutes or until inserted utensil or straw or toothpick or whatever comes out clean. I also turn the muffins halfway through.

Cool, butter, serve.

This will get you about 9 or 10 muffins, good for a number of breakfasts or snacks at about 50 cents each. You can also make this into banana bread. Put the batter into a greased loaf pan, bake for about 40 minutes (or until whatever you use to test these things comes out clean). I always turn it halfway through.

If you think these are OK, I've got a pumpkin muffin recipe that'll knock your socks off.

Beef and bean chili

Yes, it's true. I'm Texan and I put beans in my chili. Purists will recoil, but they don't have to feed five people using organic beef on a budget. Beans add bulk, flavor, and nutrition, and they are very, very cheap. Viven los frijoles!

Brown about a pound of beef in oil (I also add about a half cup of water) with one medium-sized chopped onion and a couple of cloves of garlic. When the beef is thoroughly browned and crumbled, cover it, visually speaking, with several shakes of chili powder. You'll need to do this to the level of spice that you can bear. I probably end up putting a few tablespoons in. A couple of shakes of cumin (about the equivalent of maybe a tablespoon), and salt and pepper to taste. Stir it up nicely and let simmer for a few minutes.

Then add a couple of cans of tomatoes stewed with poblano peppers. Here we use RoTel, which comes in regular or spicy, but any kind of canned chopped tomatoes with poblanos will do, or separate cans of each. I drain the cans first or the chili gets too acidy. Stir that in, then add in one or two cans of pinto beans. Please do not use kidney beans or I will have to come to your house, confiscate the "chili," and turn you into the Tex-Mex police for violation of Code 7.21, "Thou Shalt Not Use Kidney Beans in Any Dish Purporting to Be of Mexican or Tex-Mex Origin." Next in the code comes 7.22, which reads, "Black Olives Are Not Really Part of Tex-Mex or Mexican Cuisine."

At this point, I rinse the each can by filling it about a quarter to a third full with good water, swirling it, and then depositing the liquid into the chili, too. This gives it a good consistency for serving over rice, etc.

Stir it up. Let it simmer for about a half hour, stirring occasionally. We serve this over steamed rice or bean and cheese tamales or regular tamales, with cheese sprinkled on top (colby/jack mix is our choice) and corn chips--decent ones--on the side. It's satisfying as it can be, and with the beans added, you might just get two dinners' worth out of it for your family.

Feta- and jalapeno-stuffed, bacon-wrapped pork loin with scalloped potatoes

I know there's been a lot of pork around here lately, but it's what I have scheduled to give you today, so...here's some more pork. Lots of it, actually. As Homer Simpson would say, it is indeed a wonderful, magical animal.

You'll need a nice pork loin, some feta, some pickled, diced jalapenos, and some good bacon. Slice the loin almost completely through lengthwise, but leave the two halves just attached. Mix together until well combined about a third of a cup of feta cheese with about a quarter of a cup of jalapenos (adjust this to your spicy, adventurous tastes). Put this mixture into the pork loin groove, filling it from end to end. Then take the bacon--I end up using about six slices--and tightly wrap it around the loin. The final result looks unfortunately like a large, meaty caterpillar, but I promise, it's good.

We don't grill much because it's hot here, so we just do this one in the oven. I cover it with foil or a good lid and have it at about 425-450 F until the meat thermometer confirms it's at a temperature suitable for pork (about ~160-170 degrees internally)--maybe about an hour, depending on the heft of the loin. Once it's hit that temperature goal, I remove the foil or lid and let it crisp a bit because the bacon's better that way.

I served this up last time with scalloped potatoes that I baked at the same time. To make these, I sliced small, peeled Yukon golds into 1/8 inch slices and layered them in a buttered baking dish as follows: potatoes, salt, pepper, bit o' olive oil, grated cheese (your choice; I like gruyere when I have it) until I was out of potatoes. Then, I mixed in a separate bowl about a half cup to a cup of whole cream or half 'n' half with another half cup or so of the grated cheese and pour on top. Your amount will vary with how much you're making. My goal is to get the liquid at least halfway up the depth of the potatoes. Cover with foil or a good lid and bake until potatoes are tender. Remove foil or lid and let the cheese that's on top get a nice golden-brown color.

Slice the loin, spoon out the potatoes, make a good salad to go with it...and you're done. The feta with the jalapenos, bacon, and tender loin is simply a taste sensation.

Flowers of fruit

This one comes to us by way of our housekeeper, who gave me a similar bouquet for my birthday. I thought it would be a nice thing to include here, just in time for spring fruits and spring celebrations.

The "it" here is a bouquet of flowers made from fruit.

You'll need a variety of fruits. Small non-green fruits can serve as flowers, while small green fruits, like grapes, can be stems. A pineapple, jicama, melons...these can all serve to cut out or carve larger flowers. Finally, you'll need some wooden skewers, of the kind used for kabobs, some leaf lettuce, and a small head of cabbage. Yes, cabbage.

Cut the cabbage in half and place one half, dome side up, in an accommodating vase or bowl. Cover this with a nice dark green leaf of lettuce (or kale). Set aside.

From the larger fruits, cut flower shapes (pineapple makes great flowers), even using cookie cutters if you've got 'em. From the melon, cut crescent moon shapes or smaller flowers. If you have a honeydew melon, you can cut slices to make crescent-shaped "leaves." Any grapes, strawberries, etc., can simply serve as "buds" or small flowers on their own. I wouldn't use any fruits that brown easily, of course, like apples.

Load the skewers in various permutations of the following: short skewers are good for the honeydew leaves or melon slices. You can line an entire skewer with green grapes to make a "stem." Pineapple, strawberry, jicama, or small cuts of other fruits or berries go on the tips to make the flowers. Assemble it by poking the skewers through the lettuce and into the cabbage. See? There was a reason for that cabbage.

The final outcome is a colorful, edible, perfect spring bouquet that is fun to receive and fun to eat. It might be a way to introduce new fruits to your little ones, gift someone who doesn't like cake or can't eat it, or simply a way to add a little fun to dessert. Whatever you decide to do with it...enjoy it quickly. It likely won't be fresh longer than a day at most.

Penne with vodka sauce and capicola

This one's an oldie from Eating Well, and the inspiration for making it was the usual: leftover something that I could put in it. This leftover was rotini. I know the title says "penne," but we'd cooked rotini, and that's what we had left over, so that's what we used.

The pluses for this recipe are that it's really lightning fast and comes out pretty tasty. The minus could be that with the red pepper and vodka zing, it may not be something the kiddies go for.

Ingredients were cooked pasta, 2 oz. capicola (pancetta would do as a sub, as would a good bacon, I think), a small onion, three garlic cloves, 0.5 c. vodka, a 28-oz. can of crushed tom-ah-toes, 0.25 c. of half'n'half, 2 tsp Worcestershire, crushed red pepper to your taste (the recipe recommends between 0.25 and 0.5 tsp), chopped basil (if fresh, recipe recommends 0.25 c; I used dried, at about a teaspoon). Pepper and salt to taste. I found that this one didn't require much extra salting.

Put the water for the pasta on to boil if you're not like me and already have some cooked pasta around.

Chop the capicola (or pancetta), the onion, and the garlic. Cook the meat to crisp, then set aside to drain. The recipe doesn't call for oil for the onion and garlic, but I found that they required it, so I added in a lug of olive oil and cooked these on just above medium heat until the onions were transparent and soft.

The fun part, as usual, is adding the alcohol. Jack the heat up to high and pour in the vodka. Enjoy the show, then let it boil until the volume drops by about half. Then add in everything else: cream, tomatoes, half'n'half, red pepper, basil (but see below), reduce the heat, stir, cook for about 10 minutes.

In the original recipe, the recommendation is to serve the sauce over the pasta with the cooked capicola added on top and the basil sprinkled on. I add the basil into the sauce itself, and I also added in the meat. We're not really a "set the table with garnishes" kinda group around here, so I wanted the sauce ready and waiting for when dinner time rolled around.

What we did garnish with was a really nutty, good Parmesan. Add in some rosemary baguette and a good leafy salad, and we had an enjoyable, fancy-seeming dinner involving big words like "capicola" and grownup things like vodka and that bit us back a bit as we ate it, and it only took about 15 minutes to throw together.

Bon appetit.

Banana Chip Snack Cake

First, I apologize for supersaturating readers with yet another banana/baking recipe. I can't help it--I bake what I bake. And apparently, so do many other people.

It's probably because we all experience the common occurrence of a surfeit of bananas, browning on the counter. That's my weekly conundrum, what to do with aging bananas that my uber-picky offspring won't eat. My usual answer is to bake banana muffins, a hybrid involving oatmeal and wheat germ and other things my children don't know about. But I'm sick of the things, so I went searching for another way to bake bananas into food.

I found it on pg. 549 of The America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook. It's called "Banana Chip Snack Cake," which at first made me recoil in horror, envisioning those nasty banana chips (sorry if you love them so) somehow baked into a snack cake. But the chips are actually semisweet chocolate, so...phew.

This one's straightforward and made the most beautiful cake batter I've ever seen. And, my kids love it.

Ingredients: all-purpose flour (2 c), baking powder (2.5 tsp), salt (0.25 tsp), sugar (1.25 c), unsalted butter (one stick/8 tbsp), 2 large eggs @ room temp, 2 ripe large bananas, peeled and mashed (~1 c), whole milk @ room temp (0.5 c), vanilla extract (1 tsp), and semisweet chocolate chips (0.75 c).

I did a few things while making this that differed a bit from the above. First, I cut down the sugar by about a quarter cup. Second, I used 0.75 c of heavy cream because I had it left over. I sifted the dry ingredients, beat the bananas on medium until they were quite, quite smooth, and also beat the hell out of everything else as I added it, except for the flour and semisweet morsels, which I stirred in by hand.

Steps: Grease an 8x8 pan. Oven at 350. Mix flour, baking powder, salt in medium bowl and set aside. Beat the bananas or mush them, whichever. In a large bowl, beat sugar and butter until smooth and fluffy. Add in eggs, one at a time, followed by bananas, milk, and vanilla, beating well on medium until quite smooth. Stir the flour into the egg mixture, and then the chocolate chips. Smooth into the pan and bake between 55 and 65 minutes. Mine was perfectly done at one hour on the dot.

The cookbook says to cool for 2 hours. Um, no. We turned it out, let it cool about five minutes, then cut right into it. It was quite a hit. (That's the bottom you're seeing in the pic...the chips kinda sink down into their own layer there).

This cookbook also offers a nice tip that might help those of us with uneven banana ripening schedules. If you've got a banana you want to use, but it's not quite ripe enough, pop the entire thing, peel and all, into the oven (about 350) for 10-15 minutes. It'll brown just as though days had passed, bringing out the sweetness and reducing the starchiness. Given my weekly banana affliction, I thought this was a great tip.

If you're not sick of banana recipes, give this one a try...and enjoy!

Savory spring salad

It's spring break. I haven't cooked in days because we were on break and traveling or having guests. When that happens, we eat out a lot, or we eat other people's food. But, a few days ago, I made one of my favorite salads.

I know. Salads aren't exciting, and probably most people reading this know how to make a damned salad. But this salad is for people who are sensory seekers, who want flavor to savor with their greens, people who can handle the almost overwhelming combination I'm about to present to you. And, like I noted, it's spring. A great time for salads.

Regardless of your salad attitude, I can tell you that this little baby will load you up with all the green leafy things, colorful crunchy things, fiber, flavor, and sabor you'd need for a good lunch or a "light"-ish dinner. This is good (green) stuff.

That means, of course, that you're gonna need some greens. I use an organic spring mix with baby spinach added in. Top this with shredded carrots and shredded broccoli slaw. I buy these in bags at the store...if you can't find that, then I guess you'd need to shred these yourself or add in larger chopped pieces of these items.

Get the tartest apple you can find. Small, brightly green Granny Smiths, nicely chilled, are my favorites for this. Slice it thin, as thinly as you can. I use an entire apple for this salad. Keeps the doctor away, I hear, and I could use that.

Green olives--saltilicious!--go great on this (to my sensory and salt-seeking palate, anyway). I used the sliced kind with pimentos. Adds a nice color and yet another flavor to the mix.

I'm a sucker for blue-veined cheeses. For this salad, I go for gorgonzola, but bleu cheese would do, as well. I lay out for really good cheese, and the flavor a truly tasty blue adds to something like this cannot be beat.

Finally, there's meat. My preferred addition here is smoked turkey breast, sliced (we get the nitrate-free variety). Bacon, microwaved to crisp, is also good if you don't have turkey. This salad has so much flavor and substance, though, that you can dispense with the additional animal protein altogether if that's not your thing.

For the dressing, I prefer balsamic vinaigrette (I go with Newman's Own) or Marie's Greek Vinaigrette. Adds even more zing to this already zingy combination. Like I said, I'm a flavor seeker. I often make my own dressings, but for this salad, either of these is a wonderful finish.

Chill it until you eat it. Then, sit down with your fork and dig in to the cold, crunchy, salty sabor that is this salad. Mmmmmm.

Scalloped potatoes with ham

Once again, my cooking impetus consists of what's sitting around in my kitchen at the turning point of usable/not usable. This time, it was some beautiful small Yukon gold potatoes and uncured sliced applewood-smoked ham. Why, I thought, I'll make scalloped potatoes with ham.

Scalloped potatoes are tasty and pretty, and their only drawback is the bit o' work required to peel and thinly slice them. So, that's what you do first.

I had about 12 small potatoes, just a bit larger than fingerlings. The pan was an 8-x-8 pyrex, oiled with olive oil. That's important, because I've learned from experience that insufficient oiling leads to much sticking of potatoes.

Put a layer of the sliced potatoes on the bottom of the pan and sprinkle with a bit of olive oil and some salt and pepper. On this, sprinkle some grated cheese--I used a colby/jack combo because my children would be eating this, too, but I'd've used Gruyere where it only for me. I cut up the ham, about eight pieces sliced on the one setting at the deli, into centimeter pieces and sprinkled a bit of ham on this layer, too.

Continuing layering potatoes, salt, pepper, olive oil, cheese and ham until you run out of it all.

Finally, I mixed together 3/4 cup of chicken broth and 3/4 cup of heavy whipping cream and poured it over the top.

A sprinkling of cheese to cover the top, a covering with foil (important!), and this went into an oven preheated to 350 F for about 1.5 hours.

It smelled divine as it baked and emerged as a tasty hammy-cheesy potato dish that even my children would eat. We had this with green peas and buttered sourdough.

You can dress this up with a bit of flavor expansion by adding some canned, chopped poblano pepper to it and using jack cheese.

Single-pan chicken, peas, and bacon with pasta

Another one that's not for the dieters out there, as the glistening lipids in the above picture can attest.

I lifted the idea for this one from Jamie Oliver, but then I just did what I wanted to do with it. He's got a recipe in his Food Revolution cookbook that is pasta shells with peas and bacon, if you're interested. The one I describe here has chicken, too.

-Put the pasta of your choice on to boil. I think we used bowtie with this one.

-Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in a skillet.

-Add in a "lug" (as Jamie would say) of olive oil.

-Meanwhile, cut up about four slices of bacon into small pieces.

-Fry the bacon in those two fats--yes, now we have three fats in there--until it starts turning a nice golden brown color.

-Meanwhile, cut up two raw chicken breasts into small chunks or half-inch slices.

-Add these to the fats and bacon and sizzle to doneness. You can add a little salt at this point, too.

Break out some heavy whipping cream and add about a cup of that, enough to cover the pan, leave the chicken bits poking out a little. If needed, you can add more liquid in the form of chicken broth, but don't make it too thin. This sauce should nice and creamy, like an alfredo, and the cream will thin a little as it heats.

Stir, let it get to a nice simmer with an occasional stir. Then, add in at least a cup of frozen peas--more if you're a big fan of peas. If needed, add in more cream and/or chicken broth to get the sauce to the consistency you like. Do not overdo the chicken broth, or you'll thin the sauce too much. Don't forget, the peas will release some water as they thaw if they're frozen, so wait a bit before adding anything else to see what the sauce is like after the thaw.

Get it again to a simmer with an occasional stir. Salt and pepper to your taste--very little should be needed with all the flavors in this. If you like (and I always like), you can sprinkle Parmesan over the top. Ladle over bowls of warm pasta and serve. In many families, this dish would be kid friendly. It was friendly to two of our three offspring and to us. Just try not to think about the saturated fat content too much.

Crumb cake

It's a favorite book in our house, In the Night Kitchen. Thanks to Mickey, it seems, we have cake every morning, an intriguing concept.

Of course, that's not true. At least, not until this week.

I got the bug on Sunday. It was a rare day when I didn't have any work (as in, work for a client) to do. Naturally, not finding the usual work of rearing three boys and wifing one man sufficient, I suddenly felt this urge to bake something. Something...buttery. Crumbly. With a hint of cinnamon. And I'd make it for the boys to have for breakfast the coming week. Give the Viking a break in the morning, as he's the one who handles mornings around our house. What can I say? I need my beauty sleep.

What I had in mind sounded kind of like a crumb cake of some sort, so I turned to my trusty Joy of Cooking 75th Anniversary Edition for a crumb cake recipe that wouldn't take too long or overtax my limited cake-baking skills. Of course, as with all recipes, I made my own idiosyncratic adjustments with a health boost in mind.

The recipe can be found on pg. 630. (Warning: This is not for the faint of heart or the body on a diet). It calls for a 13-x-9-inch pan, and for some reason, all of mine are letter-sized. No matter. I sprayed my letter-sized Pyrex with organic cooking spray and floured it, and set the oven to 325 F.

Then, to make the morning cake. And yes, there was milk involved. I thought about calling out to one of my sons that we needed "Milk! Milk! Milk for the morning cake!" but decided against it as I thought full-bore nudity--a la the book--might ensue.

Onward. Whisk together the following:

1.5 c all-purpose flour. I used white wheat flour here.

0.5 c sugar

2.5 tsp baking powder

0.5 tsp salt

I also added in about a half cup of wheat germ, which meant reducing the flour by about the same amount.

In a medium bowl, whisk together 1 large egg, 0.5 c milk (for the morning cake!), 2 tbsp vegetable oil (I used canola), and 2 tsp vanilla.

With a rubber spatula, add the dry to the wet, mix to smoothness, and then drop in dollops into your greased, floured pan and spread until it's evenly covering the pan bottom. This was NOT easy to do, and I found that greasing the spatula every few spreading attempts helped a lot.

That was the cake part. The crumb part may give you a heart attack just reading it. Here we go.

Combine the following:

2.5 c. all-purpose flour

(You can also add in 0.5 c. nuts or coconut--I did not do this)

1 c. packed light brown sugar. Yes. That says one cup. I did 0.75 cups because I just couldn't stand it.

1 tsp ground cinnamon.

Now for the heart attack. Melt two sticks--complete sticks--of butter and pour it over the above mixture. Mix until it's like...well...crumbs. If it's not crumbly enough, add more flour, which is what I had to do.

Sprinkle the crumbs on top of the cake and bake for 30 minutes or until tester is clean. I ended up going for 40 minutes, the last 10 minutes with the oven jacked up to 350 F, probably because of the wheat flour and wheat germ.

The result is a buttery, crumbly (very crumbly) pretty sweet treat with a lot of fiber that's no worse than, say, a muffin or a scone for breakfast. My kids liked this a lot, and it was exciting to truly have cake for breakfast every morning. At least for this week.

Chicken spinach tomato cappellini

It started the way it often does. I had a couple of thawed chicken breasts. I had a lot of organic baby spinach wilting away in the fridge. And then there were the luscious red ripe tomatoes calling to me, saying "Don't let us go to waste, either!" Food speaks to me, you see.

And as I often do, I made something up. Ingredients drive what limited creativity I have as I mentally group various potential additions, trying to find one that seems exactly the right fit for what I want to achieve for dinner that night.

This night, I felt the mood should be light. Something vegetably yet savory. Something with a bit of zing that would cling softly to a nice, lean pasta, like cappellini. So, that's what I went for.

When I cook, I don't measure, so the following is my best guess at what I did.

First, I put water on to boil for the whole-wheat cappellini I was using, and then...reader, I boiled it.

As Jamie Oliver would say, I started the sauce with a couple of lugs of olive oil, heated to a fine warmth, along with a couple of tablespoons of butter. It's all bettah with buttah.

Then, I added the chicken breasts, sliced into about half-inch pieces, and knocked in a few good dashes of oregano. After letting that sizzle up until the chicken was cooked completely, I tossed in tomatoes, letting them get to sizzle. Then came the spinach, lid on top to give it a good wilt, then stirred. With a nice wilt on, I added in the juice of a single lemon, some ground sea salt and ground pepper. For the finale, I sprinkled freshly grated Parmesan over the entire thing and heated it all through.

Pop this on top of the steaming toothy cappellini, add more Parmesan as needed and a good, crusty hunk of ciabatta, and you're good to go with a light, savory, satisfying bowl of food that won't make you feel terribly guilty. This was a fast, easy, and absolutely beautifully colored dinner to make, and it received The Viking seal of approval, high praise indeed.

Dairy-free chocolate cake

As part of a family of five that goes through about seven gallons of milk a week, not to mention an abundance of yogurt, cheese, butter, and other products of the cow (and, occasionally, goat), I did not choose this recipe because it is dairy free. But, it is. So I thought it might be useful for cooks who seek either (a) dairy-free desserts their kids (and even the cook) will like or (and?) (b) a really fast way to make a chocolate cake.

This recipe achieves both. It comes from the latest edition of the Joy of Cooking, and you can find it on page 723. The text describes it as "delightfully simple." As someone who's been cooking nigh on three decades, I was skeptical. But it was really and delightfully simple and turned out to be delightfully OK.

Set the oven at 375 F. Your pan is an 8 x 8 greased square, or you can line it with parchment paper. I sprayed mine with organic cooking spray. If you're going non-dairy, that's probably one way to go.

In a large bowl, I whisked together:

1.5 c. all-purpose flour (if you're gluten free, you'll have to work out the appropriate subs here)

1 c. sugar + another 2 tbsp

1/3 c. unsweetened cocoa powder + another 1 tbsp

1 tsp baking soda

0.5 tsp salt

To this, I added:

1 c. cold water

1/4 c. vegetable oil (I used canola)

1 tbsp distilled white vinegar (full disclosure: I was clean out of this, so I used white-wine vinegar)

2 tsp vanilla

Whisked it up until it looked like a smooth cake batter, poured it into pan, popped pan into oven for 30 minutes exactly. It was done. It looked like a cake. A chocolate cake. I've never, ever been able to make a cake from scratch in 35 minutes before.

You have the option of dressing it up with various accoutrements of your choice, from a dusting of confectioners' sugar to a quick icing. We ate ours plain. And we liked it like that.

As a chocolate lover, I will say that there's not a rich, chocolatey flavor to this cake. It's juuuust chocolate enough. But it is a good cake, a quick cake, and a dairy-free cake that my kids seemed to think was just as good as anything with loads of butter or milk.

Give it a try and chime in with here the opinions around your house.

Oatmeal maple scones

The tale of oatmeal/maple scones 

It all began with spilled oatmeal. Having cleverly stored an enormous cylinder of Quaker Oats on its side, I should not have been surprised when the lid burst free of its moorings and released a flood of oats onto my countertop.

Like any good mother, I flashed on the various contamination-related scenarios, assessing with a deep maternal calculus whether or not the oats would still be usable after having possibly intermingled with a few breadcrumbs and who knows what else on that countertop. On the pro side, I never work with raw meat or other dire animal products on that counter. On the con side, I've got at least one child who climbs up there frequently to acquire a drinking vessel.

Obviously, heat would be needed. As with many of my cooking adventures, necessity drove me to the index of a large cookbook, desperately seeking to build something around a single awkward ingredient I had available. So, I turned to my new America's Test Kitchen cookbook, a Christmas gift, and looked up oatmeal. Lo', the Test Kitchen came through for me: There, on page 488, it offered up a recipe for oatmeal scones that just happened to call for 1.5 cups of oatmeal, almost exactly the amount I'd just hand-swept from my countertop into a bowl.

The rest of the ingredients

In addition to the oats, the scones required 1/4 c. whole milk, ditto of heavy cream, an egg (large, as usual), 1.5 c. all-purpose flour, 1/3 c. sugar with a bit extra for sprinkling on top, 2 tsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, and 10 tbsp unsalted butter. This last had to be cut into 1/4-inch cubes and then chilled. This cubing of butter was by far the most time-consuming part of the recipe.

The instructions

Oven set to 375 F, I dug in. First, I spread the oats on a baking pan to toast for about 8 minutes (I viewed this as a sort of decontamination step); after removing them, I fired up the oven temp to 450 F. Then, milk, cream, egg whisked together, and I added in 1/4 c. maple syrup to enhance the oats with some maply goodness (an option offered on p. 489 of the cookbook). A tablespoon of this milky mixture went on reserve for brushing on top of the scones. After I food processed the dry ingredients, I added in the cold butter cubes and processed again until it all looked like light cornmeal.

In a medium bowl, I combined the flour mixture with the toasted oats and added in the milk mixture. At this point, I could tell that I needed more flour, so I added in another quarter cup or so to give the dough a decent stiffness.

Shaping and baking scones

There are a couple of ways to shape scones. You can use a cakepan, pushing your dough into it to make a nice circle and then cutting out the triangles. Or, you can shape it into a circle yourself on some wax paper and then cut it into triangles as you would cut a pie.

Place each triangle on a cookie sheet prepped with parchment paper. Brush the tops with the reserved milk/egg/syrup mixture and then sprinkle to your tastes and desire with the reserved sugar. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until they look pretty much like golden brown scones. You can eat them after about 10 minutes of cooling, or you can have them over the next three days for breakfast, which was what I did. My three-year-old, the world's choosiest consumer, ate only the sugar-crispy, shiny tops and pronounced them acceptable.

Some scone tweaks

If I were to do it again, I think I'd add in more maple syrup into the milk mixture for an increased maple enhancement. And I also put in about a quarter cup of wheat germ because I add wheat germ to just about everything I bake.

The calorie/fat count on these remains a mystery. I can only imagine that with 1.25 sticks of butter, it's fairly robust. In my mind, that's an excellent reason to eat these flaky, maply little triangles for breakfast--that gives you the rest of the day to burn off that butter. Happy baking!