The Baker’s Lament: “It’s a HASSLE to cut cold butter into scone or biscuit batter in order to equally distribute those sublime pockets of buttery fat and achieve the perfect result I crave.”

Fear not! You don’t have to cut in cold butter EVER again!

Here’s how to make the best buttermilk biscuits you have ever tasted, without that busy busy busy.  And this is fast fast FAST!

Will you choose to spread MORE organic fresh cream butter on top, or scoop up some of our amazing British import jams and jellies from Wilkin & Sons?

I was in for the orange marmalade, first, then the lemon curd for the second one, personally.

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  In a bowl: 1 1/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour plus 3/4 cup unbleached white whole wheat flour. Add 2 T baking powder, 1 teaspoon sugar, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 3/4 teaspoon salt. Whisk to combine.

In microwavable bowl, heat 1/2 stick, (1/4 cup) butter in microwave on high for 1 minute.  Add 1 1/4 cup very cold fat free buttermilk, stir with spatula until butter reforms into clumps. Add 1T canola oil, stir to combine.

Add buttermilk mixture to the flour mixture, stir with spatula until just blended, do not over mix.  Batter will be wet.

Drop batter in 3 T mounds onto a lightly greased cookie sheet. Or into a way retro-cool cast iron biscuit pan like ours!!!  Bake at 450 degrees for 14 minutes until golden.

Lots of luck waiting for them to cool, try to distract yourself for 3-4 minutes and then dive right in.

Add two perfectly poached eggs and ascend directly into Heaven.

Credit where credit is due:

Cooking Light Magazine, Spring 2013     Just be aware that we changed a few instructions: parchment paper didn’t work, larger biscuits are better, your cooking time may vary, just sayin

The ease of frozen puff pastry comes to the rescue when making these lovely pastries at Yelton Manor Bed and Breakfast!

This recipe makes 8. All you need is one box of frozen puff pastry, a couple of tart apples, a circle of brie cheese, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and egg!  And a bit of flour for dusting.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Work quickly with thawed pastry or it gets sticky and difficult.  A box has two sheets, let them thaw for about 30 minutes, then roll them on a floured board with a floured rolling pin until about 10 inch square. Cut each square into four squares and lay on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.

Layer a slice of brie and 3 slices of Granny Smith or other tart apple in the middle of each square.

Overfilling is the enemy, don’t overdo it.

Top each with a sprinkle of brown sugar, a pinch of cinnamon and a pinch of butter (1T cut into 8 pieces.). Brush the border of each square with a wash of whisked egg. Fold two opposite corners together and press to hold.  Brush the entire top of pastry with egg wash.

Bake for 20 minutes until toasty brown and puffy.  Serve warm.   Easy and YUM!!!

Spinach salad with cucumber, carrot, red onion, avocado, chickpeas, and a lemon poppy seed dressing.

I definitely recommend the website “Garden of Vegan” for recipes to make wonderful meat/dairy free food!

   Here’s one of the simplest and most delicious ways to add fiber and nutrients to most meals!

At Yelton Manor Bed and Breakfast we keep a tightly covered container of this heavenly tasting, chewy seed mix in the fridge for spooning into yogurt and cereal.

We dip into it for dinners too, on top of rice, mixed into steamed veggies, it’s ubiquitous YUM!!!

The flax seed is the only seed that needs to be ground in order to be digested, the others are fine as is, all straight from the bulk food bins!

Here’s the mix:  ground flax, raw pumpkin seeds, raw sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, chia seeds, and hulled hemp.  Mix it up, eat it up!

   This is my favorite winter salad and it’s always a crowd pleaser at the Holidays!  Now you know what to do with all those clementines in that box!  Pomegranates are seasonal November through January too.  Break up any winter lettuce, like Romaine. Whisk up a simple dressing of  about 1/3 cup clementine juice, 1 T champagne vinegar, 1 T honey and 1 T olive oil, dress the lettuce. Top individual plates with the clementine sections, pistachios, bits of goat cheese and some pomegranate seeds. Be prepared for applause!!!

The Mother of ALL Soups is a fabulous, flavorful, vegetable stock.  Easy too.  At home all winter I keep it as a refrigerator staple. I frequently use it for luncheon soup when we have a corporate retreat at Yelton Manor Bed and Breakfast too.  Quality food, first and foremost!!!

Every season is soup season. ALL kinds of soup from the winter squashes and root vegetables through to spring asparagus. Summer is TOO easy with all the fresh produce coming into the local farms. With beans, or potato, or pasta. Greens like spinach, chard, kale. Broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms, caramelized onions, ooh la la!!!

Soup can be made extraordinary every day with a fundamental commitment to a delicious, low-sodium, homemade vegetable broth.  Dedicate a day of any/every week when you are home doing laundry, working out, etc (Saturday or Saunday, right?), and make this stock.  Then turn it into whatever kind of soup you want, or several different kinds of soup, or as a base for pot pies, all week long, every week.

This makes the house smell SO good!  Prep time is about 15 minutes, and it stews for 2 1/2 hours.  Straining takes about another 10 minutes and pot/bowl clean-up about another 10 minutes.  You should DO this!  Grocery store stock, canned OR boxed, even the very highest rated/organic/low-sodium, is simply disgusting compared to this.

Use all organic vegetables for this stock.  These are ROOT vegetables, so organic is vital or you will be making up a batch of Pesticide Punch.

After you make this 2-3 times you’ll know the ingredients by heart, making grocery shopping easy.

The basics, deconstructed: celery, flat leaf parsley, leeks, carrots, peppercorns and course salt, fresh twigs of rosemary and thyme, heads of garlic and bay leaves.

A few tips:

Slice the leeks longways and rinse.  Leeks hold a LOT of dirt between their skins.

Cut the tops of the heads of garlic and remove most of  the outside paper.

Peel and top the carrots, then slice lengthwise so the optimum area of the vegetable is exposed to the broth.

Into your big soup pan, about 13-16 cups of cold salted water, bring to boil, then simmer 2 1/2 hours. Discard solids and strain the rest.

The Yelton Manor B&B herb garden is having a glorious harvest time!  I am cooking, freezing, drying, making pesto AND using them decoratively.

In the late season when the herb garden is bursting at the seams with beautiful, fragrant foliage, I like to make indoor cuttings in vases and bowls.

I use both curly and flat parsley, rosemary, variegated thyme, purple and tri-color sage, variegated basil, rue, nasturtiums, maybe a flower or two.  Always lovely, and they last for a full 4-6 days in a vase!   Try it yourself!

It’s FALL! The Yelton Manor test kitchen is fired up to fashion some new recipes using the season’s freshest ingredients from our local farms. Coming into the market right now are bushels of tomatoes, summer and winter squashes, eggplant, beets, plums, apples, peppers.  It’s The Grand Finale of the harvest!!!

This casserole is the nexus of my lifelong passion for Mac and Cheese, love of roasted vegetables, mission of breakfast, and gratitude for exactly the right herb and spice. Breakfast is the *new dinner*, so plan this as an appetizer, main event or side dish at your autumn dinner party. It has WOW factor presentation too!

I always double this recipe so I have one to give away.  It’s a kitchen mess, so you might as well double up. It’s fun to share food!

Choose a baking dish approximately 9X13.  This will make 15 small servings, 12 if larger portions. This is fabulous freshly made, of course, but also refrigerates nicely as a leftover and can be microwaved by the serving.  Like anything with cheese that you are “rewarming”, choose a defrost cycle on your microwave so the cheese doesn’t “seize”.  I am currently freezing a few portions and will come back to edit this when I know if that’s a good option.

Here’s what you need:  3-4 butternut squash, depending on their size.  You will just use the neck (for perfect medallions, optimum pizzaz!), so look for squash with long, lovely necks. Chop, roast and freeze the rest of the squash for a soup, or veggie pot pies, later.

  Preheat the oven to 400 degrees for roasting the squash.  Prepare cookie sheet(s) with foil or parchment paper for roasting. Prepare baking dish(s) by coating the bottom and sides with olive oil and a sprinkle of kosher salt.

Peel and thinly slice the squash. In a large bowl, gently toss the squash medallions with olive oil, salt and pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg. Spread the squash on the cookie sheet(s) and roast for about 30 minutes, until soft to a fork.

Get your grated cheese ready.  A cup of Smoked Gouda and a cup of sharp cheddar cheese. Chop a bunch of scallion, including some of the green part.

For the custard, crack 10 eggs into a large bowl and add a handful of water, whisk like a warrior woman for a full minute. The ultimate awesomeness of this recipe depends on this whisk! C’mon, whisk it!

Gently fold in the cheese, scallions, a dash of paprika if you like a bit of heat, chopped dill if you like, and the roasted squash.

Pour the mixture into the casserole. For a dramatic effect, crack three more eggs onto the top of the frittata and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Next time I make this I am going to try and use a knife to cut the egg whites outward and maybe it will create a starburst effect!?  I’ll keep you posted on that.

Don’t be tempted (I am a mac and cheese freak, remember?) to add a bread crumb topping to this. It needs no further adornment and the top is going to be worth seeing just as it is.  Reduce the temperature in the oven to 325 and bake, uncovered, for about 40-50 minutes. The edges should be puffy and brown and the center should be firm, no jiggling. Remove from oven and let sit for 10-15 minutes before serving.

Oooh, are you ready for the layers of lusciousness?

   Let’s talk BASICS here.  At Yelton Manor Bed and Breakfast, we are proud to create and serve so many wonderful foods! But we are also proud of how we reduce waste and use the nutritious food we create in as many “extended” ways as possible.

If you go to all the trouble of making fabulous whole grain breads, bagels and English muffins, it makes sense to turn the leftovers into fabulous bread crumbs.  Our standard home made bread (See “Allegra Bread” on this blog!) has amazingly healthy (and pricey!!) ingredients like whole grain flour, wheat germ, millet, chia seeds, ground flax seed, pumpkin and sunflower seeds, steel cut oats, poppy, sesame and caraway seeds. If half a loaf goes stale, there is no way I am feeding it to my birds (who already get a pretty fabulous diet at the feeders as it is!). I turn it into topping for mac and cheese, summer vegetable tians and lasagna, green bean casserole, everything that reads “bake until bubbly”, you name it.

Like fresh ground pepper, home made soup stock and freshly minced garlic, there aint NUTHIN like the real thing, baby.

If you collect all your leftover breads that make their way through your breakfast, lunch and dinners–it hardly matters the varieties–and freeze them, at some point (when you have a leftover hot oven, ideal!) you can pull it all together and make yourself some bread crumbs.

You can bake the bread in slices first and then pulse in the food processor, or pulse first and bake after.  The internet is full of techniques for making home made bread crumbs.  Seriously, just do it.  Save in Ziplock bags, date and store.

It may seem expensive to eat well every day, but if you plan, shop and cook smart, also conserve and preserve wisely, fine dining can be yours every day. It’s about a pattern, a practice, a system in place to assure your health efficiently and deliciously, and within your budget.

Don’t buy bread crumbs. Make them yourself!!!!

  We sprung into Yelton Manor Bed and Breakfast “Test Kitchen Mode” this morning after we found this amazing treat on Pinterest from a blog called “Ambitious Kitchen, The Perfect Slice of Life”.   Just the NAME of this was enough to send us into spasms of food lust!!!! I dashed out to the Farmer’s Market for the raspberries while Cindi pulsed the oats in the food processor to make the perfect (and gluten free!) flour.

We are always freezing bananas at their perfect, spotted ripeness moment, the freezer is chock full of them for smoothies and banana bread. And the dark chocolate is always on hand for our signature brownies, the vanilla and oatmeal for our homemade granola, all the other ingredients for our muffins and cakes, so…..this was a natural act!!!

In the original recipe the banana bread is made in a loaf pan, but we love these individual small loaves.  This can cook much longer in a full loaf pan, upwards to 40 minutes, but these came out perfect for us at 28 minutes.  Your results may vary, so pay attention, use a toothpick in the center to check for perfect doneness!!!

   No doubt, we were smitten with the sight of sweet/tart raspberries and dark chocolate being mixed into this lovely oatmeal and banana batter.  Good heavens, it’s a healthy sweet tooth DREAM!!!!!

So, into the baking pans with it!!!!

Dark Chocolate Raspberry Oatmeal Banana Bread

About 3 cups oatmeal

Other ingredients:

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 very ripe bananas, mashed

1/2 cup dark brown sugar

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 egg whites

1 cup smashed raspberries

1/2 cup dark chocolate chips     Directions:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray 9×5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray.

Make oat flour: Place oatmeal into blender and blend for 1-2 minutes until oatmeal resembles flour. You may need to stop blender and stir oats a couple of times to ensure that all oats have been blended.

Measure out just 2 cups of the oat flour and place in a medium bowl. Whisk in baking powder, baking soda, and salt; set aside.

In a separate large bowl, beat mashed bananas, dark brown sugar, vanilla extract, and eggs for 1-2 minutes until the consistency is smooth and creamy. Slowly add in flour mixture and mix until just combined.

Gently fold in raspberries and dark chocolate chips. Pour batter into prepared loaf pan and bake for 35-40 minutes or until knife inserted into center comes out clean. If using individual small loaf pans, 28-30 minutes should do.  Cool 10-15 minutes, then remove from pan and place on wire rack to finish cooling.

Though Robert, Cindi, the rest of the staff and I stood around and simply stuffed these into our mouths amid moans and yums, we managed to snatch a photo of a serving suggestion too!  We served these to Yelton Manor B&B guests this morning with a side dollop of homemade yogurt and fresh raspberries.

These are easy to make!  Head on out for some raspberries right now when they are fresh at the farm!  I suspect that frozen berries would work just as well.  Two YUMS up!!!!!

These freeze nicely for serving later.  Individually wrap in saran and place in freezer Ziplock bag.

By the way, this will probably go Vegan pretty easily simply by leaving the egg whites out.  It’s already gluten free as is!!!!