Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Baking...with what we have!

One of the most wonderful parts of being home in the mountains of WV is being with my mom and cooking and baking with local meat and produce.

My mom is an incredible cook.   She doesn't usually cook with a recipe - she just knows how to make the most amazing dishes.  Growing up, occasionally we used a cookbook or a recipe book, but most often she just knew how to make a delicious dinner from the ingredients we had on hand. If we were out of something she just knows what to substitute in and make it work. We usually didn't make a big grocery list each week based on what we would cook and we didn't have a weekly meal plan.  Sunday, after we got the paper, she would make a list of sales and we would go from store to store buying what was on sale.  She had a general idea of what staples we needed in our house and made our shopping lists and meals from that.

I am learning to cook more like this as I have gone Paleo...I have let go of needing to always make fancy recipes all the time.   I generally have a bunch of high quality meats and vegetables on hand and know what I want to grill or bake.  (I still like to try baking with recipes to try new things, especially to bring to events with both paleo and non-paleo friends!)

This week we have a lot of local fruit and veggies on hand.  We got a 5 qt bucket of fresh picked blueberries on Tuesday from a family friend.  Delicious! We have been snacking on them and tonight decided to make something yummy.  I knew I had seen a recipe from George at Civilized Caveman Cooking for a fruit cobbler and that seemed perfect.  Only we were out of some of the ingredients....so like my mom would do, I made do with what we had!   No almond flour?  I had a bag of almonds and cashews that were my "traveling snack" so I ground those up to use.  No cinnamon honey?  I added ground cinnamon and plain honey.  Mom and dad and I didn't really need 8 servings so we changed it to a little more than half (but still used one whole egg since it's hard to use a 1/2 egg!)   It was sooo delicious!

 

Last night we had an abundance of strawberries and Mom had seen a recipe for a custard pie with berries.  So we found a recipe for making custards ... and modified it to use honey and no flour!  They were yummy!  We ate them so quickly we didn't get a picture of the baked version - just this lovely picture of them as we put them in the oven! 

Individual Strawberry Custard Cups
Place 6 custard cups/ramekins in a 9x13 pan.  In a bowl, lightly beat 4 eggs with a little less than 1/4 cup honey.  Pour in 2 cups of milk of your choice and mix well.  In 6 custard cups, add sliced strawberries (about 1 1/2 cups total).  Evenly divide the egg mix into the 6 cups.  Sprinkle with cinnamon.  Boil water and fill the 9x13 pan with about an inch of hot water.  Bake at 325 for 55-60 minutes or until a knife comes out clean.


No comments:

Post a Comment