Ebelskivers

As a family, we have a lot of Christmas traditions. One of those traditions is our Christmas morning breakfast.

This is the table as we are just getting ready for breakfast.

Our breakfast is a special meal called Ebelskivers. These are a Danish pancake ball. If you get the Williams Sonoma catalog, you have seen these as filled pancakes. But we did them before Williams Sonoma made them cool.

The history that gets told about ebelskivers is that the Vikings cooked little balls of dough in the divets on their shields. Our family history says that somehow an ancestor at some point passed the tradition down. We have always made them on Christmas morning and filled them with strawberries and whipped cream.

To make the ebelskivers, you need an ebelskiver pan. As you can sort of see, it just has half spheres. You fill each groove with batter, and then use a fork to keep turning it until all the batter is cooked and you have a little ball.

And voila! the finished product.

And these are gluten-free.

My mom used the Bisquick pancake mix. Instead of following the instructions exactly, she used whipped egg whites, one more than is called for (so if it's 3 eggs, use 4 whipped egg whites). She also added more milk than was called for.

My brother said they tasted fabulous.

Brussels Sprouts

I spent the whole morning cooking yesterday. And today, we are battening down the hatches for some serious winter weather. At least that is what they are predicting. We'll see what happens.

And so it seems like the perfect time for some blog updating. Since I have left it alone for so long.

Last week I loaded some pictures off my camera, so now I can show you some holiday cooking.

I traveled to my parents' for Christmas. I think my diet was a major source of concern for my mom, and honestly I was worried about how it would go too. It's easy to do it when you live alone, but harder when there are actually other people around. My family was super supportive.

They picked me up at the airport and we got home at about midnight. We walked in and everyone just started heading up the stairs to go to bed. But my mom turned to me and said, "Oh, are you hungry? I got you something at Trader Joe's today."

She went to the fridge and pulled out:

Yes, that's right. An actual stalk of brussels sprouts.

I said I wasn't hungry, and we went to bed. But the brussels sprouts sure tasted good when we roasted them up a few days later.

Yellow Squash

Simple food.

Yellow squash cooked in a pan with a dash of salt. I don't even put oil on these.

Soba Noodles and Sauce

This meal is a little bit of a miracle. Do you know how much stuff they put in tomato sauce? By "they" I mean those companies that process tomato sauce and put it into jars. I make really good tomato sauce (I lived in Italy. I did learn a few things). But sometimes, especially now, I really need something simple that actually feels like a meal.

By doing some finagling on my daily rotation, I was able to eat this tomato sauce. It is the most basic tomato sauce I have ever seen in a jar. Just tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, onion, and basil. The brand is Monte Bene and it's the plain tomato and basil sauce. I found it in the gluten-free section of my local health food store.

I generally like a chunky tomato sauce. This isn't chunky, but it has really good flavor. And it has some chunks of garlic, which satisfies the desire for chunks a little bit.

The brightly colored noodles are a package of soba noodles that are 100% buckwheat. The brand is King Soba. Again, I found them in the gluten-free section of my health food store.

A note about soba noodles. The first time I made these, I realized that there is definitely a reason why they are used in Japanese preparations exclusively. They are not at all what you expect when you are thinking Italian pasta. And if you put tomato sauce on them, you can't help but think Italian pasta. Be sure to cook them long enough so they loose the little bit of slimy-ness. Also I wound up just cutting mine with my kitchen scissors. They were a little hard to bite through.

There isn't really a recipe here, but I am recommending both of these brands.

Baked Sweet Potatoes

For most of my life I hated sweet potatoes. I wouldn't ever eat them. Then I had a friend in grad school who told me that marshmallows on top wasn't the only way to eat sweet potatoes. Really?

Now I love sweet potatoes. It got so bad last year, I started to turn orange. Does that memory stop me? No!

Baked Sweet Potatoes

Preheat the oven to 350. Wash and dry the sweet potato. Drizzle a little oil and rub it in. I think I used olive oil. Sprinkle with sea salt.

Cook until a fork easily pierces the potato.

Cut it up and sprinkle with a little more salt, paprika, cumin, and maybe some coriander.

Cranberry Millet

I'm pretty sure that with this recipe I am adapting some things that I have read on the great internet. But I'm not sure who to attribute it to specifically.

Cranberry Millet

1/2 cup millet

1/2 cup (or more) fresh whole cranberries

cinnamon

Bring 1 cup of water to boil and add the millet. Slice the cranberries into pieces and add them to the millet, don't stir them in yet. Add a dash of cinnamon (or two). When the millet has absorbed almost all of the water, then stir in the cranberries.

I was surprised that this wasn't as tart as I was expecting it to be. But most of you would probably prefer this sweetened a little, so I'll recommend a drizzle of honey or maple syrup over top of your bowl.

Mashed Pumpkin

Since I am going with simple food these days, I'm also going with simple pictures. Yes, I will show you that I do most of my cooking on my stovetop because it is flat. I will show you my cutting board where I chopped my toasted walnuts and the debris that is left on that. This is simple food and this is how I make it.

I was still using up the rest of my pumpkin, so this is another recipe for it.

Mashed Pumpkin

2 wedges of roasted pumpkin

walnuts, toasted

sunflower oil

dried sage

salt

I just chopped the pumpkin into a bowl. I toasted the walnuts in a pan on the stove. Be careful with that. Then I added those to the pumpkin, drizzled with oil and sprinkled in a little sage and salt and mashed everything together.