Category Archives: food

A special BLT

July 11, 2020food, gardeningsusanmanzke

Summer brings great vegetables, but most take months to grow. I’ve been craving a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, but had no homegrown tomatoes.

There are tomatoes on my plants, but it will take a couple weeks before I get any red enough to eat.

These tomatoes need a little weeding, too.

I continue to crave my BLT. Lucky for me my friend, Kathy, brought me a few little cherry tomatoes. I cut these into three pieces each and created my first BLT sandwich of the season.

The only trouble using cherry tomatoes is that pieces often slip out when you are eating.

The sandwich has to be held firmly, or risk losing one of the important ingredients, the tomato.

It was worth the trouble. I totally enjoyed my lunch and look forward to a time when I can step out my backdoor and pick a tomato for another BLT sandwich–or just to sink my teeth into one fresh homegrown fruit.

My tomatoes can’t come soon enough. I’m drooling for one right now. But that’s how the garden grows.

Rhubarb Crisp — recipe

May 21, 2020food, recipesusanmanzke

I made this every spring with fresh rhubarb, until Bob plowed up my rhubarb. These days I pick rhubarb at our neighbors’.

I halved my recipe this year and omitted the crust and found it just as good.

Here’s is my crust-less Rhubarb Crisp recipe

1 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 tsp. salt, 3/4 tsp baking powder, 2 eggs, 2 cups diced raw rhubarb (or more)…

…when I cut up my rhubarb, I had more than needed, but I added it anyway, so I used almost double the rhubarb called for.

Baked in a casserole dish at 350 degrees for 45 minutes, or until it seemed done.

Let cool before eating.

It comes our sweet/tart and creamy.

I did not miss having a crust at all.

A little added flavor

May 18, 2020food, pets, Sunnysusanmanzke

When I use a can of food, I like to scrape out every drop, which includes pet food.

Cat food cans are no exception.

Instead of just washing the empty cans out before recycling them, I put Sunny’s kibble inside the can. After stirring the dry food around a bit, I pour Sunny’s now flavored kibble back into his bowl.

Sunny likes the little extra flavor that is scraped out with his kibble.

He would eat his kibble even without the extra flavor. I do this because I love my dog and hate to even waste a smidgen of food.

Yeast for bread

May 10, 2020foodsusanmanzke

I had asked on FaceBook if anyone knew where I could get bread yeast. There seemed to have been a run on yeast as so many people currently are home making their own bread.

The store shelves were bare, but a cousin told me I could buy yeast that would work and not spend a fortune.

I bought a brewer’s yeast online and have used it to make my bread.

There is no taste difference to my home-baked bread. The only problem with my usual recipe and today’s bread is that it needed double the time to raise. This would not work in my bread machine as the settings do not change enough to suit this longer rise.

I used my bread machine to mix my loaf, but after the first raise, I took it out and put it into a loaf pan. When it had raised enough for the second time, I baked it in my oven.

It was tasty, as I ate a piece when it was still warm.