Halfway!

So the little spinning baby over on the side there says I am officially a day past halfway! To celebrate, we made some really tasty french toast for breakfast this morning. We've been trying lots of new easy recipes lately and I think it's time I gave you a little recipe run-down. These are all tasty, quick, easy and generally cheap so you should try them, okay?

Blueberry Muffins: I make muffins generally once or twice a week. This recipe is great and the muffins come out with a kind of crunchy top which we love. I use 1/2 white and 1/2 whole wheat flour and I don't make the streusel topping because I don't like streusel topping on muffins. You can play around with the stuff you add in (as well as the sugar, I usually add about a 1/3 less than the recipe calls for): we like blueberry, but have also used half berries and half cut-up canned peaches, or chopped up banana and a small handful of chocolate chips. I should warn you, if you're feeding more than one little one and a spouse, you might want to double the recipe. This recipe makes about 7 standard-size muffins.

German Apple Pancake: This was Mr. J.'s Saturday breakfast pick from a couple weekends ago. We liked it so much we made it twice in one weekend. We don't have an oven-proof skillet, so we used a big pie plate and did the apple-cooking part of the recipe in the plate in the microwave.

Creamy Corn & Turkey Soup: So simple, so tasty. This would be great with corn biscuits, regular biscuits, or just crackers. We didn't garnish with any red pepper, I just included it all while cooking.

Ham & Potato Soup: This was also super-easy. We just used deli ham, only one oxo cube because that's all we had at the time, and I made the roux in the microwave. Tip: To cut down on the starchiness of your potatoes when you cook them (or when you're baking them as fries), cut then up and let them soak in cold water for about a 1/2 hour. Rinse, drain, and cook/bake as you normally would.

Banana Stuffed French Toast: There's a little prep here, but it's worth it! If you have a griddle thing, use it because it makes this go much faster. Making just a half recipe (5 eggs was just right) was enough for two good pieces for each of us, one for the Little Goat (who LOVED it!) and three left for breakfast tomorrow morning. Oh, and we didn't dip the pieces in corn flakes cause that just sounded....weird.

Next up is this recipe which Mr. J. chose for our Valentine's Day dessert extravaganza. I'm going to borrow a smaller than usual springform pan and try making just a half a cheesecake so I'll let you know how that turns out. Mr. J. is very excited.

In other non-cooking-related news, today has been a really productive day. I'm still working on laundry, but I cleaned both bathrooms, mopped the kitchen and bathroom floors, wrapped a giant package for mailing, did some major clothes-sorting in the closet, AND cleaned out most of the fridge. Now that I'm writing it all out, it doesn't really seem like much, but dangit, it smells like lemon in here so we must've done something. Now I'm off to pick a winner for my contest.