My other skills...

I have 2.5 kids in school (kindergarten counts as half), and all my kids are so blessed to have completely wonderful teachers. There have been some issues lately that have affected them, causing extra work for these wonderful teachers. So, I decided to bake them all something.

I'm a half decent baker. Give me a recipe, and I will modify it to taste good almost every time. Usually my modifications are born out of necessity, not any stroke of baker's genius. Case in point: This morning I decided to skip the grocery store and deal with it tomorrow. I got home from the morning school run and wanted to quickly bake some treats for the kids to have as school treats and after school snacks. Half the ingredients were in the mixer for a poppyseed loaf when I realized I was out of milk (it had been on my list that I decided could wait for tomorrow). Not a problem. One and a half cups milk became half a cup of sour cream and one cup of water. I moved on. The last ingredients in the recipe were almond extract and butter flavoring. I always have almond extract in the house and never have butter flavoring in the house (I'm not so good at pre-reading the recipe). A quick check of the pantry revealed mere drops left in the almond extract. So, I used the remainder of that, and threw in some maple flavoring. The poppyseed loaf turned out so delish that I made a mental note to not follow the recipe next time (writing down the changes would be too easy - I like to challenge myself with the mental notes). My husband complains that the exact same recipe will turn out to be a completely different dish each time I make it. I don't see the problem - they are all delicious, right? Variety is the spice of life....etc, etc, yada, yada....

I digress. I baked for the teachers. French bread. 50% whole wheat, 50% white. I followed the recipe ( I think I have this recipe memorized already, I've made it so often). It turned out beautifully, like always. It was still warm when the teachers got it. 5 points for me!!



However, there was one small problem. One of the teachers is a celiac. I'm always up for the challenge. Recently my husband was diagnosed with something that makes us have to cut almost all meat out of his diet. So, for the most part, we eat as vegetarians (except at Christmas, we cheat then). I know that it gets frustrating when there aren't options for him, so I wanted to do something nice for this particular teacher. Chocolate mousse, anyone??

I'm not gonna lie to you, I scraped out the bowl and licked up every remaining morsel. It was goooooood. And yes, I know that chocolate mousse isn't a baked item. I'm a half decent cook, too. Just saying. Also, those are scraps from quilting tied around the lids. It probably didn't really help with the appearance of the jars, but I wanted something pretty-ish wrapped around the top and was running out of time.

Now, if there are any other vegetarians out there, or anyone who wants to get a few more veggies in their diet, here are my favorites so far: Lettuce wraps (the lettuce used as the wrap with a bunch of stirfried veggies and noodles as a filling, use hoisin sauce to season), African Peanut Soup (look it up on allrecipes.com), and Potato Curry (I actually just throw whatever vegetables I have on hand into a pan and add one can of mushroom soup, almost 1/4 c curry powder, small splash of mustard, maybe some ginger and garlic.... and serve over rice).

Do you have any good recipes for me?