A Day in My Life: Come Bake With Me

 To kick off September, I thought I'd do something a bit different and take you all along on what I did September 1st, which turned out was a baking day for me (I KNOW it's late, but hey, better late than never *laugh*).  So, let's get to it!

September 1st, 2022

After waking up (I know, stater of the obvious there *laugh*), getting dressed and heading upstairs, I take care of getting the kids breakfast and getting the daughter started on schoolwork.  The son woke up, ate a little bit and immediately went back to bed.  He hasn't been sleeping well with his allergies all flared up, so I just let him and get started on my list of things I needed to do.  I pull out the mixer and necessary materials and work on making bread to last for the next few days.  I get the first load of dishes on to wash after I get the bread into the pans to rise before baking them.  It is only then I go and get my first cup of coffee for the day.

Side note, but the above picture is how I make my coffee everyday.  Notice the cone above the mug?  That is called "the pour over coffee method" and it seriously makes the best cup of coffee I've ever had.  Been making coffee this way for years and I love it, although I have expanded to having two cones; The above one and another ceramic one...the ceramic one I actually prefer the taste of the coffee out of, but it was in the dishwasher this morning.  I love this system partially because it stops me from having to have a coffee maker on my countertop taking up room and I can just store the drip cone in the cupboard with my regular dishes and the other reason is because, of course, it makes an awesome cup of coffee :).

After I got a cup of coffee to sip on, I put the bread in the oven and I move onto my next project and that's getting dinner started in the slow cooker.  I use my electric pressure cooker for this (I bought a nice instant pot glass lid for my six quarter pressure cooker because it was WAY better quality than the one that came with my pot, in case you are wondering) because the chicken won't fit in my tiny crock pot.  I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of the slow cooker function on the electric pressure cookers.  I mean it gets the job done, but it cycles the heat on and off hard to get the items cooked and it just doesn't seem to work as well as a real crock pot.  My opinion anyway.  

Right, back to the matter at hand.  I take the half defrosted rotisserie chicken out the fridge (we bought one at Three Bears, so it's just a Costco rotisserie chicken with a substantial mark up on it) and put it on to slow cook so I could cook the meat off the bones for chicken noodle soup for dinner.  This will also give me a good opportunity to use up some carrots with bad spots and some celery that immediately went limp and sad from the CSA box the last few weeks as well as one of the sweet onions we got in our CSA a few days prior (the onions are delicious, but have no shelf life to them to speak of, so you have to freeze them or use them quickly).

After that, I pull out a block of cream cheese from the fridge and cut it in half.  I then put the cream cheese into a bowl to come to room temperature so I can make cheese Danishes for breakfast over the weekend.  I take a break to get the son a snack and work on schoolwork (the daughter has been working on hers the entire time I'm working on other things with me occasionally helping with a problem here and there).  

I take a intermission from schoolwork to get the bread out of the oven and unload the dish washer.  I reload it quickly so I can get the bread making tools ready to go again in a little bit.

Now that the bread is out of the oven, I reset the temperature for my next project, which is dessert.  My entire family loves the Krusteaz Lemon Pound Cake mix and I have a few left from the last bulk order I made that need to be used up.  So, I get that mixed up and put it in to bake.  I then pull the son back to school work and get the rest of his schoolwork done for the day right when the timer goes off.  

I take it from the oven and place it on it's serving dish to cool completely. 

I then put the temperature on the oven back to 375 degrees, put the dishes from the last load away and make sure my metal mixing bowl is cool enough and then start on making hard rolls for my son to snack on.  He now eats these instead of the store bought hotdog and hamburger buns and I could not be happier about that.  

Once the rolls are in the oven, I take the inner pot out of my pressure cooker and strain the chicken from the broth.  I put the broth back in the pressure cooker, add some seasonings, some bouillon (to up the chicken flavor a bit as the broth was a tiny bit bland) and cut up the vegetables I want in the soup and put the slow cooker back on to cook.  I'll add the chicken back in when it is cool enough to separate from the bones.

I pull the rolls from the oven and it is less than five minutes before the son grabs one and runs off with it, which makes me laugh.  I help the daughter on some math problems and we break for lunch.  I ended up pulling a salad we had made from our CSA vegetables from the fridge and eating that for lunch.  The son actually helped to cut up the vegetables as part of his home economics course I designed for the year, so I was more than a little proud to eat the salad he helped to make.  I boil a pound of pasta to have it ready to go for a quick and easy lunch.  The kids have spaghetti (the daughter) and pasta with olive oil and Parmesan cheese (one of the son's favorite meals in the universe).  After lunch I then check the chicken and find it to be cool enough to handle.  

As I pull the chicken from the bone and pull it apart into bite sized pieces, I find that the rotisserie chicken had a LOT more meat on it than I thought it would (Carrs chickens never have more than a meal's worth of meat on it, so it blew me away), so I took half the chicken and added it back to the soup and then took the other half and decided in an instant to try and make chicken salad out of it.  I find a few recipes online and then decide to just wing it.  I add some tarragon (goes well with chicken), some parsley, a bit of old bay seasoning (what?  I like Old Bay!), some salt and pepper and enough mayo to make it nice and moist, some almonds that I pull from the freezer and chop up a handful of, and then, since I don't have any fresh grapes or anything to add, I throw in some dried cherries and some raisins into the mix.  I finish up by adding some onion and some celery to the salad.  I have to say as a first real attempt to make chicken salad, this turned out really good!!!  We ended up eating the entire thing of salad, which is an accomplishment since it made way more than I was planning on!

By this point dinner is fast approaching and I'm very tired.  But, I am determined to stay the course and get the rest of my list done for the day.  

I get the easy cheese Danishes ready to go and put into the oven to bake and get the home made noodles rolled out, cut into noodles and added to the soup to cook for the last 1/2 to an hour before my husband is set to be home.  I put the glaze on the lemon pound cake, put the soup on "keep warm" after I make sure all of the noodles are done and that the seasoning on the soup is right.  Honestly, after all of that, I sat down with a glass of water and watched some of my favorite gardening and cooking YouTube channels and just appreciated the fact that I was sitting down *laugh*.

So, there you go folks.  Hope you enjoyed coming along on my baking adventures for the day and hope it wasn't too boring for you :).