Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Breakfast’ Category

Nov 7

Whole wheat and rye muffins

whole-wheat-rye-muffins

There’s been nothing like feeding a growing, exploring, tiny new eater to inspire me to seek out new recipes, ingredients, and techniques – healthier, simpler, easier meals that fit into our new normal (a normal that includes a tiny, joyous, screechy, maniacal human tornado). I’m not sure how we’d survive without the minutely detailed weekly meal plans and grocery lists I put together every Friday, and planning for easy breakfasts is particularly necessary. Aldo isn’t one to wait for breakfast (neither am I, let’s be honest), and stumbling around pre-caffeine isn’t a good time to start contemplating that day’s first meal.

So nearly every week I plan to make something ahead – a few pans of granola, an egg bake, or a batch of something baked and tasty that we can pair with some yogurt and fruit for a quick, filling, satisfying breakfast. Because Aldo eats all of these things too, I’m newly inspired to incorporate fruits and vegetables, whole grain flours, and healthier sweeteners into my baking routine, and the recipe I’m sharing here is the most recent success (there have been others, too, and hopefully I’ll get those on the site soon). These muffins are made with half whole wheat and half rye flour and sweetened only with a bit of molasses, making them nearly savory and deeply toasty. Perfect for pairing with scrambled eggs and a bit of cheese on a brisk fall morning.  Read more

Oct 30

Pumpkin pie granola

pumpkin-pie-granola-1

One bite of a pumpkin cheesecake sample at Trader Joe’s last week and my pumpkin spice floodgates burst wide open. I’d been sort of inadvertently avoiding it all fall, but it’s nearly impossible to walk around in fall wonderland of the Midwest and ignore the most potent of fall flavor profiles. And when some quick googling told me I could easily work some pumpkin puree into granola, my path was set.  Read more

Apr 18

4 Comments

Sweet potato muffins for littles (or bigs)

Aldo-muffin5

It comes as a surprise to no one, especially me, that Aldo starting to eat solid foods has been one of the most rewarding and fun parts of this whole ordeal. (Can you call having a baby and raising it for nearly eight months an “ordeal”? That seems simultaneously too negative and way too casual. Like I’d need at least 10,000 more words to describe what it’s like, but a decent percentage of them would be way more positive than “ordeal.”)

Also unsurprisingly, a lot of people ask me what he’s eating and what our general philosophy is on how and what he eats. Baby led weaning? Homemade? How quickly to introduce allergens? What to introduce and when? The way we’ve gone about it is a fairly good indicator for how we’ve done most things as parents – do some reading, pick and choose the elements we like to form a generalized plan, then see what works and what doesn’t, reformulating the plan nearly on a dime as needed. If there’s anything I’ve learned it’s that you can’t go into anything with too many expectations or being too rigid, because this fantastic little guy is actually a human, and he has plenty of his own thoughts and preferences.

And through everything (and we’re not just talking about food here, but also sleep, and play, and everything else he does), I get more and more of this sense that he’s going to be just fine. We can provide a general structure, but as long as we go with our intuition and take note of the signals he sends us, it’ll all work out okay. Read more

Dec 4

4 Comments

Meet Bowen Appétit + sweet potato hash with apples and sage

I’m very excited to share with you all the first in what will maybe (eventually, one day, sometime) be a series of videos highlighting Bowen Appétit cooking classes and the reasons I love being in the kitchen helping people create memorable meals. I was lucky to work with the incredibly talented Jane Duggan, a local videographer, to put together these scenes in the waning weeks of the outdoor Madison farmers’ market and then with a kitchen and table full of friends. I wanted to give a peek into what it’s like to take a Bowen Appétit class, and I think this video captures it perfectly.

I hope you love it as much as I do! Read more

Nov 17

Caramelized apple Dutch baby pancake

As the holidays approach, I can sense a growing anxiety in the conversations about food that I have with other people. From simple office potlucks to special holiday feasts and everything in between, this time of year can be particularly taxing for folks who start to feel overwhelmed by what needs to come out of their kitchens. There’s pressure to make something exciting and to keep up with traditions, to make things that feel special, and to get it all right, even when you’ve maybe never made the dish before. Sharing and enjoying food you’ve made can be one of life’s best moments, but it’s easy to let anxiety build and overshadow the experience. I get that; it happens to me too.

What’s my advice for overcoming it? Oh boy. It’s woven through my classes and through all the conversations I have with anxious home cooks, but it would take a bit of thinking and a fair amount of time to write it all out – and we all know this isn’t a time of year prone to excess time hanging around. So for now, I’ll just leave you with a secret weapon – a caramelized apple Dutch baby.

Apple-Dutch-Baby_2 Read more

« Older Entries