I have yet to meet a kid who isn’t fascinated with the whole baking process.

Not to mention the happy eating that comes later.

Yes indeedy, this is where it’s at.

I will remind myself of this next time I am tempted to say “no” when my kids ask if they can help me bake.

And I am currently reminded to say thank you to my mom, who let me make a huge mess of her flour drawer for years. I learned from her how to bake bread, and she learned from my grandmother (Wednesday Baking probably wouldn’t exist without those two women!).

So, even though the mess increases ten-fold when I include my kids, I’m determined to say “yes” more often when they ask to bake.  Because I wouldn’t be the baker I am today unless my mom and grandma had said “yes”.

Quesadillas are endlessly customizable. As long as the filling ingredients include cheese (which melts and holds everything together), you can put almost anything into a quesadilla.

Another lovely thing about quesadillas is that they can be on the table fairly quickly, so they’re a good thing to have on your menu when you are short on time and are tempted to order a pizza or get takeout.

Bacon is perhaps not the most inexpensive meat out there, but it can be had on sale almost without fail, and this recipe doesn’t use that much of it. Plus, even if you make quesadillas with shrimp (which I do sometimes!), you will still end up spending less money making these than you would if you got takeout or ate fast food. Honestly, I can usually feed my family crab cakes for the price that we would pay to get fast food for the six of us. Restaurant/take-out food is so expensive that cooking at home will save you money over eating out almost every time, regardless of what you happen to be cooking.

So, learn how to make quesadillas…it could save you big bucks.

Bacon Cheddar Quesadillas-makes 4

4 strips bacon
1 1/3 cups shredded cheddar cheese
4 flour tortillas
butter for cooking

Cook the bacon until crisp; break into bite-size pieces. Sprinkle cheese evenly over half of each tortilla. Sprinkle bacon over cheese.

Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add butter to coat the pan. Fold tortillas in half, and place two into the skillet. Cook for 2-4 minutes on each side, adding butter as needed, until both sides are lightly browned and cheese is melted. Repeat with remaining tortillas.

Cut into wedges and serve with sour cream or guacamole.

To make Bacon Cheddar Chicken Quesadillas, add several strips of cooked, sliced chicken to each tortilla along with the bacon and cheese.

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Here are a few more meal ideas to help you resist takeout temptation:
Chicken Tortilla Soup
Shrimp Quesadillas
Hibachi Chicken and Shrimp
Thin-Crust Pizza

I recently started reading your blog and have been inspired to try a few new things, including doing a lot more of my own baking. I am assuming you usually do one baking day a week, so how do you store your bread to keep it fresh if it won’t be used for a few days? And I have heard a lot of people mention freezing bread. I have never had any success with thawing frozen bread without ruining it. Is there a method that seems to work best?

-Shaylin

I actually bake here and there throughout the week, depending on what we need.  The only consistent baking I do is on Sunday mornings.  I make a whole wheat/flaxseed bread for communion at our church, and while I’m at it, I make three loaves instead of one.  Two loaves stay here at home and one goes to church.  We use that bread for toast at breakfast and for sandwiches at lunch.

When I need bread for dinner, I usually make it the day of because I just like having fresh, warm bread to serve with our meals.

I do make some things ahead of time, though.  Usually when I make hamburger buns, I make a large batch so that I can freeze the extras to use on a busy day.  And I normally freeze one of the loaves I make on Sunday mornings.  I also freeze French bread so that I can easily make garlic bread or French Bread Pizza later.

To successfully freeze bread, you will need to make sure that you package it properly.  I use plastic bags (which I reuse many times before retiring them), and I make sure that all the air is squeezed out of the bag.  Air is your enemy when you are freezing food.

It’s easiest to thaw bread by just letting it sit out on the counter for several hours, but you can also use the defrost setting on your microwave.  This tends to heat the outside of the loaf before the inside is thawed, though, so it’s not the method I would recommend.

I wouldn’t store bread in a self-defrosting freezer for more than a week or two, but in a manual defrost freezer, you can keep it for a month or two with great success.

I hope that answers your question!  If it doesn’t, or if you want to give me more specific info about what happens to your bread when you thaw it, leave me a comment or send me an email.

I was wondering what the protocal is regarding how long leftovers are good for? I feel that I waste A LOT of food because if it is in there a 2nd day I just can’t risk it. Especially meat (chicken & pork)

-Karen

Ooh, I have very good news for you! As a rule, you can definitely keep meats for more than two days in your fridge (3-4 days is usually safe for most meats).

Let me introduce you to a site that will be your new best friend: Still Tasty. On this site, you can enter any food item and find out how long you can store it a food and still safely eat it.

For example, the results for “chicken” cover everything from gravy to chicken wings to chicken sausages and everything in between.

Still Tasty doesn’t just cover meat products, though.  You can find information about grains, spices, dairy products, produce, and even beverages.   If you’re ever in doubt about a food item in your fridge, check Still Tasty before throwing it away.  You just might be able to keep your food.

I have a question about the dough rising… I have really wanted to take a chance with yeast breads since I’ve been a reader here, but find that I never have the time for the rising process. In this recipe you said the dough could sit in the fridge overnight… Can you do with with all yeast doughs? how long could they really stay in the fridge? Could I make the dough at night and bake it for dinner the next evening or is that too long?

-Kimberly

You’ll be happy to know that yes, most yeast doughs can successfully be left in the fridge overnight. 24 hours is a good rule of thumb, although I know some people keep their dough in the fridge longer than that.

Basically, the refrigerator retards the growth of the yeast. High heat kills yeast, warm temperatures encourage yeast growth, and cool temperatures slow yeast growth. When you first put your dough in the fridge, the yeast will continue to grow for a little while, and as the dough cools, the yeast growth will slow to a crawl.

The yeast does continue to multiply at these cool temperatures, albeit slowly. So, if you left your dough in the fridge for several days, it would start to be very yeasty tasting. A 24 hour rest in the fridge won’t affect the taste of the dough adversely, though, so if you’re busy working outside the home, your idea is a good one.

Refrigerated dough is fairly stiff and difficult to work with, so you’ll want to let it rest on the counter for 20 minutes before you try to shape it. Also, since your dough will be a lot chillier than normal dough, you’ll want to allow more time for the pre-baking rise of the dough. This is more important when you’re making loaves than it is when you make breadsticks. A large loaf of dough will obviously take more time to warm up and begin rising than will a skinny little breadstick.
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Readers, as always, if you have some advice to add to mine, feel free to leave a comment!

I win a $250 Visa gift card if I have the most votes when the contest ends on December 4th, and I’d love that, of course!  If I win, I’ll give half of the prize ($125) to Living Water International, a charity that digs wells in parts of the world where no clean water is available.

You have to create an account with Divine Caroline in order to vote, but it’s an easy process as registrations go.

If you’d like to help me (and help Living Water!), hop on over to the my voting page. There’s a button in my sidebar too, which, when clicked, will take you to the voting page.

Incidentally, the blurb on Divine Caroline says that I blog about knitting, which is categorically untrue (I didn’t write the blurb, obviously!).  Alas, my hobbies are photography and scrapbooking, which are not nearly as cool and hip as knitting.

Don’t try to enter by leaving a comment here, though.  You have to go directly to my Ragu Review.  Happy entering!

I don’t do anything fancy, because I’ve never had problems with bugs and weevils, but if you still want to see my method, go check out my answer.

If you DO have problems with bugs, there are a couple of things you can do.   I’ve heard that putting your flour into the freezer for 24 hours before storing it will kill any bugs.  Another option, if you have space, is to simply store your flour in the freezer.  You can also store the bags in a large bin, like a Rubbermaid tub.

As I said, though, I have no personal experience with bug prevention.  I’m sure some of you have, though, so if you’ve got some anti-bug tricks, please share them in the comments!

The price this week is $1.50/5 lbs, which is higher than the $.99 price that makes me uber happy, but considering that I was utterly and completely out of flour, $1.50 sounded pretty good to me.

My only worry was that the unbleached wouldn’t be included in the sale (the bleached flour was pictured).  I even felt slightly nervous as I entered the flour aisle, but much to my delight, the unbleached WAS included!  Woohoo!

So, I bought 17 bags of flour, which cost me $25.50.  Because I spent $25 on baking items, I got a $5 coupon off of anything I buy on my next shopping trip.  Bonus!

I cannot tell you how happy I am to be “in” flour again.

I decided to keep things simple this week, and so Safeway was my only stop.  Here’s the other stuff I bought:

All told, I spent $64.62 of my $400 grocery budget for November, and I am really, really happy with that, especially considering I bought a ton of flour.

Soo, my first week of shopping with only cash bore some pleasing results. If only I could make it through every week with only $64!

On Thursday, I did school with the kids in the morning, spent the afternoon helping a friend declutter (my kids came with me, and my older two actually helped!), and then went to meet two friends for dinner.

On Friday, we did school in the morning, and then Joshua’s friend came over (he’s staying the weekend while his mom is away). We were having company for dinner (which was fun!), so I spent my afternoon prepping for that instead of grocery shopping.

So, now it’s Saturday again, and I haven’t shopped. I could have given the kids the day off of school on either Thursday or Friday (we accomplish more than enough over the course of a school year, and can afford to take days off here and there), but school is a high priority for us, and we did have enough groceries to last us for a few more days.

I really don’t feel like going grocery shopping today, though. I have a photo session this morning, and I hate going grocery shopping on Saturday afternoons because it’s so crowded. Bleah.

I do plan to go shopping on Thursday of this coming week, so I just need enough food to hold us over for the next five days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday). I’ve planned out a simple menu using mostly what we already have here, so I’m hoping to just run out to do a quick shopping trip at Safeway.

Saturday

• Pizza
• green salad

Sunday

• French Toast
• OJ

Monday

• Bacon and Chicken Quesadillas
• fruit salad
• Zucchini Patties

Tuesday

• Beef Au Jus sandwiches
• green salad

Wednesday

• Chicken with Parmesan Risotto
• Sauteed Zucchini with Bacon and Parsley
• both of the above are new recipes, so I’ll probably throw in some homemade bread in case we’re not big fans of either recipe!

On Wednesday I’ll plan a full menu and on Thursday I will do an honest-to-goodness shopping trip.  (I guess I should preface that with a “Lord willing” because my shopping plans have been kind of waylaid for the last couple of weeks!)

I’ll be back later with a report on my first cash-only shopping trip. 

This week, I lost a sweet potato and some chopped up red pepper. I found the mold on the peppers earlier in the week, but I froze them until I could take the picture today (which is why the container is all cloudy looking!).

The sweet potato was in the fridge instead of in the cabinet with the rest of the sweet potatoes, so it didn’t get eaten in time. I was going to try to rescue it and make some sweet potato muffins, but it was just too far gone.

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How did you do this week? If you blogged about your food waste, link us up by entering your info into the Mister Linky Widget below. Participants get a spot on my Food Waste blogroll for the upcoming week, so join us! You’ll save money, reduce your trash output, and get a little publicity for your blog!

Before you can appreciate why this freezer makes me so giddy, you need to see my old one.

This was a freebie, and I think it may possibly have pre-dated me.

It was enormous.

(full disclosure: I considered cleaning up my messy laundry room before I took these pictures, and then thought better of it. Please enjoy the real-ness. )

It was leaking, which caused rusty water to drip onto the floor.

The seal no longer worked, which meant that ice would build up very quickly around the lid. That’s solid ice between the lid and freezer.

I could knock it off as much as I pleased, but it came right back.

And the lid of the freezer! Oh my goodness. There was so much ice accumulated inside of it, it must have weighed 20 pounds.

The weight of the ice in the lid was actually causing the plastic to sag and pop out.

The lid was so heavy, it scared me to think of what might happen if I didn’t manage to hold it up properly while reaching into the depths of the freezer (props to Joshua for holding it up while I took the pictures!).

The final strike against this freezer is that there were no baskets or compartments or anything inside of it. It was a massive space that just begged me to lose and forget about food I’d frozen.

Oh, I remembered one other bad thing. Lately, it had started to not stay sufficiently cold (this is a major defect in a freezer, I think).

So! Given all of that, you can maybe understand why I am so stinking thrilled with my new freezer.

Check this out. I have baskets! Small items will no longer hide in the depths of the freezer.

And I have compartments! I love compartments.

There’s even a little divider on the side of the motor, which makes a handy little storage section.

This is one of the best parts. Do you see what that lid is doing? It’s staying UP, all by itself. The lid on my other freezer never stayed up by itself.

And it has a light! The light on my other freezer never worked.

Do you know what I’m most excited about, though? I think that this freezer will help me in my fight against food waste.

• Since it has baskets! and sections!, I think that I will be much more able to keep track of what I have (no more forgetting about stuff until it’s several years old).

• Because it’s easy to organize and easy to open, I will be much more prone to storing food in it instead of in my above-the-fridge freezer. This will reduce waste because food stored in my chest freezer will not get freezer burnt like it does in my above-the-fridge freezer.

Happy sigh.

New freezer, I love you.