POWER COOKING

If you have known me for any amount of time, you know that I am not much for "power shopping". What I do enjoy though, is a good session of power cooking.

Our weather on Sunday was not at all conducive to any kind of outside activity. The temps were in the 20's. It was raining/freezing rain/sleeting. It was really cold in the house!!

It was 11 o'clock. I knew I wanted to watch the football game at 1:00, so I figured I could head into the kitchen and see how much I could accomplish in two hours.

When I stepped into the kitchen, I realized that our space heater was turned off and the temperature had dropped to 51*. Brrrr!!! One sure way to raise the heat in your kitchen is to start cooking.

The first thing I did was take a chicken carcass out of the freezer and put it into a pot with a bunch of veggies and water and put it on to simmer. In a couple of hours we had a large tasty pot of homemade stock. I'll be turning it into chicken veggie soup for lunch tomorrow.


Next, I mixed up a double batch of banana bread. The ends came out nice and chewy. Delicious!

I had a large container of chocolate pudding in the fridge so I decided to mix up a pie crust which I baked and then filled with the pudding for Chocolate Cream pie. Tonight I topped it with homemade whipped cream and chocolate shavings for dessert. MMMMM!

Next in line to cook was a pumpkin roll. My mom made these for our camping trip and I have been wanting to eat one again ever since.

I got the icing mixed up.

Then the cake baked, cooled, and filled. It's in the freezer now waiting for the perfect night to be served for dessert.

It's a super easy, quick recipe.

Batter:

3 eggs, beaten

1 cup sugar

2/3 cup pumpkin

1 tsp lemon juice

3/4 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ginger

1/2 tsp salt

mix batter ingredients together - line a greased jelly roll pan with waxed paper - grease the paper and spread the batter evenly - bake at 350* for 15 minutes - place waxed paper on a tea towel and sprinkle with powdered sugar - invert hot jelly roll onto waxed paper and remove waxed paper that was in pan - roll up from the narrow end - cool exactly 1 hour - unroll jelly roll and spread with cream cheese filling - roll up again and wrap in plastic wrap

cream cheese filling:

8 oz cream cheese

1/4 cup butter

1/2 tsp vanilla

1 cup powdered sugar

beat together until very fluffy

Lastly, I mixed up a double batch of peanut butter cookie batter. After the game, I baked them into 100 delicious cookies.

We should be set for treats for at least a couple of days.

The best thing though was that I was able to sit and enjoy the football game guilt free. Well, I don't know about enjoy. That was a hard game to enjoy!!