OK.  I’m late, but I’m awake now.  I’m showered, and my decaf cocoa-mocha is gone.  If you were here earlier, you probably visited the other 3 moms, and came back to see if I got my act together.  If you saw my earlier post, you can laugh at me.  If you didn’t see it, you’re probably wondering what in the world I’m talking about.  Maybe you should get up earlier.  ;)  That’s a joke, my friends, and only those who were up earlier will see the full irony in it.

At any rate, Cocoa Mocha is a nice way to start any crisp fall morning, including Thanksgiving.

Cocoa Mocha

• 1 tsp. cocoa powder
• 2 tsp. sugar
• 1 tsp. instant coffee (regular or decaf)
• pinch of salt
• 1 Tbs. water
• milk

Combine dry ingredients in a coffee mug.  Stir in water and microwave for 20 seconds.  Fill mug with milk, stirring again to combine.  Microwave to desired drinking temperature.

This year we will be guests in the homes of Perry’s extended family.  We’ll be the out-of-towners, so I don’t know exactly what will be on the menu though I’ve been in the family long enough to be reasonably sure we’ll see all the regulars: turkey, cornbread dressing, green bean casserole, corn, rolls, mashed potatoes, gravy, fruit salad.  We will probably try to provide a few dishes that can be made ahead or prepared easily without presuming upon someone else’s kitchen facilities.

Lately we’ve been canning our own apple pie filling, so I’m thinking we might bring that and use  store-bought crusts to make apple-cranberry pies.  We could also make our homemade cranberry sauce, which has become a tradition over the last few years.  We’ll never go back to the wiggly stuff.   We could do brown-and-serve rolls, though I suspect the road trip would leave them badly smushed.

We really enjoy trying one or two new recipes each Thanksgiving, and although we won’t necessarily be able to serve them on Thanksgiving Day this year I really want to keep doing so.  Here are the first two on my list of new recipes to try.

Pecan Raisin Pie – My sister’s mother-in-law made this for a family gathering, and it was surprisingly delicous: sweet like a pecan pie, but with a subtle fruity flavor and a heavy richness.  Not what you would expect.

• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup sugar
• 6 Tbs. butter, melted
• 1/4 cup milk
• 1 cup raisins
• 1 cup chopped pecans

Combine all ingredients and pour into a 9″ unbaked pie shell.  Bake 40-45 minutes at 350.

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Cranberry Orange Relish – I had this once when I was about 14 and have planned to make it myself ever since.  The recipe looks very simple.  I’d say it’s time to quit procrastinating and really do it this year.  I’ll bet we could make it ahead of time and take with us. What do you think?

• 12 oz. cranberries
• 1 whole orange
• 3/4 – 1 cup sugar

Rinse and sort cranberries, culling the bad ones.  Wash orange.  Cut in quarters and remove seeds but do not peel.  Grind or finely chop orange and cranberries.  (A food processor is usually recommended, though it can be done with a hand chopper.  I’ll be using my tiny little electric chopper and doing it in several small batches.)  Add sugar, adjusting to taste if desired.  Refrigerate at least 2 hours before serving.

Do you have a favorite recipe you’d like to suggest for us?

Link up below with any post relating to your Thanksgiving plans this year and your link will appear on the blogs of all 4 Moms.  Remember to play by the rules and link back to at least one of the 4 Moms.

Today we’re going to talk about breakfast.  Ugh.  I am not a morning person.  Twenty years ago?  Morning person.  Now?  Not.

Just so we’re clear.

Moving on…

Breakfast in our house needs to be high protein, because while we do enjoy breakfast, we don’t want to celebrate it twice in the same hour.  It also needs to be fast and easy so we don’t look up halfway through the meal and realize we were actually eating lunch.

Below are ten of our favorites.  Some are higher in protein than others but most have at least a moderate amount.  Those that don’t are usually supplemented with a glass of milk.

If you were a fly on the wall in our house – and you’d be in good company, because we’ve had more than our share of flies this summer – here’s what you might see us eat on an average sort of morning:

Top 10 Breakfasts

1. Homemade granola, made with lots of nuts to pump up the protein.  I also sometimes add TVP, though I might reconsider since most soy sold in the US is genetically modified.
2. Banana bread with peanut butter.  I love walnuts in banana bread but the kids don’t, so we go through a lot of peanut butter.
3. Egg/cheese burritos, with or without a smidgin of homemade sausage.
4. Pancakes, often with peanut butter, always with milk.  Not as high in protein as I’d like, but a favorite that the kids love to make.
5. Fried egg sandwiches on whole wheat bread, an old favorite that we seem to have forgotten of late.
6. Baked oatmeal.  This has several eggs to boost the modest protein found in oats, and of course it’s served with milk.
7. Green smoothies, enjoyed by Perry and me nearly every morning now.  We now use half a frozen banana plus 1 serving of fruit (half an apple and a few chunks of cantaloupe or a small handful of grapes, for example), 3 cups spinach, and 8-12 oz. of kefir.  Watch for a post soon on how we do these!  Several of the children like green smoothies too, though I’ve never tried to serve it as breakfast for everyone.
8. Breakfast in a bowl: grits with eggs, sausage and cheese stirred in.  A popular cold-weather breakfast.
9. Biscuits and sausage gravy, often served with a side of scrambled eggs, and possibly with grits and sausage patties.  You won’t see this often on a weekday.  It’s a Saturday brunch if there ever was one.
10. Anything made by my husband.  It’s guaranteed to have plenty of meat, so you know it’s high in protein.

How do the rest of the 4 Moms feed their crew?  Find out!

Want to share your own list of favorite breakfasts, or a yummy breakfast recipe?  Join in and link up below!

• Oct. 21st- Germ Warfare
• Oct. 28th- Questions for the Four Moms
• Nov. 4 – Crafts and homemade gifts (Linky!)

This is the big day!  All 4 of us will be sharing one big linky event.  Share your Cooking for a Crowd recipe on one of our blogs and the link will show up on all 4 blogs:  The Common Room, Smockity Frocks, Raising Olives, and here on Life in a Shoe.

First things first.  In my last 4 Moms post, I promised you recipes for some of our cooked-from-scratch foods.  Here are the 3 most-requested.  Let me know if I missed one that you wanted.

Vanilla Pudding

I’ve cut down the sugar in this recipe so we can occasionally eat it for breakfast.  Last week, this and 2 loaves of fresh whole wheat bread served as an emergency dinner when regular dinner prep hit an unexpected bump.

Serves a dozen 1950′s housewives or 6 Coghlans.  We double this.

• 1/2 cup flour or 1/4 cup cornstarch (Cornstarch will give you a smoother pudding but I prefer flour because we’re often out of cornstarch.  That does make it a little hard to use cornstarch, you know?)
• 1/2  - 3/4 cup sugar
• 4 1/2 cups milk
• 6 beaten egg yolks (add extra for richness, or if your chickens got ahead of you)
• 2 Tbs. butter
• 2 tsp. vanilla

Combine flour and sugar in a large saucepan.  Stir in milk.  Cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat until thickened.  Remove from heat.  Stir 1-2 cups of hot milk mixture gradually into egg yolks, then stir egg yolk mixture back into saucepan with remaining milk mixture.

Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture returns to a gentle boil.  Cook and stir for 2 minutes.  Cool slightly and add butter and vanilla.  Serve warm or chilled.  (Lay plastic wrap on surface to prevent a skin from forming as it cools.)

Whole Wheat Bread

Makes 3 soft light loaves that even whole-wheat-haters will love.  We use a 6 qt. Kitchenaid stand mixer to make this effortless.

• 4 cups warm water
• 3 Tbs. yeast
• 1 Tbs. salt
• 1/2 cup honey
• 1/2 cup oil
• whole wheat flour (we grind 9 cups of hard white wheat berries)

Combine all ingredients except flour in large mixing bowl.  Let sit 10-20 minutes, until yeast foams and looks alive.  Use dough hook to add flour 1 cup at a time until mixture cleans sides of bowl.

Continue mixing with dough hook for 5 more minutes.  Dough may begin to look sticky again, but do not add more flour.

Cover and let rise 20-60 minutes in mixing bowl, until you look at it from across the room and panic because you totally forgot you were making bread.   Punch down dough and let it rest for another 10 minutes to make it easier to handle.  You’ll probably forget again, but that’s ok.  Your loaves will just rise a little faster.

On a lightly oiled countertop, divide dough into 3 equal portions.  Flatten each into a rectangle and roll up into a loaf shape.  Pinch to seal ends and place in an oiled loaf pan.

Let rise until double, about 30 minutes.  Try not to forget this time.  Maybe you’d better set a timer.

Bake 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  Cool 10 minutes in pans, then 10 minutes on rack.  Wrap while still warm to keep moist, if there’s any left.

Red Enchilada Sauce

I had Deanna measure the ingredients the last time she made this, but it’s the first time we’ve ever measured them.  Feel free to freestyle it, and definitely tweak the seasonings to please your family’s palate.  Don’t be scared.  It’s really just a basic white sauce with a mexican twist.

Makes enough sauce for a 9×13 pan of enchiladas.  We double this.

• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 onion, diced
• 1/4 cup butter
• 1/3 cup flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper
• 1-2 tsp. chili powder
• 2 1/2  cups milk
• 1 sm. can tomato paste (6 oz?)

Saute garlic and onion in butter until onion is soft.  Stir in flour and seasonings to make a thick paste.  Whisk in milk and cook a couple of minutes until smooth and thickened.  Add tomato paste and stir until smooth.   Simmer a bit to blend flavors, stirring occasionally.  Use under, inside and on top of your enchiladas, with plenty of cheese.

Please be sure you link to an individual post on your blog (not the homepage) and your page needs to link back to one this week’s 4 Moms posts.

Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.

Past topics:

• March 18 - Live-blog day, in which all 4 of us live-blog a real day in our home.  Find out what we really do all day.  It’s our own reality show, just for you.  Who needs TV?
• March 25 – Outings with only little ones.  Mom’s rules of order, and how notto become the poster family for birth control.
• April 1 - A baker’s dozen for managing the food budget: budgeting in the kitchen to feed a crowd.
• April 8 – Menu planning, how we plan (or don’t plan) to feed our hungry crewmates.
• April 15 – Cooking from Scratch.   What we make from scratch and what we would like to make from scratch.

“Cooking from scratch, and how we get it all done.”  That was supposed to be today’s topic, but I think it sounds like 2 entirely different genres.  One is non-fiction.  We actually do it in real life.  The other is a dream (or nightmare) most sane moms give up on about 6 weeks after birthing their first child.  I think we both know which is which.

Call it intuition, but I have a sneaking suspicion that my 3 compadres don’t claim to get it all done either.  I think we all breathe a sigh of relief each Thursday when we read each others’ posts and see how alike we actually are.  Maybe we’re all secretly afraid that we have a supermom in our midst who is going to make us look bad.  Or maybe I should speak for myself and stop projecting my own fears onto others around me.  Another possibility: maybe I should remember to write these posts earlier in the day so I don’t say silly things and wind up sounding punch-drunk.

My 3 Amigas who cook from scratch:

• Smockity Frocks
• Raising Olives
• The Common Room

What we cook from scratch:

We cook from scratch both to save money and to keep our diet a bit healthier.  This doesn’t mean we don’t use white flour or white sugar, but it does mean that I can pronounce the names of the ingredients in my recipes.

As I mentioned in an earlier 4 Moms post, cooking from scratch also simplifies my grocery shopping since I just need to keep the staples well stocked instead of buying and storing each prepackaged item separately.

What follows is a brief and incomplete list of items that we often or always make from scratch rather than buying prepared.

• Bread – Usually whole wheat, though we also enjoy Challah Braids.   We make our wheat bread 3 loaves at a time in a big mixer, so it’s a relatively quick job twice a week – or less, if we eat a lot of tortillas.  This is San Antonio, after all.
• Biscuits - The dough lumps in a cardboard tube sometimes satisfy a certain craving for junk food and adventure, but they bear very little resemblance to the real thing, which is surprisingly quick and easy to whip up.
• Pancakes – My girls laugh at the thought of buying pancake mix.  Is it really so hard to measure and stir flour, salt, baking powder and sugar?  The 8yo has been making pancakes from scratch since she was 6.
• Other quick breads – Muffins, cornbread, and other quick (non-yeast) breads are so easy to make from scratch!
• Pizza - Again, we do buy freezer pizzas once in a great while but we just don’t consider those to be “real” pizza.  We love our homemade version and make it without fail every Friday.
• Enchilada sauce – My sister-in-law’s recipe, roughly.  Her recipes only exist in rough form.
• Refried beans – A staple here, and so easy to make from scratch.  Just cook ‘em good and soft in the crock pot, then smush with some of the cooking liquid and desired seasonings.  No need to really fry them again as the name would suggest.
• Macaroni and cheese –  My older cooks have discovered the charm and simplicity of homemade mac-n-cheese.  I don’t think we’ll ever go back to that fakey-orange powder from the box.  Ugh.
• Pudding – A bit time-consuming, but when you’ve had this from scratch a few times, the instant boxed variety will stop tasting like real food.  Bonus: you can control the level of sweetness.  With less sugar and some extra eggs, pudding can be a nutritious breakfast.
• Cocoa - It’s no trouble at all to mix up a mug or a whole pot from scratch.  Since there’s only a few ingredients we often don’t bother with a mix, just measuring out the ingredients as we need them.  Why pay for a premade mix that’s far too sweet and costs two or three times as much?
• Any rice/potato/pasta dish –  Do you have any idea how many of those little packages it would take to feed us?
• Cake – The texture of a homemade cake is different, but we’ve come to appreciate this difference as the taste of real food.
• Brownies -  Although I admit the boxed varieties can be pretty good, I love my recipe and have no desire to cook from a box of powder.
• Cookies – Like pizza, we buy packaged cookies once in a long time, but we just don’t consider them to be real cookies.  Real ones are mixed in a bowl, finished in the oven, and eaten while still warm.
• Sausage - Since we perfected our seasoning, I can hardly bear the thought of going back to the store-bought tubes of breakfast sausage.  Even the good brands now seem second-best, and the cheap brands are less appealing than ever.
• Salad dressing – Homemade salad dressings are new to us, but surprisingly easy, cheap, and another good way to get rid of long lists of unpronounceable ingredients.
• Rice, oats, iced tea – What do these have in common?  Instant or quick varieties of each are available and widely used.  We just make them the old-fashioned way.  It’s not really harder to cook oats for 5-10 minutes than 1 or 3 minutes.
• Granola - This is our new substitute for our summertime breakfast cereal habit.  Easy, flexible, nutritious and delicious!  btw, thanks to all our readers who contributed granola recipes and tips in the comments on that post.  We’re enjoying new variations of granola every time we make it!

I’m sure I’ve forgotten plenty of foods that could go on the list; the more we cook from scratch, the more deeply ingrained the habit becomes and we forget that many people buy a mix for the recipe that we make from memory.

There are other items that I would love to add to my list this year:

• Tortillas – We have a small press, but the results just aren’t thin or big enough to wrap around a significant amount of filling.  If we want to eat homemade tortillas, we’ll have to resign ourselves to rolling them by hand.  Did I mention we eat a LOT of tortillas?  They’re cheap, fresh and plentiful here.  It’s hard to get motivated to do these at home.  Can you hear me rationalizing and complaining already?  Not a good sign.
• Salad dressing – I would like to phase out the store-bought varieties entirely.
• Mayonnaise – I may have an uprising on my hands if I get pushy about this one, but we always seem to run out of mayo at the worst times.  It would be nice to be able to whip up a batch rather than add a $3 jar of greasy goop to the grocery list.
• Cream soups – We have nearly quit buying and using these already in favor of simple white sauce, but I would like to make it official.
• Pancake syrup – just because.  Why buy it when we can make it with ingredients we already keep on hand?
• Pasta – I have no illusions about making all of our pasta from scratch, but would like to do some. Lasagne noodles would be a good place to start since they’re so big.  We wouldn’t have to make 800 for a single meal, like little egg noodles or spaghetti.
• Spaghetti sauce – I assume it’s cheaper to make this from canned tomato paste rather than buying the premade sauce?  I also like the idea of knowing and controlling my ingredients.  We might try this soon since we use spaghetti sauce on our pizza every week.

What’s on your list?  What do you hope to add to your list this year?  Do you have a favorite recipe to contribute to my wishlist for this year?

• April 22 Recipe swap – We’ll all post a couple of our favorite, budget friendly, feed a crowd recipes and a Mr. Linky so that readers can participate by contributing their own recipes.  When you share your link on one of our blogs, it will show up on all 4!  How fun is that?!

Past topics:

• March 18 - Live-blog day, in which all 4 of us live-blog a real day in our home.  Find out what we really do all day.  It’s our own reality show, just for you.  Who needs TV?
• March 25 – Outings with only little ones.  Mom’s rules of order, and how notto become the poster family for birth control.
• April 1 - A baker’s dozen for managing the food budget: budgeting in the kitchen to feed a crowd.
• April 8 – Menu planning, how we plan (or don’t plan) to feed our hungry crewmates.