We only have a handful of beautiful days left this year, so I’m taking advantage by spending every possible minute outside.
This morning’s mini-picnic: green tea, scrambled eggs with avocado, clementines, and Pepperidge Farm Gingerbread Swirl bread (which makes your kitchen smell incredible and can be made into an amazing French toast using this recipe).
Remember when I got a bread machine, and I was all excited about it, and then discovered that I was completely incapable of creating anything that resembled an actual loaf of bread that you might actually eat? It's because 1) even though I know from years and years and years of experience that you really do have to be precise when baking, I hate that, and 2) I'm lazy and those measuring cups are on a very high-up shelf and eh.
Anyway, I posted about my bread mishaps and a reader sent me her family's recipe, assuring me that it was foolproof. And it was! So I started making it pretty much every time we had company mostly because it was so fun to just casually mention "Oh, yeah, made that from scratch" while depositing a big loaf of warm bread on the table, and then wait for the impressed back-pats to pour in (when you've had the number of baking disasters I have, you'll take all the impressed back-pats you can get).
Well, I haven't baked in awhile - it's just not a thing I do a ton of during the summer months - and apparently this is one of those "use it or lose it situations."
If you take a look inside this month’s InStyle, you’ll see a handful of my favorite tips for extra-busy mornings (which is all of them, lately). I cut corners in lots of ways: I lay out a pair of leggings and a big sweater for myself to put on first thing when I wake up so that I don’t have to go digging around for something to wear while I walk the dogs; I get my son dressed right away so that I don’t have to tote him up and down the stairs over and over and over again; I make the bed and brush my teeth while the shower heats up (which can take awhile in a house that was built over a century ago).
One thing that I do not cut corners on is breakfast. My son literally starts asking for something to eat the second that his eyes open (my daily alarm clock consists of the words “MAMA! ORANGE JUICE!”)…and I think this might be an inherited trait, because if I do not eat semi-immediately and fairly well, I turn into a hyena. (I actually disagree with this statement – I think I am lovely and sunny in the mornings whether I’ve eaten breakfast or not, but Kendrick insists that it’s accurate, so there you go.)
A few months ago, Kendrick came home from the supermarket with Pepperidge Farm Swirl bread, and: delicious. From the moment of his discovery it’s been eaten pretty much daily by everyone in my family - I stockpile it in the freezer and just defrost a loaf whenever we run low, because I am that disinterested in ever running out. It’s just a tiiiiny bit sweet, and easily lends itself to a whole bunch of different protein-inclusive toppings that make everyone in the family happy as breakfast-eating clams.
When Kendrick and I got home from our Saturday adventures, it was that moment right before the sun sets when all you (or at least I) want to do is collapse into a hammock with an US Weekly. So that's what I did, and I was all relaxed and cozy...and then I turned the page and spotted a recipe for something called a Strawberry-Basil Rickey.
You know what makes those just-before-sunset-in-a-hammock moments even better?
A cocktail.
This particular recipe required things like fresh herbs and mortar and pestles and Cointreau, though, so as delicious as it looked, it wasn't going to happen. Not right then, anyway.
